Denton Loving Joins us Live for All Over the Page!

Alan May: 00:04

Thank you all for being here tonight for a special All Over the Page discussion group. To celebrate National Poetry Month, we’re very lucky to have the poet Denton Loving with us and he’ll be reading from his work. After the reading, we’ll have some time for questions and discussion. We’re also recording this event for the library’s poetry podcast, The Beat, which is available through our website and, of course, most major podcast apps. Denton Loving is the author of two books of poetry, Crimes Against Birds and Tamp, which received the inaugural Tennessee Book Award for Poetry in 2024. He is a co-founder and editor at EastOver Press and its literary journal Cutleaf. His fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including The Kenyon Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Ecotone. His third book of poems, Feller, is forthcoming in 2025 from Mercer University Press. Please join me in welcoming Denton Loving!

Denton Loving: 01:15

Thank you all. I appreciate so much you coming out tonight on a Monday evening. It’s beautiful outside, and there are a lot of other things you could be doing, but I am happy to be here at the library and to celebrate National Poetry Month. So I’m going to start out tonight by reading some poems from my book Tamp. Tamp is a book that I was writing, I guess, when my dad was sick in one of his final illnesses. I was thinking a lot about our relationship and about his illness, and sort of preparing myself for the inevitable, and then, after he passed away, I was still writing a lot of poems, I think, as a way to process my grief, and so the poems in this book--I thought of so much as being, "Oh, this is a book about my dad." And it turns out that a lot of other people didn't just see it as a book about my dad, but a book about grief itself and about the act of losing someone that you love a lot. And I think there's some other threads that run through it, I hope, so I'm just going to start with the poems to take you through what I hope is a loose narrative about my dad and our relationship and our life. And I'm going to start with a poem called "Hurtling." I often like to write about dreams that I have. I often say that my dreams are the most interesting part of my life, because I'm pretty boring, for the most part. But this poem is called "Hurtling."

I’m five again, and it’s so dark I can't see

the road. Are we going through a tunnel? I ask.

My dead father says, No. Go back to sleep.

He reaches across the bench seat. The weight

of his hand quiets the starlings in my belly.

I know I’m safe as long as he’s close.

Within the darkness, stars pinprick the horizon.

The small blue egg inside my breastbone

cracks with understanding: we’re not sweeping

through a tunnel under the crush

of a mountain. We are hurtling across the heavens

on the wings of an ancient, magical bird.

So a lot of the poems that I've written about my dad are also about the farm where I grew up. And it was a piece of property that was very important to my dad. And it comes up in a lot of my work, because it's a place where I live also. But, through everything, the property and the land is a connector for me and my father. So this is a poem called "There Is a Barn."

"There Is a Barn"

in this poem, built by men

a century ago—no one alive

remembers exactly, but someone

cut the oaks and sawed the planks,

nailed tin sheets to shape the roof.

This barn sits by a creek. Some springs,

the creek overflows and the barn floods.

There is a hay loft in this barn

and many poles between the rafters

where tobacco once hung to cure.

Gaps between the boards let fresh air enter.

Below the loft, the barn is divided into stables.

Horse tack still hangs in some

though no one alive remembers those horses.

Out of hard labor, calves have been born here

and died. So, too, womb-locked mothers.

In the last stall, a man I knew

stacked square hay bales as tight as mice,

though the hay was thick with thistles.

The following fell, the cattle were sold,

the pastures left fallow. The man died

and the hay moldered. Did I mention

this barn is black? Its roof too.

The man who packed the hay picked the paint

though there were red barns in his history.

Perhaps the barn’s color doesn’t matter

except to me because that man was my father.

God alone knows if it makes any difference

the hay was wasted by all but the mice,

always burrowing through the past.

So that was the first poem I'm going to read that mentions cows. My first book of poems was called Crimes Against Birds, and my friends and I often joke that it should have been called "Crimes Against Cows," because I did grow up on a cattle farm, so they do pop up. This is a poem called "Cows Don't Consider Oblivion."

They obey the farmer and his fences

when they’re forced

and the dull hunger of their four stomachs.

They lust only to pasture

in lush fields and to drink from a cool creek.

They see little beyond

their meadow, longing for nothing

more pleasing

than what’s on the other side of the fence.

