The following interview with Tony Trigilio about his book The Lama's English Lessons was conducted during March 2008 by Andrew Galligan.
Andrew Galligan: According to your bio, you've spent most of your life in two major American cities - Boston and Chicago. Much dissimilarity is apparent - how are they alike?
Tony Trigilio: Both cities are quite different, yes. At the same time, both are cities of neighborhoods. That is, in both cities your daily life can be characterized by the neighborhood in which you live, and each neighborhood has its own rich history. Both cities are hugely segregated; yet at the same time, you can find neighborhoods that are diverse like no other city except probably New York.
The major similarity is that both cities are home to a number of colleges and universities, and this provides a huge, eclectic stream of artists (visual, musical, literary, performative, and so on) that become a major part of daily life. Each city has its strengths/weaknesses in this way. The theater scene in Chicago, for instance, is far more varied and experimental than in Boston. At the same time, the music scene in Boston is more innovative than Chicago's. (I should add that for part of my life in Boston I was a professional musician; my first visit to Chicago, in fact, was when my band toured and we played at a club, now defunct, called Lounge Axe.)
AG: How does the poetic "scene" vary?
TT: Boston supports the academic/scholarly side of the humanities better than Chicago does; yet Chicago is a better place right now to be a creative writer. As Bay Area poet and critic Kevin Killian said recently, in a review of The City Visible: "When young poets ask me, where should I go, what should I do, nowadays I always say pull out a map, throw in a dart. X marks the spot, but Chicago is the most exciting scene around. Years from now we'll be looking back at the early 21st century and wishing we'd all relocated there at this time in poetry history." I couldn't agree with him more. Since about 2003, Chicago's poetry scene has become one of the most energizing and inspiring -- and welcoming -- of any in the country.
AG: Could you articulate each city's presence in your work?
TT: Boston is, like Chicago and San Francisco, an important city of the imagination for me. In "Grace Notes," from The Lama's English Lessons, for instance, I'm fascinated by how each Boston neighborhood has its own accent. In "The Train from San Mateo," I'm working through the strong emotions that Bay Area landscapes evoke in me. (As I always tell my students, a great and joyful challenge from living in Chicago is to absorb the flat prairies without lapsing into flat language.) On a physical and emotional level, I can't get enough of the noise in Chicago and I'm fascinated by this in my work -- the visceral feeling I get from the El trains, from the constant construction going on, by the sadistic lake wind in winter. If I didn't work in the South Loop, I'd probably find myself fixating on something different in Chicago -- it's such a great mass of people, language, noise, and stimuli. A couple poems in the first section of The Lama's English Lessons play with these feelings and ideas.
Chicago also seems, for me, to be a place where the surreal is more relevant than in Boston. It's something I felt when I first moved here. Possibly it's because, for me, Chicago is such a utilitarian city and Boston is a city more accepting of eccentricity. In a utilitarian atmosphere, the surreal can become life-affirming and necessary because it's too often repressed. In an eccentric atmosphere, the surreal is maybe just one more instance of the everyday and maybe less meaningful. Anyway, I'm sure you can find poets who've lived in both cities who'd say the exact opposite.
AG: Why is the city landscape so often an inescapable character for writers?
TT: Urban-scapes are crucial to my personal life and to my writing. I'm not averse to nature; but the pastoral doesn't turn me on in the same way the urban does (the poem "Evidence" gets at some of this). I think a lot of poets are drawn to city landscapes because of the ways human beings in cities are forced to collide with each other, living and working on top and around each other. I don't get the same sense of constant creation, re-invention, and innovation in pastoral settings that I do in urban settings. But that's just me. For those poets who prefer nature, Wordsworth said it best, talking about nature as a place where the best imaginative work gets done in a space of refuge from the city. Can't argue with that sort of lineage; I just don't share it.
AG: Many of the poems in The Lama's English Lessons are narrative, either personal, historical or both. Is storytelling in poetry particularly compelling to you?
TT: I'm definitely moved by the way narrative inspires trust in the representational -- and, at the same time, the way we know deep down that the representations are fictions. The narrative mode was perfect for this book, especially in trying to explore my family's immigrant background, and in my family poems in general.
Without a doubt, the narrative poem can be mishandled. I do understand the aversion that some of my favorite poets have to narrative voicing. But, as I mention in my City Visible intro, what we call "narrative" needs to have a more expansive definition. Like the disjunctive poem, a narrative poem also can be an exploratory, innovative space for language, emotion, and being.
AG: Is narrative a natural inclination, a particular mood for this manuscript, etc.?
TT: I do think each manuscript calls forth its own methods and forms. My newest manuscript, Historic Diary, a look at the myths and texts of Lee Harvey Oswald, takes the mix of narrative and conceptual forms from the Lama book and expands them further.
AG: Accordingly, you also compose your poems frequently in prose form. What do you find available in this form that you don't in some of your more taught, syntax & diction-controlled lyrics? Are they conscious offsets of one another? Or, what would you say is your home field - the voice/form/mode/etc. that you typically think in, and thus compose, in?
TT: This is a great question -- though not easy to answer. I think it's really a question of verbal trajectories and, maybe more important, line trajectories. It's not a conscious thing, I guess I'm saying. A poem that needs to be messy might need to be a prose poem; yet within those prose-poem lines, a tautness still is needed -- just a different kind of taut. Some poems begin as prose poems and then become verse; others do the opposite. I'd say, compositionally, there's really no one type of field I'm at home in. As I'm drafting a poem, I trust the original voice it starts to come out in. But as I move along, if the momentum suggests other voices, or a huge change in pitch, or a different form, I follow the lead and try something new.
