84 another man helping him. But he located himself in New Hampshire and Vermont, no matter where he was. He even started dressing the way a Yankee farmer would. I can’t quite do that. I don’t need to be a Yankee farmer...So no matter where Frost was...surprisingly enough, going back and reading those poems, he’s still on that farm in New Hampshire. MB: That’s what Roethke did. TS: It’s like you’re not going to sit down and go, “OK, I’m going to...” It just evolves. Haines has a little essay about being born as a poet on a hillside 66 miles outside of Fairbanks…You know, he shifted the focus of his poetry towards the end of his life. Most people don’t really notice that he went back to the art world that he came out of, and wrote all those fine poems about sculptors and paintings. MB: There was political stuff, too... TS: What I kind of like is knowing that there was so much turmoil in ancient China that kind of mirrors our times. MB: You have that parallel…That’s a beautiful observation: that even in their world we think of them as unattached in other ways, and really the background is every bit as enormous as ours. TS: Just like ours. Even more so now that our empire seems to be in decline…So, I guess I am political, but I’m not overtly political. When I switch, when I write poems about Lowell, that’s the world I was born into, and you never completely leave it, nor would I want to leave it. I grew up in a working class mill town. In that context, I think writing about my family is important because that’s what I really know. In a sense, the good and the bad of what happened in my own family is emblematic of life in one of those places. MB: It comes down to what you said in your 49 Writers blog post: It always comes down to either place. So in place, if you’re looking around, if you’re there...that’s what you see. That’s what you said in that Gary Metras interview, that you want to leave one of those poems that resonates forever about Lowell [Gary Metras interview with Tom Sexton for the Jane Crown Show, July 4, 2010, http:// www.janecrown.com/show_download_page.html].
CIRQUE TS: And it wouldn’t work to bring in my love of Chinese poets or my love of nature…because that’s not the world I’m in then...And the style’s different, that’s why they’re longer poems because it’s more toward a narrative, to telling a story. Here’s something that I find interesting, and I don’t know the answer. Just the landscape here is so enormous, I don’t think you could write a big poem about it and try to encompass the whole. MB: It’s like trying to write a poem about the whole world. TS: Exactly. I don’t think you can do it. You can take a small bit of it. Haines’ Alaskan poems are the same way. Yes, he was writing in (as I started out and still go back to) this very narrow imagistic style. But it’s almost as if that’s the right way to write about the North. MB: It gets back to this whole sort of basis for a poem. You start out, you know, “no ideas but in things.” It gets back to the real basic, basic, basic. That’s where you start. Crummy poets write big poems that aren’t attached to anything. TS: Oh, that’s a good way of putting it. MB: They’re all just in their head. You can’t literally figure out where the poem is. It’s disembodied. TS: That’s the hardest thing in a workshop to try to explain to someone. *** TS: Until I left teaching, I didn’t really begin to become much of a poet. I was 54. Almost all this work has been written since I left the University. MB: I know. I was looking at that. Your productivity level from 2005 on…You’ve been able to put out a book about every two or three years. TS: I think I’m going to slow down now…But that’s all I do. Frost said...I keep going back to Frost even though I have mixed feelings about him. Well no, I don’t have mixed feelings about him as a poet. But Frost said, “A poet needs time to do nothing or at least to give the appearance of doing nothing”…You can’t do that [when you work]. I couldn’t do it. I think poets who teach who have all this time to produce their own work aren’t putting that much effort into teaching. At least, I couldn’t do it. I taught and I