DAVID TROUPES
About David Troupes
David Troupes grew up in Massachusetts, holds degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Edinburgh, and now lives with his wife in West Yorkshire. His first book of poems, Parsimony, was published by Two Ravens Press in 2009, and his other work includes the online comic Buttercup Festival, publications from Knucker Press, critical work on Ted Hughes, and collaborations with illustrator Laurie Hastings and composer Joel Rust. When he’s not writing, drawing or working, he’s walking.
Praise for David Troupes
A poetry of watchfulness, of immersion in wilderness and commune with the wild, David Troupes’ fine début is marked by an intensely focused inquisitiveness, delineating landscapes, shifting seasons and their creatures in a meticulous, sparing style, all filtered through a wonderfully lyrical sensibility.’ Robert Alan Jamieson
‘If “parsimony” is often equated with meanness, David Troupes reclaims its virtues – “praiseworthy economy in the use of means to pursue an end”, as my dictionary puts it. That’s a good description of Troupes’ poetic method – a sparingness with words that takes him to the heart of things. While there are moments of discovery, joy and celebration, this is no paradise – too many storms, droughts, predators and depressions – and any consolations are hard-won. What warmth there is, is created by the living beings themselves, and one of Troupes’ most striking images is that of the skunk cabbage, with its deep contractile roots and the ability to thaw frosts. Many poems are addressed to another, an intimate, creating a sense of solidarity both in and against the world. There is also a sense, properly veiled, of the sacred – a sense of wonder, and mystery too, for these poems don’t instantly yield their meanings. Formally confident, Troupes can pull off both conventional rhymes and unconventional line-breaks, and execute the most startling of shifts with his deft similes.’ Ken Cockburn
'Evokes a powerful sense of landscape ... These are spare, sharply focused poems written with great sssurance and control and an often miraculous clarity ... The abiding impression is of poise and sensitivity informed by a searching intelligence. An impressive new voice.'
AC Clarke, The Edinburgh Review
An interview with David Troupes
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I’ve been writing and drawing something or other since I was fairly young, but the first time I ever wrote poetry was during the last two years of high school. Our English teacher, much to her credit, set aside most Friday classes for creative work, and a couple embarrassing relics are preserved in the school’s literature magazine.
I began to take things more seriously as a undergrad English lit student a couple years later, and never really stopped. I’m not sure I could say what first inspired me to try writing. I’ve always been drawn to imitate other works – whatever I was enjoying, in whatever medium. When I played a lot of video games I wanted to design video games, and drew up pages of notes. When I read comic books I wanted to write and draw my own, and did, or tried to.
But poetry offered itself as one of the purest and most versatile art forms out there, in which language could be tweaked and worked at very fine levels – be made to do anything you wanted, really. You could say any number of things at the same time. It’s like oil painting and orchestrated music in that way, in its wide-openness of possibility. I couldn’t leave it alone.
Wallace Stevens was an early, if totally confounding, favorite, and continues to be (both a favorite and pleasantly, if not totally, confounding) – and his is a poetry which seems founded on the act of simply walking around, and the mind’s flights of fancy which can made and practised to accompany walking. He was a writer who understood the feel of New England, its moods and seasons. Reading William Carlos Williams and Paul Muldoon contributed a lot to my approach to form. Ted Hughes I came to later, and the appeal was immediate. He was articulating things which had been half-formed in my own mind for many years.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind The Simple Men? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?
The main preoccupation in everything I do seems to be our relationship with the environment, not so much in terms of politics and ‘eco’ concerns (although I hope there is some of that), but the way that individuals negotiate with the land around them – with the woods when we’re walking through them or a river when we’re floating down it. But at the same time I’m continually fascinated by certain compartments of human society, and some of my favorite pieces in this collection take place at wedding parties and truck stop diners. Everywhere these days we encounter the very important idea that humanity is not a thing apart from nature, that the old Eden narratives of mastery and cultivation are mistaken. Yet that reconnection, once made, cuts both ways, so that if we allow ourselves to be involved in the apparently purer natural processes of growth and decay, the so-called wilderness, we must also admit that all of human culture is absolutely a part of nature. That’s a pleasing enough idea to follow on a level of weddings and diners, but what about a coal burning plant or a greedy board mired in groupthink? Were these too not created by natural processes? I suppose. But what really interests me how each of us must constantly manage these negotiations.
Not that I set out to prove, or even to find, conclusions. Every poem comes from some little ecstatic moment, some sudden fascination, and I hope they’ll amount to something different for every reader.
The Simple Men is your second full-length collection. How do you think it compares with Parsimony (your first), in terms of theme and style?
There was a lot of autobiography and private emotion in Parsimony, and I suppose that’s less a focus this time – though there’s still a decent amount of time spent looking at love, marriage and pain. I’ve known for years that taking a walk in the woods is a terrible way to forget your worries, even though I convince myself of the opposite at least once a week, just before I go for a walk. So that sense of carrying emotion in my pocket remains. But there are plenty of poems in The Simple Men where I’ve bent autobiographical truth, or snapped it completely in half, and others about purely fictional characters.
Most of all I wanted to create a little world for walking through, so that over here there’s the euphoria of a wedding party, and over here there’s a week spent camping in Maine, with paths and diners in between, populated by a range of characters, some of whom you spend considerable time with.
When it comes to form, my goal is always to create something with the appearance of being alive, the way a field or a forest or a city is – which is to say, regular and orderly when seen from far away, but full of eccentricities close-up. This can mean creating a scheme of end-line alliteration and then not worrying when I stray from it, or throwing in very short or very long lines.
What does the title ‘The Simple Men’ refer to?
There is a group of six poems distributed across the book with titles beginning with ‘The Simple Man’, such as ‘The Simple Man Dragged By His Neck to the Mountains’, which take an ecstatic sort of look at the world. They were fun to write – strange hymns from strange creatures – and I suppose the core spirit of the book is embodied in them. But the title also works as a comment on several of the characters you meet – a father and son journeying down a river in northern Maine, or an ice fisherman isolated on a frozen lake, dwelling on the past – in which being ‘simple’ is perhaps akin to being finally rid of ego. Or making progress in that direction.
How and when do you write?
I always write longhand first, often several longhand drafts in a notebook or on lined paper. I try to be a creature of routine but it never seems to work, so the when of that question ends up being whenever I can. Given a whole day to myself (and assuming that it’s raining out so I’m not tempted to go hiking) I’ll spend the morning reading, the afternoon writing and the evening drawing. But most of the time, and in light of the fact that I work a standard 9 to 5, M to F job, I write whenever the opportunity presents itself.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
My favorite living poets are probably Jean Valentine and Paul Muldoon, but I’m always trying out new “slims,” sometimes just randomly off the shelf or e-shelf. I also subscribe to a couple poetry magazines, to keep my finger on the pulse. I’m currently working my way through two long books: Emily Dickinson’s The Complete Poems and Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama, both wonderful. And I always enjoy re-reading a Beckett or Hardy novel.
