Interview with Todd Davis on ditch memory, new and selected poems — August 19, 2024
Todd Davis is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry—Coffin Honey; Native Species; Winterkill; In the Kingdom of the Ditch; The Least of These; Some Heaven; and Ripe—as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and co-edited the anthologies A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Western Humanities Review, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.
Daniel Lassell: Todd, thank you so much for speaking with me. As I’ve been reading Ditch Memory, your fantastic new & selected poetry collection available from Michigan State University Press, I noticed that themes of mortality, spirituality, and environmental justice run as rivers throughout your work, and they take on an ever-pronounced presence with each subsequent collection. Your poetics seem also to have undergone an evolution from cataloguing life experiences—which you’ve skillfully honed with a quiet awareness—to embracing more imaginative realities, such as world-building possible futures. Could you talk about that progression and compiling this collection?
Todd Davis: I appreciate all the time you’ve spent with my poems, Daniel. You’re a kind, generous, and attentive reader. That’s the best gift a poet or writer can have.
The themes you mention have always been present in my work, but context establishes such themes and causes the evolution of perspective and attention, hopefully deepening how those themes are represented.
When I was five years old, my maternal grandfather died. He was sixty-two and had lived a very hard life. He was a subsistence farmer through the Great Depression, living with his parents, his wife, and his two young daughters in a ramshackle house in a remote, mountainous region of western Virginia. The oldest daughter died when she was nine months old, which brought grief to go along with the daily burdens of trying to make ends meet. After the Depression broke, he moved to West Virginia for a brief time, leaving his family behind with his parents so that he could find work, at first in the mines and later in a factory. This led to an opportunity to move his family to Connecticut where he worked for nearly thirty years in a rubber factory. He was an alcoholic and smoked several packs of cigarettes a day. At sixty-two, his body was worn thin with disease. He and my grandmother planned to live near us in retirement. He died less than a day after arriving and never slept one night in that house.
While I’d witnessed the deaths of animals at our family’s animal hospital, my grandfather’s death was the first loss of a close relative or neighbor, and it changed the way I looked at life. For a few years I struggled with anxiety over the possibility of my mother and father dying suddenly. I’d sit in class and imagine that a semi had crossed the line and crashed into their car. This would bring on panic attacks, which at that time we had no name for. Our family physician prescribed some kind of sedative. My second-grade teacher would give me the pill at lunch to calm my nerves. Despite the medication, I still remember crying quite a bit and being afraid and anxious.
I tell you this because initially much of my poetry was a working out of that fear, grappling with the fact of mortality, which we all must face. I’d never claim to be entirely settled with such matters. The extinction of the self and of those you love is so foreign to our lived existence. By this I mean it feels natural to be alive, to be in the presence of other living beings. But I’ve come a long way from that scared and broken boy.
Eco grief, spurred by climate collapse and a sixth great wave of extinction primarily caused by humans, adds another dimension to my struggle with, and attempt to represent, mortality in poetry. The spiritual and the natural (non-human) world have been instrumental in my coming to terms with these facts. They’re also part of my greatest joy. Being in the woods or on a stream—which is a daily act for me because my home sits just to the east of 41,000 acres of forest—is akin to being in a church or synagogue or mosque for holy believers. I’m not the first to use such language, but I think of the places I go as forest churches, roofless churches, sacred and in need of no explanation. Their “being” simply matters and feels miraculous. My walking and paying attention, noticing small changes, observing other-than-human lives is a form of prayer and a kind of poetry for me.
As for my poetics, a simple explanation might be that having worked at making poems for nearly forty years, my knowledge of prosody has expanded, and through experimentation I’ve found different ways to get work done on the page. But that’s a facile explanation, a bit too reductive. Some background might help to inform it.
As an undergrad I was exposed to a very traditional Western canon and didn’t read poems written after the 1940s. As a grad student at Northern Illinois University, my world expanded, thanks in large part to the Zen Buddhist poet Lucien Stryk. I’ve only taken one creative writing class in my formal education and that class was Lucien’s final graduate workshop in the spring of the year he retired.
Lucien’s perspective as a Buddhist profoundly informed his own poetics. I was drawn to this way of seeing—of emptying oneself of the Self, of being present to what lay before me. Since that time, I’ve spent much of my reading life with classical Chinese poetry (in translation).
