{"id":39310,"date":"2025-11-07T15:53:49","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T23:53:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=39310"},"modified":"2026-04-03T13:09:33","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T20:09:33","slug":"96-dante-di-stefano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/96-dante-di-stefano\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 96: Dante Di Stefano"},"content":{"rendered":"
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About Dante Di Stefano<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Dante Di Stefano is the author of five poetry collections and a chapbook, including, most recently, the book-length poem, The Widowing Radiance (Bordighera Press, 2025). His next poetry collection, Heartland Errata, is forthcoming from Etruscan Books in 2026. He co-edited the<\/p>\n\n\n\n

anthology Misrepresented People (NYQ Books, 2018) and lives in Endwell, New York with his wife, Christina, their daughter, Luciana, their son, Dante Jr., and their goldendoodle, Sunny. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.dantedistefano.com<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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A Profile of the Author<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Notes on the work<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This poem meditates on my own childhood (and the idea of childhood) through the lens of the childhood of my two small children. The thumbless man at the beginning of the poem was my grandmother\u2019s cousin, a machinist who had lost his thumbs on the job and who loved Frost (as did my grandmother); hearing these old cousins recite poems they\u2019d learned by heart in high school\u2014Frost, Millay, Sandburg\u2014provided my first intimations of what poetry could be and do in the world and in my life. At that time, we lived next to a funeral home and a creek. Throughout my life, I\u2019ve often lived near cemeteries, train tracks, creeks, and rivers. One of my earliest memories involves waking to birdsong in the house near the funeral home, which for me is another memory presaging how the music of words would keep on awakening me throughout my adulthood.
The \u201cunsonnet\u201d is a kind of poem I\u2019ve been writing for several years. It\u2019s not a form, though it gestures at form. Really, the \u201cunsonnet\u201d is a metapoetic convention of titling meant to foreground the poem as a made-thing (as artifice and artifact) while invoking the radical unmaking capacity of lyric discourse. Roethke said art undoes the damage of haste. For me a poem provides the habitation for such undoing. I hope, in this unsonnet, I might be about the work of unmaking\/undoing the patina that obscures the naivete that once allowed me to see the wind as a wagon pulled by sparrows, the unreproducible amber glow of early dawn through the venetian blinds when I was three or four.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Recently, I discovered the British band, Wet Leg, and I\u2019ve been really loving their new album, moisturizer. I think they\u2019re the best band to come along in a very very very long time. I\u2019ve also been listening to Jeff Tweedy\u2019s new triple album Twilight Override and an album from 2017 called Los \u00c1ngeles by the Spanish singer, Rosal\u00eda. Marshall Allen\u2019s recently released The Omniverse Oriki has been topping my jazz playlist since September. I\u2019ve also been loving Snow Tha Product\u2019s M.a.M.a. and all the singles released by Jorjiana. In the 90s, my younger brother was a huge D\u2019Angelo fan. D\u2019Angelo\u2019s passing made me revisit Brown Sugar and Voodoo and think about that time in my life around the turn of the millennium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week, I listened to a great audiobook version of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass read by Forest Whitaker. Whitaker\u2019s narration was so poignant and moving and added nuance to a book that I have read and taught many times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a weekly basis I enjoy Rolling Stone\u2019s Music Now podcast, hosted by the great music journalist, Brian Hiatt, and What Went Wrong, a well-researched behind-the-scenes look at famous Hollywood flops and blockbusters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my house, the favorite song, though, is \u201cThe Night Begins to Shine,\u201d a faux-eighties song from the cartoon Teen Titans Go! My four-year-old and seven-year-old highly recommend it. I do too. I love the lyric: \u201cWhen I look at you \/ I see the story in your eyes.\u201d I\u2019m writing this on the day after Halloween; they went as Hulk and She-Hulk.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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Featured in Willow Springs #96<\/a><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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