DAVID TROUPES
About David Troupes
David Troupes was born in 1979 and grew up in the town of Hopkinton, Massachusetts, a leafy place with good woods and swamps for wandering. He studied English at the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts, and then Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh, gaining along the way a wife and a satisfyingly varied job history. His comic art appears regularly in at least one Vermont newspaper, and has been featured in periodicals in Sweden, Portugal and the US – see www.buttercupfestival.com for more information. He currently lives in West Yorkshire, where he works in social housing.
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
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.
And it was around that time, as an undergrad, that I began to realize that my accumulated years of wandering around the woods near my home might have given me a thing or two worth saying. 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, and the way these can influence a willing soul. Ted Hughes I came to several years 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 this work in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?
Parsimony came together from several different strands or batches of poems written across four or five years, and it was only in the process of sitting down with them all, looking for common ground and larger goings-on that something resembling a collection began to take shape. I like to think of my poems as the negotiations of the cell with its body – here I am, the tiny thing, laying out my enquiries of the whole and expecting an answer. But the answers come in the process, in the doing. So each poem enacts an encounter, makes its little groping in the dark, and it requires and act of faith, on the part of both the author and the reader, that these will accumulate into meaning and significance.
Some of those enquiries, those gropings, concern the direction the world is heading in: an apocalyptic, almost biblical energy jumps out at me in several of the poems. Others examine places or encounters from my old wooded haunts in Massachusetts, and have a more innocence-to-experience quality, in which are perhaps the seeds of the later apocalyptic vines. Another sequence deals with the very human, very quotidian difficulties of hard days, emotional struggles and married life. The fascination and challenge was to come up with a single structure, a rising and falling action, which would accommodate all of this. It was important to me that the book hold out a strand of hope and clarity at the end – of clarity without explanation, if that makes sense.
How do you go about creating your voice on the page?
Can’t say that I ever worry about this sort of thing. I think that if you try too hard to “create your own voice,” you end up with an artificial and off-putting style. The important thing is to create durable art, an object which can withstand enquiry, with its own bones and its own brain.
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. Recently I got through The Opposite of Cabbage by Rob A. Mackenzie, which I very much enjoyed. I have a great love of American comic strips and return to my Calvin and Hobbes and Krazy Kat books often. And I always enjoy re-reading a Beckett or Hardy novel.
