Washburn Review

I am honored Kodee would choose me to interview and do an amazing job at capturing the essence of how I want to come across as--someone open and who truly wants to help.

http://www.washburnreview.org/arts_living/curiosity-driven-professor-and-poet-inspires/article_12896d82-c9ec-11e9-854a-537456a21060.html

Teaching is learning: Professor Etzel has a passion for learning that effortlessly translates into a passion for teaching. Etzel began teaching at Washburn in 2006 and has strived to bring something new to each class he teaches.

When senior English lecturer, Dennis Etzel, came to Washburn as an undergraduate student, he knew exactly what he wanted to be: a computer programmer. That is, until a professor of psychology, the late Jorge Nobo, called Etzel into his office to tell him that, while he knew the tenants of psychology, he wasn’t a great writer.
“I flipped the question on him and said, ‘Okay, so how do I become a great writer,’” Etzel said. “And he said, ‘carry a thesaurus, and keep a journal.’ So I started the journal, and that became poems. Then the poems led me to open mic poetry nights at The Classic Bean downtown. For me, poetry and writing has always meant community.”
Much of Etzel’s work features inspirations from his various different life experiences. “My Secret Wars of 1984” is experimental poetry based on the toughest year of Etzel’s life, while “The Sum of Two Mothers” is Etzel’s take on being raised by two mothers and how this experience has bled into his own journey as the father of five boys.
“I get excited about [writing] already, so I can’t help but be excited and optimistic [in the classroom.] That’s it. I know that when people are hesitant or worried about writing, it’s because someone somewhere has told them they’re not a great writer; it comes from my experience.”
In just the first few weeks of class, freshman English major Isabelle Pryor has found things to love about Etzel’s Reading as Writers class.
“I’ve really enjoyed how it’s a lot less formal than some of the classes I’ve taken in the past,” said Pryor, “and how the informality allows for a lot of growth and discussion that actually helps you learn.”
This knack for helping students learn comes from Etzel’s own desire to learn.
“I want to find things that are engaging and say that it's ok to fail and it’s great to have wonder and speculation and curiosity,” he said. “Every time I start a poem, it’s because I’m curious about what’s going to happen. As a professor, I think, if I’m not curious about it, how are students going to be curious about it?”
Etzel also strives to maintain an open atmosphere in the classroom in which students can share diverse ideas respectfully without changing their own world views.
“He’s really accepting of all different kinds of students and seems genuine in his desire to hear what we have to say and hear our stories and to help us develop into the best students we can be,” said Pryor.
As a final word of encouragement, Etzel pays forward the advice that he received as a student at Washburn.
“Carry a thesaurus and keep a journal,” said Etzel. “No wonder it helped me with poetry, because it’s not definitions; it’s how words are connected to other words. And that’s true learning, when you can associate words with other words. It’s really a good thing.”
Edited by Adam White, Jason Morrison, Brianna Smith, Jessica Galvin
 

Interview with Amy Brady for Indianola Review

Sadly, Inidianola Review folded, but it was such a wonderful lit mag for a small time:
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/18/iowa-man-creates-literary-journal-while-supporting/

But here is the email exchange between Amy and me.
 
"1.) You refer to yourself on your website as a "hybridwriter." What does this term mean to you, or rather, what are you trying to convey by using this term?"


My own definition of hybridwriter seems to change each year. I first thought of hybrid writing as something that experiments and pushes the boundaries of what, separately, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, images, documents, etc. can "do". Then at the 2012 AWP I attended back-to-back panels around feminist and political writing and both panels included hybrid styles (as well as collaboration) as ways to define each form. I recently fell in love with Rose Metal Press' Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of Eight Hybrid Literary Genres, edited by Marcela Sulak and Jacqueline Kolosov. The book is divided in hybrid genres: "lyric essay, epistolary, poetic memoir, prose poetry, performative, short-form nonfiction, flash fiction, and pictures made of words." I realized these are the forms I always lean to. Maybe all of these things would include a "working definition." If anything, maybe a hybridwriter's concern is to challenge notions of Patriarchy, privilege, and such.


http://www.rosemetalpress.com/Catalog/familyresemblance.html




"2.) Your work seems to share themes, often touching upon topics of social justice. Why do you focus on these subjects, and moreover, what role do you see contemporary literature playing in addressing them?"


Beginning poetry workshops often start with the individual experience as an approach to write those first poems, which is great. Mine grew into realizing I could address the public experience through my private experience--that the public and private reflect each other. It's something I consider in my approach to writing. I see that in what I enjoy reading, too. 


