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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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I was thinking, what if this planet of ours were entirely covered with a thick and obstinate layer of clouds?
Year after year, millennia after millennia,
such that we never saw the stars or even knew they existed.
What would happen if one night the clouds were suddenly to dissipate, revealing an immense celestial dome,
be jouled with constellations, pollulating with stars, shining with planetary bodies?
Would we be dumbfounded by the spectacle or what?
Every village atheist would be dazed, every fortune seeker would be phased,
every dullard would be amazed.
We would fall back into our stupor soon enough, no doubt,
but for a while everyone would be wide awake, staring up at the desmita, the Medaculum Medabiles.
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That's right, I was thinking that doubting the existence of miracles is a luxury afforded to us by the plethora of miracles we're exposed to, day in and day out, in the visible world,
which is the wonder of all wonders, even if most of us fail to take notice of it.
I believe that there are two kinds of people in the world, finally.
Those who request aisle seats on airplanes, and those who request window seats.
Why anyone would choose the claustrophobic interior of an airplane when they could have a window onto the infinite is beyond me.
What's that?
By gosh, I think you're right.
There is something in Emerson about the stars.
Where?
The nature essay?
Hold on, hold on, yes, you're exactly right, the first paragraph of Part 1.
I quote, "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe in a door and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown?"
End quote.
Very nice.
What's that?
Sorry, I have Andrea Nightingale in my headset telling me that Emerson actually gets that trope from Lucretious.
All right, let's check.
Got it.
Okay, here's the quote from Lucretious.
"Nothing is so great and wonderful that bit by bit, all men will cease to wonder at it."
"To begin the clear, pure color of the heaven and all it contains, the wandering stars, the moon and the brightness of the sun, with its dazzling light.
If all these things were suddenly and unexpectedly cast before mortal eyes for the first time, what could be more marvelous?"
Mirabile than this.
"But now no one thinks it worthwhile to look up at the lucid temples of the heavens since they are weiried by the satiety of seeing it."
End quote.
There you go, exactly what I was trying to say.
Stand by.
Now, Andrea's telling me that Lucretious actually gets it from Aristotle, is that right?
Yeah, here's the quote from Aristotle's last dialogue on philosophy as it comes down to us through Cicero.
"Suppose there were men who had always lived underground.
Suppose then that at some time the jaws of the earth opened and they were able to escape and make their way from those hidden dwellings into these regions which we inhabit."
When they suddenly saw the earth and seas and skies, when they saw the whole sky decked out and adorned with stars, and the varying light of the moon and the rising and setting of all these heavenly bodies, when they saw those things, most certainly would they have judged that they are gods and that these great works are the works of God."
Of course, in the background here there's Plato's allegory of the cave and that's exactly the point I'm trying to make in this lead-in to today's show.
That there's a prehistory to every trope, a precedent for every insight, and that try as we may to see the world as if for the first time our vision of it must pass through the untold eyes that have looked at it before us.
Just as our thoughts must pass through the predecessors thoughts.
Human vision, like thought, is a historically determined and historically unfolding phenomenon.
We can't view the sea today as we may have viewed it in the past naively and prodiously.
Words worth once declared, "I see by glimpses now when age comes on may scarcely see at all."
We have reached an age I fear in which most of us scarcely see the world at all.
The poets in our midst still see it, but only in glimpses.
One way to think of modern poetry is as a diminishing story of glimpses, which sounds like a whispering oneself away into silence.
I always believe that poets see the world more primally than other people, and that for some reason this is why they are drawn to poetry.
I say for some reason because poets, especially nowadays, face an overwhelming challenge.
They must keep open the eye of wonder on the one hand, and on the other they must describe what is glimpsed through that eye, in a language that is full of the sedimentations of history,
a language that is aged greatly over the centuries, and that it is no longer vigorous enough in its poetic character to do justice to the sheer radiance of the phenomenon, to say nothing of the rent passions of the human heart.
Prose is the name of the game, and there is nothing quite as difficult as to make it sing.
Yet a surprising number of contemporary poets actually succeed in this task.
I don't know how they do it, those that do do it, but I have one of them in the studio with me today.
His name is Troy Jollomor.
