An E-mail Interview with Todd Davis

(including Davis's essay "Looking for the Light: Making Poems from the Improbable")

As I say in my essay, my father was a lover of words, and more particularly poetry. So I grew up hearing Keats and Wordsworth and Longfellow and Frost recited at the breakfast table, at the dinner table, whenever we set foot into the woods together. I didn't start writing poems until my junior year as an undergraduate. I still didn't think I could do it, however, because I wasn't finding much poetry on the contemporary scene that I connected with. The true "breakthrough" was the last semester of my master's degree. I took a course with the Zen Buddhist poet Lucien Stryk. I was 26 or 27 years old. His mentoring helped me start to find my own voice and the voices of other poets that helped me see new possibilities.

The class with Lucien Stryk was the only creative writing course I ever took as a student. In some ways I'm glad for that. My education in poetry came in the reading of poetry: first the "classic" canon--all of those poets that wind up in the anthologies for British and American literature. At 26 or 27, however, I began reading every contemporary poet I could get my hands on. I have well over 500 books of poems on my shelves, and each book, each poet, is a teacher for me. These books show me the range of ways to write poems. Many of these books I don't "like," but the technique or craft that I see in the work affords me yet another tool for the making of poems. I think too often students read poets only for their "flavor." A poem can still teach us a great deal, even if the flavor (the content, the language) isn't our favorite.

I often tell people that it wouldn't make a bit of difference what line of work I was in--I'd still have to write poems. If I go more than 3 or 4 days in a row without working on a poem, I literally feel ill--a physical and emotional condition. I also write and publish literary scholarship. I do this because it helps me be a better teacher in some classes, but if I changed professions today, I would write another piece of scholarship. I'd have to write poems; it's just part of who I am at this point.

I think it's important to expose everyone--young and old--to poems because of the spiritual, emotional, and intellectual worlds it opens for them. Poetry needs to be read aloud. We need to taste the words in our mouths, feel them work their ways around our tongues, our throats. We need to hear the words, let them find their ways into the rhythms of our bodies, our lives. Sadly, many poets working today believe it's their job to be oblique, difficult, inaccessible.  ome poets need to write these kinds of poems, but my heros are folks like William Stafford, Galway Kinnell, Jane Kenyon, Mary Oliver, Stephen Dunn, Linda Pastan, Lucille Clifton, Robert Bly, James Wright, Donald Hall, Ginger Andrews, Ted Kooser, Jim Harrison, Julia Kasdorf, and Jeff Gundy (and the list could go on and on). These are all poets who you can take something away from the first reading of their poems. Yes, additional readings will open up the depths their poems hold, but the first reading doesn't taunt the reader, doesn't say--All those without a Ph.D. do not dare enter. Some poetry--and I mean artful poetry--should be for the people. Poetry is a communal activity, a public art, and during the 20th century, sadly, it became an art for a very select few.

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Originally published in The Palimpsest Review:

Looking for the Light:  Making Poems from the Improbable
Todd Davis, Penn State Altoona

My father and I have a passion for stone, in part born out of our love for things that last, durable and dusky in their beauty, and in part because my mother loves stone walls.  After my parents moved from their farm in the Berkshires of Massachusetts to Indiana , my father began to build with stone to deal with the loss, an attempt to give back to his wife a portion of what she had to leave behind.

For the past fourteen years, he and I have built hundreds of feet of wall, an anomalous act in the Midwest .  Unlike the Northeast, in the Midwest one must seek out the stone.  Each spring in Massachusetts , rock surfaces like the bloated bodies of the drowned, and farmers have no choice but to drag them from the earth.  In Indiana far fewer perish.  Instead we plunder the alluvial fan of the creek that runs on the north border of my parents' land, using a wheelbarrow during the driest months of summer to haul our precious stone up the bank to the waiting tractor-wagon.

I have learned the most about writing poems in building these walls with my father.  It seems to me that too often we writers allow words to consume us, blinding us to the forms that flood our vision in the world beyond the text.  When we allow the light of living, imbued with the sacredness of flesh and spirit, to guide our eye, we will be amazed, perhaps even stunned, into revelation.  What we see, of course, will inevitably differ for each writer, but in our new-found sight we will begin to understand how to make poems from the world that surrounds and sustains us, how each footing stone pushes into the ground, laying a foundation for the building of a wall, not unlike the first word in a poem that begins our journey. 

One of my earliest memories takes place in Connecticut at my maternal grandparents’ home.  I'm playing on an old stone wall that borders their backyard.  A row of cedar trees grows across the way.  The green seems almost unbearable when I remember it today: both of my grandparents dead, my own parents growing older.  I spy a rose-colored piece of granite three stones from the top of the wall.  At this age, I don't understand the way rock latches to rock, holding back the weight of the sky.  I slowly wrestle this hard rose from the gray thorns that surround it.  Several large stones crash down when I finally pull my prize free, and my index finger is crushed, leaving an indelible impression about the price of beauty.

Wrestling with words is an equally dangerous act as removing a stone from a wall.  Each word precariously balances upon the other, and like a stone wall, the words take on another life when placed together, standing for something that they could not stand for alone.  If William Carlos Williams is correct that there are no ideas but in things, then we carry an especially difficult burden in trying to find the words that can adequately represent the things of this world.  As most writers will confess, however, I am more than willing to risk the pain in building poems because of my desire to touch others with what I have seen.  The problem many of us have is in discarding romantic notions about what is worthy of our attention and what is not.  The subject of a poem matters little in comparison with our way of seeing that subject. 

When I first began to write, I thought there was nothing I could say.  I didn't live the urban experience of Ginsberg, nor was I capable of the dizzying aesthetic heights of Wallace Stevens.  It seemed as if every poet I read lived a life so foreign to my experience and so much more engaging that to begin to write was already to admit defeat.  What could the son of a veterinarian have to say?  I mucked shit from kennel floors, fed boarders, and buried the dead dogs and cats whose owners had no other place to bury them in a small field out near the railroad tracks.  Not exactly the stuff of poetry, I thought.

I didn't break this dismal spell on my own.  In a poetry class taught by the Zen poet Lucien Stryk, I finally was helped to walk into the open field of poetry where one can see for miles as on the prairies.  A Zen Buddhist, Stryk's own poems demonstrate the sacredness of the most simple or mundane act.  And with his help, I discovered the work of Raymond Carver and Mary Oliver and Jim Harrison and Maxine Kumin and Stephen Dunn and Wendell Berry and a host of other writers whose work spilled out before me like light shining through the canopy of leaves in a maple.  With the help of this light, I began to select stones from my own life, carefully brushing away the mud so I might see all of the blemishes and imperfections that make such stones unique and worthy of telling.  Soon poems began to appear, their structures unfolding out of the natural world where they were born. 

Of course, there are still many days when I cannot find the light.  I am part of the earth, and the rhythms of sky offer days of cloud, as well as days when sun and moon hang together into late morning.  On gray mornings, I try to remind myself of the blessing found in all days¾the kind of light that sifts slowly down through cloud and fog¾and then begin my work with words.  Some mornings this means waiting in silence, but more often I find in the silence some memory breaking in like a fallen branch snapped underfoot, white bottom of a doe flashing back into the undergrowth.

This past weekend my father, my son Noah, and I scoured the creek-bed for good footing stones.  The wall that will be built with these stones will hold this memory: deep blue sky of autumn; late light of day slanting across the tops of the trees that begin at the edge of the meadow; a single red-tailed hawk catching an upward current, soaring like the words I hope to find some time in the coming winter months in a poem that says how much I love the things of this world and the people that walk with me in it.  ***************************************************************************************************************************************************************