KARAN

I still remember reading your poem “How to Live” on Twitter and immediately FaceTiming Shannan to read it to her. I couldn’t contain it within myself. Then she read it to me as she couldn’t contain it either. It is such a visceral poem — I first felt it with my body (by way of goosebumps, then with my intellect (in awe of its craft), and then something inexplicable transformed within the soul.

AAAAReally, this poem is great on so many levels. I love how it opens — simple imperative sentences that ooze a sort of certainty (even authority?) — and that voice carries this poem through to the end. And the line-breaks, uff! Take, for instance, “I quit loving / with difficulty” or “I love cages / left wide open” — so full of surprise and delight!

AAAAI usually find process questions difficult to answer, but how did you write this? Could you delineate the journey of this poem for us? Where it began, how it ended? And were you amazed (or even surprised?) by how well it was received by people everywhere, since it’s not a particularly easy poem to comprehend (it is so layered and complex in its emotion, thought and craft)? Did that offer you any realizations about this particular poem, or poetry in general?

TODD

I love talking about process! I think each poem demands its own process, and talking about that process is a bit like describing the poem's fingerprint. In this poem, I noticed I had been in a mode where I was writing sentences that encompassed three or four lines or sometimes as many as twelve or fifteen lines. I wanted to write something that deployed short lines, but I wanted to do it in a way that played with syntax and really let the poem scaffold meanings—those surprise enjambments you note, for example. Next, I am very invested in this idea of what can happen in the space between two oppositional forces, and given the many awful things that have been in the news (for years now) I wanted to start with a negative feeling from there and juxtapose, or perhaps the better word is defy, it with a different feeling. In this case, I began with depravity in order to let love triumph. From there, it was a process of letting the things the poem wanted to say guide the way I wrote it down. I also am very invested in how a poem is also didactic—a poem teaches you how to read it as you read it—so I wanted to play with that. In this case, I wanted as many lines as possible that could be read as dependent or independent clauses, but I wanted enjambments and hard stops at the ends of lines in order to position the next line to do something unexpected. People have been very kind towards the ends of the lines in this poem, but honestly I think the hardest "work" of the poem is how many sentences end in the middle of the line, and yet most of the lines individually function as clauses. From there, it was really about tweaking the poem the way one may adjust a microscope. Originally, for example, the lines were “Open me, / and you'll find broken glass” as a callback to depravity, to how one way to “open” a window is to break it, but even a broken window can open onto something beautiful. The poem didn't need it, though.

AAAAWith regards to how well the poem was received—I was truly, truly blown away. I've had some poems go "viral" before, and have had people email me to thank me for my work, but this is the first time I've had people reach out to me to translate a poem of mine, and the first time my work burst onto multiple other platforms, like Reddit and Instagram. I have zero expectations for my work (what would be the point in thinking about this?), so any amount of attention my poems get is a surprise, but this was something really special. I'm so glad. I also think it's a pretty easy poem to get! I don't think you don't need the scaffolded meaning to "get" a poem overall, perhaps this is me being too "in it" to see how difficult it is though. As always, whenever I see poems go off and be shared all over, it helps me realize how essential poetry is to people all over the world, not just poets, but people who maybe are rarely touched by poetry and suddenly find themselves thinking about a poem. 

KARAN

I love that you explore fatherhood in your poems. And I think I asked a similar question to Leigh Chadwick (whose poems I absolutely adore!), but do you think witnessing a child just be in the world inspires you? I am in awe of the way my daughter looks at the world: the way she pretends sticky-notes are her babies and puts them to sleep, or the way she plucks the moon from the sky and eats it. Some of my favorite lines from all of these poems are from “Invisible Chorus”:

“I'm trying to teach my daughter grace 

is everywhere, which is why I think she leaves 

bowls out in the rain, to give the rain a place to live, 

leaves the back door open in case the storm wants to come in.”

I’d start weeping if I were to read this aloud. I’ve heard some people say that writing (especially poetry) for them is to look at the world in the way a child looks at the world. I’ve myself moved toward the kind of poetry that centers joy and delight and wonder (while hoping to not ignore the wars and various kinds of atrocities that continue to take place around the world). You balance “the good” and “the bad” really well in your work. Have you witnessed a thematic, or even a stylistic, shift in your work after the birth of your children?

TODD

I love Leigh! Everyone should go buy her books. She writes the way a blacksmith in Cirque du Soleil would forge a sword. It's a spectacle, you can't look away; it's as beautiful as it is sharp. 

