Interview Project #3: Davis McCombs

To be honest, part of my motivation for doing these interviews has been to connect with a number of writers (mostly poets, it seems) whose work I adore. It's great to read all of the witty and humorous things they have to say, but the best part for me is just being able to ask the questions.

That said, our next writer, Davis McCombs, is one of my all-time favorites. His first book, Ultima Thule, was the 1999 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, selected by W.S. Merwin. The collection is exquisite, and, as Merwin writes in his foreward, "its authenticity is deep in its language, not dependent on flash or effect: a grave, attentive holding of the light." The narrative ebb and flow in these 41 poems never strays too far from where it begins -- sure, it moves across voices and centuries, but Mammoth Cave is that always-present source around which the light is held.

Listen to Davis talk about Mammoth Cave and read his poem, "Salts Cave."

Or get yourself a copy of Ultima Thule:

Amazon
Powell's

Also, if you can find yourself a copy of the Spring/Summer 2005 issue of The Missouri Review (or if you have access to Project Muse), check out Davis's 16-part poem, "Tobacco Mosaic." It, too, is awesome.

Now onto our regularly scheduled programming...

What are you working on these days? Any work coming out in the near or semi-near future?

Not one damn thing. I do have a subject around which words have recently begun to cluster, an idea, mostly inchoate still, for a bigger kind of poem, but no time right now to get to it.

Also, I'm in that lull I seem to go through after completing a manuscript, in this case, my second collection, Dismal Rock, out from Tupelo Press next year. I put everything I had into that book, poems written during a time of great change in my life (my wife and I had two children, I changed jobs from Park Ranger to Professor, we moved from Kentucky to Arkansas) and so I guess I feel spent.

Although I believe strongly that it is healthy not to write all the time, I have an easier time believing it when I'm writing than when I'm not. The trick, I guess, is not to freak out during these times of silence. I spent two years after my first book came out cowering under my desk.

What sorts of things have you been reading?

For pleasure I have been reading book after book about ancient Egypt this fall, particularly Tutankhamen, in preparation for going to see the exhibit of King Tut treasures in Chicago this month. I have wanted to see the items taken from Tutankhamen's tomb since they last visited the United States when I was seven. Ancient Egypt is a subject I find endlessly fascinating and have for years.

Regarding your own work, do you have a favorite and/or most-representative piece?

Yes, a poem from Ultima Thule called "Floyd's Lost Passage." It's a poem that nobody ever mentions or notices and one that got rejected from all the finest literary magazines and journals of our time.

That poem was a breakthrough for me. Back then (graduate school), I had been trying to write cleaner, sparer poems (none of which went anywhere) of a type that seemed to be in vogue at the time, and then I wrote the clotted, wordy and, to my ear, musical two sections of "Floyd's Lost Passage."

I wrote the poem exactly seventy years after Floyd Collins' entrapment and death in Sand Cave, Kentucky. It's a story that I became obsessed with when I was in the sixth grade; I'm still haunted by it.

The poem says things that I want to say, or wanted to say at the time, in a way that, more than ten years later, still pleases me. That doesn't happen to me very often.

Which writer would you say has had the biggest influence on your writing style?

A poet named Aleda Shirley was one of the first contemporary poets I encountered. Back in the summer of 1987, she came to the Kentucky Governor's Scholars Program, where I was a student, and read from her first book, Chinese Architecture. I carried that book everywhere in the years that followed. I devoured it. I drank from it. It taught me what contemporary poems were. It taught me about a particular and lush kind of verbal sound a poem could have, one that I still look for and respond to and work toward. And I still think it's an excellent, gorgeous collection.

In terms of my teachers, Lucie Brock-Broido, without question, had the biggest impact.

Any thoughts on the advantages or disadvantages regarding the growth of the literary internet culture/community (web journals, blogs, etc.)?

Not really, but I don't see how one could possibly think of this development as a bad thing.

How important is the specificity of place in your work?