I wouldn’t dare say that I’m egoless, but I do find the fixation on one’s own life to be limiting. I’m far more interested in the lives of other people, and equally, if not more so, with the lives of other-than-human creatures. This is one reason I’ve been thankful for my work as an Environmental Studies professor the past twenty-one years, and it’s also the reason the longer I write poems, fewer and fewer have to do with autobiographical matters.
I’m interested in the porousness of borders, in moving beyond the fabrication of a simple, restricted self, into the many selves that comprise us. Here I mean emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, and biologically (all the creatures that inhabit our skin or gut, for example). So this is all to say that, yes, my early poems in my first books do have aspects of cataloguing, of reportage as a means to be present, to honor what I find in those moments.
What contributed to the change or evolution of my poetics to include the aspect of world-building you mention, which for me may involve surreal or magically real acts or dislocations, was an opening to other aspects of my life, other areas of artistic influence. I’ve been a reader of sci-fi and fantasy since childhood, an avid watcher of movies of all sorts, a collector of comics, a lover of paintings, a music junkie whose tastes range all over the place. I like the idea of a chorus or choral arrangement, of many voices telling a story from different perspectives. At some point—I think around the time I was writing In the Kingdom of the Ditch (Michigan State University Press, 2013)—I simply gave myself permission and freedom to incorporate these other loves to help me build worlds that move from the more realistic to the surreal or magically real.
Lassell: That’s such an insightful and poignant answer, an essential window into you, both as a poet and a person. Speaking of In the Kingdom of the Ditch, I was taken with this new collection’s title, Ditch Memory, which reminded me of that earlier collection. Was this an intentional overture? I noticed that you’ve arranged your new & selected with the newest poems coming first, then readers working their way backwards to your oldest poems. I loved this choice, since the newer poems create an interesting conversation with the older poems. Family plays a crucial role in your work—I’m thinking of the poems about your father, for example. One of your new poems, “The Wind Turbine Tech Speaks of Revolutions,” has these two incredible lines that, while they appear separately in the poem, have lingered with me: “I’m living my father’s life in reverse … Mine is a day of slow revolutions.” Could you say more about this poem, the poem’s speaker, and the poem’s relation to your work as a whole?
Davis: I suppose “Ditch Memory,” the title poem in the new collection, is an echo of that previous collection, an “intentional overture,” as you called it, which is an aesthetic or formal decision. But that decision evolved naturally from my lived passions, obsessions, and pleasures, long before it was a “poetry” decision.
Is it typical for a boy to be drawn to ditches? I really don’t know. I do know my cousins and I played in ditches when I’d visit my paternal grandparents’ farm in Kentucky, often after a rain, the red clay smearing our clothes and shoes. I also hunted for “treasures” in ditches when I wasn’t doing chores at home. In the mid-1970s, there was a fad of collecting beer cans. I had quite a beer can collection, all discovered in ditches along county roads where I walked or road my bike. I often found wild strawberries or dewberries growing in ditches, too. I associate ditches with the sweetness of fruit we didn’t grow or work for in our gardens. The idea that the earth would feed us willingly, without the sweat of our brow, comes from these ditch gifts. I still spend a lot of time foraging, and where I live blackcap raspberries tend to grow around ditches. Jewelweed, one of my favorite wildflowers, crowds the ditches here in Pennsylvania. I’ve come across plenty to repulse me in a ditch and understand the negative connotations associated with the word, but part of my work as a writer is to reclaim what is neglected or derided.
As for my father, I’m blessed that I had a good one. He told me daily that he loved me, showed me his love by spending time with me, by talking to me, by valuing what I tried to do. He wasn’t perfect, of course, and could have a temper. He also challenged me to do better when I worked for him at the animal hospital or did other chores. Often my first or second efforts were the subject of serious scolding. I was made to do the chore again and again until I got it right. His parents had a first- and fourth-grade education. He worked incredibly hard to beat the odds and become a veterinarian. He’s also the first person who I knew who loved poems. He’d recite poems when we worked together, sometimes cutting firewood or during surgery. He was very proud that I wrote poems. In the factory town where I grew up, I couldn’t imagine anyone being proud of a poem.
