Author Interview: Tom Lombardo

Atlanta poet Tom Lombardo's anthology "After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery" hit the shelves this month! Tom "stopped in" at the blob (okay, he did the interview by email) to talk about poetry, recovery, and the business of editing and publishing. Below are the highlights.

Q:Tom, you tell us in your author's note for "After Shocks" about the personal event that led you to read poetry for, as you put it, "solace...during grief." Had you been a poetry reader before your first wife, Lana, was killed in an auto accident?

A:Yes, but I would refer to myself during those years prior to 1985 as casual poetry reader, not one who would read poetry every day or even weekly. I read the poets I was taught in high school and college: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Keats, Yeats, the sonnets of Wm. Shakespeare, etc. The usual suspects. I would peruse the poetry in New Yorker, but never could recognize any names. I would keep going back and back to those poets from my past. I made sure to read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" at least once each year. At that time in my life, I was not aware of contemporary poetry, except for the odd Beat poem. My move more deeply into poetry began when a friend gave me a copy of Douglas Dunn's Elegies, which won the Whitbread Prize in 1985, and that book opened up a new world of poetry for me. Dunn was contemporary and writing about an experience that was close to mine, the death of his wife Lesley Balfour Dunn.

Q:Do you believe, as someone who sought out others who experienced loss, that we ever fully "recover," or do you find that we learn ways to carry on in our lives and live them fully, in a different form?

A: We never fully recover and we do find ways to carry on, live as fully as we can, certainly in a different form.
Based on my personal experience and those I've known directly…no, it is not really possible to fully recovery. A wound may heal, but causes a scar. Our lives, our spirits, our emotions never go back to the day before the event that forced us into recovery. Am I fully recovered? I have a new wife, whom I love deeply, and two lovely children I couldn't imagine living without, and it's a very happy life.My life goes on. I am recovering. I am happy. I've adjusted. But Lana is still dead. I've written and published poems about her. But her mother still has lost a daughter. I've published this anthology, to great reaction. But Lana's still dead. She'll never come back. So, no, I can't say I'm fully recovered.

Q: "After Shocks" includes a wide array of poets and styles. What are your personal favorites and why?

A: There certainly is a wide array of poets. And there are certainly a very, very wide variety of stories presented. I worked very hard to achieve that in the selections for After Shocks. I'm not sure that there's a wide array of styles. I may be naïve about this, but to me, from a purely editorial perspective, the poems all seem very narrowly connected. They are all very clear in story and emotion, and each contains some aspect of recovery.What has amazed me is that poets from around the world write about recovery in fundamentally the same way. There is a unity about the emotion in After Shocks that demonstrates the resilience of the human spirit. I love all of these poems. I really appreciate the poets who submitted to my open call for submissions. I will declare this: I actively sought out my favorite poets for this anthology, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, and Douglas Dunn. I purposely sought poems by some other established poets that I liked a lot, too: Thomas Lux, David Bottoms, Rita Dove, Major Jackson, Kevin Young, Cathy Smith Bowers, Donald Hall, Rebecca McClanahan, Ron Rash, Brian Turner.

Q:How have your insights and choices changed, if at all, since earning an MFA in Poetry?

A: My tastes are much more up-to-date. Now when I read poetry, I appreciate the craft, the language. I knew about structure before. I had great lit teachers in high school, who drilled the metrics of poetry into my brain, but I believe I have a much more sophisticated appreciation of the beauty of diction and syntax and tropes now.

Q:You are a published poet. How long did you work on building this anthology, and what led you to create an anthology rather than a collection of your own work?

A:I started work on After Shocks in March 2007 and received copies back from the printer in mid-August 2008, so concept to publication was exactly 18 months. This anthology was born 2 days after a lunch with Fred Marchant, director of creative writing at Suffolk University, Cambridge. I had met Fred at the Colrain Manuscript conference the previous summer, and [later] we met for a deli lunch in Atlanta during AWP's annual conference. Fred asked me how my work on my poetry manuscript was going. He listened quietly to my tale of a thousand rejections then he kicked me in the head with this: Why don't you become a poetry publisher? I mulled it over for two days, and talked about it with my wife. And then this thought popped in, "Maybe I could publish an anthology, and that would be an easy way into this publishing thing. A broad based book with a theme." Within an hour, I had the concept of the poetry of recovery.