AG: Dreams are a repeating theme in this collection. In "The Dead So Tired Living," you refer to we-the-alive as "...too busy / to keep our dream journals / and frustrated we can't / remember them in the morning" (8-11). Contrarily, you seem to recall some dreams quite vividly throughout your poems. Talk about dreams as an influence to your writing.
TT: About 20 years ago, when I first studied Freudian and post-Freudian dream work, I was struck by what now seems pretty obvious (but was brand new to me then): that what goes as "dream work" or "dream interpretation" is almost identical to the way we read poems. I don't think this insight changed the way I wrote poems, but it did give me permission to explore psychic/dream reality as something on par with -- and equally important as -- everyday waking reality. This is, I know, a nearly-hundred-year-old tenet of surrealism. But I needed to discover and experience this on my own for it to resonate with me fully -- to understand the large extent to which surrealism had been important to my artistic life over the years.
AG: Do you find your poems in the space where the line between dream and reality is blurred or buried? Is the experience of writing poetry, at times, more dreamlike or mystical?
TT: I do think that the experience of making art can be at times dreamlike. The boundary between your unconscious and conscious minds gets delightfully porous, so your sense of time, and all the utilitarian baggage that goes with the sense of time, gets thrown out and you're left in a productive zone where all that matters is you and the work -- and even then, the distinction between "you" and "the work" breaks down. I don't mean for that to sound as mystical as it might sound. Instead, I'm trying to just elevate dream reality to the same level of importance as everyday reality. It's just tough usually to find a language for it. You just get into a zone or groove. Music gives me another analogy for this. When you're playing music on stage, or, I imagine, doing anything on stage, it's just you melded with what you're playing, and you notice things like stage lights blaring down at you and other objects around you but at the same time maybe they just feel in that moment like elaborate props for a lucid dream.
I don't mean to suggest that this is the only way to compose -- or that somehow the conscious mind or the intellect doesn't play a role. Not in the least. Consciousness is there; which is why maybe "lucid dream" is the best analogy.
AG: Was the genesis of "Special Prosecutor," the result of a dream?
TT: Yes. It grew from a dream that I immediately transcribed when I woke in the middle of the night. I wrote an email the next day to my cousin, Michael Trigilio, a video artist and musician, and one of the closest people in my life. I saved the email, knowing that a poem might emerge from it sometime in the future. A few years later I went back to it and shaped it so that it would read like a poem rather than a dream transcription.
AG: You use the epigraph quite often to introduce your poems, but they mostly serve different purposes. I'm thinking, specifically, of the difference between the use of the Ginsberg quote for "The Party Turns Fifty" and the Ford quote for "Ball Game on the Car Radio." I'm sure you feel differently about these two men. Do you find you risk anything in using them?
TT: The biggest risk is to over-use epigraphs. It's an almost natural tendency for someone like me, since I've been writing down memorable quotations and lines from poems in my journals since I was in college. But it's too easy to over-use them -- to feel that the poem isn't suggestive enough, and it needs an epigraph to clinch it. If the epigraph can take the poem in a new direction -- especially after the reader finishes the poem and his/her eye drifts back to the title (I'm thinking here of "The Party Turns Fifty" and "Jack Lord is a Tough Professional") -- then it's doing the job. Or, as in "Ball Game on the Car Radio," the epigraph works if it actually propels the reader through the first line or two.
AG: Which generally comes first - the epigraph or the poem? Does one distill from the other?
TT: Almost always for me, the epigraph comes much later in the composing process. If an epigraph comes first, I let myself get it down on paper, of course; but in those instances I'm wary that the poem might be too dependent on an idea rather than an image, sound, or phrase.
AG: Staying with "Ball Game," in this poem you breathe life into the pantoum. Was it a conscious choice to exercise an old, rigid form in a poem about something as informal as baseball?
TT: Thanks for your kind words on what I'm doing with the pantoum. It's a tricky form. "Ball Game on the Car Radio" didn't start as a pantoum. But I noticed early in the composition process that the poem depended on repetition more than I originally thought it did. I came to love the tension between an old (but playful) poetic form and something populist and informal like baseball.
AG: Have you ever created any poetic forms as a way to challenge yourself?
TT: I have created forms to challenge myself. Usually these are "counting forms," often syllabics (but sometimes based on word count per line, as in "The Train from San Mateo"), to see how pacing, movement, shape, and (especially) enjambment can come at me in unexpected ways -- once the form has robbed me of conscious control of the poem. I can't really explain analytically the form I created for "The Party Turns Fifty," but it was an effort to take Williams Carlos Williams's triadic line and do something that could be patterned but less predictable (for me) than his form. I return to this form once in awhile -- and did recently, for a newer poem just finished.
I also return to older, traditional forms in order to create a tension between inherited form and contemporary subject matter (much like "Ball Game on the Car Radio"). I do this in several poems the Oswald manuscript. Early in the writing process for this mss., I realized that in my effort to tell the "unofficial" histories of Oswald's life -- especially his time as a defector in the USSR -- I was neglecting the most unofficial histories of all: the assassination's many conspiracy theories. As I composed some of these speculative poems -- not meant to solve the case, which the book is not interested in, but instead to explore the conspiracies as major U.S. myths and texts -- I found myself drawn to established forms (sonnets, haiku, chant, rhymed couplets, sestinas, and the pantoum) so that free-for-all conspiracy speculation collides with the discipline of poetic form.
AG: Ginsberg's poem "Howl" is one of the few that paralyzed me as an undergrad before I even got into poetry or being serious as a writer. How did you make your way to Ginsberg?