But they don’t fear

whether the world will continue without them.

The future is a foreign notion.

They don’t graze with the purpose

of making a lasting mark.

They don’t worry what will be written

on their gravestones,

that the only inscription for their lives

will be written

in the scattering of their bones.

Sometimes poems are just given to you, and that happened to me immediately after my dad passed away. And I took the man who would dig his grave to our family cemetery, and he said something to me that reminded me immediately of a word that my dad had often used, and that word was "Tamp," which became the title of the collection. So this poem is called "The Fence Builder."

My graves don't rise or sink

the grave digger says after I show him

the place to bury my father.

I take in the view as if this valley

is what he’ll see for eternity.

Down the hill, children play

outside the elementary school.

Sheep pasture around the cemetery.

Some people just push their pile of dirt back in,

he says. But I tamp the dirt at every leveL

I'd never wondered why some graves swell

and some settle and sag

but the grave digger’s words stay with me.

He taps the clay above my sleeping dad,

leveling the damp ground

just as the man in the casket

taught me to tamp around wooden posts

to make a new fence last,

packing the dirt and rocks

so wire is pulled taut, forced to hold tight

for at least a generation,

those rhythmic strikes a refrain

for all who take pride in a task well done,

those men who work the earth—

the fence builder erecting his monuments,

the grave digger and all he lays to rest.

This is called "After my Father Died, I Marveled."

In the field / cattle grazed, unbothered by the coming / winter, unfazed by the farmer’s absence. / Chickens laid eggs. Phoebes darted / from post to post. / I ached with hunger-- / the drive-through ladies kept taking / my orders, kept taking my money. On roadsides / deputies watched / men in striped safety vests / gather trash. / I drove back and forth / from my house to my father’s house even though / he wasn’t there. Beside me on the road / teachers were driving to teach / and bankers driving to banks. Construction crews / built new homes, and real estate agents / listed and showed them / to new homeowners. Brokers / traded stocks and bonds. Cattle futures / skyrocketed. Advertisers and stores / rolled out Christmas campaigns and children / wrote letters to Santa, but / I was too spent / to cry or be angry / or feel anything except / the motion of it all.

So one of things that I was dealing with in writing these poems was about the mythology of my father, not just who he was in reality, but who he was to me and to our family. And that led to diving into some other mythological elements. And this poem is called "Genealogy," and it was inspired by a wonderful poem by Major Jackson called "OK Cupid." My poem and his poem do two very different things, but the form is inspired by his poem.

"Genealogy"

