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DAVID TROUPES: THE
MAKING OF A POET
Hopkinton native's poetry mirrors reality
by Elizabeth
Eidlitz
For the rest of his thirty years, in becoming a poet, David has been marrying words to the visible world. He writes about Saddle Hill, “my favorite hilltop at the floor of the amber halls of evening,” and a snapping turtle in a local brook where “the creature moved away upstream, / Green-black under the water, / gliding its bony mountain/ effortlessly through the flood.”
Critics of his first book, Parsimony, recently published in Scotland, have noted his ‘poetry of watchfulness, of immersion in wilderness filtered through a “wonderfully lyrical sensibility.”
“Most of my poems come from moments I've lived or experiences I've had: an image, a whole scene, the mood which accompanied a certain walk, whatever makes me want to put pen to paper later on,” David explains.
“These sort of real-life kernels open doors to that swirling inner life of half-formed ideas which fill my head, and everyone else's too, and that's the real work of the poem: once begun, it allows me a space to explore whatever's been nagging my brain.
“I don't make anything up. I wrote a short poem about an uneventful encounter with a coyote (we just looked at each other and then it trotted off). Had I let myself get away with making the encounter up I couldn't have trusted whatever ideas that encounter led me to.
“I try never to write a poem with some purpose in mind, some meaning which I want the poem to convey like a fortune baked into a cookie.
“The world is a complicated place and poetry needs to reproduce that complication and provide a different perspective on it, to encourage thought. Otherwise it's just a form of propaganda, handing readers the poet's conclusions instead of asking them to reach their own.” READ MORE
David first wrote poetry during his last two years at Hopkinton High
School. “Tricia McGonigle, my English teacher, set aside
“Not until my junior year at UMass Amherst did I begin to hit upon anything resembling a mature style, or realize that my accumulated years of wandering around the woods near my home might have given me a thing or two worth saying.
“The best way to learn to write poetry is to read lots of poetry, says David, who admires Wallace Stevens, William Carlos William, Paul Muldoon, Ted Hughes, and Jean Valentine. His first non-student publication was in a British journal, Other Poetry. “After that, having submitted to U.S. journals for 4 years with no luck, Nimrod International, an American journal, accepted three poems and it went on from there.
David chose a one-year Creative Writing course at University of Edinburgh for graduate study. “American MFA programs are longer, and some have snobby and cut-throat reputations. I have no interest in grubbing for teaching posts, awards and fellowships. I’m content with my non-academic, non-literary day job in social housing, and in my head poetry is completely divorced from income.
He also loves American comic strips, returning to his Calvin and Hobbes and Krazy Kat books often. To view David’s comic art, as well as comments on poetry, see <www.buttercupfestival.com>
David and his English wife currently live in West Yorkshire. “I miss the New England countryside a lot, achingly sometimes,” David admits, “but my current job gives me six weeks off a year, which makes finding time to write, and to keep both the British and American halves of our family in our lives, much easier.”
To reach Elizabeth Eidlitz, call 978-369-5142 or e-mail her at eidlitz@gmail.com |
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January
17, 2010 — As a child, raised in Hopkinton, David Troupes was
introduced to nature in a backpack carried by his father, a
surveyor. At three, according to his mother, he stared at alphabet
characters. 
many Friday classes for us to work on creative writing. The
importance she placed on this surely had an effect on me, the way
she took it seriously, and passed around her own writing as we
passed around ours.