TT: I was lucky that in graduate school I had great teachers who worked with my enthusiasm for the poem but pushed me far beyond just enthusiasm. One especially, Guy Rotella, a poet and scholar, wouldn't let me get away with purely meandering, impressionistic responses to "Howl." He helped me read the poem closely -- not just for its connections to Ginsberg's biography, but instead for the way Ginsberg's Western biblical and influences are incorporated and then revised in the poem.
I actually had a more difficult time with "Kaddish," a poem that had paralyzed me for awhile before I finally found several paths coming out of it that I could follow.
My first book of criticism, which grew out of my dissertation, began really as a study of the experimental spiritual poetics of William Blake and H.D. But it was Guy who noted that the project would take full shape with Ginsberg's presence in it.
AG: I wanted to ask you about the genesis of "Autoresponder." The contrast between the inhuman, canned language of the email and the tragically human language from the counselor's manual is so striking and evocative. How did this coalesce?
TT: I'm a frequent letter-writer to Congresspeople, Senators, etc. Back during the 2nd term of the Clinton administration, I'd written an email to the President about an international torture case that was getting a lot of publicity from Amnesty International. Emailing the White House was kind of new then, and I was actually a bit excited to send my first e-message to a politician. These sorts of letters usually produced form-letter replies in postal mail, so I can't say I was surprised to get an autoresponder message back right away from whitehouse.gov. I was taken aback by the canned language of the auto-reply, though. The White House form-email language felt a little like something you'd get from a corporation: you know, something like, "Thank you for writing to Proctor and Gamble. We do our best to read our emails and make the best toothpaste possible, and we're always trying to find new products to satisfy your dental needs" etc.
AG: I'm equally intrigued by strange, found language - would I be correct in guessing that your interest in these type of texts is similar to your answer about the epigraph & dreams - notice their potential and save them for the right moment or piece?
TT: I saved it, knowing a poem would come out of it someday. Several years later, as my wife was training to serve as a volunteer counselor at the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture, she brought home the training manual for us to read. I immediately thought back to the letter I'd written to President Clinton -- and how the specific, concrete, pragmatic, and altruistic language of the Kovler manual contrasted so markedly with the corporate blah-blah of the White House autoreply. So I spent some time working on a piece that would collage the two.
AG: I'm so interested by the war and soldier-culture running through some of your poems - do the impulses to write them stay with you, after Lama where you deal prettily heavily with the subject?
TT: Yes, the impulses to write them stay with me. I'm intrigued by the "political poem" -- since political poems are so damn difficult to do well. (I mean "political poem" in the broadest sense here. Not just war poem, etc.) It's too easy to write a bad political poem, something that would be a good letter-to-the-editor but not a good work of art. Tough to make them subtle; yet I think the only political poems that do the important work of getting under a reader's skin are those political poems that are subtle. For the poetry magazine I co-edit, COURT GREEN, our Spring 2007 issue included a special section of political poetry. As an editor, this was something I'd been wanting to do with an issue of the magazine -- since, as a writer, I'm attracted to the political poem at the same time that I quarrel with the political poem.
AG: I read your poems as exploratory, so is some part of you still, or always, exploring that facet of your upbringing?
TT: Yes, I think that's a great way to put it, to say, that these sorts of war/soldier poems are "exploratory." And they are part of the upbringing of my childhood and young adulthood. My family background is lower working class, so joining the army has been a legitimate option for many folks in my immediate and extended family. It hurts me to see this -- but I see how it's been an option for many in my family. Also, we have a number of police officers in the family. I took this kind of discipline and sublimated it into art-making. Also, this sort of discipline has helped me in my Buddhist practice. But it has its down side, too: the first time I read Foucault's DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH, I felt too many twinges of deja vu, which I don't think was his intent when writing the book. :)
AG: Establish a continuum for me if you wouldn't mind: Who do you read that you consider similar aesthetically to you? And then, who's dissimilar that you enjoy?
TT: Such a great question. And, as I'm sure with most poets, the continuum isn't all poetry. The earliest poet who knocked me out -- who made me feel like this was the art form I had to work in -- was Dylan Thomas. The major figures in my continuum are George Oppen, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O'Hara, early-John-Ashbery, H.D., Ezra Pound, Kimiko Hahn, William Blake, William Carlos Williams, Elaine Equi, Rachel Loden (her book Hotel Imperium is for me, like Oppen's work, something I return to again and again to remind myself why I write), Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, Anne Sexton, and Gertrude Stein. Translating Italo Calvino and Eugenio Montale in college markedly changed the way I approached language, so they're certainly part of the continuum. Also, the prose (and to a lesser extent, the poetry) of South African writer and painter Breyten Breytenbach has influenced me greatly: I re-read parts of his memoir The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist every few years. The continuum also includes Harvey Pekar, whose American Splendor comics, which I came to in the mid-1980s, redeemed the surrealism embedded in most realist narrative for me. Also, no mention of my poetic continuum would be complete without the work of Bill Griffith, the artist for the Zippy the Pinhead comic strip, which changed my life as a writer and continues to influence me greatly.
AG: Who were your mentors?
