12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tony Trigilio

Tony Trigilio’s [Photo credit: Kevin Nance] recent books of poetry include Proof Something Happened, selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the 2020 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize (Marsh Hawk Press, 2021), and Ghosts of the Upper Floor (BlazeVOX [books], 2019). His selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in Guatemala in 2018 by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). He is editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press, 2014), and coedits the poetry journal Court Green. He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I was ecstatic when my first book of poems, The Lama's English Lessons (Three Candles Press, 2006), was published. The book gave me an incredible jolt of confidence. I'll always be grateful to publisher Steve Mueske, an excellent poet in his own right, for believing in those poems. My overall body of work is eclectic, but looking back on that first book, I can see that it's sort of a template for the kinds of poetry I'm still interested in: autobiographical lyric poems; historically-based or documentary poems; poems that experiment with traditional forms; and poems that engage difficult questions of family dynamics. When The Lama's English Lessons first came out, I felt like poets were dividing themselves into distinct camps that pitted so-called narrative poets against so-called experimental poets. Since the publication of this first book, I've tried to blur the boundary between these two camps in my poems (and I'm glad to see fewer and fewer poets invested in dividing ourselves into these kinds of camps).

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My introductions to poetry were music and song. As a young child, I was obsessed with my sister's Beatles records. "The Fool on the Hill" and "Eleanor Rigby," especially, produced emotional reactions in me that later resembled my response to poetry. As I got older, it became clearer to me that I wanted to generate the same kind of feelings in readers that songs and poems produced in me.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
My individual poems (and segments of poems that are part of longer, book-length projects) always start as a many-tentacled mess that reaches in too many directions. In the early drafting process, I'm inspired by William Blake's dictum, "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough." It takes me a lot of time, though, and many drafts, before I can actually sculpt the what-is-enough from the more-than-enough. Some poems definitely come quickly. But for the most part, I have to be patient with myself that I need many drafts before the work really starts to feel like a poem.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
It's both for me, depending on what I'm working on. Often, I'm writing shorter pieces that I trust eventually will cohere into a larger book. But I also love composing book-length poems. I'm working on the fourth volume of my ongoing project, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), which I started in 2011. The first three books were published in 2014, 2016, and 2019. For this project, I'm watching all 1,225 episodes of the old U.S. daytime soap opera Dark Shadows, a gothic soap that featured a vampire as its main character. I write one sentence in response to each episode, and I use each sentence as a conduit for autobiographical excursions. (When I was a small child, I watched the show every day with my mother, so autobiography is at the heart of my childhood viewing experience.) My newest volume (in progress) and Book 3 are both composed in hybrid poetry/prose forms, which is also a departure from the kinds of books I've written previously.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing readings. The circuit opens when I start writing the poem, and it doesn't usually feel "complete" until I've read the poem for others.
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I think most of all my interest lies in fusing the autobiographical mode with the documentary or historical mode. I'm interested in language and situations that emerge from the collision of an individual's self-consciousness with an individual's historical moment. Also, as I mentioned earlier, I'm still invested in poems the dramatize family and community belonging, especially poems that explore immigrant identity (my parents were first-generation) and working-class identity. In my documentary poems, I try to tell an unofficial version of the histories we have been told to accept as master narratives.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
For me, the role of the writer is to dramatize for their readers new ways of seeing the world. Sometimes those ways of seeing can be internal and psychological, and sometimes they're social and political.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It's essential for me. I see my work with outside editors as collaborative relationships; every book I've done is a collaboration between myself and the editor/publisher. I feel the same about my work as a coeditor for the poetry journal Court Green.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
It's probably the quotation from Blake I mentioned earlier: "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough." Blake's remark reminds me that the editor-who-lives-inside-my-head needs to go away during my initial, generative drafts so that I don't overthink the early invention stage of the writing process. This editor-in-my-head definitely needs to come back for later drafts. But the editor-in-my-head's self-judging voice tries to dominate, and it's important for me to mute that voice in the earliest stages of a piece of writing.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
It took a while for me to be comfortable moving back and forth between these genres. But it's much easier now because I have a decent sense of which projects/ideas/feelings are best suited for poetry and which are best suited for critical prose. I'm drawn to both kinds of writing because of the way they light up both hemispheres of my brain. I want my poems and critical prose to be equal parts emotion and intellect.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don't know that I have one particular routine. Instead, I try to adapt my routine to what else is happening in my life at any given time (some periods allow me to set up a solid routine; but other periods require that adapt to busy times at work or in my home life). I've learned over the years, though, that the best times for me to write are early in the morning and late at night. There's something in the quiet, sparse ambience of those times of the day sparks me.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Usually, I can get back on track by reading. Paying attention to how other poets and prose writers are working with language/vision/mystery helps realign my voice productively. When I'm stalled, I also turn to music, movies, or comics so that my imagination can still be energized without obsessing on what's happening (or not happening) with my writing.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The tangy, fungal smell of a Great Lake in early spring. I grew up a couple miles from Lake Erie. I currently live a block from Lake Michigan.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I'm also a musician (drums and percussion), so music is a definite source for my books, whether directly or indirectly. I compose poems as a musician, and compose music as a poet. I'm also hugely influenced by movies and television (especially, of course, by late-1960s/early-1970s goth vampire soap operas, haha!).

