Tom Sleigh with Solar Editor Amy Kinder Moore
Tom Sleigh is the Program Director of Hunter College’s MFA in Creative Writing, as well as the author of eleven books of poetry. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent book, The King’s Touch, came out in February 2022.
Tom spoke with Solar for our fifth issue. Our conversation explores his relationship to his own creative longevity, the unique intimacy of friendships between writers, and making art in a “murderous age.”
Solar: Your most recent book, The King’s Touch, has been out for a little over half a year. Now that the dust has settled, how are you feeling about it?
Tom Sleigh: I’ll answer your question by backing into it with some context. I’ve published eleven books of poems by now, two books of prose, and a translation of an ancient Greek play. I’ll be 70 years old in November. According to the IRS actuarial tables (who knew until you asked me this question?), I’ll probably kick off when I’m 84. Given that I published my first book when I was 30, that means I’ve published a book about once every 3 years for the last 40 years. If I do have about 14 years left, then that means I’ll publish three, maybe four more books, provided that the rhythm persists. But then the end of life, unless you’re extremely lucky, can destroy you—a bad stroke, for example, and you’re done. I have a friend who suffered a catastrophic stroke. She thought she’d die but she didn’t. And here she is putting together her collected poems. But she’s too impaired to do it on her own, and so her executor is helping her.
Then there are writers who suffer noticeable cognitive decline, and their work goes downhill. But not David Ferry, who published perhaps his best book, Bewilderment, when he was 90. And now that he’s 97, he’s still continued to write poems that are as strange and quietly original as anything he’s ever written.
I also know older writers whose work has gone to hell, not because of age or cognition, but because they need to be poets too badly. They want to thread the needle so that they’ll be relevant, hip, with it. The problem is, the eye of the needle keeps changing and the harder you try to keep up with the cultural moment, the more alienated you can become from your own linguistic gifts. That isn’t always the case, of course. Yeats modernized his style when Ezra Pound pointed out how fusty his early work was. He stopped using stock poetic diction and quaint-sounding inversions and began to revise, as he said, “in the interest of a more passionate syntax.” By which he meant a syntax that was more speech-based, more compressed, less dependent on Celtic twilight melancholy, and more responsive to the appetitive self that grew stronger in him as he got older. Yeats and Ferry, then, make it look good to be an old poet, although Yeats died when he was 73—3 years older than me, 24 years younger than David. David had published one remarkable book of poems shortly before he retired, and then just as he retired, published his second one. In effect, David has done most of his spectacularly original and strange and deeply felt work since he turned 65 and stopped teaching. He’s a model to anyone at any age, but I keep him before me as an example always.
Sadly, I also know poets for whom language no longer has any interest; or else words no longer like them, and it shows. There’s a strange way that you connive at your own relationship to language even as the gift ebbs and flows. Being a poet is more than just writing poems. Seamus Heaney makes the beautifully idealistic point that writing poetry is as deeply dependent on “the quality, intensity, and breadth of your concerns between the moments of writing, the gravity and purity of the mind’s appetites and applications between moments of inspiration” as it is the time when you’re actually working on a poem.
So to answer your question as to how I feel about the book six months out: I feel glad that it’s out, even as I’ve been moving beyond it in what I’m trying to write. I finished a long prose piece about my mother’s suicide this summer. And I’m writing new poems. Once a book is done and published, it has its own life to live. The culture will judge it and be judged by it. Whether it’s well received or ignored is something beyond me, what Montale called “the second life of art,” by which he meant its reception in the world. I’ve won prizes, I’ve lost them. Everybody has by the time you’re my age. I’m glad to be noticed, unhappy when I’m not. It’s like what Lowell said about reviews: “The good ones make me feel good, the bad ones make me feel bad.” But once I’m writing a poem, and focusing on “the gravity and purity of the mind’s appetites and applications between moments of inspiration,” all that ego-noise shuts down, and I’m totally absorbed into what Elizabeth Bishop called a “self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.”
