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| Tod Marshall |
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| Maya Jewell Zeller |
This interview was conducted over several email exchanges
in February 2016. Tod was a gracious and generous conversationalist.
MJZ: Tod,
I first encountered your work via your 2002 collection Range of the Possible: Conversations with Contemporary
Poets. I was a graduate student,
coming to understand how, collectively, this group of poets—two generations
removed from the Modernists—would speak to varied aesthetic approaches. If you
were to make a new collection of such conversations, beginning in 2016, who
would be your ideal list of interviewees?
TM: It’s
a little weird that you asked about this; Tony Leuzzi (Passwords Primeval, a collection of interviews) and I are part of an AWP panel this
spring that focuses on the literary interview. Consequently, the two of us just
finished interviewing each other about similar sorts of things; in Range, I tried to give shape to what seemed an overwhelming project:
how to choose twenty poets from so many possibilities, and to tell the truth,
accident and geography played as much of a role as anything; I started the book
in grad school in Spokane, and I finished it more than ten years later—in
Spokane. But to get to our question: I’d get rid of the lineage framework and
just focus on a wide range of poetic practices and a wide range of
personalities: Cathy Park Hong, Dorothea Lasky, Robyn Schiff, Matthew Dickman
(I’m trying to stay outside of Washington), Douglas Kearney, all roughly of a
similar generation; oh, wait, I’m doing it again. I don’t know, Maya; there are
so many fine poets doing so many worthwhile things. I can tell you some poets that
would have fit into the book with whom I didn’t get to speak (and would have loved
the chance): Norman Dubie, Jane Hirshfield, Sharon Olds, C.D. Wright. Did you
know that she picked Dare
Say for the University of Georgia Press? I never
got to thank her in person. Such a brilliant and original poet.
MJZ: How
about if the range of voices were limited to Washington State? (And yes, you
can have that project idea—I’d love to see this book!)
TM: Won’t
be by me. My interviewer days are over, I think. I have an untranscribed
recording with Tomaž Šalamun that I might bring to publication; losing him is
another sad loss for our poetry community. Anyhow, if I were magically to get
the energy to undertake such a project, I would love to talk with Lucia Perillo
again. Tim Ely (an artist/poet of sorts). Rob Schlegel. So many others. Don’t
make me choose!
MJZ: Looping
back to my first question: you’ve always been interested in Modernism, and the
book Wright chose, Dare
Say, tackles this. Is it fair to say that Modernism
is still a major influence with which you’re obsessed?
TM: Well,
modernism was my primary literary area for my PhD, and so I was pretty steeped
in it from 1992-1996. As in, immersed. So, because I was working on the
interview book then, it seemed natural to make that connection. I think, though,
as far as my own writing goes, Dare Say exorcised
that obsession. That first book is so full of stuff; it’s the rag bag that
Pound talks about in his opening riff to the Selected Cantos.
Except it ain’t so much a rag bag as a museum: Bach and Botticelli, Kandinsky,
Van Gogh and Apollinaire. Stevens. And other “leftovers”(as I kind of rename
all those cultural markers in Bugle).
I love teaching modern poetry, and the poems (and art) still speak to me, but
when I need to get my own writing going, I’m more likely to pick up Gilbert or
Hugo or Bishop or something from the stack of living poets that I try to keep
near my desk.
MJZ: Speaking
of living poets, how would the Modernists have felt about social media? You’ve
confessed to having a discomfort with social media yourself, but now, in your
new position as WaPL, you have a
Twitter account, an active Facebook
profile (both as Tod and as PL), and a Humanities Washington media guy. How do
you see yourself using social media platforms to lead people to poetry and the
arts?
TM: Well,
I guess the social media stuff for me comes down to two things: the time
investment (substantial) and the meaningfulness of the contact. It’s great for
spreading information and making an initial contact; it’s not so great for any
sort of intense or memorable dialogue. Elizabeth Austen gave me some great
advice a few days ago; she said to remember that I was appointed to this position
because of me, that people want to directly interact with what I hope to share
about poetry. All of the other stuff is just a tool to make in-person contact happen.
