THR Interview Series: Tom Sleigh
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As a continuation of our interview series, our Editorial Director, Dominic Ligon, interviewed Tom Sleigh, esteemed poet, journalist, and educator.
Tom Sleigh is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Army Cats, winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Space Walk which won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award.
He is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn. During the last decade, he has also worked as a journalist in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Iraq, and Libya.
Dominic Ligon: I’m intrigued to hear you speak about the process of putting The Land between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees together. You’ve documented the lives of refugees in the Middle East and East Africa; when did your written pieces begin to feel like a book? Was it intentional to merge these stories together, or did it naturally happen?
Tom Sleigh: I never intended to write such a book. I fell into the journalism by chance when I was asked to go to Lebanon and Syria in 2007 by Munir Akash and Amira El-Zein. They'd founded a small cross-cultural organization called the Trans-Arab Unity Foundation because they were tired of the way Palestinians were being portrayed in news media. They wanted me and the three other writers they'd invited to write something more enduring than a newsbeat. I had a newspaper headline knowledge of the Middle East, so I crammed as much reading as I could into the seven or eight months that I had to prepare for the trip. I was still ignorant, but not quite so clueless as before. But no matter how much I know, I'll l always be a cultural outsider—and it's been paramount to acknowledge that upfront. I try to be as honest as I can about my limitations as a writer, and to build those limitations into the piece, as opposed to pretending I know things I don't.
Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet who grew up during The Troubles (the sectarian violence that tore Ireland apart for almost 40 years), was a model for me: he was a dear friend, and his desire, as he put it, to be "responsive to all sides at once" became key. I very quickly learned that I had no inclination, or gift, for sketching the Big Picture. Instead, I discovered that I could write the texture of an experience, the look and feel of things, in a way that was accurate and decidedly small-scale. The sentences I wrote, and the kind of language that was available to me became more interesting, at least to myself, when I was trying to capture something concrete—say, a tank mechanic on his back in the dirt who seemed to talk to his tank by tapping on it with a wrench and listening to the little pings and clangs the tank spoke back to him. The strange intimacy of watching him, the almost familial quality of the exchange, which reminded me of the hushed, almost illicit conversations I used to have with my twin brother and older brother late at night when my parents were out for the evening, felt more provocative and suggestive about the nature of war and weapons than if I'd tried to write an Op Ed deploring this or that.
So those local, small-scale, intimate, highly contingent truths and intimations became the focus of the essays, not the big boffo statement about "speaking truth to power." I always find it a little strange to hear people use that phrase because it's said by Kent in Shakespeare's King Lear. It sounds good, liberal, in short, a good idea—but the context in which Kent speaks truth to power is deeply ambiguous. King Lear by any standard is a tyrant and from that point of view, Kent's loyalty to the king, even when he's vehemently disagreeing with him, has always seemed more a sign of blind obedience than any form of moral courage. I'm all for getting rid of King Lear—but who gets rid of him and how are also important—that is, if you don't want to just be passing the crown from one tyrant to another. Anyway, my bent has been to walk wary of large abstractions, to avoid moralizing unless what I have to say is grounded in personal experience (and our own experience is often limited in ways we might not recognize), and to try to write as close as I can to what I myself observed.
So when I think of a famine in East Africa, particular people spring to mind: a Somali herder who told me that the price of goats had fallen because no one wants to buy goats if you don't have anything to feed them. Or a goat itself climbing inside an enormous cooking pot and licking the insides clean after all the soup had been dished up to a group of starving Somali teenage boys. These kids weren't anything like the generic pictures of misery and starvation depicted in the media: a child with a swollen belly, huge head, stick figure arms and legs, ribs etched against the skin, eyes like saucers, face a blank—what's been called "disaster porn." Despite their being malnourished, these boys were high-spirited and full of jokes. We even got into a kind of guessing game in which they asked me to guess their ages, and they tried to guess mine, and before we knew it, all of us were laughing and high-fiving and generally horsing around. Not that that would last, or mitigate the fact that around 250,000 people starved to death in 2011, many of them children. Imagine a city the size of Buffalo in which every man, woman, and child died of hunger or hunger related causes: disease, exhaustion, famine-related violence, etc. Or think about Marietta which Wikipedia tells me has 60,000 people—every single person on the street, and every single person for many miles around, would be dead.
