Thomas Prater
Thomas Prater lives in Saltville, Virginia, and is currently finishing a Ph.D. in comparative studies from Florida Atlantic University. He has taught undergraduate composition courses and other English courses at Virginia Tech and Emory & HenryCollege.
A! Mag: Do you remember the first poem you wrote? If so, tell us about it and why you wrote it.
Prater: It’s hard to remember specific poems, but I do remember early writing in school, maybe third or fourth grade, as the first time I began thinking of writing as something to do for its own sake. There were a number of teachers at our school — Jane Clark, my mother (Tracy Prater), Toni Yates, Susan Buchanan, Sheila Allison, among others — that had some training in local/regional literature and were very mindful to teach us reading and writing and history with that in mind. In that sense, people like Jim Wayne Miller or George Ella Lyon were having an influence on me years before I would ever read their work or know their names. In those years, we were encouraged to write about our lives and the place around us assuming they had meaning, and to keep creative journals. In fact, if there is one thing I remember about poetry from those years, it was my mother and Ms. Yates sitting me down and telling me that they didn’t want to “limit” myself to it—that I should write essays and stories and other kinds of things, too.
A! Mag: How did you get interested in writing poetry?
Prater: I was spoiled by good English teachers, from kindergarten to now, and they told me good stories and put interesting books in my hands and encouraged me to write. In elementary school, we read Belle Prater’s “Boy,” “Johnny Tremaine,” “The Watsons Go to Birmingham,” lots of others. Middle school teachers skipped us ahead and said, eighth grade is a perfectly fine time to read “Hamlet.” And so by 12th grade, I had read and been asked to engage pretty seriously with lots of the dangerous, “banned” books: Twain, Morrison, Wiesel, Homer, Esquivel, Dickinson, Whitman, Speigelman, Eliot, Yeats, Wright, Golding, Bronte, Kingsolver, Shakespeare, etc. I had been challenged to write article-length essays at a college level. Beyond that, I was raised by really thoughtful ministers in Lutheran and Presbyterian churches that weren’t afraid to use terms like “hermeneutics” and “exegesis” in sermons. So, it was kind of hard, in a way, for me not to be drawn to poetry.
A! Mag: What poets serve as inspiration?
Prater: Recently, I’ve been re-reading some work by Seamus Heaney, Joy Harjo, Nikki Giovanni, Jim Wayne Miller, Robert Bly and Ishmael Reed (among others) as part of my research and am really appreciating them and feeling challenged. For one thing,even when they get access to the institutional center, it’s clear that never forget that they come from working class backgrounds and that they’re writing in a conversation with everyday people. That they are in the positions they’ve found themselves in because of the love and help and intelligence of everyday people. That they themselves are and remain everyday people.
A! Mag: What subjects are inspiration for your poetry?
Prater: At the moment, I don’t know. I’ve been going through a period where most of my writing energy has been focused on a dissertation project, and part of that project has been really tearing apart and reassembling thoughts I’ve had both about “Appalachia” as an idea and “Appalachian” as an identity.
A! Mag: What is the importance of poetry in our world today?
That’s a much longer conversation, but the short version might be that I’m coming to think more and more that while there is real legitimacy in art of the local and immediate — which recognizes that the life in front of you matters and deserves your attempts to create art in response to it — rooting your conception of yourself too heavily in any set concept can be limiting, if not outright dangerous. Even if you’re doing it for all the right reasons — to counter stereotypes, to treat with dignity situations which are not always treated that way — if you’re writing from a place where you already (at some level) “have the answers,” that mindset is not great for an artist.
There’s a pretty bowdlerized quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but I think it’s an important one, nonetheless. (In the context from which it comes, he’s talking specifically about Christian churches; but I think it’s broadly applicable.) Roughly, he writes that “the person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, while the person who loves the people around them will create community.”
I’m trying, as failingly as I’m sure I do, to learn from that sentence, both in my poems and my daily life.
A! Mag: What poetic forms do you tend to use?
Prater: I remember, once, a lecture by the poet Frank X Walker, where he noted that when a “free verse” writer is doing their work correctly, they’re actually writing in a new form each time they come to the page. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that.
I do like to write pieces in tercets, with somewhere between seven and 12 syllables to the line, roughly but not exclusively iambic in cadence. That way the stanza and line breaks move me away from setting things in stone, and I’m writing in a way that suggests an emotive human voice without things falling into sing song.
A! Mag: What are some publications where your poetry can be found?
Prater: Locally, some of my pieces have been in Still: The Journal, The Hollins Critic and Roanoke Review, among others., that is, is one way of actively participating in your own life and engaging with the people around you, of taking both se
Luxuries
The tap waters of Lake Michigan.
The airspace over Lebanon and Palestine.
Being in the room when your husband goes.
Perhaps not knowing, not having to know,
how the insides of machines work
or how the materials are collected.
Tomorrow and Home, for certain.
Saying the truth without looking over
your shoulder. Thinking that if YOU
had been there, things would have been
different. Thinking things are different now.
