DENISE LOW INTERVIEWS KS. POET LAUREATE WYATT TOWNLEY

The Kansas Humanities Council announced Wyatt Townley as the fourth Poet Laureate of Kansas on May 2. She will serve a two-year term as advocate for literary arts across the state. Her most recent book of poetry, The Afterlives of Trees (Woodley, 2012), won a Kansas Notable Book Award. Townley is a yoga teacher and dancer as well as a poet. She is author of Kansas City Ballet: The First Fifty Years (Kansas City Star Books, 2007). Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2009-11, interviews Townley about poetry and how it relates to yoga and dance.

Denise Low: Yoga, dance, and poetry all fit organic forms into set order. In what way(s) do you see your poems like dance steps or poses?

Wyatt Townley: Steps and poses.... Neither. I’m anti-pose. But dance and yoga come into play all the time in my poetry. The problems in composition are similar. What is inevitable and organic that flows from the last motion—or word—to the next one? That’s a very basic place to start. In poetry, just as in choreography, the next word must be born out of the word before it. There’s an inevitability there—which is not the same as predictability—that creates flow and motion. From another angle, dancers and yogis are always seeking to move beyond the edges of the body into space. The poem, too, has to get off the page. It can’t just lie there. Its instincts are kinetic.
Denise Low: How is verse different from art forms that use the body?
Wyatt Townley: Books last longer than bodies. When I was a kid, I thought that poetry and dance were at opposite ends of the spectrum—poetry arguably the most refined of the verbal arts, dance arguably the most refined of the nonverbal. Pursuing them both felt like straddling two worlds, doing the splits! I don’t think that anymore. The body is a poem, writing itself with every breath. And poems affect us physically, a la Dickinson’s crown chakra opening: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” These days I’m interested in big-picture connections, not small-picture distinctions.
Denise Low: Your poetry manipulates space in so many ways. In "Skeleton Key," for example, you write "Insert the tailbone/into the sky/turn slowly, unlocking." Are you thinking spatially as you compose?
Wyatt Townley: Partly. For me the poem itself comes out of a sense of spaciousness, something—somewhere—bigger. And as poets we’re trying to translate that expansion to the page—through compression! Another paradox. Part of what we are doing in yoga is expanding time and space. We’re exploring the space between things—between breaths, between heartbeats, between vertebrae, between the eyebrows, and so on. By retraining the breath and slowing it down, we find we can also cover more territory with it; so we get both more time (slower) and more space (deeper). The same thing happens in the poem, through the use of breath and white space—all the little choices one makes down the page in terms of placement, rhythm, sound, punctuation, enjambment, stanza break—either slowing down or speeding up time. So as poets we’re exploring the use of time in terms of space, just as dancers do. The book-length poem I’m working on now, called “Rewriting the Body,” runs with this idea.
Denise Low: How does the sky influence your sense of space?
Wyatt Townley: We think of the sky as above us, but of course we’re in the sky and the sky’s in us. We breathe it in and out, and rearrange it with every step. This is still revelatory to me. I’ve always been fascinated by space, as so many of us Kansans are, with our great view of the stars. My dad was an amateur astronomer and would spend hours setting up his telescope so he could help us understand where we are. I’m still working on that! But you’re right—and I’d never really thought of it in this way—space is a big theme for me, from personal space in and around the body all the way out to the cosmos, micro to macro.
Denise Low: Paul Muldoon has a lovely essay about the moment before a poem comes into being. What is that moment, that tipping point, for you?
Wyatt Townley: It’s an intriguing question, but I’m going to give a practical answer. For me the poem starts with a decision to sit down, the old “Apply the seat of the pants to the chair.” Maybe that’s the distinction between poetry and dance: the poet’s gotta sit down, the dancer’s gotta stand up. It’s a good mix.
Denise Low: Here is one of my favorite poems from The Afterlives of Trees (Woodley):

Tracks by Wyatt Townley

 Follow the children who follow the creek.

Their bright clothes fold into trees

and they’re gone. How you’ve grown—

too slow to keep up, too dogged

to turn back. Forget the list in your pocket.