In “The Wind Turbine Tech Speaks of Revolutions,” I’m borrowing parts of my own lived history, or my family’s, and weaving that history together with a fictional character (or composite character) who scales wind turbines as a maintenance worker. Where I live along the Allegheny Front, over the past fifteen years we’ve had a substantial amount of ridge top built up with wind turbines. While these turbines do offer energy that is “greener,” it is not without environmental cost and degradation. Forests were cut to create roads to the platforms where the turbines are installed. Forest fragmentation impacts many species. This area is also on an ancient migratory flyway, and some birds and bats are maimed or killed by the turbines. I wish we would spend more time talking about decreasing our consumption, not simply changing technology to support consumerism’s enormous appetite.
But when I write poems, I’m not seeking some singular message or answer. I’m interested in exploring the lives of the people I encounter, to present them in their complexity and contradictions. I’ve watched maintenance workers scale the turbines, talked to some at diners or at the gym. Those mules in the poem are my granddaddy’s. The miner who goes into the tunnels is from my family tree. Working-class people understand the harm they do to the earth and to their own bodies but often don’t see a way out of their existence. Work must be done. Work pays the bills. I hope to capture moments of reflection amid this cruel reality, the “slow revolutions” of the mind and heart.
Lassell: I love that. The work of a writer is “to reclaim what is neglected or derided”—wow! That is such an incredible thought, and a great way of viewing the role of poetry. It reminds me of two other new poems in this collection: “April Prayer,” which has the closing lines, “for the beauty of the devoured / and the ones who devour,” and the poem “The Dam on Loup Run,” which features a bear called Ursus. Could you speak about Ursus and the presence of bears and other predatory animals in your poetry?
Davis: The two poems you mention have predators and predatory behavior at their center: a coyote and a black bear, specifically the black bear “Ursus” who I trail after in many of my poems.
I remember having arguments in my head, starting early in grade school when the teacher would read poems to us set in the natural world. At that point, I didn’t know the Pastoral literary tradition, but I was bothered that when nature was either the protagonist or the backdrop for a poem, it was only peaceful, only beautiful in the most generic sense of beauty.
It was in college that I studied Pastoralism and later Tennyson and his admonition that nature was “red in tooth and claw.” Neither of these binaries represented my experience in the woods. Another approach related to the pastoral was the idea that nature’s sole purpose was to comfort me as a human or that it was a receptacle for my feelings or my spirit or soul. While I appreciated some of what Emerson wrote about nature, it still felt as if he “used” nature for his own purposes; it was merely a symbol for the soul in his cosmology. I’m not interested in objectifying nature; I want it to be represented in its full agency.
I know all of these traditions influence my work, but I hope my poems allow nature—(the other beings that populate the earth besides humans)—to be more complex and contradictory. To be beautiful. To be ugly. To be terrifying. To be comforting. I’m forever asking myself what I can learn from nature, how might it change my ways of seeing or thinking, if I’m open to its “languages,” its ways of speaking and acting.
To this end, in a poem like “April Prayer,” I’m wrestling with the general attitude and belief of many people where I live that there are creatures we should exterminate. It’s an odd relationship many hunters have with predators. They prize the coyote or the bear because they measure their own prowess—often their manhood—against the animal. Yet at the same time they demonize the coyote, forming ritual hunting events to kill as many as they can. In Pennsylvania, you’re permitted to kill a coyote any day of the year, any time of the day. There are no regulations in the taking of a coyote. This fact grieves me.
Because I want a healthy ecosystem, I know we must keep the deer population in check. There are still more deer in Pennsylvania today than when the first European colonists arrived. Our forests suffer when the deer population is too large. I admire the ways that coyote hunt. I share with them a love of healthy meat (the venison I work for each year when I hunt). “April Prayer” is a recognition of the awfulness of taking a life but also the skill it requires, the grief in a kill and the joy in that same kill. When I hunt, I follow the coyote’s spirit and example to share in this ancient ritual.
“The Dam on Loup Run” refers to a small dam in the state game lands near my house. It was built more than a hundred years ago and has prevented generations of fish from reaching the headwaters, separating and diminishing these groups by stopping a healthy mixing during the spawn. As I worked on this poem, I recalled Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, and my own conflicted thoughts on environmental activism, eco-terrorism, and the necessary/needed destruction of humanmade harms.
