In Three Poems (00:52)
Jehanne Dubrow is our guest poet this week on in three poems, and she's going to be reading that poem again for us. It's a villanelle called civilian, we'll be talking about that

from her latest collection, and also her craft book, The Wounded Line. is the author of 10 books of poetry and three books of creative nonfiction. I'll be sure to put links and information about Jehanne's bio in the podcast notes, so check those out. Meanwhile, let's get right to the conversation with Jeanne.

Jehanne Dubrow (12:57)
And so I came to write civilians after reflecting on these kinds of transformations that he would go and undergo individually and that we would experience as a couple. And civilians really reflects on this idea of what happens when you leave behind a life of uniforms and uniformity and become just another civilian. And the problem with being a civilian is that

if you look the word up in the dictionary, it's defined by negation. So a civilian is someone who is not a combatant, which seems to suggest that once you become a civilian, you have no identity except as an absence. And so the book is also about trying to define civilian. And that's why there's this sequence of poems in the book that just have the title civilian, because I was trying over and over again to give you.

David J Bauman (13:30)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jehanne Dubrow (13:54)
here's an explanation for what a civilian is. No, here's another one, or maybe it's this one. And so the book is this effort, yeah.

David J Bauman (13:59)
It reminded me, yeah,

it reminded me of, well, further back in time, D.H. Lawrence, I've joked has, here's another one of his poems called Poem, but I think in more the way that you were doing, like Padraig O'Tuma's book Kitchen Hymns, he has a series of poems that are entitled Do You Believe in God? And each one is a response. And so I kind of saw that same sort of.

Jehanne Dubrow (14:09)
Yes.

that's interesting.

David J Bauman (14:25)
method going on

I want you read us one of the title poems. Do you want to say anything about it first or should we just talk about it after?

Jehanne Dubrow (14:32)
Sure, so this is one of the poems in the book that's using a fixed form. It's a villanelle, which is one of my very favorite fixed forms to work in. I also am a passionate sonneteer, ⁓ and so there are a bunch of those in the book as well. So this is civilian. I bring the war into my bed each night and let it press metallic to my cheek. I barely move beneath the trembling light that it emits.

David J Bauman (14:45)
Okay.

Jehanne Dubrow (15:01)
a semaphore both bright and shadowy, its messages oblique. I bring a war into my bed. Each night it floats across the sheets toward me, despite the little swells of fear I never speak. I barely move beneath the trembling light, the bite of sea salt on my lips, the slight unnerving sound of waves, the anchor's creek. I bring his war into my bed each night, anticipate its sonar ping, invite its touch.

I know the heat its missiles seek. I barely move. Beneath the trembling light, I am a target in the line of sight. I am a shore toward which the cruisers streak. I bring our war into my bed each night and barely move beneath its trembling light.

David J Bauman (15:45)
Hmm. And for any listeners who haven't worked with Villanelle's before, they are fun because it's one of those things once you get your first line and your third line, you have almost half the poem. ⁓ I I guess I should talk about the form then for a second. And I think Usually in iambic pentameter ⁓ and 19 lines in the first and third line.

Jehanne Dubrow (15:55)
That's right.

Yes.

David J Bauman (16:09)
then are repeated at specific places and then as a couplet at the end. ⁓ I was talking to one of my dear friends who's also going to be a guest on this podcast. So he'll know that I'm talking about him. And he said, ⁓ it's a Villanelle. You know, I'll have something to say about that. Cause he and I have different favorite Villanelles. My favorite Villanelle

Jehanne Dubrow (16:25)
Hahaha!

David J Bauman (16:32)
is Elizabeth Bishop's one art. And his is the very strict form of Dylan Thomas's, do not go gentle into that good night.

Jehanne Dubrow (16:34)
mine too.

Do not go gentle.

