That’s fascinating, especially the sense of operating across the two times, the day of the run and the day of the rewriting. Is the notion of writing a poem in a day normal to you? Or are you more of an Elizabeth Bishop type?

Yeah, Bishop famously got stuck on ‘The Moose’ for years, right? And had the poem hanging over her desk with holes that she had to fill in. I think I’m a slow writer when I do critical writing. But I think when I was doing these pieces, I was really pretty committed to trying to get that poem done in a day to just see if I could. Not all of them worked in the way that I wanted. But often they did. It would take six hours of writing and taking a nap and moving around and coming back to it. But I was really trying to catch the now of the day of writing.

You mention the Seamus Heaney entry, that is one of my favourites. I think number 21, 24th May 2012 is another. The moment with the curve ball: ‘Who even knew that he knew? Turning the ball as if the merest of schoolboy banter had drawn him up out of the silence…’ It has the marks of the best poetry, that sense of a discovery happening in the composition, beyond the words themselves. First of all, do you have any memories in particular about writing that entry? And do you have an entry that, looking back, you feel most connected to?

Yes, there’s a couple. Let me look at 21 for a second. So it starts with the way the fog rises on the mountains around here. We live in the Appalachian Mountains. Then it moves to, sort of, drifting along the run, almost dreaming and talking to myself in that dream. And then I just thought of a story that my dad would tell about him and his brother – so brothers were already important to me – throwing curveballs behind their barn, and then their father, who was this hard working farmer, just rose out of the landscape and threw one perfect curveball and walked away.

I love that story that my dad tells, I love the way it came to me in this dreamy run. That my dad and my uncle seem to have conjured, by their banter, this vision of their father. Then as I was writing I was drawing this Exodus-like pillar of cloud, this memory of my brother, out of the dreamscape, out of the fog of the morning. It became yet another way of talking to my brother. Then it became, as I reread it, reflective of the book as a whole, that in what was almost banter about running, I was conjuring up – not to say I was conjuring up God – but I was conjuring up something invisible that was leading me forward.

Is that one of the entries that you do feel most connected to on rereading?

I think the ones that I feel the most connected to probably have the deepest personal stories. Behind this one, I felt thrilled, because of the discovery that came to me in my writing, just like you were saying.

Another that’s very close to me is the Fourth of July, number 27. Running the 5k in Shawsville, which is a little town near our university. It’s a race I’d run for 25 years. Now I’ve run it for 35 years. The funny part about this poem is I didn’t have a very good race that day. I decided to start the entry on the starting line before I knew how bad the race was going to go. Putting myself there allowed me to start meditating on time: how fast I once ran this, what I expected to run this year. Then time allowed me to bring in various friends who I had been running with for decades, some of whom had died or had begun to struggle. And all that stuff about time gave me Pound in the prison camp at Pisa, after he ruined his life, descended into something close to madness and emotional collapse, and sang so beautifully: ‘what thou lovest well remains’. That even in the wilderness and madness there are things that we love, that he loved, that still were with him. And I thought, oh, that’s what I feel shifting on the line of this race. That what I love, after all these years, is still with me.

And then I love just the end of the race when everybody finishes – because it’s the fourth of July and really hot – we’re all sprawled on people’s lawns, it’s like Whitman’s dream of bodies. You can’t tell who’s fast, who’s slow. We’re just all there in this grand, erotic, spiritual dance. That’s the one that feels the most beautiful to me. That remains.

I have a hard time reading the early passages about my brother, and my dad crying. So I think they must mean a lot. There’s one about my daughter when she was running her last race as a senior in high school, and I found myself at the end of the race, embracing her on the middle of the track, it was kind of an out of body experience. I love that one too.
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That poem with your father’s tears at the funeral will stick with me for a long time.