TT: Guy Rotella overall has been one of my greatest mentors, an ongoing mentor relationship that affects everything I do as both a scholar and a poet (and a reader and teacher). Early mentorship as a poet came from Cyrus Cassells, who as a visiting faculty member in my graduate program taught me to open up my voice and trust that the language would follow. Robin Becker was an important mentor for me -- really crucial, and I still hear her in my head, in the best possible ways, when I'm writing and teaching. I worked with her at a perfect time in my life, when I was undergoing great changes as a writer and person. When I started teaching at Columbia College, my colleague Maureen Seaton was very important for me -- again, at a time when I was changing quite a bit. My life was in flux then, having just moved from the east coast, a transition that was chaotic and troubling in many ways but also fantastic for growth as a writer. Maureen was a perfect person to learn from: she managed to mentor me, as a workplace peer, without any of the authoritarian baggage that sometimes comes from the mentoring process. My closest mentor has been the poet and creative nonfiction writer Diana Hume George. I learn from every conversation we have, and from everything she writes. All good mentor relationships, I think, dig deep into the psyches of the mentor and mentee, and without question, no mentor knows more about my psyche than Diana does. We're close friends now, and she's very much a maternal figure in my life. She's guided nearly every writing project I've undertaken. I trust her judgment hugely.
AG: Tell me what you think, as a writer, about teaching. How has academia met / not met expectations?
TT: My classes inspire my writing, and vice versa. I'm lucky to be at a great school with outstanding poetry colleagues -- fellow poets who are friends as well as colleagues. My students are the best I've had anywhere. I come home every night inspired, and that hasn't been the case at other schools at which I've taught.
Without a doubt, teaching takes away some of the time I'd like to have for writing. But you can say this about any job -- and for me, no job has afforded me more time to write than teaching has. I love being immersed in a job where poetry (and all the arts) is taken seriously; this immersion encourages risk-taking in my own work. I grew up in a working-class family, a life of non-unionized factory jobs, and every day I'm grateful to be doing what I do.
So in these ways, academia has exceeded my expectations. Still, academic politics are a horrible drain on one's spirit, and this kind of drain can affect your writing if you're not careful. I've experienced the viciousness of academic politics and it's very unpleasant and not conducive to the production of new writing. But again, all politics in any job can be vicious, so remembering that academia isn't unique in this way (even though many folks believe it is) helps me navigate. Sometimes.
AG: What kind of work did you do before becoming a teacher?
TT: I worked in a factory that processed oven burner grates. I did publicity coordinating at a jazz booking agency (at the site of a former funeral home; I thought the job would be much better than it was). I was a manuscripts assistant in a rare books archive (one of my favorite jobs). A pizza cook. A carpet cleaner. A freelance journalist. A bartender (for one day; I was terrible at it). A bookstore clerk at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Boston. A video store clerk (the proverbial kid-in-candy-store position for me because I love film so much). A pool table installer. An ESL tutor. I can't really include "musician" as work, since truly I was "playing." But I was recording and, for a short time, touring, so this counts -- it was my primary focus before I started teaching full-time. (I still compose music on the laptop; some of these pieces are at www.starve.org.) These are the jobs I remember most. I've been teaching since I started grad school in 1988; so even when I was doing other jobs, teaching was the foundation. I've been lucky to be teaching full-time in one form or another (as an adjunct or on the tenure line) for the past 12-13 years.
AG: I want to ask for your insight on publishing. Do you think the sentiment is strong out there that publishing legitimizes a writer?
TT: Publishing does legitimize a writer, I agree, because it shows that editors have passed judgment on your work and found it worthy of an audience. Publishing, of course, is subjective; in my own experience with COURT GREEN, I know for sure that we'll sometimes pass on publishing the same poem that another editor might later find fantastic. These things happen all the time. With poetry, publishing a full-length collection is really the gold standard. I probably spent too long finding the "right" poems for the manuscript that became THE LAMA'S ENGLISH LESSONS: I'm a perfectionist this way, and I tend to put together manuscripts at a slower pace than some of my friends.
AG: What was your initial experience like in trying to build a publishing history?
TT: My initial experience with publishing individual poems was very good. I was getting work into regional and national publications early in graduate school -- and, when rejected by magazines, getting good, personal notes from editors about the work. I put together one chapbook early in grad school and it made the finals with a couple good chapbook contests. But then I went into perfectionist mode for several years before I felt ready to start sending out a manuscript again. AG: What advice do you have for students with few or no publications?
TT: My advice for students with few or no publications is to be patient, and to read even more widely in contemporary poetry than you think you should. Read with absorption; immerse yourself in a variety of contemporary poetries, from the experimental to the traditional. It's good to start sending work out to national publications, but I always recommend that young writers start with regional journals so that you can start building relationships with editors. But no matter what, I don't think younger writers (or any writer, for that matter) should privilege publication over the actual making of new poems. As one writes good poems, the publications will come.
AG: What projects are you working on now?
TT: The major project is Historic Diary, the Oswald book manuscript I finished this fall. A number of individual poems from it have been published the last couple years, and I've just now started to send out the manuscript to prospective publishers. I'm also working on a new manuscript of poems, probably half-finished right now.
Also, for the past 3-4 years, I've been working on a web-based conceptual text, inspired by Bernadette Mayer's experiments, called AThe Usenet Project,@ a long, composition using Don DeLillo's White Noise and Google's Usenet Archive as its source texts. Right now it exists only on the Web (at the site I maintain with my cousin, Michael, http://www.starve.org). Eventually, I plan to transform it into a piece that is appropriate for hard-copy text, and it'll be in a different form than it is right now on the Web. I don't know what that form is just yet, though.
Tony Trigilio biography:
Tony Trigilio is the author or editor of four books, including the poetry collection The Lama's English Lessons (Three Candles, 2006); two books of criticism, Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics (Southern Illinois University Press, 2007) and Strange Prophecies Anew (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000); and an anthology, co-edited with Tim Prchal, Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers University Press, 2008). His recent poems are published or forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, MiPOesias, New Orleans Review, North American Review, Pebble Lake Review, Rattle, and Volt. He teaches at Columbia College Chicago, where he directs the program in Creative Writing - Poetry and co-edits the poetry magazine Court Green.
