Suss: another literary journal

“Sometimes an image will trig­ger this inex­plic­a­ble, but very real, feel­ing of guilt or shame to be alive…”

SUSS: The clear arc of the poems in this new book struck me, espe­cially given that they don’t have that sort of cohe­sive, con­cept album-like project they’re being writ­ten into. What begins very funny leaves us pained on the way out—and does so very grad­u­ally, almost effort­lessly. Having put together a chap­book before this full-length col­lec­tion, what was the process like in con­struct­ing the running-order of Give Over the Heckler…?

JT: Well, in terms of your first com­ment, if I could write a book of poems as good as Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, I’d be a very happy man!

Heckler, just like my follow-up, Wee Hour Martyrdom [sun­ny­out­side, 2008], came together quickly. I had the title early and a hand­ful of poems; I had an over­all idea of how I was hop­ing the whole book would turn out, and it came out that way. Lucky, I guess. I only cut a hand­ful of poems from the final man­u­script. Everything else seemed to fit. Most of the poems are inspired by cross-country trav­els, and the rest from liv­ing in New Hampshire and out­side Boston. Wee Hour hap­pened the same way. The title poem came quickly, and the over-arching theme fol­lowed. I’m cur­rently work­ing on a new man­u­script that’s work­ing out sim­i­larly. I guess I just think in books. I haven’t strug­gled yet with putting together my col­lec­tions. It’s a lot of fun spread­ing the poems out all over the apart­ment. I go through a cou­ple of ver­sions, show them to my wife and she gives me her two cents. I like to have links between poems, echoes from Part III back to Part I. A nar­ra­tive of sorts. There was a time when I wanted to be a fic­tion writer.

SUSS: Place is so clearly a facet of your writing—in the new book, the poems’ speak­ers show up in var­i­ous cor­ners of the coun­try, in many cases in such a way that the places them­selves become char­ac­ters. Your ear­lier chap­book was place-specific as well. How do you think about space in rela­tion to your poems? Or, how does space inform your writ­ing process?

JT: I think my view as a writer is pri­mar­ily exter­nal. I do a lot of look­ing, observ­ing, list­ing, describ­ing to get started, rather than rolling an idea around in my head. The biggest crit­i­cism I got in work­shops was that every­one wanted to know more about my speak­ers. I didn’t think they were all that impor­tant. That’s how I came to write “I Don’t Speak Donkey,” a response of sorts to those com­ments. I just seem to be more inter­ested in the peo­ple I’ve encoun­tered and places where I’ve lived (or imag­ined). I guess places and peo­ple are what most attract my eye. And I want to rep­re­sent them and ren­der them so that any­one from any­where can briefly imag­ine or com­mune with other lives and spaces.

SUSS: Those other lives and spaces seem to favor the mis­fits or mar­ginal. Yet you use them not merely as comedic foil but delve into them lov­ingly or sym­pa­thet­i­cally, even when what they’re doing is ridicu­lous, even though these are not nec­es­sar­ily char­ac­ters usu­ally cel­e­brated. Do you see any­thing polit­i­cal in what your poems do? Is this cel­e­bra­tion of class and class iden­tity attached to any sort of con­scious pol­i­tics for you?

JT: Again I think it comes back to what catches my eye, where my sen­si­tiv­i­ties lie. Certain places and peo­ple just seem to break my heart or weave them­selves into my emo­tional fab­ric. Sometimes an image will trig­ger this inex­plic­a­ble, but very real, feel­ing of guilt or shame to be alive, guilt over my good for­tunes in the midst of all kinds of suf­fer­ing both local and global. “Joint Operation,” “Last Leaves,” “Lambs Grove, Iowa,” and “Ars Poetica” are exam­ples of this.

When writ­ing I don’t set out do any­thing overtly polit­i­cal, but the English teacher/poem explicator/New critical-close reader side of me cer­tainly real­izes how my poems could be inter­preted or what cer­tain words will sug­gest. There are poems that overtly deal with race, for exam­ple. Not in any solution-based way, more inti­ma­tions of anger and irony. My father’s side of the fam­ily is Indian and I got my fair share of teas­ing and name-calling as I grew up. So I have always been con­scious of race despite hav­ing attended and existed in very homo­ge­neous com­mu­ni­ties as both teacher and student.

I wouldn’t say I have any con­scious pol­i­tics behind my poems. I’m a reg­is­tered inde­pen­dent, fis­cally con­ser­v­a­tive and socially lib­eral. I’m full of con­tra­dic­tions and I’m sure that plays out in my work.

“Until I find some­one else who knocks my socks off as much as he does, I’ll stick with him…”

SUSS: You’ve said else­where that you took a break in your twen­ties from writ­ing after col­lege, only return­ing later around the time you went to New Hampshire for grad­u­ate school. What pulled you back?

