Interview by Michael McCarthy
AN INTERVIEW WITH TOM DALEY, AUTHOR OF FAR CRY (Ethel Zine)
Tom Daley is Boston’s bard. His dedication to the craft should be obvious to anybody who’s spent an hour with him, for in that hour, he will have likely recited any number of poems from memory, as he does in this interview. Employed as a machinist for more than twenty years, he left this work to pursue poetry full-time, making him one of perhaps a half-dozen people I know who make their living exclusively as practitioners and instructors of poetry. You’d be forgiven for mistaking him for one of the Boston Brahmin due to his love of Robert Lowell, his friends at local universities, and his tweed. That perception collapses once it becomes clear that he is, quite literally, a card-carrying socialist. Politics is at a far remove from his most recent chapbook Far Cry. Intimate, searing, musical, and poignant, the collection probes the death of a friend from whom he had become estranged. The nature of their separation reveals itself verse by verse, as in the terse and pointed poem “Hearsay”:
Was it better then
that I fractured
our fixture with silent
regret, a long disavowal,
rebuffing your overtures
with thin excuses,
writing you back
with the electronic
messaging you hated
when you had asked me
to call?
With his first collection House You Cannot Reach (about the death of his mother), Daley proved himself a ceaselessly inventive, always forceful voice. In Far Cry, he continues his exploration of death and mourning in a voice distinctly, vibrantly his own. In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discuss his poetic influences, Leon Trotsky, and the essence of goodbyes.
Michael: What drew you to elegy in the first place?
Tom: I’ve always been fascinated by death. Probably the poem that made me realize what poets could do was an elegy called “Point Shirley” by Sylvia Plath. I came upon it shortly after my grandmother had died. My grandmother had lived in the summertime on the shore. Plath’s grandmother had a house on a strip of land called Point Shirley, which is a peninsula off of Winthrop, Massachusetts, just north of Logan Airport. It was such an extraordinarily beautiful, well-written poem, so full of onomatopoeia and assonance. For instance, the first stanza goes something like this:
From Water-Tower Hill to the brick prison
The shingle booms, bickering under
The sea’s collapse.
Snowcakes break and welter. This year
The gritted wave leaps
The seawall and drops onto a bier
Of quahog chips,
Leaving a salty mash of ice to whiten
In my grandmother’s sand yard. She is dead,
Whose laundry snapped and froze here, who
Kept house against
What the sluttish, rutted sea could do.
Squall waves once danced
Ship timbers in through the cellar window;
She goes on. It’s just such a beautiful poem. And it was the poem that made me realize how serious lament and elegy could be beautifully expressed without any kind of sentimentality. I mean, the subject was definitely sentimental: Grandma has died. Grandma cooked apple loaves and wheat loaves and left them out to cool on the window. But the treatment is anything but sentimental. She’s using a lot of what T.S. Eliot called the “objective correlative.” He didn’t invent the term, but he applied it to poetry. The idea is to, instead of discussing emotions directly, use images that lead the reader in the direction of an emotional tone. So that’s what she was doing. I was just blown away by that poem. We had to read that in the Norton Anthology of Poetry in a creative writing class.
And I’ve always loved [Dylan Thomas’s] “Do not go gentle into that good night,” which is a kind of pre-elegy. And Emily Dickinson’s self-elegy “Because I could not stop for death” and her “Essential oils are wrung”:
“Essential Oils — are wrung —
The Attar from the Rose
Be not expressed by Suns — alone —
It is the gift of Screws —
The General Rose — decay —
But this — in Lady’s Drawer
Make Summer — When the Lady lie
In Ceaseless Rosemary —
So she’s talking about preservation and memory and death. The memory of the writing about something is going to stick around in the same way that if you squeeze essential oil out of the rose, bottle it up, and put it in a drawer, it’ll stick around much longer than the woman who put it in her drawer does. Rosemary is for remembrance, from Shakespeare. I think Ophelia says it in Hamlet.
