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 anthology Making Poems. 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, Barrow Street, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Western Humanities Review, Sycamore Review, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily. He teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: In the title poem of your most recent collection Coffin Honey, the airy section begins with colony collapse as we read of a beekeeper who “raises a bee-box lid, / scrapes bodies / from comb, wax filling / behind fingernails, / embalmed / in stickiness.” The piece quickly progresses to his daughter’s dismay over the dead creatures and an ensuing fatal swarm as she attempts to replace them. In later sections, the beekeeper finds his daughter, builds a coffin for her, and “smothers / the girl / in streams / of honey, / only her front / teeth showing.” It is a lyric and merciless story, and so I want to begin by asking how you see narrative working in your poetry? Especially since narrative is so often anthropocentric or personifying; and since beginnings, middles, and endings blur; I’m curious about the power of a lyric to tell story, or the ways poems change what story even means. What are the factors you consider when incorporating them in poems?

Todd Davis: I am a poet who loves narrative. Stories have filled my life from my earliest memories. My grandparents on both sides were poor Appalachian farmers during the Great Depression. My paternal grandfather only had a first-grade education. But in these communities the act of telling stories was vitally important, and there was poetry in the telling of stories.

When I recall my grandfather’s voice, I can see how he carefully selected sound and phrasing, how they worked with the content of the tale. The strong images his stories were comprised of carried not only narrative depth but worked through association and metaphor.

I tell you this because I see a story in most everything I look at. A photograph. A painting. A sculpture. A woman trying to select a particular shampoo from the hundreds of shampoos in an aisle at the store. A teenager with a vintage Quiet Riot t-shirt riding a skateboard. A janitor sitting on a bench, drinking coffee from a thermos. Technically I understand the difference between lyric and narrative. But my felt sense, my instinct, sees or feels a story in the briefest of lyrics.

“Coffin Honey” is a poem that began with disparate lyrics, with images written at different places in my journal. The more I reread the passages the more I saw the story behind them, how they were connected to one another. Unlike some of my narrative poems, as “Coffin Honey” was beginning to take shape, I decided I wanted the lyrics to remain intact. I like your use of “airy” to describe the fifteen sections of the poem. I wanted that space, that breath, a wind to blow through them, maybe the flight of the bees, the hum of existence beneath their movement. I wanted the narrative to be as much implied as spelled out.

And now to think about your suggestion that narrative is anthropocentric. I suppose it is: a human construct created by humans for the consumption by other humans. (Yet somewhere scratching at the back of my head is also the possibility that other-than-human animals tell stories, that such a construct may not only be the provenance of humans, but that these other constructions might look/sound very different than ours.) And when I hear the term anthropocentric, I usually think of something negative. Look at the destruction and degradation we’ve wrought as a species. Look at what life is like in the Anthropocene, the ways we’ve made other species suffer, driven so many to extinction. Yet I don’t think narrative has to be solely anthropocentric.

I’d say my desire in using narrative is to focus on the greater-than-human world, moving away from the anthropocentric, or critiquing the anthropocene. I’m very happy that none of the covers of my books of poetry have a human on them. Instead, they feature the other-than-human lives that populate my poems, my stories.

CL: That’s fascinating to me, as someone who does not think in a narrative way. And we read your attention to the non-human world everywhere in these pieces, through particular naming, through lush and unsparing description. In terms of non-anthropocentric narratives, I’m reminded of “Ursus Grows Wings,” a poem in which a bear called Ursus finds a tulip poplar tree for hibernation. We read from Ursus’ perspective as “he craves / the sharp lemon of sorrel, acorn / meal upon the tongue, breath ripe / with the smashed ferment / of hawthorn” and “struggles to find the stars that signify him…aches for a prayer that might hold / back the seconds, sky collapsing / into darkness.” In his slumber, Ursus dreams he sprouts wings and does fly, in a way, when roused by a man come to saw the tree down. The poem could easily come from a man’s perspective, yet the interiority of the bear and his own dreaming make the story so rich. Chimamanda Adichie has widely spoken about the danger of a single story, and I think in this case it applies to a purely human story, as well. Throughout the collection, Ursus reappears, both as subject and speaker of poems. How do you see him functioning in this book’s ecosystem, perhaps in ways another creature might not?

