Todd Robinson is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Mass for Shut-Ins (U of Nebraska P, 2018). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in North American Review, The Pinch, Notre Dame Review, Superstition Review, and Sugar House Review. He is an Assistant Professor in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and caregiver to his partner, a disabled physician. Learn more at http://www.toddfather.net.
You can read Pine Wilt in the January 2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
It’s difficult for me to recall how I write poems: they pour out in these funky fugue states, digging down the page with little sense of where things will wend or end. As for why, I’m caregiver to my disabled partner, and if I don’t write about her and us, I’ll go mad with grief.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
I’ve been obsessed with haibun for a few years now. The stolidity of its prose poem body makes for an intriguing counterpoint to the haiku tail’s whispery escape velocity. I’ve never been especially nimble with form, and too often settle on couplets or tercets. Haibun, at least to me, is a less tired idiom. Finally, I’m interested in ironizing a form associated with travel, making it a vessel for poems of stranded domesticity.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
Meditation or drug abuse. Since I’m not disciplined enough for regular meditation, regular drug abuse would be the likely, ruinous course.
How do you revise your work?
I reread it slowly and carefully, looking for clunky phrases and overused expressions to polish or excise. I also do a lot of rearranging in revision, seeking a sensible progression through the poem. My old teacher, Ted Kooser, said to put a new poem in a drawer for 90 days, but I don’t have that kind of patience. So if I think a poem has some merit, I immediately and compulsively tinker with it, sometimes to the point of overworking that dough. Results vary, but sometimes a poem won’t quite shed its initial karma for many months or even years. I’ve always got a backlog of poems I’m playing with.
What are you working on now?
I’ve got a collaborative collection of haibun with Marjorie Saiser I need to take the scalpel to, and my own full-length collection of poems is closing in on completion (I hope).
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
It typically beings one of two ways: in free-associative writing (laptop, wingback, silence) or in imitative riffing off a poem I love, typically one I’ve just discovered in print or online. Verse Daily is a gold mine for such dialogic interplay.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
I try to read a bit of poetry every day. It’s good medicine. I don’t write every day, but I do write every month. If I’m not reading and writing, a certain strain of moral rot seems to set in.
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
My dear friend Pete (Miller, co-editor of A Dozen Nothing, who suggested I submit to Pinhole Poetry, bless his bones) prodded me for years to get a writing group together. For years I ignored him, but finally, as the pandemic settled down toward endemic, Pete and I agreed on a cohort of six poets of differing styles and subjects. We’ve met one a month for a year and a half, and recently had our first reading as a group, thanks to Trey Moody’s Autoblivion book release party. We call ourselves SWAY, which is an acronym with no known meaning. Maybe some day we’ll glean it, and on that day we’ll get matching tattoos of halloumi cheese chunks, because we meet in a restaurant where quinoa with grilled halloumi is always on the menu.