An interview with J. C. Todd (poetry ’90)

Curtis Smith Interviews J. C. Todd (poetry ’90)

Curtis Smith: Congratulations on The Damages of Morning. There’s a lot of history in these pieces. Have you always had a thing for history, especially this particular, horrible time? If so, what attracts you to it?

J.C. Todd: Thank you, Curtis, for all these questions that go directly to the core of the poems. They’ve sent me back to the origins of this long project in the seeds of poems from travel journals dated eighteen years ago.

I’ve always had a thing for people and their stories. Where they come from, how they got to where they are. The stories that underlie this book led me to historical and cultural museums and documents, to diaries, recollections, histories and fiction and poems and visual art that reveal life during the twentieth century wars in Europe. Many of the poems in this chapbook include bits of stories I’ve heard or read and snatches of visual memory from travels to Central and Eastern Europe

CS: Was the idea for a book dedicated to this time and these themes part of the plan from the beginning, or did you find yourself with a few poems and then discovering a current you wanted to follow? If that’s the case, when did the notion hit?

J.C.T.: I write poems.  When recurrent images, themes, or tonalities draw together in a critical mass, I begin to wonder what argument they are making, what dilemma or bewilderment they are investigating, what they are searching for.  I have in the back of my mind Denise Levertov’s observation that after gathering poems into her first book, she decided she would no longer write poems but instead write books of poems. I wish I could do that, but my interest and pleasure is in the close work of drafting the poem.

[…continue reading at Small Press Reviews.]