[Guest Author Note: Thank you to Jess and Tony for this fascinating interview and to Hanging Loose Press for permission to reproduce the poems discussed in it!]
JM: Your poetry taps out a wry tango with history; you’ve looked at it, through it, over it, beyond it, within it, and around it, describing the historical perspective of the backward-glancing present as “the cartoon with the one perennial frame.” And so we’re here to speak of poetry’s intersection with history, personal and collective.
Let’s start with the former. How has your writing process changed with age? I’m not referring to changes in style, like your shift from pop collage to a more conversational mode, but rather, to changes in the way you experience the writing process.
TT: My first thought is: how can aging not have changed my writing process (along with everything else!)? But when I try to figure out what those changes have actually been, I draw a blank. If the “writing process” is the manner in which the poems are made, regardless of individual content or style, I think I have to say that there hasn’t been perceptible (perceptible to me, anyway) change since I got going in the early ‘60s. Perhaps I mistake what you are getting at. Feel free to steer me onto the right track!
JM: I’m afraid I only have directions to the wrong track. It’s located at the intersection of poetry and history in the broadest sense: that is, at the site where poetry catalyzes cultural shifts that can, ultimately, be historical in their import. I’ve always seen your poems as being quietly countercultural — “The City in the Throes of Despair,” for example, crashes the ethos of “accomplishment” against the sort of openness that allows for “beauty to interrupt constantly.” Do you see your poems as countercultural?
TT: The poem you refer to was written in 1967, when the “real” counterculture (politics and sociology more than poetry) was well on its way to being a force in national life; but my work had nothing to do with that, nor was I personally very much a part of it, although I knew many poets who were. I’m not so much countercultural as a classic outsider, whose work is perhaps quietly subversive. Part of the subversion can be a free-wheeling parody of conventional thinking, with an insistence on being gratuitous, stubbornly irrelevant to “normal” society and daily reality. The poem in question is surreal and absurdist, with satiric reference to Robert Moses, real estate developer Samuel Lefrak, and the Borough of Queens (where I grew up). I write different kinds of poems, so one could find examples that are other than what I have just described. But I would maintain that I’m a subversive outsider rather than a counterculturalist, which usually implies an agenda beyond poetry itself.
JM: This differentiation you’ve made between the countercultural and the subversive is very useful; it offers a clearer vocabulary for discussing poetry’s role(s) in the public sphere. Now you’ve got me thinking about the value of anchoring subversion in a rich array of historical references, as you do in recent poems like “Misprision” and “Five Days in June.” When you find yourself animated by the mischievous impulse to pen something “gratuitous” or “stubbornly irrelevant” to conventional society, what historical period do you find most compelling to engage with, and why?
TT: It’s really whatever comes across my radar and suddenly seems right for inclusion in a particular poem. I’ve read enough history — starting in earnest at the age of eight — so that the material exists in my head as a kind of repertory. But the historical aspect may not be the primary motivation for the poem. “Misprision” — an archaic word for misunderstanding (among other meanings) — is about double entendres, a couple of them rather pornographic (Sappho’s original tongue, indeed!); the whole is made ambiguous by a naïve narrator going through a series of misprisions. Ambiguity is a prime feature of the subversive, at least my version of it. I’m very comfortable with ambiguity in poetry, and with art in general, but the average person is not. (The meaning should be clear, damn it!) Irony is another feature, and irony is often ambiguous. “Five Days in June” starts out as a lampoon of the clichéd and ubiquitous “Today,” used as an introductory phrase carrying bogus authority for a point that is not in the least proven: Today, Americans are less inclined . . . Today, women prefer . . . This has annoyed me enough over time so that a couple of years ago I found myself composing this short poem that I think ridicules the device but is entertaining beyond that. So I don’t know if this poem is really “historical” — though it does reference the Ottoman Empire — since what could be less historical than Today?
In any event, in both these poems it is aspects of language that drive the car, with historical references, among other items, along for the ride. In general, I’m pretty eclectic. In my book Winter Journey, there are mentions and scenarios that include the storm god Teshub, medieval Baghdad, the Mongols, Plutarch, the Battle of Kursk, Catherine the Great, John Calvin, Samuel Barber, John Clare, Val Lewton, Hedy Lamarr, George Antheil, Genghis Khan, Ogodei Khan, En-Hedu-Ana, Sargon of Akkad, the Sumerians, Phoenicia, Elijah, Ahab, Jezebel, Genghis Khan again, Parthia, Sappho, Charles VIII of France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Sassanians.
