Interview by Joshua Lew McDermott
Line Rider: Can you tell us a little about your background and about yourself generally? Are you from Utah originally? How did you start writing poetry?
Terysa Dyer: I was born and raised in the suburbs a few miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah. My family isn’t especially literary, but they have always supported my affinity for reading and writing. Like most kids, I wrote simple poetry in school, and then around 7th grade I started writing and reading a lot more poetry on my own, and never stopped.
LR: How has living in Utah shaped your worldview and your poetry?
TD: Because I grew up irreligious in a state largely populated and governed by a regionally-dominant, conservative religion, I have often been treated like an outsider. But because I have lived in Utah all my life, I have also inadvertently internalized perspectives I don’t agree with. My worldview and my poetry have been at times preoccupied with the liminal status that comes from growing up amid Utah culture without sharing its dominant beliefs. Religion aside, Utah can be at once beautiful and harsh and unexpected, and I think my poetry is at its best when those same qualities coexist within my writing.
LR: What is your professional life like and how has your work shaped your poetry and worldviews?
TD: Most of my adult life has been spent in academia, which has impacted my poetry in immensely positive ways. Although I know many poets who have been stifled by the perceived and real restrictions of the academic establishment, I have been lucky enough to learn and work in a richly creative atmosphere during my time in academia, with professors and colleagues who encouraged my writing and challenged me to improve. Even now, working as a writer outside of academia, I realize how much I rely on the creative work ethic and critical worldview I developed in school.
LR: Your poetry has a very grounded, accessible quality to it that I really appreciate. It avoids lots of the highbrow pitfalls of a lot poetry, especially academic poetry, today. But it is also intelligent and insightful and playful. What is your approach to writing poetry and what does poetry do for you?
TD: First off, thank you. I’ll admit that some of the quality poetry that gets published today goes over my head. While I think we can learn as much from the poems we like as the poems we don’t, I don’t want to write poetry I wouldn’t enjoy reading. So, since the poetry I most enjoy reading tends to be grounded in accessible images and personal experiences, much of the poetry I write tries to reflect on experiences from my own life. I am interested in many approaches to poetry, but it’s important to me that my writing is accessible.
LR: What are the biggest influences on you writing style and approach to poetry?
TD: When I first began writing poetry, I soaked up everything I could until eventually I found myself most drawn to poets from the schools of modernist and confessional poetry. As a result, much of my poetry has been influenced by the open form and image-driven writing of modernist poets, along with the first-person narrative approach of confessional poets. Currently, I am fortunate enough to be in a poetry group with some of the best poets in Utah: Star Coulbrooke (the first Poet Laureate of Logan City), Shanan Ballam (Star’s successor to the title, as current Logan City Poet Laureate), as well as Brock Dethier, Brittany Allen, and Isaac and Aaron Timm. Their writing and feedback has strengthened my poetry immeasurably.
LR: What do you think poetry’s role is in society? How do you think poets and poet communities can better engage with every day, working-class Americans who view poetry as a totally foreign medium?
TD: I think the culprit in many Americans’ discomfort with poetry is the way it’s commonly studied in school. The traditional canon of antiquated poetry—while useful to writers learning the history of their craft—pushes away the same working-class audience with whom contemporary poetry might most resonate. This leaves our poet communities with the difficult job of correcting a misperception that has been reinforced from a young age; I don’t know if I can answer the question of how, but the question of why seems clearer to me. Poetry, at its best, unifies people. It grants us unique access to shared experiences and to those we can’t imagine, from perspectives that echo or that differ from our own. As poets, when we are able to focus people’s attention on what is universal about an individual experience, then I think we are successful.
LR: Your poems have a lot to say about being a woman in contemporary America. What are some of the triumphs and challenges of being a socially aware poet and woman in the American West, especially Utah, today?
TD: One of the biggest challenges for me is to prevent myself from growing so bitter about the disparity in the treatment of women and men—especially in a state like Utah—that I lose sight of the wonders and triumphs that are also happening to and around me. Success, for me, does not entail becoming an embittered, miserable version of myself, though that is my instinct when confronted by a patriarchy that subordinates women’s bodies and rights to men’s. So, while I let myself get angry, I try to channel that energy into something furiously productive that (ideally) might counteract the aims of the patriarchy. It’s important for me to celebrate my own and other women’s triumphs in the face of the blatant, gendered double-standards that are still upheld in America for things like appropriate language, demeanor, subject matter, and sexuality, not only in writing but in life.