A Conversation with Poet Edward A. Dougherty

Interviews Editor Emily Chambers Sharpe recently spoke with Edward A. Dougherty [pronounced DOK-er-dee] about the role of the imagination in the work of social justice; moral engagement as both a spiritual and a creative practice; and his most recent book, a collection of essays titled Journey Work: Crafting a Life of Poetry and Spirit (Apprentice House Press, March 2021).

Edward A. Dougherty earned his MFA from Bowling Green State University, but it took over 15 years for his first books of poetry to be published. They were Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree and Part Darkness, Part Breath. In addition to his 11 collections, most recently 10048 and Grace Street, he’s been poetry editor at the Mid-American Review, a contributing editor at Rowboat: Poetry in Translation, and a regular contributor to American Microreviews & Interviews. He lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York State and is Professor of English at Corning Community College; he was granted the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creativity Activity.

The following transcript has been edited and condensed. The full conversation is available in the audio interview above.

Emily Chambers Sharpe: Can you talk a little bit about yourself and your book?

Edward A. Dougherty: Sure. As a poet, I've been writing for decades now. And I didn't actually think anyone would be interested in this collection of essays because, I think, like most writers, it’s just our life. It's one seamless thing. We move from one thing to another. For me, the three—I described them as a Venn diagram—of poetry, reading, and writing that's defined me since I was a little kid—but [there’s] also spirituality and religion.

We look around at what is, and we can only have a hope for what could be through imagination.

I was raised in a really devout, large Irish Catholic family. And that really infused [in me] an imagination of timelessness. And even when relationships didn't always demonstrate it, I think my Catholic faith gave me a sense of communion, of relationship—even with strangers. 

The next section of the book is about our time in Hiroshima as volunteers at a Peace Center. And so [there’s a] sense of social justice, a sense that the world can be better, which of course begins in the imagination. We look around at what is, and we can only have a hope for what could be through imagination. So I see [the three elements of poetry, spirituality, and peacemaking] as really intricately enmeshed, even though they're slightly different. 

But when I sent the book around to folks, I was like, “Who's gonna appreciate all three of those for what they are?” And I think, readers and community members of Vita Poetica might appreciate that. 

ECS: Your book is titled Journey Work…

EAD: Yeah, Journey Work. I got it [from] this really cool book by Roger Lipsey, who talked about spirituality and 20th century abstract art, which seems like it wouldn't go together. He mapped out the traditional apprentice journey—it's usually “journey man,” but [let’s call it] a “journey person”—[which is someone] who’s been working at it long enough that they're able to teach, but they haven't been recognized as a master. And that idea of a masterpiece is that piece that someone else recognizes as “you've arrived.” I feel like most of our artistic life is in that journey period. It's like, [for] those in the Christian tradition, Ordinary Time—that's the bulk of the year. So Journey Work is what I've come to I guess.

ECS: It’s interesting you mention “Ordinary Time,” because I work with children in my church locally, and we actually call that “growing time.” It fits nicely with this journey work idea, right? It’s the time most of us are spending time growing.

Vita Poetica is about this creative expression of the life of art and faith—so it's a really nice tie-in with what you're working on—and an exploration of creative work through a spiritual lens, whatever that may be. I noticed [in your book] this prominent feature of family and of your faith. From the dedication, to these women that have formed you — your mother, your cousin, and your wife—to your father, who has a big role [through] his love of words and conversation. How does family itself inform your creative or writing life?

EAD: Well, first, I want to say that [from] my sense of other writers who have immediate family, it can be a real struggle. It's almost like it's either/or. We didn't have children of our own. We adopted late in life. And there's a whole story behind that, which isn't in the book. So I committed to shaping my life to the writing — that makes it sound really functional—to a kind of dedication to living life with intention and awareness. At some point in the book, when I get real highfalutin’, I said that my stance toward life, this attitude of attention, has a genuflection in it, that the presence of God is always and everywhere. I often found that as a young person, the busier I was, the less I was able to attend to that. So I dedicated my efforts and shaped my life around trying to create conditions of that. 

