Timmy Straw’s debut book of poetry opens with a description of the Thomas salto, a gymnastics move so dangerous to execute that in 2017 it was banned from the international rulebook known as the Code of Points. It’s a fast and fluid happening—the gymnast enters through a round off into a 1½ backflip in a tucked, piked, or straight position with 1½ twists, and dismounts in a somersault facing forward—“like a salmon throwing itself up a waterfall,” (15) Straw writes. Archival videos show that the move requires a committed kind of force, and is usually executed by men; this force carries through The Thomas Salto, a lethal threat barely disguised by the book’s music. Through these modes, Straw is able to capture the residual frequency of so much precarity, which permeates their work like static in telephone wires.
The book, which tunes the eighties—Gorbachev, the Iran Contra affair, AIDS, the war on drugs—to the frequency of the present, is punctuated by “translations” of Reagan’s speeches into poetry: on the right side of the page, Straw pulls fragments from the speeches and shifts the order of phrases to present a new logic, while directly across, on the left side of the page, they present their translation of sorts. In other contexts, Straw translates from Russian, one of the few biographical details I could find about them on the internet.
Before we conducted our conversation in a collaborative Google Doc—where we discussed citational practice, the engine of anxiety, and what it means to write without considering yourself a writer—I called Straw on the phone. Having heard them read their poem “Copernicus” on Poem-a-Day, I anticipated their tone: quick, prudent, and gentle. I thought: to hear their voice is to understand the stakes of their work.
Note: Edy Guy is an Assistant Editor at Fonograf Editions, which published The Thomas Salto.
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THE THOMAS SALTO / TIMMY STRAW INTERVIEW
EG: Except for an online interview in The Paris Review and a brief explanation of “Copernicus” for Poem-a-Day, your work has been left to speak for itself. So I want to start by asking: What kind of writer do you consider yourself? What images, sounds, or ideas reoccur, and why might that be?
TS: There are a lot of recurring figures in the book—telescopes, animals (lots of one-syllable animals, like fish, voles, wasps), forms of labor, what it is to make or pose a world. I guess I think of these repeated figures as operating like signal mirrors—what you might use to send messages from one hill to another, as soldiers did in the nineteenth century, say; or, if you’re lost in the woods, to indicate to a search helicopter where you are. They flash up across the book but signify different things according to their position.
I think, too, that ideas have sounds and rhythms, and rhythms and sounds have ideas—and that is probably bound up in the action of these mirror-flashes across different poems.
I like the idea of a mirror-flash in response to the question “What kind of writer do you consider yourself?” You graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, the city I’m writing to you from. From there you went to Moscow to translate Maria Stepanova’s work, before moving to Iowa to attend the Writer’s Workshop for an MFA in poetry. You also studied translation there. Translation figures in The Thomas Salto (which we’ll get to), but first I’m curious about your relationship to the practice of translation, independent of your book.
Right, I guess I was kind of ducking that question (what kind of writer do I consider myself)—in part because I don’t think of myself as one—which might have something to do with this question of translation and positionality. I feel most at home in threshold positions, because in those positions you’re at once implicated, “inside” the room (whether that’s the poem you’re translating or writing, or the social world, or the object of study), and you’re also at its edge, not quite a part, intruding. This probably connects to a kind of trans-ness, too, which is very important to me: that I’m trans without a qualifier (not a trans man, for instance). The DJ is a threshold position, as well (I used to DJ sometimes): you’re not making the song, nor are you exactly dancing it, it’s passing through you into the room. And a poem sort of enacts this, and a translation of a poem makes this enactment explicit, I think.
I should mention that I didn’t end up translating Stepanova’s work in Moscow; I spent most of my time working on poems and essays by Grigori Dashevsky, who was also a translator (from English and Latin, mostly). His poems have had a kind of ghost presence in my own, especially the ones in this book—something I only noticed recently. For instance, I can see now that I unconsciously borrowed Dashevsky’s habit of citing himself across poems—a mode I really like because (in his work, at least) it feels like an echo but is in fact a development. It’s something like the subject of a fugue: a melodic line that reiterates itself, each time with a difference. So that when you’re reading Dashevsky’s body of work—which is fairly small, maybe a hundred poems and translations—you have these moments of uncanniness (as in, oh, I’ve seen that image, that figure, that word before!), even though the context beneath the recognition, much like the harmonic structure beneath the melody, has changed enormously. This may be similar to the signal mirrors I was talking about earlier.
And then there’s the “I” in Dashevsky’s poems. It’s roaming, unstable, less a voice than a position that moves across entities, like the “it” in a game of tag. A version of this roaming “I” occurs in The Thomas Salto too. It isn’t about impersonality (these are personal poems, and the instability I’m talking about has nothing to do with language games or the failure of language, or anything like that), but rather about personality as a contingent thing, something whose source is neither purely inside or outside the self, but that shuttles or flickers between.
This sense of trans-ness, as a form of movement, is what I carry with me throughout The Thomas Salto. Why did you choose the salto as the foregrounding idea for your book?
