Tompkins County's new poet laureate is Dr. Dan Rosenberg. Rosenberg is the author of the poetry collections Bassinet, Thigh’s Hollow, cadabra, and The Crushing Organ. He also serves as a lecturer at Cornell University.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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AURORA BERRY, HOST: Thanks so much for being here today.
DAN ROSENBERG: Thanks for having me, Aurora. It's great to be here.
BERRY: Before we get started, I'd love to have you read a poem of yours about Buttermilk Falls here in Tompkins County.
ROSENBERG: Sure, of course. It's very creatively entitled, Buttermilk Falls.
We step on barren stones while between
them the cracks teem with small living.
A game we play: Who can leave the world
most undisturbed. The water says be
like water, leave the slowest fingerprint,
but we can barely hear it over the falls.
The pebbles blunt their edges on our heels.
We are sediment. Two accidental statues,
me and my son, poor models for a better man.
What counts as life in the slush and wash around us?
The star moss wept somehow against my ankle,
and I seem now more of this place than I was.
Undivorced from stem and root. Untroubled
as a stalagmite under a generous sun. I bend
beside my son, balance stone upon stone.
The moss remains, luminous and still.
We make a home for it, and it survives.
BERRY: Thank you so much.
ROSENBERG: Thanks.
BERRY: And this leads me into something that I've really been wanting to talk about with you, and that's your connection to the natural world in your work.
ROSENBERG: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't have described myself as like a poet with a particular connection to nature, I’m not a nature poet. My work takes its roots, really, in the imagination. But, round here, I think it's hard to avoid, if you're paying attention.
I grew up on Long Island among strip malls and with no natural landscape to speak of. And now I'm raising my child here among the gorges and the waterfalls, and he and I will be hiking through one of the creeks at the bottom of a gorge, and we'll scramble down a waterfall, and I'll turn around and look at it, and I'll say, you know, ‘Check this out. Isn't this amazing?’ I want him to react to the sublime, because I remain stunned by it, and he looks at it and thinks it's Tuesday. He has no reaction at all because this is his home. It's where he grew up. But for me, it's a constant surprise.
BERRY: I'm wondering when you first started to realize that that was becoming something that moved you. Is there a particular moment that you can recall?
ROSENBERG: I'm a generous enthusiast. I get excited by all sorts of things, and so I think one of the moments when the landscape really hit me was actually when I was teaching up at Wells College. I would drive up the east side of the lake, and to approach Wells College, we would crest this final hill, and the lake would open up in front of you.
You know, you're driving along, and it's a sort of rural commute and it's the main roads. There's like trucks going by. Every now and then there'd be fields of sunflowers that were always stunning and amazing, but then it's like soybeans or whatever. They're not particularly exciting for me to look at. But you'd crest that hill and the lake would open up in front of you, and it's like the horizon exhaled. Everything got so much breathier and more expansive.
BERRY: Talking about the power of the natural world and getting into this season where, you know, the power of the natural world at times is a little bit inconvenient for us human beings who have to drive around on ice and such, I'm wondering how you tap into that power and that beauty in these times where the weather is a little bit icky, to be simplistic.
ROSENBERG: Yeah, Buttermilk Falls sort of mentioned being on the rump of summer, and that's definitely not where we are now, but it's got its own wonder.
Right now, I'm teaching at Cornell. I was walking home from the campus, and I walked down along Cascadilla Falls. To see a waterfall plummeting under ice that's got its own sort of majesty. And then you walk and there's a slushy path, and you're walking through mud because it's starting to thaw a little bit, and it's gross. And I think that has a place in the poems too. It doesn't all have to be beauty, it just has to be life.
BERRY: Talk to me a little bit about what's speaking to you outside of the natural world.
ROSENBERG: The trajectory of my work has been one where the domestic has actually taken a larger and larger role. I have a young son, and raising him has been a big part of my life. And because my work is so shaped by what I'm obsessed with in my life, it has crept in in a major way.
I’ve been thinking a lot about fatherhood, parenthood, and because he's a young boy, I've been thinking a lot about masculinity, actually. How I can model and offer for him a way of being a man in the world that isn't toxic, that isn't aggressive, that isn't about violence or dominance, but that has a positive value, right?
I feel like as a culture we often do a bad job telling boys and young men that they are good, that they can be good, right? We tell them what not to do. I'm thinking a lot about how to offer a different world view to my son, and that concern, thinking about husbandry, thinking about care and stewardship, creeps into the poems a lot.
BERRY: Thank you so much for talking with me today.
ROSENBERG: My pleasure, Aurora. Thanks for having me.