Interview: Tom Bailey

In 2023, I was in the first year of my MFA and working as an editor for EPOCH. That spring, I was excited to publish a poem by Tom Bailey, ”Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses.” As editors, we were struck by the poem’s voice: candid and playful at once, able to gradually sculpt a set of instructions into something both rapturous and heartbreaking.

This year, I was doubly excited to learn that Tom—who is also a friend—had been named winner of Poetry London’s annual chapbook contest. The collection came out in March, and I read it in one breathless sitting. These poems peel open in layers; frank, joyous, unflinching, raw. Tom’s attention to image and form builds poems that disrupt the everyday, urging the reader to look again, and look anew.

The chapbook takes its title from that same poem we published in print, so it felt only fitting to bring Tom back to Epoch for an interview. Last month—Tom in Edinburgh and myself in Ithaca—we caught up on Zoom, to discuss poetic registers, banality, telephones, the power of a good prose poem, and more. Below is our conversation, edited lightly for clarity.

Tom’s pamphlet, Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses, is available now from Poetry London.

Can you tell me a little bit about the pamphlet? What was the process of writing these poems and putting them together?

It was quite organic, I suppose—there wasn't really a plan for the collection, it sort of just gradually came together. Most of the poems were written between 2020 and 2022, with one or two from when I was an undergrad and a couple more recent poems.

And then, when I won the prize, I got to work with Isabelle Baafi, who is Poetry London's reviews editor. She was amazing, and she basically made me decide which poems I felt were at the core of the pamphlet, and we organized the rest of the poems around that. So that's how we decided what was going in and what wasn't.

Stylistically, the collection is characterised by shifts in voice and register. The speaker is often very candid and colloquial, which creates a real sense of intimacy with the reader. How important is generating contrast in your work? Can you tell us a little bit about this voice?

I guess I’m interested in what happens when you take a poem to the edge of sincerity and candor, to the point where it becomes hard to tell whether or not the poem is being sincere anymore. Or where it becomes ridiculous, or, at least, not quite as serious. I always think about that James Wright poem “Lying in a hammock on William Duffy's farm on Pine Island, Minnesota.” It ends with the line “I have wasted my life,” and it just comes out of the blue. It's so fantastic. It's like twelve lines of really beautiful description and then he's just like, yeah, screw this.

There's a line in one of the prose poems in the pamphlet: “honestly, it's exhausting having feelings all the time,” and, like, yeah, okay, that's true, but it’s also quite a banal thing to say, and there's nothing unique about it. I like treading that line between self-parody and deadly seriousness. It also allows for a kind of plausible deniability where you can be, like, oh, well, do I really mean it? And I quite like that in a poem. Another line in the pamphlet, from the poem “Good Morning,” goes “it’s so sad when someone dies,” which is maybe the most banal thing you can possibly say. Maybe I just like the banal. I like the word “sad” too. It’s just so not up to the task of describing serious feelings.

And when it comes to colloquialism, saying “like” or “anyway” or “whatever”—I guess it’s a way of undermining the poem, or stopping the poem from reaching too much towards profundity? I don’t know. I don’t want my poems to seem like they’re trying too hard to be serious.

How difficult is it for you to find that threshold that you're talking about, between banality and profundity?

I think, often, you just have to find the voice of a particular poem and then it snowballs from there. I find that writing often means redrafting the first line or two for four or five drafts until I think, oh, that's the voice, you know? And then it keeps going. Or a line comes into your head and you just go from there and see what happens.

Instances of miscommunication, misnaming and mistranslation recur through the poems. There’s sometimes a struggle to describe things and this generates both joy and panic. Why do you think you’re drawn to moments like this?

I like the way that misinterpretations or misnaming is a way of doing metaphor in a poem without waving a flag that says, here's a metaphor. You can say, I thought the X was a Y—which is essentially a metaphor, but it’s not, because you’re framing it slightly differently, within the context of being mistaken.

