Troy Jollimore: California Poets Part 5, Four Poems

Troy Jollimore (photo by Brett Hall Jones)

December 22nd, 2022

California Poets: Part V

Troy Jollimore

Four Poems

THAT LIFE And did you think that life (that begins like a fire and consumes and did you think that life (it unites you with beasts, you hold it in common that life (given to you freely, but in what dream would you have pursued it has been a series of standard answers (you put on your shoes and walked to expected questions (to the city where they said the oracle was and did you think that life (there is only one, despite the lies of the elders has haunted you like a lost child (I mean wolves, yes, but also insects and clams and are you being dramatic (I know you would deny it but you are dancing or are you (a space is opening up on the inside, that’s where the world is parsing the words of the oracle (where the world goes, and yes you are dancing and a space opens up on the inside of the world (yes that’s where you go and you go (and a space opens up, and the oracle falls into silence like a child (there is only one, you fall silent, you fall silent then you go to the city (where the fire and the beasts are, and the city falls into silence and did you think that life? (and did you think that, life? (from Earthly Delights, 2021)

ON BIRDSONG Poison, in proportion, is medicinal. Medicine, ill-meted, can be terminal. Brute noise, deftly repeated, becomes musical. An exit viewed from elsewhere is an entrance. The conjuror entrances a vast audience. The hymn that’s resurrected from the hymnal aspires, as we wish to, to the spiritual, but is slow to disentangle from the sensual. The evening light, refracted, terminates the day. (A faction is a fraction of an integral.) What would we say to the cardinal or jay, given wings that could mimic their velocities? How many wintery ferocities are encompassed in their shrill inhuman canticles? (from Syllabus of Errors, 2015)

THE SOLIPSIST Don’t be misled: that sea-song you hear when the shell’s at your ear? It’s all in your head. That primordial tide— the slurp and salt-slosh of the brain’s briny wash— is on the inside. Truth be told, the whole place, everything that the eye can take in, to the sky and beyond into space, lives inside of your skull. When you set your sad head down on Procrustes’ bed, you lay down the whole universe. You recline on the pillow: the cosmos grows dim. The soft ghost in the squishy machine, which the world is, retires. Someday it will expire. Then all will go silent and dark. For the moment, however, the black- ness is just temporary. The planet you carry will shortly swing back from the far nether regions. And life will continue— but only within you. Which raises a question that comes up again and again, as to why God would make ear and eye to face outward, not in? (from At Lake Scugog, 2011)

