Have you ever seen the Seinfeld episode involving Elaine’s encounter with The Sidler? If not, do. In brief, one of Elaine’s new co-workers reveals himself to have a habit of silently creeping up on everyone in the office; turn around and he’s suddenly there. In other words, he’s a Sidler, and, for Elaine at least, the man’s stealthy movements are inescapable; even when she’s safely ensconced in the comfort of her apartment she thinks can hear the silence of his movements, can feel his presence become, without warning, one with her own.
Current Washington state Poet Laureate Tod Marshall’s poetry works in the same way as the Sidler’s shadow; it creeps up on you quickly and, once it announces itself, refuses to quietly leave. Marshall’s latest collection, Bugle, is short—only forty-eight pages long. The poems, however, linger much longer than that page count, and when in the poem “Fuck Up” Marshall writes, “Sometimes we say death when what we mean is home,” the reader can’t help but overthink it. Find below my interview with Marshall about Bugle, his new Poet Laureate job responsibilities, and his favorite poetic words and phrases; also find some poems from Bugle here and here.
As the newly minted Washington state Poet Laureate I’m curious if there are any commonly held myths or stereotypes about the position that you might be willing to dispel. Since the WA poet laureate job description is extremely open-ended, is there anything that you’re confident you won’t be participating in as Poet Laureate?
Well, let me answer your last question first. Nope. I’ve already committed to being part of a radio vaudeville show in Bellingham, to writing occasional poems for the “passing of the state’s largest transportation bill” and the commemorative anniversary of a museum, to visiting kindergartners and colleges, to Baudelaire birthday bashes and Rotary club readings; to performing at LTAB events, POL competitions, and various literary festivals. I’m sure that en plein air readings and rap battles with Macklemore (I’ll take him out!) are on the horizon, as well as poems to commemorate the launching of new ferries, new ranger stations in the Cascades, and new airstrips for Boeing. It’s fun and exhausting (the emails!), but I am excited and enthused by all of the ways that poetry is and can be part of people’s lives.
I don’t know about myths connected to the position, although I heard that the first poet laureate Samuel Green once gave nine readings in a day, recited most of Theodore Roethke’s oeuvre to the Bellingham Rotary Club, and later in the evening engaged and defeated David Wagoner in an impromptu couplet battle where each was given the first line of a Pope couplet with the demand to make a better second line. I suppose the stereotype or misconception that I might speak to is the notion that it might be a merely honorary position (you’ve probably gathered that already); in Washington, the position is about service and outreach in the arts—it’s sponsored by Humanities Washington and Arts WA, and so it’s no surprise that it’s all about connecting people to the art. I’m excited by that sort of work, and so I’ll not be, ahem, resting on my laurels but literally traveling thousands of miles throughout our beautiful state.
In a brief sentence or two, how would you describe Washington’s “legacy of poetry” and how might that legacy differ from every other state’s?
Well, Washington has a rich legacy that Dan Lamberton, a writer and scholar at Walla Walla University, has written about here. I would add to Dan’s great outline of the literary history that the current poetry scene in Washington is especially vibrant and diverse; we have feisty and original poets like Maged Zaher and Jane Wong in Seattle; we have brilliant purveyors of landscape and environment like Derek Sheffield, Kevin Craft, and Kathleen Flenniken; Elizabeth Austen, Chris Howell, Katrina Roberts, Rick Barot, Nance Van Winckel, Jourdan Keith, Sherman Alexie, Andrew Feld and so many others: before I get too carried away with my listing, I’ll stop. O wait, I should mention Copper Canyon and Wave Books and APRIL fest and Willow Springs and Lucia Perillo and Jourdan Keith and…okay, I’ll stop again. From stuff connected to U of W (Williams’ lecture at U of W on “The Poem as Field of Action” in 1948 AND the rich metrical tradition of its teachers) to the eco-poetic concerns of groups like Cascadia (Snyder in a fire lookout, Robert Sund’s deeply rooted poems of place), Washington has a rich legacy of experiment and extending conventions; its poetics and poetries and poets and legacies are as various as the compelling landscapes throughout the state.
In your opinion, who is the quintessential Washington state poet—and why? How does he/she embody Washingtonian poetry exactly?
O jeez. I’m either going to give a cliché answer—“It’s Richard Hugo; he combined a working class ethos with a unique (and quiet musicality) that focused on the ecosystem (salmon and rivers and etc.) in a new and vibrant way”—or I’m going to fall all over myself again trying to shape a generous list. I think that what’s great about Washington is our diversity of landscapes; we have the cascades that scrape the sky’s belly; we have so many powerful rivers that rage with runoff in the spring and teem with salmon and other fish; we have the basalt columns of the eastern side of the state; we have the sensual hills of the Palouse, the rainforests of the Olympics, great coastal cliffs and beaches. The poetry of our state is equally various—from experimental to “traditional” with every spoken and slammed mode between.