JT: It was the January 2003 issue of Poets and Writers that trig­gered every­thing, the one with Kevin Young on the cover. His book Jelly Roll had just been pub­lished and he was inter­viewed by Colson Whitehead—I can remem­ber all these details, but not the actual con­tent! I do remem­ber that his responses and views of writ­ing poems were refresh­ing and fun—they ener­gized me. It was the first time I’d read an ultra-contemporary poet dis­cussing his or her work. In col­lege the poets I read were pri­mar­ily Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, English roman­tics, Frost, Whitman, Dickinson—Robert Lowell was as con­tem­po­rary as I had got­ten. After col­lege, and while get­ting my MA in English, I began teach­ing English in pri­vate schools and the poets I taught and read were many of the same. I went out and bought Jelly Roll and loved it. This led me back to Hughes, Brooks, Berryman, and ulti­mately back to Charles Simic (who I dis­cov­ered on my own just after col­lege). A few pages after Young’s inter­view was an adver­tise­ment for the Indiana Writer’s Conference, where I spent nine days in the sum­mer of 2003. That fall, I applied to UNH.

SUSS: What draws you in as a reader? What are the hall­marks of a good read­ing expe­ri­ence for you?

JT: What I per­ceive as sin­cer­ity, hon­esty, humor—great images. Tight lines. The hall­mark of a good poetry read­ing expe­ri­ence for me is one that sends me off into my own world of thought or imag­i­na­tion, or makes me imme­di­ately want to write some­thing, to con­tribute to the ongo­ing conversation.

SUSS: You write nar­ra­tives and lyrics and ele­gies, yet they’re nei­ther quiet nor staid. And you write funny, absurd poems that are not friv­o­lous or merely adven­ture­some for the sake of the joke. There are for­mal struc­tures (son­nets, espe­cially) among your poems, but you use them both sin­cerely and mock­ingly, with the inher­ited rev­er­ence and with a more post­mod­ern irony. All of this makes you a very hard poet to char­ac­ter­ize or clas­sify among the pur­ported divi­sions and schools of con­tem­po­rary poetry. (And all the bet­ter for it, I think.) Where do you see your­self work­ing in rela­tion to what­ever per­sonal canon you might define? Rather, what’s the lin­eage of your poetry as you see it? Who are you in con­ver­sa­tion with in your writing?

JT: Simic is my biggest influ­ence, no doubt. I’ve been think­ing lately that I need to move on—but every time I want to pull a book off the shelf, I’ll reach for him. I absolutely love his poetry. It’s so unlike any other American poetry, and until I find some­one else who knocks my

socks off as much as he does, I’ll stick with him. I guess if you take the rid­dling econ­omy of Dickinson with a lit­tle W.C. Williams ver­nac­u­lar and add the irrev­er­ence of a Rimbaud or Benjamin Péret and the a dash of the eeri­ness of Poe or Vasko Popa—his poems, like few oth­ers I’ve read, have that re-readable qual­ity. His poems are alive in the sense that they can cre­ate the same chill, the same won­der of amaze­ment. I tend not to like very ‘prosey’ poems, poems that emote too much, that don’t allow me a way in—I like poems that I can slip inside of and stay for­ever if I like. There aren’t many poets that I read con­sis­tently or buy every­thing they’ve writ­ten. I’m more a fan of indi­vid­ual poems that I con­tinue to return to or aspire to. I wish I had writ­ten Plath’s “Blackberrying,” Keats’s “To Autumn,” a hand­ful of “Dream Songs,” and so on.

I have strug­gled a bit with the fit: I’m a first gen­er­a­tion American with an Indian father and German mother. I’ve got a lot of rich tra­di­tions that I grew up with cul­tur­ally and con­tinue to cel­e­brate. But I don’t con­sider myself an Asian-American poet, for exam­ple. If I sub­mit­ted poems to such a jour­nal I don’t think I’d have much chance. This is also what attracts me to Simic’s work—not just his poetry but all of his essays and auto­bi­og­ra­phy that detail his immi­grant experiences.

I like what I like: I won­der how every­one would get along if I invited Yeats, Brooks, and Neruda to the same din­ner table?

“I want them to feel that there is some­thing just beyond…”

SUSS: One of the most strik­ing aspects of your work for me is the won­der­ful sounds you find in odd pair­ings and group­ing of words: “bucket them­selves,” “streetlit sage­brush,” “rain-steady trickle,” “Kwik-Stop. Exit Tub.” Musicality is obvi­ously impor­tant to any poet, but I’m won­der­ing if you find these sounds only in revi­sion or if they’re more often a start­ing point? Where or when does the sound of your poems come in to the writ­ing process?

JT: Sound comes early and often. I tend not to begin with an idea or emo­tion, as I’ve said ear­lier. It begins with the words or the phrase: “A spawn of snow fleas in my mud­room” or “We’re stranded at table six­teen” for exam­ple. Early in writ­ing Heckler I was work­ing with Richard Hugo’s com­po­si­tion by sound ideas in The Triggering Town. Trying both planned and arbi­trary pat­terns. “Men at the Lamprey” was com­posed this way. There was the actual Lamprey Tavern, but the men and the pin­ball machine became prod­ucts of sound associations.

