Q&A with Lisa Delan
This week we had the opportunity to publish two poems from Lisa Delan, “mid-migraine” and “the night before.“ In this interview, one of our poetry editors, Lara Tokar, dives into these two poems with Delan.
How did you first start writing poetry? Was there one particular moment, experience or writer that made you realise this was something you wanted to pursue?
When I was eleven or twelve my mother went back to work, and our family babysitter began spending time with me after school. She was getting her MFA, and would sit at our kitchen table writing during our afternoons together. She showed me poems she was working on, and encouraged me to join her and write my own poetry - this became our weekday ritual. Her MFA thesis project encompassed a combination of our poetry, framed by Joni Mitchell's song "The Circle Game" (I read my poems and sang the first two verses; she read her poems and sang the second two verses). It was a revelatory experience at an impressionable age, and the practice of poetry never left me.
A year or two later, my uncle gave me a copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Johnson edition), and my world shifted on its axis! It felt like a secret portal had opened into the vast capacity of language, and I was ravenous for more. So it happened that Dickinson was the first of many poets whose words I fell in love with. It's not surprising that as a classical singer, I've recorded more settings of Dickinson poems than of any other poet (in fact my last album, A Certain Slant of Light, was devoted solely to Dickinson texts!).
I was deeply moved by “the night before,” with its quiet intimacy and the way everyday gestures carry such emotional weight. Could you tell me a bit about how this poem came together? Did it develop over many drafts or did the scenes and details arrive more organically as you wrote?
Thank you, Lara. The text of "the night before" came quite organically, as a stream of consciousness in the midst of a crisis that was upending my daughter's life. Writing the first draft was an extremely visceral experience, and I retained almost all of the initial content. In revising, I refined the language somewhat, but predominantly played with form. I originally wrote the poem as a virgule, because the emotional content felt more manageable segmented. But ultimately the emotion needed the fluidity of movement afforded by free verse.
In “mid-migraine,” lines like “your thoracic vertebrae avalanche” or “the garland of osmium” create such vivid, almost startling, imagery. Can you talk about the process of choosing these specific words and images?
Absolutely! I've had migraines since my teenage years, and have suffered from chronic migraine for over two decades, and still it feels impossible to convey the nature of the experience. I'm reading a fascinating new release, The Headache (by Tom Zeller Jr.), in which the author quotes sociologist Arthur Frank describing pain as the "black hole into which language seems to disappear." No literal language does this particular painscape justice, which makes it exceedingly challenging to explain. I dug deep for tactile descriptors that felt like what my migraines feel like, driven to externalize an invisible and deeply isolating facet of my life. And the restrictive nature of the abecedarian provided an ideal structure to contain the intensity of the content.
Looking across your body of work, is there a theme, emotion or thread that you see as central to your poetry? How do you notice it showing up in pieces like “mid-migraine” and “the night before”?
Certain themes definitely recur in my poetry – trauma, mental illness, love, relational loss, my kids, my late parents.... migraines! But the unifying thread for me is poetry as a conversation – language as the connective tissue of our shared humanity. And a reverence for lyricism.
Finally, what’s next for you as a poet? Are you exploring new themes, working toward a collection, or experimenting with different forms?
Migraine comes up so often in my writing (it's such a defining element of my life experience), that I'm planning to curate a chapbook around poems that have arisen from that particular albatross. In terms of experimenting with form, I have become quite intrigued with haibun - I love writing haiku and prose poems, and am eager to work with both of those structures within a single poem. Endless possibilities!
I'm also very excited to add to the repertoire of songs based on my poetry that have been written by composer friends and colleagues, which has really been a thrill - a very full circle arrival after decades of performing and recording songs based on other poets' works. I recently penned the libretto for a multi-movement choral work that premiered in San Francisco, which was such a gratifying collaboration that I'd love to expand upon it. I am looking forward to many diverse poetic adventures ahead!
