AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: All There Is
 

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, All There Is.

Tom Sleigh is almost 70 years old, and you notice very quickly when you meet him that he doesn’t seem to have wasted a single minute; something he calls his “romance with experience.” To give you the briefest summary of that experience: 

As a child, he lived in Texas, Utah, California. His parents first operated a drive-in movie theater—he and his brother would often fall asleep curled up on the backseat, the sounds of Westerns coming through the car stereo—and when television put an end to that, his father became a rocket fuel engineer, and his mother, a whip-smart “one-woman Renaissance,” to use his words, became a high school English teacher. It’s to her he owes his love of language, the drive to write, to live with books. But she struggled, his mother, with mental health, and at the time, treatment was limited to stints in an asylum and rounds of electroshock therapy. None of this was easy on the family, of course, and Tom Sleigh reacted by throwing himself into life, into experience, with even more abandon. At 16, he briefly ran away and joined a rag-tag outfit of treasure hunters. In his 20s, he went to live in the jungle of southern Mexico, as something of an anthropologist. And much later, in his 50s, after a lifetime of writing and teaching poetry, he became a journalist, reporting from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, Iraq, mostly on the lives of refugees. 

When he writes, he writes with achy precision. He zooms in so close that moral stridencies tend to collapse. He shows you rather: the tender kiss a young man places on his sister’s cheek, very early in the morning, before going off and blowing himself up—a suicide bomber. He shows you the toddler with the empty stare, so close to starvation, but, who revives after getting a nutrition bar and starts playing with its silver wrapper. He writes about the mild, studious engineer, soft-spoken, like his father, who nevertheless was there, kicking and beating the Libyan dictator Gaddaffi to death.

Now, Tom Sleigh has a new poetry collection out, titled The King’s Touch, and I biked over to his apartment in Brooklyn to talk about it. But it didn’t take long for us to veer off topic. We had only just sat down in his little office in the back, and I apologized to him for canceling our first appointment. The reason was that I’d gotten some new psych medication and the side effects were no joke.

Helena de Groot: And I couldn’t really think or understand what I was reading, let alone ask smart questions. 

Tom Sleigh: Oh good God, yeah. 

Helena de Groot: So I thought, let’s—

Tom Sleigh: Let’s wait! (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Let’s wait, you know, before you get the wrong idea. 

Tom Sleigh: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, I have, you know, sort of very intimate experience of that with my mother. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: So, yeah, I know the territory well. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Well, the medication has changed. I mean, it’s gotten a lot better, you know. 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah. No, there was no medication on those days. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: You sort of sort of did what you did. (LAUGHING) You know. She did fine. She did fine. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: You know. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah, she seems like—I mean, from your writing, she seems like a really interesting person. 

Tom Sleigh: Yes. Yeah, yeah. She died about a month ago. 

Helena de Groot: I’m so sorry. 

Tom Sleigh: Oh, that’s okay. 

Helena de Groot: That is very close by. 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah, very close. It’s very close. I’m a bit … I don’t know how to think about it. It was a very strange death. 

Helena de Groot: Why was it strange? 

Tom Sleigh: Well, she took her own life, in the sense of medically assisted suicide. So I was actually out in Carls—not Carlsbad, yeah Carlsbad. 

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. With her, you mean.

Tom Sleigh: Yeah, with her. Yeah. You know, she drank it down in one hand and I held the other one. So, it was a very strange—she was 97. Had all her marbles. Quite a remarkable woman. But, anyway.

Helena de Groot: And were you a part of the decision or did she do that alone? 

Tom Sleigh: Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, we went over it and round and round and round and round, you know, and she finally just had had it. You know?

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Tom Sleigh: And, you know, the circumstances around my mother’s last few hours were quite mad. You know, there were, like, 13 people in the room. 

Helena de Groot: Oh, wow. 

Tom Sleigh: And it was incredibly strange. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: And, you know, she was—had a wonderfully detached, ironic sense of humor. And, you know, and the whole thing was excruciating and horrible. And I hated every minute of it. And yet at the same time, I had to admire the—the doctor walked in and she said, “Ah! You’re the person who’s going to do me in.” And his response was, because he immediately got her sense of humor, said, “No, my dear, you’re going to do yourself in.”

Helena de Groot: That’s amazing. 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah. But it was strange. She met this guy with the hospice who brought in these Tibetan singing bowls, which I thought, “This is going to be unbelievably dippy.” (LAUGHS) And what happened was, you know, they were actually rather beautiful. He kept in the background, and it sort of calmed everybody down.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: And then, you know, once she took the hemlock ... you know, I remember the doctor saying to her, you know, “You’ll drink this down, it’ll take two to four minutes for you to fall asleep, and then anywhere between 20 minutes and five hours for you to die.” And my mother said, “Well, in that case, you’ll have to forgive me if I snore.” (LAUGHS) Anyway, it’s a long story, but I won’t go on and on and on. But it was a very … anyway, it’s very fresh.

Helena de Groot: Has your mother’s death interrupted your writing habit?

Tom Sleigh: Well, you know, the problem is for me, Helena, is I had committed to an honors keynote talk. I committed to writing an essay on Derek Walcott. I had committed to writing a long piece on Christopher Logue, Michael Longley, and Alice Oswald’s version of The Iliad. And of course, all the deadlines were due. And I’d spent time out in California taking care of my mother and making the arrangements and getting (LAUGHING) the funeral home guy there. It’s just, the guy showed up, he had a huge beard, soup stains all over his jacket, you know. 

Helena de Groot: Oh, no!

Tom Sleigh: And I loved it. He looked horribly hung over. He’s like an immense guy. And he just said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” And I just thought, “Would you like an aspirin? Or an Advil? You look really hung over, pal.” (LAUGHING)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING)
Tom Sleigh: You know, it was really hysterical. And then, you know, I had the experience of helping him get her on the gurney and all that. So, long answer to your question is, I’ve had no time not to do work.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: And the fact of the matter is is, when I’m writing—everybody talks about discipline, I’ve never found it that way. Doesn’t mean I write well, necessarily. I write shit all the time, but I enjoy it. It’s deeply pleasurable.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh. 

