As long-time readers of Via Negativa know, Todd Davis is a near neighbor (and deer hunter in Plummer’s Hollow), who’s contributed a number of guest posts over the years. I asked him to write a blog post about his latest collection, and what it means to him to have a “new and selected” out in the world. Here’s the link to order. —Dave
I often hear poets say they write for themselves, and I can’t argue with that. Writing is an act of exploration—of the self to be sure, and for me, more importantly, of what exists beyond the self.
But I’m a writer who makes poems in hope of connecting, of taking a step toward a reader who might, in turn, take a step toward me, toward the words I’ve worked hard to place on the page.
I’m a writer who toils over poems with the hope of representing the experiences of those whose lives are seldom written about, seldom noticed. I want my poems to leave a record of a place, of its flora and fauna, its people and the living earth that makes all lives, our very existence, possible.
Having grown up and lived in the Rust Belt my entire life, with deep roots in Appalachia on both sides of my family in Kentucky and Virginia, I want my poems to mean something to people like my grandparents and aunts and uncles, my cousins. Folks who don’t have much experience with poems, who most likely don’t see themselves in the poems that are celebrated. I want my home along the Allegheny Front to have a place in poetry, to tell a story worth telling, to make it sing in verse.
I suppose this desire is rooted in my own reading experience and the fact I didn’t discover poems that seemed possible for me to live into for a long time. I still remember the moment I finished reading Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” for the first time when I was twenty-four years old. How in the last section when he questions “what, anyway, / was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry by which I lived?” the entire poem turned, dislocating me for a moment, unsettling me so I could see something new.
I was thrilled at the way a narrative poem suddenly, unexpectedly, became something else, turning while not abandoning the strength of its narrative. This happened again when I read Maxine Kumin’s “Excrement Poem,” and again with the farming poems of Wendell Berry, and yet again with the factory poems of Philip Levine and Jim Daniels. Over the decades many, many poets have changed the person and writer I am. They’ve helped me grow and understand far more than I could individually.
From Donika Kelly to Mary Oliver, from Robert Wrigley to Brigit Pegeen Kelly, from Tyree Daye to Jim Harrison and Jan Beatty and Ted Kooser and Jane Kenyon and Ross Gay and William Stafford and Lucille Clifton and James Wright and and and . . . . Far too many poets to name, but all of them precious to me. They helped me to believe that the places I lived and the people I lived among were worthy of attention, even adoration, of grief and sorrow, and especially of wonder.
Coincidentally, I discovered many poets through their “new and selected” volumes, those books that offer an overview of poetry careers. I surely never dreamed I’d someday have a new & selected collection of my own work.
But here in my 59th year—a long way from the first poems I tried to write in college and more than thirty years after my first poems were accepted by a little magazine in Aurora, Illinois, called Gothic Light—I found myself looking back over my previous seven books, wondering what poems I’d give to a reader who’s never encountered my work.
With the help of my publisher, Michigan State University Press, I selected poems from those books and added thirty new poems for the first section. I left behind so many poems that I wished to include, but a “new and selected” is not a “collected.” Something must always be left out.
Perhaps what’s most special for me about Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems is the foreword written by David James Duncan. David’s writing entered my life in grad school when I read his iconic novel The River Why. He’s a kindred spirit on the page, but I didn’t meet him for more than twenty years after I first read his words. It was a mutual friend who suggested I send David my third book, The Least of These. And I did and held my breath.
Would I hear back from a writer whose work meant so much to me? If I did hear, would it be a simple thanks, a bland and dismissive nod of acknowledgment?
Instead, in March 2010, I received a nine-page, single-spaced letter. In that missive, David listed titles of poems that had moved him, connected with him. Sometimes a few words, sometimes voluminous paragraphs, speaking back to my poems, back to me.
I cannot begin to explain how that letter buoyed me, floated me in a way that said what I was doing mattered, that I should continue to try to make poems, to grow in that making.
When David said he’d write a foreword for Ditch Memory—as surreal as that still seems to me, although we’ve sat with our feet in a streambed together, shared meals with each other—it brought to mind that old hymn “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”
This book feels like an unbroken circle, looping out from the self, joining with so many living beings—wildflowers and trees and all sorts of mammals and birds and insects, fungi sprouting and then disappearing, the people I’ve lived among or who lived before me, their stories handed down to me as something valuable to be saved and to be shared. The violence of this life is certainly in my poems, but there is also love. Grief and sorrow enter but also peace and joy.
Whenever a writer publishes a book, they have hopes for that book. Mine are simple for Ditch Memory. That something in the pages will matter to a reader, that it will make them value life a bit more, love some particular part of it in a way that might help us restore this world that is our home.
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A huge congratulations to Todd on this milestone publication. Here’s that link again to the publisher’s page. —Dave