To be the son of a coal miner is to be a child of mountains

and to be a child of mountains is to be Appalachian

and to be Appalachian is to be frontier & pioneer

and to be frontier & pioneer is to be Boone’s cousin

and to be Boone’s cousin is to be longhunter

and to be longhunter is to be tuckahoe & buckskin

and to be tuckahoe & buckskin is to be the son of Pocahontas

and to be the son of Pocahontas is to be Powhatan

and to be Powhatan is to be tidewater

and to be tidewater is to be settler & planter

and to be settler & planter is to be enslaved & enslaver

and to be enslaved & enslaver is to be disinherited

and to be disinherited is to be a second son

and to be a second son is to be Cavalier

and to be Cavalier is to be Catholic & Protestant

and to be Catholic & Protestant is to lose your head

and to lose your head is to take a head or two

and to take a head or two is to be Lancastrian & Yorkist

and to be Lancastrian & Yorkist is to be the devil s daughter

and to be the devil’s daughter is to be a friend of Dante

and to be a friend of Dante is to boil in the seventh circle

and to boil in the seventh circle is to be a fratricide

and to be a fratricide is to be a king

and to be a king is to wear a crown

and to wear a crown is to be a conqueror

and to be a conqueror is to be a bastard

and to be a bastard is to be chosen by God

and to be chosen by God is to be a saint

and to be a saint is to be a scourge & a plague

and to be a scourge & a plague is to be barbarian & pagan

and to be barbarian & pagan is to be the son of a bear

and to be the son of a bear is to be a senator

and to be a senator is to be a Roman imperialist

and to be a Roman imperialist is to be the twin son of a wolf

and to be the twin son of a wolf is to be an emperor

and to be an emperor is to be Julio-CIaudian

and to be Julio-CIaudian is to be the son of Aphrodite the Mother

and to be the son of Aphrodite the Mother is to be Greek

and to be Greek is to be ancient

and to be ancient is to be pre-historic

and to be pre-historic is to be mythological

and to be mythological is to be a Trojan prince

and to be a Trojan prince is to be a son of a shepherd

and to be a son of a shepherd is to be a son of Zeus

and to be a son of Zeus is to be descended from Titans

and to be descended from Titans is to be a god

and to be a god is to be divinely human

and to be divinely human is to be pre-Adamite

and to be pre-Adamite is to be shaped from particles of dust

and to be shaped from particles of dust is to be a scion of stars.

I'm going to have to take a sip of water after that one. I'll read just another one or two poems from this collection. Do you think you could take another cow poem? This is "Hag Stone, Hex Stone, Holy Stone."

The farmer enters the mouth of the barn. In shadow

he palms the weathered oak beam above the stable door,

feels for a rusty nail to hang a string of baling twine,

the other end threaded to a rock with an eye in its center--

a natural hole, created by the witchery of water

boring through the stone over time. Hag stone,

hex stone, holy stone to save his cattle from bad dreams

while they’re pendulous with unborn calves.

He bids his cows goodnight, trades barn dark

for the widening maw of dusk. In his own bed,

he counts the years he rifled dry riverbanks, seeking

a stone with enough magic to lock so many perils

in its threshold. And for peace to ease his own sleep,

to wash away his fears of midnight births, twisted

hooves, calves turned backwards, sideways.

Of umbilical cords wrapped around necks like nooses.

One of the things that I spent a lot of time doing with my dad was mowing grass on our farm and our property. And, so I'll end on this poem called "Riding Lawnmower."

After the first small-engine repairman

tells me five miles is too far for a house call

or a pick up, the second repairman tells me

I should disassemble the mower myself

bring him the offending portion.

Lincoln said his father taught him to work

but never to like it. My father taught me

to work on lawn mowers. So of course,

I think about buying a new machine.

Instead, I crawl onto summer-warm grass

like my father taught me. I pull

S-pins and retaining springs, freeing

suspension arms and the anti-sway bar,

separating clutch rod from clutch lever.

I mechanic my way beyond my skill set

until the mulching deck falls limp.

A pneumatic drill unlocks frozen, broken

blades turned upside down. New ones

hex bolt on, naked edges glinting in the light.

I reverse engineer, reattach metal to metal, '

secure it all with a taut pulley belt.

Such unbindings and rebindings are common.

This tractor and I will again tame briar hells

of blackberry, wild rose. We will battle stones

rising quietly in the pasture at night like ghosts.

There is no choice but to keep going,

to keep working until the final, unfixable end.

So I'll end there with Tamp, and I'll talk to you a little bit about my upcoming book, Feller, which is forthcoming from University of Mercer Press. This book has some similar threads and themes, but it also feels like a very different book to me. I'm anxious to see what readers think, if they think that's true or not. This is the first poem, "Do You Hear the Cicadas?"

"Do You Hear the Cicadas"

And how about the whippoorwill?

I hear him late into night, nearly

four decades gone from these

wooded foothills but returned

to sound his warrior song

whip-poor-weel, whip-poor-weel—

turf warning as well as mating call—

a blast that rips through my sleep

some nights and leaves me to lie

awake and wonder about choices

I’ve made. And I wonder why

the whippoorwill was so long silent—

probably too much pesticide,

not enough moths and beetles,

all the too-usual reasons.

What makes him think things

will be different this time? What

calls him back? What sustains

this small nightjar’s blind bravery?

You know, in Tamp, there are moments of light, but it also a relatively heavy book, being about grief, and so I enjoyed being able to do some different things in this book, and some things that felt fun to me. So this is "Careful! There’s a Man Inside the Belly of this Fish"

Lost at sea, a man and his ship

slip through the teeth of a fish.

A young woman, hungry

and alone on an island,

wishes a wish.

With a flourish

of her hand,

the same fish—

swishes into her arms.

Her hunger shifts.

She sharpens

her knife,

slices a thin line

along the dorsal fin.

