KARAN

Tom, thank you for these beautiful poems. You’re such an important part of the poetry community, amplifying voices through social media. Your poems are so philosophical and funny, complicating time, memory, and existence in wondrous ways. I’m particularly struck by how you blend the mundane with the philosophical, as in “Shape Sorter” where you write, “weeks float by like coriander / in the potato soup of being / not our parents but not / entirely not them either.” Let’s begin with the process question. How do you approach writing a poem? Do you start with an image, a line, or an idea? Do you have a writing routine? And most importantly, what drives you to write poetry?

TOM

Thank you, Karan, for these incredibly kind words and for the opportunity to talk about poetry! I really appreciate what you, Shannan, and the rest of your masthead are doing with ONLY POEMS; it’s a real honor to share space with the inaugural contest winners and your amazing poets of the week, a group that includes some of my favorite people writing right now.

I usually come into a poem with just a scrap of something to go on — sometimes it’s a line, or maybe an image, a sound I can’t shake. I almost always have a phone note going that I’ve put some small snippet into, even if it’s only a title; I record it in the hope it’ll become a poem, but you never know. Usually I let things marinate in the phone notes awhile until they either become something or they don’t. That don’t is, for sure, loaded; like a Turing machine, which might halt in finite time or might not, you never know if a poem has actually failed to become anything, or if it might just still be in the process of rattling around in your head, incubating. That rattle has a rhythm, a maddeningly irregular one. My routine is a little like a clock that’s old enough (or cheap enough) that occasionally the second hand gets stuck against the minute hand, time unable to advance until you take the whole thing off the wall and spin one of them free. I go for longish periods of writing almost nothing, nothing redeemable, and then suddenly ten sonnets or a long poem or whatever just happen, probably while I’m driving or in a meeting or somewhere else inconvenient. I’ve gotten a little better at waiting for it, although at heart I’m still fundamentally impatient. I wish I could will it to come, but I just have to wait.

You asked, And most importantly, what drives you to write poetry? I think in the last instance I see poetry as a conversation; like real conversation, it is always possible to insert oneself, but it takes some art to do it in a way that shows you’ve been listening to your interlocutors and that you want to be part of it with them, not just by talking at them. I’m not really a practiced artist of the real-life conversation, if I’m honest, so I’m grateful to poetry for being a medium where I can have freer chats with the dead and the damned, as long as I listen first.

KARAN

Your poems often touch on themes of memory and the passage of time. For instance, in “Rope Memory” you write, “Who has wisdom / Is it the weavers / Assembling memory / From bright twine.” How deeply are you concerned with the relationship between time and memory? Do you find that poetry provides a unique space for exploring these existential concepts? 

TOM

I love that you quoted from “Rope Memory” for this question; I wrote that poem when I learned that, in the 1950s and 1960s, there were early computers with memory systems made of actual “rope,” woven from magnetic cores and copper wires. Physical memory systems like this seem antiquated to us now, we who are much further down the line of Moore’s Law, but they represented a huge improvement over other magnetic-core memory systems at the time and were even used as part of NASA’s Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). I’m intrigued by the way states of the art — any art — pass through time and change, glomming onto new developments and shedding vestigial bits. The language that trails that process is fascinating.

I’m also really interested in the way time lets us play with scale, in our own lives and in a wider, more cosmic sense. I love those William Bronk poems written from the ruins, where the speaker wantonly jumps ahead or back twenty years, or five thousand. Bronk’s speakers in those poems eschew all but the barest biography in favor of a sort of parallax view of how absurd anything “present” would seem to anyone performing a similar time jump from anywhere else in the groove of memory’s record. But I also love any art that lets nostalgia mix with embarrassment, like middle school poems doused in acne and uncertainty about love, soundtracked by a kind of music you think you’ll be obsessed with for the rest of your life and now, at 30, find quaint. I think poetry is the perfect technology for treating memory like the durational, faulty thing it is; you can construct it in real time as a poem progresses, just as readily as you can dramatize its falling apart. Last month we tried planting water lilies in the pond near where we live; we thought we had buried the roots deep enough, stepped in the water ourselves and used our hands to cover them over with unruly silt, but the next day when we went out to check on them they were already gone, unmoored, probably eaten by the deer.