That's one side of it. The other side of it is, you know, I'm one of eight kids. And I married a person who's got a whole family of her own. So it's in relationship that we know who we are, I think. We can think of ourselves and do all this reflection, but it's only when you go to the family reunion, or the holiday picnic, and you bump up against all these other personalities, and they reflect to you— oh, you know, whatever. And then now I have to revise my sense of self. So it's in relationship that we learn who we are. 

ECS: I read, at least in part, this book as sort of a journey of being and becoming and actually figuring out who you are, particularly even owning a sense of yourself as a poet and a writer and a person of faith. What did writing this down feel like spiritually? How did telling this story settle in your soul? 

EAD: That’s great. ‘Cause then it's the putting out of the writing that brings back that sense of self. I think a lot of spiritual work and insight operates at that level of the nonverbal. A lot of the mystical traditions talk about people having experiences that they can't then talk about. And I think that's actually true of most of our experiences. Which is a real paradox for writers, right? Even the situation where you're standing around with friends, and you get to the end of your story, and it didn't quite have the impact that you wanted. And you go, “Well, I guess you had to be there.” It's really a concession to this quality of our experience, where the words, by their nature, have fail the experience. The experience is richer, more complex, more nuanced. And the words, to some degree, simplify that. It’s a failure that is really rewarding. 

I had a lot of those intuitive connections and certainly deep gratitude — for my cousin, Kate, for example, who features pretty strongly in one of the pieces and in my life more generally. So that gratitude, by writing it out, made me take that intuitive, wordless sense of wholeness—for that relationship and that person—and try to bring a quality of intention that, in the language, I have to explain and give examples [of] and maybe find some images that encapsulate that experience. And so it was a discipline of articulation, of delineating more specifically. For me, and I think for a lot of writers, there's a quality of savoring in that. Where I can hold on to an experience long enough to really wrestle with the language that says, “Let me see if I can get close to, or get a correspondence to the richness of that ineffable experience.” And that's worthy. Because if that happens for somebody else, they have an experience now not through life, but through the language that has that same, hopefully, vibrancy and delight.

ECS: Well, you're setting me up so nicely, because one of the things I wanted to talk about is the way that you express—especially in the opening “In Praise of Ointment”—your love of words, and almost love of play with words. And there's a quote you had, if you don't mind, I'll read you yourself: “The writing life and the religious life may seem opposed, but they share a deep and relevant core… an exercise in imagination and metaphor. Since what we encounter is literally beyond words, our language falls short.” Would that be what you think of yourself—as this person who doesn't just love words, but also plays with them? That maybe it's your area of fun?

That sense of playfulness, that lightheartedness, has always been a quality that I've associated with really deep spiritual people.

EAD: I think that sense of playfulness, that lightheartedness, has always been a quality that I've associated with really deep spiritual people. In the Quaker tradition, they call them “weighty Quakers”—you know, people who feel really settled in who they are, that sense of claiming themselves, and also steeped in the tradition enough that they're not all up in their head. They're settled. That weightiness. All of the people that I've encountered, that I look at and say, “when I grow up, I want to be like them”—they have that lightheartedness. They laugh easily. For me, to work with words, to tell stories and to write poems that [don’t] have that playfulness—I don't know, it just seems a little less dimensioned. So I think [of] the Frost phrase, that if there's “no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader”—that sense that, if I'm not anguished, then my readers won't feel it. I think it's “no delight in the writer, no delight in the reader” too.

ECS: That's wonderful. I really liked the way that I saw that poetic side, even in prose. Throughout [the book], I could see the way you used words. It seems almost like you're setting up a love story between yourself and words. What would you say about that?

EAD: I never thought of it that way. But you know, to be reading and writing as much as I do, and most of my writer friends do, it's got to be a love relationship, right? I'm more faithful to words than I am to most of my friends. So, yeah, I think that's probably true.

ECS: You mentioned at the beginning moving into your experience of going to Hiroshima. And I also read [elsewhere] about how that influenced you to write poems about 9/11 experiences. I would really like to hear you talk about both that experience in Hiroshima and what was formative for you about 9/11 and how you put all those together.

