10 Questions for Merridawn Duckler

- By Marissa Perez

while I’m outside at the dull resort, near two women trying to read
and claim to have managed so far ten pages
which is nine more than me
as I google the etymology of pugilist
which one philosopher accused another being.
—from “near the new year, the philosophers fight on a FB page,” Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
One of the first poems I ever wrote was about my friend getting pregnant at a party I threw in a forest. I was only fifteen and didn’t really grasp the consequences but I always remembered the title which was “Last Birthday Party in Forest Park. “Maybe part of me did understand this was the end of certain carefree attitudes. I find poetry titles to be oddly prescient. You can tell so much about a poet by just reading their Table of Contents.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Deep debt to Ron Padgett. Allen Ginsberg, Frost, Amichai, Richard Hugo, Levertov, Kenneth Koch. Always Gertrude Stein, Anne Carson, Li Po, Bitsui, all the Russians, Beckett, Mishima. These lists are so difficult. Even writers I hate affect me and then some person I’ve never even heard of crops up in a literary magazine and just blows my world apart.  Now I’m going to lay awake at night thinking about all the writers I should have mentioned.

What other professions have you worked in?
I’ve been a cocktail waitress, a framer, a vintage picker; I’ve written questions for TOEF, ghosted memoirs, delivered flowers, directed a film festival and taught toddlers to dance.

What did you want to be when you were young?
A lion.

What inspired you to write this piece?
When I feel like a vector I’m open to writing a poem. Here was the forced fun resort, the sun on my face, women reading, an impending holiday, the laptop and lapdog, books and crows, trees and mountains. We’re such a bunch of etymologies. Language comes for us. However else you feel about Derrida he understood the fluidity that pulses through our attempts at communication. Consciousness is not a stream. It’s a river.

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
I love to travel and that’s when I write most of my poetry. When I’ve crossed some border and my imagination about what might be ahead overpowers my memory of what I’ve left behind, that’s where stuff gets made.

Who typically gets the first read of your work?
My mind. Then my ear. Then my gut.

If you could work in another art form what would it be?
Design.

What are you working on currently?
An opera about football. A magical realism novel that features an AI therapist. Sonnet-length one sentence poems. Dialogue driven flash. I have two completed manuscripts. Please will someone take them away from me.

What are you reading right now?
I always read several books at once because I am a fast and highly excitable reader. Right this moment “Childsplay” on the great Allan Kaprow, Frank Bidarts “Half Light”, Moyra Davey “Index Cards” Rajiv Joseph 3 Plays, including “Bengal Tiger at the Bagdad Zoo” and Louise Erdrich’s “Tracks”


MERRIDAWN DUCKLER is a writer from Oregon and author of Interstate (dancing girl press) and Idiom (Washburn Prize, Harbor Review). New work has appeared in Seneca Review, Women’s Review of Books, Interim, and Posit. Fellowships and awards include Yaddo, Southampton Poetry Conference, Poets on the Coast, and the Elizabeth Sloan Tyler Memorial Award from Woven Tale Press. She’s an editor at Narrative and the philosophy journal Evental Aesthetics.