Do you know the Anne Carson essay, called “On what I think about most”? It’s about error and she uses Aristotle to argue that metaphor is “the true mistake of poetry,” which I love. The idea is that metaphor is inherently wrong. Like, no, my heart is not a rose even if the poet says it is, but there's something true about the relationship. I’m interested in how far you can push the wrongness of a metaphor. The more outrageous the better.

I think there's a poetry to misnaming things and being wrong. There's that amazing Lucille Clifton poem, which ends with the line: “i am adam and his mother / and these failures are my job.” I love that idea: that the poet’s job is failure.

These poems are wonderfully playful. You repeatedly invert expectations and strike the reader with startling literalisms. Can you talk a little about these poems’ relationship to realism and surrealism?

I don't think of myself as a surrealist poet, but I guess I like surrealism. I don't have any poems that go “and then a spaghetti monster walked into the room,” you know, in a self-consciously surreal way. There are some poets who do that and I really enjoy some of that stuff, but I suppose my poems are more interested in how the world is already a bit surreal. The boundary between the real and the surreal is what I'm interested in.

You know, I’ve got that poem called “Fancy Dress Party.” And in a way it’s surreal because you've got all these people at a party together who wouldn't be at a party together because all of them are dead. It's kind of surreal to have Jesus there in a pair of jeans. But at the same time it's not surreal at all because it's a fancy dress party. So the title of the poem undoes the surrealism of it, and I quite like that. I like the fact that Jesus isn't Jesus. He's just a guy at a house party in London. People often ask about whether the poem is a commentary on religion or something, and I'm like, No no no, please don't mistake it for that. It's just about a house party. And I thought the idea of Jesus being there forgiving people was funny.

Do you know the poet, Heather Christle? [ed. note: read Christle in EPOCH v71n2.] Her poems have this amazing, innocent voice to them. There’s one called “The Whole Thing is the Hard Part” and it goes like this: You have to live where the house lands on you. What else can you do? Your bones are all broken, and somebody loves you. Who is it? Tell me who loves you. Not as much as I do. I mean, I even built you a house, and found you. Why won't you live in it? There's something innocent and childish about her voice that, at times, becomes slightly threatening. I think she's definitely a big influence for me when it comes to the edges of realism and surrealism, and where they sort of blur.

Is it difficult to accommodate humour and play in poems that are also engaged with grief?

I remember when my friend Aaron launched his first book he was asked this exact question. His name’s Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, he’s a lovely poet, I studied with him in Boston back in 2019. And when he launched his first book he was asked this question, about humor and grief together. And he said, “I think the humor makes the grief griefier.” I'll never forget that.

He's a painter too, and maybe there's a painterly metaphor in that, as in, every painting has to have light and dark, you know, like, chiaroscuro or whatever they call it. The humor brings out the grief and vice versa. And I like the whiplash involved in juxtaposition when it’s shocking enough. I think it deepens the feelings of the poem. I've never wanted to write a poem that was, like, woe is me, you know? Or that's purely that, at least. I've always wanted to complicate that impulse instead. I mean, obviously sometimes you just feel sad and you wanna write a poem about it. But how can you complicate that feeling? I think playfulness is one way of doing that.

I'm interested in the sequence of prose poems that kind of hold the pamphlet together in the middle. What draws you to that form and is there something you feel prose poetry can accommodate that lineated poetry can't?

I don't know if I really have a theory about prose poems, and it's complicated because some of the prose poems in the pamphlet are doing very different things to the “No Weather” sequence you mentioned. But I suppose sometimes you're just writing a poem and know it needs to be a prose poem. I can't explain why you get that feeling. Or, often it happens the other way round. I'll start writing what I think is a prose poem and then I'm like, wow, I really need to take more control of the pacing and the pauses, and white space is so powerful for that.

I do like the way that the prose poem is quite inconsequential on the page. It's just a block of text. Charles Simic has a really good essay about the prose poem where he describes the prose poem’s “deceptively simple packaging.” [ed. note: He was quoting James Tate!] It's just a paragraph on the page, but it still manages to surprise you, you know? It still does the whole poetry thing of pulling a rabbit out of the hat or whatever, but it's just the block of text. I also love that there’s not much space to breathe in a prose poem. It can feel quite panicky sometimes. One of the poems in the pamphlet, “Housework”, definitely felt like a prose poem to me because I knew I wanted to make it feel hemmed in, so to speak.