Andrew Galligan biography:
Andrew Galligan is a graduate student in creative writing at Northwestern University. He works full time for a medical device company in suburban Chicago, where he has lived since completing his undergraduate degree at Bradley University. His work has appeared in The Susquehanna Review.and recently received Northwestern's nomination for the 2007-08 Intro Journals Project sponsored by the AWP.
AG: How does the poetic "scene" vary?
TT: Boston supports the academic/scholarly side of the humanities better than Chicago does; yet Chicago is a better place right now to be a creative writer. As Bay Area poet and critic Kevin Killian said recently, in a review of The City Visible: "When young poets ask me, where should I go, what should I do, nowadays I always say pull out a map, throw in a dart. X marks the spot, but Chicago is the most exciting scene around. Years from now we'll be looking back at the early 21st century and wishing we'd all relocated there at this time in poetry history." I couldn't agree with him more. Since about 2003, Chicago's poetry scene has become one of the most energizing and inspiring -- and welcoming -- of any in the country.
AG: Could you articulate each city's presence in your work?
TT: Boston is, like Chicago and San Francisco, an important city of the imagination for me. In "Grace Notes," from The Lama's English Lessons, for instance, I'm fascinated by how each Boston neighborhood has its own accent. In "The Train from San Mateo," I'm working through the strong emotions that Bay Area landscapes evoke in me. (As I always tell my students, a great and joyful challenge from living in Chicago is to absorb the flat prairies without lapsing into flat language.) On a physical and emotional level, I can't get enough of the noise in Chicago and I'm fascinated by this in my work -- the visceral feeling I get from the El trains, from the constant construction going on, by the sadistic lake wind in winter. If I didn't work in the South Loop, I'd probably find myself fixating on something different in Chicago -- it's such a great mass of people, language, noise, and stimuli. A couple poems in the first section of The Lama's English Lessons play with these feelings and ideas.
Chicago also seems, for me, to be a place where the surreal is more relevant than in Boston. It's something I felt when I first moved here. Possibly it's because, for me, Chicago is such a utilitarian city and Boston is a city more accepting of eccentricity. In a utilitarian atmosphere, the surreal can become life-affirming and necessary because it's too often repressed. In an eccentric atmosphere, the surreal is maybe just one more instance of the everyday and maybe less meaningful. Anyway, I'm sure you can find poets who've lived in both cities who'd say the exact opposite.
AG: Why is the city landscape so often an inescapable character for writers?
TT: Urban-scapes are crucial to my personal life and to my writing. I'm not averse to nature; but the pastoral doesn't turn me on in the same way the urban does (the poem "Evidence" gets at some of this). I think a lot of poets are drawn to city landscapes because of the ways human beings in cities are forced to collide with each other, living and working on top and around each other. I don't get the same sense of constant creation, re-invention, and innovation in pastoral settings that I do in urban settings. But that's just me. For those poets who prefer nature, Wordsworth said it best, talking about nature as a place where the best imaginative work gets done in a space of refuge from the city. Can't argue with that sort of lineage; I just don't share it.
AG: Many of the poems in The Lama's English Lessons are narrative, either personal, historical or both. Is storytelling in poetry particularly compelling to you?
TT: I'm definitely moved by the way narrative inspires trust in the representational -- and, at the same time, the way we know deep down that the representations are fictions. The narrative mode was perfect for this book, especially in trying to explore my family's immigrant background, and in my family poems in general.
Without a doubt, the narrative poem can be mishandled. I do understand the aversion that some of my favorite poets have to narrative voicing. But, as I mention in my City Visible intro, what we call "narrative" needs to have a more expansive definition. Like the disjunctive poem, a narrative poem also can be an exploratory, innovative space for language, emotion, and being.
AG: Is narrative a natural inclination, a particular mood for this manuscript, etc.?
TT: I do think each manuscript calls forth its own methods and forms. My newest manuscript, Historic Diary, a look at the myths and texts of Lee Harvey Oswald, takes the mix of narrative and conceptual forms from the Lama book and expands them further.
AG: Accordingly, you also compose your poems frequently in prose form. What do you find available in this form that you don't in some of your more taught, syntax & diction-controlled lyrics? Are they conscious offsets of one another? Or, what would you say is your home field - the voice/form/mode/etc. that you typically think in, and thus compose, in?
TT: This is a great question -- though not easy to answer. I think it's really a question of verbal trajectories and, maybe more important, line trajectories. It's not a conscious thing, I guess I'm saying. A poem that needs to be messy might need to be a prose poem; yet within those prose-poem lines, a tautness still is needed -- just a different kind of taut. Some poems begin as prose poems and then become verse; others do the opposite. I'd say, compositionally, there's really no one type of field I'm at home in. As I'm drafting a poem, I trust the original voice it starts to come out in. But as I move along, if the momentum suggests other voices, or a huge change in pitch, or a different form, I follow the lead and try something new.
AG: Dreams are a repeating theme in this collection. In "The Dead So Tired Living," you refer to we-the-alive as "...too busy / to keep our dream journals / and frustrated we can't / remember them in the morning" (8-11). Contrarily, you seem to recall some dreams quite vividly throughout your poems. Talk about dreams as an influence to your writing.