TROUT QUINTET 1 Where water meets water, where rain hangs lead-heavy for days before finally deciding to harden and fall, where the nearest road is sixty miles away and that a narrow track of gravel, where the lake is as still as a photograph and has never been photographed, where the trout return in accordance with a schedule that is not a human schedule, following a water- ridden brain-map, a hardwired river route, an instinct chart, Tom Thomson sits in a canoe playing solitaire. Each time he loses, he throws his cards into the water. Each time he wins he catches a trout. 2 He likes this place because the satellites cannot see it and the water is pure. He likes this place because it is where the trout come, where they stop. He likes this place because parsley and wild tomatoes grow naturally on the banks. He likes the way his canoe fits the water. He likes the way the water fits the earth Is Tom Thomson a figure of legend? Tom Thomson is a living totem pole. Is Tom Thomson larger than life? Four men could stand in Tom Thomson's s smoking cigars and talking about baseball. One night four men came for him carrying official papers and sawed-off shot A week later their Chevy Suburban was found. The motor was running. The left turn indicator blinking. The glove box was filled with trout. 3 There is much joy to be found in the imprecise usage of words. Tom Thomson disagrees. He slams his bottle down on the wooden table. The wood, anticipating the bottle's arrival, splinters in advance. Who would call a trout a salmon? But words are arbitrary. Who would call a trout an iceberg? Call it what you want, it will not come. Tom Thomson's grunt clears the forest of birds. His laughter frightens the gods. The philosopher Pythagoras devised a method of measuring Tom Thomson by taking the length of his shadow at that moment when the shadow of an ordinary man was as long as the man was tall. Tom Thomson snorts at philosophers. He has never touched a tape measure. He eyeballs every measurement, and is astoundingly accurate. He measures once, cuts once. He speaks seven languages. He has perfect pitch. 4 A hesitant breeze brings mist from the north. The location of the sun during the past three days is a matter of some controversy. The lake is stiffening with trout. They are pouring in from all over. The sound of a paddle entering and pushing the water aside slowly corrupts the silence. Tom Thomson stops, lets go the paddle, reaches over the side and makes a secret mark on a rock. The mark indicates that this is a place Tom Thomson has been, and will come to again. Have you ever seen a man murdered? Once. I saw it in a mirror. And did he remind you of your father? I can't answer that question. Nor any other. 5 Tom Thomson likes to pull a trout from the water and fry it up with parsley and wild tomatoes. The recipe is from his favorite restaurant on Yonge Street in Toronto. Tom Thomson eats there once a year. He does not need a reservation. He has left a secret mark upon the door. What is Tom Thomson’s secret mark? What does it look like? I can't tell you. Come on. Let me tell you something: the trout that come to the place where water meets are the same trout every year. They are not born. They do not die. Impossible. All I can do is tell you. What of the sign. Can you give me a hint? I already have. Tell me something. Is that Tom Thomson playing the piano? That is not Tom Thomson playing the piano. Tom Thomson plays no instrument. He does not sing. He knows no poetry. He can't even read. Tom Thomson spends each night alone, listening to the phonograph, looking at old family photos. Or so they say. (from Tom Tomson in Purgatory, 2006)

Interview

June 28th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Troy Jollimore, Poet, Philosopher, Professor

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Your first book, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, was published in 2006 and went on to receive the National Critics Circle Award. It’s extremely rare for poets to win a prestigious literary prize right out of the gate, but you did. Given the attention that the prize must have garnered, along with greater expectations for your future work, how much creative pressure did you feel at the time, and to what extent would you have approached writing in those following years differently had you not won?

TJ: I don’t recall feeling pressure. What I remember is feeling very lucky, and quite gratified that anyone was paying attention at all. Poetry tends to fly under the radar. Certainly it does in this country. So there is never any pressure, as far as poetry goes, because almost nobody wants poetry. It’s not like working on a screenplay for the next Marvel film, where the industry executives are breathing down your neck and they’ll force you to rewrite the ending if it doesn’t test well in Canoga Park. And in my case—well, that first book was published by a very, very small press. That press only stayed in existence for a few years, and this was the second book they put out. It was basically a one-man operation, a semi-retired real estate guy, Robert Nazarene, who loved poetry. I owe so much to Bob. His little press was a real labor of love.

When the book was nominated, I didn’t even know about it. One of my colleagues spotted the announcement in a newspaper. She called me early on Saturday morning and shouted, “Congratulations!” I had no idea what she was talking about. And then when that book actually won, it was just as much of a surprise. I was up against people like W.D. Snodgrass and Frederick Seidel. (Both of whom probably should have won!)

As for how I might have written differently. Who knows? My guess is that without that initial stroke of luck, I would be writing without the expectation of an audience. Letting my stuff pile up in a desk drawer. Would that have changed the poems in some way? I’m sure it would have, but I can’t say how. As the horse trader says in that wonderful scene from the Coen brothers’ True Grit, “I do not entertain hypotheticals. The world as it is is vexing enough.”

DG: Much has been said about the connection between philosophy and poetry—the likes of Aristotle, Dante, Nietzsche, and beyond have indeed produced some of the greatest philosopher-poets, but I’m more curious to know your opinion about the value of ambiguity within each respective discipline. Common sense would say the seeker of wisdom hates it and the champion of creativity loves it. What role, if any, does the ambiguous have in serious philosophical study and, likewise, could modern poetry benefit from greater clarity?