Solar: I love the poem “After a Sentence in a Letter from Pasternak to Rilke, 1926,” which interweaves stories of three poets — Pasternak, Rilke, and Tsvetaeva — and comes about halfway through The King’s Touch. Reading it reminded me of your conversational register, and how naturally you incorporate stories of past writers in your day-to-day speech. Could you tell us a little about the process of writing that poem?
Tom Sleigh: About two years ago I felt acutely out of tune with the drive toward abstraction which had overtaken the country. And so I sat down and re-read Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir about her life with her poet husband, Osip Mandelstam, during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. I was intrigued by some of the similarities between her era and ours: in Mandelstam’s new Russia, ideology and politics had completely coopted the arts, and the arts were nothing but mouthpieces for Stalinist views. Of course, there was nothing so coherent as a “Stalinist view.” However, there were Stalin’s personal whims, and those were synonymous with the State. If you watch the truly dark and hilarious comedy, “The Death of Stalin,” you’ll see a society dedicated to keeping all of its members in a realistic state of terror at every moment. The belligerence and cowardice and sheer ruthlessness of Stalin’s ministers in vying to placate the dictator made a strange hinge with what American society seemed to be like: an inability to tolerate opposing views; trivial controversies being conflated with important ones, and both being fought over to the death because they’d been turned into quasi-religious battles between ideological purity or damnation; a deep unease that the body politic was being torn apart and that all of us, no matter what we believed, were entitled to get our own way.
At any rate, I read the book and I came across a chapter in which Madame Mandelstam talked about the fate of her husband’s fellow poets, notably Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, and Pasternak. And I was fascinated by how the competing ideologies of the day completely destroyed the lives of Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva, both of whom eventually committed suicide. Madame Mandelstam also tells of her husband’s struggle to regain “his sense of inner rightness” once he ran afoul of Soviet orthodoxies. When he emerged from that crucible, he wrote the great poems of his final year of exile from Moscow, the Voronezh Notebooks, before being transported to one of Stalin’s forced labor camps where he died, so it’s reported, from starvation and disease. But for reasons that have more to do with the arbitrary nature of Stalinist terror, in which some died for ostensible resistance to the regime, while others died for no reason at all, swept up at random by the recurrent purges, both Akhmatova and Pasternak were inexplicably spared. That was the initial germ for the poem, the subconscious atmosphere, you might call it. The actual content of the poem, however, was sparked off by re-reading the letters among Tsvetaeva, Rilke, and Pasternak. As I read them, I became more and more repulsed by the hyper-Romantic attitudes, not to mention the gush of mutual flattery they dished out to one another in this truly drippy, epistolary threesome. Despite my personal revulsion, I still think the letters are astonishing documents: they give you not only the tenor of the era, but they show three highly intelligent and gifted poets, not exactly lying to one another, but writing past each other in some essential way: as if the other two weren’t real people with real problems, but idealized selves that they longed to incorporate into their own poetic egos. Underneath all the Hail, O Great One rhetoric, you can sense the urgent need of both Pasternak and Tsvetaeva for Rilke’s poetic seal of approval, even as Rilke pulls his usual inscrutable sphinx act by hiding behind elaborate compliments and windy statements about the sacred nature of poetic utterance. And yet the more I read about these three, the more I could see the desperation of their lives—and particularly of Tsvetaeva and Pasternak, who persisted in his loyalty to her when everyone else had abandoned her—being transmuted in their letters into high Romantic rhetoric that was, nonetheless, eerily prophetic of their future suffering. Cringeworthy, yes, but scaresome in what they foreshadowed.
Still, it makes sense to me that a poet like Yeats was rumored to have read Rilke, thrown the book across the room in disgust, and sat down and wrote, if I remember rightly, “The Tower.” Anyway, a poem like “The Tower” that has no patience for sentimentalities about absolute inwardness, or silly-solemn poppycock about love being “two solitudes which border, protect, and greet each other.” When you realize that such metaphysical hocus-pocus enabled Rilke to slip away from his marriage to Clara Westhoff, not to mention his daughter, Ruth, it’s hard not to agree with John Berryman’s assessment in “Dream Song 3” that “Rilke was a jerk.” But then so was Berryman and so, at different times, are we all.
