Water Lessons

By Michele Karlsberg–

Each year the month of April is set aside as National Poetry Month, a time to celebrate poets and their craft. In celebration of National Poetry Month, let me introduce you to Lisa Dordal, who is celebrating the release of her passionate and engaging poetry collection Water Lessons. Through deeply personal and culturally grounded narratives, Water Lessons explores the relationship between reality and imagination, faith and doubt, presence and absence, as the speaker grapples with multiple dimensions of grief arising from her mother’s alcoholism and eventual death; her father’s deepening dementia; and her own childlessness. Against the backdrop of these personal griefs, the speaker scrutinizes the patriarchal underpinnings of the world she grew up in as well as her complicity in systemic racism as a white girl growing up in the 70s and 80s. Woven throughout the book are the speaker’s meditations on a divine presence that, for her, is both keenly felt and necessarily elusive, mirroring the speaker’s ultimate celebration of her unborn daughter as a “lovely fiction” who is both here and not here.  

Michele Karlsberg: Who has been important to your work, and what have you learned from them?

Lisa Dordal: Jane Kenyon was a huge influence on me early on—i.e., when I really started working on my poetry in 2005. Much of her poetry focuses on completely mundane human-relational experiences and has helped me to see that, in many ways, there is nothing more sacred, nothing more extraordinary, than paying close attention to the ordinary moments of our daily lives. I love the simplicity, the plainness of her voice. There is a sparseness and succinctness in her voice that is consonant with my own; a kind of containment that I resonant with deeply.

Please enjoy the following poem by Lisa Dordal:

I Love

I love how my wife says operators are standing by, 
whenever I’m out of town and she wants to chat. 

I love that birds can see stars and that even fruit flies need sleep. 

I love that an African grey parrot learned how to use 100 words
and that his last words were: Be good and I love you.

I love how Jesus stopped a crowd of men from stoning a woman just by writing in the sand.

I love that an octopus has three hearts. 

I love that Mother Theresa only heard from God one time, and it was enough.

I love that some birds mate for life—and that after one dies, 
the survivor sings both parts of their song. 

I love that our brains are mostly water. 

I love that some people believe in heaven. And some don’t.

I love that an owl visited my wife in a dream and that my wife said hello and asked: 

Are you the kind of owl that people refer to as a barred owl?

I love that what saves one person is not the same as what saves someone else. 

I love how the word cranium sounds like the name of a flower. 

I love that my mother keeps wanting to show me her garden.

I love that the owl answered back.

Lisa Dordal holds a Master of Divinity and a Master of Fine Arts, both from Vanderbilt University, and teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt. Her first full-length collection of poetry, “Mosaic of the Dark” (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), was a finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, the Robert Watson Poetry Prize from the Greensboro Review, and the Betty Gabehart Prize from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. For more information: https://www.lisadordal.com

Michele Karlsberg Marketing and Management specializes in publicity for the LGBTQ+ community. This year, Karlsberg celebrates 33 years of successful marketing campaigns. For more information: https://www.michelekarlsberg.com

Published on April 21, 2022