1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

When it first came out, it didn’t change much at all, except the way I felt about myself, because I’d felt like pretty much a failure up until that point. So psychologically, it was good for me. But then, of course, for a while my only thought was, ‘How am I going to get people to read it?’ There’s a ton of books of poetry out there, and no one reads them; just being published doesn’t mean being read. Then it won the NBCC award, and at least some people started to read it, here and there. Also as a result of the award, I started to get published in places that wouldn’t have taken me otherwise, like McSweeney’s and the New Yorker. And I got invited to give readings at places like the Ottawa and Vancouver International Writers Festivals, and the Princeton Poetry Festival. Those are the main things, and in the grand scheme of things, they’re pretty small.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Actually I have written both poetry and prose for as long as I can remember. But I got better at poetry earlier. In college I was writing poems that I thought were good enough to send out to literary journals, whereas my skill with stories and essays was still developing. And when my poems started to get accepted, that success encouraged me to spend more of my time on those, and less on fiction in particular, even though I still intend to try to publish some fiction at some point along the way.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

There seem to be no consistent pattern for me. I’ve written poems that came almost all at once, with only the most minor changes afterward, but I’ve also written poems that went through literally dozens of drafts, and sometimes constructed poems from a confusing mess of notes and aborted previous attempts. As for starting a project, I often don’t realize that that’s even what I’ve done until I’m well along. At a certain point it takes a turn and starts to display a shape, a recognizable body, and then I say ‘Oh, this is going to be something.’

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Usually the former—I don’t write unified books—though with the ‘Tom Thomson in Purgatory’ sequence, once I had a few of those the rest were written to order, so to speak. For a period of about two years pretty much every poetic idea that I had came to me in the rhythm of the Tom Thomson sonnets (or maybe I just ignored those that didn’t). As for where poems begin, more often than not it’s a small bit of language—a few words, even as few as two, that go together and have an interesting sound, or make a pun, or suggest an image. I almost never start with a pure image—the words are always there first. And the sound is almost always the most important thing about them, although sometimes the look can matter too.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Oh yes, I love doing readings. Though I’m not sure whether they’re part of the creative process, as opposed to simply being one of the perks of the job.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I also work in philosophy, and I think I use that as the outlet for whatever theories or ‘answers’ I might have—not that I have very many. As for the “current questions,” I think these are the same as the old questions, the ones that have always been with us. How do we live? How best to make use of the limited time we have on this planet? How do we reconcile ourselves to the fact that our time is limited? As Robert Hass says in “Meditation at Lagunitas”: “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this, it resembles all the old thinking.”

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

The larger culture ignores writers, which is good insofar as it leaves them free to do what they want, though it’s bad insofar as it makes it more difficult to make a living from one’s writing, and it makes it difficult for sensitive, aware writers to change anything. I do think that writers, and readers for that matter, tend to be a bit more sensitive and aware on average of certain aspects of life—the damage inflicted in the world by our current ways of living, for instance. And if people paid a little more attention to writers—or at least, to those writers who are aware—some of that destruction might be averted. But there you go.

Anyway, part of me tends to think that as soon as you start thinking about your ‘role in larger culture,’ you’re lost. What matters is what happens between individuals—I write so that I can reach some particular person out there, and with luck give him or her the sort of experience that I’ve had in the past as a result of reading things I’ve come to love. More broadly, if, by being coaxed into the world of books, people end up becoming more educated and informed, knowing more about their own history and so forth, then this will make them somewhat less likely to be limited in their thinking, or to make stupid decisions (like electing stupid, ignorant leaders, for instance). But this is always a longshot, because we’re opposed by massive, very powerful forces that value and actively promote ignorance and stupidity. At any given moment in history the writers and other active intellectuals constitute a very small minority indeed, and one that has little power to influence the course of history, at least in the short term.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

For the most part my poetry isn’t edited very heavily. Occasionally someone at a journal will suggest a change, and I’m often amenable to that. I do, on the other hand, have certain imaginary editors—I’ll say to myself, ‘What would D. tell me about that line, or say I should do with this poem?’, etc. Imaginary editors are easier to work with than real ones, though I have on occasion received very good advice from real people. James Richardson, for instance, is an absolutely wonderful reader and editor.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I’ll cheat and mention four, because they’re all good.

First, read a lot. So incredibly obvious, yet many aspiring writers don’t.

Second, write a lot. Accept that ninety percent of it, or more, will be lousy. You can put the bad stuff in a drawer, or shred it; no one needs to see it but you. Don’t let your anxiety about ending up with a bad poem prevent the pen from making contact with the paper.

Third, memorize other people’s poems. Internalize the rhythms. Get the music inside you.