Ursus is a bear I’ve been writing about for nearly twenty years. I did not give him a name, however, until I was working on the manuscript that would become Coffin Honey (Michigan State University Press, 2022). He’s a central figure in the braided stories in that book. The earliest draft I can find of a poem where I name him is about eight years ago. I’m grateful he continues to be part of my writing and dreaming life. Because he’s a bear—and I do hope I honor him as a bear, not as a reductive symbol—he can do things I can’t do as a human. I took such pleasure in this poem as he overturns the stones of the dam, allowing the fish to move upstream. I also liked the idea that he wasn’t only a “savior” to these fish, releasing them to their original place on the mountain, but also the predator that he was born to be, eating some of the fish as they try to leap past him.
Bear have a powerful and long relationship with humans. I cringe when we make of them something they’re not, diminishing their profound place in the world. I appreciate the ways many cultures, many indigenous peoples and tribes, have recognized the emotional and intellectual lives of bears. Science has shown us that we share a remarkably high percentage of our DNA with them. Humans and grizzly bears, for instance, share 80% of their DNA. I’m fortunate that I live in a place with a healthy population of black bear. I have regular encounters with them and often follow their trails, looking for their sign as they claw the skin of beech trees or in the scat they leave, the overturned stones and logs where they’ve foraged. We pick the same berry patches, and there have been times while I’m picking that a bear will emerge from the far end of the patch.
Lassell: What a beautiful image you’ve described, sharing a berry patch with a bear! It makes me think of another important quality found in your poetry: food and its indelible connection to us and the rest of the animal kingdom. It seems that foraging is as much a part of your natural inclination as hunting and fishing are. What sorts of berries do you often find on the hikes near your home? Could you share a little bit about the landscape where many of your poems are made?
Davis: After the clearcutting of forests along the Allegheny Front in the 19th and early 20th centuries, after the charcoal making as an integral part of the iron industry, after the deep tunnel mining and then the strip mining for coal, after the quarrying for sandstone, the extractive economy of Pennsylvania wasn’t sure what to do with the desecrated land where I live. Sadly, in our economy, instead of seeing the value in wildness and in living close to the earth’s rhythms, once the obvious ways of making money are exhausted, the land is discarded, orphaned. Thankfully, much of this abused and discarded land was purchased by the Pennsylvania Game Commission and turned into state game lands. Because we have a great deal of annual precipitation, the land has healed in remarkable ways over the past 100 years. The scars are everywhere and the land is still seriously compromised in many regards. But it’s amazing what can happen when humans stop abusing a place.
The wild spaces to the west of my home are where I hunt and fish. Some of my favorite trees in this place are chestnut oak, American beech, tulip poplar, cucumber magnolia, and hemlock. The groves of rhododendron that grow along our streams and the mountain laurel that scales the mountain explode in pink and white blossoms in June and July. We have a healthy population of bear, fisher, bobcat, mink, beaver, deer, turkey, and woodcock. Sadly, during the last decade our ruffed grouse population has declined dramatically because of the impact of West Nile Virus. We are home to many warblers during the summer months. I love our kingfisher and bald eagles, the many different hawks and owls, the ravens who talk at me and over me when I walk the mountain.
Long before I hunted, I foraged. Foraging was my first inclination as a child and still what I love the best. Finding what was good to eat, what tasted good and what was given without our turning the earth and planting seed, is a blessed miracle. Our gratitude is needed for this, as is some reciprocal act of care, of giving back. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes beautifully about this relationship and our obligation in it.
As for kinds of wild edibles that I enjoy, sheep sorrel was an early love with its sharp citrus tang. Before people put poison on their yards to kill “weeds,” you could find sheep sorrel in most every lawn. In the woods where I roam now, I find lots of wood sorrel to eat, dewberries, wild strawberries, teaberries, elderberries, blackberries, red raspberries and blackcap raspberries, spicebush berries, many varieties of wild blueberries, serviceberry, black cherry, and fox grapes. We have abundant fungi, including chicken of the woods, chanterelle, turkey tail, puffball, and morel, to name a few. I often suck on a twig of sassafras or black birch while walking.
Food, the act of eating, is such a sensuous delight. Eating from the earth’s body grounds me and makes me sad for the ways Western thinking has consistently emphasized transcendence. I want to write using an incarnational poetics, a celebration of the earth that makes us and feeds us and keeps us, if we’ll only stop destroying it. I want to move deeper into the earth, not away from it.
