A Q&A with Alisha Dietzman

Cover design: Carol Chu. Photo credit: Victor Salazar

In November 2024, poets from Beacon Press’s National Poetry Series and Raised Voices series gathered at a National Council of Teachers of English panel to discuss how they use poetry to explore themes such as family, history, and identity in their lives. Poetry and its ability to access truth can be a transformative experience as they explore writing about the complexities of their lives and the world around them. Alisha Dietzman was one of the panelists. Her volume in the National Poetry Series, Sweet Movie, confronts romantic and religious masochism to interrogate spiritual, sexual, and moral agency. What follows are his answers to the panel discussion questions. 

Beacon Press: Tell us about your teaching practices. Where do you teach? Who are your students, what topics and texts do you cover? What are your goals as an educator? 

Alisha Dietzman: I’m actually not teaching at the moment! At least not formally. I mentor a small group of incredible students from my last poetry workshop who wanted to continue to meet. Most recently, I worked as an adjunct at a small Quaker liberal arts college in rural Oregon where I taught freshman composition and intermediate poetry. Over the years, I’ve taught/tutored in a wide variety of environments and to a wide variety of students. I taught English Language courses in Lithuania and Czechia, where my students ranged from toddlers to adults in their sixties, and I also worked as a paraeducator in the public schools for two years. Additionally, I taught a mixed genre creative writing course at University of Wisconsin-Madison during my MFA.

My students have been so varied that it would be impossible, almost, to pick a “student” to describe as typical, but the students I currently mentor—and who I most recently taught in a more formal setting—are largely religious. Most are from middle- and lower-income backgrounds. Faith—and wrestling with faith—plays a prominent role in their daily lives, including in their creative practice. This is also my background, and I see so much of myself in my students; sometimes that’s a challenge. I have been surprised at how rewarding but emotional it can be to work with students whose struggles and questions feel so familiar to mine.

I have many goals, naturally—as any good teacher should—but above all else, I want students to explore creativity. (I often referred to my poetry workshop last fall as “creativity class.”) Not every student who I teach will publish a book—and most won’t, especially not students who, candidly, lack the economic and social resources that many successful writers/artists are born into—but all students have access to a rich and strange and gorgeous world teeming with texts and images to look at, to open, and to hold. And they have particular, worthwhile worlds! I want students to look at their own worlds and understand these worlds as valuable. So often, students come into workshop assuming that a poem must use formal or archaic imagery and diction and cover certain “acceptable” topics. I try to emphasize that they have this world, by which I mean, whatever world is in front of them. Gas stations and Evangelical churches and Target parking lots—whatever, all of it. I’m in love with the world around me, its flawed and “ugly” and weird language. Honestly, I try so hard to get my students to unlearn the idea of ugly language entirely, but then, I also have words/things I despise—mostly just the word crimson. In a Christian context—and this often resonates with my students—I like to tell them that nothing is beyond redemption. Metaphor redeems; metaphor makes new. 

On a final note, returning to the lack of resources available to my students, I want as much as possible to show them that another life is possible, while also being straightforward about the challenges that students from low/middle-income backgrounds often face. I think this kind of honesty is critically needed in the arts community.

BP: Do you find that your teaching and poetry practices shape one another? If so, in what ways? 

AD: I love this question, and yes, with much intensity! I am not sure I thought this before last year, but my recent students impacted and continue to impact my practice. Some of this is particular and personal. Teaching students raised steeped in traditions that emphasize scriptural memorization and engagement allowed me to recognize for the first time how deeply my syntax owes itself to scripture. But the principle applies broadly! I think especially when you are re-entering your “home” culture after an extended absence. You will see things that you didn’t see before. My conclusions about metaphor, too, came out of wrestling with ways to meet my students’ needs, but helped me to see my own attachment to metaphor in a new light. Part of my love of metaphor is theological, I think. I have started to consider the ways that metaphor might be a spiritual practice as much as a poetic practice. 

On a very basic level, too, the simple act of explaining your everyday creative practice to your students—the how of writing—pushes you to think about your own practice.

BP: Our colleagues invited you to present one of your poems from Sweet Movie in the format of a sample lesson. Would you like to present your lesson now? 

AD: I never teach my own work, so bear with me, please. This is an exercise I love to teach with the work of other poets. I usually teach it with Adrienne Chung’s wonderful poem, “Y2K.” I think it’s infinitely adjustable and malleable, though, which is part of its strength as an exercise. You can adjust this exercise for more advanced students or take it down to a more introductory level easily. And again, many, many poems work as examples!

CREATING  A PERSONAL LEXICON 

A lexicon is a particular vocabulary or set of words. For example, languages have lexicons. I want you to think about your own personal lexicon through this exercise. Often, our first experience of poetry is formal: poems with high diction (diction = word choice); sometimes this diction feels fussy or archaic. Looking at “Love Poem by the Light of Eternity and a Reality TV Show About Love,” what kind of diction do you notice? What word or phrase choices stand out to you? The diction here is intended to root the reader in time and place while exploring contrasts between types of diction. The diction is also very personal to me, drawn from a particular and personal lexicon that—hopefully—still speaks clearly to readers. With all of this in mind, you’re going to construct your own personal lexicons.

1. Take out a sheet of paper. Fold and tear it into three strips or pieces.
2. Spend five minutes quietly and carefully considering the words you use frequently or that have significance for you personally. You might want to make a list on another sheet of paper. You can choose your words for any reason! Maybe one of the words holds cultural or spiritual significance for you or your family. Maybe you love one of the words. Maybe one of the words reminds you of a place or person or experience. Choose three of your words and write one word on each piece of paper.
3. Stand up and talk to others in the class about your words and their words for the next five minutes. You have to trade one of your words for another student’s words; the trick is, whatever word you trade, it still needs to feel part of your personal lexicon and vice versa. Our lexicons are particular but they also communicate to others, and often, we can find overlap and shared significance within the lexicons of others.
4. Once you have a lexicon of three words, spend ten minutes working on a poem in any style or form you want that incorporates your personal lexicon. You might do this via anaphora—repetition of a word or phrase in a poem—or by exploring the meanings of the individual words and their relationship to you, the poet. You might just use the words themselves, simply and straightforwardly. This is intentionally free and open-ended. You just need to use your lexicon of three words—all three—in the poem.

About Alisha Dietzman 

Alisha Dietzman is the author of Sweet Movie (Beacon Press, 2023), selected by Victoria Chang for the National Poetry Series. A finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Oregon Book Awards, Sweet Movie was also shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Slow Motion Something For No Reason, received the Tomaž Šalamun Prize Editors’ Choice Award (Factory Hollow Press, 2022). She received her PhD in Divinity with a focus on aesthetics and ethics from the University of St Andrews, supported by a grant from the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Her creative and critical work has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rebecca Swift Foundation, the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Raised between Prague, Czechia and Columbia, South Carolina, she now lives in Oregon.