 You've written award-winning nonfiction and poetry books, not to mention edited two landmark anthologies. How do you choose the particular forms for what you want to say? And how is it that you are so prolific? It’s funny, I don’t think of myself as that prolific. I always feel like there is a lot more work I could be getting done. But I do work pretty much as hard as I can, most days, and I am very strategic and tactical about what I am doing. I try not to waste a lot of motion. If I’m writing poems I am already thinking about where I might send them, and what manuscript of mine I think they will fit in. And I don’t write prose books unless I have a contract. I am fortunate that people have tended to like my prose books, which means that I then get another chance. As far as form, maybe I could say my prose work comes from my head and my poetry comes from my heart? That might seem terribly cliché, but—for example—the poems in my prose narrative, Mississippi: An American Journey, are there because they deal with topics—emotions—that I could not figure out how to write in prose. I was talking about this with Michael Harper, and he said, “That’s because they need to be poems.” So I made a list of the topics that I felt were beyond my prose abilities and started writing poems and they came very fast. I think that has pretty much been my model ever since. Your poetry has such lovely musicality. Could you share with our readers a bit about your relationship with music and the blues specifically, and how it infuses your poetry? Thank you for that compliment. I am conscious of music in my poetry (and prose), several different ways. First, I am hyperconscious of sound, both overtly, and what I would call covertly. I loved poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins and Paul Laurence Dunbar growing up, the music that their poems made, and I think that prepared me for the absolute beauty of poets like Seamus Heaney, who pushed that play to a music you can feel on your tongue, in the muscles of your mouth. I am always thinking about “can we get some rhymes in here? Or some recurrences of vowels or consonants?” “Can we make this a bit more verbally playful?” Things like that. I am also thinking about the music that exists in clarity of thought, which you might see, say, in the poems of Robert Hass or the best poems of Frank O’Hara or Robert Hayden or Frank Bidart. And you might say the work of Elizabeth Bishop combines all of that. I’m thinking about that. As for music as an art form, I grew up in a home where there was always some kind of music going on, whether it was my mother singing hymns and gospel, or my sister playing the flute, or my brother playing the drums, or he and I listening to records, everything from Beethoven to Steely Dan. Personally, I studied the piano very seriously for a long time. And my father had his own, very idiosyncratic taste in music that I picked up, without even knowing it. He liked Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Johnny Cash, B.B. King and a few other blues musicians, and that was about it. And because we were at heart Mississippians, the blues and gospel were going to permeate us in ways that perhaps they don’t affect other people, or mean as much to them. I don’t know. But that’s what I suspect. So, when I started to write, it felt like music and especially jazz and the blues was an obvious place of curiosity and subject matter for me. And I had the example of Michael Harper and Robert Hayden and Sterling Brown to follow. The challenge is to add something to what the musicians and poets have already accomplished. To provide a window, or some kind of praise, or some kind of feeling that gives something more to the person who reads or hears the poems. Maybe I’m able to do that. I hope so. Who are some of your literary influences? First of all, I had some wonderful teachers in high school, Sister Emily, Sister Adeline, and Michael Dunn. They pushed and encouraged. I had outstanding professors at Notre Dame, including James Robinson, Milton Wachsberg, Linda Beard, Joseph Duffy, Richard Berengarten, and my dean, Donald Sniegowski. All of them saw me, educated me, and insisted on excellence. I have been deeply influenced in prose by Bruce Chatwin, James Baldwin, James Alan McPherson, Richard Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, the King James and Douay Rheems bibles, and I learned a great deal from Susan Sontag as a graduate student at Brown. I would not be writing prose seriously without her kindness and challenge. I would want to talk about Baldwin, and we would do that, rigorously, and then she would say, “Well, what about this?” and hand me Speak, Memory, and I would go off and read that and we would discuss it. Poetic influences would include Robert Hayden, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, and James Wright. Most profoundly, I was fortunate to have two very great friends and mentors, Michael S. Harper and Richard Ford, who insisted on taking things seriously and living up to my talent. Do you have any favorite poems, short stories, or books to teach as a professor at Bowdoin College? I often teach a class in our Coastal Studies Marine Biology semester that I call “The American Shore Ode,” which is a type of poem, as I learned from Paul Fussell and Harold Bloom, that concerns a poet interacting with the beach or coast and thinking deeply about that as it happens. So, poems like Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” or A.R. Ammons’s “Corson’s Inlet,” or Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses.” Richard Wilbur’s, “Thyme Flowering Among Rocks.” I really enjoy introducing the young scientists to those poems and modes. And they like it, because it helps them think holistically about the science they are practicing. I also enjoy teaching annotation in the poetry workshop, as it unlocks the needed ability to read deeply and in an informed fashion with command, and changes how