Interview with Douglas Cole, author of “Drifter”
Douglas Cole is the author of a new poetry collection called Drifter (Finishing Line Press, 2025). Douglas Cole has published eight poetry collections, including The Cabin at the End of the World, winner of the Best Book Award in Urban Poetry and the International Impact Book Award. His novel, The White Field, won the American Fiction Award, and his screenplay of The White Field won Best Unproduced Screenplay award in the Elegant Film Festival. His work has appeared in journals such as Beloit Poetry, Fiction International, Valparaiso, The Galway Review and Two Hawks Quarterly. He also contributes a column called "Trading Fours" to the magazine, Jerry Jazz Musician.
Your new book is a poetry collection called Drifter. How did you land on that title and how would you describe the poems?
Yeah Drifter, I love it, a perfect title, a single word, trochaic… which I adopted based on the themes of the book, which come largely from roots in Baudelaire, the idea of the flaneur, but amplified through some ingredients from the Situationists and Guy Debord’s ideas of the dérive and the psychogeography of urban spaces we inhabit and move through. Then, a little cross fertilization with Bennett Miller's first film, I think it was, called The Cruise about Timothy “Speed” Levitch and his theory of The Cruise and Anti-cruise and his voluptuous descriptions of New York City and the exuberant seeking after everything worthwhile in life. There’s also a bit of the alchemical writings from Robert Fludd I explored in the Library of Congress during a year-long Fellowship to study American Cities and Public Spaces. So, from Spokane to Seattle to Washington, DC to the I-5 Freeway, the image of the drifter seemed the most unifying one. And since the aesthetic of the collection also draws from different poetic landscapes, Drifter seemed like the perfect title.
What are you hoping readers will get from your book? What kind of reaction do you want them to have?
I hope readers will find themselves hooked by the dream, catching a key to open ways of seeing. I seed the book with many quotations from Guy Debord’s book Society of the Spectacle and his writings on the dérive. They form an architecture upon which to hang many of these fleeting impressions. Reaction? Amazement, bewilderment, a sense of the unknown, hints of the dream, a consciousness ripe with wondering. Hopefully this book will be a tab of acid sending readers on an ecstatic journey. Hopefully, the reaction will be a desire to document your own psycho-geographical awareness and participate in subtle or gross fashion as you will, even if it comes down to nothing more than switching labels on soup cans in grocery stores.
Where do you find your ideas and inspiration?
Dreams, coffee, walking, reading, listening, teaching…
How did you end up writing poetry? Did you grow up seeing yourself as a poet or did you find your way to poetry more gradually?
Mr. Sheridan assigned us an in-class writing assignment to describe everything we could see, and so I did so with no boundaries of grammar or intention, and what came out she liked so much she read to the class. Perhaps there was an external validation or reward there for seeming intelligent or interesting or at least mysterious, which was better than I how I saw myself, which was as a poor student, a muddy intellect. But I never called it poetry, and I didn't think of it as poetry and when I encountered “real” poetry. I was still mystified by poetry and the wild, strange way it showed up even in novels: Joyce, Faulkner, Morrison… so I never really distinguished a genre but felt very inspired and intrigued by working in words.
When did others begin to see you as a poet?
I don't know if they do even now. Depends on who you ask. But I was certainly exposed when I published my first books.
How would you define a poem? What makes it distinctive from prose or a song or anything else?
I suppose it's just the name, the announcement, so entering in we know it's not going to be just a story, and it's not just a song, but we're on another kind of journey, something closer to a dream or an out-of-body experience or an afterlife vision or a rowdy rambunctious portrayal of a moment in a fashion that drops a little bomb-snapshot into the brain of somebody else: flash fiction, flash poetry, flash of any kind and even longer—eventually the distinction between the genres burns away.
For many artists, it can be a struggle to know when a work is finished. How do you know when your poems are finished? How do you decide when to stop revising?
That's a practical matter. Once I decide something is going to go on either into a publication, a journal or book eventually…I revise it for a lasting stance. It's kind of compulsive. I'm reminded that Malcolm Lowry continued to edit Ultramarine long after it was published in book form. I'm more motivated to go on to something new. I'm more interested in moving rather than staying in the eddy of revising something on and on. And then again, there comes a point at which I feel it trespasses my younger self and whatever vision I had then to revise anything after a certain point. I don't know if we're ever sure because we're constantly changing. I'm constantly changing, my aesthetic is always revising, and what I might have done in the past I might not do in the same way now. Some things I work on find their form and seem pretty stable early on, and if I go back and read them later I don't want to change anything. Like my good friend Bruce Beasley said, we're always trying to get past the cringe factor.
So, I’ve interviewed a few poets and initially I kind of asked them all what it’s like to be a poet when poetry is maybe not as popular as it could be. They’ve mostly suggested to me that it is more popular than people realize. How do you think of the state of poetry today?
Poetry does seem broadly written and published. There are more journals out there now than I've ever known and could ever read, publishing new poetry. I don't want to think of poetry as being an art form for an elite group, but it doesn't seem like a mass market product, unless it's attached to music, spoken word—entering the mind through an electronic medium. But I think that poetry and stories are as primal as hunger, so they’re always going to be part of our human, psychological, spiritual activity in some form or another. I think of poetry more as the product of investigation, meditation, exploration and creation fundamental to the fabric of living, however popular it may or may not be.
Do writers have a responsibility to the public or only themselves and their inspiration or ideas?
Sort of like, how political should you get in your writing? On the one hand, I think it's inevitable that you bear responsibility once you participate in publishing, so there's no dodging it. What are you putting out there? It's a good question to ask yourself. But I do believe the artist should be free of any sense of responsibility because the poetic exploration is a way to open and expand awareness and consciousness and ways of thinking. It's rather more the readers’ responsibility to absorb or reject, for whatever reasons, and then move on. I don't believe in burning books. The artist should be free.
And here is a last question, more on the personal end: If we a had a spectrum for poets and how they approach life, with Emily Dickinson on one end and Rimbaud on the other, where would you fall?
The way I'm hearing this question is, Emily Dickinson represents one who remains in a space, doesn't really travel far physically, externally, but mentally is voracious in exploration of science and spirituality and the possibility of language; and Rimbaud is one who makes a dramatic rejection of poetry and heads off into the world to explore in a more overt way. One is refining and concentrating thought to a precise diamond shape; the other is deranging the senses. But I don't really see Dickinson and Rimbaud as polar in their poetry. I think they're both poets of ecstasy, poets of prayer, both profane and pure. That's why Emily Dickinson used all the M dashes, that quantum leap, fast-clip of phrasing which I think sits comfortably with the launching, sometimes vitriolic visions of Rimbaud's poetry. Me? Both! I want both. I want adventure and I want to stay in my garden. I want to remain free to explore all forms, all ways, all methods—unbound pros, lyric, narrative, descriptive…whatever labels…slip away to the language event (I think that's the way Gerald Vizenor referred to it, the narrative chance, I love that). Poetry is an adventure you can have standing still in one space for years or wandering on steamers and through jungles and faraway lands where you don't even know the language, the customs—a wandering vagabond, a drifter.
You can find more information about Douglas Cole on his website.
