Bob Sykora (photo by Anthony Procopio Ross)
An interview with poet Bob Sykora
Local poet Bob Sykora is a self-proclaimed “sweaty person,” so when I insisted that we sit in the full sun on an early May afternoon drinking hot coffee on the patio of Oddly Correct to talk about poetry, I knew that our conversation would be equal parts inspiration and perspiration. Our conversation focused on his recent collection of poetry, “Utopians in Love,” which was recently published by Game Over Books.
Andrew Johnson: You began writing this collection a decade ago during grad school. Between then and now, have you gone through many rounds of revision? Is this close to what you completed in school?
Bob Sykora: Nine years ago, I was in grad school in Boston. I was working on a chapbook that I thought would become my MFA thesis, and I had this idea — a bad idea, in retrospect — that my thesis would be a poetry collection about online dating. That chapbook got published in 2016, and I thought I would use it as my thesis and move on. But then, for a class, we were in the rare books room of the Boston public library. They had not yet digitized their collection, so I was going through the card catalog, and I came across the title “Brook Farm: American Utopia,” and it blew my mind. I spent my night on Google, became obsessed, and in the freedom of that moment decided that my thesis could just be this new thing. And these historical utopias I discovered after that initial research about Brook Farm became the subject of my thesis manuscript. The thesis bears a lot of resemblance to, but it is such a bad version of “Utopians in Love” because it came from just one year of frantic writing. I had some of the narrative scope, but it’s sloppier and had a lot of forced poems. So, the first three or four years after grad school I was heavily revising it and submitting it until this version was accepted by Game Over Books.
Johnson: These poems explore historical American utopias, communal living experiments that existed in New England during the 19th century. The other thread throughout the poems is a breakup story that has the speaker exploring different pieces of his relationship ending, juxtaposed with these different utopias. How did these two threads come together?
Sykora: No, it was actually perfect timing. I had that library moment, so utopias were already on my mind. So, I was reading about these people who were so explicit and practical, saying “No, we are going to change the world, we are doing this with our little experiments.” The timing was right. I had a real-life breakup. But also — it’s funny to think about in 2025, but this happened back in 2016 during that miserable primary election season, watching the news of it right as the breakup happened. So, it all came together right as the life I had imagined for myself was falling apart. I was reading about these people and their ideas, some of them radical, some of them very traditional, and the different ways life completely unraveled for them. So it just hit me: How can I imagine a new life when the personal and the big-picture political look so awful?
Johnson: There have been attempted utopias and social experiments everywhere, throughout history. How did you go about focusing on the ones you chose?
Sykora: I was based out of Boston doing research in the library, so that informed a lot of the material that was available to me. As the poems developed, I also wanted to visit as many places as I could, to be able to anchor some first-person perspective rooted in place. Some of the poems are persona poems where the text is created from found material in journals from people who lived in the utopias, and I have a bit of a mixed ethical relationship to persona poems, but these ones really gave me room to play and experiment with the archives in a way that expanded the perspectives in the book. And it broadened the voices present beyond one solitary voice while remaining focused on a certain landscape during a particular century in American history.
Johnson: Many of these utopias were influenced by the 19th-century Transcendentalist movement, and the Transcendentalists romanticizing so much about themselves back then, but also, we now look back and romanticize them. In your poem “Walden Pond,” the speaker is dipping his toes into the pond, which is perhaps one of the most romanticized places in American history, a metaphorical source of our notions of rugged individualism and the solitary self-made man. But, of course, we know now that Thoreau was getting his laundry done by his mom and often walked into town to be with friends. He wasn’t as rugged as he let on. In your poem, halfway through is the line, “I’m peeing / in Walden Pond.” It comes at a pivotal moment in the book where that’s exactly what’s happening —we are faced with the disappointments of utopia, and one response is to desecrate the ideal by literally taking a piss on it.
Sykora: I’m so glad you saw that as a turning point. It’s so funny, because when I wrote that one, it came about because that’s just where I lived. I was in Somerville, near Boston, and Walden Pond just was one of the easier places to get out into nature and go for a swim. It was one of the earliest poems I wrote for the book, but it shows up later in the book because as I revised, I realized it was that turning point in the collection, where the idealized notions have gradually fallen away and you’re left facing reality.
Johnson: Toward the very end of the collection is this Lisa Robertson quote, “I needed history in order to explain myself.” And in the poem “Various Other Utopias” you write the line: “This is the utopia where I never spent so much time in the past/ where my utopias are all future, and sometimes even right here in this moment.” It’s as if you ultimately arrive at a new posture toward time, but you had to work through the past to arrive at a new stance toward the future as well as the present.
Sykora: The Lisa Robertson quote comes towards the end because I found it toward the end of writing the book, and it captured so much of what I’d hoped to say in these poems. Like, I’ve been trying to say this in so many ways, and you just said it so quickly and easily! Around the same time a friend recommended Jose Esteban Munz’s “Cruising Utopias,” which is a theory book, and I read it so late in the process, and I cracked it open and was like, ‘holy shit, he says so much of what I’ve been wanting to say.’ He was the first person who really connected utopia with time in the way that made sense to me, that we can see glimpses of the future by looking at the past and by looking for those moments of change, moments of disruption. So finding those texts toward the end of writing the poems, I felt like I had failed to say some of what I wanted to say, but what I’m grateful for, and excited about is that the failures of writing this book is what I needed to get to a new perspective.
Johnson: I particularly enjoyed the poem “Cities.” In the notes you say this poem owes its form to inspiration from poet Robin Coste Lewis. It’s like an anagram built from a quote.
Sykora: Right. Robin Coste Lewis has this incredible collection of poems that are all of these anagrams built from quotes, and I was reading her work as I was doing this research and writing these poems. When I came across the quote from “Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems” that inspired “Cities,” it just offered itself as my own opportunity to experiment with the form.
Cities
On the other hand, what absurdity can be imagined greater than the institution of cities? They originated not in love, but in war. It was war that drove men together in multitudes, and compelled them to stand so close, and build walls around them. 1 – Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
What absurdity can be imagined greater than institutions? In what men
can great cities be imagined? In what war can love be imagined?
What compelled men to build cities around absurdity? What love
drives men to war? Men imagined war together in great cities.
In great, closed cities, men can imagine absurd institutions around love.
Institutions compel men to war in the absurd walls built so close
around hand-built cities. Compelled to war, men hand city walls
to the multitudes to build greater institutions. Driven together
into cities, love built walls around war, so close to what the hands
imagined. Cities originated so close to absurdity. Love can be imagined
in the walls built around them. Hands in the war drove men to love
great absurdities. Men love not in war but in institutions. Absurd war
in close cities compelled men to build walls. But hands in other hands
built love, and together closed institutions of absurdity.
1 From “Plan of the West Roxbury Community,” The Dial, January 1842. Archived copies of The Dial can be found at the Boston Athenaeum.