As I was working on the book, I kept returning to the story of the Soviet gymnast Elena Mukhina—both as a very concrete private tragedy and as an image and parable of power relations. Mukhina joins the Soviet Olympic team in the late seventies as a teenager; she’s an orphan; her coach pressures her to add the Thomas salto into her floor routine in preparation for the 1980 Olympics, which she does—because until that point no female gymnast had been able to execute it. If she could pull off a salto at the Olympics, she’d garner a lot of points, too, because it’s both impressive and very dangerous—those moves are worth more. And a Soviet win in 1980 would represent a geopolitical victory, an ideological one. So her child body is made to bear all sorts of signs and political cargo that she herself might not be able to read or interpret. And then she breaks her neck practicing the Thomas salto and she’s paralyzed for the rest of her life.
The particulars of her accident, both as fact and as metaphor, seemed to correspond to what was going on in Reagan’s America—all kinds of vulnerable bodies were made to bear the freight of power (thinking here of AIDS, of the proxy wars in Central America, the drug wars, gutting of social programs), and to do so within a world picture increasingly conditioned by media, even defined by it. I’m thinking in particular of CNN, the first 24-hour news network, which debuted on June 1, 1980. This new technology—the 24-hour news cycle—has, as a condition of its constancy and totality, a binary structure: it presents us with a world-picture made up of zeros and ones, of absence (what isn’t on air) and presence (what is on air—the pathological repetition of certain stories and images). The older forms, like the news hour or the morning paper, suggested an elsewhere; that what was absent from the record was absent not necessarily because it didn’t exist, or—which is the same thing in this logic—because it had no value, but because the record itself was provisional.
With the 24-hour news cycle, though, media becomes more and more the arbiter of what is and what has value, because it increasingly provides the perceptual frame for social arrangements, institutions, laws, all those earlier arbiters of value—and so in some sense contains them and arbitrates them. Consent and dissent, but also self-understanding, self-perception—these things begin to look really different in the 1980s. What we call nostalgia for the eighties, then, might be an intuition of this—it’s when we left the analog for the digital. I’m not saying anything new here, but I think this is part of why the 1980s has such a power to haunt, and certainly part of why it haunts this book. That and the fact that I was born then—it’s what I know, and where I happen to come from.
And then, returning to the salto—it also becomes a figure for a poem (the turn, of course, the volta), and, I guess, for the poet; the physical turn moves, like political forces, like power, through the body of the gymnast, just as language moves through the person writing the poem. I’m not talking, in this analogy, about the poet as a receiver of some message intended for them, as in the muse or whatever. I mean something more akin to Jack Spicer’s idea of a poet as a stenographer, taking dictation from what he called the “Outside” (which he sometimes likened to Martians, angels, or ghosts). In this model, the message the poet receives is not meant for them; they only try to catch it. So the dictation the poet takes down is inevitably riddled with errors, because a poet is only ever overhearing the message, as if listening through a wall or on a bad phone line, and these obstructions (the wall, the bad phone line) are the contingencies of the poet’s particular life, their historical situation, their mother tongue. I like this way of thinking a lot, because in it the poet is like a cheap technology, a Radio Shack transistor radio or something, unreliable and wobbly, with lots of static in the reception.
Your “translations” of Reagan’s speeches into poetry are threaded through the book. These translations are from English to English, suggesting that poetry itself is a mode of translation. Can you talk about the conceptual or tonal intentions of these translations?
I’m so glad you’re asking about this! The Reagan translations were an attempt to get at the phenomenon by which the political is given meaning and flesh in private life. And I think this phenomenon is something more than entanglement—it’s closer to transubstantiation, as per the Catholic belief that the wafer literally becomes the flesh of Christ when you take it, and the wine the literal blood. So a poem that might seem quotidian and personal—like “Cascade Locks Sturgeon Hatchery Field Trip,” which is about a bunch of six-year-olds visiting a sturgeon hatchery—becomes, in its Reagan translation, a poem about funding the Contras, about power and its obfuscations and terrors. Everydayness is transformed, like the communion wafer, into a violence happening elsewhere, on “our behalf” (to “keep the world safe for democracy,” etc.).
But I think the effect of translation in general is to project a third zone, a space between the poem and its translation: a threshold, in a way, that permits a radical ambiguity; so that in this third zone the sturgeon can be an animal for itself, totally unsymbolic; and the events in Nicaragua are also completely unsymbolic, they’re terribly, singularly actual.
I see your notes section at the end of the book projecting a “third zone” too, as you put it. I read somewhere that you don’t like writing about yourself or your own life—that it’s most comfortable for you when a method of research informs your poems. I’m always very curious (and skeptical) about what constitutes “legitimate knowledge” and feel as though your citational practice is saying something in this regard. Your poem “Entgötterung” references Heidegger’s concept of “degodification,” which was part of the turn from a belief in the divine toward a more utilitarian worldview in the early twentieth century. Far from atheism, the idea is that through the “loss of the gods” one is able to encounter a pure religious experience.[1] At the start of the poem, we’re placed in a Christian frame where one is always afraid to do wrong. We read an image of children carrying a wading pool and the delicate effort they take not to get their feet wet; a falcon hunts a rodent, evoking a different but similar sensation of predation and fear. But by the end of the poem, you’ve formed a new edifice in the image of a pulley, “where we are led to purpose, / to slake another’s sense with our own” Similar to Heidegger’s concept, the poem articulates an instrumentalization of belief that experiments outside western religious ideologies. It makes me wonder: Does your citational practice, similarly, articulate a kind of belief system? How do you think about the relationship between you and those you reference in your notes?
