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Since 1990 the Wick Poetry Annual Reading Series has brought regionally, nationally, and internationally renowned poets to Kent State University for a reading of their work and to talk to students during their classes.
Featured readers have included Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winners Gwendolyn Brooks, Marilyn Hacker, Yusef Komunyakaa, Maxine Kumin, Philip Levine, Gerald Stern, Jean Valentine, and C.K. Williams.
Each year the Wick Poetry Center also sponsors a reading by the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize winner and judge; a reading by the winners of the Ohio Chapbook Competition; a reading by the High School, Undergraduate, and Honors Scholarship competition winners titled "Celebrating our Own"; and a reading by area Elementary and High School students titled "Giving Voice."
Please scroll down to read the transcripts of interviews with Wick Authors by Wick Assistant Laurin Wolf:
Richard Tayson
LW: I want to begin with a few questions about your first collection The Apprentice of Fever. This book is bold. So many poets find it difficult to write about real life drama because they risk sentimentality or melodrama. How do you balance that in your poems?
RT: One editor said that my poem “In Sickness and In Health” “risks ‘the sentimental’ in order to convey the speaker’s commitment and grief in such a way that it’s so appalling as to be unanswerable.” I think she means here that I am willing to enter into the minutiae of personal details in order to find something worthy for not only me, the writer, or the other person in the poem, but to allow a reader to engage her or his life with the life of the poem. Though I used to believe that I was writing to myself, I think now that that was an excuse that enabled me to include homosexuality in my work. I see the sentimental as to be avoided, and how I have risked its inclusion in my poems is to search for details to offset any sentimental signifiers (such as the word love, for example). The moment love becomes a detailed act of cleaning urine from someone’s body (to borrow an illustration from “In Sickness and In Health”), then the less likely it may be taken by a reader as sentimentalized surface emotion. Negotiating the sentimental in my work has been a tight-rope walk between the airy fluff of overworn poetic subjects and “emotions recollected in tranquility” and the hard ground of brute reality (the loved body breaking down at an early age, becoming paralyzed, unable to walk). The terrain of the poem pulls out of me the war between these two armies.
LW: Identity is an important theme in this book. The speaker of these poems is often coming to terms with the gay self. I am thinking of the poems “What Stops Me Sometimes Doctor,” or “First Sex.” Can you talk about what it is like to work with gay identity and an evolving self in this work?
RT: That’s like asking me what it’s like to breathe: I don’t know; I just have to do it in order to survive, to be whole, to not go into a coma, to keep my system alive and generative. Gayness / homosexuality / queerness is a given, but it causes a degree of turmoil and angst in the gay teenager that people who are not queer cannot imagine. The second a gay thirteen-year-old feels attraction for another man is the moment—the second!—that he begins to hate himself. He doesn’t hate the man who has provoked that attraction; in fact he (often desperately) wants to love him. He hates only himself—everyone else on the planet is good and worthy and wholesome and clean. He himself (or, I imagine she, though queerness in females is a very different thing, since our society also sometimes rewards same-sex activity between girls) is dirty, unworthy, empty except for the gayness which seems all-encompassing, unescapable, unavoidable, pervasive, disgusting. Becoming cognitively aware that the teenaged self is attracted to another male creates a terrorism inside that teenager. There is a rupture in the self, a fear of the self, a terror of the body one lives in. There is a failure in us to understand something as intimate as our own sexual urges. After the election on November 4, 2008, an evangelical pastor in Florida by the name of Rev. Joel Hunter said that Americans are “so inundated with images of homosexual relationship in all of the media”—and my experience has been that LGBT people are, upon recognizing same-sex urges, filled with loathing precisely because we do not have many positive images of queerness at all. The reverend is living in his own self-determined nightmare world. Granted, the situation of gays in popular culture has changed between 1975, when I was thirteen, and today. But when was the last time that any of us saw a billboard on an interstate that showed two gay men walking hand-in-hand down a tree-lined avenue in one of our precious cities. By contrast, how many gays are killers in popular movies—from Silence of the Lambs to Cruising to The Talented Mr. Ripley to Basic Instinct (all films I admire, by the way).
Aside from culture, life in general is stocked to the rafters with real aggression, discrimination, degradation, torture and death against GLBT people. According to The New York Times, on February 3, 2005 a teenager entered a bar in New Bedford, Massachusetts, verified that he was in a gay bar, then hit a man in the head with a hatchet and shot two other patrons. In September 2005 two men were found guilty of second degree murder for the death of Gwen Araujo, a transgender teenager. These men bound, bludgeoned, and strangled Araujo, then buried her body in a three-foot-deep grave in a remote area 120 miles east of San Francisco. In the summer of 2005 three men in Brooklyn, New York beat nearly to the point of death a gay man named Dwan Prince, who was taking out the trash when he was attacked. On January 28, 2006, a man who met men at gay bars, stabbed them to death, dismembered their bodies, then stuffed the parts in trashbags and left them along roadsides in New Jersey was sentenced to consecutive life sentences. And to add to these incidents of hate, Amnesty International released a 150-page report in September 2005 that states “there is a heightened pattern of misconduct and abuse” of GLBT people by the police. The report goes on to say that “[a]t times, the mere perception that someone is gay or lesbian provokes physical or verbal attacks.” And it seems that every positive image of queer culture is attacked as unwholesome (or worse). In a June 9, 2005 New York Times article it was reported that parents in Montgomery County, Maryland “went to court to block a health education course that offered a discussion of homosexuality”; in Cleveland, Georgia “gay and lesbian students were barred from forming a high school club of gay and straight youths.” A high school principal in Bakersfield, California attempted to censor “a series of articles for the school newspaper. . . that explored gay issues through student experiences.” On June 26, 2005 it was reported that the Hillsborough County Commission in Florida approved a policy that directs the county government to “’abstain from acknowledging, promoting or participating’ in gay pride recognition or events.” And in the most recent election three more states banned gay marriage.
Every GLBT person is forced to address hatreds. In order to confront the self-hatred in me, I needed to sit down and pound it out in language until it was dead. I murdered part of myself in order to let another part of myself live. But the part of myself that I killed in my poems was not inherent in me: it was forced upon me by the culture-at-large perpetrated by those like Anita Bryant, the John Birch Society, Pat Robertson and evangelicals who, up until November 4, 2008 had the power to raise themselves up at the expense of those they deemed worthless. Now that it appears we have entered a new era, I think we’re going to see their manic attempts to castigate perfectly normal people be seen for what it is: hatred of the other simply for being other.
Writing poems like “First Sex” and “What Stops Me Sometimes Doctor” allowed me the great luxury of expressing the rage that was not only in me but was in people I saw around me every day. That rage was not merely my own, but was a correlative of what it feels like to grow up gay in the United States. Once I allowed myself to speak my rage, I could look at the terror of my thirteen-year- old self and begin to recuperate the part of me that was broken. And the part of me that was broken was the part that was broken in every gay man I met. Though I don’t pretend to speak for others without their permission, I think all writers wish to rise above the self and have a wider view of the world around them. When I looked outside myself, I saw death and destruction that were caused from internalized hatred. So I spoke, however fallibly, about that.
LW: There are several poems in this collection that have food as their central imagery, such as “New Food” or “The Ice Cube.” I find it intriguing that you are able to take something so ordinary and everyday and work it into your poetry. Why the decision to use this imagery? Does this arise from direct observation with the everyday, in other words are your senses constantly tuned into your environment in such a way that you are looking for poems to write or does this imagery come later?
