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Interview by New England Poetry Club Co-President Doug Holder

I recently caught up with poet Daniel Tobin to discuss his new book of poetry The Mansions. From the publisher’s website (Four Way Books):

From award-winning poet Daniel Tobin comes The Mansions, an epic trilogy of book-length poems which examines exemplary 20th Century figures Georges Lemaître, Simone Weil, and Teilhard de Chardin, all at the crossroads of science, history, and religion. Capacious in their philosophical explorations, immaculate in their form, stirring in their alchemy of faith and empiricism, each complete section works both autonomously and as part of the whole, building a house that contains many mansions, simulating the dynamic enormity of creation itself – always already entire and yet unfinished, borderless, infinite. Immersed in a time when cataclysmic geopolitical events coincided with revolutionary scientific progress, The Mansions charts a Dantean journey as it confronts the exigencies and contingencies which define modernity: history, religion, our planet’s fate, and the purpose of humankind. A fractal symphony of voices, Tobin’s tripartite collection represents a staggering literary achievement – a lyric narrative that can hold the totality of the divine and of godlessness, that harmonizes time as change and as eternity, that sees “pendant grapes” as “embodied wine.” Its music is the harvest “cutting free the perfectly nurtured bruise-colored fruit, hour / by hour,” and its wisdom embraces the transience of all things as well as the transfiguration of the self, that everlasting impermanence: “‘I see the landscape as it is when I’m not there.’”

Doug Holder: Ryan Wilson wrote in the preface of your new collection of poetry that after reading it “We may again see deep in our hearts, as children do, the dazzle of the sun.” How hard was it for you to get back, or should I say forward, to that childhood sensibility?

Daniel Tobin: Ryan Wilson’s insightful, and generous, introduction makes some parallels between Dante’s The Divine Comedy and The Mansions and the echoes structural and otherwise are as I intend. When Dante finally comes back to earth, as it were, from his fictive paradise he sees the world anew. I can’t say that The Mansions encompasses such a journey, or that I, myself, see the sun with new eyes having written the poem over some fourteen years. What I hope, of course, is that beyond whatever I intend there is something more that the poem offers, some further place in terms of perception that the poem brings the reader. I don’t assume that, of course, but I think any poet wants that for the work. I’m immensely gratified that Ryan saw some of that furtherance in the poem.

DH: Your book is an ontological exploration. I heard it took you many years to put it together. Perhaps, at this point of your life, it seemed more germane to finish the book.

DT: The Mansions is the second very long piece I’ve written. The first was The Narrows, a mural in verse as I call it, and that one took something like seventeen years since I had the kernel of the conception. I’m older now, so it meant a great deal to me to finish the book, which is very much an ontological exploration, as well as an existential one, through the lives it delves into and tries to embody. For whatever reason, I’ve always been tuned ontologically, not only in poetry but also in my obsessions and ultimate concerns. There is a thread that runs in and around the three “books” of The Mansions, a kind of double helix of couplets. The last contains a phrase I jotted in a notebook when I was something like seventeen or eighteen years old. “All Being Becomes All,” which forms an acrostic for the word “Father” in Aramaic (not the Swedish pop group!), to whom Jesus cries out on the cross: “Father, father why have you forsaken me.” This material has been with me a long time.

DH: The book drips with scholarship, and difficult concepts. In your opinion would this book be more likely to be appreciated by a rarefied crowd or the casual reader?

DT: Well, I hope it doesn’t “drip,” but rides along. There can be some rapids, so to speak, as one moves through the sections, but the concepts and allusions and so forth, are grounded in the lives and in the felt necessity of the quest, both intellectually and emotionally. I don’t know what a casual reader of poetry is, to tell you the truth. I go to poems to have my brain re-wired and my emotional, intellectual, and contemplative life enlarged beyond my expectations. That would be as true for Elizabeth Bishop as for T.S. Eliot, or Robert Hayden. Hayden is a good example. Would a “casual reader” go to Hayden’s work without accepting the premise that learning something about the Baha’I faith might be required to appreciate the poems fully? Good poems and surely great poems carry the reader along on their music first, but that doesn’t mean concepts and forms of knowledge are necessarily obstructive of the poem’s music. Of course, I want readers, casual, rarefied and everything in between, but the audience needs to go to the work as well, since poetry can and should make demands on the reader, like all literature that aspires to be something more than entertainment, or merely an underscoring of what the reader already believed before they read the work. As I argued recently in an essay that appeared in the English online journal Berfrois, I try to write for the dead with the expectation that the living will listen.

DH: You write in one poem – and I paraphrase – that we reach for something that we can’t penetrate. Throughout the book, I sense the need to have consummation with the world, the universe. I remember, many years ago ​I experienced that after taking a psychedelic. In essence, I felt I was merging with a tree and becoming part of it. Can you comment?

DT: Yes, that is true. I have a need try to get beyond the veil of things, and pretty much always have. I think somewhere along the line I made a kind of bargain so that my poetry, hopefully, would be the trace of my spiritual journey, though that doesn’t mean “I” have gotten very far myself. Like I said, the poems need to press beyond the individual life of the poet, unless of course you are sufficiently blessed to have both. I’m thinking of Juan de la Cruz, for example, or Faiz Amed Faiz. I wish that for myself, but well, I am a failed mystic I’m afraid. I had one experience like the one you describe and without psychedelics. A rendering of a sort is woven into The Mansions, but I’m not comfortable talking about it casually or in print. Some “consummation with the world, with the universe” would be a good phrase, but fleeting and not final.

DH: How did you choose the scientists, etc., that you write about in the collection?

DT: I came across Georges Lemaître watching a PBS special on the history of physics some fourteen years ago. The circumstances of his life – a priest, the first physicist to conceptualize what we now call “the big bang,” his life as s soldier in World War I and his activities with the resistance during World War II, fed right into my obsessions. I first read Simone Weil when I was in graduate school. I’m also drawn by the drama of her life, the extremity of her commitment to justice, her refusal to fit in. I first read Teilhard de Chardin when I was in college. Such visionary idealism and optimism, the exact opposite of Weil! Their lives overlap historically, track in somewhat different directions – one might call it ontological conflict – and yet together they create a forward moving confluence of lives. When I was writing From Nothing, I realized the whole design required three “books” and the shape of the whole, and the importance of these lives, came from that realization.

DH: Why should we read your book?

DT: My wife just yesterday directed me to this quotation by Thoreau and asked if I had ever read it. I must have, since I read Walden more than once, but it did not come to mind when I was writing The Mansions: “The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!” If that doesn’t tell you why to read the book, I probably can’t convince you!

Garden

“These designs attributed to God are cuttings made by us,
chosen from infinite turns, connections that might be made
by any intelligence, human, non-human, no matter the scale,

throughout space and time…” Let this cutting be morning
in the Luxembourg Gardens: They have come by streetcar
across the Seine—son, mother, baby Simone who refuses

to be fed, except by bottle, holes cut in the nipple to let
solid foods pass. Not yet two. Sickly. This baby cannot survive.
Each day they walk the paths so she breathes the fresher air,

this intricate parterre of flowers and lawn, the central basin
with its water jet, these balustrades, the marionette theatre—
like an unbroken symmetry… And people sitting, passing,

as in a painting by Watteau. Is she looking at the toy boats?