TD: Chimamanda Adichie warning against the dangers of a single story is full of wisdom we would all do well to heed. A single story cannot speak to the myriad perspectives that comprise the reality of our world. The western idea of competition, of a marketplace that somehow winnows stories, deciding what is of value only based upon what sells or who is in power, harms many, silences many, and radically truncates our understanding of one another, of the communal, of our connections across boundaries—physical, cultural, spiritual, emotional. I love storytelling and poem-making that includes multiple perspectives, multiple voices.

That’s one of the reasons Ursus runs through many poems in the collection. I want to attend to, to suss out, how the world may look to other-than-human animals, especially in the wake of how humans have so radically remade the environment. I try to do so with care and respect, knowing that observation and empathy can only take me so far as a human animal. Yet I think it would be worse not to try to move outside our singular experiences, not to imagine what other creatures see and experience.

You mention the lines about what Ursus craves as he prepares his body for the long months of hibernation. I love to roam the woods to see what animals and birds are eating at various times. Fall is an especially fecund time here along the Allegheny Front with a banquet of choices for a bear. If I’m lucky, I get to observe firsthand the creature eating. There have been times I’ve been picking and eating my way through berry canes in a thick patch only to realize there’s a deer or bear also in the patch. We share our love and desire for these berries across species’ lines. We are in the same space filling our bellies, enjoying the sensual delight of the sugar, the strong tang of berry juice. Most often, however, there are signs to read that tell you how a bear has been moving through the woods: overturned stones, rotted logs scratched open, berry canes trampled, bits of fur caught on thorns. And there’s always scat, which is very particular to a given animal—I love to examine scat, to recreate the meal that has contributed to the health of this animal I share the woods with.

As for your question about how Ursus functions in the collection, it’s interesting to me how my obsession with animal knowledge and wisdom, with learning their ways of moving and being in the world, has created a rhetoric or poetics of sorts in my work. It’s not something I set out to do, to theorize or strategize, to make of Ursus a construct or literary device. But as the book evolved I recognized that my attitudes and values toward the natural world in general and a black bear like Ursus in particular coalesced around my sense, my belief, in the wisdom of the way Urus lives, the morality of his instinct, the rightness of that way of being, especially in the face of the catastrophes and tragic horrors we humans have wrought: here I’m thinking of climate collapse, of slavery and racism, of war, of technologies that destroy or poison. Ursus is both observer and judge, witness and victim. For me, Ursus’s life is a story to remind us of what we might turn toward: the elemental, the primal, the primary.

CL: Having Ursus appear throughout the collection does prevent him from becoming a symbol or construct, to me at least. And yet sometimes we turn to language, and literary devices in particular, to articulate those very primal and primary things we know or feel but can’t otherwise state. In one of my favorite poems in the collection “Tattoos Cataract Her Back,” we read of a woman’s body completely tattooed with the natural world, namely endangered or extinct birds. Although she “sews long dresses, shrouds these lives deep in the silent woods of her thighs” her body can only depict “a register of what their parents / and grandparents took without asking. / Waterfall of birds that flew into the cyclone / of history: pagan reed-warbler, least / vermillion flycatcher, Laysan honeycreeper, / and Marianne white-eye,” not preserve them. It is an intimate, haunting poem; I shiver when I read such invested grief—something tattooed on the heart—and yet, this is a symbolic act. What are some of the powers and dangers associated with symbol, metaphor, allegory, etc. in work that engages so forthrightly with the world? What do poems afford in this respect that other genres or art forms might not?

TD: As I worked on “Tattoos Cataract Her Back,” I thought about how we might capture something of what has passed from us, that has vanished forever. As we walk through a Sixth Mass Extinction event, primarily caused by human activity, there is heavy grief, there is guilt, there is the desire among some of us to do something, to act in the face of such calamitous change. As a writer and storyteller, as a maker of poems, I try to record what is passing or what has already passed. I love visual art and wish I could draw or paint or make tattoos that would participate in this act of witness. That’s why the woman in this poem appeared one day as I was working in my journal: her decision to remake her own body in a symbolic act by having these birds drawn and colored on her flesh was one way to bear witness. What is implied in this poem is how the remaking of her body changes her relationship to others. Who is allowed to see these tattoos? To what degree are they private? How do they transform her relationship to children or her husband? How do they change her relationship to the species that still exist but are nearing extinction? How does a symbolic representation of a creature who is gone from the earth’s face forever bring her into contact with the past, with grief, with an absence that should not rightfully exist? In a poem of mine called “Gnosis,” which is in my previous book, Native Species, I ask the question: “When our species is extinct, // what animal will carry the memory / of our lives?”