RT: Funny that you ask about “New Food,” which remains to this day associated in my mind with the most interesting (and snidely yet subtly offensive) rejection letter that I ever received. Of the hundreds of rejection letters, none but this one suggested that “That virago in ‘New Food’ must also be an animal rights extremist—no subject for an elemental ode a la Neruda! Can you imagine,” the letter goes on, “refilming the scene in Tom Jones where the meal is a rhearsal for sexual pleasure, but this time using baby bok choy? The thought makes me dyspeptic.” The letter ends by telling me that my work “would benefit from more artifice.” Though I have a rule of never reading a rejection letter twice, this one, being somehow more enticing than the rest, has called me back many times. Yes, I am dedicated to the ordinary and the everyday, because I find those things to contain as much mystery as anything else. Often we take the ordinary for granted, and don’t see beyond its surface, thereby missing the extraordinary that resides in all things. Observation, for me as, I imagine, for most writers, is where poems begin. Muriel Rukeyser, one of the beacons I look toward for what is possible in American poetry, said the following in a radio interview in 1938: “The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry.” And by “actual world” I think she was implying the ordinary which, in 1938, was on the verge of becoming horrifying. Ordinary is a term which doesn’t exclude the potential for all things, everything from the most extraordinarily beautiful as well as the most horrendous. Human beings “contain multitudes,” as Whitman tells us, and that multitude is contained within the minute seed of the ordinary. What it grows into and becomes is up to those who are making choices in the world—war, poverty, the politics of exclusion (read: the trickle down theory) are all choices which emanate from the ordinary. I’m not, as you probably guess, much for abstract reasoning, and am indeed physically oriented in the world (a person whose body acts in ways considered unacceptable by the general society cannot easily ignore the body because he’s either desperately trying to conceal his urges or celebrate them in radically effusive ways). So the ordinary is for me a source of inspiration. That said, however, I don’t get to choose my subjects—rather, they catch me, they require my attention, they won’t let me go. I guess the difference between the writer and people who aren’t writers, is that the writer’s imagination keeps circling around something she or he has seen or heard or felt in the world. And poems attack me, take me by the neck and won’t let me breath another breathe if I don’t write it down, and write it down now. My teacher, Sharon Olds, once told me that to be a writer she had to give up a lot of activities, such as going to movies, going to museums, many social activities, and I thought, ‘no way is that going to happen to me.’ But what Sharon said has turned out to be true. A writer gives up an enormous amount of stuff that ‘regular’ people get to do—and we do this in order to find time to be alone and write. But for a while I tried to live a normal, unwriterly life—and would be at the hamburger joint when I would suddenly “get a poem”—and have to leave, immediately, without fanfare, and go begin the poem. In this way, writing poems is as demanding as quitting smoking: when I quit smoking, I gave myself permission to walk out on anyone at anytime—if someone at the next table over began to smoke, I would just walk out of the restaurant. That was for self-preservation, and poems are akin to this: an object or idea—a blood test, a new mother carrying her baby, a newspaper article about an astrological discovery, or that editor’s dreaded baby bok choy—demands my attention, and if I don’t give it that attention, I lose a poem.
LW: Many of the poems in this book travel the landscape of the body, either through sex or through the imagination. Can you talk about why sex is so heavily and explicitly explored in this collection. How do you find audiences respond to this work?
RT: Sex is a metaphor in the book, which was written in response to the AIDS crisis. I moved to New York City in 1990, and it’s difficult to describe the level of fear at that time. One almost didn’t want to open one’s door! Since the disease was transmitted, for most of the gay men I knew, via sex, to write The Apprentice Of Fever meant writing about sex. As for audiences: some people, usually men, have squirmed in their seats. They may not have been exposed to frank discussions in poems about sexuality, or they may have seen the poems as one reviewer saw them: “autobiographical sex tales.” To see these poems, which were constructed with the experiences and language of others as well as myself, only as personal poems is to miss the point. We were all going through this in New York City—and I wanted to address the dilemma of being gay and young and HIV-negative, while living with constant fear of sero-conversion. In my mind, poetry has to do with seeing the viewpoints of others, and that’s what I was hoping to contribute to.
LW: Along these lines, your second collection The World Underneath continues to address the body as landscape. Although the female body and birthing are highlighted in this book, you are attracted to the body as this way of ultimately relating to the world around you. Could you talk about why you are so drawn to this as subject matter?
RT: Well, my sister-in-law invited me to participate in the home delivery of her last child. If it weren’t for her trust and openness, the book wouldn’t have taken shape. But again: the body is a metaphor—in this case a vehicle by which we all arrive in our own bodies. A day or two before my sister-in-law had the baby, I was sitting outside the house, talking on the phone to my partner (who I had met only a few weeks before I made the trip from New York to help deliver the baby in California). The newspaper was on the porch, and as I talked to my partner, I opened it. On the front page was an article titled “Found: 2 Planetary Systems--Astronomers Stunned.” I started to read the article, and began to think about the solar system in relation to the body, and how a woman’s body is like a solar system which contains another solar system, and how we are all related in that. I began meditating on what it would be like to bring a child into a world which is simultaneously expanding (new system discovered) and contracting (technology shrinking the world every day). I thought what all parents would think, it seems safe to say: that here a child is brought into the world, and there are so many problems: nuclear weapons, wars, environmental degradation, hate crimes. I began to sift through these various feelings and ideas, and that’s how the poems came about.
Just yesterday I read an article in the New York Times about how scientists have recorded three planets orbiting a star that is 130 light-years away from Earth. How fantastic! We are so small—and yet women contain beings, which are other forms of planets. So small, yet all it takes is one person to push the A-bomb button, or one Mother Theresa or one Barack Obama to change the course of history. I wanted my book to address that paradox.
LW: I am wondering if you could talk a bit about your writing process. Were the poems in this collection passed through many hands before the manuscript was complete, and if so how did people react to them? How did those reactions impact your revision process?
RT: My partner, good sport that he is, listened to all the poems as they were written. He’s not a poet, but a fiction writer. I wasn’t looking for him to make comments, but to see his emotional reactions. So we didn’t really talk about the poems—he just gave me the gift of his emotions. I am someone who is very auditory in the world, so I need to hear the poems aloud. I work with sound as I write, but it all changes when someone else is hearing the poems. They sound different. I can’t really explain it, but my process has a lot to do with sonic dimensions, and with hearing how words relate in sonic combinations. With another person that I trust as listener, I was able to hear things that I hadn’t heard when I was alone.
Other than my partner, two other close friends read the poems when they had become a manuscript. I read each of their manuscripts, and they read mine, so it was a mutually-supportive system. Other than those three, and people who heard the poems at the few readings that I gave while I was writing The World Underneath, no one else was involved, except a small group of gay poets, who invited me to bring a poem to their group once. I did that, and realized that, however helpful it was to hear what others think, if I don’t write my own work, warts and all, I’m really writing a collective book of poems.
LW: Along the same lines, can you tell our readers who some of your major poetic influences are, particularly any contemporary influences you have? I know you are working on dissertation on the work of William Blake and Patti Smith, perhaps you can talk about your connection with these two poets.
Influence is a very tricky subject, in my opinion. I can be influenced—I mean really influenced down to my toes—by hearing someone sing a song. The mystery of the song enters my life and resides with me forever. This has happened to me too many times to count. I heard Sinead O’Connor’s great album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, and played it until I memorized it. I loved the shape of her voice, the progressive shape of the songs, the way she arranged the songs to cover many different emotional states. I learned a lot from her about how to sequence my own poems. The first time I heard Joni Mitchell sing, I wanted to fall on my knees and pray. She is that good. These are people who influence me in a deep, though perhaps less-than-direct, way.
