Max Ritvo Talks & Texts With Beloved Professor Dorothea Lasky

At The Huffington Post, poet, comedian, and current Columbia MFA student Max Ritvo interviews his professor Dorothea Lasky. What's special here is the peek at their text messages: "A month into our time together, I told Dottie I wasn't writing frequently enough, that I felt tense and was overthinking when I went to write. Her response was to send me a text message every night for the entire month of October, 2013." The messages led to Ritvo's PSA Award-winning chapbook, AEONS (2014), selected by Jean Valentine. Ritvo gives Lasky credit where it's due:

"I told Dottie I wanted to interview her on her teaching philosophy on the occasion of the release of AEONS: it's a rare thing for a book of poems to be born in a single classroom. I wanted her to discuss her educational philosophy, which is idiosyncratic in the extreme."

An excerpt from their conversation follows. Read it all at HuffPo.

MR: You're a spiritual person and spiritual poet. Your work with me, as I saw it, was mainly teaching me how to enter and exit a trance. You love astrology, fate, and ritual. Do you think one needs trance states or some engagement with the spiritual realm, to write poetry?

DL: When you came to me, you said, "my mind is blocking me from writing poems," and I knew I had to help you rid yourself of the mind. I've always felt that when you tap into the part of the self that writes poems the self becomes beyond the mind. I go back and forth if I think this sort of state is part of the other world or is part of this one. I tend to favor the idea that people are creative from what the world gives them versus just being touched by the divine, because I think the former allows for the possibility that everyone can be creative versus just a chosen few. Whatever we want to call it, I think poets enter a space which is another reality when they write a poem, and that this is a great space to exist in for as long as possible.

MR: And I've heard you self-describe as a hoarder: your wrists are constantly clacking with new bracelets in your purse, and you always carry at least three pairs of glasses at once. Your spirituality seems deeply embedded in this love of physical objects--almost plastic-totem-worship. Could you talk about how material objects play a part in your spirituality and your poetry? How do material objects play a role in your teaching?

DL: Yes! You and I have discussed this a lot and have even exchanged many totems. Object-based learning is very important to my pedagogy and part of what I used as a foundation to starting a poetry school I co-direct called The Ashbery Homeschool and what I will use to create future educational programs. I think when we create and think from objects our thoughts have weight that more directly access the imagination. This may seem counterintuitive, as many times we assume thoughts beget thoughts. But I think the physicality and spirituality of an object (bearing with it the culture, individuals, and society that made it) is a symbol of the object-like schemata that exists in our imaginations as we create new things. I guess this reason alone explains my (very overwhelming) hoarding tendencies.