TT: About 20 years ago, when I first studied Freudian and post-Freudian dream work, I was struck by what now seems pretty obvious (but was brand new to me then): that what goes as "dream work" or "dream interpretation" is almost identical to the way we read poems. I don't think this insight changed the way I wrote poems, but it did give me permission to explore psychic/dream reality as something on par with -- and equally important as -- everyday waking reality. This is, I know, a nearly-hundred-year-old tenet of surrealism. But I needed to discover and experience this on my own for it to resonate with me fully -- to understand the large extent to which surrealism had been important to my artistic life over the years.
AG: Do you find your poems in the space where the line between dream and reality is blurred or buried? Is the experience of writing poetry, at times, more dreamlike or mystical?
TT: I do think that the experience of making art can be at times dreamlike. The boundary between your unconscious and conscious minds gets delightfully porous, so your sense of time, and all the utilitarian baggage that goes with the sense of time, gets thrown out and you're left in a productive zone where all that matters is you and the work -- and even then, the distinction between "you" and "the work" breaks down. I don't mean for that to sound as mystical as it might sound. Instead, I'm trying to just elevate dream reality to the same level of importance as everyday reality. It's just tough usually to find a language for it. You just get into a zone or groove. Music gives me another analogy for this. When you're playing music on stage, or, I imagine, doing anything on stage, it's just you melded with what you're playing, and you notice things like stage lights blaring down at you and other objects around you but at the same time maybe they just feel in that moment like elaborate props for a lucid dream.
I don't mean to suggest that this is the only way to compose -- or that somehow the conscious mind or the intellect doesn't play a role. Not in the least. Consciousness is there; which is why maybe "lucid dream" is the best analogy.
AG: Was the genesis of "Special Prosecutor," the result of a dream?
TT: Yes. It grew from a dream that I immediately transcribed when I woke in the middle of the night. I wrote an email the next day to my cousin, Michael Trigilio, a video artist and musician, and one of the closest people in my life. I saved the email, knowing that a poem might emerge from it sometime in the future. A few years later I went back to it and shaped it so that it would read like a poem rather than a dream transcription.
AG: You use the epigraph quite often to introduce your poems, but they mostly serve different purposes. I'm thinking, specifically, of the difference between the use of the Ginsberg quote for "The Party Turns Fifty" and the Ford quote for "Ball Game on the Car Radio." I'm sure you feel differently about these two men. Do you find you risk anything in using them?
TT: The biggest risk is to over-use epigraphs. It's an almost natural tendency for someone like me, since I've been writing down memorable quotations and lines from poems in my journals since I was in college. But it's too easy to over-use them -- to feel that the poem isn't suggestive enough, and it needs an epigraph to clinch it. If the epigraph can take the poem in a new direction -- especially after the reader finishes the poem and his/her eye drifts back to the title (I'm thinking here of "The Party Turns Fifty" and "Jack Lord is a Tough Professional") -- then it's doing the job. Or, as in "Ball Game on the Car Radio," the epigraph works if it actually propels the reader through the first line or two.
AG: Which generally comes first - the epigraph or the poem? Does one distill from the other?
TT: Almost always for me, the epigraph comes much later in the composing process. If an epigraph comes first, I let myself get it down on paper, of course; but in those instances I'm wary that the poem might be too dependent on an idea rather than an image, sound, or phrase.
AG: Staying with "Ball Game," in this poem you breathe life into the pantoum. Was it a conscious choice to exercise an old, rigid form in a poem about something as informal as baseball?
TT: Thanks for your kind words on what I'm doing with the pantoum. It's a tricky form. "Ball Game on the Car Radio" didn't start as a pantoum. But I noticed early in the composition process that the poem depended on repetition more than I originally thought it did. I came to love the tension between an old (but playful) poetic form and something populist and informal like baseball.
AG: Have you ever created any poetic forms as a way to challenge yourself?
TT: I have created forms to challenge myself. Usually these are "counting forms," often syllabics (but sometimes based on word count per line, as in "The Train from San Mateo"), to see how pacing, movement, shape, and (especially) enjambment can come at me in unexpected ways -- once the form has robbed me of conscious control of the poem. I can't really explain analytically the form I created for "The Party Turns Fifty," but it was an effort to take Williams Carlos Williams's triadic line and do something that could be patterned but less predictable (for me) than his form. I return to this form once in awhile -- and did recently, for a newer poem just finished.
I also return to older, traditional forms in order to create a tension between inherited form and contemporary subject matter (much like "Ball Game on the Car Radio"). I do this in several poems the Oswald manuscript. Early in the writing process for this mss., I realized that in my effort to tell the "unofficial" histories of Oswald's life -- especially his time as a defector in the USSR -- I was neglecting the most unofficial histories of all: the assassination's many conspiracy theories. As I composed some of these speculative poems -- not meant to solve the case, which the book is not interested in, but instead to explore the conspiracies as major U.S. myths and texts -- I found myself drawn to established forms (sonnets, haiku, chant, rhymed couplets, sestinas, and the pantoum) so that free-for-all conspiracy speculation collides with the discipline of poetic form.
AG: Ginsberg's poem "Howl" is one of the few that paralyzed me as an undergrad before I even got into poetry or being serious as a writer. How did you make your way to Ginsberg?
TT: I was lucky that in graduate school I had great teachers who worked with my enthusiasm for the poem but pushed me far beyond just enthusiasm. One especially, Guy Rotella, a poet and scholar, wouldn't let me get away with purely meandering, impressionistic responses to "Howl." He helped me read the poem closely -- not just for its connections to Ginsberg's biography, but instead for the way Ginsberg's Western biblical and influences are incorporated and then revised in the poem.
I actually had a more difficult time with "Kaddish," a poem that had paralyzed me for awhile before I finally found several paths coming out of it that I could follow.