Light slits into the abyss,

reminds the shipman he’s alive.

"The Word of the Day Is Largesse"

From the Latin largus, meaning not just big but abundant,

generous: I am blessed by the largesse of those who came

before me, benefactors bestowing aid and alms, though

no one these days gives alms, another ancient word,

this one from Greek, akin to compassion. After Artemis

transformed Hippocrates’ daughter into a sea serpent,

men seeking the largesse of her father lined up to free

the girl with their kiss. Yet, those men fled the serpent’s

scaly mouth. Her split tongue. Her poisoned breath. Did I

mention those men each died soon after? The moral is,

if you can’t love with compassion, just get out. Leave.

I’ve been reading mythology and backbone recipes

like a man sizing up a bear. The backbone, or what’s left

after the ribs are cut, is prized for its flavor and tenderness.

Pork is good, but bear is better, makes delicious broth, soup

and stir fries. It was the only meat Davy Crockett would eat.

He killed hundreds of bears, leaving his wife for weeks to hunt.

To prepare your own backbone, ensure your cleaver is sharp.

Hack the meat into small pieces. Sauté generous, abundant

amounts of aromatics. Brown the meat and mix together.

Savor. Be sure you have plenty to give away.

Does anybody know the show River Monsters? You know that one? Jeremy Wade is the host of the show, and he goes to far away places trying to find legendary water monsters, I guess, is the best way to describe it. One of the recurring themes in Feller is that I wrote several letters. So this is "Letter to Jeremy Wade."

Last night I watched you dangle in a cage

while a school of bull sharks circled round,

just so you could shine a light into their eyes—

an experiment to see if their ocular tissue—

the tapetum lucidum—might glow devil red.

But only a yellow glare reflected back—

eerie in its own right. Tapetum lucidum—

Latin for bright tapestry—like the Bayeux

with its ancient world woven inside, and all

those lives depicted in thread—except this

bright tapestry gives some animals superior

night vision. God knows why I get sucked in

as you interview villagers across the globe

who pause their digging in some river’s clay

to recall the night the monster with the red eyes

dragged a lamb or shoat—or maybe a child—

underwater. I wish you would tell me instead

about the phoenix, the quetzalcoatl, the griffin—

magical beasts with the kind of oracular sight

that can see meaning in waters far murkier

than where your monsters navigate. Oh, Jeremy!

When you dive into mysterious rivers, do you

ever wonder about your soul? If I looked

into the bright tapestry of the phoenix’s eyes,

would the light of my half-lived life reflect at all?

Have any of you ever had that experience where you run into somebody from high school that left you sort of a little shaken, a little unsure about what just happened? This is about one of those experiences. This is "Letter to J."

I’ve long feared hearing my name called in a crowd exactly

the way your mother called mine in that coffee shop

on Bloomsbury. She was unrecognizable. But I knew you

even with your hand clamped over your mouth. You sat

beside your kids, silent and still as a viper in plain sight.

It felt like a trick when I looked in your eyes, said your name.

Your staccato hello was wide enough to see the toothless

cavern of your mouth, the unexpected hollow of your life.

Drug guides say self-loathing causes self-destructive behavior.

In high school you called my house so often I invented the phrase

that’s my name, don’t wear it out. We tied up, twisted our parents’

phone lines, pretending we were hella fly, perfecting the practice

of 90’s teen life. Now, I wonder, could I have been kinder?

Dear crank mouth, dear meth head, dear girl I used to know,

you were a smart girl. How did we let this happen? The coal fields

have been burning for decades now, and users sprout in the ash.

We are what anthropologists call a self-contained people,

as if these mountains were islands in the clouds for the condemned.

Please don’t take what I say as pride. Maybe you’ve had happiness

I will never know. I hope you’ll have more. As for me, I have

no children. I’ve only known broken love. I spend most of my time

alone. You prove it’s dangerous to walk around our hometown,

our lives crashing backwards, choices barreling down

the mountain, the wreckage difficult to ignore.

This is the title poem of the new collection. It's called "Feller."

This is the white oak that grew among other oaks and beech,

pine and hemlock. This is the tag that marks the tree.

This is the saw with whirring blades. This is the sawdust

that thickens the air. Praise the machine and the task it achieves.