Lassell: “It’s amazing what can happen when humans stop abusing a place”—this is so true. It reminds me of the Kentucky landscape where I grew up. And I love to hear that your home still fruits so wildly, despite the landscape’s past wounds. It speaks to an earthly resilience that lives in all of us.
In closing this conversation, I want to draw attention to your poem “Fishing with My Seventeen-Year-Old Self” which ends with these lines: “I wait / a bit longer, shelter in this country the same way / I saved leaves to press in a book as a boy.” It is sometimes said that every poet is comprised from a constellation of other poets who preceded them, who have paved the way stylistically and thematically for new poets to enter the literary sphere. Who were the poets that have made your Art possible, who have inspired your poetry and have carried your poetic style, impulse, and concerns into fruition? In other words, what are “the leaves” you’ve saved in your Art throughout the years?
Davis: Such a question is easy and difficult at the same time. On my shelves I have more than five hundred books of poetry that I’ve hung onto because there’s something in a poem or line that has changed me and helped me to grow as a poet and as a human. So I’ll ask forgiveness for the poets I do not mention in my answer whose work I value.
The first poet who opened my eyes to what I could write about was Maxine Kumin and her “Excrement Poem.” As the son of a veterinarian and grandson of farmers, I struggled for permission about what a poem could speak to, speak about. Kumin demonstrated that a poem about mucking stalls was as important as a Wallace Stevens poem that my professor liked but I could not understand or relate to. I met Maxine only once, but I thanked her, the horse woman that she was, for setting me free with that poem, for saddling the horse of poetry and putting me on the trail.
Soon after, Galway Kinnell entered my reading world. “The Bear” taught me about narrative in poetry, about how the visceral, the violent, the unyielding might drive a poem forward. With its penultimate lines—“what, anyway, / was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?”—it taught me that metaphor can turn every line on its head, making the poem a different thing. Kinnell’s other poems about lovemaking, about the tenderness of raising and loving children, also helped me see possible ways to write about Shelly and Noah and Nathan.
In Lucien Stryk’s class I read Jim Harrison for the first time. I remember immediately leaving the class and going to the university library, searching in the stacks and finding Harrison’s first book of poems, which Denise Levertov was instrumental in getting published. I read Plain Song in one sitting. The first poem in that book begins “Form is the woods: the beast, / a bobcat padding through red sumac, / the pheasant in brake or goldenrod / that he stalks.” My insecurities about prosody fell away with these lines. I wanted to write poems in which form was taken from the woods, from the streams, from the tracks of animals walking over snow.
Other poets whose work has made my own possible over the years include Gwendolyn Brooks, Jane Kenyon, Ross Gay, Wendell Berry, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Robert Wrigley, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Adrian Matejka, Maurice Manning, Raymond Carver, Shara McCallum, Brian Turner, Mary Oliver, Dan Gerber, Donika Kelly, Ted Kooser, James Wright, Denise Levertov, David Shumate, Camille Dungy, Steve Scafidi, William Stafford, K.A. Hays, Jim Daniels, Margaret Gibson, Philip Levine, Chris Dombrowski, Robert Hass, Linda Pastan, Ron Rash, Jack Ridl, Elizabeth Bishop, Michael McGriff, Rebecca Gayle Howell, James Dickey, Joe Wilkins, Jane Hirshfield, Charles Wright, Julia Kasdorf, Harry Humes, Anne Haven McDonnell, and W.S. Merwin, to name only a few. And in translation, the classical Chinese poets Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Han Shan, Po Chü-i, and Yang Wan-li.
I think what excites me most are new poets, younger poets, who shape my work and help it to keep evolving, help me to keep learning. Writers who are much younger than me, some who were my students, include Geffrey Davis, Corrie Williamson, and Tyree Daye. And my son Noah, whose poems have stunned and amazed me. He took an independent study with me in college when he first began to write poems. His book, Of This River, won the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and his second book, The Last Beast We Revel In, will be published by CavanKerry Press in 2025. I exchange drafts of poems regularly with Noah and learn from him and his boundless imagination. I never dared hope I’d have a child whose work and life would so deeply affect me.
I’m very grateful for the life I’ve been given to live in poems.