As for the powers associated with symbol, metaphor, and allegory, I think they help in the work of collective memory. A poem or a story has the ability to become part of the body’s record without the same kinds of effort that memorizing the Periodical Table demands, for instance. We humans have evolved along with stories, along with symbol, metaphor, and allegory. As we tell our stories, we remember again, we make what has passed breathe in our imaginations, and there’s a chance that the breath of life in the act of imagining might transform our relationships to other living beings in the present moment, help us value those living beings in better ways, perhaps change the ways we live with them, alongside them, in mutually beneficial ways, true reciprocity. This is why the kinds of narratives we are exposed to, that we make part of our living bodies, is so crucial. I thought about this a great deal as Shelly and I were raising our sons, as we read or told them stories each night.

The danger of symbol, metaphor, and allegory, from my perspective as a naturalist and professor of Environmental Studies, is that the actual living, breathing creature who exists today (or that once existed in the past) might be diminished or overlooked, objectified or trivialized. The challenge for the writer is to use lived knowledge and scientific evidence to create symbols, metaphors, and allegories that take the best from such rhetorical acts—(the aesthetic space these acts construct is very important to me)—and meld it with knowledge that honors the “animal-ness” of that animal.

Poetry affords a space for this kind of investigation and representation that often allows for transformative experiences. Metaphor itself can be transformative: the changing of one thing into another through association. I get excited by this act as a possible gesture toward what we don’t know about the lives of other-than-human animals.

CL: Maybe poems uniquely afford this, as well—when people ask me why poetry? or what is a poem, exactly? all I can offer is that it’s something that can’t be said any other way. If it could be a novel or a painting or song those might be better vessels, but—just like a warbler can’t be a waxwing or a kingfisher or a pelican—it is what it is, irreducible. And as such, it creates other modes of being—like paying attention, like tolerating ambiguity or paradox—that have an actual impact on our relationships, communities, ecosystems.

Your poems have incredible precision and attention to detail. In the poem “Buck Day,” where we follow a young girl hunting and dressing a deer with her father, we also learn “It’s been two years since she stopped cutting. / She rubs Vaseline where the skin knit unevenly, / but pink ridges remain.”

The piece has descriptions that are unique: “she lays the rifle, precise / as a ruler, across her lap”; or perfect: “like field goal posts, the dead buck’s legs splay”; or uniquely-perfect for the poem: “her boyfriend works for the township. Like a blood clot / moving through a vein, he walks miles beneath streets / in tunnels of pipe”; all of which prepare us for the revelation “it’s easy to get lost in the body’s house. That’s why / she carved openings in her skin.”

As you pay close attention, do you think about crafting unique or perfect descriptions for a transformation to occur? Can the details ever overwhelm a poem? How do you know when that’s happening, or how have you cultivated your powers of zooming in/out to a poem’s (or collection’s) larger scope?

TD: Yes, absolutely, a poem can be overwhelmed by details. And I’m sure in my writing life I’ve published poems that some might think were swamped by too much precision, too much detail, too much description. I do hope I’ve gotten better at this: knowing when to pull back, when to omit certain details and allow them to be implied.

You also mention crafting the poem for “a transformation to occur.” It’s easy to force transformation on a poem, and I do my best to avoid “false” transformation. I’m drawn to moments of change—you might compare such moments in our lived lives to the volta in a poem, a turning. But how to write a poem that grapples with the ways transformation happens, that allows for the subtlety and complexity, that prepares the reader adequately for it to happen? I can only say for me it’s a felt sense, and I’m sure that felt sense is based on years of reading and observing, which leads me to the more difficult question you asked: Whether I think about the crafting, how I cultivated the powers of zooming in/out to a poem’s (or collection’s) larger scope?

More than thirty years ago, when I began writing poems—seriously writing them, apprenticing myself to other poets’ work, hoping to add a poem or two of my own to the great river of poetry that flows through human history—I very much thought about what I was crafting, tried to conjure, by will, lines like the ones you mention above. Sometimes that worked, but most often what I ended up with were lines that felt forced, contrived. I remember feeling far more anxious in the moment of writing during that period. Was I writing a poem in “the right way”? Did the poem work? How would I know if it worked? Who was to say if it was working—me, or a fellow poet I trusted, or some nameless and faceless editor who would send me a form acceptance or rejection slip?

