I first read Denton Loving’s latest collection of poetry, Feller, shortly after the sun rose, on my back porch. It was one of those seasonally cool summer mornings. The wind was stirring. Branches were gently swaying. Squirrels and chipmunks were mingling below my birdfeeders out in the yard, and a couple of blue jays, in conversation, were making use of one of the old birdbaths. They were nourishing the weeds below as much as they were themselves. My dog was in my lap, taking it in. It was the perfect kind of reading experience for Feller, a collection of poetry that beautifully observes the life of the natural world. Often, it feels like an ode sung to Appalachia.
In Feller, Loving explores many of the complexities of our shared experience. There are poems here, like “The Moon Was Only a Rumor,” that make me feel connection, that ineffable thing we’re always looking for. Another poem, “Returning,” one of the book’s standouts, does the same thing for the idea of home. I could feel that too. At other times, Feller shifts to explore longing—which pops up again and again—and love, such as in the exquisite “The Octopus School of Poetry.” This is a book that you feel as you read—even when you put it away, its images and moments linger.
Loving and I were able to connect and discuss the progression of his work, poetic warmth, place, and more.
Bradley Sides: I’m sure many readers will come into Feller having read your previous collection, 2023’s Tamp. I’m always curious about the process of closing one book and beginning another—and how the two works are in conversation with one another. Can you talk about what shifted you into Feller and how you see it as both separate and similar to your previous book?
Denton Loving: I always have a lot of projects going on at the same time. In the case of these two books, Tamp and Feller, I was moving back and forth within the same period of years, writing poems about my dad and my grief after his passing, and then switching gears to write about whatever else was on my mind.
The poems that eventually became Tamp came out of me trying to process my grief. I never set out to write a book about my dad, but there was a point when I realized I had enough poems about my dad to make a book. A bit later, I suddenly knew that Tamp was finished. It wasn’t that I had written all I had to say about my dad or about grief. I could write a dozen books about my dad. But perhaps the intensity of my loss had subsided.
It was only after Tamp was completely finished—when I could take a long look at all of the poems that were left—that the shape of Feller emerged. My process is to be as organic as possible and let the book reveal itself to me.
In comparing the two books, I think my voice is fairly consistent. I think there are threads that overlap in both books, for instance, my attention to nature and particularly to the place where I live. Tamp was a very personal book, but Feller feels personal in a different way, perhaps more deeply revealing. Many of the poems in Tamp were things I wanted to share about my dad and our relationship. Many of the poems in Feller come from a more private place, and express emotions I didn’t want to write about. But the poems called for it.
BS: When Electric Literature hosted the cover reveal for Feller a few weeks back, I was really intrigued by what you said about the title: “Feller won out because I was playing with the word’s multiple meanings, and I loved that the word is so colloquial and brings with it a feeling of intimacy. It was through that framework that I could most imagine a reader diving into these poems, hopefully finding and applying layers of meaning as they read.” I love that idea of a title helping with a book’s intimacy. Outside of language, what are some of the other ways you gain intimacy with your readers in Feller?
DL: When I teach poetry workshops, I often start the sessions by talking about how I like to think of a poem as a secret. It’s a secret that is being shared widely. But it’s coming from somewhere very deep inside the poet’s being. That’s how my more successful poems are, anyway: deeply personal but bursting to escape.
Another way to think of this is to allow myself to be vulnerable. That means, for me, that I have to sometimes put away the idea of publishing the poem. When I’m writing, I don’t want to give space to worrying what people will think when they read certain things. So sometimes I convince myself that I won’t publish the poem, that I just need to write the poem for myself but don’t ever have to show it to anyone. By the time the poem is finished, I usually come around to sending it out into the world. Because it’s exactly that piece of vulnerability that usually makes the poem succeed. And if you can’t allow yourself to be vulnerable in the poem, then what’s the point?
Many of the poems in Feller express emotions I didn’t want to write about. But the poems called for it.