But famine is only part of the story. In fact, the boys' horsing around inside their skinny bodies reveals more about each one's small-scale, individual humanity than a useful, but impersonal policy paper on how to prevent famine. I once watched some kids playing a card game with imaginary cards: they stared with deep consideration at their hands before slapping down the cards on a cardboard box. And there’s a wonderful scene in the movie Beasts of No Nation, about child soldiers in West Africa, in which a little boy salvages a broken TV screen's frame and holds it up around his face and calls it Kid TV. These details of character show something essential, irreplaceable, and unique about the person. Futile as it may seem in the face of so many dead, I want to preserve, insofar as I can, the trace of these people in the world, their quirks and little strangenesses of character.
As to how the book came together, it built up one essay at a time and, as it came together over the course of about ten years, the lives of refugees came to dominate it. If you write about a specific topic like refugees, editors tend to think of you as the "refugee guy," and they ask you to write about similar issues. More importantly, after my initial experience in Lebanon and Syria, I found how much it meant to me as a human being to do this kind of writing. I loved getting to know the people and trying to write about them in ways that they themselves would recognize. So it was natural to merge these stories together because my own affinities had led me in that direction. And the further in that direction I went, the more I felt the desire to see the world for myself, if only to get free for a little while from the hell of opinions, jabbering ideologies, and the Big Truths bombarding us every second from all forms of media.
Ligon: In your KSU lecture, you mentioned that your main focus in both Journalism and Poetry is to always create from a space of truth. What other parallels do you find between the two forms of writing? Differences?
Sleigh: When I use the word "truth", I mean something like objectively agreed on phenomena. Either there was a famine or there wasn't. Either children starved to death or they didn't. Either a car bomb went off in the ABC Shopping Mall in Beirut or it didn't. That kind of basic factuality has been severely eroded in the past twenty years by forces I won't go into here. At the same time, as you can see from my qualms about King Lear's subordinate, Kent, I think truth is deeply contingent. So rather than capital T Truth, in both my poems and my journalism I want, as Robert Frost put it, whatever "momentary stay against confusion" the poem or essay discovers to arise out of the material, and not merely parrot back to me my own religious, ethical, or political convictions. I bore myself and others silly when Old Ranty Tom gets wound up and blathers on and on in the same old dull pat phrases. Ugh. The language itself, and the invention of the sentences, are what I rely on to take me beyond “the monumental certainties that go perpetually by perpetually on time,” to quote Randall Jarrell.
Where journalism and poetry part ways has to do with the associative leapfrogging and aural intensity of a poem over a prose essay. In a poem, or at least the kind of poem that I like to read, the heat is on every word at every moment, even if the idiom is fairly plain spoken. So when I'm writing poems, I'm constantly asking myself, Where is the language interesting, where does it impinge on a psychological or ethical discovery? And then I let the language take its head and lead me where it wants to go—not where I intend for it to go. Neither intentions or ideas write poems. Poems partake of intentions and ideas, obviously, just as they partake of religion, politics, and a host of other things. But the bedrock underneath them is acoustic: you bounce the signal off the ocean floor and it gives you the shape and topography of what's hidden down there, the emotional reefs and shoals and deep water trenches. And then you have to render the signal in a language that makes those features luminously present because of how the words reflect what Seamus Heaney once called "the primal reach into the physical."
In contrast, journalism usually asks that the language be a communal language, and not a private code: it's an act of courtesy toward the reader to serve as a translator for them between their world and the world you're trying to write about, even if the doubts you have about your own authority become part of your story. Another way to say this is that not every piece of writing is written for the same audience. I was in Nigeria in Abuja, the capitol, last year, and I got to sit in on a fascinating discussion among a group of Nigerian writers about how they viewed Chinua Achebe, probably the best known Nigerian writer in the English-speaking West. Many of them were skeptical of Achebe, saying he'd written his work with an eye to what an English-speaking audience abroad would need to know. I'd just read Things Fell Apart, in part a chronicle of village life and ritual, and I had to admit they had a point: there was a lot of discursive exposition about customs and rites that fell outside the narrative frame and seemed mainly to be there to keep a foreigner like me oriented. But as I listened, I also had another reaction: most of these writers were city-dwellers. If Nigeria kept moving away from communal village life toward something more urban, then in twenty years time wouldn't these same customs be as obscure to them as they had been to me if Achebe hadn't explained them? The important point here is not so much to come down on either side of the question, but to understand how conventions, social and literary, mutate and transform. You can tell yourself that you're writing for "the ages," but the ages can be forgiven if they shrug you off. But that doesn't mean that the ages won't swing back around in your favor.