As for the moderns: I suspect Pound would have loved it. He would have been a
beast on Twitter: @il_duce, I suppose. A fun game: Twitter names for the
modernists: @hurthawk @lovetheplums @realtoads @ghosts_thattap @notherethere
@thethe @dempoliceman @wearyblues @harpandaltar. And so on.
MJZ: Perfect.
In your first reading as Laureate in Spokane, you said that poetry, and the
other arts, “engage the awful energies of the intellect.” Is that different
from the ways that academia in general engages that intellect?
TM: Hmm.
I guess what I meant was that poetry has a host of different energies that it
can use to impact us: the texture of sound, the evocation of an image, the web
of allusion, the rawness of emotion, and through the awful energy of the
intellect. I think that it’s a mistake not to recognize that there are many great
poems that demand that we bring our brains to the page. Sure, that demand can
be intimidating, but it’s usually the case that several of the energies I’ve
listed are at work. Hence, a first entry point to a great poem like “For the
Union Dead” might be through just noting the great phrases and their
musicality—both to the ear and through the mini workout they can give the lips,
teeth, and tongue. The vivid images might be a second sparking point. Eventually,
though, a reader might arrive at investigating the historical background of the
poem and think about civic duty, civil rights, the commodification of the
bombing of huge cities in Japan (and so on). That work involves brainwork. I
hope that the layered impact of how a poem might reveal is not too different
from how our classes at the university might work.
MJZ: Layered
impact—yes. I’ve heard you read on numerous occasions, and I’m always delighted
at how the musicality of your language comes trumpeting off the page (and how
layered the poem is beyond that). I’m especially taken when a poem reveals an
emotional vulnerability—like in “Birthday Poem,” a piece I’ve read aloud to
several friends, only to look up to find them crying. What are a few poems that
move you?
TM: Thanks,
Maya; that’s very generous of you. I can’t get all the way through June
Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights” without being moved: “I am not wrong: Wrong is
not my name.” Countee Cullen’s “Incident” always moves me: “Of all the things that
happened there / That’s all that I remember.” Philip Larkin’s “High Windows”—
And
immediately
Rather than words
comes the thought of high windows:
The
sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the
deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is
nowhere, and is endless.
Jeez,
what a brutal poem on that “long slide” that is our dwindling life. Li Young Lee’s
“This Room and Everything In It”—heck, many of Li-Young’s poems yank out a
little bit of your heart (“The Gift”—!!). As far as shaping that vulnerability
within a poem—that’s a hard, hard thing to do; “Birthday Poem” began as a
parody of the
PNW school of dead deer poetry, but over the course of drafting it (and the smart
help of my editor), the poem became something else entirely. Everything is constructed
in a poem, and so even an apparent “intimate” revelation, what might be seen as
vulnerability, is still very much within the poet’s shaping.
MJZ: You
have said that “mystery is a good thing.” From where does your duende
originate? Will you talk a little about your childhood in Kansas?
TM: Hmm.
Well…hmm. I was born in Tonawanda, New York. My parents were young—17 and 19, I
think, when I was conceived. Kids. They both came from households with various
levels of dysfunction, and, not surprisingly, my father’s alcoholism shaped my
early years (he’s now 25+ years sober); we moved a lot, sometimes in the middle
of the night; lots of DUIs for
him and all that attendant stuff—and one of those moves took us from the
Adirondack Mountains to a place as strange as Wichita, Kansas. I was six. We
lived in a motel for a few weeks. I imagine my story isn’t that unusual. Our
family struggled. I lived from six to thirteen or so in a trailer park; again,
not a big deal, but the thing that made it a bit more challenging for me was
that was the 70s, a time of “gifted” programs; I tested in to one, and it put
me with all of the “gifted, talented, and creative” kids—95% of whom were also
fairly wealthy. I was stigmatized; that period of my life probably entrenched
issues connected to class and privilege with which I still wrestle. When I was
a teenager, I started acting out to get attention—minor crimes and substance
abuse stuff. I got in trouble a few times, and I got lucky a few times that I
didn’t get into more trouble. I’ll take the Fifth on the details. In Wichita, I
hurt people and didn’t respect too many things, and I got hurt, too. It took me
a while to figure it out (30 years? Still hoping to do so?), but I think the duende—although
that word seems kind of melodramatic when talking about oneself (Lorca
connected it with intense dancers and bullfighters; I’m talking about street
racing in Camaros and drug abuse and misdemeanors)—might have shadowed me one
morning on the South side of Wichita. I found myself on the street, strung out
after a few days of poor behavior, and I felt pretty intensely that the
universe was always hungry, and it could take me like that. And why shouldn’t it?
