Adam O. Davis : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

I grew up in transit which meant long trips filled with country music and books-on-tape. One of my earliest musical memories was Kenny Roger’s “The Gambler,” which I maintain is a stone-cold classic. As a child, I loved the cadence of the lyric, “he crushed out his cigarette,” and also its specificity. He didn’t put out the cigarette; he crushed it out. Paul Simon’s Graceland was a mainstay during family road trips and his use of repetition fascinated me: “I know what I know/I have said what I said.” I immediately aspired to that rubberband-like fluency and logic. Finally, my hope for every poem I write is that it have the prayer-like intensity and spookiness of Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song.” The song has the bluesman’s skill of making the same lines sound new each time (their initial playfulness giving way to dread), and the atmospherics kill me—there’s something sacred in those acoustics, that pitch-black room in which the singer decries the horrors of his workday knowing the next workday is only a night’s sleep away. All this said, I’m careful to recognize that music and poetry are two separate enterprises—though they can both inspire each other, they can never be each other. As Glyn Maxwell notes in his masterful book, On Poetry, “The other half of everything for songwriters is music. For poets it’s silence, the space, the whiteness [of the page].” Poets have to make the language work double-time to communicate the atmosphere that music does for the song. Plus, a killer guitar solo can make even the clunkiest of lyrics forgivable. Just look at Van Halen.

Adam O. Davis : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I ask my students this very question. For me, poetry is an interactive art form—maybe the first—in the sense that it asks the reader to discover themselves in the poem. Poetry isn’t here to dictate but to invite, not to provide answers but ask questions. And because of its emphasis on compression there’s a clarity and precision to its proceedings, meaning that there’s no aspect of the poem that isn’t intentional and so its craft is a careful one—a poem means business from the first word to the last, punctuation included. There is no down time in the poem, no room for slack moments or filler, and I like to think of that intensity as a type of mindfulness, of absolute focus on transcribing the lived moment so that it can endure in ways that we can’t. And for me as a reader, a good poem is like a pause button in my life—it takes me out of the now by connecting me directly to language, returning me to my earliest state when the world was nothing but sound and in doing so provides the purest pleasures our language allows for: wonder born of beauty, wonder born of mystery. 

Adam O. Davis : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Mercenary as it may sound, I think of what Macbeth told his hired assassins on the eve of Banquo’s murder, “always thought that I require a cleanness…to leave no rubs or botches in the work.” When I’ve moved past cleverness and fancy and ego to arrive finally (or sometimes, if I’m very lucky, immediately) at the unvarnished imagination the poem demands, then I feel that I’m done. The work to finish a poem demands a kind of winnowing, exhausting all options until only one—the poem’s—remains and it stands firmly in its own intelligence rather than mine. The best way to test this? First, if what I’ve written surprises me, then I know the poem is working beyond me. Second, if I can read the poem in front of a crowd of strangers without feeling embarrassed then I know I’m on to something. 

Adam O. Davis : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

Legend has it my mother read poetry to me every night I was in her womb, so I’d like to think verse was with me even in those unconscious, twilit months. Once in the larger world, nursery rhymes, song lyrics, and poetry itself stoked my interest in the fires that language made possible. I moved around a lot as a kid, sometimes to places where I didn’t speak the language (France, for example) or practice the dominant religion (aka Utah), so being foreign became familiar and I was allowed to listen without expectation of speaking. This meant I got to get sensitive to language, to spend time with its tones and focus on its physicality, the way we move words through us—the stomach, the lungs, the throat, the tongue, the teeth, the lips—until they arrive, if you understand them, at meaning or if you don’t, at music. And that’s what keeps pulling me back to poetry—the way that music and meaning mirror and mar each other and how I can push that process forward. 

Adam O. Davis : part one

Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. The recipient of the 2016 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, his work has appeared widely in journals, including The Believer, The Paris Review, Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and ZYZZYVA. He currently lives in San Diego, California, where he teaches English literature at The Bishop’s School. 

What are you working on?

I’m currently working on a second collection of poems that began as a departure from the style Index of Haunted Houses established (these newer poems also served as a way of keeping hope alive when my first book was going through the contest process without much luck). With the first book, I was looking for absolute precision and compression, trying to see how much I could condense a poem without losing any of its power. With the second collection, I’ve challenged myself to write longer poems by letting more air in so that the poems can sprawl out, the thinking being lightning strikes are more common in wide open spaces. 

One of the pleasures of having a book out in the world means that other opportunities open up as a result (such as this interview) and I’m really excited about a podcast I’m working on with Colin Waters of the Scottish Poetry Library about the intersection between poetry and film. I’m also working on what I hope will be the final draft of a novel set during the Great Depression that I’ve been working on for the past seven years. And, of course, there are photographs to take, cactuses to plant, push-ups to be done…