There’s a Poem for That: Dallas Hunt + Teeth

All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about Teeth and how it came to be?

Dallas Hunt: Teeth came about after a particularly tumultuous time in my life, wherein I was dealing with loss through a variety of registers (death of family members; relationships crumbling; physical and mental health degradation). A lot of the collection is grappling with these issues and addressing them when I was in a lot of different “states.” When I was revisiting the collection, I decided to take out a lot of the pronouns and identificatory features of the book, so it can read as quite sparse or elusive, and that’s more or less a symptom of writing during these “states.” The collection was originally titled There is a place between love and ruin!, and while there is a poem with that title in the collection and while that is the general driving premise of the book, I decided on Teeth given the frequency with which it is mentioned in the book and how it signifies wildly throughout the text and life generally. And because “My Toof, My Toof!” was taken.  

ALU: Has your idea of poetry changed since you began writing? 

DH: I guess what has changed the most is “what” my writing is for, and I hope that doesn’t sound pedantic or pretentious at all. I’ve realized that there are a lot of things that I can only gesture to or address obliquely, and poetry offers a wonderful and generative avenue for getting at thorny or difficult areas, or issues that are hard to address “head on” — justice, love, grief, etc. For this collection, I’m interested in how affect or emotion always exceeds the labels we ascribe to it or spills out of the boxes we try to place it in. This book, then, and poetry broadly (at least for me) have been about these gestures or waves of the hand – attempts at describing or engaging with ideas/emotions/events that are hard to articulate or put into words. It’s difficult, but the work is in the gestures. *gesticulates wildly*

ALU: Can you discuss the significance of language and word choice in your collection. How did you land on which words to use?  

DH: A few words and phrases and titles of this collection are in Cree. I wrote this book both in and out of sleep, so apparently I dream in both Cree and English, which seems fitting to me. mîyo kisikaw! 

ALU: If you were to set your collection to a soundtrack, what song is at the top of the listing?

DH: Ugh, I hate and love this question simultaneously. I’m going to list songs that I know I wrote to while writing this collection and I’ll let you decide which song to put here. Here’s the soundtrack; you can decide the single:  

 
-Frank Ocean “Futura Free”  
-Paul Simon “Obvious Child”  
-Balmorhea “San Solomon (full band version)”  
-Greg Mendez “Rev. John / Friend”  
-The Replacements “Swinging Party” 
-Vince Staples “Law of Averages”  
-Gang of Four “Natural’s Not in It”  
-Armand Hammer “The God’s Must be Crazy”  
-Chromatics “Back from the Grave”  
-The Replacements “Can’t Hardly Wait”   
-Hop Along “How Simple” 
-Ty Dolla $ign “Love U Better”