EAD: Yeah, they're big topics. I was influenced pretty early on, I think in grad school, by Carolyn Forché’s idea of “poetry of witness.” And I think [for] anybody who's interested in social justice, particularly a faith-informed social justice, there's a beloved community that is possible. So, one quality of the poetry of witness would be to speak for those who don't have a voice, to confront readers with what is difficult to face, extremities of violence and hardship that one human being or one group of human beings will deliver on another. And I think that what's happening there is an empathetic identification with the victim. Understanding that and owning that, and then taking responsibility for choices that that has implications for. That's all wrapped up in there. 

So we became volunteers in 1993. And this was in the period after what we now have to call the first Persian Gulf War, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. In the runup to that war, thinking became very polarized: either we go to war, or we do nothing. Both Beth and I felt that was an incredible poverty of imagination. There are countless ways to intervene that are not such an organized onslaught of violence. So, it was in that context that we thought we should do something with our lives for peace. 

Long story, but we became volunteers through the Brethren Volunteer Service (BBS). So off we went to Hiroshima. And our ruling board—about half of the members were survivors of the atomic bomb. We worked pretty closely with people who were there on that day and were willing to tell the story of what happened to them. So that empathetic imagination became very direct, very personal, you know, a relationship of one friend to another. And, in fact, the leader of the chairman of the board, Mr. Morishita—he's a calligrapher—he allowed me to use a couple of his calligraphies in my first book, which came out of that time. So I think the feeling of “let me enter into this story” not from a historical point of view, but from the personal, meaning those for whom history has landed. 

Fast forward to 9/11. I was a professional at a community college, teaching my classes, going from one class to the next. Chaos in the hallways, people wheeling out TVs going, “something's happened in New York,” and I'm like, “I got class.” I went, taught my next class, and came out, and by that time, one tower had collapsed. And so we knew things were deliberate and getting worse. And I just felt like that event and the subsequent war on terror—not just the war in Afghanistan that is hopefully now winding down—but the mindset of, “because we think another country might attack us, we can preemptively launch war on them.” 

So there's a whole set of ideas that came out of 9/11. There was the event itself. And then there's the cultural and imaginative and policy sorts of stuff. So I felt like this is a defining historical event of my lifetime. There's been a lot, but I don't think things are the same in our country, or in our world since 9/11. And I felt a sense of moral obligation to at least entertain it as a writer. And so I just kept returning to it and returning to it, and finding a way of dealing with it, particularly because the aftermath continued to unfold, and the reflection continued to happen. We're continuing to mine the event for meaning. In a sense, the story kept shifting. It took about 15 years for me to finish what ends up being a pretty slim volume of poems. But it comes out of that kind of moral engagement that I think is part of the spiritual practice and commitment. 

ECS: I think it’s really beautiful, because what you're describing—it's moral engagement, but through this creative vein. It’s a very beautiful way of saying we can use art to try to work out these tensions that we're experiencing, to engage in justice work. 

Art-making, and I think art-receiving, is a way of working out the difficulty of being a human being.

EAD: I love how you said that. The art-making, and I think art-receiving, is a way of working out the difficulty of being a human being, particularly that moral dimension.

ECS: The next section that you get into is “Beyond the Fishbowl.” And you open it with [what] to me reads a little more sermon-like, maybe even [more] than the rest of your book—but in a good way. This “Lessons in Totalitarianism” chapter. I really appreciate [how] you put together this experience you had with someone affronting you from a more evangelical point of view about your Catholic upbringing, and then you yourself having an encounter with a Muslim person and being in the position that you felt like the person was in with you, and how this brought you to a questioning of absolutes. 

The thing that really strikes me as very relevant in that conversation is that there is a kind of conversation, especially actually, amongst evangelicalism at the moment around deconstruction of faith. One of my questions was, what did you imagine your audience would be here? What was in your heart? Because as I was reading it, I couldn't help but think it's almost speaking to that group, but it felt like a container that wasn't tearing everything down. We're actually finding space. I wonder if you'd like to speak to what was in your heart or what you had in mind? 