Q:Some of the categories in the anthology are what we might think of regarding loss, such as "Injury," or "Illness," but there are intriguing categories such as "Bigotry," and "Exile," as well as "Loss of Innocence," which makes me think of Blake and "Songs of Innocence" and the companion "...Experience." What categories surprised you as you collected material, and where there any poems that could have fit in multiple places?

A:I had a notion of many of the categories, even the unlikely ones. But some of them developed along the way, driven by my own reading and the submissions. For example, I knew Grief would be a chapter in the concept stage, but as I made selections, the poems about recovery from grief split into three chapters: Death of a Spouse, Loss of a Child, and Death of Loved Ones or Friends. I had been reading a number of books of poetry from outside the U.S., and I kept coming across wonderfully emotional poems about war and exile and bigotry and ethnic cleansing and deaths of children from bombs falling from the sky, and the ways these poets faced those life-shattering events--and began recovery--fascinated me. As I made piles of poems on my office floor, with a sheet atop each pile marked: Grief Spouse, Grief Child, War, Exile, etc., and of course a large stack with a big red R. But there were two piles that for a time were labeled "Other." They were very good poems, keepers, not for the Big Red R stack. One pile found its name via a poem by Kurtis Lamkin that starts "We lose our innocence believing." Other surprises: The poems in the Recovery from War section that were written by women who had never gone to war, in particular Stellasue Lee's and Pam Bernard's poems about their father's experiences are haunting and frightening.

Q:. Can humor or shock aid in recovery, and what examples can you suggest from "After Shocks."

A: Humor had a proper role in my own recovery. I'm not a therapist, but in my personal experience, I needed some humor. Here's my approach to humor in After Shocks…Early in my reading process I realized that I needed to have at least one lighter poem in each chapter. Where is the humor in Abuse? Abuse is an unspeakable horror of violence and rape. But one day I found a poem by Joy Helsing that actually had quite a light approach to her recovery from an abusive spouse. Likewise, for the chapter on Loss of Child. How do you lighten up that topic? Humor doesn't exist in the loss of children, does it? This was the most difficult chapter for me. I have two children and I can't imagine losing one of them. But one day, I received a submission from Sister Lou Ella Hickman, a Roman Catholic nun. I read her submission entitled "Missing," which revealed her thoughts on the maternal consequences of her vow of chastity.

Q: You created your own imprint, Sante Lucia, for this book. Why did you choose to go that route?

A: I'm glad I did it this way, because I was in total control the entire way. I had such a clear vision for what I wanted to do [and] a publisher would have filtered my vision through his own. This anthology - 388 pages, 152 poems, 115 poets, 15 nations - went from an idea to bound pages in 18 months. Triple that if a publisher was involved. On the publishing side, I'm learning a few things, and I contracted with Kevin Watson, Publisher at Press 53 in Winston-Salem, to work with me on the design, production, and printing. My imprint is named after my two children, Lucy, whose given name is Lucia, pronounced in the Italian way, loo-CHEE-ya, and Sam, whose given name is Sante, pronounced SAN-te. I employ them as envelope labelers and stuffers when they're not doing homework, playing hockey or tennis, or taking dance lessons. I wouldn't give up this much fun to a publisher.

Q: Your favorite part of the process?

A: Meeting so many poets, though most online. I am starting to meet them in person when readings occur, and that's been great fun. There were days when I would be communicating with poets from Iran, Israel, London, Nigeria, and Massachusetts.

Q: What was the most challenging part of the process?

A: Marketing. Selling poetry, even a book so broadly based with potential for an audience outside the traditional poetry audience - takes dogged persistence. I discovered an audience I had not expected - therapists and clergy. It took [a] conversation with two friends who happen to be more connected to God than I am to comprehend the point - every poem has a thread to recovery. After Shocks has gone from 78 to 48 to 30 back down to 55 and back up on Amazon's sales rankings in "Inspirational and Religious" category. That means people are buying this book. The next reading is scheduled for Charlotte, NC, on November 9, at 2 pm at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, following that, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta, Portland, and possibly in England where 10 contributors are based.

Q: What haven't I asked?

A:Selection. Each selection must have some aspect of recovery. I didn't want fuzzy poetry, feel-good poetry, abstract poetry, sob story poetry. The poems I selected view their topic straight on. The anthology was for a normal reader, not an academic poetry specialist.


Want more? Here's Tom's site, for in-depth information and a purchase link!