TM: My first memory of writing was in fifth or sixth grade. We had been studying Whittier's long-poem "Snowbound." All of a sudden we had a terrible blizzard of our own. I remember my dad was out in the farmyard with the tractor, making mountains of snow to open a path to the road. I was upstairs in the bedroom I shared with my brother Flip. I had been given a leather-bound journal for Christmas that winter; in it I was writing my own "Snowbound," a twenty-five page poem that wasn't very good and fortunately has been lost. But the experience got me juiced: literature was not something done only by old, dead guys, it was something I could try to do.

During the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I experienced an intense bout of loneliness and vague longing, as adolescents do, and I responded to it by writing another poem with a large subject, this time "the end of the world." What I remember of the poem: a beach, the sea, a bird, wind, this incredible sense of loneliness. Fortunately, this poem, too, has been lost.

Other than school magazines, my work first started being published in 1972 when I was 24-25 years old. That year I had made the conscious decision to throw out all my previous work and start over. And that's what I did. I burned more than 200 poems and started over. And that's when my poetry started getting published.

CT: What are your most productive times during the day to write?

TM: When I worked full-time, the most productive time of day for me was 4:00-7:00 a.m. I'd rise at 4:00, write until 7:00, take my shower, and go to my job as a manager at a printing plant. In October of 2002, I "retired" from my paying job to write full-time and now I'm a slacker, I sleep in til 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. The first three hours of the day are still my most productive, however. That is when my mind is freshest, uncluttered by everything else the day brings with it.

CT: If you experience writer's block, what do you do to overcome it?

TM: Writer's block is a luxury I don't have. I seem to put myself into endeavors that force the writing to happen. With my current Vagabond project, for instance, I have to write in my journals when I am off visiting the communities that are the focus of my interest; if I don't write in my journals about those experiences, I come back with very little that is immediately useful. So I have disciplined myself to write constantly of the experiences - early morning, before bed, at every chance in between, I'm recording details of my conversations, profiles of people I've met, descriptions of the town, the land, etc. These will become the stuff of my next book, Vagabond in the Middle. In six months, I've recorded 120,000 words; that's not a case of writer's block.

I'm a big proponent of keeping journals of various sorts, especially "project journals" that become repositories of your drafts and notions. When you write in a journal, you never really have to face an empty page, a blank mind - you have all these other pages already filled up, simply continue. Many of my essays and at least half of my memoir Curlew:Home started first as journal entries. Writing in a journal, you don't feel the pressure that every sentence has to be a great sentence; you know you are going to go back and revise it. And, as every serious writer I know will tell you, ninety percent of writing is revision.

CT: Why do you say "Middle West," rather than the conventional "Midwest?"

TM: I say "middle west" - no caps - because I want people to stumble over the words and notice them. I don't capitalize the words because middle westerners don't call that much attention to themselves. "Midwest" is a clipped quick two syllables; it is too easily dismissed. Well - I don't want the middle west to be so easily dismissed. I want people to pay attention. And using "middle" as I do, I am also drawing attention to an essential part of who we are, our middleness: we are at times mild and grey, certainly we're polite and moderate and generally conventional. "Middle" makes reference to such qualities in a way that "Mid-" does not.

CT: I read your poem "Chicago." (I don't like Chicago much, myself, although I lived there for a period of time as a youngster.) Are cities inherently not a part of our Middle West? Squalor and "sowish-ness" certainly make appearances in rural landscapes; perhaps they're just not so visible to us because they're more remote. Do you ever see yourself "cursing" any rural squalor in prose?

TM: For me, Chicago is a special case because of the intense pressure it is putting on the landscape. Even sixty or seventy-five miles west of the city you feel the effects of Chicago being there, looming, being what it is. The poem casting Chicago out of the middle west does not mean that cities aren't part of the middle west - they are. Chicago is simply the worst manifestation of some of the middle west's biggest problems - the traffic is insane, for instance, and uncountable tract houses continue getting built on cornfields at an astounding rate. There is an urban middle west, but that is not the facet of the region that interests me most. My Vagabond project grew out of writing the Curlew:Home memoir. I went back to Curlew and Palo Alto County, Iowa, for a week, re-introduced myself to the friends and neighbors of my youth, and was struck by the amazing sturdiness and strength of all those rural folks; the Vagabond project is an effort to see if those same qualities are to be found across the region. Someone should look at the urban middle west, but I don't have the time and energy to do it.

