Amanda Dettmann joins Maine Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum in conversation and to read her poems "Untranslatable Honeyed Bruises" and "When They Ask Me What Will Be the First Thing I Do after 'This Is Over,'" featured in A NEW LAND, a poetry anthology from The Telling Room. Stuart and Amanda discuss revision and the microcosms of words, becoming a writer in 7th grade, writing in spurts, finding yourself, creating, adapting, and connecting to others in pandemic times, memorization and rhythm in performance, sound in poetry, and writing the universal and the weird. Amanda is now working towards an MFA in Creative Writing at NYU.
Voices of the Future is hosted and conceived by Stuart Kestenbaum, produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects, with help from Carly Peruccio, mixed by Merritt Jacob, and music by Jordan Kramer. Voices of the Future is curated and distributed by Molly McGrath and Rylan Hynes of The Telling Room. This series is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
To learn more about The Telling Room and its programs, visit www.tellingroom.org.
Stuart Kestenbaum: What's it like to read something you wrote four years ago?
Amanda Dettmann: I still am trying to say, “This is what was written then. Let it be. That was beautiful then, and that was honest, and it still is.”
Stuart Kestenbaum: Welcome to Voices of the Future. I'm Stuart Kestenbaum. In this series, I'm interviewing young writers and poets from Maine, all of whom have participated in programs of The Telling Room, a nonprofit writing center in Portland. The Telling Room's mission is to empower youth through writing and to share their voices with the world. All of the authors in the series are featured in A New Land, an anthology of 30 poems written at The Telling Room. When I read or hear the work of these writers, I am moved by their enthusiasm, skill and courage. Some of them were born in Maine. Others have come here from Africa and the Middle East. All speak with urgency about their lives and their futures.
In this episode, I'm talking with Amanda Dettmann. Amanda graduated from Yarmouth High School, and now she's getting her MFA in Creative Writing at NYU. She published her poetry collection, Untranslatable Honey Bruises, through The Telling Room's Young Emerging Authors Fellowship. Amanda starts with reading the title poem from her collection.
Amanda Dettmann: Untranslatable Honeyed Bruises
My grandmother was known for kneading pasta dough.
Ribbons of watered-down flour elastically extended
from ceiling to hardwood countertops. Thin, edible braids
woven around her wrists.
She prayed in the dough, cupping her embroidered hands
into a quilt of promise where all days ended with open doors.
She counted in the dough, one two three, one two three
children lined up like feed sack dresses on the clothesline.
We were her boiling water, her cherished roots of ginger in oak bowls.
We were the ones gripping her fallen eyebrows,
her stretched out canvas-like skin.
We were the ones holding her splintered palms on crooked porches.
There were loaves of burnt sourdough on her back,
but she never wavered between the lines
of a baker’s dozen and a speck of wheat.
Her faith a mosaic of plums coated in sugar, thumbs dripping
with trembling juice. Her patterned cheeks entire universes,
curled with constellations under the noses of revival, regeneration.
She finally swallowed our frayed scraps of sorries down her gutter,
almost blindfolded by our trails of squashed
dimples that never amounted to much.
My grandmother wasn’t the kind
to be disarmed of lace
& we kissed her toes one last time.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Thank you. Untranslatable Honeyed Bruises, when did you write that?
Amanda Dettmann: I wrote this my senior year of high school.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Tell me about the title.
Amanda Dettmann: I think I've loved that word, untranslatable. How do we take something that can't be described in everyday life, but still get 99 percent there? I will never be able to perfectly say who my grandmother was, but I can get as close as I think. And honeyed bruises, I think we go through life with bruises and imprints from our experiences and the people we meet, but honeying them is taking the sweetness of those and that's the lasting impression of the person.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Like a distillation?
Amanda Dettmann: Yeah.
Stuart Kestenbaum: It seems like in a way, with poetry, you're always once at the edge of what you're trying to say, but can't be said always, so you do it through images. So what was the genesis of the poem like? Did you just say, "I want to write about my grandmother," or did you know the image of the pasta dough? Was that a strongest image or in your head when you think of her?
Amanda Dettmann: This is my nana from California. She is [a] very delicate person. I laugh because the other night my family was talking about when she would eat dinner, she would just pick at the food with the fork. But then once you put cheesecake in front of her, it's everything indulge. But trying to show that through other images and imagining her in other places, not just the kitchen, but on a porch because her house didn't really have a porch. Imagining her in places that I wasn't used to seeing her but still trying to get across that she's fragile, but also have been through so much. She's such a strong woman. I think that runs through our family.
Stuart Kestenbaum: What kind of discoveries did you make in the poem? Ending with "kissing her toes," did you, at the beginning, say, "Oh, this is where the poem is going to end”?