Tom Sleigh: I mean, early on when I was something like 22, I was working all kinds of stupid jobs, you know, like a janitor, and mail clerk and swimming pool construction. And, you know, my favorite job was being a gardener. Anyway, I was doing all kinds of stupid jobs, and the thing that I decided, I just asked myself, “When is my energy the best?” And I said, “In the morning.”

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh. 

Tom Sleigh: And so I said, “All right, I’m going to build my life around that.”

Helena de Groot: Wow. So you just decided, I want to be a writer, when am I going to do that, in the morning. And that was the end of that, basically?

Tom Sleigh: That was kind of the end of it.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Tom Sleigh: I didn’t, I didn’t ever really look back. I never had any idea that I would end up teaching. I didn’t really care, you know?

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Tom Sleigh: I mean, the way I started writing was just, I was doing anthropology in southern Mexico.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: “Doing anthropology” is a little grandiose for what it really was.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Tom Sleigh: It was really, I was working for a woman who was a spectacular photographer, and her name was Gertrude Blom, and she married Frans Blom, who had, quote-unquote, discovered is one of those loaded words which, having studied in anthropology, you realize yet, anyway. But he had discovered Palenque and Uaxactún, these two, you know, beautiful old Mayan complexes in the jungle. And so Trudi had sort of taken on the Lacandones. And I so I did a lot of work with—“work” is—I talked to these guys, and we became friends of a kind. And they had the language that was most like the ancient Maya.

Helena de Groot: Whoa. 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah. And so, there was a wonderful anthropologist whom I absolutely loved, again, a man named Robert Bruce, and just a huge bear of a man. And he brought back from the jungle this little monkey that had fallen into the fire. And one of its paws was severely burned. And, you know, he told me to hold the monkey’s, like, head like this so it couldn’t bite you. And we had this wonderful conversation about the Popol Vuh.

Helena de Groot: About what?

Tom Sleigh: The Popol Vuh, which is the Mayan sacred book.

Helena de Groot: Okay. 

Tom Sleigh: So he’s like, bandaging the monkey’s paws, and he’s talking about the Popol Vuh. And, you know, a guy named Cayum Yuk Mosh was in the room. And so we were sitting there discussing the Popol Vuh, and Robert Bruce and Cayum were sitting and cracking jokes the entire time. (LAUGHING)

Helena de Groot: That’s amazing that like, the sacred is just such a normal part of, like, oh, let me bandage up this monkey’s paws. Let’s also crack some jokes, and—

Tom Sleigh: I know, I know. It was really great. I mean, it was just hilarious. And I just thought, wow, this is like, this is so much more interesting than kinship systems and Claude Lévi-Strauss. (LAUGHS) 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Right. And the gift economy and all that. 

Tom Sleigh: All that horseshit that eventually got blown out of the water by Clifford Geertz anyway. 

Helena de Groot: Yes. Yeah. But that’s very interesting. I mean, I also wonder, like, when you were talking about your random jobs that you were doing, you know, as a gardener and as a construction—was it?

Tom Sleigh: Swimming pool construction.

Helena de Groot: Swimming pool construction. And then this set up where, you know, you were doing quote-unquote anthropology, as you yourself said. I’m wondering, what is it in you that drives you to sort of go with the flow like that, to not worry and just do things that are showing up, let’s say, you know, to you? Like, what do you think it is? 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah. 

Helena de Groot: Young Tom—

Tom Sleigh: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: What, what did he want? What was he curious about? And what was the role of risk in your life? 

Tom Sleigh: Well risk was a big—has been. 

Helena de Groot: Mm. 

Tom Sleigh: I remember I was 16 years old, I sort of had this unconscious little mantra in my head which was, I’ll try anything once. And I did. You know, I shot dope, I sold dope. The kind of romance of that at the moment very quickly gave way to the realities of it.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Tom Sleigh: And, you know, drugs had a very different valence at the time. If you were a white surfer dude and— 

Helena de Groot: Right. And this was the sixties. 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And there was all kinds of, you know, kind of liberation talk and discovery of psychic freedom and all that. I never gave a damn about any of that, I just wanted to get high.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: You know, and so, uh, there’s a poet I immensely admire who was dear friend of mine, been dead a long time now, Thom Gunn. And Thom really crystallized it for me, you know. He has a beautiful poem about being in a bar with two men, and they want Thom to shoot up with them. And Thom says, are they just “death’s heads lighted glamorously?” Or are they really, this is how you become more human, is by taking these risks. And for me, I’ve always had a romance with experience, and I would literally do anything once. I was scared when I did it.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Tom Sleigh: So it wasn’t like I was, you know, kind of this fearless macho. But, for me, it was kind of ecstatic. Because of the nature of the people that I was doing it with, because there was this sudden release from being 16-year-old Tommy with all his problems and, you know, and the difficulties of my home life, which I won’t go into really, because it was, you know, it’s painful. But in any case, that sense of just being a kind of heightened consciousness. 

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Tom Sleigh: There’s a wonderful definition of happiness by Bertrand Russell: living as fully as possible in all your faculties. That is happiness. And I thought, wow, that is a beautiful definition of happiness. And that’s certainly what I experienced when I was writing. And it’s certainly what I experienced when I was doing the anthropology.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: And when I went and began to do the journalism years later. There was a large hiatus in there because I, you know, had a—when I was 26, I got a life-threatening illness. And so, you know, before that, the attitude was, I will go forward into life and explore and discover my life and I will have this romance with experience. And then when I was 26 life grabbed me by the neck and shoved my head up against the glass and said, “See?” (LAUGHING)

Helena de Groot: Yeah, like, you’re not as invincible as you think you are. 

Tom Sleigh: That’s what life is, pal!

Helena de Groot: Right. 

Tom Sleigh: And everything changed, because, you know, I nearly died three times, and I thought I would be dead by the time I was 36.

Helena de Groot: Right. And the doctors told you, too, right, that you had about ten years. That that was the average life expectancy for someone with your condition. 

Tom Sleigh: Right. Yeah and that really changed me. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: It really did. I lost any sense of a future when I was, like, 27. I just had—I planned for the future, 

Helena de Groot: Right. 

