Interview with W. Todd Kaneko
- Interview with W. Todd Kaneko
In this interview conducted via email on the eve of the release of W. Todd Kaneko’s book The Dead Wrestler Elegies, Franklin K.R. Cline asks him to wrestle with reality, death, VHS tapes, and (most importantly) poetry.
Professional wrestling walks a balance between reality and fiction, and your poems often allude to the precarious relationship between the two in the sport. (Yes, I called it a sport!) How does the I of your poems walk this line? To what extent is your “I” a reflection of yourself, and how much of it is a pulled punch?
Wrestling balances the precariousness of reality and fiction by blurring them together. It’s a sport, but it’s also not a sport. It’s the story of a fight, masquerading as a fight. It’s scripted and predetermined but not fake. You have to want to suspend disbelief to fully engage with pro wrestling so the feuds and blood and conflict can be real for at least the length of a match.
I think something similar happens with poems—we know that we are not supposed to assume that the speaker and the author are the same person, yet we so often conflate the two because we crave some kind of truth in a poem. We want the speaker to be the author because fact seems a quick route to truth in an art form in which metaphor and circuitousness is a primary mode of operation.
But just because something is not factual, doesn’t mean it’s not true. That’s kind of how metaphor works, one thing becoming another thing in order to come to some new kind of meaning, right? The speaker is very much a reflection of myself, an alternate reality self overcome with grief for his father. My own father is still very much alive but he lives in Seattle and I live in Michigan—we live very distant from one another and sometimes I miss him a lot. I don’t see it so much as a pulled punch as it is a haymaker staged to concretize the conflict.
How often were you watching matches while writing this book? How does that sense of narrative and pacing work its way into your poems?
I’m a believer in the ways that obsession can drive a writer to investigate a subject. So when I was writing these poems, the project became an [End Page 135] excuse to become a full-blown fan again so I kind of went overboard. I watched a ton of pro wrestling: five to six hours of WWE a week plus Ring of Honor and sometimes Impact Wrestling, depending on the matches that night. I also watched a lot on YouTube and on DVD—I’m still watching a lot of wrestling on television because I’m still writing about wrestling: a new series of persona poems and a bunch of lyric essays, all requiring me to watch more pro wrestling than is probably healthy.
In terms of narrative and pacing, my graduate degree is in fiction writing, so I hope a reader will find the narrative, both within the poem and across the book, to be a well paced and worthy journey. A good wrestling match is paced at a certain speed so it can slow down or pick up speed depending on what the audience needs at a particular moment—it’s designed to draw the viewers into the world of conflict and invest in the outcome, which is precisely what I hope to create for a reader whenever I sit down to write, regardless of genre.
So often, wrestlers “call spots” to indicate what move is next, especially if they haven’t worked out the match beforehand a la Ricky Steamboat and Randy Savage at Wrestlemania III. Some are good at hiding it, and some aren’t. When you write, how often do you worry you’re controlling the rhetorical or image-driven moves you’re making, and how often do you let the poem more organically drive itself...
