J. C. Todd
J. C. Todd’s books are Beyond Repair (2021), an Able Muse Press Award special selection, What Space This Body (Wind, 2008), The Damages of Morning (Moonstone Press, 2019) and three chapbooks. A bilingual (English/Lithuanian) book of her selected poems is forthcoming in 2023 from the PDR Festival in Lithuania. Winner of the 2016 Rita Dove Poetry Prize and a commended winner in the 2021 National Poetry Competition of the Poetry Society of the UK, she also has been a finalist in the Robert H. Winner and Lucille Medwick contests of the Poetry Society of America and held fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Poems and interviews have appeared in Baltimore Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Night Heron Barks, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has been a faculty member in the Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College, Kutztown College, and the MFA Program at Rosemont College. Learn more about J. C. Todd by visiting her Website.
We first met J. C. at a Geraldine R. Dodge poetry workshop back in 1996. There, she generously led her workshop participants in a concluding cento-like poem exercise, a copy of which remains in one of our special binders devoted to noteworthy poetry-related experiences. From the start, we were taken by J. C.’s intelligent and creative approach to grappling with societal, personal, and political issues. She has a keen eye and heart for the nuances of human nature and uses impactful langaguage to engage her readers in ways that are thought-provoking and lingering. We are pleased to present her RHR interview.
RHR: What is the best piece of writing advice you have ever been given?
JCT: You learn to write by writing.
As a writer, I want the elements of craft I have studied and practiced to become deeply inscribed in me so that they feel intuitive at a cellular level. In this way the writing becomes my teacher, leading to a moment when I let go and the writing takes over. Each word carries the trace of the word or phrase it emerges from and evolves toward, shaping grammar, syntax, etymological reverberations, sonics, image, story.
This is the experience I open to when I write, or perhaps it opens in me, or opens me. A flicker in the corner of my mind, an awareness. I pick up the pencil and journal/tablet/paper scrap and jot it down. In this moment, I don’t know what the ‘it’ is, I am writing to catch up with it, to see it, a kind of chase that sometimes leads to letting go.
Sometimes when I am on the computer, there will be a gap between what I am writing and something that flashes from a tangent—a glimpse or a word heard out of nowhere—and in that moment, I will leap into or be drawn into a different voice that pours words onto the screen. These are moments of impulse; some might say insight. I am not recording them or writing a poem from them; I am seeking them, hunting them down because they haunt me. And so a draft begins. It has no purpose; it is pure expression, not a poem but perhaps the place where a poem may grow.
I may have first heard “you learn to write by writing’ in a training session for teaching artists offered by the New Jersey State Arts Council. It has become so embedded in my practice as a teaching and writing artist that I do not recall the point of origin. As advice, it may be a corollary of “you learn to write by reading.” Joyce Carol Oates has written, “Reading is the sole means by which we slip involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.” I suspect she writes with more intention than I often do; the slipping into she describes also occurs, not “solely” but often, when I write, undirected and unfettered by personal intention.
Understood in its broadest scope, writing encompasses reading in that you read what you write; you read the subject and tone of its content and context which informs what you write next or what you revise; you read others’ work to discover possibility for your own. Any reader engaged with a piece of writing is inscribed by it, becoming a de-constructor and reviser, an active consciousness entering the text, discovering secrets and variants the writer may not be aware of, conveying the text into interactions the writer has not imagined. As a reader of their own writing, the writer enters into revision (seeing again), whether or not that is their intention. Here is where a poem may begin to emerge.
RHR: What have you learned about the way poems can speak to one another?
JCT: My most recent book, Beyond Repair, focuses on the effects of war trauma on women, both civilians and combatants. The first months of COVID isolation offered the ideal environment for curating it. The manuscript had already been chosen as a winner in the Able Muse Poetry Book contest, but I did not think it was ready for publication. Despite the strength of many of its poems, or perhaps because of their strength, its gravitational balance was off-kilter. It felt like an unstable planetary system.
There were two related sticking points. First, the center did not hold. Recognizing that imbalance, I realized that the relationships between the poems had not coalesced, meaning the force they exerted on each other had not formed a unified system of sound and sense. Once I addressed the manuscript as a solar system, I was able to edit: reorder poems so that their alliances/resonances/echoes were more palpable, adjust the tonal and prosodic range and variations, remove a few poems I loved that didn’t belong, and write new ones that strengthened cohesion. In this way the manuscript revealed its story to me, a story so interior I could not articulate it, although I could sense it.