Richard Hugo…The Triggering Town changed my life. I truly believe that book has the power to change anyone’s life. And your laureate schedule sounds all-consuming, to say the least! A question, then, about your own Washingtoness—I know you grew up in Kansas, but how long have you lived in Washington? (I know you got your MFA from Eastern Washington University years ago, but then moved back to Kansas for your Ph.D.) And do you remember if there was a certain point when you fully began to consider yourself a Washington poet? Or was it a gradual thing that you still don’t 100% consciously think about?
Hugo is a touchstone for me, too. I have lived in many parts of the country: New York for five years, Kansas for sixteen years, Michigan for four years, and Tennessee for three years. I have been in Washington for eighteen years (1990-2 and 1999 to present). There are so many ways to think about this: my New York years are formative (psychologically speaking—if I remember anything form Psych 101); the “Kansas” years are when I came to consciousness (and, unfortunately or not, wrecked many brain cells); other places were for education or career. Let me frame it like this: Washington is the state where I first sat down on a rock and thought about where the hell I was: where the water was flowing (creek to small river to big river to sea); what the names of the trees and blooms might be. Washington is where landscape provided metaphor for my internal struggles and personal strife, where I first took the time to learn about the palimpestic history of a neighborhood, of the multi-layered nature of any tale. It’s where I have slept outdoors more than any place and where I have gone out walking among the plants (Arrowleaf Balsamroot, a favorite blossom of mine and vital foodstuff for the area) and animals (marmots! Mule deer! Elk and Moose) and marveled most gazing up at the sky. I don’t know exactly what it means to belong to a place, to be of a place—I am a pomo American mutt in many respects—and I imagine that native peoples are probably the peoples who are truly tied to location in subsistence, spiritual, and aesthetic ways that I can probably never completely understand (and in ways that, of course, don’t involve states and borders and focus more on ecosystems): regardless, this is a complicated subject, and I suppose my best answer is that I am a poet, and I consider Washington my physical home and my artistic home.
I love your latest collection, Bugle. To my humble thinking, from poem to poem it’s simultaneously insouciant and reverent. And it won the Washington State Book Award in the Poetry category in 2015, which was very well deserved. Two years after its publication, how do you view Bugle today? Are you the type of writer that looks on his past work with pride or instead do you only see what you might have done differently?
Thank you for saying that about the book. Like the blatting sound of a bugle note, it’s a harsh collection. I wanted it to be an extremely harsh book—it has several central riffs: extraction and containment is one (of coppery-zinc and “material” that might go in a poem). We scrape stuff out of the earth; we scrape stuff off the surface of the world around us; we scrape stuff off the inside of ourselves—how do we pour that stuff (smelt that stuff, stuff that stuff) into a container (call it a sonnet, call it a mold) that could be called art? Robyn Schiff is my primary editor—talk about lucky me!—and she kept pushing me to make the book even more brutal. And I think that you’ve identified the other thread that was important to me; bugles, of course, are made of brass (coppery-zinc), and so I wanted the poems to toot all over the place tonally—sometimes brassy, sometimes six clicks beyond sentimental (which maybe becomes kitschy brassy). I still like it as a book, but I have to say, it’s not a great book to tour around the state and read to elementary school kids or at retirement homes!
I’ve asked this question to other poets before, but in curiosity’s interest I’ll ask it of you: do you have—or would care to identify—favorite words you return to again and again in your work? Words that you like, for whatever reason. I asked the same thing to Eileen Myles before and she hates and won’t use the word “shard”—too stereotypically poetic—and likes and often employs “you” and “dog.” John Gallaher stated that he’s an equal opportunity employer; he doesn’t play favorites. Are there words, then, that you come back to again and again? Any words that you revile and won’t deign to write or type down? Or any Pacific Northwesty words you frequently use that poets from other regions might not use as often?
O hell. Probably too many. Flex. Spindle. Others. But more than diction, I seem compelled toward the accretive catalog, toward piling things up, toward stacking them one on top of another or spreading them out across the floor, flinging them in wide arcs and then gathering them in neat piles. Swell, swollen, plump, huckleberry. Birch. Douglas Fir. Ponderosa Pine is one of my favorites: what a cool sounding tree! Going back to the catalogs for a second: Whitman, of course, looms behind that impulse, but I remember a cool book by Helen McNeil—it’s kind of a general intro to ED written with some theory and good smarts—in which she looks at Emily Dickinson’s “heuristic” process. Dickinson will see a thing metaphorically and settle into that vision for a line or two and then immediately “re-see” it, recast, refigure it: her faith in perception is so frail (as, maybe, it should be for all of us) that she jumps onward to the next exploration of what language/the world/the senses might bring. Maybe some combo of Walt and Emily compel my listing.