Witnessing people living radical love and my own small efforts in that same direction led me to a conviction that when we touch the heart of the Divine, we experience the unity of all things and a love that bursts the wine skins. This unconditional regard reaches beyond economic class, occupation, race, gender, national boundary, even religion—maybe especially religion. When we touch this love, we are stirred to aid the suffering, right injustice, and cultivate this compassion in others.

Excerpt from “Lessons in Totalitarianism: Seeking the Path of Love-acted-out,” a chapter in Journey Work

EAD: I actually wrote that a long time ago, and I can't remember the occasion that sparked it. But the reason I kept it in the book was [because] so often these conversations about—not just what I believe, but what you should believe—can get depersonalized to the point where they become abstracted from experience in a way that these unprovable holes become almost weapons. We hurt each other with these absolute concepts. And so one of the reasons I kept the essay was because I tried to root it in my own experience and in my own struggle with that. For most Christians, and growing up Catholic, we said the creed every week. And as a kid, I would look around at other people, and I could tell people reading the bulletin as they were mouthing the words. So it becomes automated in a way that isn't life-changing. And my sense of spiritual experience and real faith is not a conclusion that is an ending. One of the early experiences I had in college was this sense that, if I really believed that God loves me, how would my life be different? And then the corollary immediately came to, well, if God loves me that much, and God loves all these other people, how would I live? And so faith for me has always had this attendant [Did I hear this word correctly?] question. 

[There’s a] Quakers’ book; they call it Faith and Practice. Faith, without putting into practice, is just ideas. We can say anything that we believe, but it's only as we try to wrestle with it and put it into our lives—just like writers can have any idea, but it's only when you actually put the words down, where you go, “Oh, no, those characters would never do that, right?” It's in the work. It's in the material of our lives and our words and our relationships, our families, our communities, that our faith is really lively. And so I try to keep that grounding in that essay, to say, here's what I said, and then I went and did it myself. 

When I moved to Japan, and I experienced these other things, then the question really evolved in ways that made me question the belief. And then you come to a new belief, and that raises new questions. And so [there’s] that ongoing unfolding of—some people might call it “revelation.” The Quakers believe that revelation didn't stop with the conclusion of the Bible. And so that ongoing revelation means we need to be engaged in it, we need to be listening for it, and we need to be testing it with our own experience. 

ECS: You have an essay, I think it's about being a writer that's not writing. You want to share a little bit about that, and maybe your learnings?

It's in the material of our lives and our words and our relationships, our families, our communities, that our faith is really lively.

EAD: Sure. I was fortunate enough to be given a sabbatical leave from my teaching position to research creativity. One big part of that was interviewing artists in all kinds of forms. I proposed it in part because I teach writing. And I wanted to put myself in a position of uncomfortability, which is what I do to my students every semester. So because I had the time, my spouse and I went on a seven-day silent Buddhist retreat. And when they say “silent,” they mean what they call “noble silence.” There's no talking. There's no reading and no writing. In fact, they encouraged us to avert our gaze, not even make eye contact, so that we could relieve each other of all that effort to put on that social mask. And we could settle into what's really happening in this body-mind system right now.

We had some great teachings about how the mind works from a Buddhist point of view, which has been confirmed in a lot of ways from recent neuroscience research to how attention works and how concentration works. There were some really cool ways in which the psychological research and how the mind works was, I could see it in action in this really stripped down way. For example, an idea that I find really compelling is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He wrote a book called Flow. He would have the clients that he was researching, he would page them (back before cell phones) and say, “What are you doing, and how are you feeling about it?” And when people had that experience of, “I'm so dialed into what I'm doing, I kind of lose track of time. I might even get hungry and not even realize it. I'm so involved in what I'm doing.” People called it flow, so that's what he's been calling it. And he identified that having a clear sense of what my goal is, what am I trying to do? And clear feedback that my efforts are either getting me closer to that goal or not. And then the zone of challenge is just right. It's challenging, but it's not so challenging that I want to give up. It's within my means, but it's not so easy that I get bored. And so, as we engage with anything that produces that sense of flow, our skills increase. So we have to make new goals, and that ongoing spiraling of improvement. 