TJ: That might be what common sense would say. In one way, at least, I disagree with common sense. I mean, let me begin by acknowledging the obvious, that there is appropriate and inappropriate ambiguity. Sometimes people, both poets and philosophers, write more obscurely than they should because they think it will seem smart and impress people. I am very strongly against that. And I am partly against it because that sort of bad, manipulative use of obscurity provokes people into thinking that what is difficult to comprehend right away, what is resistant to immediate understanding, is always bad. So they become impatient with poetry, with philosophy, with anything that resists initial accommodation, anything that isn’t “accessible,” where that means friendly, easy, eager to please. And that is just a serious mistake, in my view. There is an admirable kind of ambiguity in writing, and an admirable type of difficulty, that result from trying in an honest and open way to come to terms with the phenomena of life—which, after all, sometimes appear to be chaotic and even contradictory—in all their genuine, authentic complexity.

Creativity and wisdom are strongly aligned, because understanding the world is a creative act. It isn’t just a matter of opening your eyes and letting an already-intelligible world pour into you, as a certain sort of naïve blank-slate epistemology would have it. The mind is not just a mirror that reflects things. The mind helps create the world we experience. It was Kant, of course, in our tradition, who largely figured that out. And ambiguity has a crucial role in wisdom, because the world itself is ambiguous and complicated and contradictory; or, at any rate, that’s how it presents itself to us. For instance, it seems to me—from the inside, so to speak—that I deliberate and make decisions and act on them, which suggests that I am free. And it also seems to me that I am an object that is part of the natural order of things, which suggests that I am not free. Also, it seems to me that the world is centered around myself, and the stuff that matters to me really matters, in some strong sense; but intellectually, of course, I know that objectively speaking, no one’s stuff matters more than anybody else’s stuff. There are many places in life where we experience this sort of double vision. Something on each side of the dichotomy is true, but it’s hard to figure out how they can both be true at the same time. That struggle to try to figure that out is at the heart of philosophy. And, I think, at the core of a lot of the best poetry.

In a poem we can bring together a lot of disparate things and play with them, or let them play with each other, without feeling a need to impose an artificial resolution on them. It’s exploratory, experimental, even. (Which is part of why you should never begin a poem knowing exactly where it is going to go, or what it is going to say. It’s okay, maybe, to feel like you know where it’s going to go. But it’s good to be reasonably certain that you are wrong.) The poet Rebecca Lindenberg says, in an interview, “Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time.” I think that’s quite right. I would add that these notions are not just tangential; they often appear to be mutually exclusive or inconsistent. And there might be no single, clear, unambiguous way of articulating the relation between those various tangential notions, or of stating just how they fall together into a single thing. (The world isn’t just one single thing. Though also, of course, it is.)

This makes the poem ambiguous, resistant to definitive interpretation. And that frustrates some people, and some people even think poems are being deliberately difficult. In fact, poems are doing the best they can. As are poets. When we admit that we don’t understand things, but try to speak about them anyway, we aren’t being deliberately difficult, we are just acknowledging genuine difficulty. People say the same thing about philosophy. "Why do you philosophers make things so hard?" But things are already hard. Certain other ways of speaking and thinking, because they shy away from that hard truth, falsify things and make them seem easy. The idea that things are easy is pleasing to a lot of people, who then tend to resist more honest accounts of the world that acknowledge its deep difficulty and even deeper mystery.

DG: At Princeton you earned a PhD in Philosophy under the guidance of Harry Frankfurt. Those who know the name will immediately recognize his seminal 1986 essay and subsequent 2005 book On Bullshit. Though I’d be hard-pressed to find a more relevant book for the times, it’s not what I want to discuss—at least directly. I’m more concerned with the role of poetry, whose primary concern, unlike philosophy, is not so much truth but originality, which for its own sake alone can be bullshit by proxy of exaggerated forms and pyrotechnic displays of language. In your view, does poetry need to be more philosophically conscious in a society of almost complete disinformation? Even further, perhaps, should it assume a greater role in highlighting topics specifically situated in ethics?