I’m thankful that over the years I’ve cultivated a way of doing something I’d call a “walking poetry meditation.” The fostering of this way of being present while also performing part of the act of writing first began with reading the best poets’ work I could get my hands on. With examples of all kinds of poems floating around in my skull, I then began to name what I walked by—different flowers or trees or animal tracks or berries; types of tools or articles of clothing; kinds of windows or doors; faces or parts of the body. There’s so much we see in the world that we cannot name. I found visual dictionaries and field guides to be a big help. In the act of naming I discovered a kind of connection, a form of empathy, to see the world from the perspective of what or whom was being named. I tried to create a deeper understanding of what I was naming by exercising the powers of metaphor and association, playing with phrasing and similes to describe what I was seeing or hearing, in real time as I was observing. This “walking poetry meditation,” so necessary to my writing, has become instinctive these many years later.

But just like the best basketball player—(take Steph Curry, for instance, the greatest shooter in the history of the game)—can still have a miserable shooting night, when despite all the repetitions, all of the instinctive movement based upon what he has studied and learned, pushing the game forward into new areas, despite all of this, there are nights it just doesn’t work. The same is true for poetry: I love when it’s going well, when the poem almost seems to be writing itself. But there are plenty days when I feel like I’m just beginning again, and nothing seems to work. What I love about poetry is that I can always revise. I can sharpen what came instinctively. I can even simply ask to run it back and have another game without a loss on the team record.

CL: That’s one of the reasons I love poetry—unlike even more physical art forms (like dance) or less physical (like prose)—it reconciles the intellect and body in a way that’s mystical and hard to pin down. At their best they’re all-consuming, just like Steph’s magical drives. I wonder though, as someone with seven books and the apprenticeship experience you’ve described, how do you continue to not only hone your skills, but also grow? How do poems continue to surprise you, both in general or more specifically in writing Coffin Honey?

TD: Yes! That’s why I love poetry, too. It’s that blurring of lines—or maybe better yet no lines at all—between body and mind. I’ve spoken out against dualism often throughout my career as a teacher and a writer. I don’t like the Western idea of dividing body from spirit, the profane from the sacred, the physical from the intellectual. Ten years ago, Ross Gay and I had a long conversation about writing from the body, how a poem is a bodily act, at least for the two of us. I admire where Ross has taken that thinking and how it has shaped his writing. You think of a long poem (an entire book!) like Be Holding and the ways he weaves Dr. J’s legendary move, his flight, holding time still, the body’s grace as art and poem, as a way of speaking to cultural issues others might divide from the body. I’m so grateful for the path he offers us in that poem.

You ask a great question about growth, and I think twenty years ago when my first book was published I would have looked at a poet with seven books and said they must really understand poetry, have a handle on how to make a poem. I suppose the old adage about the more you know the more you realize how little you know applies here. Objectively, I recognize that I know more about poems than I did twenty and thirty years ago. But each poem feels new to me. The page is always blank. And even more to the point concerning apprenticeship, I’m constantly amazed by new writers, or writers new to me. I remember when I read Donika Kelly’s Bestiary for the first time and was simply in awe of her use of mythology to speak to the idea of love and sexuality and race. Or Sara Eliza Johnson’s Bone Map and the manner she explored the body and the more-than-human world that blurred into metaphor. More recently I was reading Corrie Willamson’s The River Where You Forgot My Name—a book I love for its close attention to the natural world—and learned so much from her about moving in and out of time, using historical figures of the west to inform poems written about the present moment. I mention all of these writers and their books because they’ve all helped me continue to grow and learn to write a poem, to learn to write a new kind of poem I haven’t been able to write up to that time. I also learn from poets from past centuries, from other schools of poetry, other cultures and countries. In translation, I spend a great deal of time with Classical Chinese poetry. Translators like Red Pine and David Hinton have helped me journey through time and place to the voices of the long dead whose experience, whose eye and ear for the natural world, whose spiritual understanding, connect deeply to my own meditative practices in the woods.

I guess you can see that I’m constantly surprised by poems, by the creativity and soulfulness of other poets. I love call-and-response music and think of poems as an art of call and response. When I read poems by other folks, I want to sing back, and that singing back seems to always be new, like the seep in the mountain where water ushers forth second by second, day after day.