David J Bauman (16:43)
yeah, he's one of my first editors, along with my son, when I'm looking at making revisions. But he very much.

in recipes and in forms likes to stick to the rules. And I like to quote Mary Oliver and say, hey, know, it's a dance and you can change the steps and it's still a dance. And you do, you aim for something between the two. mean, I think in Dylan Thomas's Villanelle, it's very strict, except what I think is brilliant about it is the way he uses the words. Sometimes I think it's...

like a question and sometimes it's more of a statement and the way he uses, think the punctuation changes a little bit, which you do. Now, Elizabeth Bishop, she tosses out most of the line except the last word of each line. But it echo of it. And yours is a little closer to Dylan Thomas. Yeah.

Jehanne Dubrow (17:36)
That's right. Yeah, so I mean,

I I think mine is very strict. I

have a sort of signature move that I always pull in my villanelles. I tend to be very rigid when I'm writing a villanelle. But what I try to do is there are those two refrains which we label as A1 and A2 in the poem. And I find that if you can design them in such a way that they include dependent clauses.

David J Bauman (18:06)
Mm-hmm.

Jehanne Dubrow (18:06)
then

you get a lot more flexibility with how you use those repeating lines because then you can create new sentences where those dependent clauses either end a sentence or begin a new sentence. And so you see that in this poem with the phrase, I bring the war into my bed each night. I bring my war can be its own section. Each night can be the start of a new sentence.

And so when you really think of the villanelle as in terms of sentence structure, you can be very strict while also being extremely creative with the way you handle the refrains.

David J Bauman (18:45)
But I love the tiny adjustments that you make, that it goes from, ⁓ bring the war into my bed to eventually my war.

Jehanne Dubrow (18:48)
Thank you.

Yeah, yeah,

the speaker in the poem becomes increasingly complicit the further on in the text you go through that use of the shifting pronouns to indicate like ownership or possession of the war.

David J Bauman (19:08)
Yes, it's no longer just something that the husband in this situation has, but you know, what your part or what the speaker's part is, it's beautifully, beautifully done. Thank you. Now that, I think it's in chapter 19 of the other book I said we were going to focus on you mentioned about how form

Jehanne Dubrow (19:12)
That's right.

David J Bauman (19:30)
can be a way of getting a grip on trauma. ⁓ You'd said about fixed forms can function as a safe container, for devastating subject matter. Talk to me about that.

Jehanne Dubrow (19:42)
Yeah, so I'm a very practical teacher. I like to give my students usable skills. And I brought that philosophy to The Wounded Line, partly because this book came out of my time in the classroom and out of the kinds of struggles I was seeing for my students when they were trying to navigate how to write poems that engage with trauma. And so there are 20 different chapters in the book, each one outlining

David J Bauman (19:55)
Mm-hmm.

Jehanne Dubrow (20:09)
a different practical approach that you can take to writing a poem that explores trauma or represents trauma or tries to make an argument about the nature of trauma itself. And the final two chapters in the book are the ones that are most explicitly about form, even though I'm obsessed with form, so I can never help talking about it. So chapter 19 is about the use of fixed forms. then chapter 20 is sort of about the opposite, the use of hybridity. ⁓ And

One of the things that I believe about fixed forms, and I think people will argue with me on this as they should, is that I believe, especially for those of us who sometimes think of ourselves as formalists, that form is a way of insisting that for the brief moment of the poem, you have a little more control over the uncontainable world than you have otherwise. And that the form is a kind of assertion of order,

David J Bauman (21:03)
Mm-hmm.

Jehanne Dubrow (21:09)
and a resistance to chaos. And of course, trauma is this unwieldy thing that refuses containment. But when we write, for instance, a sonnet for those 14 lines, we get to hold the trauma and contain it and apply artifice to it and apply meter to it, which is really an act of extreme control.

David J Bauman (21:33)
well, like the Villanelle when I said you, you've got half the poem or, you know, not really, but you have a good hold on it once you've got those two lines. There's something similar, I suppose, in the sonnet when you think about the Volta, you know, at some point I'm going to have to make a turn here. You know, what's that going to be? Where's that going to go? Even if you don't know where it's heading at the beginning and, you know, whether or not you do the couplet the same way at the end, traditionally.

Jehanne Dubrow (21:41)
That's right.

Yeah.

David J Bauman (22:01)
I think in the Wounded Line you also have a great little sonnet called Sissy. ⁓ Yes.