Amanda Dettmann: The most revised part is the middle and how it looks on the page. I think I've changed it hundreds of times. But, "And we kissed her toes one last time," it always sounds, like, hearing this back from four years ago, a little bit obvious, but then also in my head it's, "You don't really kiss somebody's toes." I think it still is surprising, in a way, instead of kissing somebody's forehead. Ending with a part of the body that is not really seen, but is still treading the earth and walking places.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Right. What's it like to read something you wrote four years ago? Do you revise it in your head when you read it? Do you just say, "I wrote this four years ago, this is it"?
Amanda Dettmann: I think this is one of the stronger ones from four years ago. This has been entered in a lot of competitions and contests, but I still am trying to say, "This is what was written then, let it be. That was you then, don't change something from the past." I'll go through the book maybe once a year or something, and seeing the ones are less strong in my mind now, but saying, "That was beautiful then. And that was honest and it still is." I think I've strengthened my craft a lot in the last four years, and I want to continue to do that. It's something unique of that year, in that moment.
Stuart Kestenbaum: You were a senior?
Amanda Dettmann: Yeah.
Stuart Kestenbaum: When you'd already started with Telling Room. When did you start doing things at The Telling Room?
Amanda Dettmann: Senior year of high school.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And so you just graduated from college?
Amanda Dettmann: Yes.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Where was that?
Amanda Dettmann: Marist College.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Now you're going to go to NYU?
Amanda Dettmann: Gonna immerse myself in the writing scene there.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Very exciting.
Amanda Dettmann: Yeah.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Very exciting. Did you always know you wanted to write?
Amanda Dettmann: I think it was seventh grade that really... that year, there was more opportunities to perform things. And then definitely high school, I got into Poetry Out Loud, where you perform on a stage and you have to memorize something. So it was terrifying.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And where did you go to high school?
Amanda Dettmann: I went to Yarmouth High School.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Well, let's read the second poem, which you had said it was a pandemic poem. Have you been writing a lot?
Amanda Dettmann: I'm a weird writer. I write in spurts, and then I have to take a break. I can't write every day, and I want to, but sometimes it's better for me to take a step back.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And has this particular moment in our history with a pandemic, it seems like it really inspired you in this poem. Some people feel like, "Oh, I can't do anything." Other people, maybe, feel vital in a certain way because everything feels so dormant or down. How about for you?
Amanda Dettmann: I was thinking about this, I think this morning. This has been such a time of loss in so many ways, but also I think I found more of myself and that I am driven to create opportunities for others to tell their story. And I think that has increased more in my life, ever, during the pandemic, of reaching out to others in creating even deeper connections without anything in return. I think we are craving that more than ever now. And I'm really grateful that this has happened, that we can slow down in a way, even though so much has changed and we've had to learn how to adapt our family structures, where we live, economic things, for months.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Like how in mourning you can feel alive.
Amanda Dettmann: Yes.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Good. Well, why don't we read this one?
Amanda Dettmann: I know this one by heart, but-
Stuart Kestenbaum: Oh, you do?
Amanda Dettmann: Should I look at it?
Stuart Kestenbaum: Whatever you want to do.
Amanda Dettmann: Okay. I might be a word or two off.
When They Ask Me What Will Be the First Thing I Do After "This is Over.”
I do not know what it feels like
to give birth to a child.
But right now there is a sound sizzling
every night at 7 pm
across New York
city
across rooftops
and gutters
and stickered bus benches
Clapping
for doctors, nurses, everyone
on the front lines
City as an entire
clap
City stopping to make the same motion at the same time:
A ten-year-old, clapping,
while her moon-landing puzzle pieces cartwheel
across the woven rug
A 45-year-old mother, clapping,
while her tomatillo soup sings
her engagement ring a ballet not of being found
but of finding someone who sees
A 98-year-old great-grandfather, clapping,
standing at his window with his bent cane
glasses so unfogged and unafraid it hurts a little
to open wider
How weird
for pieces of the body to choose themselves
for they have always known
foreign freckles
wrinkled, unrelated palms
cherried thumbs (not their own) sandpapering the same space they both
call home
Our dangling limbs touching each other
clap clap clap
so more people can touch
again.
***
There is a plant named bougainvillea.
I am naming my daughter
Bougainvillea—
the daughter we are all growing during this time—
because she will stretch taking nothing for granted into a new vine we call
Now
we call Monday afternoons at the office
we call nights sipping wine with strangers
Nothing will taste bitter again
Bougainvillea will thirst to say “Thank you,” anytime, anywhere, with
anyone
Bougainvillea will feed on firsts, a feast of anything, anyplace, any
moment, anybody
Because we have forgotten how starved we have been.
How a quarter of an inch of butter
did not mean a thing.