The only comment I’ll make in regards to Coffin Honey is that I allowed many old teachers—Gwendolyn Brooks with her A Street in Bronzeville or Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares—to show me how to write a book of tightly related narratives, a story that includes the perspectives and stories of a range of characters, and to braid those stories, to permit them to intersect, to make of an entire book a poem working together, showing how all things are related. There are no useless participants in an ecosystem; every species is necessary for its health. I wanted that feeling in Coffin Honey, that each poem affects another, depends on another, as the people and more-than-human animals in the poems depend on each other, for ill or good. In this way, as I wrote the book, it felt like something new and different from my other books; it felt like I was growing. I’m 57 now and I hope I never stop learning, never stop growing as a person, including as a poet.

CL: I’m so glad to hear you echo this—I know less and less, and have more and more questions! Like here, for example, one new thing I notice is that in addition to the more narrative poems (like “What I Know about the Last Lynching in Jeff Davis County,” or “Foxfire”) that populate the collection, we also have a series of linked “dream elevator” pieces which incorporate a lot of white space and fray a bit, despite several through-threads. They are quite intense in terms of content as well—child molestation and abuse, extractive practices that ruin the land, a mother’s suicide, a man mauled by a bear—even moving toward plague and apocalypse. Can you speak some about how you see these functioning differently in Coffin Honey? Is this a departure in your work? What relationship does dream have to poetry, for you?

TD: Yes, the four “dream elevator” poems, which separate the book into sections, are a departure for me, or something new, in terms of form. These are parts of growth we mentioned earlier, trying to expand what I’ve attempted in the past.

While I’ve had individual poems in all my collections that deal with trauma—including poems about my uncle’s PTSD from his service in WWII, my mother’s stories about her miscarriages, my Aunt Margie’s twin dying as a toddler after having been burnt by the wash water that had been boiled outside on the farm in Kentucky, and other sorrows—I’ve never written a book of such sustained trauma as in Coffin Honey.

I tried to weave together multiple stories that involve sexual abuse, radical desecration/degradation of the more-than-human world, racism, abandonment, self-harm, and other forms of trespass and violence. As these stories collided with one another, talked with and whispered to one another, shouted and screamed at one another, the “dream elevator” poems materialized. I saw them as a release from the more grounded, realistic narrative structures in the book. I wrote them in similar ways to my remembered dreams. Many of the characters in this book visited me in dreams over the three years of writing. I grieved in very real ways as I retold their stories.

Trauma, and its aftermath, often causes fragmentation, disconnection, gaps in thinking or remembering. And so the white space and fraying you see in the “dream elevator” poems is a way to represent trauma on the page. The content tries to do this, but I wanted the form to do it as well.

As for your question about dreaming and its relationship to poems for me, I remember my dreams, often multiple dreams, each morning when I wake. I tend to be a lucid dreamer. I’ve been gifted lines to poems in dreams or solutions to problems I’ve been having in finishing a poem. There are times that the act of writing feels very similar to dreaming (and many other times that it feels nothing like dreaming!). But I do love how dreams often transform and metamorphose through association. I’m most at home in poems that work through association.

CL: Form is content, and the trauma of those poems definitely benefits from the fragmentation, the disconnect. I write from a place of caregiving and chronic illness; the constant failure of body and breath have sometimes translated to poems that disintegrate at the phrase or even syllable-level. The grace is when they recombine in unexpected ways. Some of those dream elevator pieces are so unexpectedly beautiful: “A boy holds // a pail / of newts / collected at the seep…day old / fawn / ripped open / like an envelope” or “sun clangs on the water / as he washes his cock…Exposed and weak, / like the stalk of a fern, / the boy lifts the shotgun…” I can’t help wonder how you think about lyricism or lyric beauty in poetry, especially with writing about trespass, harm, or violence? What are the considerations you make when the brutality or the erasure, even, is in stark contrast to mindfulness and care your poetry enacts?

TD: I’m interested in art that holds the tension between grace and violence, between beauty and desecration, between joy and suffering. I certainly would make no claim to understand fully how existence is a cascading cataract of these tensions, but I try to be cognizant that in any given moment one being’s joy or grace may be connected to another’s suffering or sorrow. I think there is much wisdom to be learned in Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. I try to ground my way of living with the first truth: “Life is suffering.” But what is the cause of suffering? What can I do to ameliorate certain kinds of suffering? How might suffering end? And as a writer, how will I present that suffering, that violence, in a poem?

