JMW: What’s most exciting about this book to you?
TD: I never imagined putting together a new & selected. When I began writing, I discovered so many of the poets who were important to me—writers like Maxine Kumin, Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver, and William Stafford—through their new & selected collections.
I tend to be a person who likes to stay present, to dwell on the work that is going on in the here and now. But creating a book like this demands that you look backward, to consider what you’ve written in the past and what you might want to share with a reader who has never read one of your books. I enjoyed how the poems transported me to the experiences or thinking that originally informed them.
TD: Most exciting for me, however, was the fact that David James Duncan—author of The River Why and most recently Sun House—wrote a 2,000-word foreword for Ditch Memory. David has been a good friend to my poems for the past two decades, helping me to believe in them.
JMW: Do you see it as a new departure for you, a continuation of earlier work/themes, or some combination?
TD: I think all eight of my books are a continuation of themes and preoccupations that caused me to want to be a writer in the first place. These include outrage and grief over environmental degradation, concerns for working-class people in Rust Belt Appalachia, the depiction of intimacy between humans and other-than-human animals, and the mysteries of the spirit as found in so many sacred traditions, including Christianity.
TD: As I’d imagine happens for most folks, my understanding of what it means to be human and to be on this planet in the 21st century has undergone revision. Now in my 60th year, my ways of thinking are certainly different than when I began writing poems in my 20s. I think that is reflected in the subtle shifts from book to book, as well as in the thirty new poems that comprise the opening section of Ditch Memory.
JMW: Do you see your work as “Mennonite,” and how or how not? (We know this is a ridiculously broad and fraught question, so feel free to respond in whatever way seems right to you.)
TD: I’m not a big fan of placing a descriptor before “writer.” If someone calls me a “nature writer,” does that mean I don’t write about humans, too? And what is “nature”? And if I’m a “nature writer,” are there things I’m not allowed to writer about, to cross boundaries and follow the imagination? It feels limiting. I think everything we are, which is multifarious, goes into the creation of our stories and poems. Having said that, my faith and the ways that it is influenced by my membership over the past 21 years at University Mennonite Church in State College, Pennsylvania, plays a large role in how I see the world and how I write about it.
JMW: What themes, issues, techniques, and/or other authors were most in your mind as this project came into being?
TD: I looked at many, many other books of new & selected poems. One of the big decisions was whether I would order the book from my oldest to my newest poems or vice versa. I ended up placing the new poems first and working backward from there through the previous books. The most difficult part of putting this collection together was deciding what poems would not be included. Many poems that mean a great deal to me had to be left out because of space limitations.
JMW: What part(s) of your writing process might other writers find useful, either to imitate or to avoid?
TD: Writing grows out of who we are as people. Because of my sports background, I treat writing in similar fashion to my training regimen. I return to my desk daily. I don’t let a bad day at the desk keep me away. Athletes have bad workouts and so do writers. I know the success we have as writers—however we might define that—is similar to major league hitters. A .250 batting average is good. That means we’re going to strike out seventy-five percent of the time.
I really do think perseverance is the one quality I possess in large quantities. I keep coming back and trying again and again. But what keeps me coming back is the way writing allows me to more fully experience life, to be more fully present, to notice and attend to the life around me. My life is better for my practice of writing.
JMW: Is there a brief excerpt, or a poem if this is a book of poems, that we can reprint as part of this interview?
Free Write
The teacher asks the class
to get out their journals.
The girl who sits in the corner
looks out the window.
Like her mother’s eyes,
fog droops over the ridges
and makes false promises
about rain. The girl writes,
The sky swirls like a plate
of stones. She writes,
There’s a fox skeleton
lodged beneath the bridge
no one knows about.
She draws a picture
of a thrush, scribbles a single
word for its song
and covers it. She thinks,
What’s a word as sour
as sheep sorrel’s leaf?
She whispers, Why doesn’t
my tongue shimmer
when it speaks?