BS: Do you ever worry of being too personal or too vulnerable—or is that just not really a thing as far as you are concerned?
DL: On a personal level, yeah, I definitely worry about revealing too much. Like I said, I almost always convince myself to send those poems out for publication, but some poems make me feel really uncomfortable to share. I felt that way about everything I wrote when I first started thinking about publication, many years ago. My philosophy ever since the beginning has been to embrace that uncomfortable feeling. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
Now let me answer from a craft angle. In thinking about my own drafts and the rough drafts I’ve read from friends and students, I think poems that are exceptionally vulnerable are usually very tied to our emotions. If the poem hasn’t had time to cool down, those emotions come out of a vulnerable space and can come across as melodramatic. So that’s an argument for giving the poem whatever time it needs, and for revising your work, and for finding really good readers who will help you know how the poem is coming across.
BS: As Feller opens, you give us a series of poems—“Bluebird Dreams of Red Fox,” “Bluebird Dreams Red Fox Has Wings,” “Bluebird Flies Too Close to Red Fox,” and “Bluebird Removes Red Fox’s Tooth”—that explore the natural world, while also tackling topics such as desire and closeness. I want to hone in on the natural world first. It is abundantly apparent that you have a special bond with nature. Has that always been the case?
DL: I can’t say that I was one of those kids who lived in the woods and knew all the birds and trees, etc. I wasn’t. I was more of an indoor kid, living a very interior life, inspired fairly equally by television and books. But even so, the natural world was always really present for me, both physically and psychologically.
One reason is because my parents made a conscious choice to raise me in a rural setting, on a farm near the woods. There were animals there, both wild and domesticated. We raised big gardens and planted an orchard. All of that was important to my parents, especially my dad. He really had been one of those kids who spent most of his time outside. I still marvel at the way he could identify trees by their bark.
It took me a long time to fully appreciate everything my parents taught me, but as I’ve grown older, I’m more observant and more interested in what’s around me. I’m also just more interested in the connectivity of the natural world, especially in the fraught age we live in where the environment is changing in drastic and dramatic ways.
BS: I previously mentioned “desire.” As I was reading, I kept marking poems that explore this topic in some variation—we see it from humans, animals, and just the world. “Thirst” and “Breach” are examples of two that come to mind, but there are many here. Is it the universal shared experience of desire that makes you explore it? Or something else altogether?
DL: I started my writing career with fiction, where I was taught that every character should desire something. It can be as small as a glass of water, but it is desire in whatever form it takes that motivates character and creates action. So maybe I’ve carried that into my poetry. You mentioned “Thirst” which literally is about the desire for water. But metaphorically, it’s about a past relationship, and how the brain obsesses over what’s absent. I think you’re right, I am interested in writing about desire. It’s universal. I’m also interested in the many different ways desire manifests. Sometimes it’s about romantic love, sometimes about friendship and basic connection. The poem “Returning” explores a conundrum I often have in life which is centered around place. There are so many times in my life when I’m home that I’m plotting to leave. I love to travel and explore, and there are so many places I want to visit. I want to go see my friends who live all over the country. And yet, when I’m traveling, I get homesick. I often just can’t wait to get back to my house and my boring routine. And that’s something I’m especially interested in when it comes to desire and wanting—the way our desires twist us up and play games with us, and the way we want things that we know are bad for us or won’t work.
If the poem hasn’t had time to cool down, those emotions come out of a vulnerable space and can come across as melodramatic. That’s an argument for giving the poem whatever time it needs.
BS: Traveling is one of the things that inspires my writing the most. Since you mentioned it, I’m curious how else traveling impacts your work, if it does.
DL: Travel just generally opens our minds, right? As a writer, it so often yields new material, in both directions. There’s the material that comes from entering new spaces and learning new things. And, on the other hand, being away helps me appreciate home more, which I think leads me to some important moments of wonder. I see the place I’m from in different ways after returning from somewhere else.