Jehanne Dubrow (22:07)
Yes, by Aaron Smith, where

he rhymes the same word with itself over and over and over again as a way of sort of speaking to, yeah, expertly and as a way of taking the sting out of this word that is meant to shame the speaker about his own queerness. ⁓ And it's such a brilliant and defiant gesture. And of course, it's all packaged within the sonnet as well, which makes it sort of

David J Bauman (22:13)
But expertly.

Jehanne Dubrow (22:37)
an act of showing off, like, haha, I'll show you. And I love that, that the form can also be this assertion of your own expertise and therefore a way of insisting that you won't be silenced.

David J Bauman (22:41)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

One of the things that I really love too about the craft book, and I'm sorry for moving so quickly from one to the other. I just saw a neat opportunity for tying them together with our third poem. But at the end of each chapter, you have some little exercises.

Jehanne Dubrow (22:58)
no, it's my pleasure.

David J Bauman (23:06)
And I love those. They're very practical. Usually I think it's three at the end of each.

Jehanne Dubrow (23:10)
Yeah, usually around between two and four. And I called them writing your way in as a way of kind of diffusing the tension that often happens when we've been given like the assignment of a prompt and immediately we kind of clench up and become anxious. Whereas if it's just a matter of writing your way obliquely toward the poem, like do, do, do, do, I'm just going to make my way toward a draft. And then it becomes a little less intimidating, I think.

David J Bauman (23:16)
Yeah.

And that's something I was going to say I love that you sometimes will say write a draft as and that puts a lot less pressure because so often when I'm writing I find out that that my first two lines or first stanza was was a runway up to the actual poem.

Jehanne Dubrow (23:55)
That's right, the poem is

trying to take off, but it just can't get lift until like line three or four.

David J Bauman (24:02)
Yeah, there's a group of guys every other Sunday. that we talk and share poems. And my friend Josh very often says, you know, it'd be really interesting if this started with line 46. You move, not that he throws everything else away, but he gets you to think of it very differently. And a draft can just be a draft and you can still play with the lines and move them around.

Jehanne Dubrow (24:12)
Hahaha!

Yeah.

That's right, the key, especially when you're writing about electric subject matter like trauma, is no pressure. The more pressure you put on yourself, the harder it's going to be to write anything.

David J Bauman (24:35)
Yeah.

The

fact that you're sitting down to try to write about it, it feels like enough pressure. Yes, it is. And I had a conversation, I think, with Hannah Levy earlier in this season because I had read ⁓ some advice that I'm going to argue with that other people argue with me on. ⁓ Although I think there's some truth to it,

Jehanne Dubrow (24:46)
That's absolutely right.

David J Bauman (25:03)
but what I was thinking about is when people say, writing, it's not writing a poem that's not therapy. Yeah, no, it's not, but yeah, it can be. Maybe not the final poem, you know, not, but sometimes, if

Jehanne Dubrow (25:13)
Yeah.

David J Bauman (25:20)
If art has to do with an exploration and search for the truth, and you've been through, what do you know more about than the trauma you've been through? Or as you're trying to know more about yourself to work through that,

Jehanne Dubrow (25:24)
Yeah.

I, you know, I don't, for me, writing poems isn't therapeutic because I find writing stressful. ⁓ And I put a lot of stress on myself and I'll become angry with myself when I feel that the poem is failing. ⁓ And this is something I think I say at the end of the book, which is, yeah, maybe it's not entirely therapeutic, but there is something to be said in having to apply your intellect.

David J Bauman (25:41)
Yeah, okay.

Mm-hmm.

Jehanne Dubrow (25:59)
to something that before was pure physicality and emotion. ⁓ And that roping those feelings to those thoughts has some real therapeutic value in a way in it, if only because it's forcing you to navigate something that previously has resisted any kind of control or containment at all.

David J Bauman (26:26)
Now,

we go from containment to something else entirely because the poem that you chose ⁓ is from a different chapter of a whole different avenue toward writing about trauma. And that is through the surreal. Tell us about what you've chosen by Lindsay Lusby to read as your third poem.