There is no separation between art and politics. I so admire artists who can write personally about political situations and atrocities—Muriel Rukeyser, Alicia Ostriker, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Marilyn Hacker. William Blake is someone who gives me so many gifts that I don’t really know where to begin. He’s a consummate artist, a self-made man. He’s someone who wouldn’t genuflect to those more powerful (read: corrupt) than he. He’s someone who, through thick or thin, money or poverty, war or no war, ridicule or praise, never let himself be swayed as an artist. On the day he died, he made a drawing of his wife, Catherine. When he died he was singing what Catherine called “songs of Joy and Victory.” This was one major dude: he wouldn’t capitulate, wouldn’t do things because others wanted him to, wouldn’t stop complaining when he was underpaid. He wrote, ““I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Mans.” He also wrote, “I have travel’d thr’ Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion. I have Conquer’d, and shall still Go on Conquering. Nothing can withstand the fury of my Course among the Stars of God & the Abysses of the Accuser.” Exactly. No matter how many people berate us for what we do, write, say, no matter how many people want to abuse us for their own ends (climbing the corporate academic ladder), we will not succumb. That’s how I see Blake.
Patti Smith: total genius. I see her whenever I can. On 9/11 of this year, a film about her was showing at an art house in Manhattan, and I went. She came to the screening and sang “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” It was a great, sad moment in this city’s history. She’s like that: for the people, not afraid to speak her mind (once I saw her sing at a tiny place in Manhattan—this was right after George W. Bush stole America’s soul out from under us—and she kept yelling “Wake the fuck up people! Wake the fuck up! It was riveting—and very Blakean.) I love that she didn’t shave her armpits for the photo shoot for Easter. I love that she never apologizes for her art—but just makes it. I love her music because she synthesizes art and politics in a way that moves me beyond belief. I don’t think art is to make us feel cozy and kind—it’s got a social function. I hate it when people say poetry shouldn’t include certain subjects (read: sex), or that it’s an object separate from reality. No way. If poetry has no social function, why would those in government be concerned enough to imprison someone for writing it or, as Laura Bush did in January 2003, to cancel a symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice" when it became clear that the event was turning into an anti-war protest? Those with official power are afraid of the effects of the Word, and their actions, however misguided, spineless, and violent demonstrate this. The people who have influenced me—and there are many, many more than the very partial list I have provided—all assume that art and politics are One.
LW: Finally, how has winning the Stan and Tom Wick first book prize and having your second collection published by the Kent State University Press impacted your career as a poet?
RT: In too many ways for me to say here. What I will say is that winning the Wick Prize, and working with kind-hearted, eagle-eyed Maggie Anderson, gave me a confidence that I had been lacking in my life. I had a voice, I was part of the American poetry landscape (and there are relatively few gay poets who have access to publishers and the whole machinery behind publishing—we’re mostly vilified and silenced, in small ways and large), and people could hear me. I’m also sure that having that first book of poems enabled me to find various work as a poet—including teaching, which I have found that I love. But mostly it was being involved in a community, and to be treated as worthy by that community. When Alice Cone picked me up at the airport and took me to a restaurant where a group of people had gathered to celebrate my work, when Maggie arranged for me to have an apartment to stay in for a few days at Kent and to teach a class, when she had a basket of sweets and flowers and coffee and books, books, books waiting for me upon arrival—it was like being treated really well as a writer for the first time in my life. It was heaven.
Alicia Ostriker
LW: What compels me the most is the range of content that you handle in your work. Just in thinking of how your books are structured, you title the individual sections as if they are chapters in these epic journeys you take the reader on. Can you talk about your choice to title sections particularly in your recent collection No Heaven where the reader is catapulted from the present to the past, from speech to silence, from the city to the body.
AO: I am a seeker and always looking at the world. I think of Whitman and how his poetry is part of large embrace. I want to bring a consciousness that is buried below to the surface in my own writing, soul speaking to soul.
LW: The second section in No Heaven is titled “Archival” and includes previously uncollected poems from 1975-1995. I am curious about your decision to include these poems, and what it was like to rediscover this work that spans a twenty year period?
AO: In retrospect I would not have included those poems in the book because I think No Heaven is too fat a book. But they were all old, published poems that I felt needed to be in a book. I didn’t really rediscover them, just did not include them in any of my previously pubished works.
LW: Your skill for enjambing a line is masterful. Can you talk about how you write on a line level and where the knowledge to break a line in just the right spot comes from?
AO: I am very aware of the musicality of my poems, and when I revise I pay important attention to the music of the line. I want to deliever both what the reader expects and something unexpected. Each piece (line) of a poem comes out of the line before. I don’t always know what is coming next, but I trust that the line before will guide me.
LW: There seems to be a trend in contemporary poetry to write poems that are smart and clever, but oftentimes not accessible. How do you relate to this trend.
AO: I don’t get pressured into fads in my own writing. I like poetry that is accessible, passionate, intense, and engaged in flesh and blood. Some poetry lives in a world where everyone is supposed to be cool, and that is not my world. I am concerned with conciousness and going where the fear is in my own writing.
LW: What is different about the experience of writing The Volcano Sequence and piecing a collection of poems together for book?
AO: The Volcano Sequence is my most unified book, I think. It is unified both through music and content. This book was done as a single project, and in that way it was easier for my to unite the poems. I often worry about how unified my poems are in any individual collection, and I hope that they work together.
Edward Hirsch Talks about Lay Back The Darkness
LW: The book opens with a section entitled “The Desire Manuscripts,” and in an interesting turn, you use classical literary characters to voice these poems. Why the decision to frame the poems in this way, in other words, why use Dante, Homer, and Virgil to write about aspects of desire?
EH: Some feelings, some aspects of desire, can only be accessed through previous
texts. I believe those texts, those stories, carry a certain kind of knowledge, and that you access your own feelings through the scrim of those texts, which also carry a certain nobility.
LW: Similarly, you decide to end the book with “The Hades Sonnets.” How do you envision this juxtaposition of desire and hell working as bookends in the collection? Also, why sequence these particular poems as sonnets?
EH. The sonnet has a long history and you are partially engaging that history whenever you write a sequence of sonnets. Every book of poems is a journey and you’ve outlined mine in Lay Back the Darkness.
LW: The second section of this collection takes the reader deeper into the meditative mind of the speaker. Poems such as “My First Theology Lesson” and “Yahrzeit Candle” reveal a speaker with a strong, if ambiguous, relationship to the Jewish religion. How is writing these poems different from writing the pieces in the first and fourth sections of the book? How do you evoke Jewish ancestry when writing?
EH: These poems have Jewish rather than Greek sources. This is a more personal side of my heritage. I don’t set out to evoke my Jewish ancestry, but my background and upbringing, my Jewish feelings, do find a way into my poems.
LW: I am intrigued by the poems in the third section of the book, particularly the way they are sequenced. In “The Horizontal Line” for example you use horizontal lines to pace the sections. I am curious, how do you want the reader to read these lines? Are they indicating less linearity in the sequence; are the sections supposed to read as self-contained sections? Is this poem a response to Agnes Martin’s minimalism?
EH: “The Horizontal Line” is a poem that pays homage to the painter Agnes Martin. It is a direct response to her work, her particular form of minimalism. I felt that it would be wrong to try to impose a narrative in writing about her work, since there is so little actual content in her paintings. I decided to create a kind of parallel form. Each line is meant as an intact unit, a kind of stanza unto itself. They are not fully distinguished as sections.
LW: Similarly, the poem “Two Suitcases of Children’s Drawings from Terezin, 1942-1944” uses both numbered and titled sections as well as the horizontal line to create the sequence. How is writing a poetic sequence like this different from just numbering the sections, or using white space? What determines the form of a poem like this; does it stem from a relationship with the visual, to drawing?