Tom Sleigh: But I had no … I don’t really have—I don’t really think about it, you know?

Helena de Groot: I’m wondering if that played any role at all, when you decided to venture out into journalism and to go to all these war-torn regions or regions where the infrastructure is so bad that, even if you had to, you could not get to a hospital in time to take care of your blood disease, you know?

Tom Sleigh: Right. Right.

Helena de Groot: Like, was there a part of you that was just like, “Well, I’m going to die anyway, I might as well do something cool while I’m still alive,” or?

Tom Sleigh: Well, you know, what it was, was I, clinically, I improved. 

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh. 

Tom Sleigh: So that the … you have to understand, for years and years and years, my life was lived in six-week cycles.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Tom Sleigh: And it was all determined by the length of time that red blood cells take to, you know, you generate red blood cells and then they have a certain lifespan and then they break down and then they’re replaced by other red blood cells. But my red blood cells, because they were defective, they would suddenly break down in much greater numbers. And so, for a good many years, I would have the surge of power because my blood count was higher, and then suddenly, you know, I would have a week, you know, every six or seven weeks, in which I would begin to hemolysis lots of blood. And I would get, you know, depressed, because you’re just physically depressed because you’re getting less oxygen, and you would get weak and you would feel tired. And all of the terror would come back that you were going to die. And that never goes away. And it never seems to lessen. It’s like you’re two people at once. You know? You’re this person who is going to die and you’re this person who’s, you know, trying to pay their bills at the same time.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: You know? I remember when I was teaching once at a particular university, I was having one of these sessions, and I had to make it to the top floor, three stairs up and four, and I nearly, you know, I collapsed,

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: Trying to climb the stairs, but I didn’t stop. 

Helena de Groot: Mmm. 

Tom Sleigh: So a lot of it was will. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: And a lot of it was the desire, I’m not going to be defined by my illness. 

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. 

Tom Sleigh: And so, one of the things that happened when I clinically improved was that I knew that I could probably go overseas. And the way it happened was so happenstance. I mean, I just got asked, and I had actually, I’d always been fascinated with state violence. I’d always been interested in what it means for the states at war. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that I read a lot of classical literature. And I remember reading, you know, Livy’s The History of the War between Rome and Carthage. And I was fascinated just by the range of human experience that happened in war, that revolved around war, that kind of surpassed war, that went beyond it. 

Helena de Groot: Right.

Tom Sleigh: And that awareness played into my total fascination with, well, you know, I’m a lot better,

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. 

Tom Sleigh: And I have this invitation from a Palestinian and from a Lebanese woman to go overseas and meet lots of Palestinians.

Helena de Groot: Right. Like, it was like a writing teaching workshop, right? 

Tom Sleigh: Well, no, not really—

Helena de Groot: Oh.

Tom Sleigh: What it was, was, a guy named Munir Akash, who actually is a translator of Darwish, 

Helena de Groot: Oh, wow. 

Tom Sleigh: And his wife Amira El-Zein, who’s a scholar and a poet. A Lebanese scholar and poet. And they formed this mom and pop, quote-unquote, NGO. And they took, you know, several Americans over, writers. And they said, you know, “What we want you to do is not do your little news beat. What we want you to do is write something that will have maybe a more lasting value, but about, you know, kind of the situation of Palestinians after the 2006 war. 

Helena de Groot: Right. 

Tom Sleigh: And I just had headline familiarity with the Middle East.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: I was an utter ignoramus. You know, I’m an outsider, you know. I don’t have any policy prescriptions. Everything for me is about, you know, small-scale texture of an experience, just the quirks and strangenesses of the individual people I meet. And trying to write as accurately as I can. And as close to my own observations as I can, regardless of my cultural limitations. That’s for me, what I’m interested in, because I like all those quirks. You know, when you write about Somali refugees during that famine that I wrote about, you see all these people coming in off the desert, into the refugee camp. You know, many of them are not going to make it, because they’re just in terrible shape. And the thing that’s tragic for me is the fact that all these quirks, all these strangenesses, this human character, these people are going to die and it’s all going to be lost.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: And that’s what I’m interested in preserving. You know. 

Helena de Groot: One of the pieces that you wrote that is my favorite, where you really get into that texture of the small scale is your story about this young Syrian man. His name is Maysara. I’m probably mispronouncing this.

Tom Sleigh: No, no, no, right, Maysara, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Who fled Syria because Assad was cracking down on his own population, and fled to Jordan.

Tom Sleigh: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And he started in a refugee camp, but he was bored out of his skull.

Tom Sleigh: (LAUGHS) Right.

Helena de Groot: And so he left and got a job working at a sweet shop. And I’m just wondering, can you tell me about him? 

Tom Sleigh: Well, first off, I was introduced to him through some folks in UNHCR. 

Helena de Groot: Okay. 

Tom Sleigh: A woman named Rania, who I immensely liked. And she said, “Well, sure, you want to meet some Syrian refugees? Well, go meet some Syrian refugees. No photographs, no names.”

Helena de Groot: Okay. 

Tom Sleigh: You know, or no last names. And so we drove and we met in this coffee shop, and I know what she thought I was going to do, which was ask the boilerplate questions.

Helena de Groot: Like what? 

Tom Sleigh: Well, you know, like, “How did you come here? How are you living? Isn’t it terrible? Isn’t your existence miserable?”, etcetera, etcetera. And … when I met him, I could see that he was like, a little wary of me, as well he should be. And then when I asked him about his daily life, I think he was really surprised that somebody was taking such an interest in him not as a kind of type.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Tom Sleigh: As a sufferer. 

Helena de Groot: Tragic type. Yeah. Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: But as a guy. 

Helena de Groot: Right. 

Tom Sleigh: And then when it turned out that he was in martial arts and that I did Tai Chi, I said, “Hey, let’s go outside, you can show me some moves.” And so we went out there and we, you know, I made a fool of myself spinning around and doing spin kicks and, you know. Anyway. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: He worked at the sweet shop, so I said, “Why don’t I come?” And, “Can I work with you?” And I could tell he liked the idea, and he sort of smiles, he says, “Well, show up.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: And so I did. And, you know, the whole thing kind of unfurled from there.

