While your poems are often grounded in a careful accounting of minute details, they always reach beyond a mere cataloguing of attributes. Can you talk a bit about the role of detail in poetry and how poems make the leap from specifics to universals?

For me: detail is important, but not the be-all and end-all. As a reader (and I suppose as a writer / poet?) I think there needs to be a level of detail and a certain specificity included in a poem and its language and metaphor to ground it. To make it a tangible thing. (I mean, really, for the artful lying of metaphor to work, don’t we need to provide enough detail to be able to grasp that our perceptions and understanding are being stretched or flipped or challenged or interrogated?)

But—and this is a big but—I think, for me, there ultimately still needs to be a movement, no matter the direction(s), between minute, tangible detail(s) in the poem and some kind of greater idea(s). Otherwise it’s just a list, a catalogue of observations. There’s nothing wrong with strictly observational or list-ish poems, but I want a little more.

For me, it’s in that liminal, transitional, osmosis-y-tug-of-war sort of dynamic space where things get interesting. That, for me, is where the energy of a poem gets generated. The tension between those two worlds and ways of thinking is at the core of what makes a poem work, in many ways, for me.

I suppose the bottom line is that when I am writing I don’t want a poem or a poetry that deals solely in ‘big’ ideas or issues. No matter how important, that seems too airy or ungrounded or something of that sort. Conversely, a simple listing of details, or recounting of everyday bits of whatever, seems almost pedestrian.

There are, of course, writers who do both of those discrete things very well—better than I ever could—but that isn’t how I am wired to compose or communicate. I’m interested, I guess, in the ever-shifting relationship between the everyday domestic and quotidian details of things and how the accumulation of them, their interplay, speaks to what we have constructed as larger truths or something. I want, as cliched as it is, the sum to be greater than the (catalogued) parts.

You have a style of writing that is quite pared down and often ‘punchy’, which exploits tensioned-up rhythms and accumulations of sound. What influences helped to shape your understanding of poetic form and your sense of what a poem could do?

Thanks for this question. It’s something I’ve been thinking about more deliberately, at least a little bit, more recently. In particular during the writing of the poems in this collection. I even had a conversation that centred around this kind of question the other night over a beer or two.

So, form. In a super literal way, I appreciate poetic forms. Period. Particularly when other poets use formalism in really successful ways. But I’m no true formalist in that while I appreciate those structures and maybe enjoy playing off of them in one way or another, I do not write formal poems with real attention to particular rules and structures in any substantive way. I suppose I just don’t have the attention span for that? What I do find myself doing is taking something from a particular form and incorporating it in one way or another into a kind of bastardized or pseudo-something version of said form. Think a not-quite-glosa or a pseudo-cento or clumsy slant rhymes.

But maybe that’s not even what you’re speaking of in terms of form or poetic form. Not formalism so much as the form a poem takes?

What I can say with regard to the form of the poems in Tangled & Cleft is that with these poems, there was a deliberate choice I made, in addition to my usual interest in metaphor as the engine that acts as the driving force behind the lyric. I really wanted to pay closer attention to the possibility of the music, as pretentious as that may sound, of these particular pieces. I wanted the rhythms and whatever sort of rhymes or echoes that were occurring to be centrally involved—to be an important piece of the overall experience of engaging with these poems. I wanted the sounds of this particular chunk of poetry—whether read aloud or quietly in one’s head—to be as much of a driver and central concern as the metaphors.

But I have maybe gotten off track I think. Or rambly.

For context: in terms of sound and musical language and concision of ideas, I really value poets like Hopkins (yes, a Victorian). I also return to John Thompson over and over again for what I hear as his stripped down, but muscular, evocation of complex emotion through stark images and metaphors. Those are key traditional poetic influences for me, in addition to poets like Stevens and Creeley and Plath (nothing super original there, I don’t think).

But, truthfully, the biggest influence on the sounds of these poems were the songs and songwriters and records I was listening to while I was reading and writing and revising the last few years. The real influences on the sound of this collection are Ben Nichols (and his band, Lucero), Matt Mays, Adam Baldwin, and early Uncle Tupelo. These are poems that owe as much to dirty old alt country songs and rootsy garage rock as they do Hopkins and Thompson and other poets. The cadence and phrasing and parsing of ideas that clang and bang about in some of these is almost homage to those lyrical models as much as anything. I’m not a songwriter, but the breath work and delivery of these poems (when I read them aloud), their use of juggling slant rhymes and clunky echoes is more Tennessee and No Depression and That Much Further West than it is At the Edge of The Chopping There Are No Secrets.