EH: “Two Suitcases” is also a deeply fragmented poem, but it is also a more documentary one. I wanted to stay out of it. The material is so red hot that it seemed useful to distance the speaker a little. Here the titled sections are meant to be sections, units of their own. They do proceed in order. Every exphrastic poem raises certain kinds of problems, and these drawings by children in Terezin certainly render their own formal challenges. I wanted to create a form that would honor their work without sentimentalizing it or suggesting that their drawings saved them. Still, they were making art in the most extreme circumstances and I wanted to pay tribute to that.
LW: Several of the poems in Lay Back The Darkness deal with a speaker’s relationship with a dying father. Poem such as the title poem “Lay Back The Darkness,” and “Wheeling My Father Through the Alzheimer’s Ward” deal with difficult subject matter. Why choose to include these poems in the collection?
EH: For me, there is no particular distinction between the so-called personal poems, such as the ones to my father, and the so-called literary ones, such as “The Desire Manuscripts.” It’s all personal and it’s all literary.
LW: With such a varied collection, I am curious, how do you envision all these poems working together under the title Lay Back The Darkness?
EH: Lay Back the Darkness has many moving parts. The book as a whole is meant to call on the spirits to ease our passage.
LW: Your new collection, Special Orders, was just released. What direction do you see yourself moving in with this collection?
EH: I think when you read the book you will see that the poems are more directly personal, less mediated. The journey is very clear in this two-part book, which begins with a section called “More Than Halfway” and closes with a section called “To the Clearing.”
Carley Sachs
LW: Where did the idea for your anthology originate, and how did you go about soliciting poets to include?
CS: The idea began as my honors thesis. I wanted to do something important and relevant to me. I had been assaulted my freshman year and never talked about it. It started coming up in my poems and so I wanted to find other voices like mine. And since it was a thesis, I didn't solicit since I knew I didn't want to reject anyone. The experience is enough, I didn't want to be making those decisions yet. And so it began as completely inclusionary. Basically I asked the poets I knew---Alice, Maggie, Cat (from Cat's bookstore), Susan from Mac's Bacs--books led me to other writers. I read a lot of women's anthologies and went from there.
LW: Can you describe the anthology process? Did you decide on the sections first and the poems afterward or vice versa?
CS: That's a huge question---I remember asking Maggie to help me out with order/sequencing. For some reason, I think we wanted to group like poems together---and like meaning who it was doing the violating. That seemed to be most organic at the time as it was the one thing we could determine. I knew I wanted to the book to move through a sequence---and so it began with who was most outside our realm---strangers, and then moving inward to friends and family. And then I knew I wanted one more section. Something that would address what happens afterward. And I wanted to end with hope. With healing.
LW: I want to talk a little about your new book, stream sequence. I am intrigued by the overall form of the book, were the poems originally written to be in landscape form? How was it working with the editor to publish this unique size and shape?
CS: It's funny, the steam sequence actually was finished after the why and later, but you know how publishing goes---the poems did come out that way---even when I was drafting on notebook paper. The spaces were as essential as the language. In a way, I think the spaces are actually language. And it wasn't a problem at all working with my publisher. They were really behind the idea. They didn't question my layout or my wanting the book to be fatter instead of taller.
LW: Several of the sequences in this collection create a duality of meaning for the reader, particularly because they can be read in several different ways. Can you talk about the strategy of this technique?
CS: I wanted the reader to be an active participant in the poem. I wanted the poems to have some flexibility, so that each time you read it, perhaps you found a new layer---sort of the way memory works--in bits and pieces. The way certain things will trigger something else. I was going for a completed incompletion or an incomplete completion.
LW: You also use some innovative punctuation in this collection. Can you talk about your process with that?
CS: I think that goes back to the above. Poetry makes us rethink our experiences and our language. When I teach my students I tell them the page is their canvas. They have so much they can bring to it---space, symbol, language, meaning, sound, image. It's so much more than just putting the words on the page. (Feel free to ask for more here if you like...)
LW: Along those lines, you make unique white spacing choices in this book. How do you define the decision to surround some sequences with white space and others in traditional stanzas? Does it come down to content or something else?
CS: It comes down to the basic idea of the page. What is the best way to serve the poem. I know this sounds corny, but the poem dictates that, not me.
LW: Did this book begin as a concept collection, or did it begin as one poem and then manifest into a larger project?
CS: It's funny you ask---I had thought I was writing about water and steam---how one state of matter moves to another one. I was going for something scientific. Most of my classmates were more hip---playing with language and ideas and I was a little self conscious of my own narrative style. So I got this idea about steam and then the narrative of a woman who survived the Holocaust appeared. And then I had something else entirely. Something ghostly, but content breathing life into form.
LW: Do you find yourself drawn to projects as a writer? If so, why?
CS: I'm totally Type A---I like projects, something to do and to explore. It gives you a spectrum, a goal and a location to work. I'm very addicted to the notion of place and how that frames experience. So a project is like a place. It locates you. And when you channel your energy, discoveries are bound to come up.
LW: How did Kent Sate University shape your future in the literary arts?
CS: I'm grateful. Kent gave me roots---it was a heart and a root for me. Poetry was beating every since I began my education. I came to Kent with a Wick Honors Scholarship. And it just grew from there---from my Intro. class with Alice, then classes with Maj and my thesis with Maggie. I look at them as my poetry parents---the ones who believed and nurtured not just me or us, but the craft in general.
LW: What is like to return knowing this is where you began your career as a writer?
CS: I'm honored and overwhelmed. Ten years ago I would go to these Wick readings and was like "wow, real poets!" So I suppose this means I'm now real. It's something I struggle with. I still see myself as that shy poet who declined a dinner invite as a freshman because I was afraid of the things I was writing and was afraid of rejection and accessing that place inside myself. I still go to readings and think that other poets are more real than I am---that they have arrived and I'm still on the journey. Though I know it's not true. We're all on that journey together. We all have the way we appear and the way we are. And we're all in love with myth in some way. This is both surreal and real.
Arlan Hess
LW: Can you tell our readers about Paper Street? Why did you choose Pittsburgh as your base? What type of work does it solicit? Where can our readers find out more information?
AH: Pittsburgh was the most logical choice for Paper Street because Dory Adams (our founding fiction editor) and I are both Pittsburghers. In 2002, we started a non-profit, independent literary journal featuring both Pittsburgh and national writers. During the summer, we hold (held) public readings (poetry and fiction) and workshops in order to encourage dialogue. We often had lively discussions and interchanges between and after sets. Paper Street Press remains the only independent publisher in Pittsburgh committed to poetry, fiction and interview. Dory left the journal in December 2007. Due to the recent economic down turn, we suspended publication of our 2008 issues and have stopped soliciting submissions. We hope to re-emerge, perhaps in a slightly different format, in 2009. We have a web site, although it is shamefully out of date, at www.paperstreetpress.org.
LW: How did Kent State University help shape your future in the literary arts?
AH: Kent shaped my future in the literary arts in several ways. First, I had the opportunity at Kent to take my first creative writing classes—and I wasn’t very good. Terrible, actually. I had always wanted to be a writer, but had never approached the process with any attention to craft. I look back on my earliest work now and am so embarrassed by most of it. I really struggled to find my voice, and it wasn’t until I had the experience of collaborating with other writers in a workshop that I gained the confidence to write what I felt, not what I thought I was supposed to write.
Similarly, and this might sound silly, the summer between my two creative writing semesters at Kent, I studied at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, then went to Ireland for the first time. I visited family, toured the country side, and, in a sense, grew into myself. Although I joke by saying that it was kissing the Blarney Stone that made my writing change, it was altered by the confidence I gained by seeing something of the world, of the way others lived and the way I fit into that larger picture.