His first collection of poems entitled Tom Thompson and Purgatory was published in 2006, and this year at won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
Those of you who heard the last segment of my recent three-part show on Dante with Professor Rachel Jacob might remember that I read from a poem by Troy Jollomor in my monologue.
The poem was called Tom Thompson in situ, and later in the show we'll ask Troy about why Tom's view from his apartment in Purgatory doesn't face paradise.
But first let me welcome our guest to the program.
Troy, thanks for joining us today.
Oh, thanks very much for having me.
I have to say, Troy, ever since Susan Stewart won the National Book Critics Award for Poetry for her book, Colombarium, a few years ago.
I've been a fan of that prize, and now that I've read Tom Thompson and Purgatory, I'm even more of a fan.
A well-deserved award, and you were up against some pretty well-known and established poets, so congratulations on that.
Thanks, and thanks for saying so, that is certainly true, and all credit to that organization for being obviously very young.
I'm very open-minded, too.
I'm open to some real beginners in the field.
That's great. I should also mention that you're actually a Teach Philosophy at the University of Chico, California Chico, and that you're here at Stanford for a year as a fellow at our Humanities Center.
Yes.
Working on your second philosophy book, as it were, your first one was a book on friendship called Friendship and Agent Relative Morality.
That is right, which very analytic title there, and you're right.
I think you're researching love and friendship at the moment.
That's right. I haven't moved that far from here, but it's on the focus of my research.
Yeah. Well, I have a feeling when I read your poetry book, and I haven't read your book on friendship and agent relative morality, but I would imagine that if I were confined to that kind of dry, totally prosaic,
as antipoetic lingo as you can get, which is analytic philosophy, I might be driven to write some poetry myself.
But I think this is -- but seriously, this collection that you've put together is quite striking, and maybe I should tell our readers that it's in two parts.
Part one is discrete poems, and then part two is a series of poems about Tom Thompson in Purgatory.
Both parts have epigraves from Henry David Thoreau, which I'd like to begin by asking you what role Thoreau actually plays in your -- in this poetic world of yours that you draws into in the book.
In the book, and let me just quote the epigraves to part one, which is called from the Boy Scout Manual.
Here's Thoreau saying, "If you penetrate to some warm recess under a cliff in the woods, you will be astonished at the amount of summer life that still flourishes there.
No doubt more of the summer's life than we are aware thus slips by and outmaneuvers the winter gliding from fence to fence."
That's right. And you asked me about that when we first discussed the possibility of doing this show.
And so I've had a lot of time to think about it since and to sort of wonder as one will, what exactly it was I thinking when I chose that.
Originally, that particular passage was attached to a particular poem. It was attached to the poem "Roses Inverted."
And I think it's connection there is somewhat more obvious because "Roses Inverted" is about exactly what the title says about these "Roses That Grow Upside Down" essentially so that the roots are out where we can all see them, but the flowers are actually underground where nobody can see them.
And there was this obvious connection then with this epigram being about this remaining but hidden life all around us in a sense, but not obvious.
And the more I thought about it, especially since you originally asked me about this, the more I thought that this is a very common theme in this book.
And I guess one of the obsessions that one reveals by writing a book or writing a bunch of poems, you know, it's a process of self-discovery.
The idea of secrets and of secret life in particular, but the book is full of secrets now that I look through it. And this is something I didn't think before, but have come to realize now.
Let me see, in "Troug Quintet" for instance, Tom Thompson has a secret mark that he makes some places that he's going to come to again.
"Mockingbird and Whipperwill," the first poem in the book is all about birds that are something other than they appear. They transform into other types of birds or very nearly so, they at least attempt to the point where even they themselves aren't exactly sure where they are, or what they are.
From the Boy Scout Manual in a ways, a somewhat key poem, I think, and the connection with this theme as well.
And, I mean, this is going to get a little bit autobiographical, but I realized on thinking about this, that there was a sense in which the Boy Scout Manual was one of the first books in my life to play a certain sort of role which many books have played since, which is that it was a book that promised some sort of secret knowledge about life.
It's the Boy Scout Manual. It's going to tell you how to live. And, of course, growing up where I did being a Boy Scout, it was all with connected with nature. We would go camping, for instance, and go canoeing and all that.
No, a scosh.