Helena de Groot: But can you tell me about that? So you arrive at the sweetshop, and then— 

Tom Sleigh: Oh no, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s a very simple. I mean, I just arrived there. I got there a little early. 

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. 

Tom Sleigh: And then where they serve the sweets was downstairs. And also, I had just been to a very famous place in Jordan called Habibi,

Helena de Groot: Okay.

Tom Sleigh: which has the best knafeh. 

Helena de Groot: Which is—

Tom Sleigh: Oh, knafeh, it’s this, like, sweet cheese on this dough, and then there’s rosewater on it and cashews, and it is unbelievably delicious. So I thought, “Well, that might be really interesting and strange and fun. I could do this. And at the same time, I can ask him some questions that will be in a context which won’t be, ‘you poor refugee, how tragic your life is.’” 

Helena de Groot: Right. Because he was really good at his job, right? 

Tom Sleigh: Incredibly good at his job. 

Helena de Groot: Right. 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah. And actually, you know, when you do a lot of this work, you discover most people who are quote-unquote refugees are very ambivalent about being called that.

Helena de Groot: Huh.

Tom Sleigh: You know, they understand entirely the legal significance of it. 

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. 

Tom Sleigh: But at the same time, the human significance of it, one person said to me, “When I hear someone call me a refugee, it makes me feel lesser than other people.”

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. 

Tom Sleigh: And your status as a refugee, it sort of empties out all your experience. You know. 

Helena de Groot: Like, who you were before is not relevant to me. 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah, who you were before isn’t relevant. And so you have to have this kind of mad optimism about being able to be something else.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: But the … like, the situation in Ukraine is so interesting to me at the moment because obviously, I mean, it’s a tragic situation in every possible way. But the situations—and this is not to compare suffering. I’ve seen people making these comparisons and I think they’re invidious and they’re kind of awful. And I keep thinking it’s the kind of moral temptation, you know, of a certain kind of ideological stance to play one kind of suffering off another kind of suffering. You know, when you see Somali refugees, they have nothing.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: You know, I mean, we talk about Ukraine and we talk about the hospitals where people are holed up. There aren’t any hospitals. It’s just you, the desert, and the, it’s 50, 60, 70 miles you gotta cross in order to get to Dadaab.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: And you’re on your own, pal.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: And you’re subject to all kinds of—you’re subject to bandits, you’re subject to police. You’re subject to all kinds of things. And so the temptation, of course, is to establish this hierarchy of suffering. And I really am—I, maybe it does exist, but I can’t possibly, I don’t want to live—

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: —in my own heart, making those distinctions. I don’t want to play off one kind of suffering against another. I don’t.

Helena de Groot: But I do have a question about that because, you know, a lot of people have commented, rightly so, I think, that the way people have reported on the war in Ukraine—

Tom Sleigh: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: —is noticeably different from the way that people have reported on a war in, let’s say, you know, Afghanistan, or Iraq or, you know?

Tom Sleigh: Well, the fact is—

Helena de Groot: Because those people aren’t white and— 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah. 

Helena de Groot: You know, and the way that people have reported on the war in Ukraine has been so tender. And so humanizing.

Tom Sleigh: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Mainstream news outlets have picked up on details like this little six-year-old girl who’s in the subway tunnel slash bomb shelter who sings little songs for her fellow, right? 

Tom Sleigh: No, I heard that. Yeah, I heard that.

Helena de Groot: Or this woman who, in her completely bombed out apartment, all the windows are blasted away, there’s dust everywhere, who plays her piano one last time. You know, people saving their pets, you know, traveling.

Tom Sleigh: (LAUGHS) I know.

Helena de Groot: It’s a very tender and very humanizing and it’s great. I’m not saying, like, I know that I’m sound like a mocking it, but what I’m—

Tom Sleigh: No, no, no.

Helena de Groot: What I’m saying is like, this doesn’t happen for Somali refugees, Haitian refugees, Iraqi refugees.

Tom Sleigh: No. I mean the fact is, you know, when I first started doing this, there wasn’t any, no one was interested in it. 

Helena de Groot: No. No. But it’s interesting to me, because it is so rare, and because what people are criticizing mainstream journalists for doing is only humanizing Ukrainians and not humanizing people who are from places where people are, you know, brown, black or—

Tom Sleigh: Yeah. No, I know. 

Helena de Groot: And I wonder, just like, if you think that your way of looking for these tiny details, like, for instance, Maysara, the Syrian refugee who ends up in Jordan and works at a sweet shop, yeah, he’s also after hours, he teaches Taekwondo right, to kids. 

Tom Sleigh: He teaches Taekwondo and he—

Helena de Groot: And then he does like these exercises for his brain, like these kind of brain riddles. 

Tom Sleigh: (LAUGHING) I know, exactly. I love that.

Helena de Groot: Just the amazing detail that just takes you out of this whole, like, refugee—because at the time, the way people talked about, you know, Syrian refugees, the word “refugee crisis” was never far, right.

Tom Sleigh: Right, right.

Helena de Groot: These were not individual people. These were masses, hordes. 

Tom Sleigh: Right. 

Helena de Groot: That together, you know, made up a problem, a crisis.

Tom Sleigh: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And so, my question is, what do you think you have to do or you have to look for in order to find those details that will show that these people are people, complex and, you know, idiosyncratic? 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah. Well, I’m not a real journalist. I’m an amateur. I don’t have to make a living at it. I don’t have a paper or an editor breathing down my neck.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Tom Sleigh: You know, I write these things, it can take time. A lot of time, sometimes, several years. And I can’t really write about a place unless the texture of the place, you know, has imprinted on my nervous system. I’ll just give you an example. The very first time I did any of this journalism was when I was, you know, back in 2007.

Helena de Groot: Oh, yeah, ’07 yeah.

Tom Sleigh: Yeah. And the first thing I just said to myself is, “Well, you’re utterly incapable of doing policy speak.”

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh. 

