By Hannah Grieco
Todd Dillard’s poems have a streamlined purposefulness to them, his wit and playfulness injected into metered stories about his life. His work can be found all over, from here at Cotton Xenomorph (“Way Things Vanish”) to Split Lip, Barren Magazine, McSweeney’s, and many more.
Dillard’s debut full-length collection “Ways We Vanish” is out now from Okay Donkey Press, and it’s as powerful as you’d expect. Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with him about his work.
HG: I’ve been admonished by poets before for assuming their work is autobiographical, for searching for what is true in their collections. But just between you and me…are most of your poems autobiographical?
TD: First off—poets shouldn’t admonish anybody! We all have different understandings, different yearnings in what we bring to poems, and the “truth” a poet wields in their poems might be perceived and appreciated differently by their readers. My poems are true, and they aren’t. Every single poem in this collection came from something that happened to me—a little seed, if you will, from which I grew the poem. The fairy tale poem “East Texas,” for example, is very autobiographical—the decapitated snake, the land, the nature—all true. Same for my father prowling the house, only he was looking for the drugs Mom stashed throughout the house. Same for my mom being both a non-presence and a presence in the house, spending her many days in her bedroom. Same, too, for the narrator’s yearning for… something, which is a yearning or a confusion that I derived from my own. Did a bunch of magical bees turn a snake into an air balloon that a shadow then hijacks? Not so much!
This is a sliver of a larger conversation, I think, specifically in how magical realism is applied to cultures, not as a way to make them more fantastical, but as a way to understand them. I wonder if there’s something similar for individual trauma—a poetics that uses the impossible to navigate what should have been impossible. It’s something I’ve been thinking about, but haven’t really formed a thought around just yet.
HG: Okay, magical realism: Tell. Me. Everything. Can you give me an example of this in your own poetry?
TD: So my understanding of Magical Realism—which I will be the first to admit isn’t as thorough as I want it to be—is that it pairs realistic narratives with elements of surrealism or stuff you’d normally see in fantasy. My understanding is that this is a movement of literature that came after or complements surrealism, and that it brings elements of dreams/impossibilities to some realistic paradigm. My understanding of both of these things initially is that many of the fantastical elements and realistic elements of these kinds of writing occur within cultural contexts, say, Marquez’s dialog with colonialism/post-colonialism. For a long time I hesitated to apply magical realism as a term to any fantastical writing steeped in realism that didn’t include some sort of cultural milestone, but I’ve been told I’m being too narrow in my definition. This then—and again, just for me here—suggests there are other ways to employ magical realism in narratives, especially within poetry, which has so, so many forms, though the one that chiefly concerns my book is the confessional form. What, then, is magical realism like when employed in the confessional mode? I’ve tried to explore that in this book. Sharing a cigarette with a ghost, reimagining the parable of a seagull moving a beach grain by grain by instead having a beach made of clamoring hands, having a forest made of dead fathers while a narrator hunts a silver beard… all of these employ touchstones of confessional images and situate them within impossible settings. The intent is to remain cleaved to realism, but then to explore it by employing an impossible paradigm. It’s the difference between a poetry that explicates trauma versus poetry that invents a shape for trauma to have wings, to say hello. It’s like my poem “No Vacancy,” which identifies the mother’s trauma via the image of a window in her chest, and then ends with the narrator’s own “vacancy,” in this case a tunnel in his eye.
HG: Being a father echoes throughout so much of your work. How has your poetry changed since your daughter was born?
TD: So much! I’ve said this elsewhere, but I kind of gave up on poetry after my MFA. And when I did come back, at first it was to try my hand at some weird poems for children. It wasn’t until I became a father that I began writing in earnest again. So, my poetry has changed because it was, for the most part, entirely gone, and upon becoming a dad it showed up again, looking kind of like what I remembered writing right after getting my MFA, but also different. My interests changed. I found I was looking at the world as it was being encountered for the first time by my daughter, and this, and the years since my mother passed and the life I’d won figuring myself out—all of these influence my poetics.
HG: Up and Down the Ladder: this one really got me. This visceral fear of losing time together. Talk to me about writing about your daughter?
TD: I’m glad you picked this poem out! This and its sister poem “First Attempt” arrived in entirely different ways—both involve the pretend “deaths” parents inflict on themselves on their child’s behalf, the first as a child sees their mother “kill” herself, but the second as the narrator, a father now, has added pretend deaths into their quotidian way of living. This presents an essential paradigm in my writing and that I worked to include in the book: the dimensions of parenting include how you parent and how you were parented. It’s through writing about my daughter (and raising her) I learned so much more about my mother and my mother. Parenthood is such this massive and impossible thing, and it’s I think underappreciated in a lot of ways, I think because in a lot of ways it’s entirely unknowable. It’s no wonder my damn old knees aged me out of being a good horse for my daughter, right? But then later she asks me how to feed the invisible horse that visits her at night. Is this a dream? Is it that who I was in an apparition to her, and she’s desperate to make it stay? This is, then, how I arrive at: “I never thought there was a gift / to be made of nothing, until I became a father / and had to give it every day.”