Yes, I grew up in Nova Scotia, that's right. And so a lot of my first experiences of nature in an organized way were in that organization.
And I think that it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that I found myself reading the Boy Scout Manual the way that later I would read, you know, gravity's rainbow, for instance, or helisis, or the Bible at times, not religiously with the Bible.
But with all of those books, looking for secrets, thinking that whoever had written these had some sort of knowledge that was in there, but not on the surface. It never felt that it was going to be on the surface.
And that was something, of course, that one finds in the row as well.
Would you say that idea of a secret is an apt sort of figure for poetry in the contemporary era, where I mean, I guess I sometimes I'm Hegelian or Neo-H Hegelian enough to believe that the era of poetry is over, and that we're in the dead of winter, and that everything that still throws me.
That still thrives in terms of poetry are like these little recesses that the row describes here, where summer life persists even in the winter. And when I read you, I also think here's an example of that.
I'm flattered that you say so, and yes, I think that is one of the aspirations to outmaneuver the winter.
In some ways, maybe one of every poets' aspirations, I think we do have the sense in this age of hanging onto something which most others have walked away from and perhaps preserving it.
You know, the sort of image you have is maybe of monasteries where culture goes and is protected through the dark years, and then later on, people will be interested in it again, and so the seeds are there and you plant them again.
That's how I feel as a reader of books, these monks, after the invention of the printing press, they kept on some of them transcribing by hand for a few centuries, and we're in a new age where they call it the age of the end of the book and so forth, but I'll just hang on like the monks.
Now, that quote from Thoreau would have been appropriate for that poem, but there's the fact that there's a two epigraphs, and that the second one is also from the journal that opens Tom Thompson, Purgatory Part II of the book, leads me to believe that the presence of Thoreau is more than merely accidental.
Can I read the second one also?
The gods cannot afford to leave a man in the world who is privy to any of their secrets. They cannot have a spy here. They will at once send him packing. How can you walk on ground when you can see through it?
Yeah, it's a lovely passage, and again, the theme of secrets is very obvious. This must be one of the places where my training and occupation as a philosopher plays some sort of role because I very often find the poems set in the mind of or the mouth of or spoken by a certain sort of character who is some type of investigator, some type of metaphysical investigator, trying to figure out the world presented with this amazing amount of raw data with the
which does not really make sense in a bit own right, and it faced with the difficulty of trying to make sense of it.
You know, I have a poem that's not in the book, but it was in a journal a few years ago. It's called epistemology, which of course in philosophies, the study of knowledge and the ways we come to know things.
And I was just thinking this morning, I say, sort of mentally prepared for the show that that was a very germane poem to many of these themes too.
It's all about images of inscrutability and being lost and trying to make sense, and the last, it's in rhyming couplets, and there's only three of them, I think, but the last couplet is under the blazing fermament he wanders the maze of his own fingerprint.
And there's something to that image that really captures this feeling that I have of this goes back perhaps to what you were saying in your introduction or at least a certain aspect of it.
We have a fiction that we often tell each other and reinforce with each other in our daily lives, which is that really we pretty much understand the world and how it works, and it's a very comforting thing to sort of think, though on the other hand, that sort of takes some of the fun out of life, I think.
It's worth reminding ourselves a lot of the time that in fact, I think we're all quite baffled. We don't maybe save us enough to each other.
But the world is such an incredibly puzzling place, and it's just too easy to forget how puzzling, how deeply mysterious I think reality really is.
We can get into this awful mode of feeling like we've got a grip on it, which I think we shouldn't allow ourselves to do as much as we do.
And one of the wonderful things about Thoreau as a writer and thinker, and as a philosopher and poet, is his focus on that kind of attention that we need to pay to the world.
Constantly, he is reminding us, get out of your head, pay attention, really look at what's around you. You think you know it, but you don't.
Yeah, and I'm obviously very sympathetic to that. From my little introduction, it's clear that wonder is a kind of state of bewilderment that, according to Aristotle and the ancient tradition, was the matrix of philosophy and poetry and mythology and all these things.
And one of the things that actually, if I may, about analytic philosophy that leaves me cold is that it seems, it looks, at times from the outside it seems to me it's looking for a language of explanation rather than learning how to dwell within the enigma in the bewilderment, you know, without obfuscating.