I also love the descriptions of running as a process of distillation, forcing ourselves into an awareness of breath or rhythm or attention. Obviously, writing is a similar process in the sense that it’s a kind of intense noticing. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your shared relationship with running and writing. Which of those two loves came first?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the teaching book that I’m doing now. For years I had thought that those two parts of my life were walled off from each other. There was my life in books, there was my life running. There was my spiritual life, there was my emotional life. And they were sort of separate things. I had different friends in each area. Then something changed for me in college and those walls sort of dissolved.

I had a mentor once who encouraged me to do this without even realising it. He was my poetry teacher – Jack Wheatcroft was his name. I really admired his mind. He found me one day in college walking and said he had noticed that I had done very well in the Penn Relays marathon. I was shocked that one of my poetry teachers actually read the sports pages. That he paid enough attention to read the small print and see I was fifth or something like that. Somehow, over the years, that’s given me permission to not have that wall between the parts of my thinking.

As it’s gone on, I have realised that when I think about poetry, and I’m trying to explain it in class, or in an academic article, I’m really thinking about it bodily. I have realised that often when I’m running, and I’m trying to process what’s going on with my body, that I’m often using poems to process and understand things. They’re all ways of getting at the same thing, so that they’re not actually separate at all. I’m living the same sort of contemplative life when I’m running or when I’m teaching. I tell people that I’m doing my work when I’m running.

Mhmm.

Another way to think about it is – you’ll understand this from running – you run and some days you’re clumsy and some days you stumble, but there are days when you use your run to get outside of your body. You feel as if you’re not even in a body. You feel transcendent. You finish a 50 minute run and you don’t remember any of it. So you’ve used your body to almost get beyond your body. And that’s what poetry is about. You’re using language to get beyond language.

Like in Bishop’s poem, ‘The Moose’. She’s riding this bus and the rhythm of the bus causes her to attend in a certain way, and the light goes down, and a fog comes in. She finds herself in a place where she’s in her own body and in her own language, and in her own mind, but not there. She says ‘a dreamy divagation begins in the night’. She has an audible hallucination in which the old voices in the back of the bus seem to be grandparents in heaven talking about life. And as they talk about life they’re mourning, like I am for my brother John, but it’s a mourning, she says, that’s a way of saying yes, to life, to grief, to trauma, to all of that.

Anyway, I love that poem. It’s using the body and it’s using language to get to a place that’s not in the body anymore, that’s even not in language, it’s in some sort of undone linguistic world. I’ve learned to be there through running and I’ve learned to be there through poetry and various other things.

Speaking of Bishop, this book is full of references to other writers: Woolf, Dickinson, Weil, Edwards, Whitman. Sometimes there are references to writers making reference to other writers. I frequently found myself looking up other essays and poems as I read. Is this an invitation you welcome in your own reading? Are you interested in intertextuality as a concept?

Yes, I really am. In a way, poems grow out of other poems and poems deepen when you realise what they’re in conversation with. I think my shelves trace this sort of wandering. This book leads me to this book, leads to this book, and that leads me back around again. Two of the my critical books, three of them really, I’m sort of riffing on that. The first book I wrote was called Discovering Ourselves in Whitman and it was about contemporary poets writing long poems that were versions of ‘Song of Myself’. I realised that a lot of these great poems – Berryman’s The Dream Songs, James Merrill’s The Changing Light – they’re talking back and forth to him. Then I wrote another book about writers, not just poets now, but novelists as well, who were responding to Emily Dickinson. I wrote a book on the Gospel of John as if it was a poem, but I would follow each reading with other poems by poets who were also reading the Gospel of John. I loved the way my academic book would get challenged and overturned by the poets who weren’t nearly as careful and uptight and were bolder. So I love both intertextuality, but also difference in voice.

Speaking of influences, is there someone who wasn’t mentioned explicitly in this book whose touch you always feel on your writing, perhaps without even realising?

So I won’t play fair, because I do mention him in the book, but Kenny Moore has been so important to me. Kenny Moore is a great American marathoner, he died in 2022, a little bit older than me.

He’s one of the people I looked up after reading the book, in fact.

Yes, have you read Best Efforts? That is such an incredible book.

It’s on my list.