Tom Sleigh: “Because you don’t know anything about it, even though you’ve read a ton. And it’s not really a gift you have. So what do you have?” And I said, “Well, as a poet, I know how to register texture. I know how to do that.”

Helena de Groot: And can you make that as concrete as you possibly can? 

Tom Sleigh: Oh, sure. 

Helena de Groot: What do you do? 

Tom Sleigh: Well, I think the third night I was there, we were in Lebanon, we were at a hotel. And as soon as we arrived, a huge car bomb went off. And basically that started like the worst internal violence in Lebanon since the, you know, 15-year civil war. But I was with my friend Chris Merrill for a few days, and I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was supposed to do. So, you know, I said to Chris, “What do I do, Chris?” And Chris said to me, “All you’re doing is you’re taking very, very detailed notes of your physical impressions. Just enough notes to sketch out what, when you go back home, could be a scene.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: And I’ll give you three examples of the kind of things that stick in my mind and, for me, are more kind of revelatory than, like, this big picture, ‘I will now tell you how to think about it’. And the first one was, I was sitting in my, you know, it was late at night and I was sitting in my hotel room and it was, you know, the TV set was on, and suddenly a commercial comes on. And there was a nice, very nicely dressed guy with a leather jacket and there was a Mercedes kind of off about 30, 40 feet from him. And, you know, one of these longer tracking shots. And he’s walking up and he reaches into his nice leather jacket and he pulls out this little wand, and I think, “Oh, like, some kind of thing for the car.” And he presses it. And what it was, was it was a plastic explosive sensor.

Helena de Groot: Okay. 

Tom Sleigh: So that if somebody had put some plastic explosive underneath your Mercedes (LAUGHING) that you would know enough not to go next to it and start it up. 

Helena de Groot: So it was a car bomb detector? 

Tom Sleigh: Yes, exactly.

Helena de Groot: And there was a commercial on the TV. 

Tom Sleigh: Yes. 

Helena de Groot: Wow. 

Tom Sleigh: “PRO.SEC, for a world of security.” I’ll never forget it. And I said, “I’ll write that down.”

Helena de Groot: That’s amazing. That’s so banal, almost.

Tom Sleigh: Absolutely.

Helena de Groot: Like, I don’t know what to say, is it funny, is it tragic, is it, you know. 

Tom Sleigh: Absolutely. And it was very conscious of Hmm, handsome guy in a nice jacket, you know? (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Carefully produced, you know? Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: I know! So there was one example. Another example would be, I got quite interested in blast waves, because—

Helena de Groot: What are those?

Tom Sleigh: Well, when a bomb goes off, it moves the air around. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: And the air moves pretty much like a wave moves. So it kind of follows the path of least resistance. And a car bomb went off in this kind of fashionable shopping district called Achrafieh, if I recall correctly. And so I went down there to see it and it’s not—here, if a car bomb goes off, you know, they block it off for miles, you know, it’s like, you couldn’t get— there, it was like caution tape, you know, some street sweepers and push brooms.

Helena de Groot: Mm. Wow.

Tom Sleigh: Sweeping up the glass. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: And the thing that was so amazing was the blast wave traveled in such a way that it hit the show window of an Armani store. And because of the vacuum that it created, all of the clothes got sucked out into the street. And I’m standing five feet away from a really nice Armani jacket, and I think, “Wow, that might be a 44 long,” I mean—

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) 

Tom Sleigh: (LAUGHS) “Should I …” I mean, you know, it’s, it’s the tragic and ludicrous side by side. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: And those are the kinds of things which seem to me to have the texture of daily life. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: And I remember when I was trying to go to the south—

Helena de Groot: This is your third example? 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah, it’s the third example. I was trying to go to the south and, you know, I had to get military clearance to go. And so, I went to this base in Tyre and I got, you know, I thought, “Oh, well, there’ll be all this, like, official paperwork and whatnot.” And, you know, it was hot. It was a Sunday, and there was a yard, a compound of tanks. And I’m looking at the tanks and suddenly there are all these moving shadows. And you know, there’s a lot of sunlight, and I think, “What the hell is this?” And it turns out that there probably were like, 60, 70 feral cats that were kind of lounging around in the tanks, in the shade and lounging around. And I just thought, “Wow.”

Helena de Groot: That’s so interesting. Why? Were they being fed there, or why? 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah, I don’t know. I went in and I got my permission and—

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Tom Sleigh: But, you know, even getting the permission was totally strange because, there’s a guy, first off, he’s wearing a cowboy shirt with snaps.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: He’s obviously an intelligence and he’s got blue jeans and he’s got a comic book face down on his desk. And I’m trying to explain to him what I’m doing. And I can just see that he thinks it’s ridiculous. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: Because I said, “Well, I want to write the story from the Lebanese point of view.” And he just looks at me like, “And what point of view would that be? Would it be from the Druze? Would it be from the Maronite Christians? Would it be from the Bahá'ís? Would it be—” Because there are all these sects.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: And he must have thought, “This guy’s an idiot.” And he was right. I was. I didn’t know that. But rather than hide that,

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: You put it in the piece. 

Helena de Groot: Right. 

Tom Sleigh: You don’t try to, you know, ‘the whole war is hell, I’ve looked death in the asshole’ kind of thing.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Tom Sleigh: That’s just silly to me. You know?

Helena de Groot: I was wondering if we can get to a poem where you do just that, where you foreground something that I think most journalists will cut out because it doesn’t serve sort of the dramatic arc that they’re trying to build. So, I was wondering if you wanted to read the poem on page 29 titled “A Dictator Walks into a Bar.”

Tom Sleigh: Oh sure, yeah. 

Helena de Groot: And so, to set it up very briefly, I’ll just do that. So this poem, the setting of it is the killing of Gadhafi.

Tom Sleigh: Right.

Helena de Groot: During the Arab Spring, when, you know, the Libyans were so sick of this guy who had been a dictator for over four decades, that they found him, he was hiding in a sewage pipe?

Tom Sleigh: A culvert. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. So they dragged him out of there and basically beat him to death. 

Tom Sleigh: Mm-hmm. And then they shot him. 

Helena de Groot: Oh, I didn’t, I missed that part. 