JM: I remain curious about what drives your propensity for more distant historical allusions. So I’ll conclude by asking you this: if you were to embark upon a sustained poetic foray into the life of some figure from the more distant past, who would you choose?
I don’t think my sensibility is suited to do a long-poem biographical treatment of one individual, à la Robert Browning, or Byron — or my late friend and colleague Paul Violi, who was wonderfully adept at creating extended studies of historical figures (or invented ones, for that matter!). I wouldn’t be able to sustain it, and it would end up as something else. As to a propensity for distant historical allusions, that began long before I started writing poetry. I think it had to do with escape. I often found (find) the present limited and unsatisfying. History has always given me somewhere else to go.
* * *
The City in the Throes of Despair
The great worm of the north, in whose footsteps we tread,
eludes us with a thousand lightnings.
However the bus, the nourishment of the city, pulls in,
and nothing has been accomplished though beauty
interrupts constantly, interpolating a row of moments
like a pink balustrade basking in the sun.
The buses and planes go forward in clouds of yeast and salt,
lurching over the pipes and turbines of the city
as Wyoming would slide down the coast of Norway
and I look from the plane as from the vantage point of a roof
to see the Lefrak Building shielding my eyes from Manhattan.
Lefrak, whose first name has escaped me — like Catherine
the Great's last — into the wild blue,
but who with Moses, whose first name is an anticlimax,
has left us the Queens of today and tomorrow.
We surprise the great worm in the frozen waste of his sleep.
Our magic ax and feather do their work
and the monster lies helpless in scattered and giggling pieces.
The five boroughs are safe and rainbows arch over the brick,
bright birds with their pinions are free to range once more,
but in whose colorful wake our hurtling plane seems spiritless,
planning to touch only Chicago and perhaps Detroit,
with a landing in the meantime however subtle meaning an emergency,
with no one congenial until reaching the ground, parachutes billowing,
and relaxing on the train back to New York, the parachute as a souvenir.
Tony Towle, 1967
from The History of the Invitation: New & Selected Poems 1963-2000
(Hanging Loose Press, 2001)
Misprision
someone said Sappho could be understood
only through her original tongue
and I said I didn’t think so
as educational as that would probably be
someone wrote that Charles VIII
entered France in the 1490’s
and I said to myself: I don’t think so
he was born many years before that
but he did penetrate Italy in 1494
as far as Naples, and didn’t withdraw
for an entire year, which seems extraordinary
by today’s standards
but he finally lost virility and everything else
by hitting his head on a doorway in 1498
someone wrote that gardening was a literature
in which scholars nibbled at the edges
of what appeared to be an insurmountable edifice
and I thought: that makes perfect sense,
nibbling is an authentic scholarly pursuit
and eventually the edifice will get lower
and can be surmounted
somebody said that cretins painted murals
and got out of labyrinths but that seems unlikely
and someone wrote to say it’s time for a poetry museum
but I don’t understand how anyone could possibly know that
and isn’t that what our books are already
glassless vitrines
where you’re allowed to run your fingers over the art
or nibble on the implications
or loiter in the white passageways between the lines
hoping to meet the lenders to the exhibition
Tony Towle, 2004
from Winter Journey, Hanging Loose Press, 2008
Five Days in June
Today, the most overused introductory is Today,.
Today, nobody knows what the hell they’re talking about.
Today will be yesterday tomorrow, and it will be clear
that nobody knew what the hell they were talking about.
Today, I will put ten dollars on Pigs in Moonlight, take my winnings
and disappear into the Ottoman Empire.
Today, the Ottoman Empire is a furniture store on Queens Boulevard.
Tony Towle, 2015
from Noir: Poems 2008-2017, Hanging Loose Press, 2017
* * *
[Tony Towle, a quintessential poet of the New York School and the city of New York itself, is the author of thirteen poetry collections, including The History of the Invitation: New and Selected Poems 1983-2000 (Hanging Loose Press, 2001). His most recent collection is Noir: Poems 2008-2017 (Hanging Loose Press, 2017).]
[Jess Matuozzi received her PhD in English and African American Studies from Yale University in 2016. She is currently a fire dancer, primate conservation activist, and English teacher at Trinity School in Manhattan.]