That realization shimmered things a bit—death suddenly was the mother of beauty.
And then I probably went and spent my last few quarters on a Zip Trip hotdog
and started walking to where ever I was keeping my clothes. A few weeks after that,
I got a phone call to go play college soccer at a small school in Michigan— Siena
Heights University (lots of Dominican nuns). I went. Somehow it worked out.
Many of the people I called friends back then didn’t make it out of there. I can’t
recall too many details—or, to put it more accurately—some details from that
period come back to me through poems, but that sensation, that shivering moment
on a Wichita street, that sense of how freakin’ large and indifferent the world
is—well, that stuck with me.
MJZ: You’ve
called Bugle dark. While I wouldn’t say this collection is “light,” I can
point to your frequent language play—playfulness that in some ways undoes the
dark, and at other times compounds it, makes it more eerie (for example, a
rhyming sonnet about a friend’s suicide taps into a genre that relies on tension
between form and meaning).
TM: I
guess that I see the “brassiness” of Bugle as working in
two ways—as a sort of nervous laughter, that human twitch that happens when we see
something so awful that we don’t know quite what to do, and as a sardonic gesture
toward the reader that lets the reader know that the maker knows: “see all this
terrible stuff? It ain’t that bad; I can slant rhyme off of it.” It’s kind of a
puny bravado. Bugle
isn’t any darker than the air we breathe:
dead bodies in the river, children brutalized by sexual predators, disconnect
and various forms of abuse— of language, of substances, or each other. The
thing that frightens me is how that stuff is no longer spectacle—or, more
accurately, is only spectacle, is not felt with any visceral sensation, any
gut-wrenching horror.
MJZ: You
have particular through lines in all three of your collections. For example, in
Dare Say, section III of “Botticelli,” your long poem, is called “Primavera”
(and the long poem itself follows poems titled “Storm,” “Lightning,” and “And
This, Following the Weather”). In your newest collection, Bugle, your poem “Primavera” begins “Spring is coming, that storm,/
prophetic incubator.” (Bugle
also repeats several poem titles within one
collection—I’m a fan.) Talk about repetition and obsession, in your work and
others’.
TM: I
like the books talking to each other, and there is a lot of that— muddiness and
weather-y stuff, musical stuff; it’s something I work at. Within a book, that
repetition is absolutely essential to me; leit motif is, of course, an important
practice for the modernists, and I think that it’s probably my greatest borrowing,
but that’s not that unique of a practice. One of the poems that I’m most proud
of is the first one in Dare
Say. I became obsessed with the Goldberg Variations and Bach and was working through a great stack of literature
connected to the concentration camps. I tried to rewrite Bach’s musical piece
as a sort of recurring dirge, and although I don’t think it completely does
what I’d hoped, I still stand by it. A handful of words function as musical
motifs, and they get used and reused through homonyms and functional shifts.
“Flex” and “mud” are two words that I probably overuse. I also have a mannered
tic toward accretive catalogs, those long lists that heap details.
MJZ: Yes.
In her March 2015 Rumpus
review of Bugle, Julie Marie
Wade claims that the collection “contemplates what we think we know about
nature, music, human frailty, and human triumph,” that the “book is full of
[reveilles/ wake-up calls].” Is this a fair characterization of what you wanted
the book to do? Is this also what you want to do in your role as PL—wake us up
to poetry?
