Interventions: An Interview with C. Dale Young by Frederick Luis Aldama

An M. D. and award-winning poet, fiction author, editor and teacher, C. Dale Young stands among our greats: Avicenna, John Keats, Anton Chekhov, Nawal El Saadawi, Atul Gawande, Rafael Campo, and, of course, William Carlos Williams. Like Williams, C. Dale is mixed Latinx. Like Williams, C. Dale seeks a unity of poetic effect built in and through objects and actions, more than ideas. Through masterful calibrations of sounds and rhythms as well as lyric with narrative form, his poems guide and glide us into rich textures of place and the alpha to omega of a Whitmanian expansive existence.

Already at an early age C. Dale cultivated a passion for the arts and sciences. He would later parlay this into undergraduate studies of molecular biology, poetry, and studio art at Boston College. Our twenty-first-century renaissance man, C. Dale deepened his knowledge in these areas, receiving an MFA and MD from the University of Florida. Today, C. Dale writes, publishes, practices medicine, and teaches future generations of MFAs. With Prometeo (2021), C. Dale adds to his extraordinary body of work, including, The Day Underneath the Day (2001); The Second Person (2007), Torn (2011), The Halo (2016), and Affliction (2018).

Gentle, graceful, and drop-of-pen attentive, C. Dale Young recently shared with me deep insights into his creative process, worldview, and life.

Frederick Luis Aldama:

It’s been too long, C. Dale, since our last interview. And now with the dropping of Prometeo, yet again you’ve taken the poetic form to new extraordinary heights. There’s so much that resonates with your earlier work, and yet you take me, my heart, and my head to a whole new place. All the poems work so beautifully together. Did you conceive of Prometeo as an organic whole?

C. Dale Young:

I wish I could say that that’s how it worked. But that’s never how it’s worked for any of my books. I honestly never have any sense of a book until I’m almost two-thirds through writing the poems. I have this kind of joke that if I knew what the book was going to be, I would then ruin all the poems. That I would start trying to tailor the poems and it would be disastrous. I think part of the reason that a lot of my books feel coherent is that I’m an obsessive-compulsive person. I tend to come back at things over and over, trying to understand them in different ways. That’s what holds a lot of the books together.

I didn’t appreciate how much Prometeo was in conversation with other books of mine until I got the very first copy and sat down and read it. I was surprised. I discovered a lot of linkages between these poems and earlier poems.

I wrote the first of these poems in 2013. And I think I wrote the last of the poems in late 2018, almost 2019. And I think it was around 2017 that I had a sense of the book.

FLA:

You’ve chosen to publish Prometeo and other collections with the Four Way Press. Why?

CDY:

It’s partly technical and legal. My very first book, The Day Underneath the Day, was published by Northwestern University Press. They did not have a right of first refusal. When I approached them with the second book, The Second Person, they never rejected it, but it just kind of sat there; the editor that I had had left the press, and there wasn’t really a poetry editor at that time. The book was picked up by Zoo Press. It was supposed to appear at the AWP 2015 in Vancouver. I arrived and there was no table from Zoo Press. It was April 1st, so I thought it was an amazing April Fool’s joke. In fact, there was a big scandal. The director of Zoo Press had taken all the money. They never published the book.

I was teaching at Warren Wilson, and Martha Rhodes, the director of...