Anyway, Rilke as a BAD MAN is its own form of cliché, and so I can’t honestly say that I regret reading Rilke’s flattering letters to countesses in which he pretty aggressively angles to get himself lodged in their castles. There’s something almost slapstick in all this epistolary grovel, and it’s that quality of the ludicrous sorting with the sublime which makes Rilke seem like just another benighted Earthling. That said, the guy could write, just as Pasternak and Tsvetaeva could write. The tragedy of being caught up in a murderous age, as well as the brutally self-justifying ways in which NKVD agents felt themselves entitled to arrest and torture their fellows in the name of achieving ideological purity, is something that writing the poem helped me to understand. That, and the sheer ordinariness of Rilke writing a letter to Tsvetaeva adroitly keeping her at bay when she proposes they become lovers. And once he finishes the letter, picking up an underwear catalog and ordering some soft silken long johns. All of that speaks to our time, but not too directly: you have to squint a little to see the resonances.
As to the speech of other people, and spoken speech in general, book after book, and without really trying to, I’ve moved closer and closer to spoken speech while trying to hew as closely as I can to the look of things, how they actually present themselves when I perceive them. A kind of purged accuracy is what I’m after imagistically, whereas I want the idiom to sound both natural and original. My mother’s way of talking was the ideal amalgam of down-home speech and unstrained eloquence.
Solar: You like to say that poets should be wary not to have a fixed notion of their own “poetic voice.” How has your practice of keeping your “voice” fluid evolved over time? Is it as simple as trying to avoid habit — trying long lines if you’ve written short ones for a while, and so on?
Tom Sleigh: It can be that simple—realizing that form is cognitive, as Thom Gunn once told me. That is, as you’re trying to make a rhyme on “moon,” if all you can come up with is “June,” well, you’ve got your work cut out for you. To discover something more interesting you’ve got to think a lot more deeply into what you’re trying to say. But as to the larger question about poetic voice, I remember having a truly depressing conversation with an older poet who said that he only found his voice when he’d thrown off the influence of Modernist X. And he had indeed found HIS VOICE. Every poem sounded pretty much alike. His subjects were more like corpses in a mortuary waiting to be embalmed by his “signature style.” It was only when he wrote most unlike HIS VOICE, and turned his gifts in an unfamiliar direction, that he could write something that didn’t feel canned.
I know of another poet who had a highly eccentric style that his epigones followed slavishly. But whereas this poet was like an octopus playing eight different pianos at once, his acolytes had only two hands and could only manage to swat the same few keys over and over. Sometimes you write more originally and interestingly when you write least like how you think you should sound, and write more like how you think other poets sound. There’s no formula for any of this. It’s new every time. If you’re looking for a reliable method to relieve you of the burden of having to tear up your style and create a new one every so often, you’re doomed, I think. Or at least I am. Some poets go forward by changing their linguistic spots, and for better and worse, I see myself as one of them. Though between what I think and what I actually write, I try to keep a strict separation: best not to get too self-conscious about it.
Solar: You’re the Program Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at Hunter College, so here at Solar, we know you as a teacher first and foremost. How do you think teaching has affected your writing practice?
Tom Sleigh: I don’t know. I’m not sure how my teaching has affected anyone that I’ve taught, let alone anything I’ve written. I’m inclined to say, Not much, since I’ve always been the kind of teacher and writer who’s been able to keep very strict boundaries between the writer and the teacher. All I can really answer is that as a teacher, I hope I’ve communicated a love of the art that goes way beyond who wins this year’s book prizes—I always find it bizarre that anyone cares about such stuff in a literary way. Yes, in an ego way, I get it entirely and I’m as guilty of it as anyone. But I try to keep a strict separation between the circus end of publishing and the artistic one. I recently came across a book of poems by an English poet, Charles Boyle: incredibly fresh poems, smart, idiosyncratic, funny. He’s out there doing something no one else is. And that’s the kind of aloofness that I hope my teaching instills in people: that is, there’s something far more important and noble in the art than all the folderol attached to a career. When I’m in class and we’re talking about work, it’s an utterly impersonal love of a third thing that all of us are talking about: not me, not you, but the poem on the table. Beyond that, I’ve immensely enjoyed talking to students year after year about poems that I love and that I can bring their way.