TM: That
was a great review. Very smart and generous. I’ve read several of her reviews,
and she is a good writer and a sharp critic. So, yes; she said many insightful
things about Bugle. The “what we think we know” is probably crucial in that
sentence about the book. That’s usually the problem: that we think we know too
much, and it lulls us into complacency. I think that “waking people up” to
poetry would be a fine goal for a PL. Sam and Kathleen and Elizabeth did great work
of that sort, but there’s always more to be done—of course, that’s challenging when
there are so many forces putting us to sleep. Remember the Stafford poem? “A
Ritual to Read to Each Other”—
For it is important
that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line
may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give
— yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear:
the darkness around us is deep.
MJZ: So.
You’re a teacher, a writer, a mentor to new poets, you serve your community in
myriad ways, and you still manage to play basketball with Jess Walter on
Sundays.
TM: Well,
I’ve always been high energy, but let’s be honest. For every forty hours that I
put in working on poetry stuff, helping students, service work, raining jumpers
on Jess, there are billions of people that put in 40 hours of mind-numbing, bone-bruising
labor. My life is very blessed, and I think that the best way that I can
recognize that blessing is to work as hard as I can at the labors that I do that
somehow pass as work. MJZ:
Do you consider yourself to be an introvert?
How do—or will—you balance your need for solitude with others’ need for your
presence?
TM: This
will be a tough negotiation. I don’t know if I’m an introvert, but I do value
solitude. I thrive on being out in the woods or on a trail or along a river, figuring
out where to cast, getting lost in that one action. You know, that sense where
the clatter-chatter turns off for a bit, and you become action, the doing. Moments
like that don’t happen much when you’re having to negotiate various social
dynamics. But I knew what was going to be asked of me when I signed up for the
job, so to speak. The people at poetry events are there because they want to be
there; if people have come out to support poetry, then I owe it to them to do my
best to make their time spent worthwhile, and I can’t do that as an introvert (for
more on this dynamic see the previous answer: I’ll have plenty of time to seek solitude
after my gig is up).
MJZ: Enough
about you [“forget you!”].
TM: Thank
goodness.
MJZ: Let’s
turn back to the work of others. You often quote Ed Hirsch: “We need all our
poetries.” In your opinion, which poems or poets are underrated and deserve
more attention?
TM: Well,
Jeffers probably deserves more attention. His poetics and subject matter were
very counter the energies of the era when he wrote. Going way back, I love the
prose poetry of Thomas Traherne. He was doing Blake before Blake did Blake
(late 17th century England). Robert Sund’s poems should be known beyond the
borders of our state. When I need to mix things up in my own poems, I go to
weirdness: Mina Loy, early Merwin. A poet we hosted at Gonzaga a few years back,
George Ecklund, is doing some very unusual and energetic things in his poems.
Cid Corman is a poet not many folks know; his contributions to American poetry
(from Kyoto after the late 50s) are substantial; he was one of the first translators
of Paul Celan. William Bronk. Lorine Niedecker has been discovered, I think,
and is no longer “underrated.” She’s great. George Oppen was a touchstone for a
while. Some of these folks have become more mainstream, but the list shows that
I enjoy ranging about—from the narrative and discursive energies of Jeffers to
the paratactic textures of Oppen.
MJZ: This
echoes earlier claims in your Introduction to Range of the Possible,
when you stressed your interviewees’ “emphasis on the need for variations in
the art.” How will you work toward reifying that inclusiveness in your new
role?