TJ: I’m pretty averse to telling any poet what they "should" do. Especially in an environment where, it seems to me, there is already a lot of pressure for poets to be political—and where "political" is interpreted in a certain fairly narrow and rigid way; a lot of pressure on them to comment on what is going on, to try to enlist readers into fighting the good fight, and so on. And where so many people just seem to assume that that is what poetry is for, that that’s the point of it, and are puzzled at the very idea that a person might be interested in any poetry that was not trying to do that. Puzzled, for instance, that someone might be interested in reading Elizabeth Bishop, whose poetry was certainly not political in any clear sense. Or Keats. Of course, you can try to make Bishop or Keats political. But I would rather try to approach them openly, on their own terms. If I do that, I might find some things in their work that speak to our political situation, or to my own thinking about it. And I might instead find things that speak to very different sets of human concerns; and I don’t want to close myself off to those, at all.

Besides, most people who read poetry in this country already have the same basic political values. So when we write political poems we are generally preaching to the converted. There isn’t all that much point to it. And of course, it very quickly becomes self-congratulatory, patting myself on the back for having the right sentiments and expressing them in a poem. A pit that all forms of consciously political art are in constant danger of falling into.

I’m certainly not telling anyone not to write political poems. The great ones are truly great. But it’s so, so hard to write a truly great one, or even a truly good one. They’re like love poems that way. To try to write one is to set oneself up for failure. Anyway, it’s nearly always a mistake to set out to try to write a certain kind of poem, to impose an agenda on a poem, to tell your poem what it is supposed to be saying, or doing. You need to listen when the poem tells you what to say, or do. If it says it really wants to be a political poem, great. Write it. You might strike gold. You never know.

I keep saying "political," which is a word you did not use. You mentioned ethics. So maybe I should say: I think there is an ethics of poetry. That ethics is expressed beautifully in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” It says: always say what seems true to you in the moment, no matter what. (Emerson says it so much better, of course.) Don’t ever lie in your poems. And now, at the risk of seeming to contradict everything I wrote above (but Emerson would of course approve of my not kowtowing to the desire for “a foolish consistency,” and maybe this goes back to what I said above about ambiguity) I’ll say that I think this sort of honesty is political. Because bad politics relies heavily on lies. When we go to war with other countries, our leaders offer some sort of justification, and at least since World War II those justifications are nearly always lies. Our current heartless and cruel immigration policy is built on lies. The so-called justifications for the free market and the current, staggeringly unequal distribution of wealth are all lies. Bad political movements are built around myths and lies. Including—this gets back to what I said about difficulty, above—the lie that we know precisely how things work, and how to fix things and make everything peachy and swell. Just build a wall! Or whatever the particular lie might be. So, while I think that we should mostly avoid writing explicitly political poems, I also think that any good poem, because it tells the truth, is in that sense political. As the Irish poet Michael Longley once wrote, “In the context of political violence the deployment of words at their most precise and suggestive remains one of the few antidotes to death-dealing dishonesty.”

I’ll go further. The very existence of poetry, and of activities like reading, writing, and teaching poetry, are all inherently ethical and political, because they are fundamentally non-economic, non-productive, and inefficient. They keep alive elements of human life that the economic system wants us to forget, elements that cause people to behave erratically and unpredictably by making them into actual individuals, elements that can’t be quantified in the standardized language of production and efficiency that, along with the ways of thinking that accompany that language, has overtaken the world, and the culture, to a degree that I could not possibly have predicted even a couple decades ago. The language of poetry is the opposite of the language that bureaucrats and accountants speak, and reading poetry, and writing it, and teaching it, and sharing it with people you love, are all ways of keeping our minds from being colonized by administrators and accountants. By which I mean, you know, the sort of people who will approach a college professor, and say things like, "Well, now we need you to compose and submit a report justifying the value of teaching Aristotle or Hume in terms that can be quantified so that we can express them in a bar graph that we can put on a PowerPoint slide for our next presentation to stakeholders." When you find the people who run universities—or museums, libraries, publishing houses, theater companies, movie studios—when you find those people talking that way, all the time, and insisting that the people around them—teachers (and students!), artists, craftspeople, writers—insisting that they all talk that way too, you know something has gone very wrong in the culture.

