Daphne Gottlieb Reads Our Culture Back to Us Through a Kind of Found-Object Poetry

Joie Rey Cohen

"I go in and out of season," says Daphne Gottlieb.

​100 Profiles:
SF Weekly interviews 100 people in San Francisco arts and culture.

No. 86: Daphne Gottlieb

Daphne Gottlieb is a divisive muse, one who doesn't swallow a glassful of nonsense just because the glass is not empty. A veteran of the performance poetry scene, she has recited cross-country with the likes of Lydia Lunch, Slam America, and Sister Spit, and also at South by Southwest and Lollapalooza (way back when that was something worth claiming). Gottlieb is also author and editor of nine books, the latest of which, 15 Ways to Stay Alive, was recently released by local indie favorite Manic D Press.

Gottlieb doesn't carry a notebook. She doesn't have a routine. Someone once suggested, referring to her catalog of books, that she must be prolific. But she denies this.

"I go in and out of season," she says. "I won't write for months and then all of a sudden I'll write like I've got a fever."

Joie Rey Cohen

​Even when she doesn't have the fever, Gottlieb goes through the world like the famed Democritus, holding a lantern to everything she sees to test its legitimacy. For this reason alone we would argue that Gottlieb is among the most necessary type of poet as well as person. She always seems to tremble: with anger, with righteousness, with uncertainty. She is a tuning fork for the world around her.

Joie Rey Cohen

​"I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me," she says, and then explains this is probably why she writes about death, sex, love, gender, and violence so much. "I think those are sort of the prevailing preoccupations in my work, and I think they're all things that I'm sort of speechless around, and so trying to find the language, trying to parse out the limits of what these things are."

15 Ways to Stay Alive achieves this in spades. Many of the poems include text received in e-mail or found in traditional outlets of popular culture, such as radio programs, travel guides, and even Craigslist personal ads. "Black Beauty," the focal poem of the book, contains 20 sources, including Peter Shaffer's avant-garde play Equus and an excerpt from Disney's Familyfun.com. This juxtaposition presents to us our culture in a way that is not -- and cannot be -- reported in the news.

​"I'm entranced by the idea of reading the culture back to itself, because I'm conscious that we as people and also as a culture are myth-making machines," Gottlieb says. "So I'm interested in a resistance to that: what we can bend, what we can break. And by using the detritus of the culture in my work it's a hope to somehow, you know, put a virus in the system."

This is a strong case for the importance of literature. But Gottlieb isn't convinced. Asked whether she ever wished she weren't a poet, she responds, "Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim."

She continues by making the dubious claim that 15 Ways to Stay Alive might be her final book. We bet she said this the last time she published a book -- and probably the time before that. When we say as much, there is a pause. She laughs.

"I don't remember saying it," she says. "But yes, people have told me that I did."

Try as she might, Daphne Gottlieb can't stop writing poetry. Is it worthwhile? She continues to convince us that it is.