Tom Sleigh: Well, they beat him to death, and then they—well, that’s not in the poem. But there was a photograph. Later footage showed him with a hole here. You know, you could see where the scorch mark and, yeah, the bullet. 

Helena de Groot: Mm. They just wanted to make extra sure. 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. So, I don’t know if there’s anything else that you want to say about the poem before you read it.

Tom Sleigh: Well, the only thing I’ll say about it is that I was traveling with a militia. When we say “militia” in this country, none of these people had experience with weapons. They weren’t, you know, professional soldiers or anything like that. They really are the definition of a citizen army. And so they had to learn how to use weapons kind of on the fly. Libya, in those days anyway, and I’m sure still, was awash in weapons. 

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. 

Tom Sleigh: You couldn’t go anywhere without somebody shooting off a—I mean, we were just a casual trip to the market, there was a gun battle going on not 50 feet away from us. And then it just moved on down the waterfront, and everyone went up about their business.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Tom Sleigh: So, in any case, the guy who was the head of the militia that I was traveling with was an electrical engineer. And there’s a very famous hotel in Tripoli which goes all the way back to the Romans. At least the columns do.

(READS POEM)

A Dictator Walks into a Bar

In the hotel lobby, leaning against a marble column

from when the Romans ruled, I sip my vodka as gunfire

night and day ricochets and celebration

punctuating someone’s wedding or a moment in

someone’s mood in which blowing

off a clip into the air fights off boredom:

in this cell-phone video that’s more slashes of light,

jiggle and jag than a stable point of view,

I watch them drag him from muck out of a culvert,

his kufi knocked askew, heavy body thrown

across a Toyota battlewagon

where an electrical engineer turned militiaman,

who reminds me of my father, mild, unshowy,

studiously polite, doesn’t smile, frown, as he

watches himself slapping, in the footage that he’s

showing me, the Brother Leader, great Murshid,

the Guide—doesn’t comment, doesn’t shy away

from my oh-so-fine-tuned sensitivities

quivering on the brink, maybe a little drunk, my cloak of objectivity

already tattering into rags—his lumps, welts

not quite bleeding—unable to look away,

am I hoping to see blood? It isn’t every day that a dictator writhes

under your heel—the one powerful enough to say,

Those who do not love me do not deserve to live—

as if he himself were the soul in the body politic and we

were just an afterthought, accessory

to his glory, the merest janitors to his trash, or maybe

just the trash itself, all of us human trash waiting

to be burned. But now, it’s our turn,

and we’ve got him where we want him—

his livid puffy face, its blankness unto death

like slopped-over paint running down the can—

his nose by now smashed in so his mouth

hangs open to the blahness of desert hardpan and cliffs shadowing

tank tracks back into the Nafusa Mountains

where just an hour ago we were driving and he was worrying

about load-shedding and high-voltage grids,

the tragedy of no infrastructure—while I was daydreaming

of vodka and peeling happy-hour shrimp

glinting like armor plate—finally, I’ve seen enough; but as I

turn to give him back his phone he’s moved down

the bar and seems, head bowed, to be

peering into his drink with that intimate anticipation

that could signal a joke or a prayer speeding

to its punchline, only, it’s the new kind

of humor, the new kind of prayer,

in which the jokes aren’t funny and prayers don’t deliver,

and whether you’re praying or laughing, it’s all on you.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Yeah what I love about this poem is that you’re doing what you were describing earlier, kind of foregrounding your own … I don’t want to say incompetence, because that sounds really uncharitable, you know, but I mean—

Tom Sleigh: Incompetence will do. 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Tom Sleigh: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: But you know what I mean? Like a real quote-unquote journalist, they would probably have been kicking themselves that they were not on the scene when Khadafi was being killed. And they would have probably solved that by then finding a few people who were, and interviewing them and writing the story as if they were there.

Tom Sleigh: Right. 

Helena de Groot: But you didn’t do that. You are at this hotel, and this guy shows you the video of him being one of the people who kills Gaddafi on his cell phone. And I thought it was so funny because, you know, one of the reasons that one goes to a war zone or goes to a conflict, you know, the place where the conflict is, is so that you don’t have to see it on a cell phone. Right? Like, the rest of us see it on YouTube or see it on CNN.

Tom Sleigh: Right, right, exactly.

Helena de Groot: And there you are, supposedly in the midst of it all, and you’re still kind of seeing it on this little screen. And the disappointment of that, inevitably, there must be some, like, “oh, why wasn’t I there?” You know?

Tom Sleigh: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: I love that you just foreground that. You put the guy and the cell phone in the frame. You don’t pretend as if that wasn’t there. 

Tom Sleigh: Right. Yeah. Yeah. 

Helena de Groot: Can you tell me about that decision? Did you ever try to write this poem another way? Or, like, how did the kind of wrongness of the situation, right, you weren’t actually where you were supposed to be, or where a proper journalist was supposed to be. How did that end up being in the forefront of the poem?

Tom Sleigh: You know, in a very literal way, I mean, the poem doesn’t invent anything. You know? Uh, I remember once I saw a documentary about the Janjaweed in southern Sudan.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: And the impression that they give is that they filmed it in southern Sudan, but in fact, they didn’t. And the point I’m trying to make is that, I see, so you want to hype it up with this kind of phony drama that you were there, because it’s you who’s so important to witnessing it. And, you know, I’m—that whole kind of mentality, you know, that one person can stand in front of history and tell us how to feel about it, when everything in my experience tells me that, you know, there are so many cell phone videos out there and everybody has their own version of it. And so, why pretend that you are the representative sufferer, or everyone, you know, funnels, you know, their pain through you? It just seems ridiculous to me. And the reason why I wanted, you know, an incompetent guy who’s, like, sitting there thinking about eating the happy hour shrimp and, you know, and in a country where it’s very, very difficult to get alcohol, is thinking about alcohol. Although, you know, in part of these travels, you know, we went to an imam’s house. And one of the people I was traveling with, a Libyan doctor, had a, you know, a water bottle. And he said, “Would you like some water?” And he handed to me and it’s full of vodka, of course. 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) 

