 Welcome to Moments with Melinda. And my guest today is Dan Chasen. Hey, Dan, thanks for joining me today on Moments with Melinda. Hey, Melinda, it's great to be here. It's great to have you with me. Well, let me tell my viewers a little bit about you. There's a lot about you, so I'm gonna try to get through this quickly. Dan Chasen, who was born in Burlington, Vermont, attended Rice High School. He received his BA at Amherst and his PhD from Harvard. Dan is an American poet, critic, and journalist. The Sibony Review called Dan Chasen the country's most visible poet critic. Dan is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and received the award in literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushkart Prize and the Whiting Award. Dan is the Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English at Wellesley College. He has written six books and is embarking on a biography about Senator Bernie Sanders. Is that all about right? That's about right. Thanks so much. You have one of the most illustrious careers. I'm just so excited to have you here. I also wanted to say happy birthday to you because you have a birthday coming up in a few days. Yep, coming up. Happy birthday. 51, appalling. We look terrific. So you grew up in Vermont as the only child of a single mother and you attended Rice Memorial. Now, my son, Eli, remembers you as a very cool but studious fellow who did not participate in the foolishness of high school that he does have. I did a bit, just a little bit. But not like the crowd he was running with anyway. And he said that you marched to your own drum. He was not surprised by your tremendous success. And my husband and I directed you in a few musicals at Rice High School. So Dan, tell us a little bit about what we don't know about you. Tell us a little bit about your childhood growing up here in Vermont. That's great to hear. And yeah, I remember Eli really fondly. He was, I believe he was Puck in the production of Midsummer Night's Dream where I had a very small role. I was Robin Starvelling, one of the rude mechanicals. But maybe he was a year or two behind me and we knew each other well. I, yeah, I grew up in Burlington. I grew up across the street from Campus Kitchen on 258 Colchester Avenue. It's a house that was bought by Trinity College when my grandparents sold it. And now when Trinity went out of business, UVM took it up. So it's a dorm for grad students now. And yeah, my father vanished early in my life when I was an infant and my mother moved back in with her parents and I was raised there. Very Catholic family and upbringing. We were very connected to Trinity College which was right next door. Both my grandmother and my mother worked at Trinity in various capacities. My mom liked to socialize with the nuns at the villa there at Trinity. And so I have nice memories of that sort of neck of the woods. And right, I went to Montecristi and eventually to Rice and I credit a lot of my, I don't know if it's success or whatever, my career, my writing life to some excellent teachers that I had at those schools, including both Donahue's. John Donahue passed away when I was a sophomore in high school, it was very tragic. And his wife, Christine, was my eighth grade teacher and another name I'll mention because people know him as Robert Brown who was a great inspiring English teacher, AP English. I was introduced to poetry in high school which I don't think is that common really anymore, right? My students have not had a lot of experience with poetry so I'm really very grateful for that. So can you share with us who your greatest inspiration was in your life and who helped to guide you in your literary career? Yeah, I would say, you know, I wouldn't say the biggest intervention for me was in Robert Brown's AP English class at Rice Memorial High School. Not only did he introduce me to Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop and all these great poets that have kept me company ever since, but I was not clued into elite colleges and he told me that I had applied to his alma mater which was Amherst College. And so I did entirely with his guidance and support. And then when I got there, there were so many influences. There were so many, it was a real eye-opening experience to me, I'd barely been out of Vermont. Not that Amherst is Paris or Rome, but it felt cosmopolitan to me. Is he still alive? He is, yeah, he's still alive. I hear from him sometimes. Yeah, I think he's doing pretty well. He must love watching your career and reading your books and... Oh, well, I hope so, taught me a lot. He's involved in your career. Do you ever see him? Do you ever come up and visit with him? I haven't, but I ought to. Maybe this will be my impetus, yeah. Yes, I think that would be great. So your work has received a lot of attention over the years. And so what do you attribute your success to? And can you talk a little bit about some poets who might have inspired you in your work? Sure. Well, I always took the work very seriously and I was always very tough on myself and I never wanted to just pass as a good writer. I wanted it to be something I felt in my bones was the case. And when I was in grad school at Harvard, I was studying to be a poetry scholar, but I was not at that time writing poetry myself. And I looked up a man named Frank Bedart who was and is a good friend of mine who taught at Wellesley College. And it was yet another one of these interventions. It's incredible what a good teacher and mentor can do for a person. So for a long time I wrote really