KARAN

Bobby, thank you for these deeply moving poems that explore fatherhood from both sides of the equation with such tenderness and complexity. In “When I Am Not Thinking of My Father,” you write “And whether / he has a gun / to his head, // I am thinking / of driving you home / from the hospital” – that collision of fear and joy is stunning. Let’s begin with the process question. How do you start writing a poem? Does it begin with an image, a line, or an idea? Do you have a writing routine? And most importantly, what drives you to write poetry?

BOBBY

On some level, my life is always telling me to get to my desk. Sometimes it's to say the unsaid, but often it's something I've seen or heard that I just want to keep sitting with on the page. Over time, you get better, I think, at sensing these things, at being vigilant and attentive to them, knowing that our lives are full of portals, and time-sensitive ones, that if we don’t sit down soon, the opportunity will pass us by.

As to the when or the how: early. I’ve always been a morning person, but with two young sons, the dawn is really the only reliable time I have to myself. So, I’m usually at my desk – tea steeped – by 5:10 in the morning. It’s how I wrote The Same Man and it’s how I’ll write what’s next, too. 

A big part of my own practice is making sure it doesn’t come at the expense of my family. I wanted to become a father more than anything in life and have been okay putting the poems down when my sons are up. It gives me something to get back to the next morning, the next dawn. 

KARAN

Your poems often navigate between being a son and being a father. In “The Same Man,” you write about your father being “born to disappoint everyone / but his grandchildren.” How do you think about these dual perspectives in your work? Has becoming a father changed how you write about your own father? 

BOBBY

In retrospect, I think I needed to become a father to write The Same Man. Maybe I could have written another book if I never became a parent, but certainly not the one these poems live in now.

Fatherhood changed me as a person and as a poet in many humbling and extraordinary ways, of course, but it also changed my father. It made him a grandfather and gave me this vantage point where I saw my sons bond with him as I must have as a child – and as I still long to as a man, as a son. These poems are a painful chronicling of that confusing, widening triangulation, even as they are also an ecstatic embrace of fatherhood itself. 

KARAN

I’m struck by how these poems capture moments of profound transition – bringing a baby home during a pandemic, watching your father with your children, folding laundry “like my mother / folded ours.” Tell us about writing these threshold moments. How do you think about time and memory in your poetry?

BOBBY

Back when I was getting my MFA at the University of Virginia, Greg Orr – a poet and person I love dearly – always used to push me to seek out my “thresholds” as a writer. There are so many resonant ways to think of this metaphor, but the way I internalized it was to find my limits – to go to the places where I could just barely stand on the page and make a poem out of that.

The present is always liminal. It’s always waiting with its doorways into the past, into memory, into what haunts us and keeps shaping us in the present. This is one of the great lessons of poetry – in reading it and in writing it, we’re exposed to the depths, the layers, of our lives. And it’s transformative – I can remember when I found that closing laundry image in “Where We Land,” where I become one (if only in the poem, if only for an instant) with my mother, and I was so taken by that sense of solidarity across time that I knew it would not only end the poem but the entire book. I try to let memory flood my poems as much as I can. To me, it’s gold.

KARAN

Many of these poems wrestle with inherited trauma while also celebrating new life. In “Photographs,” you write about seeing yourself “as a boy” while your son shakes a snow globe of your childhood city. How do you balance darkness and light when writing about family?

BOBBY

For a long time, I was too afraid to write these poems – of letting in what I knew was just waiting to be admitted – and I have to say that I’m still afraid of them being in the world! When I got the call from Nate Marshall about winning the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, I was elated (of course) but also terrified – these poems, it dawned on me, would soon be in the world and up for inspection by anyone who decided to pick up a copy of The Same Man, from strangers to loved ones and everyone in between.  

That said, in the actual writing and revising of the poems I didn't think about creating balance. I certainly thought a lot about the ethics of the work – and about honoring the radical beauty and pain of experience – but my primary goal was to see the poems through and let them become whatever they needed to become. Ultimately, they do carry plenty of joy and plenty of agony and I think that balance, or juxtaposition, is vital to what they are now. 

KARAN

Your work often returns to physical spaces – apartments, living rooms, hospital rooms. In “Where We Land,” the father figure moves through the speaker’s home like a ghost. How do you think about the role of place in your poetry? What does setting allow you to explore about these relationships?

BOBBY

This is a great question, Karan. Maybe one day I'll find myself venturing out a bit more, but, for now, it's often interior, intimate spaces that I'm drawn to. The spaces where living happens, where relationships happen, in my own life. No doubt, too, the spaces where memory resides. It’s why a poem like Kevin Young’s “Ice Storm, 1984” feels so close to home. 

But I also want a reader to know where they are. I don't want them to worry mid-poem about whether the speaker’s swimming or sitting down for dinner; to me, it's a distraction I'm not interested in teasing out. Once I've got the reader situated – and once I'm situated myself – then I can get to work.

KARAN

This is a staple question for us and I’m always surprised by the range in everyone’s responses: There’s a school of poetry that believes a poem or a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work within this framework, if at all? And do you see your poetry moving in a different direction?

BOBBY

The only poet I can think of who is truly all of these things in equal measure is Lucille Clifton. She's always talked about as a poet of the body and of the heart, but she's as much a poet of the mind and soul – and the poet I love most. Whenever my students are struggling to write a particular poem, I have to fight the urge to just send them to Clifton because she did it all, year after year, book after book. 