Maybe I am already saying a given, but I enjoy reading Historical Fiction to look for how a writer addresses her or his concerns for themes of racism, sexism, "homophobia," etc. of today. Many films and television shows are taking this approach. It feels like with the Black Lives Matter movement, there are so many films and shows coming out of this: Selma, 12 Years a Slave, and the recent The Birth of a Nation (so glad they reclaimed this film title!). 
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/27/business/media/fox-searchlight-bids-17-million-for-the-birth-of-a-nation.html?_r=0

For part of my own Black Lives Matter activism as a White ally, I am at work on a hybrid novel, trying to avoid and point out the novel's historical role. I realized I didn't want to write in the "novel form," but will use hybrid genres to "tell the story."
http://dennisetzeljr.blogspot.com/2016/01/what-is-novel.html
http://dennisetzeljr.blogspot.com/2016/01/novels.html


"4.) You live, write, and teach in Topeka, KS. What, if anything, do you find inspiring about the city and/or the midwest?"


Alongside what you write in your article, I have found what can come out of place. I love the Tall Grass Prairie, how sky and earth match up with a flat horizon, and stargazing on the prairie. I was boggled by how "romantic" these things sound until actually experiencing them. I continued asking, "Is this real, or am I lending emotions to being out here?" It is real.


Maybe on another less-romantic note, I have loved researching Kansas history for my writing and acknowledgement of the fight to end discrimination towards POC. John Brown became a way for me to come up with what I could do as a White ally:
https://dennisetzeljrjohnbrown.blogspot.com/

In school, history was boring to me. I received a sympathetic D in high school. Now, I can share my love for history with my sons. They talk about John Brown, John Henry, and even asked the question, "Why would someone want to shoot Martin Luther King?"


Knowing that I am in the area where the first battles for the Abolitionist movement were fought, where Brown v. Topeka Board was the case used to begin dismantling segregation in schools, I can feel the work that still needs to be done. 


"There are some very good writers, poets, artists of all kinds who think that politics should be separate from art, because they just make each other worse. Is it accurate to say that you don't believe this, that you in fact have found a way to make political art valuable in an aesthetic sense?"


I can see why people would want their art to be art, and, sure, there are histories of movements art has gone through to change how art "is"--but isn't there that other side? About what is happening in culture and politics? Like Pollack via World War II?


Adrienne Rich answered the question for me in her speech-turned-chapbook Poetry and Commitment. Have you read it? I love that book! She would say, and I agree, that choosing what to make as art is still a political act in not choosing to be political.


Oh, here is part of it online. Mark Doty had this to say: "And if the critic in his position of aesthetic purity believes that poems suffer from it then perhaps we have labored under a hobblingly narrow definition of poetry, a fiction of a realm in which words in their harmonies and shadings operate and are removed from the world in some sacred grove. That idyllic glen, if it ever existed, was entered by human traffic long ago. And where people live inequity resides."


Here is what she said: "But we can also define the aesthetic not as a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering, but as news of an awareness, a resistance which totalizing systems want to quell, art reaching into us for what is still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched." 


I love poets. They are the resistance. They are geniuses. I hope I can be one someday.


http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspeech_arich.html#.VqkjOPkrLIU




6.) Your website says that you lead "writing to heal" workshops. Can you talk a bit about what goes on during these workshops and/or what it is that participants try to achieve by attending them?


Maybe my approach comes from having parents who were in the health care field: one an RN, the other a nurse therapist. I've lead workshops where social workers, therapists, and such wanted to learn prompts and approaches to take back to their clients in working with their recoveries. Also, we all sometimes need that extra thing to help us--from what I know about my own experiences with using poetry as an additional aid with depression and anxiety.

Poetry can call out social injustices and act as sites for activism. However, poetry can also help with the traumas, losses, and other burdens that come from living. Writing poetry isn’t simply catharsis, but can lead to healing out of the search for understanding, which is my guiding aesthetic. In other words, I see writing as my attempt to create a poetic alchemy, to create gold out of lead.

(Note: I borrowed what is in italics from what I said in an interview with The Kansas City Star: http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/article54667740.html#storylink=cpy)

So I lead those workshops with no-fail prompts to open up the world of figurative speech, or writing out of honesty and authenticity, and all of those notions people without poetry writing experience already know about poetry.

If anything, people leave the workshop with a couple of poems, lists, and strategies to continue with.

An Interview with Dennis Etzel, Jr. by Kevin Rabas

Flint Hills Review interview

The following is an interview Kevin Rabas led, which appeared in Flint Hills Review 2009.

