From the first poem of Four Fields (Trio House Press, 2024), Dorinda Wegener’s impeccably precise debut, I knew I was reading a book that would demand the world’s attention. Four Fields explores complex subjects, sometimes in one sentence: mothers, fathers, families, fields, God. Wegener, however, takes these subjects and provokes the reader, enough for the literary world to see them as more than a checklist of taboo or undesirable subjects. In the end, the book is as much about its subjects—family, trauma, relationships—as it is about the unspoken wisdom that poetics can release. The layers of meaning, sound, lyric, and language are tools of Wegener’s clinical calculation. The result is precise and powerful poetry, something that rarely comes around in a first book.
Wegener’s day job as a nurse inspires her subconscious. She writes like the fighter, artist, and neurodivergent medical professional she is. She is intentional. Every word, dot, and iota is on the page to make sense. When she holds something back, it’s to take your breath away.
I spoke with Wegener via Zoom about playlists, puzzles, writing for a purpose, and the fight to find and keep her own, precise voice.
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The Rumpus: You are a nurse by trade and also a poet. What was the path like to get here, to the publication of your first book?
Dorinda Wegener: I tried so hard when I was young—all I wanted to be was a writer and teacher. I had excellent publications, but I could not get this book picked up. I come from a blue-collar family, so money took precedence. I got a trade, and that was that.
I never walked away from poetry—I still wrote—I just walked away from the possibility of being at the literary table. So now I’m coming to the literary trade table at over fifty. Everybody I know is in their seventies and eighties, and I don’t feel like I fit because I don’t have the normal trajectory. I don’t have the academic connections. I have an MFA, but I grew up in New Hampshire, and the teaching opportunities weren’t there. I always had medical jobs, though. I would work my medical job during the day, and I would teach whatever I could at night, try[ing] to squeeze in my writing and a baby. I pushed my family as much as I could. Then they were like, “We really need you to switch gears and make some money.”
When the book came around, I actually asked for a little bit of time, because I have so many poems that are in the manuscript that no one had seen, and they got picked up.
Rumpus: Is this a manuscript that has been written over the span of your writing life, or have you written multiple iterations of this book that just never got picked up?
Wegener: Multiple, multiple iterations. It’s gone through title changes. Poems came into it. Poems fell out of it. Even though I became a nurse and started working, I never gave up. It was very bittersweet. I gave up, yet never did give up. When I wrote, I would always tinker with the manuscript whenever new stuff came, I would always go to this make-believe manuscript and take out old stuff, put in new stuff. I was always working on the book, even though I knew there would never be a book. Even though I thought there wouldn’t be a book. I walked away from submitting, publishing, and jockeying. I walked away from all of it, and I only wrote for me.
So this book has been refined multiple times and rejected multiple times under all its different guises. The closest it ever came was with Copper Canyon. They wrote me the most amazing note. It warmed my heart because I was like, all right, it could happen. Then, Trio House reached out, and I wasn’t going to say no.
Rumpus: In this book, there are these particular double meanings you produce with punctuation, the kind of doubling one might expect to see in line breaks. For example, the first poem’s last stanza begins, “I create a new, name.” This punctuation-forward reversal is very subtle. “I create a new name,” is what one expects, but that’s not what it is. You do this over the course of the book, as well. How did you arrive at this exploration? Is that play about subtraction or addition?
Wegener: Because I am neurodivergent, I absolutely adore word puzzles and math puzzles. In every poem I write, I try to have a puzzle. I try to have its face-value meaning and then, for people who wish, there’s always a deeper underneath meaning and there’s always a puzzle. Before I can say a poem is done, I go through it, line by line, as if it was a single-lined poem. I ask myself: “What is this one line saying?” And then, “What is this one line saying back to the whole piece?” I write slowly because I do this process. Manipulation seems to be a negative term, but whatever manipulation is, in a positive light, I do with sound and lines and punctuation.
Rumpus: How does this play into revision?