AAAAI'm going to be blunt: children don't inspire me! In the same way people don't inspire me. They're just people. It's the relationship between a child and some other thing that interests me. But this interest is something I have in people in general—there's a poem in my book about a woman who gets bees stuck in her eyes while cleaning her family's grave—that has a lot going on there. I do think children in poems open the poems to a certain kind of wonder that I covet in my personal life, and certainly writing poems about my children (who are then, in the poem, no longer my children!) has opened my poems to feelings I wouldn't typically include in other poems. But I am wary of pitching poems entirely in those feelings alone—this is that "the good" and "the bad" you note. I really do think the poem is only done when it shows you something you didn't know before or shows you something you didn't know you knew before, so that means poems, even in exploring delight, to me at least, have to at least get a little mud on their cheek, a little scab on their knee. On beautiful days you more easily see the vultures overhead, etc. 

AAAAIt's funny you mention shifts in my work! There's been a big one. Before kids, I didn't write poems, after my daughter was born (and a little before) I started writing poems. Bad ones—shaking off the rust—from when I more or less quit poetry in 2009. I'd been trying to write novels, but I'm just lousy at fiction. With less time to write, and yet more time to sit, to hold someone, to feed them, etc., I had more time to think. This led to poems—lots of thought in a little space, easy to reread and revisit when I snagged snatches of time. It's been this way for me ever since. 

KARAN

Hah, it’s fascinating how so many of us are driven by circumstance to write in the particular ways we do. I’m most intrigued by what you said about your children once in the poem are no longer your children — would you speak more about this? In your opinion and/or experience, does poetry incline toward fiction or nonfiction? Or does it lie in a different realm altogether, one beyond these binaries? Leonard Cohen used to say this: “You cannot let the facts get in the way of the truth.” In any case, how do your children, once in the poem, move away from being your children? Do you mean, just by way of only a very small fraction of them being in the poem, or are you hinting toward something else altogether? I’d love to know.

TODD

I think poetry is fiction in the same way that a statue is fiction, or ballet. By being an object it is “real,” but by being representative of others it is a projection. This is the plight of all visual representations—language in particular. Ceci n'est pas une pipe, etc. This is important, because it frees up the poem to be cartographers of abstractions, moments, the soul, and more. In this sense, I don’t see nonfiction and fiction as binaries, rather, I see them as tools that, on demand, become landscapes. An example of this is from “How to Live” when I say the children “live the way horses run.” We all know how horses run—perhaps the reader imagines them in a field on a clear day. This image is a fiction that is derived from our understanding of horses—which, to us, is nonfiction. But then it’s complicated by “they live the way.” You’d die if you spent your life only running in fields! But if you found a way to live like that, wouldn’t it be joyful? So here, fiction and nonfiction helix together to make something else, a sort of RNA strand for possibility. 

AAAANow, specifically, I could never do this to my children. They are independent, thoughtful, wonderful people, and to render them as objects that move to my whims trespasses, I think, on their lives. I do write about things they may have said or done, but once that becomes something I write about I invent whole new children who help with what the poem requires. In this way, the children in the poem are less important than the poem—my children, though, are more important than any poem I could write. 

KARAN

Recently, I learned in a class that poems can often be divided into poetry of the body, mind, heart, and soul. To me, reading your poems feels like an exercise of the spirit. And I mean that as the highest compliment. (This is of course not to say that there’s hierarchy among these 4 types — they’re broad generalizations that often fail as a lot of great poetry mostly falls into all 4). But for now, I want to ask you this: do you feel that writing for you has been a way to engage with your spirit, or the spirit of others? Do you ever feel you write from the body, or the mind, or the heart? What kind of poetry (both writing and reading) most appeals to you?

TODD

Thank you! I love this idea of dividing poems in this way, though the jokester in me is also saying you can divide poems into ones with little dogs and ones without little dogs too. 

AAAAI also like this idea of the "other" and specifically engaging with the other, spiritually or otherwise. I think there's a lot of bad advice out there saying that you shouldn't consider anyone when you write, and I think this is an excellent way to ensure you end up aping writers you admire. I wish more writing advice was geared towards thinking about others—audience, other writers, teachers, etc.—and saying "no" to them. I've found my way to my voice almost entirely by saying no. In order to say no at the right time or in the right way, I have had to think about many people. This idea that you shouldn't consider others at all is so bizarre to me. (Bit of a tangent, sorry!) 

AAAABut no, I don't engage in the spirit of others when I write, unless I am specifically writing in response to something someone else has written (either through inspiration or refusal—though I suppose in some cases that's both). 