I think Kenny Moore, who I read in Sports Illustrated since high school, taught me how to be a literary critic. I never said that out loud in graduate school, but I think that I learned to attend to details and to weave them together into a story through reading Kenny Moore. I learned to narrate bodies and minds moving through space and time through Kenny More. He was just a huge influence. I wish he had read this book. I don’t know that he did and I didn’t have the nerve to send it to him.

Then the non-running books that were important to me for Poverty Creek were Robert Hass’s prose poems in Human Wishes, James Wright’s prose poems Moments of the Italian Summer, and paragraphs from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping.

As we’ve discussed, as much as this is a book about running, in many ways it’s also a record of your own reading. So I have to ask what book(s) are on your bedside table right now?

Ah, so let’s see… I’ve been looking at Anne Carson. Alice Oswald, she’s a poet I wish I knew better, so I’ve been starting to make my way through her work. I’ve been reading Robert Macfarlane too, wishing I had a life like that for my writing. That’s a start.

To finish, I was hoping you’d allow me some indulgent running questions. I wanted to ask, since you mentioned the Shawsville 5k, what time can you finish it in these days?

So my time has drifted up to 25:35. And that’s quite a drift. But I’m 72 now, so it just is what it is. I don’t keep great records, but I looked the other day and from about age 40 on, each year I seem to be losing about five seconds per mile in most races. You could probably graph it. So on the one hand, you think each run is a moral crisis, and why couldn’t I run faster? Could I have done better? And then you look at a chart like that, and you think, oh, it’s sort of inevitable! But I still do love that race. I’m racing 10 and 12 year olds, sometimes.

Another fun local race, there’s a road mile here in the middle of a big street festival. You finish the race and there’s probably, 800 or 1000, people milling around. They’re hardly looking at you, they’re just buying things and eating, but you finish the race in the middle of this crowd. And it’s slightly downhill. So it’s a time that you’re proud of even if you’re an old person. I did that last summer at 7:35. I was happy about that.

What was your best mile time at your peak?

You know, I don’t remember. I remember the day I broke five minutes in high school. I remember a six mile in college. I remember going through three miles in 15 minutes plus. But I don’t know that I could really come up with a mile time that wouldn’t be half fantasy.

My last question was actually about a sub-five minute mile, because I’ve been languishing at about 5:15 for what feels like about five years, philosophically, for a quick a mile, are you a speed work kind of guy or an aerobic base kind of guy?

I’m really very aerobic. So I ran in high school from 1966 to 1970, and then college from 70 to 74, and that was just when the running boom started. Bill Rodgers and Frank Shorter over here, and Arthur Lydiard was showing in his coaching that many miles would make you better. So I grew up that way. And still, I tend to run more miles than really I probably need to, and I’m a little worried that speed work is going to hurt me. I mean, it all helps my running, but you wouldn’t believe the number of races that I get up to within two or three weeks, and then the last bit of speed work I tweak something. So my go-to is always to run more miles. That’s just how my body is.

I often feel that the fastest people are just the ones who can most reliably do speed work without injuring themselves. Anyway, I just want to say thank you again for this book. It’s something that I know I’ll be revisiting a lot. I think it might take a lifetime to go through every single reference in there, but I’ll try my best.

Well, thank you for reading it with that much attention. And you’re right, I think it does end up being a book – a couple of my books are this way – where people read it once quickly, just to see what happened with my brother, but then I think if the book touches them, they tend to read it a page at a time, you know, on the side of their bed or something. So I’m really happy to have a book like that sitting on people’s bookshelves or near their bed to be returned to over and over. So thanks for saying that.

You’re very welcome. Thank you Tom.
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Thomas Gardner has published six volumes of literary criticism as well as a book of poetry and two collections of lyric essays: Poverty Creek Journal and Sundays. His play Eurydice was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He has held Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and was the Fulbright Bicentennial Chair in American Studies at the University of Helsinki. He is Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech. He and his wife live at the edge of the Jefferson National Forest in Southwest Virginia.