Advice for Poets: an Interview with Tomas Q. Morin

This interview with Tomas is one of three posts on the site that were written for The MFA Project in fall/winter 2015, prior to the start of Primal School. 

I had been a distant admirer of Tomás Q. Morín, but the award-winning poet from Texas finally entered my orbit several months ago when he taught me it’s indeed okay to “friend” a writer you admire on Facebook and enter a conversation. With that gesture of kindness a door was opened to the interview below, a treat for all you practicing poets out there. And be sure to check out his poem “Nature Boy” at the Poetry Foundation website.  — Hannah

Tell us a little about your MFA experience. Specifically, let’s talk about pros and cons: what are some good reasons to pursue an MFA in creative writing? What are some of the challenges?

I’m a graduate of the MFA program at Texas State University. When I was mulling over whether to pursue an MFA or not I was a first year PhD student in the Hispanic & Italian Studies program at Johns Hopkins. I was spending a lot of time writing poems. A friend encouraged me to write a poet whose work I idolized, a story I recount in an essay in Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, and after some reluctance, I did. Levine wrote me back and asked me to send him some poems I had faith in with the promise he would tell me the truth. His response was positive and gave me the courage to jump ship at Hopkins and try to learn everything I could about making poems.

I think if you feel you still have a lot left to learn, and we should all feel that way, then you should get an MFA if you don’t have one. The biggest benefit of one, to me, is that it saves you time. In a good MFA program you can learn in 2-3 years what it might take you 10 to learn on your own. There are exceptions of course, but I think this is generally true. Being in an MFA program is like becoming an apprentice to a cobbler. By the end of your apprenticeship you won’t be a master cobbler that makes the best shoes in the world; rather, it means you know how to make shoes. What you do with those skills and how far you take them is up to you. The same goes for writing stories and poems and what not. One challenge to getting an MFA that I haven’t seen go away is navigating all the self-doubt and anxiety and fear that so many students feel. When a lot of people who all feel like that get in one place for a few years it can create a tough atmosphere for everyone. This is where teachers and mentors and administrations need to step in and be supportive and encouraging.

What advice would you offer to poets and students of writing who aren’t part of an MFA program? How might they structure and self-direct their writing education?

If someone decides to bypass the MFA, I think reading interviews with poets you admire after you’ve read their work is a good way to start learning what you need to learn. Also, the various conferences (Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Squaw Valley, Idyllwild, Tin House, etc.) held across the country throughout the year are great places to pick up some of those skills. You can find many master teachers at these places. Just as many members of my writing community have come from attending conferences like this as from my MFA years. 

What have you been up to these days, and what are you working on now? 

Most of my time these days is spent teaching or traveling to give readings. When I do have a chance to write, I’m working on either a new poem or a memoir I started last year. Being my first prose book, the memoir is both exciting and intimidating. It’s very different to work with a canvas that is so much bigger than what I normally use when writing a poem. All in all, writing this book brings me both heartache and joy. It’s a journey I’m glad I finally took after years of prompting from friends.

Please “teach” us! Assign us some reading and/or homework, maybe a writing prompt. 

Things to read, hmm. It’s impossible to know where to start because as soon as I’m done naming some names I know I’m going to remember a book I left off. Rather than name books, here are some names of people who have written books I return to again and again: Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Gerald Stern, Ai, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Elizabeth Bishop, Etheridge Knight, Joy Harjo, Jack Gilbert, Wislawa Szymborska, Ross Gay, Zbigniew Herbert, Anna Swir, and Vievee Francis. I will name one book of poems: Headwaters by Ellen Bryant Voigt is a revelation whose poems astonish me over and over. 

This is not so much a prompt as something I do in my own practice when composing a new poem. After I have a full working draft, if the poem feels off in some way I can’t quite put my finger on, I will change its clothes. What I mean by that is that sometimes I write a poem in some linen bermuda shorts, polo, and sandals (think free verse) when what the poem actually needs is to be more formal. Sometimes a poem needs a tuxedo before it steps out into the world. This tux could be a sestina or anything really that you consider more formal than the form you currently have it in. There have been poems that have morphed from a pantoum to free verse to a sonnet and back to some sort of combination of various forms. I keep changing the poem’s clothes until I find the right outfit. Often, I’ll raid the closets of my favorite poets for inspiration. My poem “Nights Like This” went through so many different forms until finally I decided to try the loose 3-beat lines of Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” and much to my surprise, the language came to life in a way it hadn’t in any other form. And then that was it, the poem was done. So your assignment is to try this with a poem that’s stuck and see what happens. 

Any parting shots?

Mari L'Esperance and I co-edited a book a couple years back titled Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. At first we conceived the project as a way to pay tribute to a man who taught poets for 50 years but then once the collection of essays by people he had taught and mentored was assembled and I took in the whole scope, I realized the book was also a master class on the art of writing poetry. I remember thinking, If I couldn’t have attended an MFA program then a book like this would have helped me learn a lot of what I needed. I know that might sound like a shameless plug to some, but it’s true. Levine was a master teacher who is brought to life in these pages. I’m still learning from it myself.

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the poetry collection A Larger Country, and translator of Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu. He is co-editor with Mari L’Esperance of Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. He teaches at Texas State University and in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.