I respond to a deep impulse – probably the deepest one I know – to speak up, to return, to relive. This, to me, feels like the essential work of the heart. I ache if I don't get that image of our son – perched atop his bed frame as he looks out his window and listens to a story – into a poem. Poetry’s my way of being in touch with that ache.

KARAN

Many of these poems capture the delicate dance of maintaining boundaries with family. In “The Same Man,” therapy sessions and restaurant dinners become sites of negotiation. Could you talk about writing these complex dynamics? What challenges do you face in rendering them on the page?

BOBBY

What I will say is that I'm not alone, of course, in writing poems that take on complex familial relationships. Natasha Trethewey, Cornelius Eady, and Edgar Kunz – to name just three poets who are deeply important to me – have shown me the way, again and again. They've set an example and I've tried to join them in this work. (Also: the fact that You Don't Miss Your Water – Eady’s slimmest-of-slim, prose poem masterclass – is out of print is a crime. Someone should change that!)

But to your specific question: much of The Same Man takes up what is asked of us as children and as parents, and I think these poems do speak to a longing to both establish boundaries and love. I wonder, though, if the book’s deepest subject is really the erosion of boundaries – in the past, in the present – and the struggle to rebuild or reassemble them in real time.

In some fundamental, human way, the real challenge has been believing in the work enough to let it enter the world. I knew I needed to write these poems, for myself and for my life as a poet, but there’s a certain danger to them and now that they’re appearing in print and online, I’ve had to reflect a lot about how (and when) to share them with my family. My wife read the book as soon as it was done – and I recited some of the poems to our sons as I was writing and revising them – but no other members of my family had. That process is playing out now (and has actually been incredibly meaningful), but I still have no idea if my father will read these poems or the book. Part of me wants him to – and part of me lives in fear of how he’ll respond.

KARAN

The body appears in these poems in intimate ways – skin-to-skin contact with a newborn, hands performing CPR, the physical presence of threat and love. How do you think about embodiment in your work? What role does the physical play in exploring emotional territory?

BOBBY

I think a lot about embrace and rejection when it comes to the body. This moves through my poems and my experience as a man, as a husband, as a son and as a father. I’m aware that to be tender, to be affectionate, with loved ones is to ostensibly run afoul of what it means to be a man; I’m aware, too, of how ridiculous and damaging, of how absurd, that is. And as a father of two sons, it feels especially essential that I model another path. Poets first taught me this – I’m thinking here of Ross Gay, of Li-Young Lee, of Keetje Kuipers – but so, too, have the many people in my life who have made me feel held and loved.

KARAN

Many congratulations on winning the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize! Tell us about putting together The Same Man. How did you think about arranging these poems into a collection? What emerged in that process? And what are your hopes for the book?

BOBBY

Thank you so much! When I say this is a dream come true, I mean it – it's something I'm still processing and am in awe of.

Similar to a lot of writers, I graduated from my MFA program with what I was loosely calling a book. But it wasn't really a book, or at least it wasn’t mine. I'd been too swayed by feedback (including excellent and well-meaning feedback) to know what I wanted to make, and over the course of about two years following the MFA, I started to face that reality. I stopped submitting poems, scrapped the entire manuscript and began working on new poems. Doing that was a game-changer. 

When I felt true momentum building around the book – this was a few years into writing it on my own and just as our second child was born – I sent it off to one person: Michael Dhyne. We spent hours on the phone together, I made some final changes and, in the winter of 2024, I felt ready to start sending it out – and weather the inevitable rejections to come.

The odds are so long with a first book that we all need to write books we can call our own. If we’re sending work out that we don’t believe in or are waffling on, rejection is a killer; if we’re sending work out we believe in, the rejection hurts, of course, but it doesn’t have to sink us. And I thought a lot about how I would respond if The Same Man never saw the light of day. Fortunately and somewhat miraculously, it quickly found a remarkable home at Pitt after being a finalist for two other prizes, but I was prepared to muster all the resolve I could to keep at it, to keep writing, regardless of the results.

As for my hopes for the book itself, I hope this is just the beginning. 

KARAN

We always ask our poets for a poetry prompt at the end. Would you provide a prompt for our readers, to help them kickstart a poem?

BOBBY

With Greg Orr retired from teaching, I feel like it’s incumbent upon me to keep his classic, Joe Brainard-inspired prompt alive: Find a quiet, private place to sit down and write for 15 minutes, non-stop, with every line beginning with the words, “I remember…” Do your best to avoid thinking of this as writing a poem and instead let your memory guide you wherever it chooses – deeper into a specific memory or jumping from one to the next (or both). Try to hunt for details. Try to refrain from judging what you’re writing. After 15 minutes, put what you’ve written away and return to it after a few weeks, re-reading it and choosing a single line/image/memory to begin a new poem with. (Greg’s poem “A Litany” is an all-time example of what an exercise like this can ultimately lead to.)

KARAN

We’d also love for you to recommend a piece of art (anything other than a poem) — perhaps a song, a film, or a visual artwork — that you find particularly inspiring or that you think everyone should experience.

BOBBY

I’m a big fan of soul music and want to recommend two albums here: a somewhat slept-on masterpiece – Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear – and the most vivid example I’ve ever encountered of an artistic voice coming into its own – The Complete Speciality Recordings by Sam Cooke and The Soul Stirrers. If you know, you know; if you don’t, get to listening!