There's a poet called Lila Matsumoto who I really like. She has a book called Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water, and her prose poems are really great because they're all like little stories. They're oddly formal in their voice and also quite comic and dark. And I like the idea of a poem as a story. A lot of my prose poems are stories, some more than others, but maybe it makes sense that the prose poem can accommodate that – if only because of the way we associate narrative with prose.

How do you see nature and technology intersecting in your poems?

I'm definitely gesturing towards the “nature poem” as a genre—one I want to engage with but also mess around with a little. I mean, there's literally a poem called “Pastoral” in the pamphlet, and the title poem is about horses—or it’s supposedly about horses. I guess I’m using the pastoral as a theme there rather than writing in that mode. But generally I think the poems are about relations, or how we relate to one another, as well as how we relate to “nature”—though I’m skeptical about that word. And in terms of technology, I guess it's inevitable that that would come into a collection interested in how we relate to one another and to the world we live in.

Tom Bailey. Photo by Neil Kidd.

I guess you're thinking about the “Pastoral” poem, right, with the repeated image of trying to get in touch with the sky and the trees via telephone? I like the telephone as a metaphor. It’s so fruitful for poetry I think, like the fact that people make recordings of themselves saying “Sorry I can’t get to the phone right now.” And the fact that you can put someone on hold. There's something weirdly poetic about being put on hold.

A lot of my favorite poets use telephone imagery all the time. I think someone should write an essay about Anne Carson and telephones. Nox. So many telephones! And WS Graham has so many great lines about telephones. He has this line, I think it's in “Malcolm Mooney's Land,” where he says “I am in a telephoneless, blue / Green crevasse and I can’t get out.” And that's the place from which he's writing his poem. I love that word, “telephoneless.”

And then there’s Frank O'Hara's Personism manifesto. He talks about the poem as a sort of telephone call. Or the possibility that instead of writing a poem, you could just call someone up and be like, hey this is what I have to say to you, you know. I guess in a way it’s a very traditional way of thinking about lyric address and the idea that a poem is directly addressing a particular thing or person. But maybe a poem is a bit safer because you don't have to risk the person not picking up, you know? You’ve just got to talk to yourself.

That segues nicely onto my next question. There’s a chattiness to the poems and I’m wondering whether you’re thinking about reading aloud as you write?

I kind of hate reading publicly because I get so nervous. I have to read off my phone at readings because if I hold paper you can see the paper shaking too much. But I do think about sound. The sound of the poem is so important. A lot of my poems are trying to develop an almost robotic voice, like the pastoral poem and the please do not touch or feed the horses poem. They both work through repetition, creating a flatness to the voice. I think rhythm's always important, even when you're trying to avoid it. Even when you're trying to deliberately write a poem that isn't mellifluous and really pretty-sounding, even then, the rhythm is still important. I think being blunt in a poem is its own rhythm. It’s a way to kind of undermine the rhetoric of a poem, in the same way that James Wright does when he says “I have wasted my life.”

To wrap up, could you tell us who your poetic influences are, and if you have any reading recommendations?

I love Emily Berry. I go back to her work all the time and I think that if you read my poems her influence is probably quite obvious. I really think she's brilliant.

Reading recommendations, I’ve already mentioned Lila Matsumoto and Heather Christle. I mean, some of your American audience have probably come across Natalie Shapiro’s work? I think she’s amazing. And there's a British poet called Selima Hill. She writes these really short one or two line poems that are often very dark. And then I guess, for older stuff, I just love mid-century American poetry: Elizabeth Bishop and Frank O'Hara and Robert Lowell. The big dogs.

Tom Bailey is a poet based in Edinburgh. His debut pamphlet, Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses, won the 2024 Poetry London Pamphlet Prize and was published by Poetry London in March 2025. His poems have been published in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Propel, bath magg, EPOCH, and elsewhere. He is also the editor of the online poetry magazine And Other Poems.