Todd Robinson teaches in the Writer’s Workshop at UNO and for several local arts organizations. His poems have appeared most recently in Chiron Review, Arct Poetry Magazine, burntdistrict, and Sugar House Review and are forthcoming in Main Street Rag, great weather for MEDIA, and A Dozen Nothing. His first collection of poems, Note at Heart Rock, was published by Main Street Rag Press in 2012. http://mainstreetragbookstore.com/?product=note-at-heart-rock
Todd and I meet at a small, Midtown coffee shop. We have our coffee in a sunny windowed corner in comfortable arm chairs. Todd is taller than I expected and looks tidy in one of his signature checked shirts, this one blue and white.
Eve: I’ve heard you read, of course, and seen your Facebook posts, so I have been wondering if that goofy exuberance is all a persona or is it for real?
Todd: (laughs with goofy exuberance) It is, Baby, it is!
Eve: First of all, congratulations on your upcoming writing residency in August at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. That is quite an honor. Is there a project you will be working on?
Todd: Thank you. It is terribly beautiful to ponder. I don’t really write suites of poems or consciously grope toward any subject, so there’s no cohesive project underway other than my abiding desire to be a better seeker and maker.
Eve: How old were you when you first started writing, becoming a “seeker and maker” as you say, and what kind of things did you write about?
Todd: I must have started in Kindergarten on grey paper, my burly black pencil chunking out simple sentences about mom, dad, chocolate milk, and what have you. My first poem was about King Tut, about how young and rich he was, and I graced it with a crayon drawing of the lad in a headdress.
Eve: Was there someone in your early life who encouraged your writing?
Todd: A fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Hudson, was always giving us cartoons with empty dialogue bubbles, and we could write whatever we wanted. I usually filled the white space with postmodern jokes culled from commercials (“Not now, I’m right in the middle of a Rothchilds”, etc.), which must have driven her batty, but she was an obliging sort, even laughing at a play I wrote about pirates in which every scalawag died by heart attack (she wouldn’t countenance any stabbings).
I’m so grateful that all my early teachers were so patient and good-humored. When I’m doing my best teaching, I’m just like them.
Eve: (laughing at scalliwags dying of heart attacks) They could have died of rickets or something, at least. Tell a little about how your work has evolved.
Todd: My high school and college poems were overly influenced by Pink Floyd lyrics, and so were grandiosely self-pitying (a fact that sadly stands to this day) and full of clichés: graves, headstones, nooses, and so on.
When I could shake off the medieval era, I wrote some pretty strong fiction about lackluster dudes making self-defeating choices in an exurban waste (write what you know, as they say).
My academic training is largely in literary scholarship, so I’m o’er-steeped in nineteenth century rhetoric: florid, verbose, allusive, roundabout. It ruined my prose and nearly sank my poetry, but I had the good fortune of taking classes with Grace Bauer and Ted Kooser in my doctoral program.
Eve: And what was their influence?
They stressed clarity and openness, which I largely adopted: in my late twenties my poems became ever more imbued with landscape and lovescape, charting the (de)moralized cartographies of my childhood (summers spent on a farm in northern Nebraska, when I wasn’t caterwauling through suburbia) and the perplexing beauties of my incipient adultness: marriage, travel, politics, and so on.
The work became looser and louder in my thirties, as I became the same, bending too often to drink and smoke, burying my brain in misdeeds instead of books. Finally, sobriety achieved, I find the work longer, stronger, more vulnerable, stranger. I write about addiction and recovery, marriage and its unsteady consolations, the garden, yearning and regret, with more breath in each line, with more breadth of reference and sound.
Eve: Love it! Are there particular themes you come back to frequently, or have they changed over time?
Todd: I keep circling that theme of self-defeat, of the ways we fail to be the people we want to be, of the ways we make toxic lives and landscapes for ourselves. I also continue to blow the wreathed horn of pagan celebration, exulting in love and beauty, in the mysterious glory of self, place, and other.
In terms of thematic change, I am probably obsessed with recovery from addiction, and so write about alcohol and drugs more than I ever did when I was using. I try to strike at the appeal of self-forgetting without romanticizing it, but I probably romanticize it, like everybody else.
Eve: Interesting. Who was or is your biggest influence?
Todd: My biggest influence was T.S. Eliot, for good and ill. He showed me how to nest the self in a thicket of external references, how to incorporate culture in fresh and surprising ways, how to build rhythm and resonance.
This is all good, but in it is some of the ill: he did it too well, and my pale imitations filled me with self-doubt. The rest of the ill lies in his pretension, which infected much of my early poetry: a tone of alienated indifference, a stilted voice in love-hate with itself.
