Timothy Kercher’s three poems, The Travelling, Sasquatch, and Nose Box, appear in Fringe Issue 23.  Assistant poetry editor Nellie Bellows interviewed Tim by email.

Sasquatch seems to be a popular figure these days. Are you a believer?

I’ve always been curious, ever since doing a research report on Big Foot when I was in sixth grade. As a backpacking counselor for teenagers, I used to tell a story of how my grandfather said he was half Sasquatch—I told this story to get the kids to sleep, but some believed it.

This particular poem came after listening to a professor give a lecture on how he believes in Sasquatch and was searching for proof. The original title of this poem was “How to Catch Sight of Sasquatch for Dummies,” which I came up with before writing the poem. Maybe that title is an indication of my lack of belief. But I do want to believe. . .

Who are you currently reading?

On my bedstand: Russell Edson’s The Tormented Tree, Orhan Pamuk’s The New Life, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Tadeusz Rozewicz’s New Poems.

Of your three poems in Fringe, I admit that “Nose Box” is my favorite.  It’s raw, and I love how tactile the imagery is. Can you tell us a little bit about how this poem came about?

I had been reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and in the wonderful opening, the father of the main character, Saleem Sinai, has a prominent nose, which is why I had noses on my mind. But I don’t remember the actual composition—it was a poem written late at night, one, I remember, that surprised me in the morning. Sometimes those are the best kind.

What do you want readers to take away from your work?

Maybe the best reason for writing was told to me by Zviad Ratiani, one of the Georgian poets I translate: “I write to force myself to understand my life.” And maybe this is why I read, too. I’m not answering the question, I know…maybe the answer is as simple as Robert Frost’s idea that a poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”

I know you’re currently living in Georgia. What’s the poetry culture like there? Can you tell us a little bit about living there, and fill us in on the poetry scene?

Actually, I was living in the Republic of Georgia for the past four years. I just arrived in Kyiv, Ukraine, where I am beginning a new teaching assignment. That said, I’m going to miss Georgia, especially the poetry and its poets. My wife and I moved there five years ago to teach at an international school. We met as Peace Corps volunteers in Mongolia, so this desire to get back overseas was not surprising. Georgia is a wonderful little country, despite its recent problems, most notably the August 2008 conflict with Russia.

I got involved in translating poetry while doing my MFA critical thesis. I quickly learned that the poetry of Georgia is something beautiful and unique. Georgia has been called “the mountains of poetry”by some, owing to the high esteem Georgians hold for poetry and poets. It is even said that there are still people who live in the high mountains who speak back and forth to each other in poetry. In Tbilisi, the poetry scene is certainly alive—although, like just about anywhere, poets struggle.

You’re currently translating an anthology of Georgian poetry. How did this come about?

I owe the genesis of the project to Richard Jackson, my professor at Vermont College of Fine Arts, who suggested I work on Georgian translation. I began primarily to find a new way to interact with a culture I felt far away from. It was the perfect topic—I was introduced to some incredible poetry, but more than that, to some incredible people, and I got to experience Georgian culture in ways I hadn’t before.

I’ve always seen poetry as something subversive and an act of advocacy—it gives voice to what one sees as important. I believe Georgian poetry is important—one of the many wonderful, diverse voices of our world. I probably will continue to translate it even after these projects are finished.

Has working on translation influenced your own writing?

Yes, immensely. It’s not that my poetry has started to take on characteristics of the poets I’ve been translating, but to translate a poem is to have an intimate experience with that poem. It can’t but influence you in one way or another. I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that translating has helped me become a more competent editor. When I’m translating a section of a poem from a poet whom I know is good, I have faith that the right words can be found in English.

And usually this faith pays off. I’ve noticed that I can use something akin to this faith in my own poetry—when I’m working on a draft, I know that the right words are out there. I just need to have the perseverance to find them.

How does a poem start for you? Tell me a bit about your process.

My friend, the poet Martin Balgach, says that my poetry comes from “a stuttery place of existential restlessness.” I explore this place both intentionally and nonintentionally as I write, but I don’t think it’s where I begin most of the time.

The one thing I could always do well was imagine—as a kid, I would lock myself away playing out complex dramas with army men or Star War figures, and I think my desire to write is intimately connected with this. I love to fiddle with words, and it’s the closest thing I can do to playing Star Wars without revealing how much my inner life is like that of a child’s. There’s a million ways to compose a poem, and I’m always looking for new approaches.

I love the Christopher Morley quote, “The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.” And maybe this is at the heart of what I like to do—put myself in situations where I’m accessing some open door to the imagination. Often this looks like insomnia, or is accessed by writing late at night, by drinking beer, or by just reading stacks of poetry or mythology.

I love waking up and not quite remembering what I wrote the night before, and then reading it and finding that I have surprised myself (again, this points back to Frost’s little pieces of wisdom). I believe the best poetry is “language driven” poetry, where when you start to write it, you have no idea where it’s going to take you—like Hugo’s “triggering town” idea, where you need to find a place that you don’t know too intimately to trigger the poem, then let the language left over.

What’s the story behind your bio profile pic?

I was on a school camping trip, and we were heading home¸ back to Tbilisi, and had stopped for lunch. The little restaurant, which was not too far from Gori, the birthplace of Stalin, had this cardboard Stalin hidden on their back porch. I found it and had one of my students take a photo of me and Josef.

Many people in Georgia, especially in the countryside, still consider Stalin to be a great man. In fact, if you go through his museum in Gori, you’ll find not one discouraging word about anything he did. Stalin himself built the museum, preserving, in typical Stalin fashion, his birth home, which he lived in for just four years, by wiping out all the homes for blocks around it and then building a concrete Soviet mausoleum over the top of it.

Who are your favorite poets and or influences?

I never wanted to be a poet. I found poetry by way of working in Bosnia as a relief worker right after the war in 1996. When I got back to the States, I started reading all the Serbian/Bosnia/Croatian poets I could find. That’s when I rediscovered Charles Simic, who is originally from Serbia. His poetry has influenced me greatly, along with the work of Mark Strand, Vasko Popa, Larry Levis, Maya Sarishvili, Besik Kharanauli, Franz Wright, Jack Gilbert, Russell Edson, Ruth Stone, Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson. . . and the list goes on.