In which I answer a few questions about my new book, OVERPASS.

An Interview by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum. (For the full treatment–sample poems, recordings, reviews, etc.–go directly to PoemoftheWeek.org.)

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: What’s going on with these titles? Almost all of them are titled after magazines.

Steve Davenport: I like what Kathleen Kirk has to say in her review at Prick of the Spindle: “As it happened, I was reading Overpass, by Steve Davenport, in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, which turned out to be exactly the right place to read it. The first three poems I read were titled after magazines I might find there. . . . Alas, the reason to be in doctors’ waiting rooms in Overpass is to attend the appointments and surgeries of Overpass Girl, who is being treated for breast cancer and to whom the book is dedicated.” In fact, though I wasn’t articulating it to myself that way at the time, I was writing those poems in a waiting room.

AMK: Talk to us about the forms of these poems from your second book, Overpass. In your first book, Uncontainable Noise, you use a form you called “yodel sonnets,” which are 100-lines long, as well as more traditional 14-line sonnets, some of which we featured back in 2010.

Almost every poem in Overpass is in the form of what you call “curtal or curtailed sonnets” in the back of the book: a sextet followed by a quatrain followed by a single-line stanza (is there a name for a single-line stanza by the way??).

How can you call these sonnets? What is it that attracts you to this form so frequently in the book.

SD: Ah yes, the yodel sonnets, both the standard 14-line versions (each line packed with 12 syllables) threatening to explode both thematically and formally. And the 100-line sonnets. Extensions of that idea. Rupture and rapture. Voice breaks pushing the form. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets were a strong influence. We talk about all of that in the first Poem of the Week interview.

In Overpass I begin with a form attributed to Hopkins, the curtal sonnet. Curtal as in curtailed. Hopkins’ curtailment is 75% of a 14-line sonnet. 10.5 lines. As in Uncontainable Noise, I set out to write a handful of poems in a specific form and one thing led to another. I love what Emily Dickinson does with space and I feel a kinship with Elizabeth Bishop in poems like “One Art.” So it felt natural when I discovered the curtal sonnet. I knew immediately I wanted to go shorter than a sonnet. I wanted to see what I could do in an even tighter space. The yodel sonnet’s 12-syllable line became the curtal’s 10-syllable line, and 14 lines become 10.5, the final half-line a visual and syllabic reduction that might underscore the power of curtailment.

AMK: There are a few variations of form in the book. In “Field and Stream,” you use a sequence of this form. “The Sestina Has Been Sinking” is a sestina, and a number of other forms appear in the latter pages of the book. Why?

SD: A couple of the poems, “Field and Stream” and “True Confessions,” are compound curtal sonnets. That is, they’re each a curtal-sonnet sequence and therefore, as in “Shore Song in Cinq Cinquain” (a cinquain I multiply), they constitute a stretching of the form. It’s in the Sinking, Drinking, and Thinking sestinas where, I think, I do the work of the 100-line sonnets and push the form most fully. I stay true to the number of lines, but I play with the end-line rhymes that are key to the form. In the Sinking sestina, I destabilize the form with “blood,” replacing it once with “hell” and shifting its position a tiny bit in the last half-stanza. In the Drinking sestina, I alter at one time or another four of the six end-line rhymes to suggest inebriation or instability. The form, like Overpass Girl’s body, is at risk. The final and most brutal of the sestinas, the Thinking one, obsesses over the six words, destabilizing all of them, and makes the removal of a last breast (or “tit” as it’s called in the poem five times) the focus. Sestina and Overpass Girl are one and the same at this point. The bodies of both are at stake. These are the things I see when I reread the poems.

AMK: Overpass is, at its heart, a book about the Illinois Floodplain you grew up on near St. Louis as well as a breast cancer victim named the “Overpass Girl.” Both this setting and character figure largely in these poems but are always discussed from the side; you rarely address or discuss them directly; rather, you utilize a more lyrical approach via which we receive fragments of these figures but never a complete picture. What’s up with that? Why avoid straight narrative so fiercely?