Tom Sleigh: You know, so, I’m sitting there drinking vodka in the imam’s house given to me by, you know, by this Libyan doctor, I think, “Well, yeah, this is—”

Helena de Groot: Another great detail. 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah. And that’s how it is. Even in the most restricted places and mentalities, these people always make room for their pleasures. And that was part of the idea that you’re sitting here daydreaming about shrimp. I mean, that just seemed to me to be a much more interesting way to—I never thought for a second that I shouldn’t put that in. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: And one of the things I felt profoundly when I was watching this video is, you know, Gadhafi was a bad guy. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: You know, I mean, there’s no question about it. But I also didn’t know how to feel about the fact that I was watching a fellow, you know, creature—

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: being beaten to death, no matter how terrible the things that he’d done were. And when I was writing the poem, I thought, you know, “Well, my political, you know, convictions say he needs to be removed, but my political emotions are a lot more complicated than that.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: And it’s the gap between those two things that seemed to me to make truly interesting. That’s the place I want to try to write from if I’m trying to write about these subjects.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: I mean, I feel like you were going to a thing that I was wondering about as I was reading all your work, which is empathy and its limits, you know.

Tom Sleigh: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And you wrote something a long time ago. This was before you even started doing journalism. You wrote, “The limit of what you can and can’t know about other people becomes more and more a preoccupation as I get older.”

Tom Sleigh: Right. 

Helena de Groot: How do you feel about that now? Does that still ring true to you? 

Tom Sleigh: I think it’s even more true. And the person who gave me that insight was my friend Thom Gunn. And Thom has a wonderful poem about empathy in which he said, “save the word empathy … for your freshman essays.” He thinks it’s overweening. He thinks it’s too much to claim. And he recommends sympathy as opposed to empathy. The fact that you can, you can take your subjectivity, you can fuse it with somebody else. And Thom was saying, no, you can’t. Your subjectivity has real limits. And the most honest thing you can do, this will be Thom, now, is to acknowledge what those limits are. And then, rather than trying to hide that, is build that into the piece, make that—the limits of your own empathy or subjectivity, or—make that the focus of your persona as opposed to trying to expand it past, you know, what its, you know, limits are. And I always loved that in Thom. He wrote beautiful poems about what used to be called homeless people.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. 

Tom Sleigh: And now, you know, they’re just folks who live on the street. But Thom has this beautiful moment in one of his poems, and it focuses on this one guy, and he says, and, you know, Thom’s gay, and he says, “lest I be guilty of giving to the good looking only.” 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) 

Tom Sleigh: (LAUGHS) And putting that into the poem and at the same time acknowledging what a kind of reprehensible viewpoint that is.

Helena de Groot: Right. 

Tom Sleigh: Then at the same time, clearing all that space out and trying to see this person beyond just, you know, Thom’s interest in them as a sexual object or a this or that or the other thing. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tom Sleigh: You know. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah, it’s like you coveting this Armani jacket that has been blown out of the window. 

Tom Sleigh: I know! Right. And I’m not thinking like, “God, did anybody die?”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: But, “God, an Armani jacket.” (LAUGHS) You know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: You know, it’s that there’s just so many contradictory, weird thoughts that, you know, it’s the difference between what you think you ought to feel and what you really do feel. And the collision between those two things, you know. 

Helena de Groot: Can, can I—and you don’t have to answer this, you—

Tom Sleigh: Oh, no, go ahead.

Helena de Groot: I’m just asking. And you choose whether you want to answer it or not, you know. But I’m interested in, in what you say about, you know the gap between what we’re supposed to feel and what we really feel. Have you noticed that gap in yourself when your mother decided to end her own life?

Tom Sleigh: Oh, it was awful. Yeah. Oh, I very much didn’t want her to do that. (PAUSES) You know, my mother was ... she was a wonderful friend. And it wasn’t exactly … that she had her version of mothering, let’s say, (LAUGHS) wasn’t everybody’s version of mothering. In the sense that it wasn’t so much your emotional life, or rather, I would say, it wasn’t your well-being that she was so concerned about as it was your intellectual life. And … I’d grown up in a house with books, but in a place in which books were not valued.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Tom Sleigh: Except with my mother. And. And that, and that made, you know, this kind of really deep, deep friendship possible. Because here this woman is, who grew up dirt poor, and I say dirt poor, her first home was a sod house. First person to go to college in her county. And then, you know, she became this kind of legendary teacher. I mean, quite famous teacher. To the point where, when, you know, she lived for so long, she would kind of run out of money. And it was a very dire—you know, we needed to get money. And so, a former student of hers launched a GoFundMe campaign. And I thought, “Well, great, I’ll donate a thousand, he’ll donate a thousand, and that’ll be that.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: But students from 40 years ago came out of the woodwork and began donating money. But her friend decided he was going to try to pitch this to the newspapers. And then what happened, I got a phone call and he said, “They’re going to run it on the front page of The San Diego Union-Tribune on Christmas Day.” My mom. Then the story got picked up and it ended up, I think, on the front page of the biggest daily in Hanoi.

Helena de Groot: Oh!

Tom Sleigh: And then Kelly Clarkson, the talk show host, they contacted her and they wanted her to come on the show. And that was going to be—they had this whole show, it was going to be called Teacher Appreciation Day, on April 28. And then I had to give a reading out in L.A. at USC. And so she called me and she said she’d had it. She was done. She wanted to end it. And so what happened is, you know, she decided that she was going to do it. And these are the kinds of crazy conversations that we would have. And we’d been having this conversation on and off for years. I mean, she called me when she was like, I don’t know, 89 and said, “Tom, I don’t think I’m going to make it to my next birthday.” And I said, “Really, Ma? You seem fine to me. Why aren’t you going to make it?” She said, “Well, I have to take a driving test, and I’m afraid if I can’t drive.” And I said, “Well, you know, Ma, you can take a cab.” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah, this is not a reason for you to die. Yeah!

