A Chat With Todd Dillard About Three Poems
Evan Fleischer: I know poems speak for themselves, but why the Guinness Book of World Records?
Todd Dillard: I loved the GBWR as a kid — it was this really organized and contained way of showing a young me how far humans can go, but it was also very useful in showing me early on that I don't know shit about people and what they can do. This not knowing — this always being surprised and slightly confused and open to whatever the world lobs at me — I wanted to write an homage to that. Also I wanted to make fun of myself.
EF: Why does grief lead us to a stunt double?
TD: My book Ways We Vanish really dives into my mom's addiction and death and my grief, and it was something I'd been writing about for over a decade by the time the book came out. I sort of thought I'd be "done" writing those poems after writing a book filled with them, but they still show up all the time, I still write them, I still haven't exhausted what it is I feel/I have to say. So that's half the answer. The other half is that the early drafts of my book were awful because they centered solely on my experience. I completely failed at making my mom feel like the multi-dimensional and complicated person she was. Once I realized/fixed this, the book improved rapidly, and it's had this effect afterward of me visualizing my mom popping into my mom-centered poems and having an opinion about what's going on in the most mommish way. It just made sense to me that she'd hire a stunt double to take on some of my mom-poems; I'm sure they exhaust her some days. She has better things to do. The poem just felt like an extension of all that.
EF: Is there anything in particular that 'opens up' a character for you?
TD: Writing and reading a character or characters — the thing that makes them open up to me is when they begin operating outside the parameters of advancing the narrative or plot. Basically, when a character (or really, a poem) knows more than I do, or at least fakes knowing more than I do really well, I'm then immediately hooked. When it seems like a character is just a machine pushing things forward, I lose interest, it doesn't matter how beautiful the writing is. And I guess you can argue all characters are machines advancing narratives or whatever, but I call BS. When I think of great characters I remember them as actual people, with desires and bad habits and a hatred of parsley and a memory of finding a Garfield telephone in the ocean and answering it and hearing their dead great aunt say "Hello." A good character is bigger than the page they're on.
EF: What does a freshly painted arrow promise a slightly drunk someone at a Taco Bell?
TD: Beauty's everywhere and sometimes we ruin it by participating.
EF: If you could make one word repeated seven times be a grammatically correct sentence, a la "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo,” what would it be?
TD: Here's a kid from Pennsylvania cheering his grandaddy whooping his other grandaddy: Pop-Pop Pop-Pop pop Pop-Pop!