exclusively for him, I would write a poem and I would wait in a nervous, intense way for him to read it and get back to me. And it was that kind of intense mentorship, I think that made a real difference for me. He was a tough reader, a tough mentor. I would often have to go back to the drawing board. I think that kind of thing is too rare these days. I sense myself being too soft on my students. I know it's terrible. Yeah. But there's a story about you slipping the poems through the mailbox. Can you share it with us? Oh yeah. Great, great story. Yeah, yeah, so Frank's an eccentric guy. He keeps evening hours. He wakes up four in the afternoon or six in the evening and stays up all night. So I would drive my poems and this is before email, right? So I would drive the physical object over to his department in Cambridge on Spark Street and I'd slip it in the mailbox. And I would wait in a nervous, anxious way all day long for the phone call, for the phone to ring and for him to get back to me. Often with disappointing news, I must say, but it's okay. There was trust and a long-term investment. So back to the drawing board. Frank had been the protege of the great poet Robert Lowell, who was a favorite of mine. And one thing that just wowed me was when I would go over to his apartment to slip my poems in his mailbox, Lowell had stayed with him in the apartment in the 1970s for like two months. And there was Robert Lowell's name on the mailbox. And I really felt I was part of this kind of literary ancestry, so. Well, you are. I mean, I don't think that you can avoid that. I think you are part of that. Thank you, thank you. Talk to us a little bit about your works, about some of the books that you've written. You've written six. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about your books? That's my guess. Sure, I mean, one thing I would say is there's a lot of Vermont in them and a lot of Burlington in them. And as you mentioned, I am writing this book about Bernie now. It's specifically about Bernie's rise in Burlington, which feels like a departure for me, except that I've been living mentally in Burlington pretty much since I left. And so the first book I wrote is called The Afterlife of Objects. And it is about growing up, you know, in the specific circumstances of my family, living with my grandparents and my mother, and reckoning with some tragedies that had befallen my family in the past. It's very autobiographical. I don't know if it feels that way to readers, but it certainly felt that way writing it. So I did that. I wrote a book called Natural History, which is an attempt to get out of my own autobiography and write sort of a more encyclopedic, bring more of the world in, science, knowledge, have a bigger grander view, bigger canvas. So that was a highlight. I wrote a book in 2014, a book of poetry called Bicentennial. And the title poem is set in Battery Park in Burlington at the Bicentennial Celebration, which I think is my first memory. I was five. And I remember, I've always cultivated as my first memory anyway. I remember getting up on somebody's shoulders and in the band shell or hat shell there, there was a group of, I don't know, veterans, guys from various wars playing music. And I remember looking past it over the lake at the Adirondacks. And so what I did when I wrote that book was kind of go back into my memory of that day and build a structure around it. So that was kind of thrilling for me to do. And then the latest book I have is called The Math Campers. I had it right here. We're gonna talk about that. I have it. Okay, cool. I have it too. Look at that. I've read it. I love it. And this was sort of a tip of the hat to your two teenage sons. Is that correct? It is. It really is, right? Yeah, because they were 15 and 17. Well, they were 13 and 15 when I wrote the book. And it is quite strange to see your own adolescents come back around that quickly. I have to say, I was a keen observer of adolescents because it seemed like mine was not that long in the past. Yeah. No, it wasn't. So talk a little bit about The Math Campers. Sure. And then I'm gonna ask you to read from it. Quite often you allude to your life in Vermont. And it's written so that the reader and poet talk to each other. Yes. The void of silence and mystery. Yeah. Your poem is focused on your teenage sons and their world living during a global crisis. Yes. So share with us a little bit about it. And if you could read a few pages from your book, I would love that for my view. That's great. That's great. Yeah. Thank you. You're right. So, okay, let's back up a little bit because another thing I do is write a lot of reviews of poetry. And that means that I'm sent hundreds of books a month. I've stopped a little now because I'm working on my Bernie book, but I'm still active. But when I was really at a clip, I would get a hundred books a month or something. And I know. And they would just pile up, you know? And, but I loved it. And I loved being in the position, you know, to me, a poem is partly constructed by the author and partly constructed by the reader. We have to bring so much of ourselves, you know, to a poem. So when I sat down to write the poems in this book, I wanted to represent the process where a poem gets shared between the writer of the verses and the reader who encounters it. So as you noted, and that's really kind of you observe the structure is a kind of dialogue, a sort of dialogue between two figures. One of them is the writer and one of them is a stranger who's getting the poems in the mail in the