Emerson has an essay which begins with the question, where do we find ourselves? And I think you're right to suggest that Thoreau, Emerson, a certain kind of strange philosophy is more about trying to get us to awaken to the mystery and inscootability of things rather than to come up with rasciosinative arguments about the nature of things.
I think that's right. They really represent a tradition or the beginning of a possible tradition in American philosophy that for the most part didn't really happen. There was all this pressure for various reasons, pressures of professionalization and so on, for philosophy in that tradition to go the way that you've suggested and it's a shame.
And it's not that I'm opposed to providing explanations. I think that's a wonderful pursuit, but to make that the only criterion of success and to think that there's no value in being bewildered and in feeling awe and wonder and reverence before something which is truly majestic as the world is. It's a spiritual cost of philosophy has currently practiced.
And that's where the voice of Andrea Nightingale was in my head there because she's written a book and has worked a lot on the state of wonder as the origin of philosophy. And a big Thoreauvian at that, by the way.
So, good for her.
We have a lot to cover here, Joy. So, I wouldn't mind if we actually heard a poem or two from part one of your book in which maybe that experience of bewilderment comes forth.
One of the poems in which that's very much the case for me is a poem called Glass, which believe it or not actually is a poem that inspired this introduction of mine because I think that in many ways it's about the experience of a certain kind of wonder. Would you mind reading it? It's not that short, but I think it's definitely worthwhile.
It is one of the longer poems in the first part, at least not huge, but yeah, I'd love to read it. Glass.
When was it that he first saw something shatter and learned in that instant so much about the world?
He must have seemed a little webs of glittering glass a hundred times before that on the sidewalks and streets, on the playground concrete and supposed them to have been deposited like do, or they might have coalesced from the empty rigid air.
But then something broke before his eyes and from that moment everything was clear. What a shock it must have been. What a surprise to see that things end, that things are transformed into other things. It must have been so much for a child to grasp and what of water, which looks like glass but does not shatter. And what of air and what of the soul? Are we glass or are we water? And where does the child go who want to be?
He went to a field of yellow grass and fizzle behind the old train station and sat alone for hours. The place was alive with the ominous omnivorous hum of the neighborhood insects. And the waving, muttering grass seemed to capture the heat of the sun, the way a puddle of water will capture and hold one small corner of sky's panorama.
In the distance, noises, barking dogs, traffic, groaning lawnmowers. He learned the beginnings and the ends of noises and how the silence that goes before differs from the silence that comes after.
And he took this knowledge back to his home where there was a different kind of silence. The long pauses between his mother's questions and their responses, the careful, weary evening reticence of his father.
The quiet neglect of books and small objects untouched left alone to be what they were. In his corner room, he made notes, kept journals and charted a course of investigation as outside the world passed by a featureless ocean identical in all directions.
The producer of this show is a graduate student of ours, David Lummis, a graduate student of mine who wrote a review of this book before you received the prize for it.
I thought it was very perceptible, but about this poem, he says in this poem another such as "Fireflies" and so forth.
The juxtaposes the natural world against the world of human knowledge and technology and suggests that an ethics derives from observation of the natural world and from the realization that the human does not entirely belong there.
I agree with this comment.
And again, it's an ethics that has been de-emphasized in the tradition that I'm usually taken to work in, but which is there in writers like Thoreau and Emerson. Also more recently, Iris Murdoch did write about the importance of attention.
And our dude quite literally, and I think philosophers always misunderstand her by not realizing how literal she was being, but quite literally that ethics, ethical behavior was love and love was paying attention.
That essentially was what it was to live well and be a good human being.
As for whether the human fits in the natural, I do have conflicting feelings and maybe the human fate is to have conflicting feelings about that on the one hand.
I think we are natural, we couldn't be more natural, and yet there always is some sort of holding back or some sort of double consciousness about that prospect, about how we do fit in.
Which I think is essential to the human, it's not that I would want to lose it, but it is connected with some sort of regret.
I mean, there are certainly moments when one wishes that one could just let that observing consciousness go and just enter the flow of being.
And I think we imagine in a romantic way that must be what it's like for the other animals, which I'm not sure if it's true or not.