Working with the knit of the poems showed me the shape that would hold them together. That story, which is multi-voiced and told in segments, has found a reader who articulates it eloquently, the poet Michael Collins. You can read his review of Beyond Repair in the January 2023 issue of North of Oxford.
RHR: Do you believe a poem can be overly crafted?
JCT: You can work a poem to death. Over-practicing craft can inflate a poem with ornament, stuff it beyond capacity with figures of speech, turn it into an obese, overblown performer of prosody. Craft can perform excisions of vitals, dull the poem’s appetite, hinder its curiosity, extinguish the spark of its origin. Or it can starve the poem, take away the nourishment of intuition, impulse, experimentation, play. In short, craft can be a form of abuse, malpractice, and authoritarian control. But craft is also the agent of art when used in the service of coherence of meaning and music. Applying craft with awareness can allow the poet to let go and leave behind her “darlings,” and it can nudge or catapult the poem beyond the poet’s original intentions into unexpected resonances, mysteries, discoveries.
RHR: Whose name do you invoke at your shrine to poetry?
JCT: I do not worship poetry, nor do I adore it in the sense of paying divine honors to it. Poetry itself and the writing of it can be an act of adoration, in that it beseeches, entreats, asks as in prayer. In this sense there might be a shrine to poetry, but I have not made one, not even in an ars poetica. I did worship at a shrine in my childhood home—a bookcase in the living room. It was about three feet high, its wood dark, perhaps mahogany, built to hold the twenty-four volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th edition, A new survey of universal knowledge. I couldn’t actually read the title but I memorized the first two words, asking my mother to say them repeatedly, and saying them over and over until I gathered the gold-toned letters into words I recognized, even that strange ‘ae’ configuration which didn’t appear in my Weekly Reader or in the Dick and Jane books used as early readers in primary school. The letters, so bright against the stolid navy blue of the book cloth, were the only gold in our home except for my parents’ wedding rings and a bracelet my mother wore on special occasions, so I understood they were valuable, although I didn’t know that word. I was maybe six when the bookcase and its contents became a shrine to language, where I performed the ritual of selecting a letter, pulling the heavy volume from the shelf onto the floor where I knelt, opening to random crinkly pages. I would choose a subject heading to spell to my mother: what is J-a-g-u-a-r? what is J-e-r-u-s-a-l-e-m?, then stare at the word and chant its sound until the two merged. That initial fascination with individual words, as units of printed letters and the sounds they are keyed to, continues. Saying aloud is an aspect of shaping every draft and revision I make.
Although I have not made a shrine to poetry, poetry has made a sanctuary for me, a refuge where I can tune to the conjoined mind-heart, to image, story, and sound. It is a space to evoke rather than invoke. I am not calling on others as authorities but rather calling forth resonances with them (writers, visual artists, composers, musicians, artisans, scientists, historians, social scientists) and with what I observe. If I invoke anything, it is vision—the first glimpse. And re-vision—seeing again, uncovering the layers so that the resonances rise.
RHR: Notebook paper or computer? Pen or pencil?
JCT: All, plus voice.
Paper and pencil for journal, notes on scraps of paper, longhand drafts on legal tablets. Pen when a pencil isn’t available. Writing by hand is akin to drawing, accessing the brain through pathways different than the percussive of the keyboard. Initially, I prefer to freewrite drafts by hand, making early revisions or asking questions. From there, I move to the computer to key in the draft, its early edits, notes on alternative phrasing, and ideas about how the draft might develop, although often when I’m keyboarding, I will also make notes by hand that I later enter into a computer file. After that, I work between the hand written versions and the printed-out digital versions to produce revised drafts that I save as a separate digital files. As you can see, despite the computer screen, it’s paper all the way. I usually handwrite lines to work on scansion or rephrasing. To concentrate on lineation, stanza breaks, punctuation, and spacing within lines and to check etymology, synonyms, and spelling, working with a digital file is more efficient. Throughout this process, which may continue for weeks, months, or years, I read aloud as I edit, so each draft is modified by voice, which is to say by breath. I do not record the voice iterations. One time I constructed poems primarily by voice was the sonnet crown “FUBAR’d” in Beyond Repair. I built each poem by voice and ear, line by line, then preserved the voiced drafts by hand. During the first spring of Covid, I composed one haiku by voice during a daily walk. With both of these voice-initiated poem series, the drafts ended up as computer documents.
Read J. C. Todd’s poem, “It’s War, Fadwa Says,” originally published in The Baha’i Review (Spring ‘2016) and in Beyond Repair (Able Muse Press, 2021):
