Interview with Doug Holder
Recently I caught up with New England Poetry Club member Tim Mayo. He has a new collection of poetry out, "Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster." He generously agreed to this interview.
Mayo is the author of two previous full-length poetry collections, The Kingdom of Possibilities (2009), and Thesaurus of Separation (2016) and two chapbooks, The Loneliness of Dogs (2008) and Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper (2019). He holds an ALB, cum laude, from Harvard University and an MFA from Bennington College. A ten-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and a two-time finalist for the Paumanok Award, Mayo is also the recipient of three Vermont Writers Fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, as well as being a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the Montaigne Medal. He lives in Brattleboro, VT, where he worked for fifteen years at the Brattleboro Retreat, a mental institution, and where he is also a founding member and organizer of the Brattleboro Literary Festival. His third full-length collection Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster was just published by Bainbridge Island Press in March, 2026.
DH: The book faces death in a head on collision. There is little romantic gloss, it is devoid of purple poetry. It has great irony, beauty, gallows humor, and it rages against the dying of the light. Was it in any way frightening to write this book? Its honesty can be disarming.
TM: That's an interesting question, "was it frightening to write this book?" No is the quick answer, but quite obviously says very little. Nonetheless, it's interesting that you should say "The book faces death in a head on collision," since, I did in fact have one on my bicycle, and that almost killed me. This was the motivation for me to finish the manuscript. I'd like to say it kept me alive in the ICU. The deaths I face in this book, even my own, are all in the past. It's hard to be afraid of death or anything when it has already happened, and you've survived it. Of course, I have not so much survived the losses of those I write about as I have endured them. None of us ever forget grief, it just moves to another place in our consciousness and our bodies.
I must say in the poem "Meditation on Your Final Moment," which I wrote to the poet Patricia Fargnoli, I felt that some of what I wrote might be irreverent and as such insulting and not lovingly acknowledging or validating her suffering in a more delicate and diplomatic way. I read it to her and most likely sent her a copy. She never told me her reactions. When you write a poem, it is a thinking out loud, where the reader can "hear" what you're thinking, and the epiphanies you may come to in the poem. Even then, when the poem was more truly directed to her while she was alive, I must have sensed that I was also writing to those readers overhearing what I was saying. Certainly, that irony and gallows humor kept the poem from descending into a maudlin exploration that Pat was dying. She claimed she didn't believe in God, but wanted to. I'm an unabashed atheist and have been for my entire life, but having worked with addicts and seen them thrive in twelve step programs such as AA and NA, I realize it's not what I believe or don't believe that counts, it's what they believe, that is important to their recovery. And so, it's the same with Pat and dying. I don't know what she realized before she died, but I hoped that she left this world with a comforting thought. That's why I end the poem with the couplet about her final moment:
Who cares whether it’s real or not?
Won’t that breath be worth it?
About my own near-death experience, which I write about in the second section of the book, I think I have mixed feelings. Although it made me realize that, for example, living to write poetry was more important to me than I thought, I realize how much my reaction to the accident depressed and angered me. I still suffer from a form of depression which in part derives from my past, but could also be biological. Depression dulls your senses. Almost dying did not give me religion or a belief in a god, but it did show me, in retrospect, that my life was worth living if I wanted to live it. And I do. Falling in love helped, too.
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DH: Your title is interesting " Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster." Pain evokes memories for you. Yor music seems to reside in the very muscles—fonts of memory mixed with pain. It reminds of the lines Billie Holiday once sang, " Hush now don't complain, you're my joy and pain." Your take?
TM: Yes. I agree. What good does it do to complain of what you've lost. It's gone, and to honor it, you must acknowledge that others in your life are gone, too, or otherwise you are living in a state of denial. And there is no joy in denial, just an avoidance of pain, which is dysfunctional. I must say that in so far as this book honors dead loved ones, it also evokes the ghosts of emotional pain, but I'm not writing about it to evoke pity. I am exploring the meaning of these losses at least to me, and I am trying to make sense of it in a way that might be meaningful to the reader.
Nonetheless, there is joy in this book, that is entirely apart from loss. Finding love late in life has given me untold joy. I am at an age where people begin to reckon with what they have done and what they have experienced. I spent a large part of my life avoiding the emotional pain of past experiences, and now I find it doesn't hurt as much as it did before, and I can talk about the events that gave me pain with a certain emotional and perhaps clinical distance. Oddly enough there is a joy to be able to write about something you couldn't talk about before. I think working in a mental hospital may have contributed to this. Talking to and helping people in greater pain than I was, began to put my emotional circumstances into a different perspective. When I write about anything, I have to be in an emotionally neutral state of mind, or I can't write about it. I think with all the pain in this book, I have tried to form a positive emotional arc to the book. I hope readers can see it.