KARAN

Most of your titles also set up the tone of humor or the witty voice of your poems. What are your thoughts on poetic voice? Is it a concern for you to find yours? Do you think you’ve found it? Or is the task of finding one’s voice not one worthy of embarking upon? Forgive me for the lousy sentence. I’m hoping you’d write a flash essay on the capital-V Voice.

TOM

This is a little bit of a goofy answer, but the middle school I went to had a pledge that we all said in homeroom, right after the Pledge of Allegiance. (My sister visited us here in Virginia recently, and we were both kind of shocked to learn we still knew it, every word.) A burning line in it says, I have only one voice, and sometimes it is hard to speak up. I think the poet’s voice is very much analogous to the “one voice” in this pledge: it is single, singular, and incredibly difficult to exercise with any consistency. In fact it can feel silly even to use it at all, especially knowing (in this, our social media era) how it has never been easier to open oneself to ridicule. And yet we do speak up, we do write poems, we do find something in our own indelible experience to try to express, however badly. I think voice is the function of working through these little-to-medium shames and embarrassments to find something true, or true enough to say. My sense is I’ve found a kind of vocal plateau for myself, right now, but I also look forward to it cracking, breaking, becoming something different, like out of a Holly Herndon recording or The Bedlam in Goliath-era The Mars Volta. I hope my voice is not just one thing, that it will continue to morph and warp and change. I admire tremendously those poets who manage to speak with a different voice depending on which book of theirs you pick up; although, in the same breath, I have to admit I love poets too whose cadence is instantly recognizable as theirs.

KARAN

Your poems hold a wide range of references, from mathematics to literature to wildlife to scientific/technological advancements. We encounter Chaucer, Bacon, Shakespeare, set theory, infinities, possums, vultures, etc. How do you approach incorporating such diverse elements into your poetry? Does this breadth of reference come naturally during the writing process, or is it something you consciously cultivate for a specific reading experience? 

TOM

One weakness I have as a reader is that I tend to move laterally with a text; rather than read it on its own terms, giving it the depth treatment it probably deserves, I almost always want to compare it to something else, or find analogies that may or may not carry any actual hermeneutic water. As with reading, so with writing, I think; I have written poems that are on the stiller side, little imagistic studies or reflections on a single idea, but most of my poems do have this jumpy quality of wanting to cross registers or domains at a pretty rapid pace. My poetics for this owes a debt to these lines from Ariana Reines’s great poem “Open Fifths”:

It’s true what they say, that meaning can be made from anything.  The real

Question might be must it & if so how.  It’s true what the Jews say

That the drawing-together of the two most disparate things is the real

Mark of intelligence.  It’s true what the Greeks say

That metaphor is transportation.  And Art’s

Demand that one turn a single idea into a thing, a place

A series, and do it elegantly, I’ve put that in my pipe

All over again and smoked it too. 

I was a philosophy student when I was younger, and I think that has something to do with this too. Philosophies aren’t much good if they can’t countenance the particulars of living, of life, and I think a similar thing is true of poems, albeit with fewer rules about consistency. Some of my favorite poems I’ve ever written feel like colliders, protected spaces for two or more unlike elements to meet – sometimes at great speed – and for the reader to get to see what happens.

KARAN

“Fifty Days” touches on themes of faith and mortality. You write, “The miracle / of Saint Cecelia is not / that she doesn’t die, / it’s that she does / when god decides.” Does poetry serve as a way for you to explore or grapple with existential questions? And, Tom, does writing bring you joy or ease your pain?

TOM

I was raised Catholic, which is a great way to guarantee that the saints will follow you for life. I’ve always really adored the way poetry can partake of the language, personae, and other materials of these existential questions while also taking the piss out of them a little bit; one of my very favorite poems is John Ashbery’s “My Philosophy of Life,” which is simultaneously 1) a very good satire/reductio showing what happens when you take a blinkered, over-individualized approach to thinking about The Big Questions, and 2) an honest document of the fear of being wrong when trying earnestly to tackle these selfsame questions: “I won’t be embarrassed by my friends’ dumb remarks, / or even my own, though admittedly that’s the hardest part . . . .” I think what writing does most for me, rather than necessarily being a palliative or an avenue for joy, is act as a proof of concept: the very existence of a poem, especially a weird one that is hard to paraphrase or explain, is evidence for Hamlet’s claim about there being “more things” out there than we might otherwise have dreamt of. I love writing that offers a kind of inscrutability, the rendering of a sort of experience/disjunction/whatever that seems nigh impossible to make sense of, or talk about at all; if any poem I ever write partakes of the faintest whiff of that, for even one reader, that would be a really great thing by my lights.