My first book of criticism, which grew out of my dissertation, began really as a study of the experimental spiritual poetics of William Blake and H.D. But it was Guy who noted that the project would take full shape with Ginsberg's presence in it.
AG: I wanted to ask you about the genesis of "Autoresponder." The contrast between the inhuman, canned language of the email and the tragically human language from the counselor's manual is so striking and evocative. How did this coalesce?
TT: I'm a frequent letter-writer to Congresspeople, Senators, etc. Back during the 2nd term of the Clinton administration, I'd written an email to the President about an international torture case that was getting a lot of publicity from Amnesty International. Emailing the White House was kind of new then, and I was actually a bit excited to send my first e-message to a politician. These sorts of letters usually produced form-letter replies in postal mail, so I can't say I was surprised to get an autoresponder message back right away from whitehouse.gov. I was taken aback by the canned language of the auto-reply, though. The White House form-email language felt a little like something you'd get from a corporation: you know, something like, "Thank you for writing to Proctor and Gamble. We do our best to read our emails and make the best toothpaste possible, and we're always trying to find new products to satisfy your dental needs" etc.
AG: I'm equally intrigued by strange, found language - would I be correct in guessing that your interest in these type of texts is similar to your answer about the epigraph & dreams - notice their potential and save them for the right moment or piece?
TT: I saved it, knowing a poem would come out of it someday. Several years later, as my wife was training to serve as a volunteer counselor at the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture, she brought home the training manual for us to read. I immediately thought back to the letter I'd written to President Clinton -- and how the specific, concrete, pragmatic, and altruistic language of the Kovler manual contrasted so markedly with the corporate blah-blah of the White House autoreply. So I spent some time working on a piece that would collage the two.
AG: I'm so interested by the war and soldier-culture running through some of your poems - do the impulses to write them stay with you, after Lama where you deal prettily heavily with the subject?
TT: Yes, the impulses to write them stay with me. I'm intrigued by the "political poem" -- since political poems are so damn difficult to do well. (I mean "political poem" in the broadest sense here. Not just war poem, etc.) It's too easy to write a bad political poem, something that would be a good letter-to-the-editor but not a good work of art. Tough to make them subtle; yet I think the only political poems that do the important work of getting under a reader's skin are those political poems that are subtle. For the poetry magazine I co-edit, COURT GREEN, our Spring 2007 issue included a special section of political poetry. As an editor, this was something I'd been wanting to do with an issue of the magazine -- since, as a writer, I'm attracted to the political poem at the same time that I quarrel with the political poem.
AG: I read your poems as exploratory, so is some part of you still, or always, exploring that facet of your upbringing?
TT: Yes, I think that's a great way to put it, to say, that these sorts of war/soldier poems are "exploratory." And they are part of the upbringing of my childhood and young adulthood. My family background is lower working class, so joining the army has been a legitimate option for many folks in my immediate and extended family. It hurts me to see this -- but I see how it's been an option for many in my family. Also, we have a number of police officers in the family. I took this kind of discipline and sublimated it into art-making. Also, this sort of discipline has helped me in my Buddhist practice. But it has its down side, too: the first time I read Foucault's DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH, I felt too many twinges of deja vu, which I don't think was his intent when writing the book. :)
AG: Establish a continuum for me if you wouldn't mind: Who do you read that you consider similar aesthetically to you? And then, who's dissimilar that you enjoy?
TT: Such a great question. And, as I'm sure with most poets, the continuum isn't all poetry. The earliest poet who knocked me out -- who made me feel like this was the art form I had to work in -- was Dylan Thomas. The major figures in my continuum are George Oppen, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O'Hara, early-John-Ashbery, H.D., Ezra Pound, Kimiko Hahn, William Blake, William Carlos Williams, Elaine Equi, Rachel Loden (her book Hotel Imperium is for me, like Oppen's work, something I return to again and again to remind myself why I write), Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, Anne Sexton, and Gertrude Stein. Translating Italo Calvino and Eugenio Montale in college markedly changed the way I approached language, so they're certainly part of the continuum. Also, the prose (and to a lesser extent, the poetry) of South African writer and painter Breyten Breytenbach has influenced me greatly: I re-read parts of his memoir The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist every few years. The continuum also includes Harvey Pekar, whose American Splendor comics, which I came to in the mid-1980s, redeemed the surrealism embedded in most realist narrative for me. Also, no mention of my poetic continuum would be complete without the work of Bill Griffith, the artist for the Zippy the Pinhead comic strip, which changed my life as a writer and continues to influence me greatly.
AG: Who were your mentors?
TT: Guy Rotella overall has been one of my greatest mentors, an ongoing mentor relationship that affects everything I do as both a scholar and a poet (and a reader and teacher). Early mentorship as a poet came from Cyrus Cassells, who as a visiting faculty member in my graduate program taught me to open up my voice and trust that the language would follow. Robin Becker was an important mentor for me -- really crucial, and I still hear her in my head, in the best possible ways, when I'm writing and teaching. I worked with her at a perfect time in my life, when I was undergoing great changes as a writer and person. When I started teaching at Columbia College, my colleague Maureen Seaton was very important for me -- again, at a time when I was changing quite a bit. My life was in flux then, having just moved from the east coast, a transition that was chaotic and troubling in many ways but also fantastic for growth as a writer. Maureen was a perfect person to learn from: she managed to mentor me, as a workplace peer, without any of the authoritarian baggage that sometimes comes from the mentoring process. My closest mentor has been the poet and creative nonfiction writer Diana Hume George. I learn from every conversation we have, and from everything she writes. All good mentor relationships, I think, dig deep into the psyches of the mentor and mentee, and without question, no mentor knows more about my psyche than Diana does. We're close friends now, and she's very much a maternal figure in my life. She's guided nearly every writing project I've undertaken. I trust her judgment hugely.