Jehanne Dubrow (26:28)
Thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, so

Lindsay's poem is a prose poem. It appears on the page as a kind of big block. But then she's also doing, including those slashes that kind of create line breaks within the prose poem, which I think allows the pump to feel really jagged and like it's hesitating or moving toward its next phrase.

And it's a poem about having a conversation with the speaker's father about ⁓ his death, about his imminent death, and what that conversation makes the speaker feel about herself. And the poem is called Self-Portrait as a Psychopomp. And a psychopomp is a creature essentially who brings someone to the underworld, who guides them there.

sometimes willingly, sometimes by force. And she's using this concept of the psychopomp to implicate herself and to really talk about her anguish in this conversation. So this is self-portrait as a psychopomp.

When we ask my father how he wants to die, he opens his mouth and the crows and the crows and the crows flash their purple black feathers over his bed. Bastard birds named breathless, named hunger, named sleep, named something rotten in the fatherless. Scavengers plucking at the bones and the bones and the bones still sunken under. Skin sunken under air too heavy.

To swim up through, He says, don't you know we live at the bottom of an ocean named sky? We do and we do and we don't know how to hold this in our barbed grasp without breaking the glass globe of his dreaming, he says. Look at these clouds like seafoam floating on currents of troposphere and the crows darken the air in the rooms where they wait.

and they wait and we wait for him to close his heavy eyes.

David J Bauman (28:54)
one of the things I love about these talks is you start to see whether you planned it or not, how the poems talk to each other. And your poem that I read, I guess the starting one, had that phrase about, you know, the the bruise against the sky. And I'm seeing the crows working as that same sort of metaphor for what's

Jehanne Dubrow (29:03)
Yeah.

Yeah.

David J Bauman (29:19)
unnameable what what I don't want to talk about you know what I what I can't face

But I think putting the metaphor into something surreal, putting the feelings into something that

Jehanne Dubrow (29:25)
Yeah.

David J Bauman (29:32)
I don't know how to name this feeling, but I know crows are black and purplish like a bruise.

Jehanne Dubrow (29:38)
That's right. And sometimes trauma is so horrific that it does feel both real and above the real, beyond the real, dreamlike. And I think, you know, surrealism is such a useful tool when the emotions are particularly frightening that the poet wants to articulate. And, you know, in Lindsay Lusby's poem, what she's articulating is deep grief, but also kind of feeling that

David J Bauman (29:48)
Yes.

Jehanne Dubrow (30:07)
She's wondering, am I a carrion bird hovering over the body of my father? ⁓ You know, in having to ask this question, you know, how do you want to die? ⁓ That there's some, she feels as if there's something unseemly about that. That's both intellectually and emotionally complex. And I love the way she uses the surreal to get at that extreme guilt and shame that the speaker fears as being this sort of bird picking.

David J Bauman (30:13)
Mm-hmm.

Jehanne Dubrow (30:37)
at the Father's Body.

David J Bauman (30:38)
Yeah,

you said that and I'm going to highlight it again because I did write, I actually, though most people aren't seeing the visuals, I held up the book, I actually underlined the beginning of chapter eight and circled the word above because I was expecting the surreal lies just beneath what we understand to be real, but that's not what you said. You said lies above what we understand to be real.

Jehanne Dubrow (30:43)
Hahaha!

That's right. That's right. It comes after

all from the French, Sûre. Right? And I mean, I think also it's interesting to think about the birth of surrealism is associated with the birth of psychotherapy ⁓ and the ways in which in the early 20th century we developed a new sense of the self because we were starting to understand about these different layers of ⁓

David J Bauman (31:06)
Yeah. So.

Mm-hmm.

Jehanne Dubrow (31:28)
the mind and of our psychology. And I love that the surreal then births incredible films, pieces of music, dance, and of course literature. And the impact of surrealism is now 100 years on and remains, I think, an important aesthetic approach for many writers to this day.

David J Bauman (31:51)
And a lot of poems I know may start out in what sounds very literal and then move into the surreal And I guess this in that way does,

Jehanne Dubrow (31:57)
Yeah.