That, in turn, leads me into the second way that Kent shaped my future as a writer. In the fall of 1988, as a result of my travel that summer, my writing style changed. I didn’t anguish so much about my work. I gave up a little control. The poem that won the Wick Scholarship, “Outside the Sugarloaf Hotel,” was written during that time. And it was written in a very short time. I submitted three poems for the award, and when I got the initial phone call that I had won, I thought it was for one of the other pieces. I was stunned that it was for Sugarloaf. Anyway, winning the award is the second factor that had a major influence on me. If I hadn’t won, I doubt I would have felt the same kind of unbiased encouragement from my family and friends, and I probably would have stopped writing.
Lastly, not in regards to my poetry, but in relation to my love for literature in general, I was sitting in Baird’s History of the English Language class reading the Conversion of King Eadwine when I, quite literally, felt a gust of cool air ripple through my body and escape as if the top of my head were being blown off. Talk about an epiphany. It was at that moment I realized that, no matter how much I earned, or failed to earn, I needed to spend the rest of my life with words. Now, I talk about reading and writing all day and get paid for it.
LW: When did you discover your talent for writing?
AH: Honestly, I’m not sure I do. I’ve written less than a handful of poems that I actually like. I’m constantly comparing myself to other writers and rarely finding that I measure up. I hardly ever send work out because I’m so insecure about it. And the business is so competitive. There are so many writers out there whose work I admire, poets and fiction writers who never get published, or who will only get published in PSt. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to publish a journal: to give voice to the writers who would otherwise go unheard. I am, by far, a much better editor than I am a writer.
LW: When did you make the decision to pursue a career and dedicate yourself to writing full time?
AH: I don’t write full time. I am a full-time Lecturer of Literature and Creative Writing at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, PA. It’s hard for me to find the time to write poetry during the academic year unless I’m particularly moved by someone or something, although I do continue scholarly writing and have recently discovered the joys of blogging, which, for me, is somewhere between creative non-fiction and memoir.
LW: Can you talk about some of your major influences as a writer/artist?
AH: I came to poetry through Dylan Thomas. I was, and still am, blown away by his ability to articulate the confusion and exhilaration and pain that is life. I went to Wales to study him with some of the greatest Thomas scholars: Walford Davies, John Wain, John Ackerman. I think “Fern Hill” is one of the greatest poems ever written. Twenty years after I went to Wales, I designed and taught a Dylan Thomas class at W&J for Intersession this January. I subtitled it “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll.” The students loved it. It was a lot of hard work, but they got so much out of it. At the end of the class, we broadcast Under Milk Wood, Thomas’s play for voices,live on the college station. We thought the station was taping it, but it turned out the recording was flawed, so it was truly a once-in-a-lifetime event.
I also am a big fan of Robert Haas, Marie Howe, Jack Gilbert, Mark Doty, and, I’m not just saying this because she’s at Kent, Maggie Anderson. I have always taught Maggie in class, and this semester, when I decided to teach a collection of poetry in addition to my regular Norton Anthology, I adopted Windfall, Maggie’s new and selected from a few years back. Her work is so accessible, and because she has a strong OH/PA/WV sensibility and most of my students come from the tri-state area, they connect to her work in very visceral ways.
Beyond the page, I have also been influenced by music and film as well. When I studied with David Wojahn during my MFA at Vermont College, he assigned Chet Baker albums and Terrence Malick movies in order to get his students thinking about imagery and style and tone in different ways. I find myself moved by Andy Goldsworthy much more than I am moved by Andy Warhol these days.
LW: Are you currently working on a collection or project that you would like to share with our readers?
AH: I’ve had a book proposal accepted by an academic publisher for a critical project that I’ve been working on, but I’m such a procrastinator, that I’m not very far along. I’d rather not go into more detail because I’ll just feel terrible if I’ve told lots of people then never actually finish the project.
LW: You write both poetry and dramatic work. Do you have a preference for one genre over the other? Can you describe the differences in multi-genre writing?
AH: Because I was so uncomfortable, or at least couldn’t identify, my own voice for so long, I wrote a lot of dramatic monologues at Kent. That grew into a love of playwriting—and I actually completed two semesters of an MA in Theatre at Pitt before I took a radical detour into finance for most of my twenties. I don’t have a preference for one over the other, although I do still dabble with one-act plays. Ideas come to me in a specific genre. That is, they come to me either as a poem or a play or a short story, and I never alter my course after that initial vision. I don’t see a lot of differences in multi-genre writing. To me they all require craft that pays attention to imagery, style, voice, conflict/tension, etc. Sometimes, I think poets are mistaken for playwrights. Like August Wilson, for example. He may have written for the stage, but his work is poetry.
LW: Can you talk about your role as a literary arts educator? How do you encourage young writers and foster a creative environment for them in the classroom?
AH: I teach at the college level as well as serve as a Poet-in-Person for the International Poetry Forum here in Pittsburgh. That means I go around to middle and junior high schools, teaching poetry lessons and, in general, letting them get up close and personal with a living person who writes poetry. For my college students, most of whom are only taking the course for the Arts requirement, I hope I help them understand that writing poetry and fiction isn’t nearly as easy at it looks when it is done well. That usually means assigning a series of exercises that allow them to try their hands at the various skills--character, dialogue, conflict, image, metaphor, form—then submit their work to criticism from their peers. Most of them already have pretty set notions about what a poem is, so I try to make the class atmosphere safe to share and try new things, and, if all goes well, they discover they have an interest or a talent that goes beyond what they had at first thought. I strive to get them to produce one poem or one story that shows something original, fresh, new, but there are always the students who are just there for the credit and don’t want to push themselves beyond their current limits. In many ways, working with younger children is easier. Most of them haven’t formed prejudices against literature and many still have dreams of becoming writers. If I’m able to get my college students in touch with that side of themselves, I’m on to something. I want all of my students them to understand poetry is all around them, not just something they read in books.
Amanda McGuire
LW: What if any are the current projects you are working on?
AM: A couple of things. Let’s start with oldest to newest, lyrical essays that deal with issues related to my sister with special needs. This prose writing comes slower for me. I am also working on a collection of poems that deal with domestic violence. I cannot emotionally process domestic violence, but I work for a non-profit organization in Bowling Green called Alicia’s Voice that deals with victims of domestic violence. I am approaching this collection as a person who never experienced domestic violence, and I want them to stand alone as poems and work as one long poem.
LW: What poets/writers are you currently reading?
AW: I am obsessed, to put it lightly, with Rachel Zucker, Eula Biss, and Brenda Hillman, the non-fiction writer.
LW: What is your process like?
AW: I am a slow writer; I obsess and obsess and then write. By the time I go to write the poem is already done in my head. I see the poem in my mind visually.
LW: Can you obsess about multiple things at once?
AW: Yes. Right now I am really into what’s overheard, splicing things I am reading and hearing into my work. I also do sampling.
LW: What do you think about the argument that “sampling” creates a poem that doesn’t really belong to the writer. Essentially, if we are using other peoples words then do the poems still belong to us?
AW: That is what we have a notes page for, right? If you just sample then it is not really yours, but if you find a way to build off it intellectually—to further your idea, then the piece builds its own voice. Borrow until you are content, but always give props.
LW: What was your experience as an undergrad here at Kent State like?
AM: Well, I was an English major with a creative writing minor. Then when I won the Wick Scholarship, poetry took over my life. I was always interested in making books as a kid; you know, it was a form of escapism. I would recreate The Young & Restless with Barbie Dolls—I was destined to be a writer. I studies creative writing with Kat Blackbird at Kent, and writing kept me healthy, mentally. Wick really shaped my life. Winning that scholarship helped to open up the world for me.
LW: Do you like your writing?
AM: There are days when I look at my stuff and I think “Wow I wrote that!” I am always willing to learn and experiment, though. It is humbling because it helps me grow.
LW: You write in several genres, poetry / essay / blog. Do you think that there is any literary merit in blogging?
