The Radiance of Lookout Mountain: A Conversation with Tim Carrier

conducted by W.J. Herbert

Tim and I met several years ago when we were participants at the Vermont College Postgraduate Writers Conference. As we shared perspectives on our manuscripts, Tim helped me to access crucial elements missing from mine. Now in Lookout Mountain, I’m struck again by his ability to offer, not only physical and emotional truths, but a glimpse of the limitless. Tim agreed to speak with me recently about his new collection, a conversation that I hope will provide insight into the creative process of one of the most gifted poets writing today. 

WH: The specificity of time and space that you render throughout “Lookout Mountain” is often contrasted with a concept of past / present / future occurring simultaneously. In “For Karen O,” the speaker and his friends after a hot day in July are “…walking wilted down Sunset in shiny platforms & ruby-studded cut-offs,” while in “Plenty,” “The animal in the dark scrub where the moonlight hasn’t reached yet, says, // Handsome, soothe your sorrow. Now you’re having a better past.” Can you tell us more about the fluidity of time in your work?

TC:  It seems like even some of the physicists now agree that there is no linear time, and that ‘time’ is not at all what we’ve understood, or have been taught, that it is. Apparently everything across time is all happening at once. At this point in my life, I feel closer to experiencing this reality.

I have the awareness that I am here responding to this question in the first days of autumn, 2025 – and I am there, on Sunset Boulevard, on a warm summer night, at some time in the future or past. And I am in my little fake adobe house on the nightplain in La Plata, in the far north and almost west corner of New Mexico, in 1996, smoking a cigarette on the roof – with the two sentry cottonwoods near the front door to the house, standing by.

Joy Harjo, who has been one of my teachers, posted something on Facebook recently about how we, through our actions in the present, can actually change the past. That might be what I’m doing in Lookout Mountain.

WH: Your chapbook is dedicated to Christopher Gilbert, a poet you never met, but whom you refer as a “brother poet.” In the poem “Now” from Gilbert’s Walt Whitman-award winning “Across the Mutual Landscape,” [Graywolf Press, 1984,] the speaker hands to his longtime friend half of a luminous memory, as if the past could exist in the present as a material object. Does this poem and others in the collection share your interest not only in the concept of time, but in the connections between people?

TC: I love him so much. In the poems I call him Chris because that’s what he calls himself in his own poems. I didn’t know him personally before he died, in 2007, at age 57, and I didn’t know his poems for a long time.

Then in 2015, I went to a talk at Cave Canem given by Terrance Hayes and was floored by what Hayes shared from Gilbert’s poems. On my way home across the city that night, I detoured to the Strand and bought the one copy they had— the only book he published in his lifetime. I’ve been in heaven with him ever since.

To answer your question: Yes. I love everything about Gilbert’s poems and I do feel like he is my poet-brother. Certainly I’m interested in time, as we’ve been talking about, but connections between people, and connections with non-human people (animals, trees, mountains), are also very important to me. I am more at home with animals & trees & mountains than I am with most humans. But I am totally at home with Christopher Gilbert and with the presence of “Chris” in my poems.

Paul Éluard said, “There is most certainly another world, but it is inside this one.” Chris was (is) always writing from that place. I try to be there with him.

WH: The aboriginal concept of “songlines” includes ancestral figures of enormous proportions, and in In the Footsteps of the Traveler, [U. of Manitoba Press, 2025,] Chris Cannon describes Northern Dene traditions in which constellations comprise a single “traveler” who straddles the entire sky. You express a similar concept in Lookout Mountain:

“And in one of the many time-worlds on the patio 
in the cold & dark beneath the long black field of trees, & sky,
passing by, tall as trees, giant people made of light.”

Do these and other cosmologies influence your writing?

TC: I know very little about the concept of songlines (which I understand to be a European / Western word that may have little to do with Aboriginal cosmologies – though I do love it as a word) – but I am interested in all cosmologies. As a white settler, I practice care in what and how I study – not all cultural information is for my eyes.

But as an American whose family lines are almost entirely Irish, I feel comfortable studying Irish language and lore. That language and its knowledge, including its starscape, live inside me. I’m still very much a beginner but that study has for sure influenced the poems in Lookout Mountain.

WH: Parts of New Mexico, where you currently live, are ideal for viewing the cosmos under dark sky conditions. Do you think your poetry is influenced by what you see in the night sky?

