William Trowbridge (photo by Hank Young)
An interview with William Trowbridge
Former Poet Laureate of Missouri and Lee’s Summit resident, William Trowbridge, is publishing his 11th full-length book of poems, “Maintenance” (Spartan Press, 2025), which displays the wit, style, historical perspective and humor readers have come to know and admire. He is one of the most widely read poets in the country. In the following interview, we asked him to share his path to poetry.
Robert Stewart: The title of this book, “Maintenance,” belies in one word the notion that poetry is disconnected from ordinary life. The title poem mentions plumbers, dentists, then leaps to your role as editor and writing teacher. Can I say that mundane maintenance shifts to the topic you consider more significant?
William Trowbridge: Yes, the title includes the mundane meaning, but it also refers to the metaphorical sense, which involves maintenance of one’s life and that of others in the face of a world that seems tilted toward physical and spiritual disintegration. We must do our best to keep ourselves and, in our small way, the world in decent working order. I certainly wanted to keep this collection relevant to ordinary life, which can often seem extraordinary. I hope it reflects what William Carlos Williams called “the ground sense necessary.”
RS: Your poem “Moon” is also a maintenance poem — “Moon, moon, moon,” you say to defend language from the deconstructionists. Do I have that right? What is behind that choice of the moon as your vehicle?
WT: In “Moon” I side with Eudora Welty, that the word moon has a physical reality connected to the object itself. Yes, postmodernists, words have solid meanings that are not arbitrary. That’s not strictly a matter of faith: You can hold words in your mouth. Open wide, ye doubters.
RS: In your early years, you worked in a slaughterhouse and in a can factory; then, you became a Faulkner scholar. What made you think you could be a poet?
WT: An undergrad degree in philosophy and a doctoral specialty in Faulkner involved quite a jump from slaughterhouse and can company. And writing poetry seemed an even longer one. That didn’t happen till I was bitten by a Howard Nemerov poem, “Mousemeal,” while studying for my PhD comps in American lit. I liked the poem so much I tried to write a few of my own. And, with a sense of delight and some encouragement from a trusted professor, I wrote some more. Even after I started getting published, I wasn’t sure I could actually be a poet. That, as I recall Frost once observed, is a title others must confer on you. So I guess I’ll have to ask around some day. At any rate, after teaching a few years, I decided to switch from Faulkner to poetry. And I got a number of poems from my work at the can company and a chapbook from working in the slaughterhouse.
RS: I’ve read that there are no prodigies in literature. Do you agree? You were one of those artists whose initial spark came later in life — unlike Picasso, who made his first drawing at
age 9. Is literature different from other arts in that way?
WT: That may well be. I haven’t heard of any 6-year-olds giving poetry readings at Carnegie Hall. I certainly got a late start, partially because I grew up in a family with no interest in the arts. The only books in my father’s library were his ledger and a copy of Harold Robbins’ “The Carpetbaggers.” He did buy me a set of The Harvard Classics, though neither of us ever read any. Has anybody read even one of them? I had a collection of Classics comic books, which I did read.
My first real exposure to art in our home was watching film classics shown on our TV. This was before Turner Classic Movies, but our two channels in Omaha offered late-night shows (including the ones on Creature Double Feature). I especially loved Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy. Their comedy seemed to have a more serious undertone. Chaplin’s Little Tramp always seemed a little syrupy and derivative to me.
My senior year in high school I was assigned Book I of “Paradise Lost.” I had only about three quarters comprehension, but the power of the blank verse, whopper periodic sentences gripped me. Later, I wasn’t surprised to learn that some suspected Milton was a closet Satanist. But in college, my literary interests shifted to fiction, especially that of Hemingway, Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, though I ended up majoring in philosophy. It didn’t help my job opportunities when I switched to English in grad school.
RS: Your previous books include some mythic, archetypal characters — the character Fool, a trickster; King Kong, himself; and many people’s favorite, Old Guy, Superhero. Were those characters actually you in hiding? Come clean.
WT: I’ll try to come clean. All of those characters are seriocomic. Most of my favorite writers work in that territory. My Kong derives partly from turning Delmore Schwartz’s bear in “The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me” into the comic fumbler of my “Book of Kong.” Kong also comes from the seriocomic misfits one encounters in silent comedy, who partly serve as vehicles to satirize “respectable” society. Fool is cut from the same cloth, though I suppose the satire there moves into the cosmic and surreal realm as well.
