An Interview with Tim Seibles

An interview with Tim Seibles, originally published in Little Patuxent Review in 2019.

Tim Seibles asks an audacious question: “Why not a sublimely reckless poetry?”

That question, in the open letter that begins his collection Buffalo Head Solos, sounds like a way to rouse a complacent public, a population lately more interested in Instagram pix and snappy political comeback Tweets than poetry of wakefulness.

“Being human is wildly complicated if one is attentive,” Seibles has said. His language, his choices of voice and persona, of form and of topic – from the voice of a cat with a speech impediment or a homeless man in a coffee shop parking lot – show evidence that Seibles is both complicated and attentive.

His work references African languages, Hindu goddesses, CNN, McDonald’s fries, Dick Cheney, Wonder bread, Pablo Neruda, extraterrestrials, “the sumptuous weight of good company,” comic book characters. There’s something modernly Whitmanesque in his inclusiveness.

His most recent book, One Turn Around the Sun, manages to chronicle the decline and full lives of his ailing parents and to speak in the ambitious voices of a mosquito, a virus, a cow.

In the citation for the 2012 National Book Awards, for which his book Fast Animal was a finalist, the National Book Foundation notes, “Tim Seibles’ work is proof: the new American poet can’t just speak one language. In his new book, he fuses our street corners’ quickest wit, our violent vernaculars, and our numerous tongues of longing and love.”

His poetry both imagines speculative wonders – what would happen if all the white people on Earth rocketed to the moon? And his work recalls ordinary happenings – two high school students wait for a bus, watching a beautiful girl, a memory so fresh it becomes viscerally painful, as in his poem “Terry Moore.”

I don’t think I’ve ever understood
how lonely I am, but I was
closer to it at fifteen because
I didn’t know anything: my heart
so near the surface of my skin
I could have moved it with my hand.

For his own poetry, Seibles has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Theodore Roethke Prize and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award.

His books include One Turn Around the Sun (2017), Fast Animal (2012), Buffalo Head Solos (2004); and Body Moves (1988). Seibles served from 2016 to 2018 as Virginia’s Poet Laureate, and has taught at Cave Canem and for more than thirty years at Old Dominion University.

He retired in 2019, and hopes to spend more time on writing projects, teaching workshops, traveling, and learning Spanish so he can read poets that have influenced him, such as Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Federico García Lorca, in their original language, “just as a sign of respect.”

Seibles spoke by phone earlier this spring.

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Susan Thornton Hobby: What first drew you to poetry?

Tim Seibles: A combination of things. One is I came into my middle teens in the 60s. The black arts movement was a pretty big deal. There were a number of poets in that movement, Amiri Baraka (at the time he was known as Leroi Jones), Sonia Sanchez, the Last Poets, who were certainly known as much as musicians as poets. Those were the minds that were shaping what I was thinking about what it meant to be black, what it meant to be engaged in the issues of the time, some of which were issues of identity. I have probably always been at least somewhat extroverted. I like the idea of being outspoken. Poetry was one way that one could speak out loud even if one was not talking, even if one was simply on the page.

I also felt as a restless young man, that there were ideas and possibilities that just weren’t being discussed, things that were missing from what felt to me was an important cultural discourse. Even though I didn’t have the skill to write well as a young person, I had the itch to say what I thought wasn’t being said.

STH: What do forms like the villanelle and the ode offer you as a poet, compared with your verse that’s more free?

TS: When I think about the odes that I’ve written, they’re more free verse. They certainly wouldn’t be formal in any sense of the word. I like the ode as a song of celebration or a song of exploration, and Pablo Neruda’s many, many, many odes, I found very inspiring. Not only for any craft stuff, but for the sheer abundance of play in his odes. It was like watching a great jazz musician improvise.