AM: I blog to keep up with family and friends. I know it is egotistical to think that people care to see if I update it everyday. What is on the line in the blogging is life; it is a type of branding or a negotiation of that. Things I am trying to work out on the blog make their way into my poems. Reginald Shepard’s is a good example of a blog that had distinct literary merit. Do I think it happens enough online? No.
Irene McKinney’s Vivid Companion
LW: Several poems in Vivid Companion move the reader from the abstract to the concrete. I am thinking of the poem “Three Three Three” which begins with broad philosophical questioning and ends with the speaker talking about her father’s stroke and his loss of language. What is your process for constructing a poem like this with such a movement from abstract to visceral?
IM: In "Three Three Three" I was aware that we all need to be reminded of the stark truth of not only our mortality, but the terrible circumstances leading up to death. Often, people will say that they aren't afraid of dying, but of the pain and chaos leading up to it. I address that question first, both for myself and others, by asking blunt questions that force us into humility.I want to shock us into understanding that the present level of comfort we have is subject to sudden reversal. Then I can progress to the particular circumstances of my own life and my father's confusion and suffering. As a poet, a person who lives by words, there is nothing more terrifying than the idea of losing the capacity to speak, of being reduced to single syllables, as the aphasia victim is, and as my father was. I wanted to convey the raw truth of this, but also I wanted to convey that the basic emotional life of the heart persists even in this, so that finally that is all we hear.
LW: Death and dying are recurring themes in this collection. How is working with this source material different from others in the books, particularly the Oneida poems?
IM: The Onieda Poems are concerned with human sexuality, marriage, human selfishness, gender relations, and the social structures we build around these. As such, they deal with more public issues, albeit through personal testimony and witnessing in fictionalized voices of historical characters. Persona poems give one a bit more distance on the concerns one is addressing. My poems dealing with death and dying are autobiographical in a way the Oneida Poems are not. Writing about my father was a way of dealing with his suffering and mine in real time: I wrote the poems often actually sitting at his bedside. I felt a sense of desperation and tragedy during that time that was quite different from the almost happy engagement I had with the material of the Oneida Poems.
LW: One thing that strikes me most about this collection is the non-judgmental speaker. The narrative in “Atavistic” resonates strongly; the speaker tells the story of her mother tossing scalding water on animals at the back door. Yet the language of this piece is not aggressive, and the title is rich and elusive. You really focus the piece on the details, leaving the speaker’s emotions for the end. How do you craft such a well restrained narrative?
IM: If the voice of "Atavistic" is non-judgmental, as you say, it is because I value clear seeing more than ego satisfaction. I am not a victim in this little drama, but a participant, acting on my own volition, and coming to my own conclusions, although I realize that wanting to be part of the animal world is an archaic emotion, and may separate me from the human beings I love. In the larger context, I feel that socially unacceptable emotions and impulses need to be acknowledged, even though the speaker may be showing herself in a bad light. I have also come to believe that our sense of animals as "other" is the same emotion we use to separate ourselves from people of different races and ethnicities. I address that in another poem with animals in it, "Monkey Heart."
LW: The vast landscape of humanity is explored in this collection. The Oneida poems in the second section are remarkable. How did you discover such rich source material, and what was the research process like?
IM: When I was teaching at Hamilton College in upstate New York, I was only a few miles away from the Oneida Community, and the college had a lot of material and manuscripts from Oneida. I became utterly fascinated and really obsessed with the social experiment they had undertaken there, and I did research on it for a year or so, and finally had so much information and so many voices in my head I had to start writing about it. The engine that drove all this was the fact that I was newly in love with a colleague there who was married, and I naturally began to be drawn to Oneida's exploration of the questions of marriage, community, and sexuality. He suggested that we go and visit the old community, which we did, and interviewed an elderly woman, Imogene Stone, who had been an original member of the community. Walking through the old mansion with her, where she still lived along with other elderly members, I felt transported back into that life and those hopes and aspirations for human possibility.
LW: The voice that resonates in these Oneida poems is one of sad compliancy. The characters seem oddly content given the strangeness of their condition; the poems “The Testimony of Harriet Warden, 1850” and “Sarah Burt: The Doll Burning, 1851” exemplify this tone. Did this tone rise out of your emotional discourse with the material or from the testimonies themselves?
IM: You speak of the tone of the Oneida Poems as one of "sad compliancy," which may be the case. My own feeling that borders on sadness in this context stems from watching the sincere efforts we undergo, believing that selfishness and greed can be done away with, but sensing the shadows of those urges lurking even under the most heartfelt efforts to get rid of them. For example, I knew that John Humphrey Noyes, the patriarch of the community, had sex with young women on a regular basis, for questionable motives. The rhetoric was that he wanted to father children from a spiritual bond, and that as the spiritual leader his seed was the most spiritually elevated. The young women were only too glad to comply, rather like female graduate students sleeping with their male teachers, out of the desire to come inot contact with their authority and talent, in the hope of attaining some of that for themselves. So the tone of the poems arises more from my inner dialogue rather than the tone of the research material, which is usually relentlessly upbeat.
LW: The poem “Stained” touches on pain with such tenderness. There is a mature speaker here who has moved beyond anger to acceptance and a juxtaposition in the ways the poem itself is crafted. How do you write about such intense emotions using nature imagery, such as the “ten-degree weather” and the squirrel? How do these images propel the emotion of the speaker?
IM: In "Stained," the images of the cold weather, the stains and pollutions from the coal mines, and the squirrel, are what the world gives me, and I want to learn to align myself with them. This necessitates pausing for a while and admitting my own doubts, glaring imperfections, and lower-class origins. Only then can I really appreciate and love the fact that the squirrel ignores me and has its own life and desires to pursue. The fact that the natural world goes on without us is a source of great joy, because it puts our ego and self-centeredness in its place. Then it might be possible for us to feel genuine tenderness toward ourselves and our little pains, without whining or self-pity.I feel deeply compelled to acknowledge our "human stain," the imperfection of being alive, because this can counteract hubris and destructive abstraction.
LW: The speaker in “Ready”, the last poem in Vivid Companion, states that, “I was about to embark on a third life.” Do you think of writing as a third life, or perhaps a first, a second? Can you comment a bit on your writing process?
IM: The "third life" refers first to the fact that physical illnesses have brought me near death on a couple of occasions, and I have come close to a kind of mental death many times. And I am partial to the number three because of its magical connotations, and its use in ordering experience, although we're usually aware that numbering things to control them is utter fantasy, and is therefore humorous to me. But I'm also thinking of the infinite riches of a single human life, which contains a great many lives within it, and I want to eagerly consume each one of them, even if they are painful. And of course the writing life, not to mention the reading life, encompasses many lives. And there's the edge of a hope that maybe this great richness might go on to a fourth, or a fifth, after death. Who knows? Not me, that's for sure. For me, writing is the way to learn, again and again, a necessary humility. I go after that any way I can, and all my writing strategies grow from that.
Questions for Alberto Rìos on The Theater of Night
LW: The poems in section two of The Theater of Night are narrated in the voice of a woman. How does writing in a voice other than your own affect your perspective of a poem? How do you approach a poem like this?
AR: I have many people inside me, so many people I was before me. I don’t say this as if it were an illness—rather, all these people inside me are a celebration. Therefore, when I write poems in the voice of a woman, I don’t write as a stranger.
LW: Writing in couplets appears to be a favored form for you, as in this book as well as The Smallest Muscle in The Human Body. Do you see this form as tempering your work? Why are you drawn to the couplet as a form?
AR: I have come to see this as my stride, my breath not just out but in as well. Two lines for me is the full breath, and includes the things said paired with the things thought—which can also be and deserve to be said. For every line I write, I know there’s more to say if I think of my lines in twos. It is a device that draws more from me than I at first thought was there.