OK, Kong is pretty surreal. In Fool I see the schlemiel and schlimazel characters from Yiddish comedy. Old guy is related to both, as well as myself getting older. They do say there’s no fool like an old fool. But he’s also a bit Jewish. Influences here, of course, are Jack Benny, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce. Pryor and Carlin are there too, though not officially Jewish. OK, yes, there’s a bit of all three characters in me. Like Plath, “I may be a bit of a Jew.” Of course, the fool archetype includes us all.
RS: You use a lot of formal structures in “Maintenance,” everything from lists and syntactic repetition to the sonnet, even rhyme. You never were considered a “new formalist,” as some poets once were known, but identifiable forms show up all through this book. What prompted this use of traditional forms?
WT: I’ve always admired the “old” formalists Auden, Frost, Wilbur, and Larkin. And I’ve become more drawn to form in my later poems. I find it creeping into poems I started as free verse — as the great Paul Fussell put it, “free, sort of.” An unintentional rhyme will persuade me to turn a free-verse poem into a sonnet. I agree with Wilbur that, rather than being a restriction, form, especially rhymed form, can free one from choosing the easy word, inviting the fresher one to come along.
Anti-formalists have argued that form inhibits power in poetry by squeezing content into a box and, as Pound insists, using the rhythm “of the metronome” instead of “the musical phase” (which wrongly assumes a good iambic line’s rhythm is actually metronomic). I don’t think anyone’s ever thought that Dylan Thomas’ poems, for example, lack power. Part of that power comes from his use of form. If you just put gunpowder in a pile, for example, all you get is a fizzle, but pack it tightly in a container and you get something a good deal more powerful. Of course, you have to use good powder. Nevertheless, I still write mainly in free verse — sort of.
RS: “Maintenance” starts by evoking an earlier era — the 1950s, the Eisenhower years — and other eras. How does one use the past in art so it has meaning to our current lives?
WT: One has to select elements of the past that can be shown to have a nearly timeless relevance. King Kong has outlived any number of movie monsters. One of my grad students, who worked in a Planned Parenthood clinic, brought me a pack of King Kong condoms. Kong lives, thanks to his relevance to our inner selves. Or, in Eisenhower’s case, seeing a hero change into someone all-too-human. Unfortunately, my poems about the Holocaust seem more relevant with each new headline.
RS: You often cite World War II and your veteran father’s PTSD, which also was a topic in your 2024 book, “Father and Son.” In “Maintenance,” you say you woke once to “pigs screaming” to realize it was your father, “pinned down by his dreams.” Can we say that such PTSD carries through generations, too?
WT: Speaking for myself and others I’ve shared memories with about living with a PTSD sufferer, I’d say it certainly carries through generations. It affects more than combat veterans. Cops, firefighters, accident victims, abused spouses, and their families have to suffer from its effects. It’s the main cause of suicide by veterans. There are coping mechanisms, but it doesn’t seem to go away. I still remember my father’s cries in the bedroom next to mine.
RS: Later in “Maintenance,” you offer two poems about works by the artist Bruegel the Elder, including his “Massacre of the Innocents,” one end-rhymed and one slant-rhymed. Both take us through time, Bethlehem to Flanders to My Lai — the war of our generation — and others. Is humanity failing its maintenance? Given current massacres, what is an artist to do?
WT: Well, I’d say it’s time to circle the wagons, or perhaps the metaphors. Trouble may be clomping up our street any day, wearing combat fatigues, masks and ICE badges. We are close to facing an army of thugs at the beck and call of someone with great admiration for tyrants past and present. That someone reminds me of the final lines of Auden’s “Epitaph on a Tyrant.”
When he laughed, respectable senators burst
with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in
the streets.
All artists can do in the face of this menace is to witness through their art what’s going on, to try to keep it from becoming merely part of what Walker Percy called “everydayness.” On the other hand, there’s Howard Nemerov’s Vietnam-era satire “On Being Asked for a Peace Poem.”
Here is Joe Blow the poet
Sitting before the console of the giant instrument
That mediates his spirit to the world.
. . . Applying the immense leverage of art,
He is about to stop this senseless war.
So Homer stopped that dreadful thing at Troy
By giving the troops the Iliad to read instead;
So Wordsworth stopped the Revolution when
he felt Robespierre had gone too far;
So Yevtushenko was invited by the Times
to keep Arabs out of Israel
By smiting once his mighty lyre.
Despite those doubts, artists should, like Joe Blow, do what they can, even if it goes, to cite T.S. Eliot, “Jug Jug to dirty ears.”