HG: How long did this collection take to create? When did you start, and when did you *know* you had the right combination of poems to make “Ways We Vanish?”
TD: I wrote “Put the Jukebox On” when I was 22, and I wrote “Up and Down the Latter” when I was 36. So there’s this sense it took 15 years to put the book together. At the same time, I didn’t try to start putting this iteration of the book together until about seven months ago (mid-2019, book released in March of 2020). I had enough poems to shop a collection around in 2018 and the tail end of 2017, but the collection was a mess, basically the manuscript equivalent of a cartoon character’s closet, where they open the door and everything avalanches onto them. I thought being buried in my work meant I had enough work, that I just needed to pick the right ones and apply the right structure and be done. But having enough poems doesn’t make a collection—my poems were all asking similar questions, were addressing the subject of my mother’s death in the same ways. I needed new questions, and different ways to answer the old questions. That took almost two years of work to reach. I *knew* “Ways We Vanish” was finished when I started having to choose which poems to include based on the many conversations they were having with other poems. When it was just about having a certain number of pages ready, I didn’t have a collection, I had a filing cabinet.
HG: What drew (draws?) you to this vanishing? Every poem here has a sense of loss – what does it cost you to write like this?
TD: I have a really bad memory, or perhaps I have a normal memory and I’m sensitive to the amount of forgetting that requires. So I’m constantly aware of all these things essential to my life are slowly becoming shapes in a fog, and that to move toward them risks moving away from something else. To imagine this happening to everyone all over the world… it’s overwhelming. I’ve been obsessed with these kinds of disappearances for years. I even wrote a failed novel about them! Which is to say, I’ve been so focused on vanishing and have such a bad memory that I can’t even remember what initially drew me to this theme.
The cost is astronomical. I can’t remember if what I’ve written is my mother or a facsimile of her. The truth asserted in these poems—I can no longer tell where they end and where the memory of my mother begins. But it’s not just my mom… it’s everything in my past. I have a perfect visual of a flood in Houston, the gray-brown water rising into yard, the ruby Christmas ornament of a colony of ants bobbing up and down in it. When did this happen? Did it? Why can I remember the stick, breaking it apart? In this way the book, too, is about a different kind of vanishing… how the absences, the grief that marks our lives isn’t a form of subtraction, it’s additive. We become the absences too. The people we love will become our absences too.
HG: Were there poems that you loved that didn’t make into this book?
TD: Yes! There’s a poem about dumping Winter to hook up with Spring that didn’t make it. It’s in the journal Pidgeonholes.
HG: What caused that poem to not quite fit in the collection? How do you decide?
TD: That poem was intentionally singular and disruptive to the metaphor of snow I build throughout the collection. Snow is tied to my mother in many of these poems, having a sexy poem about the arrival of Spring contrasted by a late snowstorm—it kind of felt like including a random moment from my teenage years when I’d sneak girls into my room and my mom would randomly knock on my door while, uh, we were watching “Willow.” I watched “Willow” a lot in high school.
HG: How long does it take for you to write a poem? Are there poems done in minutes? Poems that you revise a thousand times?
TD: “Love Poem to My Brother as He Gives Our Father a Shave” took 13 minutes to write. “Parallax” and “Interview with an Addict’s Son” and “Every Story Is an Origin Story” took dozens of drafts spread out over a year. I am not sure, now, how long it takes on average… I have poems I can finish in a month or so, but many of my poems look similar to their final drafts within a few weeks of being written down. Usually it takes me a few months, so I’ll say that: these poems are measured in months.
HG: What poetry books are stacked next to your bed right now?
TD: Circe’s Bicycle by Tara Campbell
The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All by C.D. Wright
I just finished:
Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser
With Deer by Aase Berg
I’m not sure what I will read next—I get in moods and use my moods to pick my poems. I feel a Carl Phillips or Claudia Emerson mood coming on. Don’t ask me why!
HG: Who was the first poet you remember reading and just falling in love with?
TD: e.e. cummings! And then Pablo Neruda. I remember them now for how much they contrasted the formulaic and English idea I had of poetry at the time—we’re talking middle school at this point. They were erotic and I was a teenage boy trying to navigate all types of desires. I started off by writing love poems, and in many ways, I think love poems are still what I write. It’s just my love has expanded to something bigger than the complicated, dark red desire of an adolescent clumsy with want.
Todd Dillard's work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including The Adroit Journal, Fairy Tale Review, Booth, The Boiler Journal, and Electric Literature. His debut book "Ways We Vanish" is available from Okay Donkey Press. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and daughter. Follow him on twitter via @toddedillard
Hannah Grieco is a writer in Arlington, VA. She can be found online at www.hgrieco.com and on Twitter at @writesloud.