That said, I never set out to be a teacher. I did all kinds of stupid menial labor jobs for years and years: I ran a blueprint machine in a civil engineering firm back when they used ammonia. At the end of the day, it was like being gassed. Very likely, I should have been wearing a respirator, but expressing such concerns would probably have gotten me fired. And I needed the money. I also worked construction, especially swimming pool construction, which I really liked. Then I was a gardener, the one job I truly loved—pruning and planting and transplanting, working outdoors all day, getting to know the people I worked with and for, some of them immensely generous and kind. I’ll never forget the bricklayer, also named Tom, a big bluff Irish-American guy with a handlebar moustache, who interceded with the owner to rent a jackhammer when I was asked to dig a fairly deep fishpond in stony ground with nothing but a pick-axe, telling the owner in a no-nonsense voice, “Look, you’re killing your help, it’s taking way too long, if you rent the guy a jackhammer, he’ll have this done in a day. And to the owner’s credit, he immediately got it and did as he was asked. Then when it became clear that I had no idea how to use a jackhammer, Tom very kindly and gently showed me how. He was a great teacher: he cared about me as a human being, he wasn’t afraid to stick up for me, and he believed in my ability to learn—three qualities that I hope I’ve learned from him.
Solar: Speaking of teaching at Hunter: you like to remind your students that our connections with each other as young writers are bonds for life. What do you think is crucial in a good friendship between writers, or artists more broadly? What do you think writers can do to be better friends to each other?
Tom Sleigh: I was immensely lucky. When I was young, I had the example of Seamus Heaney who always had the time of day for everyone, who never put on airs, and who thought it was his duty as a human being “to suffer fools.” Just like Thom Gunn, he offered me immediate terms of equality. He never praised his own work to you: the only thing I ever remember him saying in reference to his own work was about a poem that he’d asked me “to hit”—Seamus’s way of asking for criticism. He always made it easy for me to tell him exactly what I thought, and when I had reservations, I weighed in without a second thought. But in this particular poem, I loved it and told him so. I think he was embarrassed by my enthusiasm and said, a little shyly: “Well, I guess it’ll have to do.” And then he sighed, “If only there were more like this one.” That kind of modesty and dedication to a certain standard that was highly idiosyncratic even as it looked backward toward past poetry and forward to a future dream of oneself, kept him from turning into an “eminence grise.”
As far as my own contemporaries, I have a handful of friends that I send work to, and they send work to me. We’ve been doing this for 45 years. We’ve never fallen out or gotten annoyed or let our egos intrude in the pursuit to write the best poems that we can possibly write. For example, Alan Shapiro’s and Michael Collier’s poems are as crucial to me as my own poems. I feel almost NO difference between what they write and what I write. It’s a wonderful extension of self that at the same time is selfless. And to get to know Alan and Michael in that way, to understand who they are as human beings, and how the human being and the poet are connected, but not in ways that you can neatly predict, has been one of the great solaces of my life. When I finally do die, they’ll be a part of me just as I’ll be a part of them. Love of that kind comes rarely, and it only comes if you’re lucky enough to have such friends. When Yeats wrote, “Say that my glory was I had such friends,” it was more than stirring rhetoric. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. To applaud your friends’ poems even as you envy them, however, is a desirable kind of envy because it spurs you on to try to write the best poem that you can possibly write. You’re writing for your friends, not against them, and all of you are writing toward an ideal of poetic expression that’s personal, highly idiosyncratic, and that each of you intuitively comprehends. As I said earlier, NOT to know too much about it keeps it fresh. And as you change and age and your body changes and ages, that understanding has to keep changing too. You can’t fall back on anything you’ve written in the past because your friends are there and they’ll simply say, “Yeah, yeah, been there, done that. Now do something else, something stranger, something better, OK?”