Community Columns_4

A Hit and Sink for Poetry

By Carley Lee-Lampshire '06

Poet Todd Davis

Our English teachers surround us, breathing rhyme and rhythm down our necks and pleading with us to appreciate all we are about to observe. I can hear the faint groans from my peers as they choose one of the many seats encircling a lamp, a couch snugged in fabric with printed books all over, and a poet. My friend and I sit front and center, but whether we want to be closer to the speaker or the door is a Grier Girl's secret.

I stand and introduce the fellow who is residing comfortably on the couch. He is engulfed by notebooks which sport black lines up and down the page creating boxes, pig pens containing poetry. His name is Todd Davis, a local poet who teaches Creative Writing and Environmental Studies at Penn State Altoona. I had to report on Mr. Davis's writing history, concerning the book he has written and the book he is about to publish. So here is the Grier senior class, along with a few other randomly invited students, being entertained by a poet with the promise of cookies and soda after the reading.

Mr. Davis begins with an explanation of how anyone or more specifically he became interested in poetry. His interest originated from, in one word, poop. No, he didn't write poop, but was inspired by a poem concerning horse excrements. How did this man become professionally and profoundly moved by horse crap? He claims that it was the author (Maxine Kumin's) ability to take the most mundane, and smelly, thing and turn it into something beautiful. I'm not sure if even Mr. Davis would go as far as to put that much of an euphemism on it, but the author turned it into something besides what it is, and I suppose that was the point.

So the poet who currently sits in front of us continued on quoting William Wordsworth (of course the name is appropriate to the profession, and of course this joke is sure to have been cracked one too many times already in the face of poetry) who, when asked how one might go about in the eventual grasping of the craft of poetry responded with wisdom, “We murder to dissect.”

As Mr. Davis explains this almost condemnation of the public's means of relating to each poet, he says “In order to begin the craft of poetry we must take it apart.” I suppose Wordsworth was pleading with us to at least harbor enough respect and medical talents to put it back together.

Mr. Davis continues on and states, “Poem making is all about association, (bringing you from image to image to image),” He then reads one of the numerous poems scattered before him.

The Blind Man
is led by his dog onto the bus
across the street from the baggage
claim at O'Hare. The only open seat
left is halfway back on the right side,
but the dog knows what to do
and does it well and soon we
are in motion. Across the aisle,
a young Indian boy grins
at his father, points at the dog
with quick, furtive movements,
giggles at the harness,at the way
the canine's ears drape his head.
The father leans over and explains
to the blind man that his son
has just arrived in America and has never
seen anyone led by a dog. Another man
two seats back reaches forward to get
the boy's attention and proudly tells him
that the dog knows forty-five different
word and signs, that he understands
better than most of us could.

Later in the trip, the same man notices
that I'm not asleep and begins to tell
me a story about how he once trained
seeing-eye dogs. He describes the kennels
housed in the garage behind his house,
the concrete floors that would sweat
in summer, the drains that clogged
with shit and hair and scraps of unwanted
food and how he had to dig it all out
at least once a week so the water would
again move freely when he sprayed
down the runs with the garden hose.

For a moment he cannot speak,
and when he begins again, his hands
tremble as he tells me about his wife-
her hair, how before it fell from her head
during chemo it was the beautiful brown
and gold of the blind man's shepherd;
how she would find injured birds, squirrels,
raccoons, even skunks, and nurse them;
how he buried her nearly five years ago
yet nothing seems to stay in the ground.

At a convenience store in Gary, we both
get sandwiches sealed in plastic wrap.
He drinks coffee, he says, because
he doesnt like to sleep when the bus
is moving; it reminds him too much
of long trips with her. Not far
from the South Bend, just as I begin
to nod off into a dream of my own wife
and our sons, he bends towards my ear
and whispers—as if what he tells me must
be kept quiet-that the reason he lost
his business or, he corrects himself, the reason
he had to give it up, was because of dogs
like the one that now rests its head in the hands
of the small, dark boy—he just couldn't stand
each year having to give away
all that he had seen.

Mr. Davis finishes his theory by adding, “Language always carries baggage: you have no control over how it is going to read or what kind of experience people are going to have with it once you put it [meaning poetry] out there.”

Linnea asks, “Do you like your work?”

We hear a rather (although lengthy) perfect response, “Your work always fails you. It is never good enough. Every poet has to learn to like his work to some degree. A writer searches for what is ineffable, or what you can't put into words, a writer is simply making a gesture towards it.”

“Do you write for yourself?”

Davis answers, “The minute you show a poem to somebody else, that means you are no longer writing it for yourself. You develop a relationship with the writers that touch you, poetry can communicate something.”

Mr. Davis wraps up his words by stating that he “never demands a poem to be brilliant.” This enables him to write without writer's block from now through the rest of his life. I think this is the most influential advice any one writer can ever hope to grasp. Epiphanies are not mandatory and excellence does not have to flow from your fingertips every time you sit down to write.

We are lucky enough to hear several poems from his new book entitled A Piece of Heaven and then as the reading comes to an end Mr. Davis finishes the session by reading his last poem, entitled Some Heaven.

Some Heaven

The rabbit's head is caught between the slats of the fence, and in its struggle it has turned so the hind legs nearly touch the nose—neck broken, lungs failing. My boys ask me to do something but see no mercy in my plan. At four and seven, they are so far away from their own deaths that they cannot imagine the blessing a shovel might hold, the lesson suffering offers those who have not suffered.

At bedtime, my youngest prays the rabbit is in a heaven where there are no fences, where there is more than enough to eat. He begins to cry and we rock until sleep's embrace takes him from me. I know his prayer is right. What more should heaven be? A place wild with carrot and dill, sunflower and phlox, fields that stretch on for miles, every coyote full, every hawk passing over, a warm October day that need never end.

The students don't move as quickly as expected to the awaiting cookies and water. In fact, just before the reality of the time and the lists of other homework assignments in need of attention hit, we all sit (if even for a couple of seconds) and let the occasion sink into us.