Debt by David Armand

The twenty poems in David Armand’s latest collection, Debt, are a series of emotional meditations on fatherhood, growing up poor, and the legacies we leave behind for our families. Deftly using his own experiences, then casting them out into the world so that they become a part of the universal exploration of life and all of its intricacies, Armand paints an honest and devastating portrait of what it means to be a father, a husband, and a son.

The poems in Debt immerse the reader in the narrator’s reckonings with what was given, and what was taken, by his father -- a man who borrows his son’s money for beer, challenges him to fist fights, tends a garden that yields more than they can eat, and mends broken things as best he can. In language that captures the rhythms of everyday speech, and line breaks that evoke both the dissonances and harmonies of memory, Armand reveals the difficult beauty in a cigarette flicked in anger, a “wilting tree doused with lights,” and “stars like buckshot across the sky,” images that flicker with promise and sorrow. Debt is suffused with gratitude, understanding, empathy, and loss, a celebration of the “pain exchanged and passed along...when someone says ‘I love you’.”

—Robert Lee Kendrick
Author of What Once Burst With Brilliance and Winter Skin

DELTA POETRY REVIEW: Thank you for sitting down with us today. I know you’re a very busy person: full-time teaching responsibilities, a family, everyday life. All that and you’ve still somehow managed to publish six books in under ten years. Not to mention multiple journal publications in almost every genre there is. How do you do it?

DAVID ARMAND: Well, people ask me that all the time. They either assume I’m neglecting one of my responsibilities or that I’m just some superhuman machine. The fact is that neither one of those assumptions is correct. I mean, look: there are twenty-four hours every day and we have seven of those days each week. If you know what things to make a priority, it’s really not that hard to do the math. I simply make writing one of my priorities by incorporating it into my everyday routine.

DPR: Could you elaborate on that a little bit more? Are you saying that you write every day for a set amount of time? Is writing a part of your daily schedule?

DA: Not at all. This isn’t a really a science, and I think if somebody puts that kind of pressure on themselves, they’ll never get anything done. There has to be a certain amount of pressure, sure, a drive to work toward some greater purpose, but I think if you try to make yourself sit down for a certain amount of time each day to work, it will very quickly kill your creativity. That’s just my opinion, though, what works for me. I know it’s different for everybody.

DA: For now it is, at least, though my process could change some day. I think the point is just being flexible and to not beat yourself up. If you’re a writer, you’re going to write no matter what. You don’t have to make an excuse to do it or talk about it. The work that needs to get done will find a way to get done. It always has.

DPR: Thank you for saying that. I’m sure lots of our readers will breathe a sigh of relief to hear another writer say they don’t write all the time. It seems like we’re made to feel guilty if we’re not always working.

DA: That’s just part of our culture, unfortunately. I’m guilty of falling into that trap myself sometimes, but I try to be aware of it and take a step back when I can. Go outside and just breathe.

DPR: Good advice. So you’re mostly known for your novels and creative nonfiction, but the main reason we asked you to talk with us today is because you’re also a fairly-well published poet. What made you start writing poetry?

DA: I actually started off as a poet. I just love our language, the way certain words sound next to each other, or the way they look on a piece of paper. It’s magical to me. But Faulkner said that all novelists are just failed poets so maybe I fall into that category. I don’t know.

But, yeah, I’ve been lucky to be able to publish some poetry, and it’s always great to sit down and work with that form; the kinetics of the blank page are just so much more exciting when making poems, in my opinion. It’s also very immediate, very emotional. But I feel like I have to qualify that by saying I don’t think poetry should be confessional, the writer spilling their guts onto the page. There has to be some objectivity, something to elevate those feelings into art. Otherwise, you’re just journaling.

DPR: But a lot of your poems, if not all of them, deal with your own life and childhood. Like they’re these sort of flash-memoirs or something. How do you take those very personal stories and elevate them into art, as you put it?

DA: Well, it was Raymond Carver who said that art is not self-expression, it is communication. And I believe that is true. You have to take your own experiences and somehow make them everyone’s experiences for it to become art. Writing in a journal is one thing, but creating an artifact for public consumption is a different matter. You have to ask yourself: what do I want to say here? What do I want these people to know? In the end, it always has to be about them, even though you might be writing about yourself. Does that make sense?

DPR: Interestingly, though, the poems you’ve included here are not autobiographical. They’re ekphrastic poems, based off of the work of Birney Imes, correct?

DA: Yes, that’s right. I mean, after all, there’s only so much I can write about myself! Plus I was just so moved by these beautiful photographs of people and places in the Delta that I couldn’t help but imagine a story, to inquire about what was outside of that frame. I always suggest to folks who are struggling with writer’s block (which I don’t believe in) to just look at some beautiful art. Nine times out of ten, they’ll get inspired right quick!

DPR: But do you feel it’s necessary for the reader to see the photographs in order to appreciate these poems?

DA: Not at all. I like to think the poems can stand on their own. Certainly, looking at the images enhances the experience, but I think the poems would fall apart if they relied too much on the photographs for their own existence. It’s like being in a band—sure, when all the group is together, the songs sound great, but the bass player should be able to sound pretty good on his own, too.

DPR: You used to be in a band, didn’t you? Has music influenced your poetry at all?

DA: Without a doubt. Before I started making poems, I was writing songs in my bedroom with a guitar and a little tape recorder. Again, just loving the way words sounded next to each other, but I think that taught me a lot about cadence and rhythm and that sort of thing. Something you really have to develop an ear for, whether you’re writing poetry or prose or music. After it’s all said and done, though, for me it’s just about a deep, deep reverence for language. It’s my religion.