ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Stephen Michael Davenport
General Questions
1. Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
Northern edge of American Bottom, the 175 square-mile Illinois floodplain across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Birth home in Hartford between two sets of railroad tracks (widen lens to a town sandwiched between canal and refineries) a few miles north of nine-year-old Robert Olen Butler’s steel mills in Granite City, which is just a few miles north of poet Eugene Redmond’s East St. Louis. Hartford promoters would have you think Lewis and Clark, who did their 1803 wintering at Camp River Dubois, the training site and jumping-off point for their westward expedition, later known as Hartford. Hartford’s also the birthplace of actor Clint Walker (AKA The Big Guy Himself), best known as Samson Posey in The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Cheyenne Bodie in the early TV series Cheyenne (1955-63).
Environmentalists and homeowners would tell you about the lake of gasoline (maybe as many as four million gallons) under Hartford’s northeast end, my old neighborhood of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. I’d tell you about the smell, the amazing geyser of fire that shot up in the night sky like Old Faithful, the oil tanks and pipes across the street my oddly beautiful bad lands, the family murder-suicide, the Pentecostal church for bible school and funerals. All of it, from symbols of western expansion to death to failed vapor-recovery systems, the stuff of poetry. Mine, at least.
Luckily for my immediate family, we moved when I was two just up the terrace off the floodplain to the old coal-mining town of Bethalto, where I did 50-75% of my growing up. I remember books: both parents reading, small-town library, a next-door neighbor with living-room shelves full of books (an amazing site visible through the picture window), later a shelf of used paperbacks in the corner grocery store my parents bought, a high school teacher (Mr. Considine) who made us read stuff beyond our means.
Poetry in particular? I remember a poetry-writing competition in my third-grade class (I didn’t win) and Mr. Considine reading aloud Dylan Thomas’s villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” in a high school English class.
2. Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
Patterns, friends, shapes on pages, numbers, history, shades, always music, lyricists, rooms, noise, midnight to two, coffee, liquor, soft drinks, ice, Duchamps, Man Ray, Arbus, O’Keeffe, Rauschenberg, Basquiat, comic books, television, movies, the old Tivoli (late 70s) in St. Louis, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville1976-80, Confessional and Language poets, long baths, muscularity of Pollock, precision of Satie and Dickinson, the Beats, Modern Continental European drama, Westerns from Rogers/Evans (Roy, Dale) to the Sams (Peckinpah, Shepard) and beyond, Theodore Roethke (no underestimating his effect on me as close reader), Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” old neighborhoods (mine), EE Cummings, Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” Corso’s “Marriage,” Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” metaphysical poets Donne and Herbert (I imagine my work as the marriage of Donne’s violent rhetoric and Herbert’s formal precision in a poem like “A Wreath”), Ishmael Reed, Joyce, Henry Miller, the full body of Kerouac’s work, Donleavy’s Ginger Man, Stein’s Tender Buttons, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, Sapphire’s “Mickey Mouse Was a Scorpio,” Hejinian’s My Life, Auster’s Invention of Solitude, Kathy Acker, young poets I’m discovering via blogs and links, maps, architecture, stop me, finis, okay.
3. When did you “become” a poet? When did poetry become part of your everyday life?
“Become”? As in “arrived”? Or “hooked,” “unable to escape”? I have four daughters ranging in age from six weeks to seven years. Like lovely piranha, they feast on my time. When I have time, I write in multiple genres, but under my writer’s cloaks, I carry the needle marks of poetry.
4. Where were you educated? Was this important?
Essential (or so I tell myself). Got my poetry thirteen miles away from Bethalto at SIUE via a creative writing class and a year of working on Sou’wester, the lit mag there, nearly in the same biographical tracks laid down a few years before by Robert Wrigley before he headed west to study poetry at the University of Montana (Richard Hugo et al.) and make his mark as a Northwest poet. I eventually ended up at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I studied poetry writing with no one and earned my PhD in American literature. The closest I came to Richard Hugo, besides a couple of trips to Missoula with a buddy to see a buddy (long after Hugo’s death), is an essay on Hugo’s poetry for an anthology about Montana literature. I suppose a part of me shambles still after Wrigley.
At SIUE, Lloyd Kropp gave me an undergrad opportunity to work on a good lit mag with Jana Sawyer-Prewitt and Mary Diesel, student writers to admire and emulate. A poem by Lana Hayes, another student writer, told me something about the distance between what I was writing and what I needed to write if anyone was going to want to read it. Fred Robbins and Paul Gaston taught me how to read poetry. Mike Awalt introduced me to Beat writing, and I watched him scribble ideas and lecture notes in books in class. I’d never seen anyone deface a book before, and I’ve been scribbling in margins ever since. Molly Vinyard and Steve Diesel were sexy action-figures who opened my field of play and think.
UIUC PhD days followed (a dissertation on wounded family and sonhood in Kerouac’s fiction), but by then my poetry education was locked and loaded.
5) You teach at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign?
I work there. Although I’m the Associate Director of Creative Writing Program (BA and MFA) and teach occasionally at the undergrad level, I serve the program primarily in an administrative capacity. At present, I’m also the Creative Nonfiction Editor of Ninth Letter.
6) What is your favorite food?
Coffee, bacon, toast. Watermelon with salt. Brother-in-law Ali’s Persian cooking.
7) Favorite sports team or Activity?
Team: St. Louis Cardinals. Moment: 1968 Olympic sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos bowing their heads and raising their black-gloved fists on the awards podium during the USA national anthem to protest racist treatment at home.
Boyhood activities: baseball (neighborhood games on well-groomed, empty high school ball diamond during the summer, 20-30 innings at a time); track (quarter-mile); wrestling (nothing like the smell of mats and sweat); football (catching a pass mid-stride). Adult activities: slow-pitch softball (wind blowing out, good; canal mosquitoes the size of golf balls, bad); co-ed wallyball (106 straight weeks of one-hour bump-and-slam-athons); long runs (occasional runner’s high, good; pounding on pavement, bad).
8) Vacation spot(s).
Extended family: annual August week in the Missouri Ozarks. One day alone: Hartford or Athensville, Illinois, some June Saturday in 1964. One day with nuclear family: some June Saturday in 2023 (my daughters aged 26, 24, 22, and 18). One to three months: Lafayette, Louisiana, or Paris.
9) Curse word.
Fuck, though I laughed and laughed when I heard Holly Hunter say her favorite is “cocksucker.”
Craft Questions
1) How do you form a poem? Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
I typically start with a phrase and a pattern. As much as I’d like to blow freely (a la Kerouac’s instructions), I very early on need one or more formal constraints: a sonnet of twelve syllables per line, for instance, or a sequence of poems about song titles or back roads. Uncontainable Noise bears that out, and right now I’m working on a sequence of song-poems that operate by a set of strictly defined rules that develop in the process of an individual poem’s composition.
2. Where do you write? Is ambience important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
BC (Before Children), I had to have control of the ambience. AC (Among Children), I do what I can when I can. I almost never use a pen or a pencil. I prefer late night to all other times.
3. In the balance between found language and created language where does you work fall?
Depends on the project. The one that I get to now in the cracks of time I’m afforded relies on found language quite a bit. Some would say, too much. The poems in Uncontainable Noise rely on found language in much smaller doses. In “A Note on the Notes,” which can be found in her Complete Poems, Marianne Moore addresses what she calls her “hybrid form of composition.” At the end of Uncontainable Noise, I tip my hat to her.
Note on No Notes
This book jimmies a few locks and steals a phrase here and there. If probity on faith is impossible and notes you must, then ask and I’ll give up my sources. I took no oath.