Original Language
An Interview with Richard Todd
by Willy Tyce
May 26, 2002

Here's a standard question, why do you write poetry?

It's seems to be the way my brain works, with words. Not that there's anything particularly special or precious about words. It could be music or a painting or the way your body moves or ultimately how you live your life. I like the way a poem compresses or distills an experience, the way it concentrates it so that this container we build holds the most it can possibly hold. I like it when something is so simple, yet its meanings, its impacts just multiply. A poem can operate on different scales, from the obvious to the subtle, or it can be just what is, so that it's just the realization of what is that deepens the meaning and impact. These containers we call poems can be ornate or simple, but in the end they must convey something from the writer to the listener. And whether that something is perceived as having value partly determines whether the poem is perceived as having value. Or a poem could have value, but it's not obvious, or easy to get to. So I try to bring all these together - to concentrate experience, to deepen impact, in order to convey something of value from one mind to another.

How do you do that?

You do it with the traditional tools of language. Sound, rhythm, meaning. You mix in surprise, perspective, careful observation. How it all comes together is really the mysterious part of creativity. I really don't how something works, but I usually know whether it works or not. But for me, getting to that place where a poem works, it's not an intuitive thing. It takes a lot of effort, either at the front end or at the back end.

What do you mean?

Poets have to create the stuff they work with. We've got to go out and mine words, mine the word ore we use to refine down to a poem. Sometimes it's already stockpiled, it's in the mind, and maybe it's already been purified and it comes out as a near-completed poem. Other times, you've got to dig deep for the raw stuff, and it comes out as very rough and very dilute, and it becomes a back end process of refining and refining until you reach the desired level of purity.

This refining process, does that mean you revise a lot?

Sometimes obsessively. Changing this word or that word. Put an article in or take it out. Sometimes I get in a mood where I want to cut down and simplify to the very fewest words needed to build the vessel, and those poems are the short line poems with a very sparse, zen simplicity to them. Other times I leave more in, or try for a conversational, storytelling kind of structure. Or sometimes the words just explode out, and something tells you to just leave them alone.

The form depends on what you put in the poem, and what tone or voice that particular meaning has. Or it could depend on the path that got me to a particular place. Maybe you start out with something mundane, and then you move along a certain trajectory that takes you to a strange or mysterious or singular place. And the poem becomes the map to get you back to that place, because it's a good place to be.

Let me shift gears a little. It's easy to pigeon-hole you as a ‘nature poet', reading the poems and what you say about your work. Do you like that term? Is it accurate?

I've looked at it a couple ways. First is the old axiom that a person should write about what they know best. And what I know best is what's around me, the place where I'm from, and that's the High Plains. Ever since I was a little kid, I've had this awareness and this empathy for open spaces. It's in my bones, it's in my breath. Loren Eiseley writes in an essay about floating in the Platte River, and feeling the whole of the river. And I knew exactly what he was feeling the first time I read it, because I'd done just that. And it's always been the wild nature of the place that I connect with, and that seems most real to me. So yeah, I don't mind being called a nature poet.

The problem I had early on when I started writing, was a self-questioning, asking myself ‘Does the world really need another wild Buddhist nature poet'? Because one of my heroes is Gary Snyder, and no one does it better than him. And I was a little intimidated by the example of his life. Then I thought, but there isn't another wild Buddhist nature poet from the High Plains. That's me. I'm that poet. So write about what you know, about what you love. Bring your own perspective to the poems, and don't worry about pigeon holes and labels and comparisons. Leave that to the people who get paid to waste their time doing that.

You mentioned Eiseley and Snyder. Who else has influenced you?

Back in my young days, I lived in the mountains of Montana. I had two books with me - The Complete Poetry of Walt Whitman, and Thoreau's Walden. It was the sheer power of their spirits that moved me as much as their words. Whitman I usually read out loud to the trees and rocks. Thoreau was more internal. I read him in my little cabin, not unlike his, around the stove on cold nights.

I was always drawn to music that revolved around words - Dylan, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon. So that's where I put ten years of creativity, into rock and roll, writing songs, performing, setting up a studio and recording. And I owe them a big debt, for inspiring me, for teaching me a love of words and their power.