I often write out of love for a very specific place, namely the beautiful hills and ridges and valleys of South Central Kentucky's Caveland or Cave Country where I grew up. Of all the places on the planet, this little area has more caves than any other, including Mammoth Cave, the longest known cave (350 miles and counting), where I used to work as a Park Ranger.

I find that thinking about some aspect of that place or the people who live there is what, more often than not, drives me to the blank page/computer screen. For the most part, I don't write about myself or out of some urge toward self-expression.

Are there any "words of wisdom" that linger in your head when you're writing? Any advice that has stayed with you?

Charles Wright says that the trouble with a lot of poets is that they start to write as if they're somebody, but that poets should always write is if they're nobody (I'm paraphrasing slightly). He says that one should write as if every poem is just another handhold out of the pit.

I can't tell you how important I think that is. And, believe me, these are difficult words to live by, especially given the culture of flattery, congratulation, and hyperbolic praise that seem to be a part of the current po-biz scene.

What word do you never tire of seeing in poem? What word could you live without ever seeing again? (Billy Collins said he hates poems with the word "cicada"...what a joker. Cicadas are always cool.)

I'll speak here of my own work.

The word "stob" is a current favorite and one I grew up hearing and saying.

I probably should stay away from "cedars" and "fencerows," but I doubt that I'll be able to.

You meet someone for the first time and they ask you the proverbial, "So, Davis, what is it that you do?" What do you tell them?

I tell them that I am the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arkansas and that I am drunk on power.

How conscious of meter are you when writing poems?

A strict metrical pattern or framework has less and less to do with how I want to say what I want to say.

I work really intuitively. I go on nerve. I try to trust what I hear in my head and I try very, very hard to get that onto the page. I'm almost never successful, but I find that what I hear is a free verse line -- and a cluttered one at that.

I have also learned to try to stay true to what pleases me. People ask about the audience I have in mind when I write and the truth is that I write, first and foremost, for myself. I have this sense that there's a type of poem I want to read and, since no one else is writing that kind of poem, I have to be the one to do it. If I don't write for myself, I have found, the poems are no good.

Favorite poetic form?

A hint: I'm currently in a fourteen-step program to cure myself of my addiction to this particular form.

What was the genesis or thought behind the sonnet sequences in the first and third parts of Ultima Thule?

I wanted them to mirror each other in a way and I wanted the book to go forward in time but to stay put, to knuckle down, to dig in its local heels.

The book begins with the slave Stephen Bishop's imagined experiences as a guide at Mammoth Cave in the 1830s and 40s, and it ends with my experiences as a guide there in the 1990s.

Let me say something further about the Stephen Bishop sonnets, which I wrote during a magical two months in the Spring of 1997. Bishop was a great subject to invent around because he is, it occurred to me later, the exact opposite of almost every other historical figure. By this I mean that there are moments in the travel narratives written about Mammoth Cave during his time there when Bishop comes perfectly into focus. For example, we know that on a particular day in a particular year (I forget the dates) he was leading a tour, had a toothache and, because of the pain, was forced to turn the group over to another guide. We know something that specific about him, yet we don't know when or where he was born, who his parents were, how he died, etc. -- the things that we usually know about historical figures.

I wanted the series of nineteen sonnets to work in that same way: moments of perfect illumination surrounded by darkness.

Once I had written those poems, I realized that they needed a companion piece. I actually wrote twenty-five sonnets for that second sequence, but over time, cut them down to ten.

Favorite river?

An easy one. The beautiful Green River in Kentucky. Cave-fed, bluff-lined, flowing in its current channel for the last 100 million years.

Charles Wright said, "Poems should be written line by line, not idea by idea." Do you share that notion?

I try not to think about how my poems get written. A big part of me doesn't want to know -- and if I did know, believe me, I would never, ever put it in print. I don't want to publicly commit myself to something other than just following the writing wherever and however it leads me. I don't want all that baggage when I sit down at my desk.

I find that thinking about my own process does me no good as a writer. I just have to trust it.

What is the "Great American Poem"?

If we're talking here about contemporary poems, those written in our time, the poems in Charles Wright's Country Music, a selection from his early books, taken together, come awfully close.