form of letters. And she's doing the narrating for most of the book. She's reporting that she has just gotten this stuff. She's quoting from it. She's analyzing it. Anyway, it, to me, it felt, I really wanted to figure out a way to represent how collaborative a poem is, you know, how much it's made between people. It's very social. I think it has the reputation of being a very isolating, isolated art, but you are so dependent on readers, you know? So maybe there's a little bit of gratitude in the book for, for readers who, you know, if I don't, if I don't go to a bookstore and pick up a book of somebody's poems and nobody does, then they just go away. It's terrible. Even Shakespeare could go away. Even John Milton could go away. And there are risks, actually, in our culture that they will go away. So it is so dependent on readers. Yeah, yeah. So would you, would you honor us with reader from your beautiful book, The Math Campers? Thank you. Well, what I could do is read some sections that have a lot of Burlington in them. Yeah. This is a, oh, this is sort of funny. This is a section where I'm talking about being in high school and driving around with my girlfriend. And it's amazing I had a girlfriend because all I wanted to do was listen to poetry on cassette tapes. But Dan, you needed a muse. I needed a muse. I had to have a muse. You had to muse, right? There it is. Okay. Well, anyway, so I had a T.S. Eliot cassette that I used to play and I used to just, just irritate everyone in my car. And so this is about driving on route seven down to Middlebury and we're sort of in, oh, I must say that the girlfriend in this one is totally fictionalized. So nobody should be looking for their own biography in this, in this, but the setting is real. And it mentions a poem called East Coker by T.S. Eliot. I owned East Coker on cassette. We're close to Middlebury now. I pause and ask my girlfriend how she likes to line in my beginning is my end. She's deep inside her mind. A memory of her father. This would have been the farm in Charlotte. Highbush blueberry under a canopy of red pines. He's picking blueberries for pies. She rolls in a bed of fragrant needles. She's nine or 10. Later, by the lake, they eat leftovers with lemon juice. Houses rise and fall. I pause. Isn't that beautiful? Or extended or removed? And now she's in the backyard of the house on Pearl Reggae Fest weekend. This was the summer the stars could physically be touched, palmed, released like butterflies in the electric heat of the city. And well, anyway, there's a lot of recognizable Burlington in that from the 80s, right? Right, Reggae Fest, absolutely. Oh my heavens, it's so beautiful. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I wanted them to feel universal so you could read these never having been to our city and like them, but also I really wanted there to be something for you and me. And so here's another such poem. How beautiful it was, how beautiful we were growing up beside the lake with the West right over there back East where we still were. And in between Juniper Island where we paddled our kayaks, got high, tied up and slept. Past campfires, little ash smudge flowers in the sand. Ours is still visible from the pier balcony. I swear I was in both places on the balcony, on the beach. Not as a metaphor, I swear, but split doubled. That was me and that was me. With Sean and Mike and Dave and the star cattle and Tom, whose ratatata was shame. Tom's brother too, his Adonis turbo boost backhand that rent in twain the Mount Mansfield first doubles team, the champions. At least the island wasn't someone's failed attempt to halt time. It had that in common with Pinhead and the Desons and the other bands whose homegrown new wave was television plus the clash minus the Wednesday reggae lunch on RUV. The dread DJ ripped hits on air. Of course, you know all those references. I love it, I absolutely. And having you read it, I just love it. And did you play tennis for rice? I did play tennis for rice. I was on the doubles team. Yeah, I played. Was it Eli? You remember Eli when it was the finals, you were in the championship and Eli lost his match and you all lost. He never got over that. It just still haunts him that he was the one. Well, it's just driven him to greater success. Sweet man. I mean, but now, yeah, you were also on the doubles tennis team with Eli. Yeah, yeah, we had George Shaw as our coach. Remember that guy? Yes, yes, because they got lost trying to get Eli home and they got lost in Monkton. So we always called Eli Monkton. He never called him Eli, called him Monkton because Eli and I'm driving around Monkton for like two hours. But anyway. Well, George was very resourceful because we didn't have courts, of course, at Rice. So he had to find courts for us to practice. And we would often practice at Bolton Valley, which was a pretty long drive. But one time we actually got on the Charlotte Ferry because he'd found some courts over in New York that we were gonna practice at. I mean, it was really, it was funny. It was funny. So I wanna ask you, as we're coming to the end of the show, do you miss being in Vermont? Yes, of course. Yeah, I'd love to get back. Do you think you might? We'd love to have you. I have a very nice job at Wellesley with great students and your career is there. So absolutely. But do you come back? I mean, do you have a place up here? Do you get to come back and visit? Is your mother still here? Yeah, my mom is in South Burlington. So I see her a bunch. Yeah, when we come back, my whole family loves