AAAAI begin my poetry—always—in the mind. This "begin" is specific to when my fingers first touch a keyboard or my pen touches a page. Much of how I write I think is the work of a translator—I am taking things I know and things I don't know and trying to invent a syntax for them in which they can coexist and speak to each other. Sometimes this means having an idea for a poem but not having the words to home it; it will be days, sometimes, before I can assemble some sort of structure for it. Sometimes I never do. But I believe all poems begin in the mind, even if there are forces outside of the mind which spur us first to write the poem. 

AAAAI like poems that take quotidian things and roll them over to show you something unspoken and weird underneath. I don't particularly care if the "underneath" makes sense. I like poems that embrace how reality is a theatre of perceptions.

KARAN

That’s such a wonderful phrase — “reality is a theatre of perceptions” — seems just right! I am also really fascinated by what you said here, relating writing to the work of a translator — to try to invent a syntax in which the things you know and the things you don’t know can coexist — that is beautiful and also a little mystifying. Could you try and demystify this a little, perhaps by using one of the poems here as an example?

TODD

Happy to. Take my poem “Insomnia.” On the outset, it is clearly about a little girl who has insomnia and crawls into bed with her parents. The first four tercets are foundational—I might even say etymological—for what happens in the fifth stanza, when the girl suddenly becomes embedded in a metaphor—her legs are keys. And the only door in the poem is the dark. The landscape shifts—this isn’t a poem about insomnia, it’s a poem about death! Specifically the peace a parent wishes to give their child (a place to sleep when they cannot) is one the parent hopes continues even after they pass (“the warmth I’ve shed,” “when I leave / there will be light / where I used to be.”). In essence, the first half of the poem is that theatre of perception, and from it I have built a way for a childhood encounter to be much more than that. Death, hope, the work to do, the way a parent’s peaceful end can be opened by a loving child—the work of the poem is finding a way for these disparate things to coexist. 

KARAN

“After the Holiday Party” is such a sensual poem — so tender, and full of love. I love it. I mean: “Let’s take meaning off like clothes, / then take off our clothes too.” At the end of “Insomnia” you offer light to the addressed — “when I leave / there will be light / where I used to be” — this is such a tender (and somehow melancholic) place to leave the reader. 

AAAAIs tenderness a preoccupation for you? I think we live in a world where beauty, joy, tenderness gets unnoticed — and sometimes rightly so (because, let me quote Marwan Makhoul here: “In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political / I must listen to the birds / and in order to hear the birds / the warplanes must be silent”) — is that something you think about? It is crucial to witness and document the world burning, especially in the times we’re living in, so where does this tenderness and beauty lie in the equation? How important is it, in the face of everything violent that the world is witnessing?

TODD

Tenderness is very important to me, yes. I think some of it is in defiance of (toxic) masculinity. I despise how men are taught strength is couched in harm—either the ability to do it, or the ability to stop yourself from doing harm—and I lean into tenderness fiercely because I want to prove there's strength there too. It's one of the things that frustrates me when readers approach fatherhood poems as something saccharine or treacly—I'm sorry, but someone's inability to see strength where there is also an abundance of care is something they bring to the poem. They should own that. This is also why it's important to document tenderness and beauty in times of disaster and harm. The expectation that a writer should be one-note in deference to disaster is as absurd as it is insidious. A human is greater than the sum of all the awful things that have happened to them. We have to start and end here, otherwise—no matter your intentions!—you're working to dehumanize someone. 

KARAN

Ah, I love that, and resonate with it completely! I wish to advocate the same via my poems. Though the only poem I’ve written in the last three months or so is a haiku called Fatherhood: “I cannot write / poetry anymore / I’ve been so happy”. You make me feel that it is very much possible to write poetry about happiness and wonder and delight. “Happy Men” is such an unusual poem, and I am exhilarated by it — for its subject and also the execution of that subject. I was going to say there’s something magical about the poem, but there’s actual magic in there too — “happy men stitch quilts from laughter”, or “once I touched a happy man's belly / and his skin began to glow”. This poem has a huge heart. I especially love the harmonious union that you’re hinting toward at the end: “My favorite hymn is the way happy men sing / until you cannot tell them apart”. This one too is an important poem for the culture we live in. Do you think about the subject as you write? Do you think about the cultural relevance of a poem? Or is it something that’s part of your editing/revision process? Or is it something you let naturally seep into your poems without making it a conscious effort?

TODD

I almost titled this poem “Ode to Himbos” and it was something I intentionally set out to write. I forget the context, but it was one of those Twitter moments where a man or some men did something harmless but joyful and it launched some sort of discourse about the violence inherent in that joy. Obviously, men's joy is not nearly as policed as others, but I think there's still something culturally going on where people want to litigate what joy people experience, and how, and who gets to for what reasons. I wanted to write a poem that was just an ode to happy men, and I wanted to pitch it in this liminal space between what happens, what could happen, and what we wish could happen. I wanted to show how men can be a source of light, how they touch, they goof, they love. So yes, this was very much in mind when I wrote this poem. 