That's right, it's so grounded in that initial question of basically how do you want to die? ⁓

David J Bauman (32:06)
Yeah, we're here by his

bedside and all of a sudden there's crows.

Jehanne Dubrow (32:09)
That's right. That's right. And of course, what a surreal poem does really well is treat that arrival as if it's totally natural. Because in the dream world, the arrival of crows on the scene at a deathbed would be totally normal and the mind certainly would not question it. So she does this really, I think, really well. And I very much hope that we'll be seeing a full-length book from Lindsay that circles around this topic because

David J Bauman (32:16)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jehanne Dubrow (32:38)
because her insights, I think, about grief and loss are so rich.

David J Bauman (32:41)
very much would look forward to that, yes. So this, the book, The Wounded Line, a guide to writing poems of trauma. I think anybody who is interested in writing

maybe not through trauma, but about trauma, and whether or not it's maybe just even trying to understand what you've been through. ⁓ I think it's a great resource and I look forward to reading more of it. I mean, I've kind of devoured sections of it as I went through, but I'm looking forward to reading it completely front to back. And also I very much enjoyed the poems in civilians.

Jehanne Dubrow (32:52)
you

Yeah.

David J Bauman (33:15)
Wow, it feels like time's just flown here talking to you. What else, what are you doing next? you've had a craft book that has taken you, you said it took nine months, the actual writing, but how long since conception? Yeah.

Jehanne Dubrow (33:18)
Thank you, David

I think it was 20 years in my brain and 20

years of thinking through these issues in the classroom as well. But yeah, I wrote it quite quickly and it of poured out of me, I think because I had these ideas so clearly formed and I had such a vision for what I hoped people could get out of the book, which is lots of useful tools and practical advice.

David J Bauman (33:43)
Mm-hmm.

I think it's

Jehanne Dubrow (33:53)
But yeah,

I mean, I'm always working on several books at once. ⁓ I ⁓ write nonfiction too, so I have a book length essay called Frivolity, a Defense coming out ⁓ I think in September of this year. And it's a meditation on frivolous objects, pursuits, and people and why perhaps we should cherish them.

David J Bauman (33:57)
I was going to say, what's next? What are you working on now?

nice.

What a great title.

Jehanne Dubrow (34:18)
And then I've been working on a book of poems called The Brief Temple Taken Down, which is about the relationship between the health of the body and the health of the body politic. And then I'm working, I'm very excited about this. I'm working on a book of poems. It's a sonnet sequence called A Bit of Martyred Clay. And it's a book inspired by a 17th century Yiddish language memoir

written by a woman named Glickle of Hameln. And this is, basically the first ⁓ Yiddish language memoir of its kind written by a woman in the 17th century. And she talks about bubonic plague and pogroms and a whole host of topics that I think actually can feel relevant to current readers. And so I've been working through the memoir.

and then taking little passages from the memoir and transforming them into sonnets in her voice. And that's been a really delightful project to work on.

David J Bauman (35:23)
Well, I hope we get the chance to talk again about it because

I could just keep reading poems with you all evening. So thank you. Thank you for being here. Thanks for joining me for a conversation in three poems. I will put links to the books and where people can purchase them and find out more about you and more about your work in the show notes as well as we'll share some things on social media. And I look forward to talking to you again real soon, Jehanne

Jehanne Dubrow (35:29)
Thank you,

Thank

Great, thank you so much David, it's been my pleasure.

David J Bauman (35:51)
Thank you.

In Three Poems (35:53)
Thank you for listening to the in three poems podcast. My name is David Bellman and that again was Jean Dubrow. And I had the honor of reading my husband's father from her book civilians out in 2025 from Louisiana State University Press. And she read the poem civilian, one of the two poems by that title in that same collection. she also read for us a self portrait as psycho pomp

And that was written by Lindsay Lusby and appears in the Wounded Line, a guide to writing poems of trauma. University of Mexico Press 2025. And that poem was used by permission of both the author and the poet. If you're enjoying this podcast, I ask you please share it to other people that you know who love talking about poetry and learning about today's poets as we get to know them. Three poems at a time.