BS: You live in Appalachia and your work is often classified as part of the Appalachian literary tradition. Your poetry respects the place you know, and at the same time you are also able to expand that place. The result, for me, is that your poetry feels both of home and of the bigger world, too. In one poem, for example, you plant us under a chestnut tree. In another, we are in “sticky Kentucky,”and among the songs of the whippoorwill in a third. But at other times, you also allude to Mount Athos, Xanadu, and Montañas de San Miguel.
I’m curious how you view place and its impact on writing. Is it ever limiting? Is the way we write about it a gateway to understanding something or connecting with someone beyond the regions from which we write?
DL: Place is foundational to all of my work, both my poetry and prose. Just this weekend, I taught a workshop about writing place-based poetry. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about—I live by Eudora Welty’s words: “One place understood helps us understand all places better.” That doesn’t mean that I claim to understand everything about this place where I live—neither the eighty acres of farmland and orchard and woods where I literally live, nor in the larger sense, this corner of Appalachia with its complex environment, history and socioeconomics. But it’s my place, and it’s a gift to understand it to the extent that I do. No one else is positioned to know it in exactly the same way. So it feels almost like a duty to honor that in my writing. But not in a limiting way. As a younger writer, I struggled to understand why anyone would care about this place, which maybe felt less glamorous or less interesting to a younger me than nearly every other place. Now I see it as endlessly fascinating. And as a differentiator, or as I said before, a gift. Addressing sense of place in my work allows me to share this place with people who don’t know it. Likewise, I feel entranced when I read work that helps me know places that are unfamiliar to me. It’s definitely more of a gateway than any kind of limitation.
BS: I love that: “Addressing sense of place in my work allows me to share this place with people who don’t know it.” Who are some of the writers you think of that present place really well?
I don’t consciously set out to observe the world. But I’m in the world, and I find it impossible to ignore everything in motion around me.
DL: This is a dangerous question because there’s no way I can include everyone. I’ll say that Maurice Manning’s work has been an inspiration and a model for me since I first started writing poems. Everything he writes is shaped by place in one way or another. Ron Rash, also. Some of the other poets I met early in my career who inspired me to try poetry are George Ella Lyon, Anne Shelby, Jane Hicks and Jesse Graves. All four of them write so well about place. Joy Priest, Annie Woodford, John Davis, Jr., Kari Gunter-Seymour, but there are so many others. And I’m limiting myself here to poets. There are so many fantastic prose writers whose work is inspired by a sense of place. I’ll end this list with Jennifer Stewart Miller, who is another poet who consistently inspires me and has taught me so much. Her poem, “This poem has a highway in it,” is the first example I always teach in my workshops about writing about place.
BS: Feller ends with “Rosy Maple Moth,” which is such a beautiful poem about moths and life. Truly, I’ve probably read this poem a dozen times. I’m so moved by it, and it’s absolutely the perfect poem to end the book. Reading it makes me realize how like, my goodness, this world, when we look hard enough, is full of small wonders, but we have to take the time to look.
I want to close by asking you about your own relationship to the act of observation. How much time do you spend just looking and listening and seeing our world?
DL: I don’t consciously set out to observe the world, or not as much as I should. But I’m in the world, and I find it impossible to ignore everything in motion around me. Today, for example, the farmers in my community were rushing to put up the first cuttings of hay before rain sets in, and the smell of fresh cut and curing hay was everywhere in the air. In the mowed fields, vultures combed through the piles of hay searching for the snakes and rodents that get caught in the mowing. An indigo bunting flew across the gravel road, its blue feathers shining in the June sun as it swooped down in front of my car and back up before it disappeared into the trees. I saw a fox slink out of the woods behind my house, and a mockingbird was divebombing the little fox, warning it away from its nest. There is always something happening around here, and that’s true for all places. We just have to be open to seeing it. The rosy maple moth is a great example. I spent the majority of my life never coming into contact, or more likely just never noticing these moths, and then one day, they appeared in front of me. And they refused to be ignored.
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