December Feature: Interview with Tomas Morin

We are proud to present Tomas Morin as our featured artist of December!

Tomás Q. Morín’s poetry collection A Larger Country was the winner of the 2012 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and runner-up for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. His poems have appeared in Slate, Threepenny Review, Poetry, and others. He is a recipient of fellowships and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and elsewhere. A graduate of Texas State University and Johns Hopkins University, he teaches at Texas State University and the low residency MFA program of Vermont College.

Two featured examples of his work appear on our homepage. To read Morin's full bio, please click here. Now, see what he had to say below in an interview with our editor in chief, Tyler Tsay:

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Q: When did you start writing, and at what point did you know writing was "it" for you?

A: While I took some workshops as an undergraduate, I didn't really start writing seriously until I began the MFA program at Texas State University. I guess the moment I knew writing was "it" for me was during the middle of a five year stretch of rejections. Of course, at the time I had no clue there were two more years of rejections by journal editors waiting for me when it happened. To tell the truth, ever getting a poem published in a journal seemed like something that would never happen again. I think it was a summer day when I opened my mailbox and found three SASE envelopes containing rejection slips. While I always had a healthy relationship with rejection, when I opened those envelopes and discovered that the same group of poems had been rejected by three different editors on the same day, I considered giving up. After I stopped moping and heard my poems calling me to the page like they always had, I knew then that if I never had another poem published that I would never stop writing so long as it continued to bring me the joy it always had. Writing makes me happy. It always has. That summer day I learned finally that writing and publishing are not the same thing.

Q: I think a lot of writers these days go through a similar experience with rejection. We hear the story of writers, like yourself, who push through and eventually get their big break. But do you think the very process of sending poems out in the first place, when really it's the creation aspect that should make you happy, not publication, is hypocritical? In some cases, unnecessary? (Perhaps this is coming from a strange place, considering we're a lit mag ourselves/guilty of rejecting writers).

A: If you're asking whether it's hypocritical to feel happy when work gets published, no. For one thing, no one gets to decide that for anyone else. I don't live my life as an artist in a vacuum. I want readers and having something I've written accepted for publication means there's a good chance that piece is going to be read by more than just a few close friends. When it comes to poems, I feel like a poem isn't complete until a reader engages it with her imagination. So as you see, good news from an editor brings its own kind of joy that is different than the joy of writing. These days, I'll take all the joy I can get.

Q: Let’s talk about your translation of Pablo Neruda, “The Heights of Macchu Picchu." What drew you to pick Neruda to translate, and what was the process like? How do you take a poem in one language and transfer the same piece, with the same emotions, into a different language?

A: I was reading Alturas for the first time in years while taking a break from my own writing one summer. I got to reading it and glancing over at the English version and finding myself wondering about some of the choices the translator had made. I decided to try my hand at the first line which led to the first stanza and so on. A couple of weeks later, I had a first draft of the book done.

For me, one has to remake the poem in the new language if one is to have a chance at recreating the same reading experience a reader of the original would have. The great Edith Grossman makes the argument that translation should be considered its own genre. I agree. A translator is just as much of a creator as a playwright, novelist, or poet. As for how one should do this, I think you have to try your best to make the same language choices the author would've made if they had been writing in the new language during the years in which they originally composed the work. So for me a Neruda born in Ohio writing Alturas in English in the 1940s is who I had in mind and who I consulted when I was trying to make a tough decision.

Q: Do you find translation or creating other works more rewarding or fulfilling? When writing originals, how do you start that process?

A: I find them equally rewarding, though the rewards are different. In translation, you have a great responsibility to not just the spirit of the work you're creating but the spirit of the original and the original's author. What usually starts me on the path to one of my own poems is trying to find the answer to a silly question that has occurred to me. For example, in my poem "Egg Ministry," wondering what a human preacher in a chicken religion would be like and say and do led me to write the poem.

Q: What do you want people to learn or know about you from your work?

A: That the person who wrote my poems cared about others and tried, as best he could, to capture both the sadness and joy of the times in which we live.

Q: But why do you think this world hurts so much?

A: There's an easy answer to the question of why the world contains so much pain: because there are humans in it. And by the world I mean the planet on which animals and fish and humans and insects and plants all are trying to live their lives.

Q: You’ve said before that poetry has been an anchor for you when you’ve felt lost in the crowd. Our About Us page speaks a bit about this as well: “In emptiness, we aspire to collision…” On that note, what are you searching for with your writing? Is it a community, solace, etc? What do you hope to find?

A: What am I searching for? That's an interesting question. My usual response would be answers, answers to silly questions that have occurred to me. And while that's true, I don't really have anything at stake with regards to whether I find those answers or not. If I do, great, but if not, that's also fine. So what is it then? Nothing. In the end, writing poems isn't really about a search. Rather, it's about spending time with words. Play. Writing poems is play.

Q: What writers or artists do you look to for inspiration?

A: The artists that inspire me change all the time. Today, my answer is: Elizabeth Bishop, Caravaggio, Wislawa Szymborska, Son House, Kabir, Isaak Babel, and Vievee Francis.

Q: With that said, what advice do you have for our readers?

A: My advice is to read widely. Find the work of poets from other countries and cultures and times and absorb them all. The literature of the world is so rich and inexhaustible.

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