Dorothea Lasky’s poetry mesmerizes and conflates the confessional with the cerebral, as if Hallmark hired Frank O’Hara for their 1960 valentines line. Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Lasky has published four collections of poetry, AWE (2007), Black Life (2010), Thunderbird (2012), and Rome (2014), as well as several chapbooks, including the polemical Poetry Is Not a Project (2010). Her poems have appeared The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and American Poetry Review. Lasky was awarded a Bagley Wright Fellowship in 2013 and is an assistant professor of poetry at Columbia University.

How did Rome as an entity shape your book Rome? Obviously, those who dabble in the ways of Roman poetry would see your hints and nudges along the way. But to a periphery creature, we can call a reader, how would you explain how you were drawn into the Roman Empire as it were, and why did you choose to incorporate these tropes in your contemporary work?

Rome has been a deeply important space in my imagination ever since I was a little girl. When I was in fifth grade, I had a phenomenal teacher, Jayne Hanlin (the kind of teacher every student deserves to have), who loved Latin and read us Roman poetry every day right before lunch break. I remember most vividly her reading us Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the weird way those very weird stories cut into me. They felt like they were speaking to me.

I took Latin all through high school and in college; I majored in Latin, and all those Roman poets and that landscape — I always felt a deep kindred relationship to it. As I look back, I think a big deal was that Roman poets placed an emphasis on the poet as immortal bird. There is a sense, when you read a poem written in Ancient Rome, that poetry is the thing that matters. Not the people who have rejected you, not the shitty details of your everyday existence, but the ultimate power to make it into magical language — that’s what matters. That’s always been a captivating power of poetry for me and it probably always will be.

So, Rome as an entity, as a thing that shaped my book, Rome, is a kind of homage to that. My book, Rome, is ultimately about power — the spiritual power of poetry to transcend all of the disappointing or daresay, tragic, things that happen in this lifetime.

Your poetry reads like it was meant to be no other way. Not a lot of clutter of ingredients or cut and paste nonsense in some grand experiment gone wrong. Do you believe your poetry is honest? I’m not suggesting it has to be one way or the other. But when you think about it, do you think, “Yes, this is how the poem/me feels, or the me in that poem. This is an honest emotional portrait.”

Thank you so much! That means a lot to me for you to say that, because I tend to think about poems as these constructions of mercury. Like you know how in old-fashioned thermometers, they used to be filled with mercury and when you shattered one, all of these beads of the stuff would spill everywhere in holistic little globes. I want my poems to always be that way, to be indestructible — not to in terms of “argument,” but in terms of mood.

But as far as honesty goes, no, I don’t think my poems are honest. Maybe a tad non-deceptive, but not in any real way. The word “honesty” has always had a moral ring to me, and I feel that my poems are immoral. My goal though is to eventually make them amoral.

Is your poetry a war against information and contemporary lifestyle glow trends? That may sound ridiculous, but I notice a sense of anxiety towards the complicated world we modern folks have created and a desire to simply speak and express mood and emotion no frills.

In some ways, yes! I mean, I am indebted to our present time. And I am an absolute product of it. But I long for something like simplicity. But it’s not in a sense of nostalgia for the simplicity we have had in the past, because the past as I see it has been full of evil and injustice and corruption. But perhaps my poems long for a perfect future we might go towards, where humanity might be valued for its kindness versus its greed.

In a previous interview, you stated that your first three books were a trilogy, and Rome was a starting point for something new. Do you feel like you accomplished that, and where will you go forward from Rome?

Thank you for reading this somewhere and knowing this! It was definitely my intention for my first three books to act as a trilogy and for Thunderbird to end up as a descent of the I into the demonic. I would like to think that that happened and that Rome was the starting point for this new place where the I has complete freedom to say anything as a sort of demon. But as I finish my next book, I have thought more that Rome was a sort of peak of this demon I, a shapeshifter who can say and be anything and that my I in my next book will be more of a human and more a spirit within its own humanity. Perhaps it will be that each new book from now on will reinvent its own I. That seems a bit dramatic to state, but perhaps it will be true.

Your work has been described as “temperamental,” yet they tend to read as cohesive parts of a larger mood. How do you react to reviews of your work — or do you?

I think that I both love and hate to read reviews of my work. Some part of me is always grateful that anyone is reading my work and I feel thankful when I see someone has taken the time to write a review. And then of course when what they say is positive, I feel vindicated in some way and maybe everyone feels that way, even if they got what I wanted a reader to get “wrong.” Maybe that’s the way every poet feels, I don’t know. But there’s always this feeling of exposure when you read a review, no matter what it says, and depending on the day, that makes me feel something a bit unpleasant rather strongly.

As far as a review saying my work is “temperamental,” I can’t recall the specific review you are referring to, but I guess I might agree with that idea. I would love for my poems to be seen as moody. But as you say, part of a larger mood, in that they are all part of a distinct personality.

Can you talk about how teaching influences your writing? And perhaps describe your feelings about teaching at Columbia University this summer. The course “The Transfer of Poetry Between the Eye and the Word” sounds incredible.

Teaching influences my writing immensely. I think that I found my voice (both for teaching and writing poetry) while teaching five classes a semester over a decade ago while living in Boston. Because I had to teach so much and to audiences who might not be excited about my “poetic” rhetoric, I had to think about language differently, as a tool versus a decoration, and this changed the way I wrote my poems.

I love teaching at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and I love my fellow teachers and students excessively. It’s a total blessing to be in conversation with artists all day long. And thank you for saying that about my summer course. I’ll be teaching it in the fall as well, and I am really excited to teach it. It’s a variation on a course I’ve taught for several years. The intersection between poetry and visual art has always been extremely important to me, and I am looking forward to exploring it more in the summer.

I think that for me, teaching, is the space in which I work out my own ideas about poetry. All of my poetry writing has birthed itself somewhere in the classroom. I see the distinction between teacher and student very lightly, and as the distance between my role as a student gets farther away from my role as a teacher, I use the classroom as a place to have new ideas and to be in real conversation. The classroom for me is always the holy space.