10 Questions for Dan Rosenberg

You must be very tall
to love the dark. You need
sturdy legs and a heart
that struggles just enough
to bring your blood about them
and raise it again to your head.
You must feel in your chest
the finite days of its function.
—from Dan Rosenberg’s “To Love the Dark,” Volume 66, Issue 2 (Summer 2025)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I was a student at the Pines Elementary School, I wrote and illustrated a short book called The Kangaroo that Said Moo. It was “published” in an edition of 1 by the Pines Publishing Company, which was essentially three middle-aged women in a supply closet with glue sticks. I think my understanding of the pleasures of language began with that project. I will always be grateful for the teachers who expected me to do big, challenging things and helped me meet those expectations. 

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
My undergraduate poetry mentor, Peter Richards, introduced me to a whole world of poets, historical and contemporary, who shaped my aesthetics forever—most notably, Tomaž Šalamun, an incredible poet, mentor, and advocate, opened doors to registers of serious play I had never imagined.

There are countless others, of course; my writing is always in conversation with the living and the dead. Zbigniew Herbert and Wisława Szymborska are among the great Polish poets who have shaped my work with how they blend the personal with larger contexts. Bashō and Issa continue to teach me how attention works. A lifelong obsession with both Paul Celan and Sappho has shaped my understanding of silence. (All of these people I’ve read in translations—for Celan, I am in awe of John Felstiner’s translation work; for Sappho, Anne Carson, though I recognize that some of what I love in her versions is more Carson than Sappho.)

What other professions have you worked in?
I’m a professor, and I’ve always understood teaching as how I can do the most good, as my genuine vocation. That said, I had a brief stint in book publishing in NYC, which taught me what exploitation might feel like. I was a paralegal for a while, which required so little of my brainpower that I was able to do a lot of my own reading and writing while on the clock. That was a good gig for a single poet in his 20s! But other than those brief digressions, my professional path has always led me to the endless, frustrating, precarious, deeply fulfilling work of education.

What did you want to be when you were young?
It was always teaching for me. I can’t remember a version of myself that wasn’t committed to education as a project—a commitment that has only seemed to grow more urgent and necessary because of things like AI and what often feels like a larger cultural collapse of critical and ethical thinking.

What inspired you to write this piece?
I usually write poems from a position of not-knowing, from some urge I don’t fully understand that rises from the alchemy of language and lived experience. But this poem sounds quite confident, which is a temporary and fragile stay against the unknown. It borrows from the fact that I’m fairly tall, and it borrows from my entering middle age and feeling my mortality, and it borrows from my not knowing what to do with all the darkness I find in the world and in myself. Oh, and it ends with a tree fact! Bishop pines are not fire resistant, but they usually need fire to open their cones and release their seeds. So the trees burn, but their seeds germinate in the newly burnt ground. Is that hopeful? To write a poem at all is to grope in the dark with just these words and hope to discover why it was worthwhile by the end.

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
I’ve lived for the last 11 years on the shores of Cayuga Lake, and the landscape here has certainly shaped my work. The horizon is local, intimate, bounded by verdure; the natural world is animate and always just a bit bigger than the human world.

I also grew up on Long Island, and I think the scale of my writing is often suburban in a way that is informed by that childhood: near but not in the centers of human activity. Other voices in my work are present but rarely exceed the landscape. (The mall closest to my childhood home was the Walt Whitman Mall, which surely confirms that suburban poetics—and explains my love of both loafing and Auntie Anne’s.)

Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I prefer silence. My ear is very susceptible to new rhythms, and I struggle to hear the music of my own language if I hear someone else’s. Which means I’ve never been one of those writers who enjoy working in coffee shops. Museums yes, outside sure, but not where they’re playing tunes.

Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I wish my life were orderly enough for rituals or traditions. I write in stolen time, often late at night after my family is asleep, or in the early morning. Writing comes easier to me when I’ve found a way to quiet my internal puritan, who is always concerned about my lack of progress on the day’s endless to-do list.

What are you working on currently?
I have a new manuscript that’s almost complete, tentatively titled In the Lighthouse Shadow. After my past couple of books have centered on the domestic, on marriage and fatherhood and husbandry of various kinds, this one opens out to wider concerns. That said, I rarely work in projects; it’s almost always one poem at a time, for me. So now I’m seeing how well these individual poems play together.

What are you reading right now?
Many things at once, always! Alicia Rebecca Myers’s Warble, which recently came out from Meadowlark Press, is a beautiful poetry collection centered on the complexities of losing a father. Hilary Plum’s State Champ is a novel that is blowing me away with its deft humor while confronting some of the hardest and least funny social issues of our moment. And I am captivated by the work of British poet Sean Borodale, who writes his books “live on-site.” Right now I’m reading his Asylum, which he wrote underground in Somerset’s caves, mines, etc. Reading people whose relationship to language is wildly different from my own jumpstarts something inside me, and I’m always grateful to find those voices that arrive like secrets whispered in my ear or new flavors on my tongue.

DAN ROSENBERG’s books include Bassinet, cadabra, and The Crushing Organ, which won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize. He has also published the chapbooks A Thread of Hands and Thigh’s Hollow, which won the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, and he co-translated Slovenian poet Miklavž Komelj’s Hippodrome. Rosenberg teaches at Cornell University and lives in Ithaca, NY.