LW: There are reoccurring characters in this book, particularly the emergence and re-emergence of Clemente particularly at the beginning and end of the book. How does his importance affect the book’s structure? Are poems subsequently chosen that illuminate the presence of an over arching character or to detract from it?
AR: The book is the love story of my great-grandparents, Clemente and Ventura. They are characters, I suppose, but they are people, too, and more than that, they are my people. The overarching character of the book is not really a character at all, but the love story—a love story that, many years later, would produce me.
LW: The poems in this book teeter on the mythical and the real; I am thinking of the poems “A Marrow of Water,” “Noise from the Sea,” and “The River Was Their Honeymoon” to name a few, how do you enter a mythical place for writing poems like these? How is that space different from the one that occupies that of narrative poems?
AR: I think of those moments not as mythical, but simply as feeling put into words, into containers which perhaps have not held them before. It is sometimes an odd pairing, and can seem almost magical, but to me it is absolute sense. In this way, the more mythical poems are no different from the more narrative ones. The narrative ones simply walk on more familiar ground, but all of them are walking, and have this in common.
LW: A familial tone echoes in this book. Not all poets tackle the loaded subject matter of family. Your observations in poems like “Great-Grandmother Neatly Starched” or commentary in “Chance Meeting of Two Men” are important. What relevance does family, as a subject matter, have on your poetry? Do you approach this subject matter with more caution than you would other subjects?
AR: I remember learning something many years ago, a thing that sounds awful when spoken aloud: for a writer, the worst thing is to have your parents still be alive. I think we all understand this, and don’t take it literally. But family, of course, family is always a delicate subject. The good thing is that I have such a terrible memory—which is to say, I remember things in very different ways from other people in my family, and from other people generally. What happens, then, is that when I write a family story, nobody recognizes it, even though for me it is as true and certain as whatever anyone else remembers. I don’t want anyone to think that I make things up, certainly, but what I remember always seems to be mine alone.
LW: Horse imagery is lurking throughout this book, and I wonder does something like this happen naturally, rising out of a possible obsession that you write about; or do you specifically craft these images into the poems so the reader can see a connection and possibly be comforted by their reiteration?
I would probably say it is organic. I grew up in a rural setting, even though it was close to the border. The rolling hillsides of southern Arizona are horse country, cattle country, and it was just part of growing up, but a part that has stayed with me.
AR: You have a vast collection of work in your repertoire, which includes stories as well as poems. I wonder, how do you decide what becomes a story as opposed to what becomes a poem? When you are grappling with a narrative that can become either, how do you choose?
Quite often I don’t choose at all. I don’t think a good idea can be exhausted, and simply writing about it once is inevitably inadequate. So, I write it again, but often in a different genre. There are many ways for an idea to dress, just as there are many ways for us to dress.
LW: You were the judge for the Wick first book prize, and choose Anna Leahy as the winner. Were there specific criteria that you were looking for when choosing a winner? What resonated for you about Anna’s poetry?
AR: Whenever I judge a contest, what I’m looking for is never different from what I want whenever I read a book—to be taken away by it, and to believe that, for the span of its pages, I am in hands that I trust absolutely. As a teacher, the urge to lift the mythical red pen is strong, and when I can find a book that makes that urge go away right from the beginning, I am in the right circumstance. Anna Leahy’s book did exactly that, taking me to that place of trust—and surprise.
Tony Trigilio
LW: “Choosing a Stone,” the opening poem of The Lama’s English Lessons, is the only poem in the book that is not in a section. Do you see this poem as a preface of what is to come in the book, or does it stand alone, unique from the rest of book?
TT: I wanted “Choosing a Stone” to serve as a preface of sorts, yes. It’s there as a poem on its own, but my hope is that it forecasts what follows in the book.
LW: There is a conscious play with various forms at work in this book. Do you have an idea of form in mind when you are writing a poem? Do you have certain criteria for choosing form, what makes a poem a prose piece, or stanzas, or couplets? How do you decide what form best fits the piece?
TT: For the most part I let the poem decide its form as I’m drafting it. As I’m working on a new poem, its formal textures suggest themselves in the process of writing. In “Ball Game on the Car Radio,” for instance, the repetition and obsession of the early draft pretty much demanded a form like the pantoum. “Special Prosecutor” came to me as a strange, dreamy narrative, and this seemed particularly suited to the prose poem. “The Party Turns Fifty” began with a lot of uncontained out-of-control emotion, and I knew the poem wasn’t going to work without something to provide tension and risk. So with that poem I started playing with variations on William Carlos Williams’s triadic line until I found something that would offer some shape to the landscape of the poem -- something that would offer boundaries that would give the piece ebb and flow. Form is really important to me as a device that heightens tension and gives the poem boundaries that it then can violate -- as something that gives the poem necessary torque. But I don’t have other criteria for choosing form. I feel it’s important to feel at ease with a broad palette of forms, so that when a particular form suggests itself you can jump right into it without hesitation.
LW: There are several poems in this book that reference religion or religious ideals, such as the references to Jesus and Christianity in “The Longest Continuing Running Policeman,” or Buddhist references in “Special Prosecutor,” “ Smuggled Video,” and “The Lama’s English Lesson.” Do you find that using religion helps to ground the poems in some way, gives them a center? What is the attraction for you as a poet to incorporate religious ideas into your work, particularly the Buddhist ideals that repeat themselves so often?
TT: Using religion does ground the poems for me; it does give them an ethical center of gravity. Like many poets, my first experience with poetry was in a religious setting: sermons, religious texts, prayers, and so on. When I first started seriously reading and writing poetry, I realized that I was using the same parts of myself that I used when I meditated or when I read great religious texts. Still, I grew up with horrific Catholic experiences as a child, so the whole thing can be kind of vexing for me. The whole-body religious feeling I got from, say, reading the Christian New Testament was completely at odds with what I experienced face-to-face with the fire-and-brimstone churches of my childhood. Converting to Buddhism was a great relief -- it brought me back to the imperatives of mindfulness and altruism that I first learned reading Bible stories independent of institutions like Catholicism. The last thing I want to do in the poems is sound like I’m evangelizing. I know you’re not suggesting this. It’s just a fear of mine, based on the religious training I had growing up. It’s an anxiety that comes from that great tug of religion that you see in the title poem -- but that also comes from the speaker’s difficult collision with the religious sensibilities in “Bibles for Vietnam.” A close friend and fellow poet in Chicago, Chris Green, was the person who really urged me to take the leap in organizing this book the way I did, with its religious emphasis in significant places. I think I needed an outside voice to give me permission to do this -- to do what I really wanted to, as I organized the poems in the book.
LW: There is an interesting juxtaposition at work in the poem “Autoresponder@whitehouse.gov,” and I was wondering if you could talk more about that. Why did you choose to intersect an e-mail message with facts on torture? What do you feel are the political implications of a piece like this?
TT: I’ve always written constituent letters to politicians, local and national, about pressing issues, so when I first read that the White House had gone online and was accepting email correspondence, I felt a kind of wild optimism about human communication and political organization. Of course, when I saw how White House email conducted itself in practice, I was disappointed. I’d been part of an Amnesty International anti-torture letter-writing campaign, and I sent an email to President Clinton about this. I couldn’t believe that I got an email reply almost instantaneously. When I opened it, and saw (with disappointment) that it was an autoresponder form letter, I save it on my hard drive, knowing that the stiff, bureaucratic language would have to be appropriated somehow into a poem in the future. I didn’t intend to use it in a poem that would explicitly reference my original letter to the President, as this poem does. But a couple years later, my wife was volunteering at the Marjorie Kovler Center here in Chicago -- an organization devoted to the physical, psychological, and financial health of victims of torture. The training manual was really emotional for me; as I was reading it, I kept thinking of the disconnection I felt in the autoresponder reply from a couple years back, and I realized then that the poem had to be in the form of a tortured letter about torture. I’m not sure what the political implications might be for readers, but I’m hoping that the mix of humor and outrage has some kind of effect. My easiest default response to political events can be simple desensitization; if this is true for others, then I hope the poem sparks reaction, and maybe makes us think about how the personal and the historical can intersect in cruel (torture), compassionate (Marjorie Kovler Center), and indifferent (autoresponder) ways. I’m thinking of Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” here, too: it’s one of my favorite poems, but I don’t believe human suffering has to be a solitary thing.