I will write of the darker aspects of the rural middle west, it's uglinesses, the parts of it that we don't always want to own up to. In Maysville, Missouri, for instance, the county board has refused to fund 4-H the past year and as a result the Extension Service has left the county; this is a big controversy in the community, neighbors are split over it, there are people who simply won't even talk about it. What's going on, I wonder? In the same community, the sheriff has just resigned; the deputy whom the sheriff had fired three months ago has been named interim sheriff. What's going on, I wonder? There are bad people out in the country, there is squalor there too. I'll be less than honest if I don't confront such things when I find them. Yet how will I confront them is a question I've paid some attention to. How do you criticize those you love? My answer for the present? When I write about negative aspects of our middle western existence, I put myself in the middle of it; I don't say "they," I say "we." I try include my own failings in any discussion of the failings of others; and I have plenty of failings to cite as examples.

CT: What do you think of New Formalism? (I was taught by the Dana Goia/David Mason school [Rebel Angels] but don't have a proper appreciation for New Formalism as anything other than a form.) You seem to be a free-verse sort of poet. Why is free-verse okay? How might free-verse be an appropriate choice of form in terms of your subject?

TM: I don't know enough about the "New Formalism" to have an opinion. I think your question is about free verse. Poetry, by its nature, requires measurement. Poetry that is often called "free verse" simply employs units of measurement that are untraditional - Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg tapped into a prosody that goes all the way back to the Psalms of the Bible, and beyond; it's altogether as rigorous a prosody at conventional English metrics. My daughter wasn't ten years old when she said to me after she saw me give a reading, "Dad, why do they call it free verse? When you read, you tap your foot to the beat." So I'm not "a free verse poet," I believe that the line has to be measured by some principle that makes sense to the material you are dealing with. In my long-poem "Making Hay," the rhythm is that of mowing and baling hay: I want you to feel the baler making bales. "Free verse" is often code for "I don't understand your principle of measurement." In discussion of free verse in English, it is always wise to remember the observation that we tend to speak in iambic pentameter without thinking about it. I have rejected the constraint of traditional forms mostly because in current times the poetry in traditional forms seems pretty universally bad.

CT: Is there such a thing as bad poetry? If so, what makes poetry bad ... or, good?

TM: Yes, there is good poetry, there is mediocre poetry, and there is god-awful bad poetry. In a bad poem, the poet's work is insufficient to the task; he or she has been dishonest with the materials or has bent the material to an inappropriate shape or has stopped working before being done. Sentiment is okay. "Sentimental" sentiment is not okay. With any art, if the work makes me "want to cry," I'm suspect of it. Good art makes me say Yes! or makes me laugh or say Aha! Some good works of art, including good poems, make me want to cry, but first I've said Yes! or laughed or said Aha! My wife and I have had this conversation for years. "How can you say this poem is good or that poem is bad? Isn't it all subjective?" This is how I've answered her, and how I will answer you: you can start to make such judgments when you educate yourself enough to know what goes on in a poem. That means reading a lot of poems on the one hand, and living a lot of life on the other, so that you establish your own standards of comparison. If you don't read poetry and you've written your first poem, you cannot possibly know whether it's any good or not.

CT: Why should anyone read poetry? What can the genre offer folks living in the 21st century---particularly those who are accustomed to surfing the 'net, carrying cell phones, and using public restrooms with electric-eye faucets (as opposed to using outhouses, talking on rural party-lines, and reading newspapers)?

TM: I think poetry and the other arts - verbal, visual, plastic, kinetic, and musical - offer us our only chance of saving ourselves. Good poetry is an antidote to what is being done to language by ad writers and Pentagon spokesmen/women and sportscasters. To read a good poem is to plug into the electricity of the universe, a direct jolt, juiced at a primal level. All good art does this: it plugs you directly into something larger, more powerful, more noble, more intense, than you will find elsewhere. In art we as human beings are saying: this is who we truly are, we are this noble, and this base. Of course, good art requires an unrelenting commitment to honesty, and there are a lot f people who don't want to make that commitment - either because they are dishonest or it's too much work. One should want to read poetry so that what is true stays true in a world full of liars.