The biggest difference for me in poetry and journalism is that poems rise more centrally out of the need for language to have its own say. You could put it gnomically by saying that you see and think and feel through the ear. And in my own case, I'd like to think that my poems embody the world—if they comment on it, fine—but if I haven't found a way to make the shining and sounding surfaces of the world come forth in the language, then I need to rethink the poem from top to bottom.
Ligon: In your latest collection of poems, House of Fact, House of Ruin, the poem, “Before Rain,” caught my attention. What’s the back story behind this piece? How did it come about?
Sleigh: That came out of two experiences, one in Syria, the other in Jordan. In Syria I went to the town of Quneitra, a town in the Golan Heights—a town that had been “razed to the ground.” The very term—“razed”—has always seemed like literary artifice from histories of the war between Carthage and Rome. But in Quneitra, the word feels deadly accurate.
Before pulling out of Quneitra at the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Israeli army evicted the 37,000 Syrian Arabs living there, then stripped buildings of fixtures, windows, doors, anything that could be carted off, right down to the hinges and knobs. Once the town was completely picked clean, bulldozers and tractors moved in and knocked down most of the buildings. It was odd, disturbingly odd, to hear birdsong in the clear, quiet air, and to see a herd of cows, heads bowed to graze among the ruins overgrown by flowers and weeds, roses run wild in what used to be somebody's garden. Now, Quneitra serves the dual purpose of a Syrian memorial and propaganda site.
The second experience took place in southern Jordan when I visited the Nabatean and Roman ruins of Petra, an astonishingly well-preserved ancient city that you might recall from one of the Indian Jones movies. When I visited, there was almost nobody there, since the regional wars had killed off the tourist trade. It was a city of tombs, many of them hollowed out of the sandstone cliffs so that they had a rock lintel overhanging the ornate Corinthian columns that rose up in partial support of the pediments. The city fell into serious decline after an earthquake in A.D. 363 crippled the water system. The only contemporary life were the Bidul (Petra Bedouin) women who sold postcards, Petra keychains, pottery, and other tourist souvenirs. For years a Bidul community had used the ruins as their homes, but the government forcibly resettled them to block housing in 1985.
When I wrote the poem, the memory of these two destroyed cities came together, one ancient, one modern. And I couldn't help but think of New York City as a ruin in the making. Someday, and maybe not all that far in the future, New York, too, could be abandoned. So those three cities came together in that poem.
Ligon: As a graduate student who’s trying to figure out their direction and role in the world of literature, I must ask this question: Did you know what you wanted to write while attending John Hopkins University? How did you navigate this?
Sleigh: I'm wary of pretending to know all about that young man back in graduate school: 40 years separate us now. At Hopkins, I didn't so much have an inkling of what I'd write about—I didn't include a single poem from my thesis in my first book—as get a feel for the kind of poems I admired and wanted to write. I loved Bishop. Beyond her, I read widely and indiscriminately for a while, and then I began to narrow in on other writers whom I loved: Robert Browning became hugely important to me because of the immense variety of rhyme patterns and meters and stanzaic shapes that he used. I imitated every one of them. I read Pound's essays and his poems, ditto Eliot, I spent a lot of time reading John Donne and the Metaphysicals, I devoted one summer reading all of Shakespeare. I wanted to know everything that had been done, not because I was systematic, but because I was curious and excited to be discovering a whole new art form. I read work in translation, especially the Spanish and Latin American poets. At a certain point, I read Lowell, though I started with his last book, Day by Day, which I still think is his most useful book to other writers. He's a wonderful poet, large, smashing, often capable of extraordinarily delicate feeling, a cautionary tale in some ways, an exemplary one in others. I read Robert Hayden and loved the lyric intelligence running head-on into the historical facts of the Middle Passage and the broad humanity that ran through his Baha'i faith. I guess you could say that by reading I discovered what was lying in wait for me to discover in my own poems. It's true that I have a romance with experience, but since my reading is a deep part of my experience, I draw on it. You could also say that I'm NOT interested in finding that mythical property, "my voice—" but I am interested in finding the voice that will do justice to the particular world of one particular poem.
