I’ve been hearing about Bob Sykora, his work, and the things he gets up to for years. He was in the cohort that left the spring before I started an MFA at UMass Boston, and everyone spoke so fondly of him and that crew, of the great parties and readings they put on, of their excellent qualities as writers and as people. I admit: I felt like I had somehow missed out. But fast forward a (good) number of years and Bob pops up again, this time as a podcaster, co-hosting “The Line Break,” a poetry (and basketball?) podcast, interviewing another poet I’d been reading at the time. (It’s a marvelously small world.) Nowadays, Bob also teaches at community college, edits with Garden Party Collective, and curates the KC Poetry Calendar (which I’ve pinned for the next time I go visit my Kansas City family). He’s the author of the chapbook I Was Talking About Love –You Are Talking About Geography (Nostrovia! 2016), and, more recently, a damn good book of poetry called Utopians in Love, his first full-length. Being nosy – wanting to finally meet this elusive character I’ve heard mentioned over and over for years – I managed to get in touch under the pretext of talking about the book. Bob is just as smart and sweet and wonderful as advertised, and we had a great conversation about road trips, love, discovery, poetic form, and, of course, “utopia.” What follows is that conversation, edited for clarity and length.
To start with the Obvious Question: How did you end up writing a book about utopias?
I was taking a class on the “slippery definition of lyric poetry” in the MFA program at UMass Boston, and we were doing work in the rare books room at the Boston Public Library – which is cool as hell – and at the time, they had not digitized the collection in the rare books room, so you had to page through the old school catalog cards. I don’t remember what research I was actually supposed to be doing for the class, but I came across a card that said “Brook Farm American Utopia.”
This was the spring of 2016 and, if you remember, the presidential primaries were so wild, so distinctly weird. I remember thinking, “is this really the country I’m living in?” And so seeing the word “utopia” next to “America” broke my brain a little bit. I went down a Google rabbit hole that night. I did not do the homework I was supposed to be doing, but opened up this whole can of stuff that I had never heard of.
Especially now that I have a book about it, so many people are like, “Did you know about this utopia? Or this one?” And I knew about none of this stuff. Where was this history?
One of the really interesting things about this book is its structure and, I would argue, narrative arc. I’m curious about how you got there. Was there a plan from the start, or was the structure more emergent?
It definitely wasn’t super planned, but I think the structure helped me kind of make some sense of what I was doing. So much of this book was propelled by the poet Jill McDonough, who was my professor at the time and had done a fellowship at the Boston Athenaeum years ago, and she encouraged everyone in our program to apply. When I got one of those fellowships, I realized that I had come up with a really cool idea in my proposal, but one that I was so not prepared to do.
I found myself doing this research, and I was dealing with personal heartbreak, so I was trying to write into both of those things at once, but, as you know, one of the cool things about living in New England is the pretty immediate and physical access to history and these historical places, so the narrative really started to make sense to me once I decided to visit some of the sites I was learning about. I did the ones that it was easy for me to get to first, but it turned out that the order I was visiting them in matched the shape that the book was taking anyway, so it turned into a serendipitous kind of organizing principle.
Brook Farm was the initial place of interest, so I made that one happen first, and then the Shakers and Fruitlands are at the same site, so I saw those next. Oneida was further away, so I had to wait until I had more free time.
The very last poem in the book is about visiting the last two shakers and going to one of their services. That trip came after a lot of the book was written, but driving to see these last two living figures of the history I was obsessed with, it felt like a natural place to end, like I could just feel there was really a narrative emerging. Whether or not there is some revelation or change in the poet by the end of the book, I was experiencing a change in that moment in my real life, so it felt like it had to be where the book had to end.
I love a road trip book. And I loved this one! But. I’ve lived in Boston long enough to feel a little chagrined reading about how the poet (or you, yourself?) was falling in love while “shout[ing] Fuck Boston over and over / at the early moon” (“The Sky Doesn’t Have Any Answers”). Suffice to say, the city plays a big role in the book, and not just because most of the historical utopias you look at were nearby. Can you tell me a little bit about how that all fit in?
The very real answer is that I was grumpy about being in Boston almost the entire time I was there, but then the second I left I was immediately like, ah “We had a good thing going, I could have stuck around there longer.”