students see literature and what they are capable of, including what they can learn from close reading to apply in their own work. I am a very big believer in close reading and what we might call out of fashion New Critical techniques as ways of instructing young writers. Young poets start the semester looking at North by Seamus Heaney as if it is Cyrillic and end the semester relating poems near the end of the book to poems early on and identifying recurring symbols and concepts and talking knowledgably about the profundity and skill of the weave and build and language. Are there certain courses you particularly enjoy teaching? Aside from the previously mentioned, I enjoy teaching the poetry workshops. But on another hand, I’ve been at it thirty years, so I kind of don’t teach anything anymore that I don’t enjoy. I like the students at Bowdoin. They tend to come well-prepared from high school and are eager to learn, and most of them are willing to work very hard. I’m fortunate in that way, and full speed ahead. What is your writing process? Any favorite rituals, if you believe in them? My process is to be writing or thinking about writing pretty much all the time. Even if I am watching a basketball game I am probably actually thinking about, mulling, some writing task I need to be dealing with, or some specific writing problem I need to solve. And I trust my unconscious, in that if I am not “thinking” about something, I trust that I am “actually thinking about it.” So even in class, we might be discussing something, a certain poem, say, and I’ll go, to myself, “a-ha, that’s how you need to be thinking about that sentence you’ve been wrestling with,” or something like that. But no rituals, just up and at ‘em, “what needs to be finished today?” And I do agree with the Roger Ebert admonition, “the muse visits during the work, not before.” So get busy. How do you know when a poem is ready to send out into the world? It’s a feeling. I’ll read through and finally feel like there’s no what I call “bumps.” It’s kind of like striking a tuning fork and feeling the unimpeded frequencies, to slightly modify the metaphor. And there’s no schedule for that. For example, two of the poems I’ve had in The New Yorker had extremely different lengths of gestation: “Gwendolyn Brooks” I wrote and perfected in about 15 minutes, while “Dead Reckoning” took 40 years. I just go over them and go over them until I feel like they are what I think of as “smooth.” And, as I’m a perfectionist with a lot of reading experience, it usually takes a long time. And all along I’m also interrogating them over and over until I think they are finished. Could you do more? Could you do less? Is the vocabulary strong enough, original enough, are there any what I call “soft” words—words that are flat or commonplace? What if you turned this into a pantoum? Are you working the theme hard enough? What would Donald Justice do? What would August Kleinzahler do? Is there something I can do that I haven’t done before? And so forth and so on. And I’ve learned from my years of publishing poems too quickly—which is very painful—not to do that. You've written many poems honoring others – could you share a bit about what draws you to this kind of elegiac poem? I don’t really know. Perhaps it is a way of connecting with that person, and in that connection bringing them back, so to speak. As I think about it, there are different reasons. Sometimes, if I knew the person, if I deeply understand how great or special they were in life, like Gwendolyn Brooks, say, or Michael Harper, writing an elegy is a way of conjuring them, of keeping them near. I’ve written a great deal, a couple dozen poems, about the great jazz musician Thelonious Monk. He is someone I admire for his extraordinary—and utterly unique—accomplishment, for his perseverance through injustice and bad luck, and for his kindness and good cheer. I am profoundly moved by his generationally original music. I think I was also interested in him because of my own interest in the piano. And also, I can’t get over how a person who had done so much for the world could not be helped by the medical establishment during his time of need at the end of his life. So that’s a different kind of elegy, a kind of screaming at the world, “you all should honor this person! Take note of his greatness!” And then there are elegies about or for people whose stories just strike me, who I want to note, or bring into my world. That could be anyone, my old friend from Chicago John Knox, or Miles Davis, or Robert McNamara, who I felt great sympathy for because he so blindly led us into national tragedy and dishonor. What was it like growing up in Illinois and how did it shape you? I enjoyed growing up in Illinois, and the older I get and the more places I become familiar with, the more I am convinced that I grew up in a unique and special time and place in our national history. I grew up in northern Illinois towns where Black people were not the focus (and locus) of the ire and resentment of white folks, as might have been if, say, I had been growing up in Boston or New York or Hartford or East Texas at that same exact time, and I was encouraged in my interests by my teachers and by, especially, the very rigorous Catholic school systems, including Notre Dame, I was able to be a part of. I had, as Sterling A. Brown would put it, “runnin’ space.” At the same time, I was surrounded by family members, especially my aunts on my mother’s side, who were a source of constant support (and policing). Above all, my parents were able to participate in the sweet spot of the American post-World War II industrial boom, 1955-1980, when average Americans, white and Black, who wanted to work and participate in the system were able to make very good livings and share in the national cornucopia. Then Reagan and Clinton, to name two, took it all back through union busting and downsizing and globalization and created the dog-eat-dog national economy