Fourth: I was lucky enough to have the chance to take a class from Paul Muldoon. He would tell his students, repeatedly, that the most useful thing is to learn to get out of the poem’s way, to listen to it and let it be what it wanted to be, rather than trying to force it to be something that fit your pre-established agenda. That’s hard, but it’s so very important.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to critical/creative non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

Very easy (though as I said, I still haven’t licked the fiction thing.) The appeal is that if you get tired or bored when working on one, you can switch and suddenly feel energized again, because it feels like you’re cheating – you *should* be working on the other thing, so working on this thing feels like fun, not work. And obviously, of course, it lets me say things I couldn’t say otherwise, and make contact with different parts of my sensibility (and maybe with different groups of readers as well). No one is just one thing; each of us is many things. And I have, on occasion, had essays that started out as poems, or vice versa.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

If only I could establish a typical routine, I might be much more productive. But I can say that I work a lot in coffeeshops. And my typical day, sadly, begins with me wasting an hour or two before even settling in to be productive. It’s really absurd.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

It’s often a good idea for me to turn to someone whose work bears no resemblance to what I’ve just been working on. So if I’ve been working on something formal and heavy and somber, I’ll read some Kenneth Koch, and maybe it will make me write a Kenneth Koch poem. If I do, chances are it will be lousy and I’ll shred it. But then there’s a good chance that I’ll be able to go back to the original project feeling somewhat renewed. And every so often that Koch-ish poem turns out to be good in its own right.

13 - What fairy tale character do you resonate with most?

The Gingerbread Boy.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music is a very important source of emotional support for me, but I’m not sure how much of a direct influence there is. Though perhaps my ultimate aspiration is, in fact, something like, to write a poem that moves me the way a song like the Rheostatics’ “Self Serve Gas Station” or Tom Waits’ “Time” or the Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize?” moves me. But I think McFadden was onto something: for the most part, it’s reading other people’s stuff that has made me want to write my own, and by far the most important influence on my poetry has been the poetry of other people.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Contemporary Irish poets mean a lot to me, because of the music in their work. Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Michael Longley, Eavan Boland, Tom Paulin, and others. Among Canadians, Michael Ondaatje, Christopher Dewdney, and bpNichol are the most important, plus short story writers including Alistair MacLeod, Alice Munro, and Rebecca Rosenblum. In the U.S., the New York poets—Koch, Ashbery, O’Hara, Schuyler—plus Berryman, Lowell, Roethke, Bishop, and Jarrell; plus Gary Snyder, plus C.K. Williams, plus a lot of more recent writers—H.L. Hix, Frederick Seidel, James Richardson, D.A. Powell, August Kleinzahler, and Craig Arnold are the first to come to mind, but there are so many. Among fiction writers—again, so many!—but Harold Brodkey, John Banville, Mark Helprin, Lee K. Abbott, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon are at the top. And then there are lots of people in other genres: Alexander Nehamas, Pauline Kael, Wallace Shawn, Joel & Ethan Coen. And I’m already regretting some that I’ve left out.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Write fiction, travel to Greece, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires, understand economics and theoretical physics, write at least one good song, learn Spanish and Italian, direct a movie, take up mountain climbing, act in a play, learn to cook, take up painting or photography in a serious way, take a year to do nothing but read and walk around and look at things.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I assume that being a professor of philosophy, which I already am, doesn’t count. Above all, I would have liked to be a musician, or else a film director, or a painter. Of the things that people actually get paid for, artistic pursuits are by far the most interesting to me. On the other hand, in many ways my ideal life would be to be independently wealthy and able to be a student my entire life, going back and getting one degree after another, and traveling all over the world between semesters.

18- What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Well I do other things too. And it still surprises me on some level that there are people in the world that don’t write, in addition to doing the other things they do. But I guess in my case, there is a kind of envy involved. If someone does something that touches me, moves me, or impresses me, I want to do it myself. So when I started being deeply moved and changed by books, I immediately began to want the power to do that to other people. It’s like when you see someone beautiful: you want to be around that person, but that’s only half the response: the other half is it makes you want to be beautiful yourself. So when I started to really read, authors and other sorts of artists started to seem important in a very special way, that they could do this to people. And I wanted a piece of that.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Annie Dillard’s ‘The Maytrees,’ or Alexander Nehamas’s ‘Only a Promise of Happiness,’ or Craig Arnold’s ‘Made Flesh.’ The last great film I saw was Charlie Kaufmann’s ‘Synecdoche, New York.’

20 - What are you currently working on?

My second book of poems, and a philosophical monograph called “Love’s Vision.” I also have six or eight essays that I want to write, that I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. Some are about poetry, some are about movies. And of course there is the novel. Always the novel. Eventually it will have to be faced.

Bio
TROY JOLLIMORE teaches philosophy in Northern California. His first book of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory (Margie/Intuit House, 2006) was selected by Billy Collins for the Lee-Wilson Poetry Award and went on to win a National Book Critics Circle Award. His reviews and articles have appeared in The Believer, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Book Review, Truthdig.com, and elsewhere. A chapbook of new poems, The Solipsist, was published by Bear Star Press in 2008.

You can find the second series of 12 or 20 questions at rob mclennan's blog: http://robmclennansindex.blogspot.com/2009/06/12-or-20-questions-second-series.html