AG: Tell me what you think, as a writer, about teaching. How has academia met / not met expectations?
TT: My classes inspire my writing, and vice versa. I'm lucky to be at a great school with outstanding poetry colleagues -- fellow poets who are friends as well as colleagues. My students are the best I've had anywhere. I come home every night inspired, and that hasn't been the case at other schools at which I've taught.
Without a doubt, teaching takes away some of the time I'd like to have for writing. But you can say this about any job -- and for me, no job has afforded me more time to write than teaching has. I love being immersed in a job where poetry (and all the arts) is taken seriously; this immersion encourages risk-taking in my own work. I grew up in a working-class family, a life of non-unionized factory jobs, and every day I'm grateful to be doing what I do.
So in these ways, academia has exceeded my expectations. Still, academic politics are a horrible drain on one's spirit, and this kind of drain can affect your writing if you're not careful. I've experienced the viciousness of academic politics and it's very unpleasant and not conducive to the production of new writing. But again, all politics in any job can be vicious, so remembering that academia isn't unique in this way (even though many folks believe it is) helps me navigate. Sometimes.
AG: What kind of work did you do before becoming a teacher?
TT: I worked in a factory that processed oven burner grates. I did publicity coordinating at a jazz booking agency (at the site of a former funeral home; I thought the job would be much better than it was). I was a manuscripts assistant in a rare books archive (one of my favorite jobs). A pizza cook. A carpet cleaner. A freelance journalist. A bartender (for one day; I was terrible at it). A bookstore clerk at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Boston. A video store clerk (the proverbial kid-in-candy-store position for me because I love film so much). A pool table installer. An ESL tutor. I can't really include "musician" as work, since truly I was "playing." But I was recording and, for a short time, touring, so this counts -- it was my primary focus before I started teaching full-time. (I still compose music on the laptop; some of these pieces are at www.starve.org.) These are the jobs I remember most. I've been teaching since I started grad school in 1988; so even when I was doing other jobs, teaching was the foundation. I've been lucky to be teaching full-time in one form or another (as an adjunct or on the tenure line) for the past 12-13 years.
AG: I want to ask for your insight on publishing. Do you think the sentiment is strong out there that publishing legitimizes a writer?
TT: Publishing does legitimize a writer, I agree, because it shows that editors have passed judgment on your work and found it worthy of an audience. Publishing, of course, is subjective; in my own experience with COURT GREEN, I know for sure that we'll sometimes pass on publishing the same poem that another editor might later find fantastic. These things happen all the time. With poetry, publishing a full-length collection is really the gold standard. I probably spent too long finding the "right" poems for the manuscript that became THE LAMA'S ENGLISH LESSONS: I'm a perfectionist this way, and I tend to put together manuscripts at a slower pace than some of my friends.
AG: What was your initial experience like in trying to build a publishing history?
TT: My initial experience with publishing individual poems was very good. I was getting work into regional and national publications early in graduate school -- and, when rejected by magazines, getting good, personal notes from editors about the work. I put together one chapbook early in grad school and it made the finals with a couple good chapbook contests. But then I went into perfectionist mode for several years before I felt ready to start sending out a manuscript again. AG: What advice do you have for students with few or no publications?
TT: My advice for students with few or no publications is to be patient, and to read even more widely in contemporary poetry than you think you should. Read with absorption; immerse yourself in a variety of contemporary poetries, from the experimental to the traditional. It's good to start sending work out to national publications, but I always recommend that young writers start with regional journals so that you can start building relationships with editors. But no matter what, I don't think younger writers (or any writer, for that matter) should privilege publication over the actual making of new poems. As one writes good poems, the publications will come.
AG: What projects are you working on now?
TT: The major project is Historic Diary, the Oswald book manuscript I finished this fall. A number of individual poems from it have been published the last couple years, and I've just now started to send out the manuscript to prospective publishers. I'm also working on a new manuscript of poems, probably half-finished right now.
Also, for the past 3-4 years, I've been working on a web-based conceptual text, inspired by Bernadette Mayer's experiments, called AThe Usenet Project,@ a long, composition using Don DeLillo's White Noise and Google's Usenet Archive as its source texts. Right now it exists only on the Web (at the site I maintain with my cousin, Michael, http://www.starve.org). Eventually, I plan to transform it into a piece that is appropriate for hard-copy text, and it'll be in a different form than it is right now on the Web. I don't know what that form is just yet, though.
Tony Trigilio biography:
Tony Trigilio is the author or editor of four books, including the poetry collection The Lama's English Lessons (Three Candles, 2006); two books of criticism, Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics (Southern Illinois University Press, 2007) and Strange Prophecies Anew (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000); and an anthology, co-edited with Tim Prchal, Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers University Press, 2008). His recent poems are published or forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, MiPOesias, New Orleans Review, North American Review, Pebble Lake Review, Rattle, and Volt. He teaches at Columbia College Chicago, where he directs the program in Creative Writing - Poetry and co-edits the poetry magazine Court Green.
Andrew Galligan biography:
Andrew Galligan is a graduate student in creative writing at Northwestern University. He works full time for a medical device company in suburban Chicago, where he has lived since completing his undergraduate degree at Bradley University. His work has appeared in The Susquehanna Review.and recently received Northwestern's nomination for the 2007-08 Intro Journals Project sponsored by the AWP.
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