An Interview with Dennis Etzel, Jr.

by Kevin Rabas

KR: Dennis, several of your poems meditate on Kansas terrain, especially your connection to the prairie. I found this theme works prominently in your poems “Along the prairie,” found in FHR 2007, and in “Site Fidelity,” in which the prairie is compared to the body of a woman. You have mentioned in the past how your connection with the prairie deepened after visits to the Kanza prairie preserve in Manhattan, Kansas. Talk a little about how a sense of place, especially the prairie, informs some of your work.

DE: For me, the idea of place is just as much as an internal one than an external one, so poetry and art seem like the best mediums to show that internal space.  I’m not a great painter—I’ve tried!  Luckily, poetry is where I found my first art.  My visits to the tallgrass prairie always return something deeper within me, so I just follow whatever whims I find. 

Also, my studies in ecolit, ecopoetry, and the idea of “deep ecology” helped me to think of the craft as something outside of “nature writing.”  Nature writing is wonderful, but I find the aesthetics of poetry writing are richer when an ecopoems context does outside of the “I” center.  In other words, can someone write a poem where the “I-thou” relationship between poet and environment (like the tallgrass prairie) becomes blurred, challenges boundaries, and changes perceptions in our postmodern, industrialized world in crisis?

KR: In some of your poems, such as in “And so,” you adopt modern techniques to shape new forms, such as in your flarfing-based poems. Talk a little about what flarfing is and how it works—and about how you use this technique to generate and shape some of your poems. Also, your flarfing-based poems seem to embrace randomness and chaos in an approach that seems somewhat similar to the technique of French surrealist poets, such as André Breton or Guillaume Apollinaire. Do you think that flarfing-based poetry might possibly be reviving or revisiting that approach, but using technology to tap new associative, randomizing territory?

DE: For your first question, flarf is an interesting topic to talk about.  It started as a prank between a group of poets who were friends—Gary Sullivan coined the phrase “flarf”—to see who could have the worst poem published on poetry.com, that famous vanity press website.  However, flarf is now approached with a certain poetic aesthetic.  If you go to YouTube, you can see the mock flarf convention, where poets like K. Silem Mohammed (whose book Deer Head Nation started flarf publications), Jordan Davis, Katie Degentesh, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Rodney Koeneke, Michael Magee, and Sharon Mesmer read their works.  Anne Boyer is another flarfist who lives in Kansas City! 

Each poet has an approach to flarf, but it starts with Google searches.  Flarfing is also known as Google-collage, where the poet works with the words returned on the screen.  Some poets, like Mohammed, continue placing words in until there are around 100 returns to work with.  Gardner is said to actually go into the websites to copy and paste for material.

I like to approach my flarf with choosing words I use often, like “prairie,” with other words for tension, like “visit” and “waste.”  If you notice in the Google results/returns there are fragments of sentences.  I use those fragments to fragment even more, and to fill in the spaces where the ellipses are.  The ellipses allow a place for the imagination to enter.

For your second question: yes!  I like your idea of the French surrealist poets being an influence.  I also think about flarf as  collage, maybe something Gertrude Stein would be doing, because you could include the repetition of words that come back as part of the Google search.  I also think of Lyn Hejinian’s ideas of experimentation and non-closure in a poem.  Having differently-themed websites come together by using one search may present its own kind of metaphor—one website is another website, is another.  The approaches for using Google technology for randomness, for “cut ups,” and for collage seem endless.

KR: Your poetry seems to embrace the lyric mode. Talk about how and why you are drawn to this mode and about how you see it operating in your poems. Also, what are some of your thoughts on the role of the lyric in contemporary American poetry.

Li-Young Lee, Amy Fleury, and Elizabeth Dodd truly helped me to discover my love for the lyric.  Each of these poets write lyrical poetry in different ways, and I’m happy to have learned from their classes and workshops. 

When we think of the lyric, we think of an idea of music in poetry.  However, Li-Young Lee has inspired me with his approach—how lyrical poetry contains layers of space and layers of time.  He is truly making a poetics that involves the universe!  The lyrical poem also uses silence, space, and the internal voice, things that are not often taught in your average poetry class.  The use of the external world is to convey the internal place.  Amy and Elizabeth work with the prairie in their poems, so they were also influences.

For me, the lyric helps build community, helps people realize the importance of our inner realities, helps to show the “I-thou” relationships, helps reconnect both the writer and the reader to that intangible “something,” and comforts us. 

One of my interests is the poem as a means of survival.  Each of us are trying to survive in this world.  I do not want to sound romantic, that poetry is going to save the world.  I don’t think it can, as Adrienne Rich also said in her latest essay Poetry and Commitment.  However, people writing and sharing their work can lead to healing and community.  The lyrical poem is the one form that is being used in all cultures around the world, so I’m not sure if I can express the power of it. 