This is the creak of the trunk splitting. This is the fracturing

of fibrous limbs as they bend and break. Praise the thunder

of the falling. Praise the quake of the earth accepting its weight.

This is the log hauled to the sawmill, cut into lumber, measured

by board feet. Praise the planks that will shape a dwelling.

This is the crown of the tree. These are the branches left to rot.

This is the wood’s cellulose and lignin that replenish the soil.

These are the fungi, the beetles and the earthworms that flourish

in the oak’s remains. Praise decay and decomposition.

This is the feller who brought down the tree. Praise the worker

and the work of felling trees. Praise the quickening pulse

and the flowing blood.

This is the first green leaf from last year’s acorn, taking root.

This is the light that enters the woods and cleanses the wound.

Praise the wood and the woods. Praise the light, praise the wound.

And, so, not to end on the wound, even though there is light coming through, I wanted to end tonight and end the book with a, hopefully, a more hopeful note, so this is "The Octopus School of Poetry"

Yes, that they have three hearts is remarkable.

So too, the way they navigate man-made mazes.

That their eight arms simultaneously perform

separate tasks. That they can unscrew jar lids

even when they’re trapped inside the glass.

But of all the strange facts, I can’t get past

their ability to squirt jets of black ink,

theatrical for sure, but an effective tactic

to distract a hungry eel or seal or albatross—

not unlike the poem, shooting fireworks

to ward off what haunts us. Such a nifty trick.

Almost worth the burden of those extra hearts.

Thank you so much for allowing me to share my poems. I'd be happy to answer questions or talk with all of you individually.

Alan May: 26:15

One thing that I found very interesting was that it seems like, uh--I'm not sure like when Tamp was completed, but it seems like you have this other, you know, new book that's come out almost immediately afterward. Was this a pretty quick... Was Feller a pretty quick book for you to write?

Denton Loving: 26:37

No. No, some of the poems in Feller are at least ten years old. But I realized that I was writing two books at the same time, and the book about my dad finished first. And I said that phrase in that way recently to someone, and they said, "Oh, I like the way you said that. It feels so true that I had so little agency over either of the collections. I just was writing and writing and I knew when I came to the end of Tamp that it was a book. And then I knew that there were more poems that I needed to write. But some of those poems were quite old, and some of those were little scraps that had been very old that became completely new poems in the couple of years before Tamp came out and then after Tamp.

Alan May: 27:36

Did you find that any of the poems were kind of bleeding into each other--like into different manuscripts. Did you ever have to make like a decision... "Uh, yeah, this needs to go in a different manuscript than I thought it might...?"

Denton Loving: 27:52

So, this is my third book, and with every book, there have been poems that could have gone in either direction. And I hope that they work based on the way that the poems are arranged and how they speak to the other poems. But there have always been a poem in each thing that I thought, "Oh, I wish I had saved that poem from the last one to go in this one, and, likewise, a poem from the new book that I thought, "Oh, I wish I had had that one finished for the previous book, but these things, you know, they sort of work the way they do and, so, I think, for the most part, they work the way they are. But there's always some bleeding over, I think. For me there is, anyway.

Audience member: 28:40

Could you talk a little bit about your farm, a little bit more in terms of, like, how long it's been in your family, what you all currently do...

Denton Loving: 28:47

Yeah, so, my parents bought the farm in the late nineteen sixties, which was before I was born. But it was land that my dad had worked on when he was very young, a very young man. He often spent his summers with his aunts and uncles who lived in the area, and so he knew the valley in Claibourne County, where we were lived, very well, and found that property, that he also knew. And, so, we've owned it as long as I've been alive, but it was really important to my dad who grew up in a coal camp and didn't have that sort of experience of open countryside for most of his childhood. He only had it in the summers. So it was important to sort of have that later during life and to give it to me. So it's about eighty acres, and it's a working cattle farm. I am fortunate that I don't operate and have to take care of the cattle myself anymore. Um, but there are people who do use it to raise cattle, beef cattle. And it's a lot for me to try to keep up the other aspects of the property without having to be a cattle farmer on the side.

Audience member: 30:09

Is it just you that lives at the farm?

Denton Loving: 30:12

Yes.