KARAN

There’s a school of poetry that believes a poem or a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work within this framework, if at all? And do you see your poetry moving in a different direction?

TOM

Ooh, I love this question! I don’t mean to completely dodge it, but I think I’m most interested in the moments and decisions and weird axiomatics that go into the making of frameworks like this; if this framework is a stage, I’d hope my poems would be banging around up on the catwalk, fiddling with the lights like David Lynch as Bucky Jay in Inland Empire.

One thing I really love is when poets aren’t afraid to do philosophy, to be essayists or novelists a little in their work. I find that to be a way of bending or interrogating the rules for which I have tremendous admiration. I just spent some time with Les chants de Maldoror for the first time in an age, and Lautréamont is certainly not afraid of the oratorical pronouncement! (“The novel is a false genre,” he drops on the reader at one point, which helped me feel free of the need to try to write a poet-novel.) As I type this I’m also waiting for my copy of Ariana Reines’s book Wave of Blood to arrive (fittingly, from overseas), a book Reines describes “as an extended essay, though it includes poems, and is also a travelogue.” So far my own books have all been more-or-less conventional collections of poems, but someday I would love to see if a different direction in terms of form could give them a kind of life they heretofore haven’t lived. I’d love to write a book-length poem, for example, which I think could hold all kinds of other genres in it too (play, libretto, instruction booklet . . .); this past summer I read Zukofsky’s A in a hopeful fantasia about starting this project. LZ worked on A for fifty years, though, so I’m in no hurry.

KARAN

You mention that you live in the mountains of northwestern Virginia (we’re probably not far). Do you think your physical environment seeps into your poetry? Do you find that the natural world of Virginia informs your imagery or themes?

TOM

This is definitely something that shifted for me in a big way around the time I was writing A Letter From The Mountain. I’ve lived in Virginia for going on four years now — my wife Kristi and I moved here from Massachusetts in the early summer of 2021, after Kristi finished grad school at Harvard and we both taught through COVID. My first book, Light-Up Swan, was essentially a document of coming to know poetry and of falling in love with Kristi, written entirely while we both still lived in Massachusetts and published the month before we moved. Two years later, Reclaimed Water was a book of transition — there was the fact of being in a new place, and then there was also the surprise (to me!) of my leaving teaching. That time in my life was a really uncertain period — I had thought I was going to be teaching for the rest of my life, and realizing that it wasn’t going to work out that way took a bit of a toll on me, at first. I felt like a fool who had placed all his eggs in one basket and then kicked it off a cliff. Luckily Kristi and our family were very supportive, and after a nervous bit of searching I started the job I have now, still working in math education but on the curriculum side of things. It was around that time when I finally felt like I could get out of my own head a little, and started writing more and more about what was around me, including local history and ecology (and, of course, the Virginia opossum!), all of which made their way into the poems.

This might not make perfect sense, or it may seem contradictory with the idea of settling into a new place, but one thing I really appreciate about living in Virginia is that I get to be a little bit of an outsider here. We live in the same community Kristi grew up in, and there’s a kind of bone-deep familiarity that runs through a lot of folks’ relationship to this place; maybe they grew up here, too, or perhaps their family has been here for generations. (I imagine I would have felt a similar flavor of attachment, had I stayed in Massachusetts.) By contrast, I’m always learning the ropes, the little bits of county folklore, who knows who from where and why. It’s a really nice position from which to observe and get to know (and of course, write about) a place.

KARAN

Congratulations on your upcoming book, Tom: A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems! Tell us about the book. And has the process of putting together a full-length collection influenced your approach to individual poems? 

TOM

Thank you! I am so excited that A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems will be coming out in 2025 with Animal Heart Press. I’m really grateful to the folks at Animal Heart for their willingness to work with the manuscript, and I’m especially grateful to Beth Gordon, my editor, who has started working on the book and preparing it for release next year; Beth is a wonderful poet and a careful reader who comes to the work of editing from a place of great empathy and understanding. We had a Zoom call early on to talk about the book, and I was overcome with the attention and care she had given to the manuscript before we had even met!