KR: I notice that in terms of style and approach that some of your new prose poems, such as “And so,” seem similar to work in Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw. This may be coincidental, though. Who are some of your influences, especially in regard to your recent work?

Yes—there is no coincidence about Ben Lerner.  I love his work, and local Cyrus Console’s Brief Under Water.  They are both from Topeka, and I am still in Topeka, so I feel a psychic resonance from all of the Topeka poets: Amy Fleury, Kevin Young, Eric McHenry, Ed Skoog, Ben, and Cyrus.  Another influence is Anne Boyer, who was born in Topeka.  When I discovered flarf last year, I was hooked.  It certainly opened up my internal world to the possibilities of what poetry can be and how we, as writers, can challenge the boundaries between forms.  Other influences for the prose pieces are Harryette Mullen and Lyn Hejinian, but all of these poets have seemed to pave a way for me to enter my own work.

Thank you for interviewing me, and for including my work in Flint Hills Review.  It means a lot to me.  Also, I enjoyed the students I met at Emporia State, and I’m looking forward to seeing their names in the future!

Writing as Therapy Interview by Talitha Martin

Writing as Therapy Interview by Talitha Martin
 
Dennis Etzel Jr. is a Professor of English at Washburn University.  He has a personal and professional investment in utilizing poetry as path towards survival and healing.  Prof. Etzel leads a variety of community poetry classes and readings as well as teaching Beginning /Advanced Composition, Beginning Fiction and Mythologies in Literature at Washburn.

I had a fortunate meeting with him to discuss “writing as therapy”.

On writing as therapy -  The first thing to know is, we are not therapists. When you are working with kids to write about traumatic events, we are not therapists, we cannot come at them expecting them to be able to put all this down on paper. One thing we can do, we should do a lot of is praise and applaud.  “Thank you for your courage and bravery in sharing”, no matter how minute the sharing is. Vulnerability is a strength and we need to stress that to our students. Poetry and personal writing is the best time to be vulnerable, be vulnerable on a page.

On poetry as survival – No one can take from you what you create, you own that. Putting it down on paper makes you a double survivor. You survived it and wrote about it, now you are a survivor to your reader as well. Your experience makes that real to someone else.

On journaling -  My own journey involved self-awareness through journaling which led to poetry. Dr. Nobo here at Washburn said to me, as an undergrad, that I should become a better writer. To do that, I should keep a journal and carry around a thesaurus. So I did. I loved the thesaurus and pass them on now, because it opens up such an appreciation for the meaning behind words. Journaling is effective because repetition becomes a habit. I journaled because I wanted to be a better writer.

On connecting to students– Every class I am in, I know that there are people there who have gone through something. So, I mention it and take a firm stance on it, letting them know up front that I care about these issues (abuse, neglect etc) and their stories.

On grammar and conventions - This is the last step, and I find rubrics very important when approaching it. They are a good visual representation of the process. I put things on the rubric in the order of importance to me and grammar is at the very bottom. I allow many revisions, until a student feels they finally “got” it. I use “minimal marking” to grade and allow them to make “cheat sheets” of common grammar errors until they don’t struggle with those errors anymore.

Ideas for Writing as Therapy

• This is low stakes writing, with a loose definition of “poetry”, this is not about rules at all. Free writing and brainstorming are huge!
• Find an example of a poem “type” – a poem about love, friendship, etc. Read together, share and discuss and then have students write one of their own
• Be willing to share personal stories about writing fears. Writing can be scary, we ALL feel that way. Give voice to it!
• Word Play – Divide a piece of paper in half. One on half list 10 nouns, one the other list one occupation and then a few verbs that go with that occupation. Have the students pick two nouns and a verb from their sheet and write a sentence, even a nonsense sentence about it. Use these sentences as a starting place for poetry.
• Write a favorite color. Think of a person to write a poem to, and write using your color word as many times as possible.
• Have students get in groups. Surveys show students understand material better in groups--hearing what others have to say, instead of the teacher. Groups! We need to have students work in groups every day, and have them change roles: leader, note-taker, etc. and report to the class.

I greatly enjoyed getting to speak with Professor Etzel and I appreciate his insight. He is both a teacher of ‘writing as therapy’ and a student who has used writing to process his own challenging life experiences. Many of the ideas presented here go hand in hand with the principles outlined in the portion “Strategies for Healing Childhood Trauma” and provide educators with real world examples to start implementing these ideas into their classrooms.

