Todd Davis is the author of three full-length collections of poetry—The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe—as well as of a limited edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow: The Thoreau Poems. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and co-edited Making Poems: 40 Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His poetry has been featured on the radio by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac and by Ted Kooser in his syndicated newspaper column American Life in Poetry. His poems have won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, have been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize, and have appeared in such journals and magazines as Poetry Daily, Iowa Review, The North American Review, Indiana Review, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, Image, Ecotone, Orion, West Branch, River Styx, Quarterly West, Green Mountains Review, Sou’wester, and Poetry East. He teaches creative writing and environmental studies at Penn State University’s Altoona College.
Why I Try to Write Poems in the First Place
I suppose April’s as good as any month to celebrate poetry. Rain falls. The grass grows. Cherry trees blossom, as do dogwoods and redbuds, and the wind blows the petals from these trees along the ground, forming lines befitting the likes of Wang Wei or Han Shan or Li Po.
And as far as cruelty goes, I think T.S. Eliot was being a bit overly dramatic when he suggested that these 30 greening days in the fourth month of the year were the cruelest. I can think of many other months that offer far more by way of cruelty.
Perhaps as a Midwesterner transplanted to England, Eliot never had the opportunity to walk deep into a northern forest in the first days of March—snows slowly pulling their tongues back into the earth’s mouth—to see winterkill huddled beneath hemlock boughs: the carcasses of deer withered on January’s barren fruit; the corpses of porcupines who weren’t fast enough to evade the brutal teeth of fisher; or even the rare bear who trudged too soon from slumber and found nothing but the empty taste of ashes in its belly.
By April, at least here in central Pennsylvania, the entire ridge-side is burgundy with the tiny blossoms of sugar and red maples. The coltsfoot has already discarded its yellow-fringed flower, and May apple is unfurling the glossy umbrella that will hide its fruit in June and July. Everywhere the fiddleheads of the multifarious ferns are giving way to the second life of their opened fronds, and violets burgeon in shades of white, purple, and yellow, stretching across southern exposures where trailing arbutus flowered more than a month before.
Life wishes to create itself over and over, endlessly longing for yet more creation. Look at the number of religions that suggest there’s some life beyond this life—resurrection, reincarnation, mystical beginnings leading to yet more beginnings.
And that’s what poems offer me—that promise of creation, of process, of bringing something to life after gestation. It might be a moment from the past, an observation of the hour before me in what Emerson suggested is an Ever-Present-Now, or something yet to come in a future that may never even happen. But in working out the sensual details and working at the rhythms and the sounds of lived patterns, somehow that thing we call soul or spirit, the very core of our emotional well-being, is touched.
These are primal, elemental urges. This is the ecstatic always born out of the mundane. It’s the reason that Yeats writes in “Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop”: “nothing can be sole or whole / that has not been rent.”
And it’s the reason William Stafford remains a teacher in my writing life, although we never met. His call to rise early, to “wander around” in language, in memory, in the conditions of life on this given day, this precious day. Process always seemed more important to Stafford than product, the poem less an artifact than a testament to a life lived in close observation. But we’d be fooled if we didn’t think Stafford polished and revised, creating many stunning artifacts of language and memory and place.
I’m happy for the river of poetry in which Stafford’s poems swim. Most every morning I dip my cup there and find enough sustenance to bear me through the day. And when I sit at my own desk—my wife and children off to school—I secretly hope to add a poem or two to that river, a note sailing on toward some vast and beautifully unknowable sea.
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