About the title, I was an athlete before I was injured. Muscle memory is a guiding force to any athlete, but also the title evokes that emotions are not just feelings you experience in your mind, but they are there remembered in your body, in your whole being. Again, I hope the poems I've written in this book to and about the people I've lost, honor those people, and that the poems don't say woe is me, because they are gone or for any other reason. In the first poem of the book ("Landscape with Still Life") I write
We die . . . we die . . .
nothing new there.
For me that's an acceptance of death. It is an event which is part of life, be it the last part, the end for the person dying or dead, and a disaster for the living who survive them, that they must also accept. Yet people live on in memories. For me that's a big part of life, because I tried for so long to forget an aggregate of emotional pain in my past. But now, by remembering I paradoxically begin to live.
You still love the people in your life who have died, and the memory of that love can give you joy, as they did when they lived, but their death obviously modifies your life into something we can call disaster, because it alters the way you can love them. You can't caress or kiss them, change their diapers or act in other loving ways anymore. Oddly enough, you can still give them flowers, putting them on their grave, even bring them their favorite food as in a Day of the Dead offering, write poems about them, but they can never say thank you or love you back as they might have done before.
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DH: In a review I read of your book the critic opined that your poetry is welcoming—it wastes no time getting between the reader and the poem. Do you feel your book differs in many ways from the trends in modern poetry?
TM:I don't know whether I can speak with any authority to current trends in contemporary poetry. I do find that a lot more poetry written these days seems to depend on how the words are arranged on the page rather than how the sounds of words are aesthetically arranged and still maintain meaning. Often the syntax of poems (especially those where the poem depends on how the words are arranged on the page) seems to stretch beyond what I can comprehend. My poems don't depend on some visual arrangement of words on the page to work. They are meant to be heard. What you read on the page should be like a piece of sheet music, that you play with your voice, when you speak it. When you read the words out loud, the arrangement of the words should make a spoken melody without losing its conversational lilt and its purported meaning. I don't use rhyme as a musical device, mainly because English has a poverty of rhyming words that other languages don't. Instead, I want to make a less obvious arrangement of sound through a combination of assonance and alliteration to have the words create that melody. The reader should be able by reading out loud thus hear that spoken melody. I want this idea of spoken melody to converge with the meaning of the words to make a whole. I'm not sure if I am succeeding in this, but that's something I'd like to be there in my poems.
My poems are personal with what I hope is a conversational tone. In that sense they become a personal conversation to the reader. This is may be what Eden Hefferon-Hanson, who reviewed my book, meant when she said my poems were welcoming, that their diction and accessibility close the distance between the reader and the speaker.
Almost all my poems are anecdotal. If the speaker in the poem is telling you an anecdote about their life, this, too, welcomes you into the poem, the same way when a friend or an acquaintance starts to say, "you know, what happened to me the other day." Although, my poems never talk about daily occurrences or daily life, the anecdote, I hope, communicates something that happened which is important to the speaker and as such could be important to the reader as an empathic reader and another human being.
Lastly, I find a lot of poems where the poet either shies away from metaphor, or doesn't know how to use it, or uses it in a way where it sounds good and is even striking, but doesn't make any sense. In poems lacking metaphor, all I can say is plain speaking is admirable, I am not an advocate of writing complicated poems, I really try to make my poems accessible, and you can still do that and include imagery, which when combined with a good flow of sounds is powerful stuff. To me metaphors need to make sense or they just muddy the waters. They should also have an emotional immediacy to them. One of my mentors said metaphors should have a verisimilitude, and I think if they do they evoke a stronger emotional impact.
I read a lot of contemporary poetry, but I also realize there's more out there than I can read. I'm also probably more old-fashioned–– probably because I'm just getting old. Poems should be heard, and not seen, even though as poets they are our children. Erasure poems are interesting, if you can see them against the text the poet has derived them from, but you still can't hear them. Or if you read them out loud, do they make a melody? In any case, I'm not interested in doing them. I prefer a blank page. Although, in concept, the idea of making an erasure poem suggests to me Michelangelo chipping away at a block of stone and leaving you the statue of David. I like that idea.
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DH: Why should we read this book?
