Looking Back with Todd Davis: Falling in Love With Writing

with Assistant Editors Lexi Bonin and Jacob Hood

“Fall in love with writing, the process of it, the exploration of it.”

In the following interview, Chautauqua contributor Todd Davis shares the joy he finds in the making of poems and how we can all cultivate our love of writing. Todd Davis is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry—Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems, Coffin Honey, Native Species, Winterkill, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe—and a limited edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and co-edited A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His poetry has appeared in Ted Kooser's syndicated newspaper column American Life in Poetry and has been anthologized in such books as The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and Bedford/St. Martin's textbook, Approaching Literature. His poems have won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editor's Prize, the Midwest Book Award, the ForeWord INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, and the Bloomsburg University Book Prize. More than 400 of his poems have appeared in journals and magazines. He teaches creative writing, American literature, and environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

More information about Todd's writing and books can be found on his website www.todddavispoet.com.

Can you comment on your process? How do your poems begin? Are you able to describe how you approach revision?

My poems begin in all sorts of ways.

Sometimes as a sound or a phrase, and in those poems the music in the line is often emphasized, a map or score I try to follow.

Sometimes as an image, some visual element that evokes a strong feeling or emotion in me, and in those poems I’m teasing out associations and connections.

And sometimes as a thread of narrative, a character that tugs at me, a bit of action that I find myself obsessing over and wanting to contextualize.

But all of these elements are usually at play in my poems, and it’s in revision that I try to create some balance between these elements.

So I suppose if I were to describe my approach to revision—which involves reading the poem aloud hundreds of times—it is the process of thinking about sound and image and narrative, trying to understand how they are fulfilling something necessary in the poem, especially in relationship to the form the poem assumes.

But learning and practicing the nuts and bolts of poem making is so different from the mystery of making a poem that works somehow. Like the best hitters in baseball, I hope that my pen connects twenty or thirty percent of the time. Many days I strike out.

What are you reading currently, and does reading feed your writing process?

I’ll start with the second part of the question first. Yes, reading feeds my writing process. It is the most crucial aspect of the writing process. It is how I learned to write and how I continue to learn.

I’ve only had one creative writing class in my life. I’m old enough that when I was in college very few places actually taught creative writing. My understanding of how to learn to write involved reading the best poets I could find and emulating them, taking apart their poems to understand how they were made, learning stylistic maneuvers and different skills and slowly incorporating them into my own person, into my own voice, to create something new and unique to my own art.

At any given time, I’m usually reading at least one novel, a collection of short stories, a work of nonfiction, and a book of poems. Depending on the time of day, the genre will change. I love to read prose as much as I love to read poems.

At present on my desk and my nightstand, I’m working my way through Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl, from unincorporated territory [åmot] by Craig Santos Perez, Fools Crow by James Welch, Poachers by Tom Franklin, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall, and Black Pastoral: Poems by Ariana Benson.

I’ve read some of these books before and am revisiting them to see what they have to teach me this time around. As we change, the ways we read a book and how it can talk to us changes, too.

“My understanding of how to learn to write involved reading the best poets I could find and emulating them, taking apart their poems to understand how they were made, learning stylistic maneuvers and different skills and slowly incorporating them into my own person, into my own voice, to create something new and unique to my own art.”

What advice do you have for poets or other writers?

Ditch Memory by Todd Davis Cover — Purchase Todd Davis's most recent collection of poems!

Such a big question! I’ll offer an answer, and this answer is directed toward my 25-year-old self. To put this in context, I’m in my 60th year of life, so this is a callback across 35 years.

Fall in love with writing, the process of it, the exploration of it.

Don’t be afraid to fail. Writing is full of failure.

Try to figure out what you can learn from failure.

A poem, a story, an essay is an imperfect thing. Don’t try to erase all imperfection. You’ll end up destroying what makes the poem, the story, the essay good. Learning to find this balance will be the work of a lifetime.

Seek out readers who understand you. Listen carefully to their criticism. Incorporate what feels true to your work. Don’t let a bruised ego stop you from improving your work.

As you seek publication, remember rejection is part of that process. See publication as a way to share your work. Do not see publication as the only confirmation of your work.

Think of all writing, all art, as a gift. Drink from the river of poetry. I love reading new poets and finding something necessary to my life and to my practice of the art in their work. When you are finished writing your own poem, which is in conversation with the poems you have read and needed, put it on the river’s surface and let it drift down stream to someone who will find it when the time is right.

Has your relationship to any of your pieces changed after their publication? How do you interact with your pieces after this process?

I try to live in the present and am most interested in what I’m trying to write today.

I don’t go back and read my work from past books, unless a particular public reading demands the reading of that past work. I tell you this because I literally forget some poems I’ve written, and when someone talks to me about them, I’m surprised by the gift of that poem, the memory of how it was written.

This happened a great deal as I worked on my most recent book, Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems (Michigan State University Press, 2024). It was a strange feeling, moving back through my first seven books, reading poems and trying to decide what I would include from each volume.

To answer your question with a bit more precision: Sometimes I do revise poems after their publication in a journal before their publication in a book. However, I do not revise poems after I’ve published them in a book. The poems in Ditch Memory appear as they were printed in the previous books. This means there are parts of poems from 30 years ago that cause a bit of discomfort in me, but I want those poems to represent who I was in that long-ago moment, not who I am now.