Wegener: Revision is my favorite part. I get jazzed when it comes time to revise. Revision is not so much addition or subtraction, revision occurs parallel. When I have the poem as far along as I can push it, I take it to my writers’ group and get their input. The back of my neck will let me know if what they say is not right. If the hairs on the back of my neck say, “This is a beautiful comment and I love this person, but what they [are saying] is wrong,” I don’t take it. Even my book editor wanted me to change “I create a new, name.” I said, “No.” I will fight for it, trust me. I will fight you, and I will win.
I look at revision as a parallel. I make sure that every single line tells a story, on its own, to the line above and to the line below. And I do that by writing out prose in a notebook that no one sees. It will either pass the test or it won’t. If it doesn’t pass the test, we work on revision. Once I have hammered out the line and it says what I want it to say, I make sure that the sound is correct. The sound will even trump—I hate that word—the other concepts of line. Sonically, it has to make sense. Sometimes I will purposely break the sonic if the poem needs the sound to be broken. If it jars your ear, like if you’re reading through my book and all of a sudden something hits you and you’re like, “Oh, God, that’s the wrong sound, right?” That really is the wrong sound. In those places, I want someone to ask, “Why is it the wrong sound?” Look at the lines. Look at what’s going on. Why is it the wrong sound?
So it’s line, and then it’s sound, and then it’s punctuation for breath or manipulation of grammar. Again, for meaning—always for meaning—everything has to be written with a purpose. We’re not just here for writing, you know. Everything has to be done with purpose.
After all this, I’ll look at punctuation. Then I look at the stanza. Stanza has a lot to say too. When I write in tercets, it’s because I’m giving you facts. Tercets is the language of fact giving. I’m giving you facts on a relationship. I’m giving you facts on one person and another person. [Someone may ask,] “Why don’t you do it in couplets, then?” There’s no need to do it in couplets because there’s a third person there. The relationship itself is a third person. There’s my mother, there’s me, and there’s our relationship.
So that’s how I revise. I revise line, sound, [and] line and sound will flip-flop as to who’s number one. Punctuation and stanza kind of go back and forth as to who’s going to be third or fourth. I love revision. I will spend hours over “the” and “a.”
People are like, “Oh come on, just pick one,” and I’m like, “Oh no, this article means everything.” Is it “the” mug or is it “a” mug? They are very different creatures. I could revise and revise and never publish a damn thing. Thank God for publishing! It tells me when I can stop.
Rumpus: Your response about revision sounds like the skill of methodical fact-checking and care, essential to the nursing profession. In your poems, you also use language that sounds medical, even clinical at times. In what other ways do you see your profession informing the writing of this book?
Wegener: I am a perianesthesia certified registered nurse, so I get [patients] before and after surgery. The medical jobs I was holding while writing Four Fields were all about looking inward. I was working in a surgery department where the procedures were outpatient and they were done under fluoroscopy, which is a type of X-ray machine. I would help by running that machine. So again, always looking inward. I think that influenced the poems, because a lot of the book is about family, but it’s also about building family and religious conversation. I looked and worked with human bodies, where everything was looking internally, at the skeletal, the diseased joints. I worked every day with surgeries and X-rays. That lent to looking inside myself and inside the poems.
Rumpus: To meet these poems is a mystery of image and vision, sometimes literal visions of Christ. There is such a continuous interplay between the familial, religious, and inner self. What is the tension, or the intention, of layering and inclusion of all those parts?
Wegener: Like I said, I am neurodivergent. Everything is a puzzle. Surviving in the neurotypical world is a puzzle. I have to figure out where and how to fit in and not be sussed out. Music is a puzzle. It’s math. The medical field is a science, but it’s also an art. There are surgeons with these beautiful hands. They can beautifully execute incisions. And then you have other surgeons who are book smart as can be, but they can’t stitch a straight line.
I am very interested in the microscopic. I love people who can see the cosmos and the stars and that’s what jazzes them up or even people looking out into the environment. Nature is very important to me, but I’m the one that’s looking at the minute piece of bark and not the whole forest. I’m looking at one piece of lichen on this one piece of bark, so the layering comes with constantly getting down to the smallest piece, getting down to the start.