That’s interesting. Maybe it is a kind of belief—or at least a way of making a home, as in citations are like furniture or pictures in a room, both of which make a space feel like you can trust it, understand it, live in it—but also make it so that your own voice doesn’t echo back at you. If it was only “me” in these poems, I’d probably feel quite alone, in a banal and beige kind of way. It matters, too, that the citations are wild, unprogrammatic, mercenary—they came up when they wanted to—Mandelstam (“nature is the same as Rome”), or Oppen (“this, the moment’s populace”), but also my younger self (from a song I wrote and no longer like: “all the poses hurt”). Or a song by a friend, Emily Wells (“two dogs tethered inside”); or Sonny (Al Pacino) in Dog Day Afternoon, when he’s yelling “Attica!” There are faint but present rhythmic citations too, from Bach, from Biggie, from Hopkins.
Citation demonstrates a kind of trust—that I’m here, that you’re here, that there’s a world we’re making together, even across time, and if I cite something in a poem I’m also there, where the citation came from. So you can backfill yourself into the past with it, too. It’s kind of a trick.
I want to go deeper into something we touched on earlier. Throughout the book, I perceive a question about gender and autonomy—maybe it’s more a question of internalized ideologies—first posed as the Olympic body “explicitly inscribed on and by forces that are, in power, scope, and timescale, magnitudes greater than itself” (16). In “That too is stealing,” you write, “the body is not the song / but the bearing of the song,” and in “The ax,” there’s trouble when one is able to be “both sight and the self” (22, 37). In the titular, poem you write, “Laws, facts, phenomena all / shine in the body of the host. And who here is not a / host?” (38). What are you advocating for with regard to gender and embodiment? What are your concerns?
I’m not sure that the word “advocating” applies here, because I’m likewise never sure what the poem is doing when I’m writing it. And when the poem is written, its meanings feel very unstable, sometimes even scary, or unpleasant, or downright wrong. I had a teacher who would say a poem comes into being out of an anxiety—a generative anxiety, and an unresolvable, maybe even unrepresentable one. But in The Thomas Salto, there is a very insistent concern with responsibility and judgment, with how a world is made and recognized, and by and for whom. I’ve often felt locked outside the categories that afford some people a kind of recognizable figuration (when I was a kid, my gender was a matter of discussion and sometimes an object of aggression, other kids asking me whether I was a boy or a girl). And I grew up in a family that was low-income and also kept a lot of books around; so while we were very financially precarious, we were also tremendously privileged, for all sorts of reasons. There was something strangely unrecognizable, socially, politically, about this position; the narrative is you’re either poor and uneducated or well-off and educated; there’s not a lot of room for nuance (and then what does “education” mean, who gets to call it that, etc.). So the questions of who makes a world and who is recognizable in it, and how—these felt like ones I lived out in real time.
Because of the singular sonic quality achieved in your work, it’s very apparent that you’re a musician. Was music another way you moved through this complexity surrounding categorization and legibility? You write, “To want the world as it is not / is how its pitch is heard” (85). This sentiment reminds me of an article I’ve been a bit obsessed with by Andrew Navin Brooks called “Fugitive Listening: Sounds from the Undercommons.” In it he asks, “How might we attend to the sonicity of those voices that refuse to individuate, possess, and accumulate?”[2] You and Brooks seem to be in dialogue about the ethical implications of sound. In the lines quoted, you argue that in order to apprehend the tone of the world, one has to want to change it first. Brooks asks how we might care for voices that evade the norm or have been rendered illegible through erasure. How would you describe the relationship between sound and language in your work? What senses do you rely on most?
I think you’re very right to note that sound in The Thomas Salto is about listening and the body—not about producing sound but hearing it, and language is a way of tuning your body to others, to the absolute unreproducible singularity of others, but also, again, to the thing in another person that can’t be fixed or explained. As embarrassing as it might sound, I do believe in the soul as a figure for trying to get at this.
I had a piano teacher when I was a kid, a former concert pianist who at the time thought (very understandably, he’d been given a terrible prognosis) that he was dying of cancer (he didn’t, and is, I think, still very much alive), and so took me on as his student as a kind of apprentice to his philosophy of music and his way of approaching the piano. It was pretty intense, actually: I remember he was also very into cultivating orchids, and would call me on the landline and want to talk about the relationship between orchids and Bach. In any case, he told me that I should never put my self into the piano—shouldn’t play “into” it, as if I were putting the notes there; I should pull the notes out of the piano, where they already were. I shouldn’t make a song, in short; I should listen for the song that’s already there. It was, I think, one of the most useful and generous things anyone has ever told me.
Notes:
[1] Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 115–16.
[2] Andrew Navin Brooks, “Fugitive Listening: Sounds from the Undercommons.” Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 6 (November 2020):34.