Then I got very interested in poets like John Berryman and Robert Lowell, who wrote a lot of elegy.
Michael: So Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson—these are some pretty heavy hitters. Would you consider them a direct influence on the poems in Far Cry?
Tom: Oh yeah. There’s a poem by Robert Lowell called “To Delmore Schwartz.” This is in Life Studies. Delmore Schwartz was a poet and short story writer who burned out early and went mad and died very young. Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift is loosely based on Delmore Schwartz. So this poem is talking about how Lowell and Delmore Schwartz lived together, not too far from here, in 1946. The camaraderie that Lowell expresses in that poem was something I very much felt for my friend Phil, for whom all these poems are written. The poem about Delmore Schwartz starts:
Cambridge 1946
We couldn’t even keep the furnace lit!
Even when we had disconnected it,
the antiquated
refrigerator gurgled mustard gas
through your mustard-yellow house
and spoiled our long maneuvered visit
from T.S. Eliot’s brother, Henry Ware. . .
And it goes on. It’s just a really delightful evocation of a kind of madcap connection with somebody. I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, but I had read it so many times that it was in my head. Lowell has given me and so many poets permission to turn common relationships, nothingout of the ordinary, into poetry. Even though he was an aristocrat, he was a great poet of the ordinary.
So Lowell is probably the biggest influence in Far Cry. But the language, Dylan Thomas is very much there.
Michael: I could feel Dylan Thomas’s propulsion in it. Systems of consonance and assonance keep the poems moving forward at such a sure pace. And it’s interesting what you said about the Norton Anthology because I have the same anthology. I had to get it for a lyric poetry class, in which we read quite a few elegies. Foremost among them was John Milton’s “Lycidas.”
Tom: That’s a beautiful poem.
Michael: Sort of the elegy to end all elegies. There are certainly many big names that have contributed to the centuries-long tradition of elegiac poetry. When you decided to set pen to paper for Far Cry, were you ever intimidated by the other names in that canon?
Tom: I don’t understand this idea of the “anxiety of influence.” I’m very happy to be influenced. If somebody said “That sounds like a Robert Lowell poem,” I would be very honored by that. I think it was John Crowe Ransom to whom somebody once said, “That sounds like an old poem.” He said, “It had damn well better!”
So no, I wasn’t really thinking at all about anything except the subject at hand. I was in mourning. This guy, who I’d been very close to but had become estranged from, died. It was a double blow because there was assurance we’d never be able to patch up our differences. He didn’t even realize we were estranged. He was oblivious to it.
Michael: Really?
Tom: Maybe he caught on after a while. He would write me as if nothing was wrong, asking, “When are you gonna come for a visit?” It had been about three years when I had had it with him. He was a nasty motherfucker.
Michael: I thought “estranged” was such an interesting phrase to use for a relationship petering out or fading away. Why did you choose that particular word “estrangement”?
Tom: Well, for me it wasn’t a fading out. I made a very conscious decision that I didn’t want anything to do with him again. I mean, not anything. We would write. I’d send him cards, and he’d send me cards. But I didn’t ever want to see him again. To me, estrangement is not petering out. It can be the result of a relationship petering out, but our relationship didn’t peter out. It was very hot and alive when I ended it. One of the last things he said to me is “I think of you as a brother.” And I thought to myself, “Yeah, a bad brother.”
Michael: Moving to your background, I gathered from my research that you were a machinist. Are you still a machinist now?
Tom: No, I’m retired. I lead writing workshops. That’s how I make my living.
Michael: When did that transition occur?
Tom: Let’s see. I had been active in a socialist group for many years, which is why I became a machinist. Then, I left the socialist group in 1997, but I continued being a machinist until about 2006. In 1998, I took a workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education, and then a couple of years later I took another one at the same place. This is all while I’m working as a machinist. The woman who taught the workshop said to me, “You ought to be leading this workshop, not just being a participant of it.” She did six eight-week sessions every year. She turned over three of them to me. That was when my career started, but I was still working as a machinist. Around 2006, I figured out a way that I could make enough money to live on and not have to do the machinist work.