Ligon: What should readers expect from your upcoming collection of poems: The King's Touch?
Sleigh: I hope that they'll find it a deeply pleasurable and challenging read. The title refers to the ancient belief that the divinely anointed king can lay his hands on the sick and cure them. Of course, the king I had in mind, James the VI, couldn't stand touching the sick, but felt like he had to do it to maintain his power over the commons. I like the mixed nature of experience, the darkly humorous way that the king as a man and the king as public figure are at odds. Obviously, the poems that come out of that paradox speak to our pandemic moment in ways both direct and oblique. And the book also looks at the lives of refugees, both children and adults, and the soldiers who often determine their fate, and explores how language can and can't adequately represent their worlds, offer solace in myths, history, and art—and hopefully, provide a provisional “clarification of life," to quote Frost again, amidst violence and chaos. The poems have pushed me toward an emotional directness and urgency which I hope gets at the heart of our strangely surreal moment, and the potentially apocalyptic future that's opening up before us.
Ligon: How has the pandemic affected your creative process?
Sleigh: I've written some poems that came out of the pandemic, but because of my long history with a chronic illness that has nearly killed me three times, Covid just intensified what I've been living with most of my life: desperately ill hospital stays, the often quietly surreal nature of fighting for your life while having comically absurd dreams: I once dreamed that I was a model sashaying down the hospital corridor as if it were a fashion show runway. Holding on to my IV pole, my naked ass exposed by the backless hospital gown called a johnny, I heard the dream’s voice-over say in a perfect imitation of a breathlessly excited New York Fashion Week announcer, “Here we have Tommy in a johnny by Gianni!” Maybe you had to be there, but I woke up laughing, which hurt, because I was having horrible stomach cramps. As I said, for me Covid has been a continuation, not a rupture with the past. Luckily for me, my health stabilized in my mid-forties, but the threat hangs over my head every day. So for me what's new about Covid is to see how the existential situation for all of us has been so radically transformed in such a short amount of time. All of us have had our faces shoved up against the blank wall of our own mortality.
Ligon: I’ve always associated poetry as a form of prayer—a spiritual journey. What does poetry mean to you?
Sleigh: Let me put it this way: I was having a drink with Seamus Heaney a few years into our friendship. Seamus was a wonderful talker, loved jokes and foolishness, and was one of the kindest men I've ever known. That he had immense gifts as a poet and critic, and carried himself with such modesty and care for other people's feelings, always astonished me. One of the subjects we loved to talk about was what we liked in poet X's work or had reservations about in Y's. One day, after a second ice-cold vodka that made the afternoon especially convivial, we were speaking about a poet whom we liked as a person and whose poems we admired—and then Seamus said of this poet what I would come to learn was his highest form of praise: "Well, Tom, Z is a very reliable sensibility."
And I’ve had that experience with other poet pals over the years, especially Alan Shapiro, in which the encouragement and criticism we give to one another has led to a deep intimacy, a uniqueness of affection that beats hands down any prize or award you might win. It keeps alive in you the aspiration to do the best work you can, regardless of what MFA programs or poetry institutions or publishers are glomming onto at any particular moment. You have to keep at a tangent to all that if you want to write something that goes beyond mere period styles and fashionable blips. I remember having a conversation with Mark Strand just after he’d been diagnosed with incurable cancer, and we somehow got on the subject of what writing means. And I said something that was kind of boilerplate, like “Well, I suppose we all want to write great poems.” And Mark said to me, “No, I don’t want to write great poems—I just want to write the poems that are mine to write.”
And that's what poetry means to me: writing the poems that are mine to write, deep abiding friendship, and trying to have a very reliable sensibility.
Tom Sleigh’s latest book of poems, The King’s Touch, is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2022.