CT: Are there any questions that you're ALWAYS asked at presentations such as the one you'll be giving at Manawa? Is there any question you wish folks would ask?

TM: The one question I've been asked several times about the Vagabond project is: how do you support yourself while doing research and writing. The first answer I give is that since I retired in October of 2002, my wife and I have learned to live poor (or "poorer," as Mary has said). The second answer is that I sell copies of my books - do you want to buy copies of my books? The third answer: since the government agencies and the private foundations to which I've applied have not seen fit to support my work, I've appeal directly to my readers for donations to help pay the costs associated with my Vagabond effort. To date, I've received 73 contributions: typically $20-50; a few as much as $1000; one, a 92-year-old woman living on fixed income, $2.00. My wife works, she keeps us in medical insurance, one way or another we pay the bills and continue to buy groceries. Look and me and you see that I'm not starving.

The first thing I most want to tell people about the Vagabond project is this: without fail, in every community I visit, with every person I interview, I am amazed that EVERYONE has a powerful and interesting story to tell; when I talk to these people, the stories boil up, spill over, explode out of them as if they have been waiting all their lives for someone to ask them about themselves and their lives, about what they've accomplished, about their hopes and dreams. I have had people tell me things they don't tell their spouses. I have had people be so honest and frank with me that I will check back with them later to see how much of what they've told me they really want to make public.

The second thing I would tell about the Vagabond project: without fail the communities I've visited have embraced me - literally, as in Maysville, Missouri, where my contact, 72-year-old Emma Newkirk hugged me good-bye at the end of my last visit there; and on other levels, as at the Sale Barn in Rugby, North Dakota, where I sat taking notes all through the day's cattle auction - at one point one of the fellows moving cattle in and out of the pen in front of the auctioneer looked up at me and said - "Well, what do you think about all this?" These people have embraced me, they trust me, I feel warmly welcomed. I have the key to a house in one of my communities, in case "you're passing by and we're not home and you need a place to stay."

CT: How did you "swing" your first publishing deal? How many rejections have you received from publishers? Is it all about "networking" (with a nod to your publishing background)?

TM: If you write poetry and want to be published, hang around with other poets. In about ten minutes or so, one of them will get the idea to start a poetry magazine and will ask you to submit. Or you will get the idea to start a magazine.

I am unlike those writers who won't write something if they don't know that it will be published or that they're going to get paid for it. I try to write to the integrity of my materials (or should I say, to the integrity of my obsessions). If what I write gets published, good. If I get paid for it, good. If I don't get paid for it, still I've written something that's good and I can be proud of. Personally, I think we worry too much about getting published and getting paid. Commercial publishers are now pretty much run by "bean-counters" rather than by people who love good writing. Don't get me wrong - there are still people in publishing who love good writing; it's just that, usually, they're not in charge.

Rejection - yes, I know rejection; as a poet I've received almost a hundred rejection slips in the past two years. How do I console myself? I remember that I write not to be loved by editors but so I can love myself, or at least sleep at night.

CT: Do you have a favorite poem, a favorite poet or writer? Which poem of your own do like best---and, why?

TM: Currently I'm intensely interested in the work of Wisconsin's own Lorine Niedecker. Poet Cid Corm includes her with Sappho and Emily Dickinson as "the three greatest women poets the world has seen." Yes, she's that good. Currently I'm working on a piece about how she has taken her common, indigenous, local materials and made of them something that flies far beyond the boundaries of any regional label, flies into the realm of powerful, quite overpowering art. Niedecker plugs straight into the juice of the universe. She should be more well-known than she is; she is more famous in England than in Wisconsin. Aren't we all?

CT: When you write a poem or an essay, do you ever have other "eyes" look it over? How often do you revise? How much do you revise? Do you have a trusted editor?

TM: My wife Mary is my best and truest and most faithful editor, and always has been. I don't always make the changes she suggests but I always wrestle with the decision. She has a good eye and a good ear, and time after time she keeps me from embarrassing myself in public.

I never stop revising. Ninety percent of writing - at least ninety percent - is revision. I'll revise a piece that has been published in a magazine before I put it in a book. This is art, remember: we're trying to make something beautiful. If you let me keep sanding and polishing, well, I'll keep sanding and polishing.