SD: I addressed damage to and on the floodplain (AKA American Bottom) directly in essay form in Murder on Gasoline Lake, originally published in Black Warrior Review and later as a chapbook by New American Press. In between those two publishing events it got itself listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2007. Around this time I was already beginning to make poems of the floodplain, curtalizing, if you will, material from Gasoline Lake. And then the cancer-witness work began and took the early form of a highly fragmented essay, “Bomb Fragments 12.11.07,” I read at the Hyde Park Center in Chicago for Series A, a podcast of which is still available on the internet. In that essay, I addressed damage underway in Overpass Girl’s body and said I would fight cancer with spit balls, with words, with poems. The curtal sonnets became my spit balls. A year after the Series A broadcast on WBEZ-FM, I was asked for an essay by the then editor of the now-defunct Northwest Review. I was already writing the Overpass poems, the spit balls, and wondered how the cancer material might work in a less fragmented form. You can decide for yourself how it worked by feeding some combination of my name, Northwest Review, and “No Apology for Happiness” into a search engine. You can find a copy of it on-line. [I’ve since posted it here at this website.] Why does Overpass, as you say, “avoid straight narrative so fiercely”? If it lacks the long, straight address it might receive in prose form, I suppose that’s the nature of a collection of short poems. Or spit balls, which do their best work via odd, sneaky angles.

AMK: I love the language of “The Sestina Has Been Sinking,” I express frustration with the form, its tight-ass sixes and sevens, its predictable thirty-nine sutures (or lines), and yes, I threaten Sestina with a shotgun, with death, if she won’t do something to save herself. I charge her with stale blood stale and old skin. I threaten to use my rough hands, my poet hands, to make her (to scrape and shape her) as real, as gritty as the Bottom land I’ve relocated her to. Rough language is part of it. In “The Sestina Has Been Drinking,” I do my playful Tom Waits’ best to liquor up the nearly dead form (easy to make one, hard to make a good one) and, in so doing, declare my love (yes, via the old Herb Alpert lyric “this guy’s in love with you,” in part because it was popular when the woman who’s the inspiration for Overpass Girl and I were growing up). By the time we get to “The Sestina Has Been Thinking,” arguably the most brutal poem in the book, Sestina has become synonymous with Overpass Girl, the book’s central figure of damage, and I’m working as hard as I can to save her as a witness, as a poet. Just as O.G. has lost a breast to metastatic cancer, she is about to lose the other and the nights are long with pain and waiting, pills and liquor her medicine, stirred with my “six words or lines or shots repeating shit.” I bend the six words, show the ultimate respect for form by risking showing none at all: “Rough as the moon,/ my hands twist Shot to Shoot to Shit, Six to Sick to Sink,/ beat Bell back to Bowl, Neat to Night, knock Blue to Blow.” Sestina becomes, in this rendition, as rough as she needs to be to make it on the Bottom, to survive another cancer night.

AMK: “The Sestina Has Been Sinking,” as well as much of your work in general, is a rather violent poem. The voice/tone of the poem is rather gruff and working class and images of guns and dirt and blood appear time and time again. Where does all this strife, all this poverty and violence come from? While I realize you grew up poor, you’re now Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Why dwell in the floodplain? Why not write about the academic life or iPhones or travel?

SD: First, I’ve never been poor. My father, protected by a union, worked steadily as a pipefitter at a Shell Oil plant. My mother was an R.N., who could always find work if we needed it. For a few years we owned a corner grocery store and reaped the economic benefits of that added income. And so on. Still, I was the oldest of four and therefore the one who most fully felt the early pinch and understood the landscape of the Bottom as rough and the aesthetic I grew up in as working-class. Is that synonymous with “poverty”? No. Is there “strife”? Sure, for some, for many folks at different points in their lives, their weeks and days. As I write elsewhere, the landscape in Overpass is a largely depressed industrial area across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. American Bottom runs from Alton down past East St. Louis. As is true in many places around the world, folks need work. Too often settling for scraps is the only deal on the table. That doesn’t mean they’re without dignity or complexity, those with and without iPhones, those with and without jobs, those who stay and those who go. It doesn’t mean they live in poverty or they’re without hope. It means they’re alive and insisting on staying that way for as long as the clock will let them.

Where does my preoccupation with “violence” or the “violence” in my poetry come from? Life. Birth. It begins there. I’ve watched four daughters being born. Though each delivery was successful, birth is an inherently violent act. In both of my books, Uncontainable Noise and Overpass, I write about the body under pressure. If you want some joy, go back to Uncontainable Noise. There you’ll find real, explosive joy (“rupture and rapture,” as I explain in the first interview I did with you). The second time around, in Overpass, I take on multiple forms of damage in a particular location. I take on cancer. I settle for scraps. Like scrub bushes through asphalt, I insist on life in spite of the odds.