What I love about the villanelle, in many cases those are ten- or eleven-syllable lines, they wouldn’t be purely iambic. … If you can maintain a strict syllabic count in each line, you’re going to get a very regular rhythm moving throughout, particularly if it’s punctuated by a rhyming pattern. It’s got a pulse. It moves for me closer towards singing. I think all poetry has song at its foundation, of course, but the villanelle, to me, feels much more like I’m just right on the edge of bursting into literal song. Most of the forms have their roots in music. The villanelle has its roots in the singing of the French peasants when they worked in the fields, they had a repeated pattern that they were singing that was drafted by poets into a written form. …

W. H. Auden his “Time will say nothing but I told you so./ Time only knows the price we have to pay;/ If I could tell you I would let you know.” [“If I Could Tell You”] That was the first villanelle I ever heard. Even as an undergraduate in a workshop, when I heard that, I went, “Oh me, oh my, I like the way that sounds.”

STH: Your most recent book touches on the protagonist’s parents. The poems about the father, such as “Ode to Your Father” and “Eight Ball,” describe a difficult, competitive relationship for the youth, but I hear more compassion as the son grows older for the father’s position. Could you talk about the fathers and sons in those poems?

TS: One Turn Around the Sun, you’ve probably surmised, is a pretty autobiographical book. I wouldn’t lay everything down as fact, but much of what is going on in that book is rooted in recollections, at least to my best ability to recall, things that I experienced as a kid in that house, raised by those two parents. My father, who I tried to capture in various ways, in the ode and in the longer poem, the three sessions from “The Hilt,” those are all very tied to my experience of being a child, and of being an older man watching his parents decline.

I tried to be as frank as I could be about my sense of my father, and both my anger as a younger man, but my great, great indebtedness to my father. … You realize at a certain point that virtually no parent can be an ideal parent. But what you realize as you live long enough – unless you’ve been in the hands of a parent who was genuinely menacing – most of us find that our parents did the best that they could. If we’re lucky, and we’re healthy enough to develop our bodies and our minds, you realize that you could not have accomplished the things that you have accomplished without someone really giving you a pretty solid sense of rootedness in the world.

Both of my parents were of that generation of black people who had so much to prove to a world that was trying to deny their full humanity. My mother sat in the backs of buses, my father sat in the backs of buses. My mother grew up in Philadelphia. People think all that was in the South, and that was not so. There were department stores she couldn’t go in, restaurants she couldn’t go in, and my father the same stuff. But they were both, which I find kind of remarkable from where I sit now, they were both really self-assured people. There was never any sense, in my recollection, of my father ever doubting himself, or my mother ever doubting herself.

I think my relationship to my father, like many relationships between sons and fathers, of course is going to be fraught with conflict, because there’s the battle for any developing human being to try to assert his or her autonomy. That necessarily comes at the expense of the parent’s authority. There’s conflict built into that. To the extent that I could, I just tried to capture the spectrum of the things that I experienced with my father, as well as with my mother. You want to be frank. You have to write with integrity. You can’t be an artist if you don’t have integrity. You can’t pretty things up. You can’t dance around what seems to be an honest part of your sense of things. But at the same time, you don’t want to only dwell on what is difficult about being a child in the family. You also want to recognize what was marvelous about those times. … You hope that if you’re careful enough, if you’re craft-savvy enough, that you make a good poem that other people can read and say, “Yeah, I think I know what you mean.”

STH: How was it to write about a mother “stolen from herself” with dementia, and to write lines such as “my good mother/ her mind a trail of crumbs in a woods flocked with birds” It sounds like there’s some dementia or cognitive loss there?

TS: I have found it very difficult to write about, and I find it very difficult to think about. My mother is, at this point, mid- to late stage Alzheimer’s. This book was written when the symptoms are really becoming profound. And so, yeah, I found it really agonizing in certain ways, but at the same time, but I know lots of people know exactly what this experience is like. So many people even in my own small circle of friends and acquaintances, so many of them have a mother, a father, some have both parents with Alzheimer’s, certainly a grandmother or a grandfather or a great aunt.