Well, in part because "the book faces death in a head on collision. There is little romantic gloss, it is devoid of purple poetry. It has great irony, beauty, gallows humor, and it rages against the dying of the light." Besides all of that, we will all sooner or later experience grief and loss and love––if we haven't already. It can be a comfort to know you're not alone in the first two of these, and what you are reading expresses your feelings or plight in some way that matches your own experiences.
Nonetheless, I do for the most part write about what I've experienced. Also, I think that the experiences I've written about are relatable to others. Our experiences are not unique to ourselves. So, what I have experienced others have as well. Does that make these poems universal? It can, in so far as most of what I experience in life has been experienced by others. If I face death head on, as you mentioned above, it's really grief and loss, that the poems are exploring, and grief and loss are universal experiences. Of course, love is, too. Let's definitely not forget love, the universal elixir. And everyone should read about love.
Granted there are poems in this book about my experiences working in a mental hospital that are more unique. Not everyone will be able to easily relate to them, if they have not experienced either mental illness themselves or people with mental health problems. People (readers) are or may be afraid of others with mental illness. There, I hope I show the compassion I've learned from my former job towards the patients I've worked with, and that mentally ill people deserve empathy and compassion, nor should they be stigmatized. They are as human as any "normal" (whatever the hell that means) person. They are just mentally frailer than your average individual.
This book definitely does not provide a "Lord-is-my-Shepherd-I-shall-not-want" kind of comforting answer to that part of life, which is death or to any other part of life. As a poet, I am trying to create well-crafted poems that most often describe experiences that I've found were important to me and wrestled with trying to find an insight into them. Part of my aesthetic is to also create poems that have an emotional urgency to them, and I think that urgency is conveyed to the reader. This might also be what the reviewer was alluding to, when she said my poems were welcoming.
I think literature is always a two-way street; the reader must be willing to give up something in order to be able receive what the poet has offered them. Even as I write this, I see my literary prejudices coming to contradict what I just said. I pooh-pooh poems that rely on the visual effects they make on the page, because those poems disregard the dimension of sound, be it an erasure poem or just one which spends so much time scattering words around as though the poet is planting a field and hoping what they drop on the page grows. I am making my own two-way street trying to include sound. They honestly reach out to the reader.
As a poet, I keep needing to consciously open myself up to read and accept poems, which are different from my own. We should always be learning our art, even as we hunker down developing our own, perhaps, more-narrow, aesthetic through what we write. None of us have monopoly on poetry. We just want to write what we believe will be poetry that lasts beyond our lives, continuing to speak deeply to a reader somewhere in the future and, hopefully, be recognized for it to some extent during our own lives. At least, I do.
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Meditation on Your Final Moment
For Pat Fargnoli
For me, maybe that moment is a heightened state
slackened to a palatable point, where body
and brain can balance before the end. Or is it
possibly . . . just a state of immense relief?
No, it must be more, although I’d settle for that.
Any old port in the storm as they say. But for you,
the poet in me wants something more out-of-body,
where, when it fans its feathers before your eyes,
your jaw just drops and you’re there.
In some stories that must be how it happens:
an affirmation of the holy spirit extends its wing
like the hand of God. But in the flesh and blood world?
A bird before your eyes, and bingo! you’ve suddenly
bounced off the bottom of your life ascending
into the air of who-knows-where? Not a chance.
So let us then think of the practical how,
the mechanics to move you to your end without needing
some bureaucratic benediction, some absolution,
or a passport for your pale ghosts of regret.
Maybe all you need is just a gentle,
saline solution of generosity
flushing the blood right out of your veins––
I mean, why not? It feels right
in its medically nonjudgmental soulagement,*
the cool liquid diffusing the fever that was
the passionate red of your life’s discomfort.
Your salut* in all its meanings as you greet
the penultimate experience of your life.
The soul––I hate to say the word––twisted with the wishes
and wants of this world––I hate to say it, because
nothing’s immortal except the stone base of the universe––
the soul, as your seeing-eye dog sensing everything you can’t,
wants its way to where the flesh isn’t in the way.
Christ! How did I get here? Talking like this.
I’m not a believer. Yet I think of you, now, only you,
and not myself, my own less pain-racked body
aching in the dark with its muscle memories
of love and disaster. I think of you reaching
for this timeless moment, and I ask why not
pass these last moments of your life in that grace
of letting go, that anti-struggle to faith? But I know
you're waiting for some ecstatic flash of mind to happen
before the big sigh you only have to exhale once
lifts you to the wherever you’ve always wanted to be.
Who cares whether it’s real or not?
Won’t that breath be worth it?
*soulagement is French for relief, and salut has two meanings in French, the first is as a greeting and the second meaning is salvation.
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