And so on this retreat, I was assigned to do pots after one of the major meals. And because we weren't talking to each other, I could see this quality of flow entering into this attentiveness that wasn't just a rigid kind of “what am I doing?” but a playful, light “look at how this is working—let me gamify it a little bit and see if I can do the pots in a pretty efficient way (because we were on a pretty tight schedule), so that the next crew would have fewer to do.” It became this game of “how many can I do?” So it was really fun to experience that. And then really fun afterwards try to articulate it, break it down, and explain and savor that experience so that the insights settled in more.

ECS: So the last section of your book is “Laying It on the Wire.” It seems like it builds into a deeper appreciation of what else is out there in terms of words and the world of words, and how those things have followed you. I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about that section and how you see it coming together to tie up what's been before it.

EAD: I think the way you describe that, Emily, is right on. That sense that any real craft always exceeds our ability. Like poetry: You know, it's millennia in the making. Just a tradition in English is beyond any one person's capacity to absorb. So a certain amount of humility before the craft I think is good. So, to leave the book not just at “here's what I have come to understand about poetry and poets that I admire.” One of the things that section does is spotlight a couple of poets that set the bar for me and continue to inspire me. And there are others, but they fit the themes of the book best. But also, “Wow, look at what's still possible in the word craft.” And so that's why the last essay is tracing one poem that I wrote through several revisions—so you can see the development of the ideas, but also how it takes a lifetime to write a poem. 

One of my interviews was with a glassmaker named Dan Mirer. And I asked him, I said,”You must get this all the time: How long does it take you to make one of these?” He was making red wine glasses when he let me observe him. And He chuckled. He says, “Yeah, I get that a lot. Because I like to say, it takes me about 20 minutes and 20 years.” 

I think that that's really true. People pick up a novel, and it's 220 pages. They're like, “all of that time gets down to this kind of product.” And it can be disappointing. But I think it's the richness of the process of writing, that it's a companion and a way of wrestling. So may it go on for all of us beyond our capacity to fulfill it.

ECS: What books have influenced your writing or made you think, “this is a book that spoke similarly to me”? What would those models be for you?

EAD: Many of Thomas Merton's essays. There are times when he can get really scholastic and dry, but some of his works, especially the later ones—he's got an essay called “Rain and the Rhinoceros” that I just love. This is when he was living in his hermitage (for those of you who are familiar with Merton's life). He was able to be in solitude a great deal. And so he's in the hills of Kentucky, and an Air Force jet flies over his hermit. And so here he is trying to do sacred work, and the military is right there with him. So you can't go to the monastery, you can't go anywhere, without bringing the world with you. 

So Merton’s essays, Scott Russell Sanders’s essays. I even hesitate to mention his [Sanders] work, because as much as I'm inspired by it, I don't think my work comes anywhere near what he does. Just such a delightful wordsmith and entertainer of his own experience in a way that's openhearted and wise. I'd like to grow up into someone like him. There are other essayists, but those two are the ones that I continue to return to. And, yeah, they've really influenced how I would put together an essay.

ECS: Lastly, I would love to hear from you—I don't know if you do this as a practice or if it's something you thought about—what would be your hopes for this book as a whole?

EAD: Yeah, I have a hard time with that, because, just like apprentice to journey work to master, I feel like the masterpiece is bestowed—someone else recognizes that. I feel like that's not my work. That's other people's work. Similarly, what happens to the book when it goes out there? I would like it to be inspiring to people, that they could read my experiences and relate. I've always loved that experience when I'm reading, and someone names something, and I'm like, “Oh, me, too.” If that happens, I'd be so gratified because that's like the magic of really good writing. I [also] thought, if it got into the hands of people who are aspiring to be poets, and writers, and they felt like, “Oh, this is this is helpful for me”—I think that would be very gratifying.