Audience member: 30:17

Yeah, it really came across to me in the book... That area...

Denton Loving: 30:22

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah... Did you have a question?

Audience member: 30:24

Yes. In that genealogy poem...

Denton Loving: 30:28

Yeah...

Audience member: 30:29

...The long list of relationships. I guess you probably didn't have all of those in your mind when you started writing it. Could you talk a little bit about how you built that.

Denton Loving: 30:40

Yeah. As I said, it was inspired by Major Jackson's poem "OK Cupid," which was revolutionary to me in the way that he connected different ideas from "this thing is also this thing," and, so, as I was inspired by that poem, thinking about the poem that I wanted to write, I have always been interested in knowing who my family was, and also just in general history, and I started thinking about how interesting it was that we indentify ourselves in certain ways. And, for the most part, that identification only goes for a certain number of years, maybe to our grandparents or our great grandparents, and, you know, we say things like, well, "We were Methodists" or "We were coal miners" or "We did this, we did that." But, if you keep tracing further back, these people--they identified in some other way. Or they identified their past in some other way. And so I just kept thinking about historical terms and kept trying to go backwards as far as I could to think, "these people are also those people" in some way. And it was a poem, I think like so many of my other poems, it was me trying to work out those connections for myself, and putting it into the form of a poem helped me understand it better.

Audience member: 32:11

Um, so I noticed, kind of, a lot of repetition of, or emphasis on birds as a motif...

Denton Loving: 32:20

Yes.

Audience member: 32:21

And you said one of your books was...

Denton Loving: 32:23

My first book is called Crimes Against Birds and birds and cows are often coming up in my poems. I do pay a lot of attention to birds. I'm by no means an expert, but I really... I wouldn't even call myself a serious bird watcher, but I do like to know what I'm looking at, and I like to understand what they're doing and how they live. So I just like to pay attention to what's around me. So birds are always, often, often very important. And there's still some birds that come through as well. Yeah. Thank you.

Alan May: 33:01

So I've read Tamp pretty closely, and then I've also been fortunate enough to be able to read Feller before it's published. Um, could you talk a little bit... I get a very strong sense that you're using meter to, at least, kind of generate--and though they're may not be a strict meter in all of it, could you talk a little bit about that. About your writing process.

Denton Loving: 33:35

I hate to tell you, but I think you're wrong , in terms of... in terms of the way that I am able to talk about it. Meter is something that is extremely difficult to me, and the only thing I can say to support your statement is that I rely so much on that the poem has to work in the way that I would say it. And so I'm relying on my own natural meter, which, for those of us who live in Appalachia or the South, use particular different meters as we speak in our everyday life. I suppose many people from all over the country, or world, do that, but it's something that's been written about and noted about southern and Appalachian speakers. And so I have to rely on that sense. Meter is something that I could easily feel like I was in the weeds with because it's something that I'm interested in, but I honestly can't hear very well when I'm thinking about it consciously. Like I said, I have to rely on the way that I would say the poem. I'm not a spoken word poet, but I have to be able to... the poem has to work for me to say it aloud or to read it aloud as equally as it works on the page. That's the tension that I'm always working with is trying to make, trying to achieve both of those things, and sometimes that can be hard because sometimes you have to give a little to make one work or not the other, but that's really one of the most important things that I think about, especially in the revision process. But I appreciate that you think that.

Alan May: 35:25

Well, it just seems very natural, and a lot of line lengths throughout are--seem the same, just in terms of the number of feet, and things like that.

Denton Loving: 35:38

I think I do--I feel like the visual aspect of line length is also important. And I'm part of a wonderful poetry group where we're all very different writers, and there's one poet in particular who expertly writes using line lengths of all kinds of varying degrees, and when she does it, I am so amazed because it makes absolute sense why she'd do it, and I admire it, and I think, "I'm going to write a poem that has really long lines and really short lines and I just can't do it. It just does not work for me. When I'm working on the page, like I said, the visual aspect is important. It's not prose. The visual aspect is an element of a poem. Right? Not every poem, for most. So I think about that a lot. And there can be variation Like I said, I admire it when other people can do it well, but it's another aspect that I struggle with. I appreciate y'all coming out so much and listening to me. Thank you.

[Applause from audience.]