Well, certainly the questions that are posed at the end of the first stanza, you know, what a bear, what a soul are we like water or are we like glass, and this is the state of bewilderment, which is a, I would call it a visionary experience in childhood, except for the fact that the question is asked, when was it that he first saw you can't really, it must have been, and what a shock it must have been.
This reminds me of the very end of Dante's Patadizo, where he's describing a divine vision, and he can't recall anything, and he says it must have been like this or like that because I have this feeling there.
But here again, it's almost by conjecture that there was this visionary moment, and that we're left in a state of bewilderment.
And then he took this knowledge back home, so you go from nature back into the human social world, and a whole new set of questions, you know, opens up that they're correlated for sure, but these are two different orders of experience.
Right.
So, of course, he retreats quite quickly from the social world into his own little room, which is, yeah, we got another, and we leave him at the end of the day, locked away in his study. I mean, he's just a kid, but clearly I'm projecting the adults back into this child as well, and you're right, it's written from a point of view looking back, trying to determine this because he doesn't remember it, so he wants to figure it out.
I had forgotten that about the end of that parody, so I'm glad you mentioned that, it's a wonderful connection, which I was not aware of at all.
Well, we'll talk in a moment about Tom Thompson as a persona who fits into nature in a way that the rest of us don't, and of course, he has all this kind of mythological, legendary folkloric dimensions, precisely to accentuate the fact that he's an exception, that maybe the rest of us have forgotten how we can fit in there.
But before we turn to part two, there's another poem there that is dear to me that connects with the motif of vision that I brought up at the beginning, which is about the turtle. Would you mind reading that one?
Sure.
The turtle.
Ventures and I, into the realm of air, nobody's there, only the sky, upside down lake where strange fish float by.
Silent, still, wedged like a shim between the two realms, his reptilian will, is urgent and grim. The gap is filled.
Picture them stacked under the ground, he and his kind, all the way down.
This might be a good time to raise the question of the role at form plays for you in poetry, because there are a number of poems that are playfully formalistic, I wouldn't call it, I don't know, how else?
Playfully, in the sense that you're playing with inversions of syntax, they're rhyme. Sometimes it's emphasized, sometimes it's more subtle, internal rhymes, a little racial.
And it goes from, you can juxtapose extreme colloquial idiom with more archaic sounding syntax.
Is this something that, I'm sure you've been questioned on this before, but can you share with our listeners what role form plays in?
Yeah, I think it's many roles. And some of them are very influenced by poets that have preceded me. The last thing that you mentioned, the mixing of different dicksons and so on, the archaic with the colloquial is definitely something from John Barram and more than anyone else, although I've ever said it to.
More generally, there's something about form, it's a great resource that I think a lot of people, a lot of contemporary poets, don't make use of, because they feel either that it's going to mark them as some sort of conservative or some sort of old-fashioned poet, or just that it's going to be so powerful that it's going to take over the poem.
I think there's something to that. The trick always is to let the poem be what it wants and not to make a sonnet form or anything else into a kind of a procrastrian bed where you're just lopping it off, it wants to be longer, but no damn, it has to be 14 lines, or you're stretching it out to try to make the 14 lines or whatever it is.
That's a general point about a poetry that doesn't just have to do with form, either it's so easy to have designs on the poem and things that they're like your kids, there's things you want your kids to be, but you have to let your kids ultimately be the people they want to be.
And so it's that backing away from the poet and they're from the poem and hearing what it wants to be that it's one of the difficult things to learn.
I like this poem formally because it isn't it isn't a sonnet, and in fact maybe it's to borrow an image from the poem itself, maybe it's wedge like a shim between the two realms.
It has the right number of lines and it has a rhinescame which is not quite one of the traditional rhinescames for sonnets, but quite close and it does end with a rhyming couplet, so in that way very traditional.
But of course the rhythms are often the lines are much shorter, in fact to the point where really the first four stances each of them feels quite a bit like a haiku.
So it's almost a sonnet composed of haiku with them and a rhyming couplet at the end which is a rather unusual thing and it was fun to do and for whatever reason maybe just because I had this image of the turtle being between the two realms it seemed like an appropriate mix of forms for the for the poem to take.
Yeah and what I was trying to get at earlier I suppose it was that poets these days and for a long time now have been in a double bind of on the one hand.
