An E-mail Interview With Di Brandt

Conducted by Paul Shetler, October 2004

In many of your poems you discuss the faults inherent in Mennonite culture. Do you see Mennonite culture shifting towards a more healthy future, especially in regards to how it views women? If so, do you see your role as a controversial Mennonite poet changing?

Di: Great question, not sure of the answer: there is so much that is really beautiful in Mennonite culture - the strong sense of community, pacifism, gorgeous heritage of music and other communal ceremonies, inspiring rootedness in ancient traditions, etc. and there does seem to be an opening to the arts in some communities, as in Goshen, so that's hopeful. And it seems that women can hold positions of power there too, so that's lovely to see. I don't see the same thing happening in my home Mennonite community in Manitoba, where I have been shunned by my own family for my writing and general views on things - an excruciating experience. Miriam Toews's new novel doesn't present a very pretty picture of Mennonite culture either - her portrait of shunning in the community is fairly accurate (and brutal) in terms of my experience, though the community she depicts seems to have lost its deep connection to the land, which mine still in many ways has.

What of your work deals with this shunning in particular?

Di: I haven't written anywhere about the shunning - it happened six years ago and is still too painful to write down publicly in any detail.

You often use very striking imagery in your poems, which gives them a life and power which would be hard to get any other way. However, these images are often very graphic and a cause for controversy -- I am thinking in particular of your descriptions of Jesus in “Testimony” from questions i asked my mother. How do you decide where that line between the simply profane and the ineffectively mild lies? And what do you see as the purpose behind riding this line in many of your poems?

Di: I've never thought of my poems as intending controversy: our Mennonite heritage is filled with all kinds of painful and scandalous contradictions, and sensitive people growing up in that context will necessarily suffer them in painful ways. Exposing those contradictions (playfully, intelligently, creatively, as is the aim of art) may seem controversial to people who insist on closing their eyes to them and just going with the status quo, but even they must surely in their heart of hearts admit the pain of some of these contradictions. The "jesus" poem in questions i asked my mother as you probably know is taken very closely from a familiar gospel song, where the singer meets Jesus as a secret lover in a garden at night: hardly changed a thing, except to comment on the eroticism of the song, and our comparatively bloodless metaphorization of Christian notions of transformation in the church nowadays - this kind of bloodlessness and disembodiment of vital notions of engagement surely underlying much of the violent desperation of modern life?

What were the elements of your poetry that were most offensive to the conservative community, and how did this affect your writing? 

Di: Exposing the violence toward young children in childrearing and the misogyny toward women in a community which calls itself pacifist. I wrote about that most in my essay collection, Dancing Naked, but also in Agnes in the Sky and in Mother, Not Mother.

Paul Shetler
paulbsgoshen.edu