we face today. How has living in Brunswick, Maine influenced your writing? Brunswick, on the campus of Bowdoin and off, is very quiet but also friendly and nurturing. That has helped me a great deal. I have been able to focus on getting my work done while also living in a small town full of people I recognize and who recognize me (and who believe in and support my aspirations). It is also a bit of a cultural center, with good libraries, several theaters, a thriving food scene, lots of artists, and an astonishing history going back to the Civil War and before. A wonderful small city, Portland, is just down the road. Finally, it is adjacent to the ocean, and I have been able to spend a lot of time at the shore, which is one of my favorite—essential, even—things to do. Could you share a bit about your lovely collection of poems, 1968, which you just published with Staircase Books? James Fraser asked me if I would be open to working with him and Bella on a project, and I said yes, I’d be thrilled. It evolved from there. I had been wanting to do a chapbook, a small collection of poems from over the years. I thought about a theme, and found a group that I think works well together, and which represents a long period of time in my work, several different styles of poems that I write, and many different concerns of mine: love poems, music, history, seriousness, and play—even goofing off. And I actually like it, the chapbook, which for me is saying something. And it’s the first of several volumes of varying length I’m publishing over the next few years. Next, I hope is another chapbook early next summer from Eileen Cleary and Lily Review Press, The Monk Variations, which collects many of my poems about Thelonious Monk, and after that, my first full-length collection, Celestial Mechanics, hopefully next year from Godine. And then more, as I have hundreds of poems. They all, I think, fit together, and it is my plan, or perhaps I should say, again, “my hope,” to years from now eventually fit them all into one long volume, my “planet on the table.” What are you currently working on? I am fortunate to have a year-long sabbatical from my duties at Bowdoin, so I am steady at work on a number of things. In prose, I am actively writing a new book of nonfiction that I hope will be out in 2027, and also reading and taking notes toward the nonfiction book after that one, maybe 2029, Lord willing and if the creek don’t rise? In poetry, I am writing poems, revising poems, organizing poems, putting the final touches on that first full-length book of poems while also looking toward the next full-length and the one after that. Do you have any advice for young writers? READ- there’s something I tell my students at Bowdoin: “Good writers are made from good readers; great writers are made from great readers.” Reading—regularly, deeply, and with intent, gives us a sense of what is out there, what is possible with language, and what might be missing from our own work. We need to work and acquire a vocabulary of tools that can help us with our interpretations, then apply those tools and interpretations to what we read. Often, we can learn to avoid a lot of the mistakes and errors that “everyone” makes, and that recognition alone can begin to elevate our work. Then, we can study the greats as well as our contemporary favorites and ask questions like “How did she achieve that effect?” and “What is going on here that is not in my work?” For example, I was reading some poems by James Tate the other day and noticing how sly he can be with how he deploys punctuation, how he can devastate you with a colon that any other writer would make a period. Stuff like that. Learning these sorts of things little by little will help our work get better, and before you know it you will have made tremendous leaps in skill and execution. But it all starts with reading. Are there any poets or books that you would recommend them reading? I think all young American poets can benefit from reading Robert Hayden. His beyond masterful use of vocabulary (who else would use the word “gracile”?), and his sense of the timeless power of history and what it means to us is something all young American poets should be aware of. Richard Wilbur and Donald Justice, just to remind oneself of how dazzling a mastery of form and meter can actually be. August Kleinzahler is a great contemporary master who I think should be even more praised than he is. Every poem of his is an adventure, and they’re all different. He exhibits how poets should, to paraphrase Ammons, “treat every walk as a new walk.” James Tate’s first book The Lost Pilot, remains after almost sixty years a kind of miracle, and I recommend that anyone working on their poems study it. I also think that the best poems of Campbell McGrath remind us of what is possible, in the best sense of that phrase. Gwendolyn Brooks teaches us how to see what is immediately around us, specific individuals, and our larger communities. She also teaches us compassion and to not judge. Robert Hass’s The Essential Haiku is a gift to all poets. It is a thorough introduction into the Western practice of that tradition, and the supporting material found in the book is its own little education on poetics. It teaches how much can be done with so little. Finally, I think young poets should read Polish poets like Milosz, Herbert, Szymborska, and Zagajewski, and Irish poets like Yeats, Heaney, Longley, Ní Dhomhnaill, and Boland. These poets wrote out of their own long traditions with profundity and grace, and they can teach young Americans how to write about both the personal and the political without noise, narcissism, or sentimentality. I could go on all day, but I think that’s enough?
Upcoming Reading There will be a book launch event celebrating the publication of Anthony Walton's chapbook, 1968 (Staircase Books, 2025), on December 15, 2025 at 7 p.m. at the Woodberry Poetry Room.
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