Committing themselves to writing a poetry which is a formal art form.
And at the same time not hitting false notes which a certain kind of engagement with form can very easily end up sounding false.
And therefore I think you're right that a lot of poets avoid exploiting the resources of the formal and I think Susan Stewart who I mentioned earlier that the column volume was so great about that book is the way it.
Adventures into all sorts of possibilities of form you know without those false notes and likewise here another poems.
Thanks it's pleasant to be compared to her because I think she's a great example and very successful in what she does yes.
Yeah so what but what does the is there anything about the turtle that we should be alerted to as the appropriate figure for this.
Well you know my mother loves turtles and I'm sure that in some level that does it does come back to that I do have again becoming autobiographical but it's a potent image and symbol for me partly for purely personal reasons that I have very early memories of going out and can do is I'm looking for them and having little baby turtles that we put in the bucket and watched for an afternoon and then let go and you know that sort of thing.
So I associate it with home and with a lot of those again camping images and all that.
And I think that enough other people share those sort of associations that it can it's a poem that works on a certain level for people that have those which other people might not have access to but hopefully will enjoy it in other ways.
More broadly than that certainly the last couple it you know connects to that ancient idea of the world being supported by a turtle you know and it's that common story right.
And you ask the guy you think you've got him you know well but what does the turtle has time and he says I don't be silly it's turtles all the way down.
There's an endless stack of them which is such a nice image.
Yeah picture them stacked under the ground he and his kind all the way down.
I have to say I find that many contemporary poets don't know how to end poems and they have very lame last lines.
Even really great poems have lame last lines if there's an initial inspiration that just can't sustain itself.
It's so hard well again you know there's this worry that you're going to end by making a big point in which case you look like you're trying to hard to do something and it just ends with a fud and so instead people throw away their last lines and they end on something trivial or end with a joker and on sequitur.
I've often actually received advice I mean when I think back about the specific advice on poems that I've gotten probably more of it that was helpful than anything else concerned where to end it and people saying no don't end it there move this stands to the end and so on.
It's something that one can spend a very long time thinking about.
Of course maybe because I just did a three-part show on Dante but I see Dante all sorts of places and here the idea of this shift of perspective where the turtle is looking up side and sees a strange fish float by so you have this image of someone under the sea which again in the last kind of Padizo Dante has the image of Neptune.
At the bottom of the sea looking at the first shadow to cross the Argo which was the first ship to cross the sea and marveling at this completely unknown unprecedented phenomenon which is the first shadow.
And so here you're at the very pinnacle of heaven and now you're put at the bottom of the sea looking upwards.
So I guess there's also the turtle is interesting insofar as there's a very fragile plastic living organism inside a very hard shell.
That's perfect.
Somehow which may bear some resemblance to the Tom Thompson character.
That's right the layer of self protection and then on the inside of the extremely vulnerable naked consciousness that wants to come into contact with the world and yet you know can't let itself because it will be destroyed.
I can't resist the poem on the other page which is staring at me and it's called Rosencrest and Guildenstern are dead ruined by reading the cantos of Ezra Pound subtitle or Song of My Shell.
Now this is a relatively long poem I think in nine parts and every line is the title of a book.
That's right.
Would you mind reading maybe the first five sections of this poem?
Yeah that's absolutely sure.
Section 1 under the volcano in the Garden of the North American Martyrs two serious ladies left out in the rain.
Repair the crooked timber of humanity.
God knows the heart never fits its wanting.
God knows love is the crooked thing.
God knows the information.
All things all at once.
God knows the untouchable dreams of distant lives.
When one has lived a long time alone on the great Atlantic rainway and the stars were shining, the importance of what we care about lies with ignorance, divine comedies, difficult loves.
Why Brown Lee left the book of laughter and forgetting at swim-to-birds.
Ulysses annotated the annotated Lolita at weddings and wakes.
Praise the cunning man, the engineer of human souls.
Praise the dispossessed, the man who mistook his wife for a hat.
While England sleeps, Kant and the platypus kiss in the hotel Joseph Conrad.
The boy on the step, second guesses, the fortunate traveler.
After Ovid, who will run the frog hospital?
Oh, that's great.
And you even got Laurie Moore.
