Dorothea Lasky on Sweetness and Horror
"There’s something in horror that, by acknowledging the evil in the world, is actually very nurturing."
When our editor was working on this interview with the poet Dorothea Lasky, they texted to say, “Her voice is just so warm, like a hug.” It’s true! Sort of everything about being in Lasky’s presence feels like a hug: her big laugh, her friendly voice, the bright colors she wears. You’ll see what I mean when you hear the episode.
Her poetry, which spans six collections, has warmth, too, but not always— and certainly not only warmth. It’s fierce and feral, playful and strange, concerned with animals and ghosts and milk and blood, love and viscera! One of my favorites is titled “Kill Marry Fuck.” Another, “To Be the Thing,” includes the stunning lines:
To be the name uttered, but not to have the burden to be
To be the name said, but not heard
To not breathe anymore, to be the thing
To be the thing being breathed
To not be about to die, to be already dead
To not have to disappoint
To not have the burden of being late
Or punctualWhew! Lasky says in our conversation that she loves about poems that they don’t always make you feel like everything is going to be okay. In fact, she says, she finds poetry a sharper, harsher format than the genre of horror, of which she is an avid fan. Her most recent book mixes both: it’s a collection of poetry based on The Shining (and bearing the same name).
She began writing it in a period when she was actively trying to avoid poetry, and thought maybe she was done with it altogether. Then, when an editor asked whether she might have something to write about The Shining, “the poems came flooding out.” It’s not a retelling of Stephen King story or the Kubrick film, but more a conversation with its imagery and themes: violence, haunting, labyrinths, the impulse toward survival.
We talk in the interview about the way she has come to think of horror as a genre with a lot of sweetness in it. By taking seriously the terrifying qualities of the human experience and allowing us to experience them safely, to tinker with them and rehearse them, horror movies and books offer us a kind of care— horror helps us train ourselves to survive.
“Life is so so scary, and we really don’t know why we’re here. Just the idea of existence is so terrifying. And so many scary things can happen. Humans do evil things. There’s something in horror that, by acknowledging that, is actually very nurturing. It gives us a platform to test our our fears and our reactions that to me feel almost maternal, in a way.”
Something I love about this conversation, and about Lasky’s work more broadly, is that she seems to treat every facet of the human experience (nature, sex, beauty, hilarity, death, love, horror) with equal curiosity. She’s able to laugh and talk about “Capital E Evil” in the same sentence, because as she wrote around the launch of The Shining, “maybe a good horror story—a space where everything completely terrible is simply acknowledged—is a human embrace after all.”
She also gives us the gift of a reading mid-ep, which you shouldn’t miss.
Mentioned in the episode:
Bernadette Mayer’s MEMORY
Lasky’s essay on the power of horror
The Shining (the movie)
The Shining (the novel)
Not mentioned in the ep, but an incredible part of Lasky’s creative output:
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Til soon,
Jordan