For me, there’s no gap between the speaker and myself; it feels like it’s me through and through. It’s not that every story is “true,” but the speaker is me. And I think a big thing that I was discovering through the process of writing poems and putting the book together is how much pressure I was putting on my romantic relationships, and how that collided and got mixed in with everything else. The city is so much a part of that time in my life and that relationship that they’re permanently stuck together for me; I’m not sure I can actually undo that logic.
And that’s part of why the road trip narrative made so much sense – and driving places has been a part of my writing forever – I have trouble completely detaching a place from the memories that are associated with it. The memories become the place, and I think writing about either kind of crystalizes that tie.
One of the things along those lines that I found interesting was the way that mirrored the documentary aspects of the book; one of my favorite things about it is that it’s simultaneously engaging with documentary poetics while also being, almost literally, self-documenting. How were you approaching the source texts?
It was totally one of those things that I made up as I went along. The fellowship I had at the Athenaeum was so great because the people I was working alongside were all “real historians.” I quickly learned that I couldn’t actually do “historian work,” because the level of dedication and reading and triple verifying everything was so beyond the scope of my project, but I got excited about the idea of having some sort of document about of these parts of history that I hadn’t known about, and at the same time documenting the emotional experience of actually doing the work. It coincided with my real life emotional experiences, experiences that weren’t supposed to have anything to do with doing research.
I also wanted to hit at how hard it was to make a poetry project out of that. A lot of my first instincts were to use the language that I was finding in, for example, the constitutions of these historical utopias. One of the earliest things, that is very much not in the book because it was very bad, was taking words from Thomas Moore’s Utopia and trying to string something together, and that led me so short. And it turned into trying to do persona poems and, though I found some really fruitful moments there, I also really quickly found myself uncomfortable in that space, thinking, “I don’t know how much I want to actually do that.”
There’s definitely a few that made it in there, but something that was so important to me was capturing how much I admired these communities, even in the ways they failed really badly, doing creepy things and doing things wrong. There were so many consequences of trying to do something different that went really awry. I wanted to explore the fullness of all their ideas, good and bad, especially the good ideas that came up short.
As we move from utopia to utopia across the course of the book, the good ideas did seem to hold a certain attraction, narratively, almost as a self-organizing principal, or as a means of self-renewal, especially thinking about poems like “I Have My First Vision of Utopia in the Shower One Morning,” “Crying on the Exercise Bike While Watching the Great British Bake Off,” and “Self-Portrait as Utopian” (to pick a handful). Was this structural twinning something you were thinking about as you were putting the book together, or did that naturally mirror what was going on in your life at the time?
Definitely a little bit of both.
It’s funny to be pretty far removed from the composing of it at this point, though I’m slowly but surely being able to articulate some of the thematic and philosophical underpinnings that I definitely wasn’t aware of at the time. I couldn’t do the version of this book that’s completely detached from me.
The starting instinct had something to do with how much I felt like I couldn’t imagine a new life or what my life would look like in the context of the end of that relationship, having a broken heart, so I said, “let’s look at these people who did radically rethink their lives.”
I had to keep coming back to where I was at with it and what I was going through. My favorite thing about having a project like this is that when I put on the “utopia goggles,” I was seeing it everywhere, everything I looked at was speaking to it. Every experience could somehow fit in, and I think that’s where a lot of those kinds of poems came from.
There’s a lot of reworking of themes throughout the book, where you have poems that cover similar ground, whether structurally, or by virtue of their titles, etc. I’m thinking of, for example, the ‘vision of utopia’ poems, the “Visiting Utopia”s numbers one through five, or the variations on the etymology of the word “utopia” itself (e.g., “E-U-Topia (Good Place)”, “U-Topia (No Place)”). Were these planned mini-series, or another thing you discovered as you worked through the book?
I’m trying to remember which would have come first. Probably the shower one [“I Have My First Vision of Utopia in the Shower One Morning”], and that came out of, again, seeing utopia everywhere. I wanted to write a poem about the Dr. Bronner’s bottle, and all the crazy text printed on it. I started with a lot of that language and eventually ended with just three or four words at the end of the poem. I feel like the other two “vision of” poems were originally more their own things, but I started seeing some connections there, and I wanted there to be some sort of recursive element to the book, especially with the “visiting utopia” poems.