SUSS: Many poets have some pet point of craft—line as unit, meter, some­thing that they focus on in com­pos­ing and revis­ing that maybe is taken for granted or largely unno­ticed by a casual reader. Is there some­thing that you find your­self focused on when you’re draft­ing poems that is only for you, or per­haps only for the clos­est of readers?

JT: I am con­scious when writ­ing of cer­tain words car­ry­ing cer­tain allu­sive weight. This comes from so many years in the class­room “ana­lyz­ing poems.” My ideal poem is one that can be appre­hended lit­er­ally by a reader and a reader can be enter­tained or find plea­sure in just that, but I also want them to feel that there is some­thing just beyond, either because of a cer­tain word or group­ing, or a jux­ta­po­si­tion. Nothing too crazy, of course--how much can a lyric poem hon­estly get away with?

SUSS: There’s a long his­tory of humor in poetry—especially in the last cen­tury, from the sur­re­al­ists through the var­i­ous gen­er­a­tions of the New York School to a lot of con­tem­po­rary poetry—yet there’s still some divide among poetry read­ers that causes those of us who revere the comedic to find our­selves defend­ing, say, Ron Padgett against claims of friv­o­lity. As some­one who writes poems that are actu­ally funny, how do you nego­ti­ate this point of view?

JT: In his essay “Cut the Comedy,” Charles Simic wrote, “The phi­los­o­phy of laugh­ter reminds us that we live in the midst of con­tra­dic­tions, pulled this way by the head, pulled that way by the heart, and still another way by our sex organs.” I sub­scribe to this philosophy.

On a related note, James Tate in a Paris Review inter­view said, “I love my funny poems, but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best.”

There is, of course, a ten­dency for poets to take them­selves very, very seri­ously. I hope peo­ple read in my poems moments of cel­e­bra­tion too: sex, friend­ship, a great cheese­burger, or a well-poured Guinness—the good things in life.

There are cer­tainly times when I want to do the same as Tate; loss, sad­ness, pain, lone­li­ness are all pow­er­ful emo­tions. I wish I laughed as much or more than I feel these other emo­tions. It’s hard to write funny poems. Humor’s a very sub­jec­tive thing—nothing worse, too, that try­ing to be funny and fail­ing. Most peo­ple give me a look when I tell them that Heckler was intended to be a com­edy. I was read­ing a lot of Kenneth Koch and Richard Hugo at the time—I sup­pose that was my per­fect blend of poem. I get tired of Koch—the zaniness—and some­times you just want a human voice speak­ing to you about human con­cerns in sin­cere ways.

But I con­tinue to read and love Edson, Péret, Huidobro, Rimbaud—I think Dickinson has a won­der­ful sense of humor. No need to defend any­one or any­thing in this busi­ness. Like O’Hara said, I’m not look­ing to force feed any­one too much cooked meat.

SUSS: Often your poems find their power in the jux­ta­po­si­tion of the pro­fane or jar­ring against a calm back­drop. For instance, in other hands “Fire in the Great Hawk Colony” could have been a pas­toral lyric of berry pick­ing and the threat of smoke above the tree line, yet it becomes some­thing else entirely when

You wanted to see a charred child’s body,
a parakeet’s burnt beak thrust through cage bars,
a doll’s head with loosey­goosey eye.

This turn away from the expected emo­tional land­scape hap­pens again and again—often mark­ing the fun­ni­est or most mov­ing moments in the book. Does this abil­ity to see the absurd and the unex­pected in the face of the mun­dane come nat­u­rally to you or is it some­thing you’ve adopted for your poetry? I sup­pose another way of ask­ing this ques­tion would be, do you think this way of see­ing the world pre­de­ter­mined you toward writ­ing poetry?

JT: I’ve been asked in job inter­views ques­tions like what made you want to be a poet? or why did you start writ­ing poetry? Strange ques­tions. For starters, I really don’t like the word poet. I never refer to myself as one. When peo­ple ask what I do, I teach. You real­ize pretty quickly post-MFA that no one (out here in the “real world”) cares about poetry or has heard of a hun­dredth of the poets you could men­tion let alone a sin­gle jour­nal where you’ve published.

But back to your ques­tion! I think my poems come very much from how I see or want to see the world. There’s a lot of revi­sion­ist his­tory. It’s a great oppor­tu­nity to shape my past life. There are moments and images that just stick with me. I like to say that they bully their way onto the page.

My “turn away from the expected land­scape” is also some­thing I’ve thought about. It’s a prod­uct of my upbring­ing, my par­ents, their cul­tures: emo­tions weren’t gen­er­ally some­thing expressed. I’m still learn­ing to hug.