DG: In writing about movies, you have talked about the similarities between filmmaking and poetry: “The questions that arise while writing and editing poetry are very much like those that arise when editing film. Where should the shot be cut? Where should the line be broken? How long should the camera be held on this face, this landscape, this particular image? How long should the poem dwell on this particular thought before it moves on? Cutting shots, and putting them together to construct scenes, and then putting scenes together to make a film, is like breaking lines and putting them together to construct a stanza, and then putting stanzas together to make a poem.” These reflections would suggest that your approach to editing is quite extensive. Could speak a bit about your revision process and how it differs when you’re working on philosophical research as opposed to poetry?

TJ: Revising poetry really does feel to me like film editing, or what I imagine film editing to be: you are tweaking tiny details to try to make the aesthetic experience as intense and meaningful as possible. Another art I tend to think about in that connection is stand-up comedy. Because good comedians are like film editors, or poets: they pay such close attention to language and timing and articulation and emphasis and delivery. You watch a skilled comedian at work, and you see them get big laughs from stuff that, flat on the page, just wouldn’t be funny at all. Now, we poets, we only have the page. I mean, we give readings too. But in our culture the primary instantiation of the poem is the written text, and so we have to find a way to use the resources at our disposal—rhythm, rhyme, word order, punctuation, white space, all of it—to do that work. From one perspective, those resources are very narrow, compared with what stand-up comedians have to work with. From another perspective they are quite vast, and supple.

As for philosophy, the obvious difference here is that the standard for what "works" is presumably quite different in philosophy. Though again, going back in a way to what I said earlier, not as different as people often assume. In fact when I am writing philosophy I do think about many of the kinds of things I think about when I write poetry. Things like rhythm, for instance. Good philosophy, like any good prose, has rhythm. It moves well. It even dances a little. A lot of today’s philosophy doesn’t, and in general philosophers aren’t trained to think about that, which is a real shame. It’s held us back, in some ways. After all, form and content are intimately related. As a poet—and this might be a rather uncommon or possibly eccentric view among philosophers—I think that there tends to a kind of general co-incidence or harmony between prose that states its ideas in the best possible way and prose that is pleasurable to read.

DG: Having spoken about ethics, I'd like to now frame the topic in the context of AI. There are moral concerns such as exclusivity, honor, betrayal, and so on that, for better or worse, are not yet figured into the computer framework, whether in relation to friendship or romantic love (at least for the moment). In other words, from a philosophy of mind perspective, the robots don’t yet possess the faculties to care about how they are “interacted” with, although some preliminary studies have shown that, when threatened, they do take belligerent stances. In the event that AI does attain human levels of consciousness, would it then necessarily be entitled to the same code of ethics people are entitled to? And how might this look in the context of sending these machines into war?

TJ: I would go further, and say that these robots don’t yet possess the faculties for even the most rudimentary ethical thinking, or for any mental states at all. They aren’t that kind of entity. They can’t care, they can’t think, they have no concepts. They are pattern-predictors, built to mimic human behavior and mentality without actually being capable of it. A lot of people don’t realize this because they don’t know the basics of how these things work. And there are some people who do know the basics, but still think that they can think, feel, etc., because they are in the grip of a bad theory of philosophy of mind. And then there is another group, probably quite a bit larger, who do understand this but who speak as if it were otherwise—who keep using the language that is appropriate to responsible agents that actually deliberate and perform actions and have thoughts about what they are doing—even though they know it is not appropriate, because they want to encourage that sort of widespread misunderstanding, or for other various cynical reasons.