TC: Oh yes. The stars are our very close relatives and my poems come directly out of the night sky. They just barely pass through my body!

WH: At the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), you studied with Joy Harjo. You have also said that you admire the work of Jean Valentine, Layli Long Soldier, Alice Notley, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, and Nathaniel Mackey. Is there an essential element in their writing that inspires you, or are their influences on your work distinctly different?

TC: Joy has taught at IAIA, but I was actually lucky to work with her in small manuscript workshops at the Taos Summer Writers Conference. Through her poems, she had been my close teacher for a long time. James Baldwin and Adrienne Rich and Joy were my first guides.

In each of those Taos workshops, there were just five of us poets plus Joy. She took us through our manuscripts poem by poem, and it was like she was reading each poem’s palm. She knew exactly what was happening and where the energy was going.

And yes, I love all the poets you mention. I think these are the greatest American poets of our era – also Brenda Hillman, and of course Christopher Gilbert, June Jordan, and Leslie Marmon Silko. They’re my poetry ancestors and relatives. Poetry lineage is very important to me.

I was very lucky to know Jean Valentine as a teacher and beloved friend. She was my closest friend for a time – and my Maid of Honor when I got married! Jean taught me more than anyone else, just through her work and our long afternoons talking at the high table in her kitchen. We disagreed a lot and it could be tough (Aries / Taurus), but that was an important part of the learning, for me. I hear myself talking to her out loud every day.

I think I would say that what these poets have in common for me is they are working from tremendous depth of feeling; they seem to have no regard for the fashion of the times; and they work in deep connection to their own souls.

WH: In “Warm Night Stars,” the speaker says: “I chose this world for solace.” He later remarks: “You are trying to tell me something about my heart.” …” The poem concludes: “all night our hands make this memory map / in the dark.” Recognizing our myopia as a species in the face of catastrophic problems we’ve created—how are you able to write so intensely about a speaker who clearly loves the world?

TC: I feel overwhelmed by your question because it is perhaps the core question of my life right now: What is the purpose of this suffering that we are experiencing in our separate bodies and collectively? And I appreciate the question so much. (I appreciate you so much.)

I can say that I spent the last five years in what I crudely think of now as spiritual bootcamp. For most of that time, we were living on a small farm in a rural area between two ranges of mountains – in a valley that’s held like a bowl between the mountains.

I’m sure every location is a vortex of some kind of energy. And that particular energy was a teaching energy for me at that time. We were living through Trump round one, and the first years of the pandemic, and then the devastation of Gaza, and an election in which there were no “good guys.” And I was writing and writing the poems of Lookout Mountain. These are not, I’m sure to the eyes of some readers, political poems. But trust me, they are.

Through that period of time, I gave up my attachment to this human identity. And I kind of forsook the world – this material human world, I mean. And I made a kind of peace, and decided I still want to live this lifetime, and I recommitted to the soul-practice of love. Though humans test me on this commitment every day.

WH: And yet, what makes your manuscript most human as well as magical for me is the way you juxtapose physical minutiae with the “aleph to ylem” of our own existence. In the poem “The Hunter,” your speaker says: “…the leaves are little boats, tipped & cracking / on the ground. // All night the animals move in patterns / between the longing planes. // All night my heavy breath breaks in the dark.” Was it difficult to write these vast transitions and make them seem so effortless?

TC: It was not difficult at all [lol.] But only because I didn’t know I was doing it!

All I’m really interested in, in life, is the experience of my soul. I, as my soul, still can’t believe I’m having this experience and I don’t understand why I’m having it.

My most recent therapist – who I lost going on two years ago, to Zionism – said to me once or maybe more than once, “Embodiment isn’t at all what you bargained for.” And that feels like perhaps the truest thing about this lifetime, for me.

WH: In times as fraught as these, Lookout Mountain is truly a balm. Will the full-length manuscript you’re working on expand on this collection? Or move in a different direction?

TC: I love that you used the world balm. When Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s book A Treatise on Stars came out just as the pandemic was approaching, my friend Layli Long Soldier used that word to describe it. I don’t know that my poems can do what Mei-Mei’s do, but I like to try.

The poems in Lookout Mountain are drawn from a full-length manuscript called Ryan – and yes, I think it’s expansive. It’s formatted for a larger-than-usual page because many of the poems require the space of a full landscape. I can’t wait for it to be a book.

My new poems, what I’m working on now, are almost all connected to the people of Gaza since my attention is there for most of the day, every day.