Tom Sleigh: So it was sort of like, you’re going to kill yourself because you can’t drive? And that’s kind of the way we—that was kind of our M.O. It wasn’t like, you know— 

Helena de Groot: Super serious. Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: Oh, my God, we’re discussing death. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Tom Sleigh: It wasn’t like that. None of it was like that. And she said, “Well, I want you to research it, how to, how I can off myself.” And I said, “Okay, I can do that. Not a problem.” And I did. You know, and I figured it out and I told her how to do it. And we had this whole plan. And if the law in California hadn’t changed, I was totally ready to do that for her, because my father went off dialysis and I didn’t do it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: And I deeply regretted that. I wish I had been able to find some kind of narcotic and just ended it for him, because the suffering he went through was merciless and needless. In any case, I was going out there to give this reading and she said, “Well, you know, I think I’m going to do it on—you’re going to be out here what day?” I said, “Well, I’m flying in on a Monday so I can see you.” And she said, “Okay, well, I think I’ll do it on Wednesday.” And I said, “Well, Ma, you know, the reading’s on Thursday. So do you think you could, like, hold off until Friday?” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: That’s such a funny way of even being, like, let me grab my calendar, you know? 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah, no, exactly. And I just said, “You know, it’s going to be kind of a downer for me, Ma, to try to give a reading, if you just offed yourself on Wednesday and I have to get in front of an audience on Thursday. So, maybe Friday. What do you think about Friday?” And she laughed and she said, “Oh, well, you know, maybe you’re right.” And then she said, “Well, I’m worried about the rent.” And I said, “Well, why are you worried about the rent? The rent gets paid on the 15th. You know, don’t you want to get your money’s worth? It’s like there’s three, you got three weeks left before it’s the 15th. And then you’ve got the Kelly Clarkson show on April 28th. Don’t you want to be on Kelly Clarkson?” And she laughed and said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, fine. I get it. I get it.” And so I went out there and I saw her and did the reading and I flew back, because then I had to go out and give another reading in Texas. And then I got a phone call from her and she said, “I’m going to do it this week.” And I said, “Are you sure you don’t want to do Kelly Clarkson?” And she said, “No, I’m done.” And so I said, “Okay, I’ll fly from Texas and I’ll get there on a Friday. (PAUSES) And we’ll do it on Monday.” And so. You know, when she decided that she was going to do that … you know, I didn’t, of course, I said, well, sure, yeah, I totally get it. But that’s, that’s not what I experienced in my heart.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Tom Sleigh: You know, I miss her. You know, I called her. We always had these wonderful conversations, you know. You could you could roam anywhere. You could say pretty much anything. Yeah. She was a pistol. She was a real pistol. And where she came from and where she got to, my God, you know. Really something else. I remember on the very last day, you know, before, you know, we did the deed in the morning, she wanted to have a last drive to go to this place called Dog Beach.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Tom Sleigh: And she really loved dogs. I think she loved dogs better than humans, really. And so my mother had always lived with dogs. And a matter of fact, for years and years and years, she’d had a Samoyed, you know, those white Husky-like dogs, pure white. She liked white dogs. And she had little ones who were all ankle biters. And I got so many fucking nips over the years from these little dogs. And she would brush them. And she had the comb and she would brush the dogs. And then rather than throwing the hair out, she put it into a bag. And then she had the bag when it was full of hair, shipped off to a person who turned it into thread and then made a blanket out of it, a solid white dog fur blanket. And when she was talking about dying, she said, “Oh, God, you know, death is so cold.” And she said, “I want my blanket on me. I want to be cremated in that blanket.” And so, on this very last day, what she wanted to do, she wanted to go to Dog Beach, where she’d taken her dogs for years. And so we went to Dog Beach and we got right next to the curb so she could actually see the dogs, and, you know, lowered the window down a little bit. And she just looked out the window and then suddenly she just said to herself, “This will be the last time that I ever see this.” (PAUSES) And it was that kind of sense that, you know, you’re choosing this, but, you know, it had to take a certain amount of courage. And then the next moment was, you know, she said, “I’m hungry.” I said, “Well, what do you want to have to eat?” She said, “Fish and chips.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Tom Sleigh: (LAUGHING) Because she was a diabetic. She hadn’t been able to eat fish and chips for, you know, three years. And she was dying for some fish and fucking chips. And she said, “Air-fried.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Tom Sleigh: I said, “Okay, we can get you air-fried fish and chips.” And that was our last meal. And that’s what it is. “This will be the last time that I’ll ever be seeing this. I want fish and chips.” And she loved the fish and chips. 

Helena de Groot: Yes. Yeah. 

Tom Sleigh: Yeah she was a—I just loved the—you know, but really, the final moments were so strange. My brother Jay who’s a musician had played this old Peggy Lee song for her on the day before. I don’t know if you know Peggy Lee, but there’s a great song she does called “Is That All There Is?” And it goes, (SINGS) Is that all there is? Is that all there is? If that’s all there is, my friends. (PAUSES) (SINGS) Then let’s keep dancing. Bring out the booze and have a ball. If that’s all there is. And her last words were to, you know, Dr. Bob, who we called him, she just said. “Is that all there is to it?” And then about maybe 30 seconds later, her eyes shut and she did indeed start to snore. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Tom Sleigh: And then. Maybe 15, 20 minutes went by, and she was snoring like a chimney, as she always did. And then suddenly her arms lifted. (PAUSES) And they went back down just like that. Very gently. And she’d had Parkinson’s and Bell’s Palsy. And then when she took the medication, her hands stopped shaking. And they went up like this. And they went down. And she was gone. (PAUSES) Yeah.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Tom Sleigh is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Army Cats, winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Space Walk, which won the Kingsley Tufts Award, Far Side of the Earth, which won an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his latest collection, The King’s Touch. He also published a collection of essays on refugees in the Middle East and Africa, titled The Land Between Two Rivers, which was published simultaneously with a companion poetry collection, titled House of Fact, House of Ruin. Before that he published another essay collection, Interview With a Ghost, a translation of Euripides’s Herakles and several plays. He has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, a Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, a Guggenheim grant, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among many other honors.

He teaches at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn with the writer, Sarah Harwell. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. And if you want to read the article about his mother, just Google “San Diego Union-Tribune” and “Rose Sleigh”—that’s S-L-E-I-G-H. 

The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

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