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
As for poets: William Blake, George Oppen, Harryette Mullen, Bernadette Mayer, Allen Ginsberg, H.D., Joanne Kyger, Audre Lorde, James Schuyler, and Denise Levertov, among so many others. Fiction writers like Don DeLillo and Philip K. Dick are also huge influences on how I experience writing and how I move through the world, as is the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault. As I mentioned earlier, comics are a big part of my creative process. Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead comic strip made me want to write poetry (and introduced Dada and Surrealism to me), and Harvey Pekar's American Splendor taught me how to experiment with narrative and make it strange.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
One of my dreams is to play drums and percussion in Eugene Chadbourne's band.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
In my twenties, I left the music business to go to graduate school, so if I hadn't become a writer, I probably would've continued playing and recording music. I still do, though music is more of a serious hobby these days. If writing and music hadn't worked out, I would've probably tried law school. Back in high school and early college, I wanted to become a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
More than any other art form, writing makes the world coherent and representable to me. But music comes really close.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book of poems I read is Wanda Coleman, Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems (ed. Terrance Hayes), and the two best novels I've read recently are Sigrid Nunez, The Friend, and Don DeLillo, The Silence. Also, since I read a lot of comics and graphic novels, I have to add that the last great one I read is Derf Backderf's Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio. (I did my undergraduate degree at Kent State, and I'm never far removed from my outrage at the infamous 1970 National Guard shooting that killed four students and wounded nine.) I haven't seen many films since the pandemic hit. But of the films I saw right before the pandemic, my favorites are Parasite (dir. Bong Joon-ho) and Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman).

20 - What are you currently working on?
I'm just past the halfway point of Volume 4 of The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood). As with the third volume, this one is a poetry/prose hybrid. I recently transitioned from a series of prose poems into a pantoum. I'm spending this week trying to write myself back into prose.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry, ed. Ryan G. Van Cleave

Wishbone

I have a bone to pick

with whoever runs this joint.

I don’t much like

being stuck out in the rain

just to feed on the occasional

vole or baby rabbit

and these wet weed-salads

confound my intestines.

A cat can’t throw himself

into the Chicago river,

not even in the luscious fall.

I get yelled at in human

language every single day

for things I can’t begin

to comprehend, let alone change.

But I go on cleaning myself—

why shouldn’t I?—

and so I think I smell sweet,

even though I suspect otherwise.

I wouldn’t harm a fly normally,

but why doesn’t anybody

take care of me? How am I

supposed to know that it’s Easter,

that I’m not allowed to die

in my own bed, and that neither prong

of this wishbone is meant for me? (Don Share)

Taking as its subject the City of Chicago itself is City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry, ed. Ryan G. Van Cleave (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012). Over the past couple of years, Vancouver and Winnipeg have each produced anthologies along similar veins – A Verse Map of Vancouver, ed.George McWhirter (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2009) and The Imagined City: A Literary History of Winnipeg, ed. David Arnason and Mhari Mackintosh (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2005) – each utilizing and exploring their cities-as-subject in poetry specifically, and literature generally, predominantly by residents former and current. Chicago has long been known for a city of poets and poetry, from the origins of Poetry magazine over a century ago and Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems (1916) to more recent activity by poets such as Srikanth Reddy, Suzanne Buffam and Nathanaël, among others. The anthology explores and expands the mythology of the city by those who have known it, in whatever capacity, sent in after an initial call for submissions. As editor Ryan G. Van Cleave writes to end his introduction:

1916’s The Chicago Anthology: A Collection of Verse from the Work of Chicago Poets, edited by Charles G. Blanden and Minna Mathison, was one of the first attempts to define and present the poetry of Chicago as a distinctive, unified body of literature. Indeed, plenty of writers have gone on to be defined by their relationship to the city: Carl Sandburg, Karl Shapiro, George Dillon, Edgar Lee Masters, and Gwendolyn Brooks, to name just a few. And this anthology takes up the literary torch with some of America’s brightest poetic lights who’ve been touched by Chicago’s many inspirations. But by no means is the poetic conversation about Chicago over. It’s a vital, important part of the literary landscape of America, and it’s clear that new members are appearing daily. More than a few contributors remarked in their cover letters that the literature of Chicago is experiencing a renaissance. After seeing so many fine new writers and quality veterans, I’m inclined to agree.