A paper movie ticket.
Scissors through hair.
Sleeping next to someone.
Sharing the same spoon.
Holding my grandmother has been a decade of drought
and all the water is yelling at me “Do it now! Do it now.”
We are in battle. This
battle. To prove that Bougainvillea is a climbing plant
even when the dictionary says its flowers are “insignificant” and cannot
move.
To prove that we are not machines
addicted to repetition addicted to repetition addicted to repetition
Our papery green thumbs were once
born as thin sheets of metal, once
gloved and greedy, masked and eyeless,
Our thumbs were shields
to touch
and be touched
to kiss
and be kissed
to breathe
and be breathed into
We have forgotten that a fly can still find its fire
even in capture and we are that fly.
Bougainvillea, you are blind now,
but I promise
you will photograph this world
in its most naked state of being:
black and white
no one is there
click, snap, flutter, flare
you will name a plastic grocery bag dancing in air alone on the street
as its own word. This.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Wow. That was all memorized. How many of your poems have you committed to memory?
Amanda Dettmann: Not a lot.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And how about... Why this one?
Amanda Dettmann: Something about it, I wanted the rhythm to be ingrained. I think it holds a different rhythm than other poems I've written, and a lot of people have asked me if this is more of a slam poem.
Stuart Kestenbaum: I read it a few times before, but when you did that [clap], I was just thinking, "Clap” like that. I thought were for emphasis, but it was an actual clap. And the bougainvillea, how did that come into your mind?
Amanda Dettmann: My family has visited St. John in the US Virgin Islands. There's bougainvillea everywhere on the island. There's a lot of stores even called Bougainvillea. So, something about that has stayed with me of, it's kind of like ivy, of growing and clinging onto a surface and not being apologetic for that, owning its existence. And I love that.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And what's your writing process like? Did you revise this a lot?
Amanda Dettmann: I don't think I did. I had two pieces of it. I had the bougainvillea part, was one of the first things, so, I think it was, "How do I put these two things together?" And it just didn't feel finished with just the New York City part. I had to widen it to become more universal because not everyone is from New York City. You don't have to be, I don't think, but, yeah. I'm a weird writer, and sometimes I get so much of it down in the first go and I know that it's, "This is one that I got to keep revising."
Stuart Kestenbaum: What other kinds of poems have you written since you've been home?
Amanda Dettmann: If this is a theme, doubt. I feel like I've had a personal journey from March to now of learning who I am. Just really digging into things that I want to grow on myself and how to be better in so many kinds of relationships in my life. What really matters, I think is what we're all learning during this time.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Also graduating from college is a big moment of summing up in a way, and then to be in your generation where that coincides with a pandemic that we've never experienced before, and then you're about to embark on a brand new adventure of going to New York City to write, you're so excited about. The big transitions.
Amanda Dettmann: And it's transitions that I've had without closure, is what I would say. I didn't get to say goodbye to hundreds of people at my college. So how do I create poems that can still feel like we're unified in some way, but we're still grieving that? And I also would say I've written a lot about family ancestry and lots of things of dealing with racism, even throughout a family history and how to unveil that and maybe say, “You know, you can't always say it was the times,” that there can be problems in your family and you still need to write those down or they get lost. So I've been digging up a lot.
Stuart Kestenbaum: So grew up in Maine? Is Maine a figure in your work, do you think?
Amanda Dettmann: I was born in Michigan. I was so young when we moved, I was three years old, but a lot of people come up to me all the time and they say, "Your voice is like, where are you from? You have this Midwestern thing." And I think that has to do with sounds. I wouldn’t say I read about lobsters and the pine trees. I'm less of a location placed writer, but the sounds of the places I've been, stick with me because I think sound is my favorite thing of poetry.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Can you say anything more about the sound of Maine?
Amanda Dettmann: I think of it like the boat ride where you're alone in the boat but everybody is still on shore. We're all together in the same space, even if we're not on that shared boat of the same experience out in the water, screaming and water flying everywhere. Everybody's still cheering each other on. I think it's a state that has so much support of anyone in a community. I especially felt that growing up. So the sound of Maine, it’s just, it's like an audience that's there and is willing to listen. But also, you're sitting back and learning, "I have to listen to everybody around me,” because they're coming from all different places around the world, especially Portland, especially here at The Telling Room. There's something special about this place, kids coming from all over the world. You're sitting in the same room with people from places so different than you know, and hearing their perspectives is something I'll never forget.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Voices of the Future is hosted and conceived by me and produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects, with help from Carly Peruccio. The music in this episode is by Jordan Kramer. The series is made possible by the Academy of American Poets, with funds from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. To learn more about The Telling Room and its programs, visit tellingroom.org. I'm Stuart Kestenbaum. Thanks for listening.