Michael: And did you have a writing practice before your classes in the Center for Adult Education?
Tom: It’s funny. I probably wrote more when I was a machinist. That was after I stopped doing political work. I didn’t have time to write much when I was doing the political work.
Michael: How would you describe the political work you did?
Tom: Do you know who Leon Trotsky was?
Michael: Of course I do.
Tom: I was in a group that called themselves Trotskyists. The work that I did was mostly recruiting college students off of campuses. Boston, of course, is a big college town. The Ku Klux Klan came to Springfield, Illinois in 1992, or they were planning to. The Chicago branch of this group I worked with organized a “Stop the Klan” rally, and I was the press person. I worked for a week doing that. Do you know who Mumia Abu-Jamal is?
Michael: Yes.
Tom: The group I worked with sort of made his case an international cause célèbre. Certainly people had been working for years on his behalf before we came along, but we really made a big deal about getting as many different people as possible to call for his removal from death row. And he eventually did. There was an event for that in Chicago, and I did the press then as well.
I went to Berlin when the Berlin Wall came down. The Trotskyist position is that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers’ state. In other words, there had been a working class revolution there, but workers’ democracy had been smashed by the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Michael: Do you see your poetry as political?
Tom: Not in the sense that it’s promoting an agenda. There’s a word, which is a pejorative, tendentious, which basically means a poet promoting a tendency. No, not really. I have written political poems. I have a book called House You Cannot Reach: Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems, which is actually on Kindle. These poems are all in my mother’s voice and one of them—actually, that didn’t make it into the book—but I did write one called “My Mother Tries to Explain the Position of the Trotskyists in Relation to the Election.” She was a big Obama supporter. Our position was that the Democrats were just another party of the ruling class.
Michael: My introduction to your poetry was the 95th Annual Grolier Street Poetry Reading, where I saw you perform. You just happened to be the person reading when I arrived. I wanted to ask how you found your poetic voice, and when I say voice I mean your performative voice, the voice you use when reading your poetry. How long did it take to develop that voice?
Tom: I feel like I had a long apprenticeship at the Cantab Lounge. When I got to the Cantab, I hadn’t been reading at open mics very much. I noticed that certainly all of the slam poets and a lot of the people reading at the open mics memorized their poems. If you’ve memorized your poems, you inhabit the poem in a very different way than when you read it off the page. Do you memorize any poetry?
Michael: Yes, I have about six in my arsenal that I can recite from memory.
Tom: So you must know for yourself that when you’re standing in front of an audience, first of all you’re able to make eye contact with a lot of people. There’s something about the connection you make with an audience that actually modulates the way you read poetry. That’s my experience anyway. I learned over time what kind of things seem to have an impact on people. I was partly trained by their response, to be more voluble, to be louder, to change the rhythm, to slow down, to be a little ironic. And also, my preferred way to read is to just read a whole set of poems as if it were a kind of suite of poems, as if I was just reading the whole book through without any interruption. But I also know that especially people who aren’t poets really appreciate a little introduction to something, sometimes humorous or informational. I learned to throw in a little of that.
The greatest teacher, really, is memorizing the poem and inhabiting the poem and thinking about what those words mean. There’s so many poets who recite monotonously. Have you ever heard Louise Glück recite poetry?
Michael: I have.
Tom: (scoffs)
Michael: Are you otherwise a fan of Louise Glück?
Tom: Not at all.
Michael: Really?
Tom: I love her early stuff.
Michael: Like Firstborn? I believe it was her first collection.