Putting together a book is still something I feel like I’m learning fresh every time. The process is so different for different books: Light-Up Swan was a slow accretion over the course of years, and Reclaimed Water was a much quicker assembly process, coming together at its core over the course of only a few weeks (with some later additions); A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems was an odd case because of the title poem, which I knew I wanted to take up about half the manuscript. It was a lot of fun to choose the remaining poems that make up the back half of the book, in part because I allowed myself a bit more formal impulsiveness than I had indulged in with the first two books. I am really looking forward to people encountering the final product and seeing what speaks to them (as well as finding a little easter egg or two!).

While we’re on the subject of forthcoming books, I am also really excited to share the news that I will have another collection of poetry, entitled MOUNTEBANK, coming out with the wonderful Broken Sleep Books in 2026. Broken Sleep did my chapbook Complete Sentences in 2022, and it was such a joy to work with editor Aaron Kent on that chap; I’m so glad to be able to do a longer book with Aaron, a book which includes several of the poems in this portfolio!

KARAN

What is some of the best writing or writing-adjacent advice you’ve received so far? And as someone who is so deeply involved with the poetry community, what is some advice you’d like to give to young writers?

TOM

Ha! I don’t feel very well-qualified to offer advice, but I’m happy to share the things I’ve been told that have helped me. (Some of them flirt with cliché, but you know what, so does existence half the time.) I’ve heard it said a few different ways that there’s no one right way to be a poet: you don’t need an MFA, though you can of course get one if you like. You don’t need a book either, although it can be nice to publish. The status of being a poet is, in the final account, orthogonal to all of that (which is, unfortunately, also one of the most difficult things about poetry; it is impossible to know when or if you have written a truly good poem. As Merwin wrote in “Berryman,” “if you have to be sure don’t write”). Earlier, I described writing as a proof of concept, and I think the same is true of finding a way to be in the world as a poet: each poet who manages to still exist and make poems shows us all another way it can be done. Don’t worry about conforming to whatever model of being a poet might be colonizing your head this instant, because I can assure you it will be outmoded in ten years. That might seem like an eternity right now — especially if you’re a young poet! — but in the timeline of poetry, it’s a blip.

Another thing I was once told, and that I have come to believe, is that poetry is a very long game. Seven years passed between when I published my first poem and when I published my first full-length book, and even though there were moments during that time when I was heartbroken by rejection or desperately wanted to just have a book out already, I can see now that the universe was doing me a good turn; I got to put out my first two books with a press I really believe in (Ornithopter Press), working with an editor I admire and trust (Mark Harris), and there would have been no guarantee of any of that if I had hurried to put the book out earlier in different circumstances. I think the greatest thing that can happen to you as a poet is you find a way to keep doing your work and sharing it with others who are interested in what you do; no formal trappings are really necessary beyond that, and if you have anything like that — even an imperfect version of it — you are really doing it. And you can be doing it anyway, even if you have no book, or no publication record whatsoever. Congratulations, you are a poet!

KARAN

Recently, we decided to ask our poets for a poetry prompt at the end. Would you provide a prompt for our readers, to help kickstart a poem?

TOM

This will probably be underwhelming as a prompt, but I have a pet theory that 17 lines is the perfect length for a poem. So I invite you to write a 17-line poem; no other constraints. If you need another constraint to get things moving, I strongly encourage you to include a possum in it, or another animal who is (in your estimation) either underappreciated or unjustly maligned.

KARAN

We’d also love for you to recommend a piece of art (anything other than a poem) — perhaps a song, a film, or a visual artwork — that you find particularly inspiring or that you think everyone should experience.

TOM

Oh, this is incredibly difficult but also such a wonderful prompt! Off the top of my head there’s this painting by Jane Freilicher, the film Au hasard Balthazar, and my favorite song. One more by Elizabeth Bishop, a lifelong obsession for me. Also if you ever get the opportunity to see the Turrells at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, that experience may be the most viable shortcut to negative capability that’s available to a 21st-century American poet.

KARAN

Finally, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would love to know which poets have influenced you most throughout your career.

TOM

In lieu of spending this whole answer listing off favorite poets, I’ll link this document, which my friend Jo Ianni and I made together a while back, of Poets Who Have It. It’s not a perfect list (how could it be?), but looking at it again for the first time in a while, it’s a good list. There are a lot of people on there whose work I’ve learned from, and hope to continue learning from.