AAAAI try not to let things like this slip into the poem during the revision process—if I feel a pull to do that, I generally scrap the poem and start over. That's essential to my process, I think. Nothing is sacred, everything can go at any time. Sometimes these things slip in during the drafting process though—that's usually something that happens when I've reached a stopping point for the first poem and this other thing is really a second poem demanding my attention. Often it's these second poems that end up better than the first—often the first is never finished in these cases!

KARAN

Can you speak more about the “Nothing is sacred” bit. I know writers who are able to write a lot, and with consistency, generally feel comfortable cutting and letting go of drafts or the first hundred pages of their novel, and then there are writers who write less and feel attached to their drafts. Were you always able to scrap poems that didn’t meet your standards, or did you learn to do that over the years? What helped you get comfortable with this process? And also, is it sometimes difficult for you to kill your darlings?

TODD

It’s very easy for me to murder my darlings once I know they need to die, the greater issue for me is the time to earnestly sit with my work and determine which poems need the ax. I have a hundred poems, probably more, in a massive document that I haven’t read in its entirety in years. Most of them are fine, which is a problem, since “fine” is the worst thing a poem can be. (At least be ambitious enough to risk being bad!) 

AAAASome part of me will always believe if I dig deep enough I can reach the “the thing behind the thing” in all of these poems. But when I see I can’t do that, I almost immediately delete the poem, or move it to a second document of abandoned drafts I call my elephant graveyard. This is to say, the words are never sacred, but the thing that the words were reaching for is, as long as you know it’s there.

AAAAThis means I’ve always been willing to scrap poems, but as I get older I am often too eager to scrap poems. I have had several poems saved by friends and readers—“Fishing for Dark” and “Facts About Emily Dickinson” are recent examples of this, both now in Stone Circle Review and rescued by editor Lee Potts. As I am writing this, I just received an email from Verse Daily that features “Facts About Emily Dickinson” as Web Weekly Feature! 

AAAASo, I think it’s OK to be hard on yourself like this—and I became comfortable being like this as a result—as long as you have friends willing to tell you when you’re wrong. 

KARAN

I want to return to your voice. It’s so self-assured and confident that I’m always there with you in all these poems — whatever you’re saying, I’m listening, believing. This is what appeals most to me about your poems. And this is especially true of the way you begin and end your poems. Consider: “I keep the keys on a keyring / in my teeth. If you want them, / please, come and get them.” You’re saying such a surreal thing but manage to make it sexy, inviting, and commandeering at the same time. Do you think about the poetic voice, while you’re writing, or afterwards, or talk about it in workshops? I’d love to know your  thoughts on the capital V voice that so many young poets are often anxious about.

TODD

I suspect my voice sounds like this as a result of engaging with the poem as a didactic and from how scrappy I am in saying "no" to other styles and voices. But also, I think if you're going to write something weird, own it. Say the thing without softening it to make sure someone gets it. This means avoiding detailed descriptions that are there only to help someone visualize the weird thing, but also avoiding language—and this is something I see a lot in workshops I lead—that draws attention to how surreal or weird an image is. That language is for you to feel comfortable with the image, not the poem. The poem is totally fine having teeth with keyrings in them. 

AAAAI think about the poetic voice all the time. In my own work, usually I'm just asking if something sounds phony, if a metaphor is fragmented in a way that I am taking for granted because what I see completed in my head isn't fully delivered on the page. I try to think of the poem as independent of me—the poem, I believe, knows more than I do about itself—and then I try to think whether a poem would say the things about itself that I am saying as I draft or edit it. 

AAAAI do think there's too much stress on voice in young poets. Like, somehow you magically figure out your voice, then your career as a poet is solved. It's too much pressure! This is how you get poets who write one or two books and then end up rewriting the same books over and over or stop writing entirely because they don't know what else to write, or, worse, they're bored. It's important to think about why you're writing—to delight, surprise, and explore too. You can have a kind of vanilla voice and write some amazing poems if you're thinking deeply or writing about new, surprising things. As an editor, I have rejected a lot of poems that had a great sense of voice but the poems were about things I'd read or seen many times before. Language and voice might be the most important things, but they aren't the only things. For younger poets especially, exploring other ways to write—or really other arts entirely—is incredibly important too. You mention a sort of confidence in my voice, for example, and maybe that's a result of the things I've noted, but I should also note I've written instructional guides on fixing hair removal lasers, or onboarding physicians to a new clinical practice, or I've edited a textbook on Lyme's disease. Writing things that aren't poetry has made my poetry much better. 