            The poems in this anthology are not just beautiful objects to be enjoyed once and then put away. Savor the ones that seem written specifically for you. Consider the rest a challenge to be met. I guarantee at least three poems in this book will unlock a memory (real or imagined) of State Street vendor brats, the cacophony of smells that is the Taste of Chicago, or the sight of children skating at dusk at Daley Plaza – even if you’ve never been to the Windy City itself yet.

            Chicago is my hometown. No matter your background or interests, these poems do a fine job of making it yours too.

City of the Big Shoulders also provides an interesting counterpoint to the more author-specific anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, eds. William Allegrezza and Raymond Bianchi (Chicago Il: Cracked Slab Books, 2007) [see my review of such here]. I admit, I’m more interested in the sake of a geographic anthology to gain a sense of what kinds of writing and writer activity is happening within that arbitrary boundary, rather than an exploration of the personality of that geographic space. Still, I’m fascinated by the exploration of the myth of Chicago, one I’m very little aware of, but for the story of the city as central rail point, or inventor of the Second City comedy troupe, or namesake of that easy-listening shameful 1980s-era pop band. Who are you, really, Chicago?

Windy City

They wrote all over the rocks, the ones

who came before and come still; choicer

than graffiti, the paint cubed and letters

blocked like epitaphs: Acid or small groove

or baby cakes. And primary colors whet

the schools of foam the lake makes,

its mobile cursive less serene, while the city

wells above that trace of sociability—

its steeples snuffed, or nearly, in the mist:

this could have been Christminster,

or these the moral rocks Tess read

on her journey home in terrible,

delicate boots: the shores mirror us

always, but the city transpires. (Christina Pugh)

There are remarkably few names in this collection I’m previously aware of – but for Rachel Loden, Tony Trigilio and Don Share – meaning that the bulk of writers from the city working in an entirely different vein, including the more language-centred and more experimental poets are somehow absent from this collection. Contributors to the anthology include Barbra Nightingale, ElisePaschen, Janet Wondra, Vivian Shipley, Maya Quintero, Ellen Wehle, Susan Elbe and some two or three dozen others, each providing their own perspective on the windy city.

At the Crawford Coal-Fired Power Plant

As she inhales the scent of boiled eggs, the woman thinks of childhood, the farm she grew up on, the chicken coop down the hill from the clothesline. She thinks how back then, coal dust could coat sheets in a matter of minutes. Not anymore. These days it’s what she can’t see that worries her. But the plant manager says that this is a forward-thinking plant. Why? Because Crawford has reduced its mercury emissions ahead of schedule. And its nitrogen oxide emissions are down 30%. She doesn’t ask him what schedule. She doesn’t ask how much mercury or nitrogen oxide a person should breathe. Nor does she ask why the plant has been in the news in the past few years for spewing deadly toxins into the Chicago air and increasing the risk and incidence rate of asthma. She’s a guest here, so she smiles and nods when he hands her a hardhat, goggles, and orange earplugs. The building hums and throbs around them. She can barely make out his words as he shouts and points. She sees the pulverizer where the coal is crushed and blown into a furnace. She sees the boiler, the precipitator, and the fireball that glows like a small sun. In one room fly ash lands on her black sweater. She tries to brush it off, but it sticks to the cashmere. She asks if she should wear a facemask. She asks if the ash is dangerous. No, no, he says. These days we collect the ash from the precipitator and gather it into bins. Then we sell it for cement. But it’s in the air, she tries to tell him, pointing to the ash she sees rising like dust. She’s not sure he hears her. She’s not sure he sees what she means. He keeps opening and closing his mouth, as if to reassure her, as if to explain that everything is fine. She has nothing to worry about here. (Nin Andrews)

Perhaps this might be a matter of the style itself in which those more experimental poets work, given that subject was the centre of the collection (or perhaps these writers simply didn’t submit to the original submission call), a call more easily suited to a narrative, metaphor-driven lyric style. This also means that the work within the collection are predominantly, if not entirely exclusively, from the previous decade. It would have been interesting to have seen an anthology that worked archivally, to actually dig through the past half-century or so of Chicago (and further) writing, to see how the city has been already depicted, instead of the fraction of the anthology that appears to have been composed for the call itself. How has the city already been discussed, and by whom? What kind of portrait of the city has already been painted?