There’s some level of failure in all of them, whether it was not living up to a new idea or being able to fully grasp it. What felt important though was this journey and not having an end-point in mind. I got to the last visit and wasn’t even sure of what I learned. I knew that something had happened, but I don’t know that I had taken away a lesson or a moral.
And with Brook Farm, for example, the thing is that there’s nothing there. There’re a couple buildings, but there’s no historical museum or anything, there’s no one to talk to you. It was just a lovely day walking around a cemetery, and that had to be a poem, which then set off thinking that there must be some sort of arc here, something I could do to form these experiences.
You manage to sneak in quite a wide range of forms in the book. Many of what I’ll call the more “documentary” poems show off your skills with traditional forms and meter, and then the more “personal narrative” poems allow themselves to explode, getting almost into concrete territory at times. So please: tell me more about this, and how you were thinking about it as you went along.
Part of it is that I think anyone who comes out of the UMass Boston MFA program, especially under Jill on the poetry side, becomes a bit of a formalist. And they’re not stringent, or obsessed with traditional forms, but we’ve all at least tried our hand at it and found some value from it. And as much as I’m interested in these communities as being radical for their time, such a central thing for me as I was reading over and over again, was this tension between tradition and progress, as they were trying something new.
And as much as they were trying to do something new, Brook Farm was such a good starting point because alongside the utopian thinking, it was also just some rich people from Boston. Most of their experiment was traditional, was going back to saying, “let’s live together, let’s share some stuff, let’s do farming together.”
I saw this thematic thing happening where each community I visited felt a little bit more radical, and a little bit more like they were shifting things and trying to do something new. I wanted there to be a similar progression through the book, starting with some more traditional forms, mostly some sonnets, thinking about meter really closely, and then have it slowly feel like it’s unraveling a little bit, feel like form becomes less and less important. So when it comes back to me/the speaker into the present day, especially by the second to last poem, I wanted to say something about how we’ve come so far from form and tradition.
I was reading Frank Stanford’s “The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You,” which is a big long poem, no periods, and he’s doing a persona the whole time, and as I was reading that, this thing [“Various Other Utopias”] just comes out of me. And I really loved having all my work thinking about utopias and form and tradition culminate in this thing that felt so far away from where I’d started.
You then return to form at the very end in “Visiting Utopia #5”. Aside from the nice symmetry of being back on the road again — mirroring the poem that opens the collection — what made that seem like the right place to end?
Again, the short easy answer was it was the last stop. There were no more stops after that, and while there were definitely poems that were written well after, it was the last actual stop I would do at the places I was talking about in the book.
It was also the only utopia that lasted, if we want to consider the Shakers utopians. I drove up there and went to their service. It was such a cool day. And this was in January of 2017, so the heartbreak that propelled the book was no longer fresh, I was getting ready to graduate and move, so I had this sense that the changes going on in my personal life were also going to be reflected in the poems. Even if I didn’t have a full grasp on what the book was going to be, or if it would amount to anything, it was at that place that it seemed like I could look up and see that oh, I’ve got something here.
One part of the project for me that got really exciting and has really come to life, as I’ve started talking to people about it and especially when teaching utopian-themed Comp II classes, is how there’s so much this impression of utopia equals perfect, or a perfect world, and because perfect doesn’t exist, this world doesn’t exist, and we’re never going to get there, and so on. And what’s implied in all this is a relationship to the way that, culturally, we talk about failure, and how sometimes we shouldn’t try a thing because it’s bound to fail or because we know it’s going to fail, and that’s so self-defeating and so upsetting.
So much of my own interest in the concept of utopia and in utopian thinkers is how it’s actually about process and reaching for the thing, trying to find something new via the reaching. As I was reading about all these utopias, it was a lot about learning about how I wanted to operate in the world going forward, and I think I got a lot out of their failures.
I’m working on this essay about utopian poetry, and one of the things I come to is, if there is such thing as a “utopian poetry,” I think my book’s a failure. I don’t think it does that. But I only learned that I’m even interested in, or even desire a utopian poetry, because I wrote this book that failed. I may have even very much failed in finding a “utopian poetry,” but reaching for the new, or the possible, is so important.