KARAN

That’s so cool! I like that you think that the poem is beyond language and voice. Can you point out the other elements that make (or break) a poem? 

TODD

There are some basic ones, like a poem generally has four lines to grab me, or I’m out. If a poem is 20 lines or more and the middle starts to drag, my reading of the poem starts to become complicated by questions I bring to the poem—this isn’t bad in of itself, but this second sort of “background” reading can get in the way of my enjoyment of the poem. (Though admittedly sometimes it results in even greater enjoyment of the poem.) Poems that from the title/first line telegraph they are deep, heavy poems grappling with abstract ideas (despair, love, death) and they never move around in that register, or out of that register, or really say anything beyond what the narrator feels—these poems feel extremely one-note to me. 

AAAAThe poems I am drawn to the most tend to use a voice and rhythm that is speech-like, but then they find a way to make that voice say or describe things I have never heard before. They often wield “is” in novel ways. I think a lot, for example, of Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End, the opening poem of which goes:

My mother was a braid of black smoke.

She bore me swaddled over the burning cities.

The sky was a vast and windy place for a child to play.

We met many others who were just like us.

They were trying to put their overcoats with arms made of smoke.

The high heavens were full of shrunken deaf ears instead of stars.

There’s no flourish here. The strange, the horror, the familial, they all just were. No language rendered to the point of being overwrought could accomplish this. If I could give any advice to a young poet, I would say make a point of using “to be” verbs in new, strange ways. I also enjoy this poem’s—and in poems in general—jarring juxtapositions. It doesn’t work all the time, but if a poem is talking about joy and adds in something dark, I am going to want to see how the rest of the poem plays out. Same for poems about death/grief that grapple with positive things. I want to see ideas collide like tectonic plates.

KARAN

We recently made a point of asking seasoned poets for advice for young writers. Now, you’re not “old” in the scheme of things, but you’ve had books published that are well acclaimed and you’re also an editor. So, especially as an editor, what is something you’d like to say to young writers, as way of advice or caveats?

TODD

Build community. Getting that big publication is going to feel great for a little while, but having people who love you and your work is what will sustain you. Don’t compare yourselves to others—poetry is a lot like bricklaying a path as you walk on it. Some people start off ahead of you, are helped along by others. That’s got nothing to do with the work you need to do to move forward. Take breaks. Don’t write every day. Don’t slap a poem onto paper then shunt it off to a journal. Give your ink time to dry, revisit poems after the process of writing them has left you—you’ll see then what you foisted into the poem versus what the poem was really trying to say. Trust the work. Trust your gut. Be willing to say no to editors and readers. Floss. Tell people whose work you admire that you admire their work. I could go on. 

AAAAIf you can, read for a journal. I read thousands of submissions a year. What you’re going to find is a lot of people are writing about the same kinds of things in similar ways, and as a result you’re going to not write about those things in those ways, or you’re going to write about different, novel things. It doesn’t have to be Paris Review, from my understanding every journal out there gets a huge number of submissions for each submission cycle. Reading for a lit mag is one of the best ways to improve your work. 

AAAAOne last thing, which I can say just as someone who has a larger social media presence than most writers—social media doesn’t really matter. There are exceptions, of course, mainly on Instagram. But I am not getting into journals because I posted a burnt quesadilla tweet, and the majority of award-winning poets across the US are fine with smaller followings. I’m not selling books because of this either—the month I hit 25 million impressions on Twitter I sold 20ish books. So don’t worry about social media, if you find yourself worrying at all.

KARAN

Thank you so much, Todd. Finally, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would also love to know poets who have influenced you most.

TODD

This is pretty easy because I have had some of the best writers in America as my teachers and mentors: Jericho Brown, Claudia Rankine, Tom Lux, Marie Howe. All of these poets have taught me different ways to write, different ways to think about writing, have introduced me to new poets, and have expected nothing from me but excellence. This latter thing I think is extremely important, having someone whose expectations—not in terms of subject matter, but in quality—you can rise to meet and can motivate you to find "the thing behind the thing" in your writing. Ideally as you mature you want this person to become you—never let yourself slack off in writing. But you have to internalize that expectation somehow, and working with these poets did that for me. (Though admittedly I still fail in this regard regularly.) 

AAAAThe fifth influential poet for me rotates, but it usually some eastern European writer—over the years, it's been Wislawa Szymborska, Charles Simic, Tomas Transtromer, Adam Zagajewski, etc. Throw in Russel Edson, Sabrina Orah Mark, and some others—all poets who write clearly about things both real and beyond real, reporters from that liminal country inside us all.