O Hypothalamus by Tiff Dressen
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How did you come to write O Hypothalamus?
I wrote the core of these poems while traveling to and from the Twin Cities to help care for my father who was recovering from multiple heart surgeries. I found myself (strangely) able to focus on writing while waiting around in airports, those in-between spaces I find so disorienting. And reflecting on it, I’ve often found it easier to focus and write in chaotic spaces like bars at happy hour. Perhaps that’s about being ignited (creatively) by being surrounded by people living their lives. However, in all that coming and going, articulating a sense of place became especially important to me. I am haunted by the landscapes of my youth, the humid summers with all their insect energy, the wooded marshlands, rivers, river valleys, and the snow-quieted winters in Minnesota. I think of these poems as my emotional and psychological maps.
Lorine Niedecker and Ted Berrigan loom large in this work. Could you speak a bit about your relation to them?
Niedecker has been a part of my personal poetic landscape for a long time. Years ago, I attended a centenary celebration for her in San Francisco where poet Thom Gunn read “Wintergreen Ridge.” I was deeply moved by her work and have been ever since. More recently I discovered her collection Lake Superior a miscellany of poetry, essays, entries from her travel journal (she and her husband took a trip around Lake Superior in 1966) as well as other writings that place her life and work into context. Here’s a snippet from her essay “Lake Superior Country,”
“The journey of the rock is never ended. In every tiny part of every living thing are materials that once were rock that turned to soil…Your teeth and bones were once coral…The air you breathe has swirled thru places of the earth that no one has ever seen…Every bit of you is a bit of the earth and has been on many strange and wonderful journeys over countless millions of years.”
My walk with Ted Berrigan has been more recent, but also influential. I’m drawn to the way he took the tidiness of Shakespearian sonnets and remade them for life in the mid 20th century—everything’s a little messy and mixed up, love and relationships, and the form itself. When I’m reading those sonnets, I feel like he’s in the room with me. It’s that kind of intimacy between writer and reader I find myself seeking.
What was your process in writing these poems, and in selecting them for this collection?
I tend to write very slowly over several months. I want to let ideas, the images unfold over time and, by allowing a poem to take its time, there’s a story that gets told. I writenearly every day in a journal, and that’s where most poems begin. Mostly, the daily writing is superficial, but sometimes, if I’m writing long enough, I can get beyond that surface-level detailing and dig into something moremeaningful and/or surprising—for instance, seeing correspondences between things that wouldn’t ordinarily occur to me as I document the debris of my daily life. Getting to that place takes time, focus and discipline, and a letting go—of who I think I am and what I’m certain about.
There are also poems that emerge from dreams—which, I think, is a special gift from the universe. What is being communicated here? And why? Speaking of dreams, there’s that amazing quote from Adrienne Rich from her essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision:”
“But poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.”
Poetry constantly reminds me there are so many ways to come by knowledge and knowing.
Were there any challenges along the way?
The challenge, for me, is mostly about pushing myself out of my comfort zone. As many poets I know have expressed, there’s the question of whether one is simply writing the same poem over and over.
I also wrestle with the sense that language can be inadequate to meet the moment—though perhaps it’s me.
Speaking of language and inadequacy, I’m remembering my brief forays into translation, working with Greek poets to translate their work into English and vice versa, I was struck by how flat the English translations felt compared to poems originally written in English and translated into Greek. To me, the poems in English seemed to gain new dimensionality in Greek, while something was lost in translation to English.
Ultimately, I would like to bring the poems I’m writing down to earth, be of earth and at the same time, I want language to reflect the transcendent aspect of that—
if that makes sense.
The world of animals, plants and the biosphere itself feels omnipresent here, completely interwoven with the dailyness of being. Could you speak a bit about that?
I was the kid who disappeared into the woods on summer days and returned home because I was being called back for dinner, kind of like the feral cat who comes to the porch to eat. I was also the kid who dreamed of being a geologist, specifically a vulcanist. Nature has always been a grounding force, a north star, how I find my way back to myself. I think it comes into the work because it’s (almost) always on my mind. I want to explore and express, as expansively as possible, a sense of belonging not only to each other as humans, but to all existing species united not only through our DNA, but also through cycles, carbon, water, nitrogen, rock weathering, lunar, Milankovitch, etc.
I think that’s the poem I keep trying to write over and over.
Also foundational to my writing and thinking are the years I spent working for a physical chemist at UC Berkeley who has devoted decades to studying the initial steps of photosynthesis, processes that unfold on almost inconceivably brief timescales known as femtoseconds, a millionth of a billionth of a second. During that time, I was immersed in conversations about how energy moves through a photosynthetic system, how plants protect themselves from an overabundance of sunlight, and what we can learn from these exceedingly efficient systems that could help us create artificial systems to convert energy from captured sunlight safely and reliably. When onebumps up against the limits of reproduceable knowledge, that is, for me, a place where poetry (and art) can be powerful instruments of perception and attention.
There’s also a sense of potential disaster hovering. How is that sense informing your writing these days?