I come late to poetry, and I approach it as a primitive. I know this offends some people, or they may dismiss my work because it comes from a certain naivete about poetry, about its critical or theoretical or academic face. Lately I've made an effort to broaden my exposure, so now I include on my favorites list poets like John Brandi, Judyth Hill, Mary Oliver, Carl Sandburg, because we speak the same languages, there's a familiarity. But the person who's probably influenced me most, because he's my friend and we hang out and bounce poems off each other, is Hunter Ingalls. Here's a guy who lives poetry, whose life is given up to it and exemplifies it. And that inspires me, and it makes me a better poet. I guess they're all kindred spirits, and you don't want to be like them or write like them, but to be inspired and pushed on by their example.

One thing that strikes me about you is that you are trained and work as a scientist, yet you write poetry. How do you reconcile these two vocations, that seem so different?

By not seeing them as being different, I guess. Here's how they're alike. Science and poetry are both based on experience - they're both empirical. They're both ways of learning about and expressing the world - our working model of the world, which is what we have, this changing, evolving, ever-refining representation of what really is. Both have their technique, although it's more proscribed in the scientific method. And for both, the most important discoveries are usually these non-linear leaps, these creative surprises, when we're able to leave old preconceived notions behind, and see the world in new ways. Here's something that not all scientists recognize, this unbound leap into creativity. But it's really important in science as well as the arts.

I think we need to break down these dichotomies, like science versus religion, or science versus art. Scientists need to recognize mystery, religion needs a dose of rationality, biology majors should take a poetry course and English majors should read Darwin. The brave new world demands a lot of us. Society needs to be science-literate and society needs to value the arts much, much more than it does.

So where does Buddhism fit into this?

For me, Buddhism lays out a very straight-forward, empirical approach to understanding the world and our place in it. Buddhism is ecological - it recognizes the linkages and causalities between things, and it emphasizes process over state, which means that how something moves and changes is more important than what it is or what we say it is.

Practicing Buddhism creates other challenges for me, because the Buddha said, OK, here's the problem, suffering, here's the cause, desiring, but you can be free from that, and here's how you do it, here's the path. So what I get caught up in, what I spend a lot of time dealing with is desire. Because I've always lived my life with a certain passion, which sometimes helps me and oftentimes gets me in trouble. Hunter says that without desire, there's no beauty, no creativity, which I don't necessarily agree with, drawing a distinction between desiring and aspiring, one arising maybe somewhere south of the belly button and the other arising with the breath, and our mindfulness of it and the mindfulness that flows from it. But this is all getting a little esoteric. Back to the original thought. Buddhism is scientific, and it aims to obscure those dichotomies we talked about before.

It's not unusual for poems to come out of a meditative process, like tending a fire, or steady rhythmic hiking, or being quiet and motionless in a tree stand watching deer move beneath you. Anything that moves us from ourselves into a more careful, more mindful awareness. Those places worth having a map or a poem to get back to. I imagine most poets have some kind of technique to do that, though they call it something else.

Let's talk about your book.

Manuscript. No publisher yet.

Your manuscript. Talk a little about how "Into The Blue Vision" came together and what it's about.

I guess it was in 1999 I noticed the poems resolving themselves into a theme, or several themes. First, was this notion of the languages that the land speaks, what I called the original languages of the land. But these are water languages, hoofed languages, winged languages, leaf languages, sky languages, not just speech from the tongue. I'd come to understand and speak several of these dialects and realized that most people had forgotten them, or really hadn't been taught, and that for us to understand our place, we had to learn its languages.

Then, I looked to my roots in the High Plains, how my ancestors came here, speaking Swedish and speaking rain and speaking trees, and how this land was so foreign to them. They had to learn new languages - like English and drought and grass. And that took awhile. It took four generations. The fourth generation is the fulcrum in the idea of seven generations, this idea that all decisions should be made with seven generations in mind. The fourth generation is central, because it's from that vantage point that we look back three generations and consider our ancestors, and look forward three generations to consider our descendants. So it was my duty, since I was the fourth generation to this land, to make an accounting of where we'd been and where we were, and where we needed to be.