By the way, I’m only referring to the AIs that currently exist. I can’t rule out the possibility that a robot might be able to actually have genuine mental states, or to care, or to act belligerently. But the things we have now can’t. They aren’t saying anything when words appear on the screen. They don’t mean it. They don’t mean anything. Sadly, though, the human brain was designed through millennia of evolution to be prone to see consciousness and agency in the world on the basis, at times, of insufficient evidence. And these machines are exploiting that. Or better to say, maybe, that the people who build and own these machines are using them to exploit that.

If someone did manage to build an AI that was genuinely conscious, then in my view it would be entitled to ethical consideration. The same ethical consideration as humans are entitled to? That would depend on a lot of things. You use the phrase “human levels of consciousness,” but of course consciousness is not just defined by a certain "level." It’s a more complicated phenomenon than that. Right now, I couldn’t really do much more than to speculate idly about what a certain AI of a certain sort might be entitled to, morally speaking. And to express relief at the fact that we aren’t yet in the position of having to face those questions, and also express, in the strongest possible terms, the hope that we never find ourselves in that situation.

DG: In 2021, you published an insightful essay “Anxious feelings, anxious friends: on anxiety and friendship” in which you write the following: “We don’t always fear what we should, and sometimes fear things we shouldn’t. We don’t always become angry when we should, and sometimes become angry when we shouldn’t. Likewise, we don’t always become anxious when we should, or in the way that we should. (And it is also true, of course, that we sometimes become anxious when we shouldn’t, or feel more anxious than we should …. For this reason alone, it is useful to have emotionally reliable friends around to help correct misguided emotional responses, just as it is helpful to have epistemically reliable friends to help one recognize and correct false or unjustified beliefs.” Given the yes-man attitude of LLMs, along with the effusiveness they display towards their users, can we, in the Nietzschean sense, proclaim that the age of anxiety is dead, and if so, what the implications of this are?

TJ: That partly depends on what we decide to do with them. And also on who "we" refers to. There certainly is a very real danger that a lot of people are going to make a lot of huge mistakes, including some very serious ones, in part because LLMs are not sufficiently reliable about identifying possible problems, risks, and so forth; and one part of this certainly does arise from the yes-man tendencies that you point to. We might hope that people who train these things, and try to direct their “behavior,” decide to try to make them smarter, which would include getting them to say things like "no," or "bad idea," or "are you really sure you want to do that?" more often than they currently do. Based on recent evidence, I am not optimistic. Of course, not everyone is naïve enough to listen to advice from LLMs.  But they might still find themselves suffering as the result of the stupidity of others. That’s how human history goes, it seems.

DG: Your love for cinema is well-documented. Have you been watching a lot of movies these days and what interesting films have you seen?

TJ: Like a lot of people, I absolutely loved Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. That’s my favorite from the past few years. Other good reasonably recent ones would include It Was Just an Accident, Eephus, Sorry Baby, Asteroid City, The Mastermind, Eddington, Blue Moon, Nouvelle Vague, Die My Darling, Is This Thing On?, Friendship, Hundreds of Beavers, The Outrun, Evil Does Not Exist, and Send Help. My favorite so far this year is Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters. Wow, that was a good one.

DG: If you could collaborate with a famous filmmaker or a philosopher (living or dead), but it had to be only one or the other, which would you choose and why?

TJ: I think collaboration in film is a lot more fun than collaboration in philosophy. Film is essentially a collaborative medium. And honestly, I would love to be part of the filmmaking process that resulted in something great. Of course, I say this knowing that I have no skills in film; I have nothing to bring to the table. So this is a pure exercise in fantasy. As for who I’d want to work with—I assume that’s part of the question—there are all sorts of people I could name: the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory—that’s five, and there are so many more I could easily name. Especially since you allowed dead filmmakers as well. This really is an exercise in fantasy! And I guess part of the fantasy is, again, imagining that I have something I could contribute to such a collaboration.