Tom: She has a poem called “Our Hallows,” which I think is in her first book. And another poem called “December on the Croton on Hudson.” Those are just astonishing poems. She was a great wordsmith in those poems, and in the last twenty years, she made a very conscious decision, it would seem, to be as plain-spoken as possible and to ditch anything that smacked of poetic diction. Robert Pinsky says of her, “The language is almost invisible.” But to me, poetry is not invisible language. If language is invisible, then it’s not a poem. A poem to me is not just a statement of lyrical feeling, or a screed, or an angry polemic, or a lament, or an elegy. It’s the words. The words are important, and the way they’re shaped, and the way they shape the content. That’s really really important. Coleridge said poetry is “the best words in the best order.” “I can’t say that about anything I’ve read that Louise Glück has written since the early days, except some parts of “The Wild Iris.” But I was flabbergasted when she won the Nobel Prize.
Michael: Speaking of poetry as visible language, your poetry on the page is—perhaps “ordered” isn’t the right word because I sense a rambunctiousness in the sound of the poems—but they’re all ordered mainly into couplets. How did you decide on the form of the couplet for Far Cry?
Tom: It’s just a form I’ve been writing in for a long time. The beauty of a couplet is it ventilates the poem so that it’s a little easier for the reader to take in the two-line bits. My couplets are enjambed many times, so they’re not true couplets in the true sense of the word. But I think that idea of an emptiness in between–where you have to pause a little bit–slows you down and gives you a break as you’re reading. To read a long single stanza that’s fifty lines long, that’s pretty intimidating. Especially since poetry, if it’s done well, is going to be something you’ll have to stop and think about almost every line.
Michael: For the reasons you outlined, do you think that couplet in the way that you practiced it lends itself well to elegy specifically?
Tom: There’s a hole in the heart of the elegiac poet. When the poet writes elegy, there’s a hole in her or his heart. And so, the couplets represent that hole so that at every instance I know I can’t bring him back with my poems. Not that I even want to. But the absence is being communicated by that empty space. Somebody’s gonna say, “What a stupid, gimmicky thing to say!” But I had never thought of it until you asked me that. I wouldn’t prescribe it necessarily to anybody else, but for me it allowed that absence to be palpably, physically visible on the page. You wouldn’t necessarily hear it when I read the poem.
Michael: It’s interesting. The reason I ask is that a poet friend of mine in Philadelphia said that to me when he was reading some poetry I had written in memory of my late uncle. He said that the form lent itself particularly well because of those gaps. Do you consider this collection to be a kind of goodbye?
Tom: Yes. It’s valedictory in the original Latin sense, as in to say goodbye. But I don’t think I’ll ever be finished saying goodbye to him. As you probably know about your feelings about your uncle, there’s never a resolution to grief or mourning. The intensity of it quiets. You get distracted by other things. But I’ll always be mourning him. It’s not an “I’m finished with you.” I probably won’t write any more poems about him anytime soon. But it’s a goodbye, not an “I’m done with you.”
Michael: Do you feel that, even though grief doesn’t have resolution, that your poems do?
Tom: That the poems have resolution?
Michael: Yes, that they propose a question which is resolved by the last line.
Tom: Well, in some cases that’s true. I mean, most of the poems are not open-ended in the end. They’re sealed off. They’re not like a crown of sonnets where you’re moving to the next thing. But they’re utterly connected. They’re an unfolding narrative. The last poem in the book is a total resolution, but it also harkens back.
Never a time like this to know
That the future will find us
But never let us go.
So that’s not the end. “The future will find us”—what we had will continue in some strange way, most certainly in my heart, in my unconscious, as long as I’m capable of recollection. It’s going to be there. So not a resolution in the psychological sense, but certainly that was a finish to that poem. That poem ends, but it’s an ending that loops back into the experience that’s being described in the poem.
Michael McCarthy‘s work has appeared in Beyond Queer Words, The Adroit Journal, and Prairie Schooner, among others. His debut poetry chapbook Steve: An Unexpected Gift is forthcoming from the Moonstone Arts Center in Philadelphia in early 2023. Originally from Massachusetts, he currently studies at the University of Carlos III in Madrid, Spain.