Kansas Young interview

This is Dennis Etzel Jr. Dennis is a Washburn University English professor, a poet with multiple books and awards to his name, as well as a husband and father. He got a degree as a Computer Programmer Analyst, before finding his passion for teaching and writing, which led him to earning an MFA from the University of Kansas and a Graduate Certificate in women and gender studies from Kansas State University. He frequently advises students in the Black Student Union and Hispanic American Leadership Organization (HALO) on how to move forward with their education. He grew up with two mothers, something he wrote about a few years ago in a chapbook titled “The Sum of Two Mothers.” Sadly, his mother Sondra passed away recently. I’m really thankful for his time and friendship.

----
“My mothers both have nursing background. My biological mother Susan was an RN who worked for the state and at Saint Francis and Sondra worked as a psych nurse at Menninger’s, so I felt like I had the best of both worlds growing up, the mind and the body. When Sondra moved in she moved in with her books and music. I feel like I owe a lot to her. I was her son. This was the 80s, so having two moms wasn't something people did. The neighbors thought she was an aunt, or whatever assumptions they had. I didn't tell anybody growing up.

The one thing that made me really proud of the book 'The Sum of Two Mothers' was the feedback from the community. Poetry for me is like a high form of ethics. You can't just write anything you want. If poetry is a reflection of our world and our experiences and those all have ethics, then we need to write ethically too. So, for example, I didn't want to write a persona poem. I can't write what it is to be a lesbian, but I can write what it is to be the son of one. So that's what the writing is out of, it’s out of the observations and the experiences.

The great thing is that when I read poetry from that book at an open mic night, I had people come up to me who were either two mothers or two fathers raising kids that saw me as a success, that seeing me up there was a relief to them. I would have never even thought of that but it was great. Any of the poetry I write has to have some sort of activism in it. There's always something I want to tackle, there's always something I want to voice.

For example, one of the most heartbreaking moments was during the time of the Michael Brown shooting.The AME church had a vigil and we took our kids and Asmund at the time was five or six. He was on my shoulders and he said, 'Is this about the boy who died?' and I told him that yes, it was. It was really cold outside and then he said, 'Can you feel my breath?' It was heartbreaking, my own son breathing on the back of my neck while all of this was going on; it really brought home what had happened. Those moments are hard to put into words. Poetry allows us to express them. Metaphors try to find those words.”

Interviews

2009 interview

Flint Hills Review
http://dennisetzeljrinterviews.blogspot.com/2018/07/an-interview-with-dennis-etzel-jr-by.html

2014 interviews

Interview with Washburn student Talitha Martin
http://dennisetzeljrinterviews.blogspot.com/2018/07/writing-as-therapy-interview-by-talitha.html

I appreciate Amy Brady for this interview (sadly, the Indianola Review folded):
http://theindianolareview.com/interview-dennis-etzel.html

http://dennisetzeljrinterviews.blogspot.com/2018/07/interview-with-amy-brady-for-indianola.html

2015 interviews

Thanks to Denise Low-Weso for what she does for community! Here is an interview on her blog:
http://deniselow.blogspot.com/2015/11/denise-low-interviews-dennis-etzel-jr.html

I am also thankful for Miranda Ericsson to interview me:
http://tscpl.org/books-movies-music/topeka-poet-dennis-etzel

A big thanks to Laura Madeline Wiseman for this interview:
http://www.lauramadelinewiseman.com/blog/2015/07/15/the-chapbook-interview-dennis-etzel-jr-on-spending-less-than-a-dollar-to-put-work-out-into-the-world/

I loved being a part of this! I didn't realize it was a DREAM come TRUE, talking about writing alongside other AMAZING writers in Kansas City, overlooking Main, thinking about how a normal-town guy like me was in the big city discussing [HE]ART. Really, don't tell anyone how I was blown away by these amazing guests: :  Sara Nicole Glass aka MissConception, Annie Raab, & Godfrey Riddle. With a BIG THANKS to Maria Vasquez Boyd:
http://www.kkfi.org/program-episodes/artspeak-radio-presents-dennis-etzel-jr-sara-nicole-glass-aka-missconception-annie-raab-godfrey-riddle-with-artskc/

An amazing article from The Kansas City Star:
http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/article54667740.html



2018 interviews

Thank you, Tara and Ryan with Sunflower Sutras--on Washburn's very own radio station.
https://castbox.fm/channel/Sunflower-Sutras-id1301776?country=us 

Thanks to Israel Sanchez for this interview for Kansas Young!
http://dennisetzeljrinterviews.blogspot.com/2018/07/kansas-young-interview.html