Luciano Iacobelli has done it again. His newest collection of poetry, Dolor Midnight, takes us deep inside the world of the gambler at roulette-wheel speed, and never disappoints. Iacobelli is also a playwright, visual artist, and mentor to many local writers. He is the author of several full length books of poetry including: The Angel Notebook (2007), Book of Disorders (2011), Painting Circles (2011) The Emu Dialogues, with Jens Kohler and Robert Marra (2015), and The Examined Life (2016), as well as the artists’ chapbook Noctograms (2018). He has been active in the literary community as a creative writing instructor, event organizer, publisher and editor. Dolor Midnight is his sixth book and is a spectacular sure bet.
Why did you write this book?
I did not want to write this book, but it nagged itself into existence. To write a book specifically about gambling was contrary to my aesthetic concerns. I have for years been trying to write a poetry that is non-specific, a poetry that is broad and open ended in its subject matter, a poetry that at times has no subject matter other than itself. The goal is to move away from expression and proceed towards a pure poetic experience where the poetic charge does not come from the significance of the words but rather the interplay of words, phrases and images, and even the sound and physical appearance of the language on the page.
Dolor Midnight goes contrary to my literary aims. The poems are pointed and closed, many of pieces are anecdotal and narrative driven, some pieces are didactic or confessional, and many pieces are concerned with painting an emotional portrait of what it is like to be a compulsive gambler. There are some language driven poems and even some experimental pieces, but they do not constitute the bulk of the book.
I wrote the book because the content, despite my struggle with the specificity of it, demanded it be recorded and shared, and that gambling, as a universal archetypal experience (or even as a metaphor) is a way of exploring the mind or soul, and even existence itself. Although the book is at many points personal and confessional, it equally impersonal in that stands back and observes the world of gambling as a microcosm of the world as a whole: To live in the world, to be alive is to gamble. It is when you obsessively try to formulate fortune and devise schemes to outdo chance, that dysfunction occurs.
What does the title mean and why did you choose it?
The title Dolor Midnight is a play on Dollar Midnight. Dollar Midnight is a one roll bet in the game of craps. It is a one dollar wager that that 12 (also called a midnight) will come up on the roll. The bet pays 36 to 1. I changed Dollar to Dolor in order to emphasize the kind of pain and sorrow associated with gambling and the losses it incurs.
This book seems deeply personal. Did that make it harder to write?
I have no difficulty being personal, there is plenty to draw on from my personal life that I can write about, but I often feel guilty accessing the material, because it is too easy and too tempting to write about one self. Readers who like reading personal or confessional writing are very often just moved by the emotional content of the work and not the art. I did not want to cater to that kind of reader. What I wanted was a balance of the personal and the impersonal, and one way I thought I could do that was to bring attention to more than the content but to highlight how the content was being delivered, the language play and the physical form of the work on the page.
There is such an amazing balance between confessional lyricism and language and form play. How did you achieve this balance?
My primary objective in writing Dolor was to see if I could balance the lyricism, language and form play. I scrapped the book five or six times over a span of five years because I could not meet that objective. The text was either too lyrical or confessional, or too formal or language centered. But I solved the problem by downplaying the language and form play and inserting it strategically, as a relief from the lyricism, as a surprising contrast to it. The language and form poems pop up occasionally and provides a welcome break from the confessional or narrative portions of the text. They also provide a distant and objective vantage point from which the “personal” sections of the book can be surveyed.
There are no titles for any of the poems, which makes the book feel like an epic poem. Was that your intent?
Leaving the poems untitled was deliberate. In my last three books all the poems are untitled. I believe this gives the reader a choice to read the poems as separate works or as parts of a whole. It all depends on the kind of work a reader is willing to do. To read the text as if it were one poem, to connect the sections into a whole requires thought and creativity. The book is designed to offer that creative challenge to the reader.
Few entire books explore this topic. Did you use any as inspiration?
The subject of gambling does come up in literature a number of times like Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, for example, but those works deal with extreme or romanticized scenarios. Although there are many extreme events that are described in Dolor Midnight, it is the every day mindset of the gambler that takes up the bulk of the book, the unromantic existence, the slow leaking of life that gambling can lead to. There was no book I was aware of that really covered that. I did read a number of books on the history of gambling and a couple of books on the mathematics of gambling, but most of the writing comes from things I have experienced or witnessed.
There is some wonderful and powerful art in the book. Is it yours and how does it fit into the overall book?
I created all the illustrations in the book. They appear at the beginning of each section and I think they add to the mood or atmosphere of that section and to the entire book. On the whole, the illustrations are decorative, but in future books I intend the visual art to be part of the work and not just an extra non-essential component.
How did your Italian background influence this book?
At one point in the book, I mention how as a child I watched my father and his brothers play cards in the kitchen. They played Italian games, they used Italian cards. I am sure these card games were being played in most homes in my neighbourhood. It was part of the tradition these Italian men brought over, and we boys continued it spending our summer afternoons playing Scopa or Tre Sette in our backyards or verandas. So yes, I would say my Italian background had a lot to do with my exposure to gambling. But I must also add that the tradition of gambling is not unique to Italians. I have met Chinese, Jews, Russians and other ethnicities that have the same tradition.
What advice do you have for writers who are trying to write about deeply personal topics?
The advice I would give to them is to steer clear of the easy praise that comes from writing about personal matters. A lot of confessional writers are commended for their honesty and for the therapeutic effect their work. The praise does not mean the work has artistic merit. The work has to be more than honest, moving or emotionally seductive, it must be inventive and original and to a great degree a product of the imagination even though the content maybe factual. In the end the writer is still producing a language artefact; language and form have to be explored and employed in a unique and engaging way,
What are you working on now?
I am putting final touches on a book entitled Noctograms to be published this fall. The book is structured like a metastasis that is finally resolved. It is a text where language and images become less and less contained, where image invades text and text invades image, and the material grows wildly until it reaches a point where the book becomes something other and something more than what it started to be. At this point, the book regains its composure, but not as a written text but as a visual work locked in silence.
I am also randomly writing pieces here and there, but I have no direction in mind, and my hope is that if I write enough the direction will make itself apparent. But who knows.
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