See what you’ve missed. Deep in the woods

the wind erases the way you came. All paths

lead here. Beside you the tracks of a wild turkey,
 
and earlier, a raccoon retracing its steps.
There a deer paused, perfect disguise,

and here we all are, leaving ourselves

behind. We fold into trees and are gone.
     (copyright Wyatt Townley, reprinted with permission)

More information about Wyatt Townley and the poet laureate program: http://kansashumanities.org/programs/poet-laureate-of-kansas/

A Guest Contribution: Brian Dadolph’s Introduction to Paul Muldoon Lecture: “The Eternity of the Poem" 27 Feb., KU

On e of the good thing about working at a university for a number years is that sometimes you’re lucky enough to meet a great speaker a second time around. So I’m very glad that poet Paul Muldoon is with us again.
In introducing our speaker tonight, I don’t want to make the same mistake as the one made by the university president of Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, a mistake referred to by Paul Muldoon in his marvelous new book of Oxford Lectures about poetry, The End of the Poem. According to Muldoon, the university president insisted on introducing Mr. Yeats to the audience, and did his own research about the poet. Unfortunately, however, he made the mistake of thinking that the speaker was Keats and not Yeats—it’s the difference of one letter after all—and introduced the great Irish poet as Keats, the author of “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode to Melancholy.” I hope to do better than that.
Paul is one of the most honored of contemporary writers. He has won the prestigious T.S.Eliot Prize for poetry, and the Pulitzer Prize for his 2002 collection, Moy Sand and Gravel. There have been many other prizes and honors, too many to mention now. As well as his Professorships at Princeton and Oxford, Paul Muldoon is also the new poetry editor of The New Yorker.
I have been reading Paul Muldoon’s poetry for many years, following the course of his prolific career. In reading his early poems, I always appreciated the way that Muldoon could make the political both personal and immediate, and I like in particular his poem “Cuba,” which yokes together very disparate events. In “Cuba” the Cold War confrontation between America and the USSR is the unlikely backdrop for a young girl’s confession. It is typical of Muldoon to see the Big Picture in the small scene, and enable his readers to clearly see it too.
Muldoon’s poetry is in many ways a series of contrasts between, for example, a sort of casual tone and yet tight form; between commonplace events and their great significance; between the new world and the “old country”; between very different events, unexpectedly yoked together. Muldoon himself has said that he wants his poetry to sound “very off-the-cuff,” aiming for “clear, translucent surfaces,” which on closer inspection hold, “other things happening under the surface.”
Muldoon’s most recent book of poems, Horse Latitudes, is another powerful and intriguing collection. First of all, I found myself learning about the significance of the title: “Horse Latitudes are the latitudes close to the equator where ships were often becalmed, and horses were supposedly thrown overboard so they didn’t have to be fed and watered.”
This is a collection of masterful poetic technique and considerable emotional power, the two in perfect combination in “The Old Country,” for example, in which Muldoon describes a country—his old country, perhaps—in which “every resort was a last resort,” “every cut was a cut to the quick,” and “every slope was a slippery slope.” Muldoon evokes an awful sense of impending doom, which reminded me, at least, of Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding songs. Perhaps I was thinking of Dylan because there’s a sort of tribute to Dylan in this collection, “Bob Dylan at Princeton, November 2000,” in which Bob picks up his “ornery degree” at Princeton with “absolute refusal to bend the knee.”

“Absolute refusal to bend the knee”: that might be applied to Paul Muldoon too, who has, it seems to me, always gone his own way in his writing, and everyone who loves poetry—and art in general—should be glad of that.

There are many Big moments of Paul’s career that I might mention as a final point, but instead I’d like to mention just one small point, and small poem—a haiku, in fact—which not only shows Paul’s mastery of form and wit, but also shows how much fun it is to read this poet who seems to have an endless supply of surprises in his magician’s hat. In the long haiku sequence “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore,” Muldoon writes:

Skirts round their middles,
the girls have a right confab
while taking widdles.