TM: It’s
not too hard, I think. I try to remember that to keep “the line from
thickening,” poetry has to undergo constant renewal. So, I hope that as WaPL, I
convey to people that I’m excited by all of the ways that poetry is written and
spoken and performed. Poetry
in Motion, a fun film from the 80s by
Ron Mann, emphasizes this point—the video has Bukowski, Waldman, Ginsberg, The
Four Horseman, Snyder, Creeley, Shange, and so many various voices. It’s a cool
project. I think that it’s going to be important to listen to what people
outside of “poetry world” think about poetry; unlike Ezra Pound, I think that
it’s very important that we do not punch readers in the face: we can challenge
readers, sure, but as Whitman asserted, we need great audiences for poetry—the
best way to make that happen is to be a good audience member yourself; listen
to others’ works; attend readings; try to understand different visions of what
poetry is.
MJZ: In
a blurb on Poets
& Writers, you say you
“think that it’s best not to know where a poem or essay might come from and, of
course, not to anticipate the next sudden swerve of where it might go.
Cultivate possibility through a willed variety of influences.” I like this as a
dictum for young writers, but as I’m sure you’ve found, people often need
direction. What specific resources would you recommend for teachers in our
school systems?
TM: Well,
it depends what they are teaching. I just came upon a textbook, Sound Ideas, by Eugene McCarthy and Fran Quinn. It emphasizes the energy
that can blossom when poetry is approached as a performative art, as a sound
texture and a field of meaning. Lots of the time, tracking terminology and ferreting
out figures of speech can mute the poem, relegate radical alliterative chains
and soothing tunes to a non-concern. That’s too bad. Donald Hall writes about
this a lot, of course; so do Pinsky and Hirsch and Laux: the music of poetry is
important, and it’s part of why children love poetry. As teachers, we need to
try to avoid pushing the mute button. That’s a great first step.
MJZ: Agreed.
What if someone approaches poetry—as many of us do—outside of school systems?
In a recent radio interview, you mentioned how rap and performance poetry
embody the spirit of the beat poets, saying that it’s just “another incarnation
of that energy,” and that you admired the way it makes “gymnastics with
language.” In addition to those more popular venues, or through schools, where
should young—and new—poets begin their study?
TM: Well,
I was riffing on Carl Sandburg who praised the beats for their counter cultural
energies. Rap and Hip Hop and Spoken Word and Slams all celebrate incredible
brilliance with language: word play and sound texture. That’s all good. Maybe
young poets should begin their study by memorizing the poems they love; if the
poems impact us, we should show them the courtesy of “taking them by heart,”
show them the hospitality of entrance into our identity. I think that many
music enthusiasts do this all the time; memorable poems are as easy to take in,
to graft to our being (I’m borrowing some of these ideas from George Steiner).
Yeats was sometimes quite snobbish, but he was onto something important when he
said “Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own
magnificence.” Studying: painstaking application. But that sounds so severe: if
a young person wants to find poetry, he or she should just go look for it in
the library; sit down in the stacks and start peeking into books. I’ll bet something
cool happens.
TOD
MARSHALL was born in Tonawanda, NY, and
grew up in Wichita, KS. He studied English and philosophy at Siena Heights
University, earned an MFA from Eastern Washington University, and graduated
with his PhD from The University of Kansas.
Tod’s
books include Range of the Possible: Conversations with Contemporary Poets (2002) and the accompanying anthology, Range of Voices
(2005); and poetry collections Dare Say (2002), The Tangled Line
(2009), and Bugle (2014),which won the
2015 Washington State Book Award. Tod’s work has been published in many
journals, featured by prominent websites, and appreciated by a wide variety of
audiences. He directs the Writing Concentration program and coordinates the Visiting Writers Series
at Gonzaga University, where he is the Robert K. and Ann J. Powers Endowed
Professor in the Humanities. He also serves in several mentorship capacities
with Eastern Washington youth. In addition to his public work, Tod enjoys backpacking
and fishing and spends about a month of every year in a tent.
In
February 2016, Tod Marshall became the fourth Poet
Laureate of Washington State. Sponsored by
Arts Washington and Humanities Washington, the Poet Laureate “serves to build awareness
and appreciation of poetry—including Washington’s legacy of poetry— through
public readings, workshops, and presentations in communities throughout the
state.” Learn more about the Poet Laureate program at wapoetlaureate.org.
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