What I really wanted to do was somehow to treat this experience of their decline in a way that you want the work to speak honestly and clearly, but at the same time, I wanted the portrait of my mother to be complex enough that she was not only an Alzheimer’s patient, which is why in that last long poem “Mosaic,” you get a couple more shadings of her character.

STH: I see a strong dichotomy in your work between complacency and rebellion – you’ve written entire poems in a zombified persona’s voice, and many poems speak of raging against the machine.

TS: The poems in which the speaker seems complacent or zombified are the poems that I’m hoping are seen as satire. If they’re not, that’s okay too, because there are states of mind that are more complacent, more staid. What I’m also hoping, in the long poem “One Turn Around the Sun” or in other poems in other collections, is that the contrast between the more staid voice and the more wildly revolutionary sharpens the reader’s sense of each of them.

What is seen as zombified seems even more deeply that, and a poem like “One Turn Around the Sun” or poems that exhibit the deep flexing of the muscles against what appears to be institutional corruption, a culture that seems to exalt in a kind of mindlessness -- you hope that each of those types of poems serve to sharpen the other. You’re hoping that the full spectrum of your sensibilities can be realized in a collection. I like to write poems that are funny or playful or mischievous, but I also have poems that, I hope, appear to be intensely desperate, intensely angry, more than willing to trespass on people’s safe spaces. As I said, what drew me to poetry was the sense that I could talk out of turn if I needed to.

STH: Your work has a vein of erotic running through it. The healing power of sex -- “The sumptuous weight of good company” -- is a theme. How do you keep that kind of poem from feeling prurient and why do you need sex in there?

TS: If you asked me when I was probably sixteen did I think sex was a big important thing, I would have said yes, though I would have known virtually nothing about sex. There’s this magnificent pleasure that human beings can share, and for whatever reason, religions, most of them, have tried to make it a reason for us to apologize. I’ve always found that really offensive. Even though all I would have known about sex at sixteen was about kissing, I thought, there’s an intrinsic good here. I refuse to find any guilt in it. Even early on, I felt there was something marvelous about human contact that is quintessentially all about mutual delight. I would go so far as to say, there is something wildly sacred about that.

And so part of my interest as a young writer and extending to this very moment, is to try to figure out a way to write poems that are vividly erotic, but at the same time I want them to be elegant, I want them to be resonant, spiritual, in the sense that the spiritual embodies the things that we cannot name but we know are there. And so I want there to be some of that in the atmosphere of those poems. Some of them are more playful, some of them are more deeply erotic, but I hope that there would be something in them of the divine, and I mean divine in the large sense of the word, not in the particular idea of God.

I want there to be a place for the whole spectrum of the erotic world – I want there to be a place for that, in my work, and ultimately in the literature in general. … The sexual realm for me, it’s one of a few realms of shared human experience that really does speak to some aspect of our angelic self, the good self that enjoys being pleased and enjoys pleasing.

STH: You’ve written wonderful, candid poems about male friendship – poems to Melvin, José, and Terry. I don’t see a whole lot of contemporary poets don’t handling that topic.

TS: Much of my work is rooted in memories and in particular memories of relationships. I think for most of us, as younger people, our closest friends were people of the same sex, not always, but often. …When I look back at my life and I try to tell whatever I think I understand about this life, it’s almost impossible for those relationships not to be important, you know? The hours that I spent on the phone talking, for example, to Terry about the things we did together, about the things we dreamed of together, for example, of being football players in the NFL -- those are critical periods in a life, and even though you don’t know it, you’re really trying to solidify your own self, in terms of what matters, what doesn’t matter.

For better or for worse, when you’re young, you’re trying to figure out what it means to be masculine. And masculinity, certainly when I was young, was all about toughness and athletic heroism. So Terry and Melvin were people with whom I shared the hours of football and that someday we would be these amazing players and even though that never came to pass, for which I’m grateful (to be quite honest), it was really a critical part of solidifying my sense of what I was, or how I wanted to proceed in the world. I believed that I had something great in me. It didn’t turn out to be football, but there was something great in us and I think … as the world did what it did to young black boys, we had this other thing. We had our friendship and we had our belief that we could be superstars as a way to deflect much of what could be considered toxic in the world.