DG: You were born in Nova Scotia, did your PhD in Princeton, and now work in Northern California. Has living in different environments influenced your poetry and philosophical work equally, or do you find the former pursuit to have been affected a bit more by these changes?

TJ: The most obvious influences are the people. As you mentioned above, Harry Frankfurt became my dissertation advisor at Princeton. That was a great stroke of luck for me, though I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time. I mean, it wasn’t until years after I was finished with grad school that I began to sense just how significant he was, and it was just as long before I even began to really understand Harry’s thinking. And the more time has gone by, the more influence his thinking has exerted over me. Not that I agree with everything he said. In fact I think he was very wrong about a whole lot of stuff! But that’s a form of influence, too—in philosophy it’s often the most significant kind. And whether he was right or wrong, he was insightful and perceptive.

Also at Princeton I got to know a number of extraordinary writers: Paul Muldoon, James Richardson, CK Williams, the novelist Stephen Wright. There were others who were around but were in so much demand that I never got to take their courses: Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates, for example. But they gave readings I attended, and there were always high-profile people passing through. Michael Ondaatje. Annie Proulx. Carlos Fuentes. Michael Longley and Edna Longley. J.M. Coetzee. Allen Ginsberg. Patrick Stewart came and talked about Shakespeare. I saw the actor David Morse give an incredible performance in a one-man show at McCarter Theater, just down the street from where I lived. And of course I was eighty minutes by train from New York, and I can’t even begin to list all the things I was able to experience there. The amount of culture and intellectual life I absorbed and was exposed to in that brief span of a few years is staggering.

Here in Northern California, I have my philosophy colleagues, who are really quite wonderful, and who influence me in various ways. And I used to go, sometimes, to the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley, where I participated in workshops led by poets like Robert Hass, Forrest Gander, CD Wright, Sharon Olds, Dean Young, and Brenda Hillman, among others. Another incredible experience. Also, I am lucky enough to be married to a writer! Heather Altfeld, a fantastic poet. So the environmental influence begins at home.

But yes, when I think about the influence of environment, it’s largely the people. That said, there’s no question that the physical nature of these places—Nova Scotia in particular—lives inside me in a very deep way. I resonate with that landscape and on a certain level I don’t really feel like I’m at home when I’m not there. I’ve tried, from time to time, to get that into my writing in a more direct way. I haven’t succeeded yet. But I do suspect that there is an influence, at a deeper level.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

TJ: I am writing a philosophy book. Another book about the philosophy of love! But in no way a repetition of what I have done before—different topics and approach this time around. That’s the main project, along with a number of academic philosophy papers. I have a number of essays that I would like to collect into something coherent and, as people say when describing coffee, full-bodied, though at the moment it doesn’t feel quite complete and I need to figure out precisely what it is that is missing and how to write to fill that gap. But it’s almost there. For whatever reason it’s been a little while since I’ve written poetry, and I am definitely itching to get back to it. But you know, you can’t control it. In my experience, anyway, it chooses to show up when it wants to, and you just need to be open to it, to listen and be receptive. Trying to control it is pretty much always a mistake.

Author Bio:

Troy Jollimore’s first book of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 2006. His third book, Syllabus of Errors (2015), was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best poetry books of 2015. His writings have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, Conjunctions, Poetry, The Believer, McSweeney’s, the Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry 2020. He makes his living as a professor of philosophy, and as a philosopher is the author of Love’s Vision (Princeton University Press, 2011) and On Loyalty (Routledge, 2012). He has received fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Guggenheim foundation. His most recent collection of poems, Earthly Delights, was published by Princeton University Press in 2021.