Since we live in a time and place where every day feels like a fresh disaster, having a creative practice has kept me from losing my mind. But your question touches on one of biggest challenges I encounter in writing and that is how to write poems that speak to the surround sound of inequities and suffering, and to do so in a way that feels true to my voice and experience.
How do your projects generally begin?
I don’t know that I have projects per se, but I do have preoccupations and I tend to follow their lead.
I’m thinking back to Laurie Anderson’s incredible Norton Lectures she did at the beginning of the pandemic where she mentions her art as “I’m talking to the part of you that never speaks.” For me, writing poems is about talking to the part of myself that never speaks, but I also hope the poems talk to the part of the reader that never speaks. Also, I want the poems to be of the moment, marking this place and time, its complexities, beauty, ugliness, and possibility.
How do you know when a project is finished?
I have a difficult time knowing when anything is finished because it never feels complete. Usually, I hit the “this is as good as it’s going to get right now” point and need to move on. I had a similar experience with this chapbook. That said, what I’ve learned from letting work settle and coming back to it weeks or months later is that time and living gives me greater clarity, offers new doors or windows into the work, and that’s exciting.
Are there any places or rituals that are important to your writing process now?
I wish I could say I had writing rituals, I would like to have them, but the busyness of life means that I’m writing (or thinking about writing) whenever there’s a break in the action. I can work just about anywhere especially busy places like airports and bars as mentioned earlier. Recently, my journaling has taken the form of writing a long letter to a much older, future self. I was recently listening to Krista Tippett’s podcast “On Being” (which I highly recommend!!), she interviewed translators Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows during the pandemic about their experience revisiting Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet with a fresh translation and commentary (published in 2021)—Macy brought up Rilke’s advice to the young cadet (which I paraphrase) to live the questions now so that you may one day live into the answers. I can’t think of a more beautiful, graceful way to approach living one’s life and, for that matter, one’s creative endeavors. “To be open to the reciprocity of life,” as Macy says later, is perhaps the closest I come to ritual.
Why poetry? What’s inspiring you/inciting you these days?
Back to Krista Tippett and “On Being and her interview with Ocean Vuong, which took place in 2020, on the edge of the pandemic. Vuong talks about how we often use the phrase, “the future is in our hands” but how actually, “the future is in our mouths.” We have the power to create and destroy) worlds and realities with our words. How clearly,we can see today, in winter of 2026, how language has been wielded as a tool to manufacture false narratives, to distract, dehumanize, and divide, and to integrate and normalize hatred and brutality into American civilian life. Poetry asks that I choose my words with care; it’s a practice of choosing my words with care.
And yet, over the past several months, I’ll admit to having a loss of heart around writing, slipping into a more corrosive refrain: Who cares? What difference does this make? Why not do something more useful, Tiff? Then I’llpick up a book of poems by Paul Celan, a survivor of a Nazi labor camp whose parents died in a death camp or by any number of Latin American poets, such as Chileans Raúl Zurita, Gabriela Mistral, and Pablo Neruda, or the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, whose work bears witness to state violence, repression, and political injustices, and I am quickly reminded why poetry matters.
You’ve collaborated with other poets on projects. Could you speak a bit about your experiences?
I’ve been fortunate to be part of a long-term collaboration with fellow Bay Area poet, Alex Mattraw. After years of working together, I think we are hitting our stride, so to speak. Collaborations are relationships and with relationships, I’m usually drawn to those with whom I share interests, ideas and dreams—that creates foundation or common ground from which to co-create—but then it’s the differences (perspectives, proclivities etc), that capture and hold my attention. Alex and I share a love and concern for the fate of our biosphere, and that’s a strong common ground for our practice and yet because we are two distinct beings with equally distinct lives, there’s plenty of space for surprise in our writing. More recently, we have been experimenting with the Japanese form of poetry called the haibun, a form perfected by Japanese poet, Bashō, which pairs prose with haiku. In my own creative practice, I seldom pull together a complete sentence, subject, predicate and proper punctuation—so this has been a good challenge for me. I’ve been enjoying the experience of our voices blending at times and, at other times, remaining quite perceptible.
What advice might you give to someone who wants to get started writing?
For any creative endeavor, I would recommend checkingout composer and choreographer John Cage’s “Some Rules and Hints for Students and Teachers or Anybody Else” (add link) and maybe focus on 2 or three of them at a At present, I’m working on:
Rule 1: Find a place you trust and then, try trusting it for a while.
Rule 8: Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes. (This one has been a lifelong challenge for me!)
Rule 9: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It is lighter than you think.
I would also suggest spending time in nature, experiencing it with whatever senses are available to you. Reading as much as you can, reading more than you write, watching as many films as you can, taking notes on what moves you, what repulses you, what makes you feel uncomfortable and why, absorbing as much art and theater as you can, and doing whatever you can to commit yourself to a regular writing practice.
Download free chapbook
You can purchase Tiff’s book Of Mineral here. Read their Two Poems and Four Sonnets on Conjunctions and read them with Alex Mattraw at Brooklyn Rail.