LW: You take some risks in this book by choosing to write about well-known figures, such as Kenneth Starr, Lee Harvey Oswald, Benny Goodman. How do you handle a poem that includes such a well-known character? Do you feel a greater responsibility to the characters in a piece like this or even to the audience?
TT: This is something I continue to play with, beyond the scope of this current book. These continue to be important questions. I mean, at one level, I want to play with our culture’s celebrity obsessions -- and as much as I might want to critique, negatively, these obsessions, I also have to acknowledge that I take part in them as much as anyone else. I can’t escape that I’m part of a culture that elevates celebrities into polytheistic figures looking down on us from high. So I think the best way to handle these issues in the poems is to acknowledge my vulnerability, as the speaker, so that the celebrity obsession in the poems is a question handled from the vantage of the first-person-plural “we” rather than the second-person “you.”
The greater responsibility, as you mention, is always there, yes. In “It Came from a Clarinet,” for instance, I’m not just working with Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw as famous musicians, but I’m also working with Goodman and Shaw as huge influences on my family life. The poem is grounded in the experiences of my grandfather, who was a touring jazz musician on the northeast coast of the U.S., and my father, who was a clarinetist. My family has lots of other musicians in it, and I’ve been playing and writing music since I was 10. So Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw (and Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Glenn Miller, and Patsy Cline, to name 4 others off the top of my head) were a huge influence handed down to me by my father as I was growing up. The responsibilities in this poem ranged pretty far for me, then, with my family’s immigration background and music background as part of the mix.
Then there’s the political responsibility, such as in the Kenneth Starr poem (or in a more recent poem, not in this manuscript, “Alan Greenspan”; Timothy Green talks about these responsibilities in a blog entry earlier this year: http://timothygreen.blogspot.com/2007/05/features-of-good-poem.html). I wouldn’t want to invoke these public figures just for the sake of the cultural authority they carry with them -- any more than, say, I’d want to write about Greek or Roman gods & goddesses in the same way. But I do want to write about public figures in ways that help me (and, I hope, readers) see the world from a new or slightly different frame of reference. With Kenneth Starr, there’s also a highly personal reason for writing “Special Prosecutor.” As a child, I watched the Watergate hearings on TV with my mother, and she took great pains to explain to me that this truly was a historic event -- that I was watching justice in action. So years later, when Starr’s travesty was allowed to play itself out, I felt like this important lesson from my mother (and this important experience of sharing a historical event with her) was tainted. This personal outrage was matched by the political outrage that the Starr prosecution was allowed to continue unabated. The personal always is political, and for me that has to be a part of these kinds of poems -- even if the personal, such as the experience with my mother, is submerged so deeply in the poem that it’s part of my compositional energies and not necessarily part of the reader’s experiences.
And Lee Harvey Oswald. I didn’t really guess this at the time, but I wasn’t finished with Oswald, as a subject, even with the two Oswald-influenced poems in the book, “A Simple Worker’s Notebook” and “Oh, Death.” These only led to further obsessions. My newest manuscript, which I’ve just finished and I’m currently polishing/revising, takes the myths and texts of Oswald and the JFK assassination as its subject matter. These two poems in The Lama’s English Lessons led to a few other poems, and I thought I might have a small chapbook forming. Then I was awarded a grant to travel to Dallas and do research at the Texas School Book Depository . . . and I was hooked. It’s now a book-length sequence of historical poems. The responsibilities there were huge -- responsibilities to, as you mentioned, audience and the characters. I wanted only to explore the psychological dimensions of Oswald and the other cast of characters, and I want to make it clear to readers early on that I’m not trying to answer the mysteries of the assassination. Instead, I’m trying to explore the assassination as an archetypal event in the U.S. cultural imaginary. That all sounds theoretically fine, but I have an even larger responsibility to the real people who are the cast of characters -- several of whom are still alive, or have relatives who are still alive and involved in assassination research. This issue of responsibility really hit its peak for me this past June, when I was visiting my cousin, Michael, in San Francisco, and I was able to secure an interview in Santa Rosa with Ruth Hyde Paine, the woman with whom Marina Oswald was living at the time of the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald would visit on weekends, traveling from his rooming house in Dallas to the Paines’ home in Irving. Ruth tried to teach Oswald how to drive. She helped Marina with their two kids, and generally tried to keep the Oswald family from breaking up under the strain of the father’s psychological problems and his inability to hold a job. Ruth is a Quaker and political activist; she was an educator and is now retired. The more I researched the assassination, the more I identified with her spiritual sensibilities (I feel, nicely, like I’m answering your question on religious poems here, too). I identified with her quite a bit. I felt an abiding responsibility to her in the poem I eventually created out of our interview, “He Needed a Learner’s Permit” (which, as it turns out, is the last poem I wrote for the manuscript). I wanted the poem to be true to her individual, personal experiences and also true to her role, however unwelcome, as a figure in the historical drama of what happened on November 22, 1963, and afterwards. These responsibilities, frankly, made it difficult for me to start writing the poem from my interview notes. Eventually, though, they energized the poem -- I don’t think I’d be happy with the poem at all if I didn’t write it with these responsibilities to Ruth in my mind.
LW: Why did you choose to end the book with the title poem?
TT: This also was a suggestion from my friend Chris Green. We had just exchanged manuscripts and were giving each other ideas on how to organize and title our books. He pushed me, in the best ways possible, to highlight the Buddhist subject matter that threads itself throughout the book. We both agreed, then, that this particular poem crystallized the personal/historical/religious ethos of the book as a whole. Geshe Tsultrim Chöpel, the lama with whom I studied when I lived in Boston, is also the subject of “Smuggled Video,” and I feel like these two poems are road-markers or signposts for the directions the book can go for readers.
LW: Finally, how does it feel to be returning to Kent State University where you studied as an undergraduate and were a former Wick Scholarship winner now that you have become an accomplished poet?
TT: I can’t wait to go back to Kent State. I learned how to write there -- Satterfield and Bowman Halls were artistic havens for my friends and me. I also spent a lot of time in the Kent music scene and played in my first original band, Incline, at Kent State with two fellow students. So Kent State, then, also was a place where I learned the value of shaping and maintaining active artistic communities. I can attribute every success in the present to the instruction and mentoring I received at Kent State, so it means a lot to me to go back and take part in an event like this.
Also, like probably every Wick Award winner, the Wick Program gave me confidence I needed at a crucial time in my development as a poet. At that time (I was 20, and a 3rd-year English Major), it had become more and more clear to me that what I loved most, poetry, was what the rest of the world loved least. Then I won the Wick scholarship, and it gave me a boost, a validation, for the work and passion I was putting in as a reader and writer of poetry. It made a real difference over the next few years -- when I would have moments of writers block, I would remember that the Wick Award was a public affirmation that I could write poems that people wanted to read. I see that same kind of feeling in students at Columbia College Chicago who win our awards and scholarships, and I’ve seen it have that affirmative effect on them as they continue writing. So to be able to come back as part of a Wick event is a really important way for me to express my gratitude to Kent State, the English Department, and the Wick family.
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