Also it’s important to me also to be a celebration of friendship. I believe deeply in the erotic world, but goodness gracious, how far would any of us in the world would have gotten without good friends in the world? I can’t conceive of myself without Melvin and Terry and others, of course, and my brother. I’m different from my brother, but my brother was critical when I came to understand what it was to be a dude.

Especially when you’re thinking about masculinity in general, but black masculinity in particular, so often black masculinity is imagined, from the outside, in terms of toughness, meanness, the ability to withstand punishment and to dish out punishment. That can be in the athletic realm or on the street, depending on where you live. But I have never been in a black community where there weren’t very tender, kind-hearted and truly vulnerable boys that care about each other. You don’t often see that portrayed in the media, or in the hip-hop community, but there are many, many gentle spirits walking South Side of Chicago, West Philly, South Dallas, Compton. You may adapt in many ways to protect yourself, but at the core, there is a soft, vulnerable, sweet human being. What is difficult for me as I live in this world is that so many people, certainly outside the black community, have no notion of such people walking the streets, especially when they think of black boys and men. That’s sad to me, because it makes for all kinds of insanity, as in the violence that is perpetrated against black boys.

Those are things that you think in some way, even though a hundred million people are not reading my poems – that would be lovely – but you’d like to think that just to keep the idea alive and moving around quietly in the culture in such poems is a good thing, and perhaps an antidote to some of the lunacy that makes life so difficult and painful for not just black people, but all people. Violence ultimately serves no one. … All people are vulnerable to extremely narrow interpretations of each other, particularly when fear is served by such concepts.

A poem, even though it speaks to maybe 73 people, a poem can invite another way of imagining other people, whoever you are. Latinos, black folks, Asian-Americans, indigenous people, white people, be they from South Boston or from Hollywood – we have a chance if we can write well about what we sense and see in the world then maybe we have a chance to redress certain distortions that ultimately make life difficult to live. That’s part of why there has to be poetry, there has to be art, there has to be music. It’s good to have a wider lens to imagine other people.

STH: What have your years of teaching and going into the community as Virginia’s Poet Laureate given you and your work?

TS: It hasn’t changed the way I work. I was a poet laureate from 2016 to 2018, so I’m an ex-laureate now. But during that time, what being a laureate allowed was that it gave me a lot of opportunities to talk to kids in high school and even elementary school about poetry. The main thing that was fun about it was it gave me a chance to be an ambassador for poems. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not delusional, that’s not to say I think now they’re all reading poetry.

But at least you think that among the people you encountered, that some of them will walk around thinking, you know, poetry is kinda cool. Maybe they may read one or two poems a year. But they won’t walk around thinking, I don’t understand poetry, I don’t know what poetry is doing. I think when I read and talk about poetry, many of the kids get it -- it’s one person trying to talk to another person about his or her life and what it feels like to be in the world in this time or this place.

That’s really the most important thing to me as a writer and as a human being, is that you want there to be a place for the contemplation that poetry invites. A society in which poetry is locked in the attic is a society that is maybe heading toward a kind of insanity. This is not to say that poetry will fix everything in the world, that is not what I mean. But I do think the kind of time one might spend with a poem, imagining a life as well as reimagining one’s own life, I think those times help us not lose our way in the world. …

The level of violence in this society in particular is rooted in a kind of brainlessness, and a kind of emotional vacuum. … People talk about the opioid epidemic as though it’s some kind of coincidence. … People are trying to numb themselves, because it hurts. For many reasons that I understand and many that I don’t, for many people, being in the world hurts. It’s that simple. ... I think of poetry as one possible antidote to some of these vast vacancies in the human heart.