So the poems chart this progression, from refusing to speak the new languages, to destroying the land out of ignorance and greed, to discovering and learning what it is to live on the plains, to at last becoming a lover of the land, so that when you finally pass, your ashes, what's left of your body, is spread all over and becomes part of the land.

Another theme touches on what we talked about earlier. This idea of desire, how what is done at a coarse scale, like destroying the land from greed and ignorance, also operates and originates at a fine scale within each of us in the form of desiring something, or wanting something to be a certain way we think it should be. It's Dhamma operating at landscape scale. There is suffering in the land, the cause of suffering begins in our craving and attachments, but we can be free from that by understanding and following the path of ecology and wholeness. The blue vision is Nibbana, always there in front of us, never quite reaching it, but experiencing enough hints and suggestions to know that it's really there.

You're pretty hard on your home town. The poems ‘North Platte', ‘Ugly Town', and ‘Stone Lakota' come to mind.

Well, it was pretty hard on me and others not as lucky as me. Not a very tolerant place, and not able to build its own vision of itself. It's happy to be a "leech on belly of leech sucking other leeches". That doesn't mean there aren't decent, well-intentioned people there, doing good work. It's just that most folks seem trapped in someone else's dream, or someone else's nightmare, and can't imagine any other way to live.

How about where you live now? What's it like in Amarillo Texas?

It turns out that Amarillo and Lubbock are the largest cities on the High Plains, actually the only urban areas. And there's a confluence of oil and gas and water, cotton and corn and cattle, all these exploited, big-time money-making resources. So you end up with a much larger disparity in wealth than in other parts of the High Plains. Add to that this arrogance that seems typical of Texans and a Bible Belt mentality and you'd think it'd be a very unpleasant, repressive kind of place. And there's a lot of that. But there's also a very strong creative, progressive community that shimmers on the edge of the social fabric, and that's actively involved, with influence far beyond their numbers, in most of the good things that get done in the city.

And coming from the outside, I don't see Texans here, but Westerners. There are more independent people who have a live-and-let-live attitude, and they still value what a person does more than what they are or where they come from. I'm drawing some pretty gross generalities here. I like to tell people that Amarillo isn't in Texas, it's really a part of southwestern Nebraska. Not many takers here on that bioregional concept yet.

And there are still plenty of wild places, close by like Palo Duro Canyon and the Caprock Escarpment. And we're right on the edge of the Empty Quarter, that huge space between here and the mountains, the western half of the High Plains, where the land just explodes into space. That keeps me happy and gives my boots plenty of places of go, and plenty of places to pitch my tipi.

Tell me about this strange little book, ‘Stinking Water'. I'm looking at one here and the cover is, literally, from a beer six pack.

My friend Hunter carries around a little notebook that he makes, using found covers, and stitched together with yarn. I admired it once, and he made me one, with a beautiful cover, Horsetooth Mountain near Fort Collins, from a six pack of Fat Tire Ale. Another friend, Scott Hyde, a photographer, and one of the Wise Old Artists I hang out with, has been on a lifelong mission to "cheapen art", to make it reproducible and accessible to all kinds of people.

So I thought, I'll put together a little book of poems, based on Hunter's notebooks, and I'll give it away to people. So, ‘Stinking Water' is a collection of poems pulled from ‘Into The Blue Vision', most of Blue Vision actually. I use found covers, anything from old calendars to cereal boxes to beer six packs, with my favorites being microbrews. I hand-stitch the books, number them and sign them. They're intended to fit in your pocket, so you can always carry poetry with you.

What's next for you, where do you see your poetry going?

I just keep writing, knowing that whatever the path is, it'll resolve behind me, after I've walked it for a while. There's an old map of North America, from the 1600s, and the middle part, the Great Plains, was called Terra Incognita. My work to now has tried to turn that unknown land, still mostly unknown, into Terra Lingua, a land of language.

The poems I'm writing now are more personal, more focused on human relations, how we get along with each other. They come out of Terra Cardia, the land of the heart, which is more incognita than the Great Plains ever were, and whose language, whose tongue is very very elusive.