Burlington. Maybe one of my kids will go to UVM. I don't know. We're there a lot. We're there a lot in Burlington. And also sometimes we got to Greensboro for a more rustic vacation, but yeah. So I wanna move into your current project about Bernie, this biography that you're tackling on the life of Bernie Sanders. Can you talk to us like, I mean, absolutely. I mean, why wouldn't anyone want to know the life of Bernie Sanders? There's no one like him. And there's been no one like him since in Burlington. And so isn't it interesting that I don't think anyone's ever really tackled Bernie in this way. And to have someone like you to do this is just so super special. And it will be so super special for him. But talk to us a little bit about what came into your mind. Cause when Bernie was in office, you were, you were like 10 or 12, right? You were born in 17. When he came in, I was nine. So, and I guess he was 17, I was 17 when he left. Absolutely. Well, you know, honestly, Melinda, I just felt like I had a great story to tell. And, you know, these days we're all supposed to just write about our lived experience, right? So here was my lived experience as a teenager growing up and really broadened my world. The city really changed, you know? Oh my God. I mean, how lucky were we? You were really lucky. Bernie, and do you remember the moment where the bird landed on the podium? Yeah, yeah. I mean, he's a magical creature. He really is. I love it. And the other thing I would say is coming out of the pandemic, you know? I wanted a project that was, that involved talking and listening to people. You know, poetry can be kind of isolating. So, you know, for example, I'm gonna be interviewing you and Rick next week. And lots of people like you who made a big difference in the city. Well, I wouldn't have met you. I mean, I knew of you, but I would not have met you if I hadn't reached out to me. So I'm just, I'm so delighted. Oh, thank you. I'm gonna be able to participate in some form or fashion with you understanding this man. Yeah. If anybody who's watching this who has any information would like to get in touch with me, I'm very easy to find. Very, very easy to find. So I, so, and Bernie, does Bernie know that you're writing this book about him or that you're embarking on this? Have you reached out to him? I've reached out to his people. I don't wanna be a pest, but his brother Larry's helping me. So I would imagine that they've been in touch and good old friends, close friends, like Jim Rader and other famous names from the city. So a lot of people are on board, but I have a plan either way. I do, he's a busy man. Right, but so are you. I mean, and to have somebody like you, Dan Chasen to write this book for him is gotta be a gift for Bernie. I mean, that's all I have to say. I mean, he is so lucky to have you be that person. Thank you. It really, really written, you know? I wanna write good sentences, good paragraphs. I want it to be, you know, and I think you owe him a poem. Yeah, well, I may do that. There needs to be a Bernie poem. Why not? So I wanna ask you about the state of our world. We know now that Roe v. Wade's gonna be overturned. We have a planet that's burning. We have young people who have just experienced two plus years of COVID. What is your vision for the world? Well, currently, because of the news about Roe, I'm just so pessimistic. I just feel terrible. I'm not gonna give up hope, but, you know, it was good to be with my students yesterday. I teach at all women's college and it was good to be with them yesterday and just to go through the issues. I had an 830 class and I had read and some of my students had read the draft decision and just the appalling rhetoric. This guy Alito is a psychotic lunatic. So I don't know, I'm afraid I feel very pessimistic, but maybe writing the Bernie book is a way of recovering some optimism because there's a light in the darkness there. Well, you know, I'm a product of the 60s and you know what our generation did and what we didn't do. We certainly could have done a lot more, but I'm hoping that young people rise up in the way that we did and only 17% of my generation changed the world and we have 70% of this country on board with more progressive beliefs. So I have great hope, but I wanted to reach out to you because you have a depth, you have a depth where you go and I also know that politically we're moving into sort of a very tenuous place in our government that could be. So you're going to have to be an inspiration for us Dan. I'll try. I am inspired by the, you know, I have two teenage sons and lots of students around that age too and they're not going to slack on this, you know? I think the future is there as they know it. I mean, it's life or death for them, right? It is and that's a tough place for us to be as we look at our children and our grandchildren. So this is a conversation for another day, which I hope when you finish your book on Bernie that you will come back and that you will meet with me and that we can chat again and I know I'm going to see you in a little bit to talk about your book about Bernie but I just want to thank you, Dan Chason for being with me today and for talking to my viewers and to my viewers, I want to thank you for joining us. This has been a really special interview with Dan and I will see you all shortly and I wish you well in the springtime. Take care and be well and Dan, thank you for being with me. Thank you, Melinda. It was a pleasure. It's really a pleasure. Thank you, my friend. I'll talk to you later. Bye-bye.