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| Poet Daniel Tobin |
Poet Daniel Tobin: Casting a wide Net with his new poetry collection.
Interview
with Doug Holder
Like any
fine poet Daniel Tobin casts a wide net in his new collection of poetry The Net. Tobin, like Whitman, takes it
all in and uses what he finds for fodder for his accomplished work. He is
always on the lookout for what transcends the material world, the steak behind
the sizzle, and what makes us run like a mutt after a meat truck.
Daniel Tobin is the author of seven books of poems, Where the World is Made (University Press of New England, 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005), Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008), Belated Heavens (Four Way Books, 2010), The Net (Four Way Books, 2014), and From Nothing (forthcoming, Four Way Books, 2016). Among his awards are the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, "The Discovery/The Nation Award," The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Greensboro Review Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. The Narrows was a featured book on Poetry Daily, as well as a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book Award.
I had the pleasure to speak to him on my Somerville Community Access TV show Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.
Daniel Tobin is the author of seven books of poems, Where the World is Made (University Press of New England, 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005), Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008), Belated Heavens (Four Way Books, 2010), The Net (Four Way Books, 2014), and From Nothing (forthcoming, Four Way Books, 2016). Among his awards are the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, "The Discovery/The Nation Award," The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Greensboro Review Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. The Narrows was a featured book on Poetry Daily, as well as a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book Award.
I had the pleasure to speak to him on my Somerville Community Access TV show Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.
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Doug Holder:
Dan, the poet Bill Knott died recently. He was a colleague of yours at Emerson
College in Boston. Any anecdotes you would like to share?
Dan
Tobin: Bill was a terrific teacher. He
was a very important poet of his generation. I was his department chair at one
point. Bill was an eccentric. He basically did what he wanted to do. On one
hand it was difficult to be his department chair, but on the other hand he was
brilliant and you had to appreciate his dedication to the students. He was
profoundly dedicated to them. He even bought them books…just one of the many
things he did for them. He was very challenging in the classroom, and he would
challenge his students very vigorously. He pulled no punches. If you could
accept Knott’s stringent evaluation then you could learn a few things.
DH: You have
a new poetry collection out The Net (Four
Way Books). Can you explain the genesis of this collection—the germ of the
idea?
DT: The
title came to me after a number of false starts over the years. I saw this pattern
of water imagery—things being connected to each other—in ways that were cosmic
and intimate. The poems in the collection are philosophical and personal. The book
has an epigraph from John Donne’s great poem “Anatomy of the World”:
For our meridians, and parallels,
Man hath weaved
Upon the heavens, and how they are
his own.
This book I suppose is a book of boundaries.
Part of it is the human consciousness that shapes our view of heaven. But part
of it deals with what is beyond our access—beyond our control. It is book of
boundaries between the natural world and internal human space. I have to
believe there is something that transcends us.
DH: You were brought up in the Catholic faith.
Did that meet your spiritual needs?
DT: Not
always. I always had an ongoing argument with the church when I was young. And
of course with the disheartening recent history of the church—well... the argument
continues. The Catholic writers I admire most were on the fringes. They went
out to the wider world to reach something larger than themselves. Then they
reported back. Anyway I struggle with my religion, but I don’t reject it.
DH: One
blurb on the back of your book states that you combine the metaphysical with
the physical. Isn’t that the definition of poetry?
DT: I think
so. Poetry inhabits a strange space. It is physical on the page, and a good
poem gets into your body. Poems have rhythms that becomes part of the body. The
poems often point to the human questions…the ontological. Poems are clarified
boundary spaces. We of course use language in a poem. It is a rarefied
space—every word counts.
DH: As we
have been taught since grade school point of view is important to all kinds of
writing. A critic points out that you write not from the narcissistic “I” but
from the “eye” itself. Hard thing to
pull off?
DT: It is
always hard when one is going to write autobiographical materials to go above
that, so it is not just a documentary
recording. So I allow my form to lead me to a broader perspective. I let the
poem lead. I follow clues it gives to me. I see the poem as a path beyond the
self. The poem wants something from you. It is very important to remember that.
DH: In the
poems I have read in your new collection I get the sense that you want to
dissolve into the landscape.
DT: Well…
there is something to that. The tension seems to me between being alive in the
world and wanting to enter a larger reality through nature or whatever. You
want to be inhabited by something larger than yourself.
DH: You
weren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth. In fact you grew up in a
working class family ( In the then unhip) Brooklyn. How did your path lead to
poetry?
THE
NET
Translated
loosely from a lost Akkadian tablet
discovered among the ruins of Kush.
God
of the first waters, Ea, listen,
You
who parsed chaos with a net from the day:
Unfasten
your knots, let the swells replenish
From
subtlest channels, from the seams of flesh.
The
galaxies circuit in their bright delay.
The
least wind tempts me with what might have been.
_____
This
petition you’ve given is nothing new
Since
nothing is older than the wish to die.
The
dew is famished for the sun’s caress
But
disappearance does not bring release.
You
long to slip the image from the eye
But
the sky’s wide mesh will not acquit you.
Published
in The Common.