I was a friend of yours.
A friend of mine.
Wow.
And the great novel that book of first called "Who will run the frog hospital?"
He's got her in there too.
It's a fun poem to do at readings.
Though I always face the question of whether I should announce the nature of the poem ahead of time or let people
know what they are.
I'm not a part of the poem.
I'm a part of the poem.
The fact of these are the ones I chose to save as well.
And so in some ways it's difficult, and my guess is similar or perhaps no more authoritative
than anyone else's.
Any other person who picks up the book and reads it.
My guess would then go back to some of the things, for instance, that we've already talked
about, about having to do with secrets, about having to do with the figure of the speaker
of the poem, or the main figure of the poem who is now perhaps a speaker, as a kind of
an agent of some sort of investigating the world.
That certainly is at the heart of the character of Tom Thompson, in both the long sequence
at the end and also "Troukwing Tet," which is the first place he appears.
In the book, although in "Troukwing Tet" he seems for the most part a little more at
peace.
Through Tom Thompson in Purgatory as the title suggests, he's not so much.
He's working through something.
He suffers a lot in a lot of different ways.
But he definitely does, among the many things that he goes through, some of them more frequently
than others and some of them longer lasting than others.
There seem to be quite a few bouts of epistemological anxiety.
If you want to call it that, truly desiring very strongly to understand the world and just
knowing that he doesn't, and in fact it's not even clear that he's getting any closer.
And so I think that the speakers of most of these poems to the extent that we can imagine
are postulated speakers on sorts, experience something along those lines.
One of the first questions people would ask is who is Tom Thompson?
We know that in Canada he was an early 20th century painter.
You also have Canadian origins.
Is there any reason, you don't have to answer this because I think it's also probably
irrelevant, but is there any compelling reason why Tom Thompson was the mask or the persona
you chose for this series of songs?
I think there are some deep thematic reasons and also in part though it's contingent historical
reason which is that I wrote "Trop Quintet First" and that was consciously about Tom Thompson
the painter to some degree.
It really wasn't, it was really about the myth of Tom Thompson, and how, I mean he's just
an iconic Canadian figure and on the Canadian consciousness he looms so large.
And so this was a poem, it was the first poem I wrote by the way after moving to California
and for a little while I felt out of place and just poetically speaking I couldn't get
back into my groove and so for a while I didn't write anything and then finally started
to come again and this poem then came very quickly.
And he served as the figure in that way of this semi-mythical figure where I was trying
to understand the myth and why we feel that way about him and then by undercutting the
myth to a degree but I hope not totally and at that point I thought it was done with Tom
Thompson but then what happened was I was talking with Bob Nazarene Lenday who would
end up being the guy that published this book and he was a big fan of "Trop Quintet"
and at just this time I was starting the long song at sequence but I didn't know yet
how long it would be I didn't know what would unify it or how it would work and Bob said
that just about the right moment in time, we really liked that Tom Thompson guy, you
need to write more about him and it's sort of coalesced in my mind you know at that moment
it really was I had to talk about Epiphanes as a poet but that was one maybe that was
the only one that I've really had I saw oh okay he can unify it if Tom Thompson is the figure
that all this stuff is happening to then he can be the unifying force and from then on
I had certain worries about it because he's a very different figure in the second half
of the book than he is in "Trop Quintet" but it hasn't seemed to bother anyone and so I've
mostly stopped worrying about it at this point. Well I'm gonna you know David's review begins by saying
I have having read the book I still do not truly know who Tom Thompson is but I have an
idea why he is in Purgatory I'm gonna reverse that and say I think I have a pretty good idea
who he is but I'm not sure I know why he is in Purgatory or what Purgatory is in this
case right that's that's a good question because as I'm in an interesting position in a way
as an essentially non-religious person certainly not a member of any organized religion
who still wants to take certain religious concepts very seriously and in particular I think
some of the concepts of Inferno and Purgatory and so on these seem to me real aspects of human
existence and not just in a metaphorical way I mean it seems to me that the human life in
this century but probably in any century in any place contains elements of Inferno,
contains elements of Purgatory and some of Paradise I would hope but they don't come in that
order you know I think that's the one of the main differences of a poet writing now
well an obvious example aside from what I've tried to do here would be as repound in
the canto's where you find a lot of that imagery deployed in a similar way and but sort
