~ Delta Poetry Review ~
Denton Loving's Interview by Susan Swartwout
DPR:
Landscape exerts a major influence on most Southern poets, and your
poetry beautifully underscores that statement. What would you say
are two other influences from the South in general or Appalachia in
particular that greatly inform your work, and why are they, in
particular, important to you as a writer?
DL:
Like most Southerners, I have a fascination
with my ancestors that borders on worship. In a similar vein, I’m
interested in the way more general history, the history of a place
for instance, shapes us. I suppose some would argue that I’m
referring to one thing in two different ways. But in my mind, our
geographic history and our ancestral history can certainly be
related but remain distinct. The way both of those elements relate
to landscape—or our sense of place—creates the perfect trifecta from
which a lot of my work is generated.
DPR:
From your new book,
Tamp, published
by Mercer University Press, the poem “Whatever Frame It Pleases” is
now one of my all-time favorite poems, when memory of a loved one is
brought into physical existence again by the speaker’s imagination.
How have you experienced the continuance of your relationship with
your father? How is he with you in the
quotidian world?
DL:
Ironically, I think there were things about
my dad that I wasn’t able to understand until after he passed away.
I think in particular about the fact that my paternal grandparents
both died before I was born. So my dad was in this sense, an orphan,
all my life. It wasn’t until after he passed that I could truly
appreciate the sense of loss that he carried. Soon after he died, I
calculated that he was only 29 years old when he lost his father. I
had always known this, but once it was framed by my own loss, it
became real to me in a new way.
Seven years since my dad’s death, I still feel
connected to him. He worked so hard to transform a hilly, rock pile
in East Tennessee into a working cattle farm and an orchard and a
beautiful place to live. I live there now, and so I’m often
literally walking in his footsteps. And when I pause to look around,
I see the place through his eyes, either thinking about what task he
would say needed done or appreciating what he saw and loved about
the land. And even now, his voice is the strongest voice in my
head—the voice that guides me with most of my decisions.
DPR:
How did you decide upon “Tamp” as the title
for your collection? How would you describe the
process of tamping, in relation to
your poems in the book?
DL:
The title comes from the poem “The Fence
Builder,” which was somewhat of a found poem. Immediately after my
dad’s death, I had to escort the grave digger to the cemetery to
show him where the grave should be dug. Unprompted, the man told me,
“My graves don’t rise or sink. Some people just push their pile of
dirt back in. But I tamp the dirt at every level.” Perhaps it was
the rhythm of the man’s voice or the emotional state that I was in,
but the words kept repeating in my head until I wrote them down.
There was also an echo of my dad in that moment, telling me to tamp
the ground down when he taught me how to build a fence and make a
fence post strong. As I thought about the word, I thought how we
often try to tamp down our emotions, and that certainly seemed
relevant. The more I thought about the word, the more central it
became to the overall narrative of the book.
DPR:
You’ve written several poems about cows and others about deer as
integral parts of your farm landscape that incorporate the
cultivated and the wild. If you were blessed with the languages of
cows and deer, what secret longings might you hear from both?
DL:
I don’t think we have to speak the same
language to recognize most animal longings. All we have to do is
observe. I’ve seen cows mourn their calves. I’ve watched deer
stealthily slip under an apple tree and eat apple after apple,
savoring each bite. They hunger and feel love. I can’t say that I
know if they feel these things in the exact same ways that we do,
but these emotional behaviors feel very recognizable. Maybe that’s
why we poets turn so often to the natural world.
DPR:
What is your writing practice and process?
Are you a scheduler or are you inspired more sporadically?
DL:
My writing practice used to be more
consistent, and I would set aside time every day to write. But my
daily routine has changed a lot over the last few years, especially
since I became an editor at EastOver Press and EastOver’s journal
Cutleaf,
and since I have taken on more teaching roles. As an editor and
teacher, I’m still engaging with written work, but it’s often
someone else’s. I find my own writing to come more sporadically
these days, coming either from intense inspiration or dedicated
times when I can intentionally push the rest of the world away.
DPR:
What are you working on next?
DL:
When I was writing the poems that would
become Tamp,
I was also writing other poems that I recognized were centered
around some other ideas—ideas of self-reflection and what it means
to live an authentic, fully-lived life. That work is finally finding
its shape as a manuscript, which I hope to soon send to my editor.
The poems that you’re publishing in this issue of
Delta Poetry Review
are part of that work.
Denton Loving's Poetry and Bio
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