Staff member Elijah Woodruff sat down to chat with visiting reader Todd Kaneko. Here is some of the wisdom he gathered!

On the Line & Stanzas

When explaining his approach to writing a line of poetry, Kaneko emphasized that while crafting a line, he thinks toward the end of the line through the lens of syntax, working out what the next line of the poem would be based on the line break he was working toward. He had a lot of friends who wrote poems out in chunks before they began the process of lineation. He compared it to writing sentences with no periods. That kind of process didn’t work for him.

And he approached the stanza as a line break “on steroids” for shifting the poem’s focal distance or topic in a rhetorical sense. What mattered when constructing stanzas was the relationship the poet and reader had with the text of the poem. What was difficult to parse in a poem might be made clear by breaking the line or breaking for the stanza. But despite this, sometimes, Kaneko said, he would write in quatrains. It was simply a matter of needing “a rule to survive the draft of a poem.”

But inversely, sometimes the poem drew too much attention to what it was trying to do through a stanza or line break and might need to be unified to layer over what had become an exposed seam. Kaneko said, ultimately “it always comes down to did make senses for the poem.”

On Navigating the Responsibilities of the Real World as a Writer

Todd Kaneko is the kind of writer who gets lost in the dream, but that makes it difficult to navigate the world he’s creating and the real world with all its responsibilities. Writing long form fiction required getting into the dream and then disentangling himself from what he had created which according to Kaneko was difficult to do especially with children. He had to find both the time and the correct form for his writing to be able to continue to produce work.

This is how Kaneko found his way into poetry: as a way to finish drafts to free himself of that dream world that was too difficult to pick up after he’d left it incomplete. He could return to a poem because the initial draft could be finished in as little as a day. This was how he navigated a world of responsibilities that told him, “don’t write because you got to pay your bills.

On the Process of Creating a book

Originally, This is How the Bones Sing was a much longer project—almost double. With that version, Kaneko received semi-finalist and finalist recognition from poetry contests, but no one wanted to publish it. Kaneko decided that the original version of the book wasn’t good enough despite his circle of poets and readers telling him that he would get published next time.

“You know that it’s a lie,” Kaneko said. “It doesn’t happen next time. Since no one wanted to publish it, it just wasn’t good enough.” He shelved the project for The Dead Wrestler Elegies.

When he returned to the project, he decided to remove half the poems, but as he removed the poems that were extraneous to the manuscript, he found that the necessary structure of the book changed.

Finally, Kaneko spoke of his struggle on putting together the manuscript with his father’s death highlighting the unique challenge posed by each new collection of poetry and the way a poet can choose to order certain poems to highlight movements, key ideas, and symbols within a text.

W. Todd Kaneko is the author of This is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press 2020) and The Dead Wrestler Elegies, Championship Edition (New Michigan Press 2023). He is co-author with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018, second edition 2024), and Slash / Slash, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest. 

His poems, essays, and stories can be seen in Poetry, Alaskan Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, The Normal School, Hobart, [PANK], Blackbird, The Rumpus, Song of the Owashtanong: Grand Rapids Poetry in the 21st Century, Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays from Barrelhouse Magazine , Best Small Fictions 2017 and 2018, and many other journals and anthologies.

He holds degrees from Arizona State University (MFA, Creative Writing) and the University of Washington (BA, English). His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Originally from Seattle, he is currently an Associate Professor in the Writing Department at Grand Valley State University and lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.