of mixed up temporally or mixed up even thematically you don't know when Inferno or Purgatory
is going to strike and that of course is part of the 20th century experience that
paneled himself would have lived through and so I want that to be part of Tom Thompson's
experience too as you know there are four poems called Tom Thompson and Limbo and which
the Vatican is just a ball of my way I think it's a huge wonder I share some of those feelings
as you know again I'm not a Catholic or anything close to it but it plays such an important
conceptual role that it seems sad in a way to diminish how it was taken in that is
Inferno are now condemned to where are they where do they end up I don't know why I don't
understand how it's supposed to work but again the idea of Limbo and you have quite
literal sense of something we have all experienced and not something any more than Purgatory
that you go into work through and are done with it keeps coming back well you know
you you did not hear my third segment of the padaisabat I actually begin by quoting
Pound that the last fragments of the of the canto's where he says I have tried to
write paradise made the gods forgive what I have done you know let the wind speak that
is paradise and so this confession of failure and I and then I quoted from Tom Thompson
in situ where you describe him inhabiting a house that has a balcony that looks onto
that if he looks through a telescope you can see the gates of hell and then the last
stands this on page 54 and what of heaven must it to not be same distance opposite
direction but his view don't face that way that's speculation I think I mentioned that that
is like the most succinct characterization of the age of the modern or your age which
is that our view doesn't face in the direction of heaven right we find ourselves able
to believe quite wholeheartedly in the idea of Inferno but the idea of heaven it still
means a lot to us and speculation is obviously of one of the main activities of philosophers
know I don't know if you if you have that kind of illusion that if you're going to that
maybe that for which there's no direct empirical evidence because we can't see our view
doesn't face that way that we can speculate about it at most it's a funny thing about
the fortunes of philosophy though that speculation I think is fallen out of favor again speaking
to my analytic tradition it used to be huge and you mentioned Hegel for instance earlier
and what is what are Hegel's works but a huge incredible profound speculation and 20th
century philosophy in this tradition of course has turned its back on that and said that
no we only want to talk about things that are supported by the evidence and we don't
want to waste time speculating and I think again I'm not totally alienated from that because
I think it's important to be somewhat disciplined and strict with oneself in deciding
what to believe but there's so much to be learned from thinking that way and reading
that way that I think it did constitute in many ways that a real impoverishment of the
philosophical tradition and when I was talking about glimpses earlier and when I read
the first Thoreau epigraph about these pockets of summer in the winter and I was thinking
of modern poetry that if paradise if you're going to speculate about paradise obviously
we can't do it at a Dante of a celestial paradise it's just not possible but I think people
like Thoreau or in the poetic tradition the Hambou in illuminations that if paradise
is anywhere it's right here all around us and it's not a question of its existence or
non-existence it's a question of our ability to envision it and to see it and sometimes
well Hambou thought it required a systematic deregulation of all the senses in order to see
the world or the way William Blake put it is when the doors of perception are cleanse
the world will appear as it truly is infinite and so maybe it's more of a question of perception
deregulation of the habitual modes of perception and that somehow it's that poetry exists
in order to continue opening up Vistas onto what some people have called the ordinary
but in its ordinaryness at the same time miraculous right I mean if we could really see the
ordinary as it actually is yes it wouldn't be ordinary at all be the furthest thing
from it it is a matter of perception and I do think that I resist reductive accounts
I'm always I always stop myself on a bat to say this is what poetry is for something
like that but that one of the things that it can do which is incredibly valuable I hope
is to open up people's eyes and help them pay attention to what's in front of them without
preconceptions and help them somehow throw off even if only for a moment that that huge
thick crust of sophistication and intellect and education and so on which accumulates on
us as we as we move through life which in many ways I'm a big fan of I love culture I
will have intellect and all that you know but I do have that longing in a very strong
form to go back to earlier fresher perceptions that I seem to remember experiencing as a child
that's a good place to end our conversation here Troy who reached the end of our hour we've
been talking with Troy Jollomor about his book Tom Thompson in Purgatory and the fascinating
conversation that has been indeed so thank you very much for joining us thanks for
having me all you listeners tune in again next week thanks again
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