Thomas A. Thomas is a talented poet and photographer. His poetry focuses on the natural world while reaching for spiritual meaning. Similarly, his photos capture the beauty of life’s moments in pensive portraits at close scale. The lighting is alluring and dark, the subject matter exalted. It’s as if a simple flower or drop of rain is a sacrament and Thomas is the holy man channeling its godliness for the viewer. Or should I say “experiencer” because reading and viewing Thomas’s art is truly its own unique experience. As I, he was a student at Goddard College and lives in the Pacific Northwest. We covered his love of poetry, fascination with photography, interest in the natural world, and how he got his unusual name. Check out this amazing artist.

When did you become interested in poetry?

I have to say as a preschooler, because my mother would recite wonderful classics like “The Jabberwocky” and “The Tyger” and even longer ones like Noyes’ “The Highwayman” as well as Kipling and Poe classics. Then in high school Miss Eileen Driscoll cracked open the wide world of literature and cultures, from Aleut songs to Zarathustra…

Why does poetry resonate with you? Is it the precision of the word, the depth of truth or something else?

I think it is the intensity first, how worlds and lifetimes can be brought to life with a 17-syllable haiku or a couplet. The deep truth of poetry is beyond our rational minds and can reverberate like a gong (or a depth charge) in our soul. And intense poetry provokes pleasure and love in me, even in expressing the worst of what humans do to one another.

Who were the first poets or writers who influenced you and why?

After my early youth awash in the classics of rhyming poetry, historical novels, drama ancient and modern, and American Indian song poems, the first great explosion was the discovery that living humans could write about the present world… Ferlinghetti! e.e.cummings(!) Poetry was living in the world, not confined to stone and books. It could be made of jazz as well as ancient classical music, and it could rock & roll and be sexy too!  

You’re also an outstanding photographer. Are you self-trained or did you attend some sort of schooling?

There were photographers in my family, going way back. Mom put a Brownie in my hands at age 11, with black and white film, and I almost immediately started looking seeing in different way. That little kid on a horseback trail-ride in New Mexico started shooting shadows on adobe walls, and generally channeling Ansel Adams, who he would only discover a decade later. I guess I have to say I’m self-taught, though Georgia O’Keefe might beg to differ…

What’s struck me about your photographs is that they are a close examination of a moment or object, similar to a poem. What’s your process in finding subjects and photographing them?

In fact, I call my good shots “sub-second poems”. At my best times, it is a deeply meditative awareness that comes upon me, a Zen intensity. I look and see and feel, and I touch the shutter button, wait, breathe, feel a presence, click NOW. To paraphrase Mary Oliver, “pay attention, be astonished, capture the sight”.  Also like poetry, the image/poem is not usually done at first capture (though the divine muses do grace us with such miracles from time to time). There is the process of revision, polishing, making it look like it really felt in that instant. There’s the inspiration, and then there’s the craft.

What the camera captured:

What I made:

Why are you interested in photographing plants? In some ways, they do seem structural and multidimensional, almost picture-ready.

I tried big city living in the 70s, including New York City. Frenetic excitement is entertaining for a while, but then I want to live, and be, in the natural world again. There is enough awfulness in the world, and I pay attention to that too. But I want to look at what makes the horrors worth fighting through, what makes the suffering bearable. I want to bring that news back to my fellow sufferers, to remind myself and others why I love it all so much.  

Do you have any favorite lines you’ve written about plants or nature that you’d like to share?

How about a mysterious little poem about both loving nature and experiencing the slipperiness of attention:

I have nothing to say

 This poem is yours, but you must 
 look carefully for it:
 this poem is there among the rocks
 where the gray rain falls
 on lichen, moss, and marmot shit.
 It is growing there in the marmot shit:
 rather, it is the marmot
 running down the hill from you.
  
 Walk quietly. It hears you
 stumbling clumsily after it.
 This poem has little respect for you
 because this tundra has no need
 you can answer. It was happy
 lying in the sun, with the hawks
 circling above it. And there you are,
 still tracking the marmot which
 this poem has already left. 

You care for your wife who’s been afflicted by early onset Alzheimer’s. Can you talk about how you cope with that while having art in your life?

I absolutely could not cope without art in my life. Gregory Orr has a book specifically about it: Poetry as Survival. And of course “art” includes my own sub-second photo-poems. And I definitely have written what people generally describe as “heartrending” poems about our long goodbye.

You have an interesting name. Is it a given name or chosen name?

My name is part bio and part history. Mom was Patricia A. Thomas MD (one of only three women in her class at Northwestern) before she married the Chicago Ballet dancer, William E. Sturges, who happened to be volunteering at the hospital where she was doing her residency. He came to her special attention by tackling a would-be suicide as he was running to jump through a several stories high window.

The marriage only lasted long enough for me to be 23 months old, and at the time, Mom wasn’t showing she was pregnant with my brother yet. Her dad, Milton G. Thomas, a NASA engineer, had three daughters, so it looked like the end of our branch of the Thomas name. And in the 1960s, my mom, whose name ended in “Thomas,” with her two sons “Tom and Peter Sturges,” just didn’t sound right to her. She liked the idea of “Thomas A. Thomas.” My grandfather, Milton’s dad, Thomas Moses Thomas, liked the idea of my name change as well. It’s a Welsh thing.

So when I was 11, I appeared in court to request the legal name change.

Where can we find your work, either poetry-wise or photography-wise or both?

The 2005 book of poems I published includes my photos on the cover and inside chapter pages. Getting Here is available direct from the publisher (Trafford.com) as paperback or e-book. It is also available either way on Amazon & Kindle, and I have found it in iBooks, Google has it; as does B&N etc.

Look for my photos in Instagram (tthomas7828) on Facebook, and at ViewBug. One of these days I will have a book of my photos paired with other people’s words, and another with my own. I have sold prints individually, and donated them to charity auctions with some success.

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Thomas A. Thomas is a lyrical poet who has studied with Gregory Orr and Donald Hall at the University of Michigan, where he won both a Hopwood Minor and a Hopwood Major Award in Poetry. He has also studied with Matthew Shenoda at Goddard College. His work has appeared in “Anesthesia Review”, “The Periodical Lunch”, Writer’s Digest, and “Oberon.” Getting Here, a collection of early work, was published in 2005 and is most easily available through Trafford Publishing.