With this in mind, as a writer I do not wish to flinch or shy away from the very real violence that is enacted on the world, on individual beings, like that boy in Coffin Honey. I do not wish to erase or elide necessary scenes. In most of my poetry, I try to write from the perspective of “the least of these,” those who suffer the most, who are born into systems that subjugate them, use them as tools, that objectify them. That’s why I return in book after book to working-class folks in the Rust Belt, why I’m interested in the girl whose life is changed by diabetes, or the mother who is deaf trying to communicate with her daughter, or the woman who wanders away in an Alzheimer’s haze, or the African American parishioners who were brutally murdered in church. But even in the midst of suffering or pain, the world continues to exist, even beyond the boundaries of our perceptions. And in that existence, there is still beauty.

I do not wish to be misunderstood, however: there is no beauty in the suffering of that boy who is raped by his uncle. I am not trying to suggest anything like that in the poem or in my answer to your question. Yet in moments of trauma that I’ve experienced, including a narrow escape in elementary school from a sexual predator, I’ve found myself noticing other elements of the scene around me, finding a connection to something beautiful or consoling. In such moments I’ve wondered how others feel or perceive the same events. I’ve been reminded that while one person receives good news—the birth of a child, an acceptance of a marriage proposal, a book contract—another person, maybe only a few feet away, is informed that a parent has died, or that a biopsy shows a malignancy, or that their book manuscript has been rejected again.

I want to juggle as many of these contradictory, even chaotic, emotions within a given piece as a I can. And this leads to your specific question about the lyric. I think the question might be how does the lyric form—one which demands a certain kind of aesthetic—hold or embody suffering or violence? I suppose I’d turn to the world of music as my guide. I marvel at how all different kinds of music can express fundamentally different emotions. Think about how love is expressed in rhythm and blues, then in classic rock, or hip hop, or rap, or heavy metal, or punk, or classical. What is at root in the expression—in this case of “love”—is not necessarily different, but how it may be expressed changes, our idea of the aesthetic changes, as the form interacts and bonds with “love.” This is true of other emotions, I think, too, like rage and anger, like grief. What power might the writer enact in using a form—like the lyric—to play against, even create dissonance with a given subject? How do we use minor and major keys? How do we use a flat or a sharp where it’s not expected?

CL: The music analogy makes a lot of sense; I think many more people would fall in love with poetry if they experienced it in the same way we experience music—bodily, variously, with a peculiar sense of ownership. If you met someone who had never really encountered a poem before, which one (yours or someone else’s) would you share first?

TD: I couldn’t agree more. I think so many people experience poetry feeling pressure to “understand” or “interpret” it. For most, poetry is something introduced in a classroom setting, and too often it remains isolated, trapped in that academic setting. Unlike music, which people interact with, join with, make on improvised instruments, in all kinds of settings, not worrying about an academic sense of “meaning” or “interpretation.” I’d love to bring people to poetry without those academic pressures, to help celebrate poetry in all its array.

Now for your impossible question, which makes me smile but also makes me nervous. What poem, what poem?!? I feel like I’d need to take the person’s poetic temperature, check their metrical blood pressure, ask if they have any stanza aches or pains. So I’ll cheat on my answer and tell you about the poem I needed so long ago, the poem that allowed me to open myself to poetry’s possibilities: Maxine Kumin’s “The Excrement Poem.”

I’d cleaned so many kennels, so many cages, so many stalls, growing up. I was convinced that I had nothing in my life worthy of a poem. Then I read Kumin’s poem about mucking out horse stalls, those “risen brown buns” lifted on the tines of a pitchfork, and I found my creed in the poem’s closing line: “I honor shit for saying: We go on.” This was the world of my grandparents on the farm, the world at the animal hospital where I spent most of my time, and with Kumin’s permission, I began to write poems. I was fortunate, a few years before her death, we were going through customs at the same time in Vancouver in the airport. I went up and introduced myself and thanked her for giving me my life in letters. I truly don’t think I would have pursued poetry if not for her poem.

I suppose in my teaching life that’s what I want most: to find the right poem for each of my students, from their many and varied backgrounds, that gives them permission to write, that says to them that their lives, their backgrounds, matter and are worthy of poetry.