Michael Tyrell's poems have appeared in many magazines, including American Letters & Commentary, The Canary, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at St. Francis College and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. See some work here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? When I was about twelve, I came across a few Wallace Stevens poems in an anthology stashed somewhere in the family bookshelves. “The Snow Man” and “The Emperor of Ice Cream” stood out in particular, but I wasn’t ready for them—it would be many years before I would read Mallarmé’s dictum to Degas that poems are made of words, not ideas. So the answer would have to be Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror,” which I read in eleventh grade. The vivid and accessible imagery; the mirror’s seemingly dispassionate tone, which seemed such a clever buffer to the disturbance of the reflected figure (the woman wringing her hands and so forth)—all of it just floored me. It made me want to read it and hear it repeatedly, the way you want to hear a song more than once—that was a new sensation, because before that, once I was done with something that was it. I read novels—the required ones for school, and others in my spare time, some of which, even then, seemed like a terrible waste of time. None of them, even the ones pitched to us as great literature, really made me want to revisit them. So “Mirror” was the jolt I needed to make me a sharper, hungrier reader, which I think means being a compulsive re-reader. It made me turn to the other poets in my high school Sound and Sense anthology—Shakespeare’s sonnets, Keats, Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Stevens, and Dickenson. I wound up not returning the anthology at the end of the school term. I still have it. Fortunately, the administration never charged me for it. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I don’t know if it qualifies as “non-literary,” but recently I read Daniel Clowes’s funny and smart graphic novel Ghost World. It’s one of my favorite films of the past few years, and I enjoyed the episodic style of both the book and the movie. There were moments in there that could have been so inconsequential, but still hit upon something authentic about the decaying friendship between the two characters. I think of the scene in the supermarket—when Enid and Becky follow two eccentrics they dub “Satanists” into a supermarket, to discover what Satanists shop for in the supermarket. I wish I had enough talent as a visual artist to pull off a graphic novel. I used to read true crime occasionally. Detective work; the social roles of investigator, criminal, victim: these themes have intrigued me since I read Crime and Punishment, and probably even before that (see the earlier response about stealing the poetry anthology). 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? In college, I had to write a paper about Hegel and Nietzsche. The professor of the course returned it to me with some stern remarks that my reading of their works was “too literary” and not “philosophical” enough. While I never had a chance to ask him what he meant, exactly—he died of a heart attack a week later—I think I know now. I was too caught up with the individual writing styles (which came down to me in translation and not the original language) to say anything profound about the material itself, though it stimulated me. This still feels true. When I turn to Freud, Marx, Jung, Arendt, Benjamin and others, their ideas always seem too grandiose, or too fixed, to be useful to me in the writing of poems. It’s there on some submerged level, I’m sure, but it’s definitely not a conscious trigger. I usually hate poems that have deliberate references to philosophy. It’s like watching a film and catching a glimpse of a boom mike in the frame. Ugh. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Here are a few I’ve read and admired recently: Walter Abish (for his stylistic innovations, which never seem purely clever); Haruki Murakami (for the subtle weavings of fate in his novels and short stories); Marguerite Duras (for her fragmentary approach to recollection) and Wislawa Szymborska (for her way of turning every subject—from a missing day of her life to Hitler as a baby—on its head). 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? When I’m not writing, which is a good deal of the time, I read poems in a fragmentary way—a few lines in a poetry magazine, some stanzas as I flip through an unfamiliar book. It’s like calling someone, listening to the phone ring, and then hanging up before the person can answer. (Something I don’t do often since the invention of *69.) When I write, I write steadily—usually one poem after another, maybe a dozen in a few weeks if I’m lucky. Toward the end of the cycle and right after I’m exhausted and I’ve started going on repeat, I stop writing. I read whole books rather than excerpts. Lines and whole stanzas from other people’s work their way into my memory. And I’m conscious of poems as whole structures, both in my work and elsewhere. For my work, that reading period helps me distinguish between intention and product, whatever those terms mean during that particular writing cycle. Most often, I read first and second books now. That gulf between the first and second collection has to be one of the most difficult for any writer. Many mid-career poets repeat themselves; write the same book again and again. That makes me feel that I’d rather give up writing poems if all I have to look forward to is the formulaic. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? The Changing Light at Sandover. I lived in James Merrill’s apartment for a year and read several sections, but never finished the entire work. It needs no recommendations from me as a brilliant, daunting poem, and of course I got a kick out of reading it in the house where those Ouija sessions occurred and where the poem’s roots were laid down. But the bookshelves in that house were overflowing with rare volumes, first editions, ancient literary magazines—too many other temptations won me over. I don’t regret my distractedness, though. It’s unlikely I’ll have nearly constant access to such a library again—not to mention the peculiar privilege of living in a kind of museum. Sandover is a book I’m giving myself at least a year to read. There’s nothing incidental about it. Every page gives me pause. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? A poem shouldn’t be a story, but like a story it should make the listener want to hear more of it. It should have at least one secret. Writing it should feel like a game, though unlike a game it may not always have an object. It should be made up of real things, though the things may not always act the way they’re supposed to. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I think it’s vital that writers make sure that poetry gets read and heard, even on a small scale, by people outside their circles. That’s the only absolute duty I envision for the poet. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Rind Chiseled**Shattered I**You Of**Course Form**Vessel 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? The body has its own intractable life apart from our intentions for it and our representations of it. It’s something I’m wrestling with in my poems—how to get away with tackling a subject so commonplace (for lack of a better adjective) and not wind up with a result that’s confessional or trite. I admire poems like Frank Bidart’s “Ellen West,” which make such an active, memorably articulated connection between the body and the psyche.