Eve: And who would you say is your favorite poet?
Todd: My favorite poet usually changes according to who I’m reading. After Eliot, it was Dickinson, whose poems are dense and bright as stars. After Dickinson, it was Kooser, master of polishing the small moment to unbearable sheen. Then Goldbarth, so brilliantly breathless. Then Dean Young, master of the non sequitur. Lately, I’d say Tracy K. Smith (Life on Mars is a masterpiece) and Bill Kloefkorn, whose poems are both warm and cold, simple on the surface but full of psychosocial intricacy.
Eve: I am still taking in “dense and bright as stars”! That’s perfect. Todd, I have heard you are much-loved as a writing teacher. How does teaching figure into your creative life? Is it hard to find the balance?
Todd: You’re so kind. I much love teaching. It’s a privilege in so many ways: it affords us intimate access to all kinds of lives, it generates lively and lovely conversations, and it allows for all sorts of surprises. But I’ll concur that the energy spent on it does not seem to leave room for a lot of writing, in my experience.
I do all the in-class writing my students do and complete many of the writing assignments along with them, but these pieces rarely become finished, polished, or profound. I’m not sure why, except that when I’m teaching I’m more teacher than writer: I have to plan lessons, conduct classes, grade a seeming infinitude of papers. When all that’s done, I’m not really hungry to read and to write in a similar vein. I crave escape rather than further engagement.
I’m hopeful, though, that the hilarious profundities I experience with my students seeps in somewhere, somehow, some way into my writing.
Eve: What has been your biggest setback as a writer?
Todd: My biggest setback is, was, and will always be laziness. I don’t read as often or as broadly as I should, I write like a dilettante, I am distracted and diffuse. I go months without submitting poems to journals, I write two sentences and quit, I journal irregularly…
Eve: So you don’t keep a regular writing schedule?
Todd: My habits are truly terrible, and I have no one to blame but that handsome devil in the mirror.
Eve: Have you ever considered giving up writing?
Todd: I last considered giving up writing a month ago, just before a reading, when I was full of self-doubt and loneliness. It’s not always play, it’s not always fun, it doesn’t always work. But when it does…ommmmmm.
Eve: What are you proudest or happiest about as a poet/writer/teacher?
Todd: I’m proud of the writing I’ve done in the last two years, which have seen me shake off a long and sluggish period. There’s a new charge in my work, a better ethic of making and daring. It’s still often a fraught process, but I find myself writing, submitting, and publishing at greater clip than was my wont.
I’m proud of myself as a teacher, too, as I continue to build deep and lasting relationships with my students and test my mettle by teaching in settings other than the university. I’ll be teaching full time next year, four classes a semester, so I’m starting to feel like a grownup at long last.
I’m happiest about the many readings I’ve partaken of, both as reader and listener. To gather as one, to speak and to hear, to be fed that ephemeral bread… sustenance!
Eve: What are the difficulties of becoming a writer, and what would you advise someone who wants to write?
Todd: Tillie Olsen in her book Silences talks about the many circumstances that can silence writers: The time and place in which we’re born, the culture’s expectations and our own. Childbearing and rearing, often, for women.
If you want to become a writer, make time, space, and quiet for reading and writing. Become a teacher of yourself. There are actually some analogies to recovery. Show up! Don’t stop, Baby, don’t give up! Keep working! Keep pushing rock!
Eve: Oh, I almost forgot to ask. What’s your greatest fear?
Todd: (laughs) Silence.
Todd’s poem “Among the Octogenarians,” was recently published as a limited-edition letterpress by Gibraltar editions as part of “All Along the Fence,” a collection of broadsides in honor of the centennial of the birth of Harry Duncan.
Among the Octogenarians
Anything is enough if you know how poor you are.
–Larry Levis, “Sleeping Lioness”
Spring yawns a few weeks off,
sticks from the covers one cold foot.
Beneath ice dams
an old couple sits talking
about the renal clinic,
where no one, I think, is
looking at casket catalogues.
Maybe the whole hospital is dancing
naked. Maybe the old lovers dress
without wondering how
a body is dolled up for its unbirthday,
or how the Learjet
with those quiet golfers
kept flying until the fuel ran out,
while the dead dreamed of fairways.
A purple daylily is splaying
in a photo on my phone. I want
to splay and be purple,
and want only light,
the way a whittled cane
cannot remember the tree.
The phone vibrates or not
and means nothing.
I want to race forward and approach
myself at age eighty-two,
and press a daylily into his hand
so he can see.
He will stand naked in a polished hallway,
suddenly awake among the many sleepers.
I want to be parallel;
the timeline of my life
never touching the dirt.
Along the Way 