Tomás Q. Morín’s poems have appeared in New England Review, Boulevard,
Slate, Threepenny Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. A native of Texas, Morín has been awarded scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute and has been a fellow at the Idyllwild Summer Arts Program. Morín is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Texas State University-San Marcos. His first collection A Larger Country has been awarded an APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Tom Sleigh.
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Tomás Q. Morín Interview, with Mari L’Esperance
I enjoyed listening to your public radio interview at PRX, where you read poems and talk about your path to poetry. I’m also struck by what a hard working poet you are: your dedication to not only making new poems, but to getting them out into the world on a regular basis, and as a busy academic, is inspiring. Do you have any kind of writing/submission practice that you can share with our readers? And what keeps you writing, despite all the well-known obstacles and challenges?
My one piece of advice regarding submissions would be to aim high. By this I mean send your work first to the journals and magazines that have the lowest acceptance rates and thus are the hardest to crack. I developed this practice because of a lesson I learned the hard way, which is how I’ve learned most of the important lessons in my life. During my last year as a graduate student I began to send work out hesitantly. The hesitance was because I had gone through a lot of stylistic changes during my MFA program so I wasn’t sure how good my poems were. So I steadily sent my work to journals that had a fairly high acceptance rate. The result was I spent the next five years getting everything rejected over and over. The worst was when a group of poems I had sent to three different places all arrived in my mailbox with rejection slips on the same day. During these five years I kept sending to tougher and tougher places on the slim chance that the poems would strike a chord with the right editor. Sure enough, once I was consistently submitting to places where I shouldn’t have had a chance of being accepted, the poems started getting picked up left and right. What’s more, I hadn’t revised a single word of the poems because I knew in my heart that for better or worse they were done.
As for what keeps me writing, that’s easy: it’s fun. I enjoy taking out the bits of images and rhythms in my head and organizing them in such a way that I can share them with other people.
As a mixed-race poet, I’m always curious about how race, ethnicity, and culture affect a poet’s art, poetics, and place in the world, with the awareness that this can vary widely from poet to poet. Can you tell us a bit about how these elements influence and are integrated into your poetry and worldview? In your estimation, how’s the poetry world evolving (or not) in this regard?
I can’t speak for the rest of the poetry world, but I can say that for me, being Mexican-American plays no major role in my life as a writer. Neither does the fact that I’m male or straight or Democrat or an eldest son. None of these biographical truths trumps the others because at the end of the day, I’m a complex composite of all of them. Now this is not to say that it’s unimportant for writers from historically underrepresented groups to achieve the same measure of visibility as their counterparts who have had better access, opportunities, etc. However, it’s unfair to ask every minority writer to be a social reformer that breaks walls and desegregates publishing for all of us in the way that someone like Jackie Robinson did for baseball. At the end of the day we can’t all be Jackie Robinson. Someone has to aspire to be Willie Mays, too, and forget about the labels we give each other and just do the thing you do for no other reason than because you love it.
Tell us what inspired your poem “Mule Day”.
“Mule Day” was inspired by an NPR piece I heard many years ago about how the mule was first introduced to the U. S. When I learned how the King of Spain sent two of his prize donkeys to George Washington as a gift, and how only one survived the trip, I knew there was a poem in there somewhere. Plus, I’ve loved mules ever since I discovered the Francis the Talking Mule movies as a kid. I love mules for their fierce independence, loyalty, and gentleness. I guess I was bound to write an ode for them sooner or later.
You make your living as a university instructor. Have you always considered yourself a teacher, i. e., have you entertained thoughts of other money earning careers, or has academic teaching always been “it” for you? And do you have any thoughts you’d like to share about the current relationship between poetry and academia—how it enhances or detracts from the art?
I knew I wanted to be a teacher since they first talked to us about careers in sixth grade. My mother and aunt were both wonderful teachers, so I had some good role models. I know people warn that academia can lead to a disconnection from the “real” world. I just don’t buy it. I think Flannery O’Connor articulated this better than I ever could when she wrote, “We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot. The writer’s business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.”
You’ve shared with me how summer writing conferences have provided you with a poetry “family” that you’d not had for some years during your earlier development as a poet. Looking back, do you see value in having “gone it alone” for a period of time before being welcomed into a community? Can you tell us how a community of poets has been helpful to you, as a poet and person?
There was certainly a lot of value in having gone it alone, as you put it. There’s nothing like an endless stream of rejections and no other writers to prop you up to help you learn if this is something you want to keep doing. At the end of the day I would keep writing because it was exhilarating. Places like the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference reconnected me with the tribe and gave me a diverse family of writers made up of not just poets, but fabulous fiction and non-fiction writers as well.
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Mule Day
The children, sunlit, polish their bells on the porch. The march
through town will stop at the square where the usual gentlemen and ladies
of civic duty will undress, dance and shake, share their intimate tales
of mules. Later, we’ll raise our glasses and honor the marble-
dun ears of Antietam and Vicksburg, the shrunken withers that cradled
a Puritan fever westward. With much pomp and circumstance, one tasteful
medievalist hired from among the very best will drop to all fours
and reenact that most immaculate of struggles between donkeys of talent
and mares. And who
will not journey to witness this, to honor the fallen and forgotten
jack that slipped jet black under the shell of the Atlantic, his regal bray
never swelling with brassy bravuras the paddocks of Mount Vernon? Foreign
to restraint, his Catalonian brother toured the South in style, fucking his way
down Sherman’s trail like an equine Nostradamus. Let us parade, let us pray
and drink for the lost until the pastor hazards to toast “basta, bastards, my belated
brothers-in-arms!”
Race Day
While our friends were reading the odds,
we watched the jockeys trot out the racers.
Why in pairs? A nervous horse needs a friend
to rub and nip from paddock to gate
where it must wait, loaded like a God-fist. Sprung
suddenly into the backfield the pack keeps
tight until the final turn where the body
succumbs to the titanic need of muscle
to be done, and in spite of each rider’s
rush and gad, the group splinters.
How do they feel at the line? One can’t know
but after the stubs are cashed and halved,
each horse is led to the fence
to hose down haunch and withers,
flank and hoof, where the grin-bearing cold water
catches the panting heart off guard.
Weekend Home
Not like any of the solemn ones on the cape
sitting empty week after week on those
ice-bitten January streets one can never find
in summer magazines and I am tempted, as with
so many things, to say a house can grow
a conscience when no one is around to slam its
wooden tongues and I wonder if it’ll miss
the romantic declarations of our long nights
spent sobbing and roaring, promising the end
of the end of love and how I so wanted to see
the face it made when we slowly pulled out
from the driveway for the last time I never
shared out of meekness until now; was it a Garbo
pleading for adoration or a wrinkled Rimbaud
for melancholy because with much effort
we had done what we do best and put away
another season of anger in the books, made healthy
our tab with another debt we could never repay.
Sunday School, Ebola Zaire
Deep in a valley clergy spilled the host
as Sister M shook to the floor.
Under her black wool a thing
had sown milk-green pustules.
Reap and bind the soul
is what she taught the children.
Soapy hands washed her while she rested,
chinked her teeth on a glass of water.
Always more water, she begged.
In her head a fire made her eyes dance.
One billionth our size and older
than the zero, the little worm
crawled in and twinned and twinned
the straw of her cells into itself
like a Rumpelstiltskin
until her clots slipped their wounds
and bumped against the mud walls
like lost balloons going up and out.