I was born Catholic, but I spent most of my life not Catholic and desperately trying to fill the spiritual void. Then I realized: I am Catholic. I’m Catholic in the sense that Christ is love. There are certain parts of the church I don’t agree with. That’s my reckoning, but that’s where the layering comes from.
I’m very intentional. In my writing, everything serves a purpose. There’s nothing in the poems that’s not meant to be there, even the poems that are just over the top with diction and language. Someone could say, “You don’t need that,” but that’s where the learning comes from. It comes from internal searching, microscopic searching, trying to find the seed of it all: the beginning. That’s where the layers come from.
Then there’s the energy, the tension and intention come from Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. It’s about the energy in between: what holds people, what pulls people in. Every poem is a love poem, even if the poem is filled with spite and hate, because in order to understand hate you have to understand its opposite. If you don’t, it’s just indifference.
To speak to it in medical terms, it’s the heartbeat, the chemicals. It’s calcium and potassium, shooting off the electrical cycle, which causes the muscles to contract.
Rumpus: What elements, beyond the nursing profession, your faith, and your family, inspired the writing and editing of this book?
Wegener: The book has two playlists. It has a revision playlist, which is all instrumental music. When I sit down to do something that is not creative, it’s nice if my brain has something, a puzzle, a layer to work on. When I was writing my thesis, I was really into jazz. I would put that on and my brain would work on the math, figure out which instrument was gonna come in, which one was going to cut, follow the beat. My brain would be off doing that, and I could get the revision done. The revision playlist is three-hours long. My brain goes off, and I revise.
The book itself also has its own playlist, set up around the feel of the book. There’s a lot of gothic folk, which I don’t really listen to otherwise, but there’s a lot of gothic folk for this book.
As for people, a lineage of those who came before me surround the book: Anne Sexton. Sexton gave the female voice the chance to be disgusting and raw and say whatever the hell you want to say. Someone living who influenced the book is Kimiko Hahn, who came to our MFA and taught me to embrace the grotesque. She taught me it’s okay to write about corpses, and it’s okay to write about the images that make up your life. Being a nurse and growing up the way I did, corpses are part of my life, so they’re in the book. [Hahn] gave me the permission to freely put them in the book. Terry Lucas, just with ordering, helping me see the forest for the trees and the trees for the forest. The people I pull off my bookshelf: Patricia Smith, Jane Hirshfield, and when I’m really stuck, William Carlos Williams. The Bible is there, with its Hebrew poetry.
As for close friends and community: Tara Bray helped a lot. She is an LSU poet. She’s a very close friend here in Virginia. I met her through Sandy Longhorn, who is another poet I love who helped me not shy away from birds in poems. Poets sometimes, they’re like: “You can’t write about birds.” “You can’t write about horses.” “You can’t write about gossamer.” “Don’t put butterflies in there.” There are so many ridiculous things, and Sandy Longhorn was like, “Girl, embrace your birds.” So I embraced my birds, and birds are in there.
Rumpus: You also have a lot of snakes in this book. How do animals emerge in your poems? Is that a common thing, or is that specific to this book?
Wegener: Animals are always there. They carry what’s assigned to them by society. The snakes carry trickery, fallacy, or error. I’ll manipulate that. Sometimes I use them as an anchor, like in, “A Poem for My Father on Raccoons.” The raccoon in that poem is an anchor.
[Animals] represent many different things. They are either representing themselves, or they’re present for me to use them as a sounding board, or to carry an arc that’s already been assigned to them by social norms. Or they show up on their own, and they teach me something about the poem.Rumpus: What are you working on now?
Wegener: I’m trying to market this book, trying to get it in people’s hands. I’m over fifty, and I don’t know if this will be my only book, so I’d like to take it all the way home. Outside of that, I’m working on a nurse sequence. I am processing the trauma of COVID, and I’m beginning to write about it. I’m playing around with prose poems.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll just ride this book’s wave and be thankful and send out and send up gratitude and fade away. You know? Who knows? Maybe there will be a second book. Maybe it will be a prose book on the nurse.
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Author photograph courtesy of Dorinda Wegener
