10 Questions for Teddy Macker
- By Marissa Perez
As drone strikes fell from skies
and executed children
Mary Oliver did not abandon
roses busy being roses.
—from "Marguerite", Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I first began writing in response to the beauty of girls. Maybe sixth grade. “Thou shalt acknowledge the wonder,” says D.H. Lawrence. In my little fumbling way, I’ve tried to acknowledge the wonder, while also remembering the insight of Robinson Jeffers:
Praise life, it deserves praise, but the praise of life
That forgets the pain is a pebble
Rattled in a dry gourd.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
There’s not enough space here for an answer. Instead let me, somewhat glibly (and clichédly?) but truly, invoke the Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez:
The lemon tree in my garden
Is a bigger influence on my work
Than all the poets together.
What other professions have you worked in?
Gardener, security guard, elementary school principal. High school English teacher, busboy, life insurance agent. Online florist, university lecturer, counter of widgets in an airplane parts warehouse. Furniture mover, editor, hired companion for folks with disabilities.
What inspired you to write this piece?
Applause partly. The beautiful ugly lifelong distemper that is human ambition. The impulse to rise up singing. To say a little grace. To scribble another entry in the Counter-Desecration Phrasebook. To circulate more rumors about the mysterious holiness of the world.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Where I live, on a tiny farm in an oaky canyon in Carpinteria, California, is my favorite place in the world. This place and my work aren’t separable.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
Like many, I write by-hook-or-by-crook. Sometimes I’ll sift through notebooks to get going; sometimes I’ll sit outside and look around; sometimes I’ll think back to something in the day that broke my heart. To write, Chekhov says, you need “compassion down to your fingertips.” That is “the only method,” he says, by which to write and live. In general, I work to keep my heart open and limber, despite its deathless habit of puckering and petrifying. And I try to live an un-hijacked life, un-hijacked by gadgets, some (most?) of which seem improved means to an unimproved end. How the hell do poets these days have time to live poetically with iPhones / iPads / earbuds / personal websites / Instagram / Facebook / Twitter / YouTube / Zoom and all this other shit? It’s almost touchingly delusional to think a life bombarded thusly might conduce to song (not to mention love and meaning). (Kenneth Rexroth, were he around today, might call the blind drift of today’s technology the “Social Lie”; or, better yet, he might invoke a French phrase he cherished: hallucination publicitaire. And I do realize, with mixed emotions, that these words are being written on a gadget and will most likely be read on a gadget. I won’t try to patch up that contradiction.)
Wresting myself from the orgy of abstraction that is modern life, from the shrill complexity, the pressed-in-upon-ness; slowing down and living with broad margins to let my being settle enough so I can receive (which, of course, I don’t always pull off—not even close): this is what I need to do to create anything of value. Cornel West somewhere writes about “weapons of mass distraction.” If I don’t dodge these weapons of mass distraction, I can’t make contact with the world and therefore I can’t sing. So for me it boils down to the barest sort of logic: if I’m not here while I’m here, I won’t be able to write about here. But writing aside: isn’t it high time that we human beings put down these gadgets in our hands and return? As in: return to the actual world and each other? (Can you hear William Blake singing? O Earth O Earth return! Can you hear Emerson in his grief and wonder asking: “What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep?”)
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
My wife Laura tends to read my work first. In her slantwise way, she gives no quarter, which is helpful. Then I might send the piece to David James Duncan and Mike Seid—two geniuses of language and soul I’m blessed to know—for any nuggets of insight.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
Years ago I planted an orchard, about 150 fruit trees, here where I live. I’m usually out there every day, sometimes futzing just a little, sometimes doing heavier work. Keeping an orchard is an art of sorts. Our word “paradise” comes from the Persian pardes, a word we find in the Song of Songs. Your limbs—selahim—are an orchard—pardes—of pomegranates. I love that: the limbs of the beloved are an orchard, and an orchard is paradise.
Writing poems and keeping fruit trees: both for me are ways of tending the orchard, tending paradise. If that sounds dubiously mystical or pollyannaish, so be it. Despite all the anguish and darkness, and the darkness around us is deep indeed, my gut insists on informing me that there is no higher heaven, that we never left the garden, that the old enchantment still holds.
What are you working on currently?
A book of poems. Stray essays on education. A book of short stories. A translation of an elegy by Tibullus, a Roman poet I love.
What are you reading right now?
Nicolas Bouvier’s The Way of the World, a book of the deepest kind of glamour, the glamour of eggplant, goat cheese, the scent of melons.
TEDDY MACKER is the author of the poetry collection This World (White Cloud Press, 2015; foreword by Brother David Steindl-Rast). His writing appears widely: Antioch Review, New Letters, Orion, Seneca Review, Massachusetts Review, Terrain.org, The Sun, Tin House, and various anthologies. Among his honors is the Reginald S. Tickner Creative Writing Fellowship of the Gilman School in Baltimore. A lecturer of literature in the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara, he lives with his wife and daughters on a farm in Carpinteria, California, where he maintains an orchard.
