INTERVIEWER

To get us started, can you take yourself back to a time before the poem existed? Is it possible to pinpoint a moment when poem “Pyrrhic Symphony” began?

ADAM O. DAVIS

The central image that begins the poem—that of the cruise ship—can be traced back to a specific day in the early days of the pandemic. I had my young daughters with me all day while I was teaching from home, and to stay sane we would go on walks, or I would just put them in the car and drive them all over town, and hopefully they would nap for a while, and I’d get a little break.

One day I drove them down to Coronado so we could see the ocean—this was still when all public spaces like parks and beaches were closed so we parked at the curb and watched the cruise ships that were anchored about a mile offshore. After a minute or so I noticed people on the cruise ships. These weren’t passengers but employees, because when the pandemic hit, the cruise ships evacuated the customers but left the workers, effectively trapping them on board and leaving them to spend their days wandering these giant, mostly-empty, floating shopping malls, all within sight of a world they couldn’t join. It struck me as an incredibly lonely existence. It also struck me as a  perfect metaphor for the way that we were all living in that moment, stuck at home yet still engaging with the vehicles of commerce. Nothing to do but wander aimlessly, like the zombies in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead who after breaking into the shopping mall shuffle past storefronts, remembering their past lives as consumers.

INTERVIEWER

Yes, that eerie “Dawn of the Dead” ghosty quality comes across so well in the poem, especially in beginning:

So, any memory of what came next after this experience.

DAVIS

Everything in the poem unfurled from that image of the cruise ship—the supermarkets, the birds, the sudden increase in air quality… These were all details that I’d noted during my own experience of the pandemic, so much of the first part of the poem was me listing all these images or emotions that I’d collected.

INTERVIEWER

It’s interesting you mention collecting things, because I have this impression that the experience of reading your work, not just this poem but also others, that it was often like entering a “whatnot” shop or an antique store hidden away in a strip mall. There’s the charm and the excitement of seeing things together, things that seemed to just land there with their own histories, like old radios, odd hats.

DAVIS

I had a Turkish housemate in grad school who told me, after looking at my poems one time, “You know you’re like one of those trash pickers who just finds garbage on the road and then picks it up, and then recycles it and turns it into something.” I don’t know if that was a compliment or not. But I’m always collecting words, lines, images, stories—that’s what poets do, collecting with the aim of repurposing what’s been collected in new and interesting fashions. The poet Jay Hopler had this advice for poets: he said to pay attention to absolutely everything out there, because everything becomes something, right?  We give our attention to the things we love, so as a poet you have license to be fully in love with the world—the only catch is that that means you have to constantly pay attention to everything in it.

INTERVIEWER

Yes! And in that same vein, I also came away from your work wanting to know how you spend your days. What do you look at? Notice?

DAVIS

What a question!

Well, I teach high school so there’s always all kinds of crazy stuff going on around here things that students say. A student in my class recently mispronounced chrysanthemums as crystal meth, which of course set my poetic radar off. Again, my trash-picker tendency…

And then, having young daughters helps to keep me attuned to the world because they’re experiencing it in fresh, new ways—ways that I haven’t experienced it in decades. Whatever I’m doing, reading and writing and seeing films and listening to music, I’m always looking for reasons to be curious.

My greatest fear is dogmatism of any kind, especially the kind that occurs naturally as we age, that sense of having seen and done it all that leads to a hermetic fanaticism. Certainly, as I get older, I feel the ways in which my ideas might be calcifying or my interest might be calcifying, which terrifies me, but poetry saves me from it. Poetry demands that I stay open to all frequencies so that I see things anew. I don’t ever want to be the person who looks out their window and says, “Oh, I don’t need this—I’ve seen it all before.”

Wait…did I answer your question about what came next?

INTERVIEWER

Actually, I think in some ways you did…

Speaking of what comes next, I’d like to spend some time looking closely at the amazing turn that happens about halfway through the poem. Up until that point the poem is focused on the general situation, broad sweeping statements about life during lockdown—“There has been weather / & there has been food” and “The freeways are quiet. // Birds are on the move. // The sky is a color the sky hasn’t been / in a century.”  

And then, all of a sudden, it becomes personal and we’re in the speaker’s memory. Let me quote here the lines where this turn happens:

And can you talk about this turn. Where did it come from?

DAVIS

It happened pretty organically. One of my earliest memories is of watching a house burn down during a monsoon in Tucson when I was around four years old. It’s an elemental memory, one that’s always humming in the back of my brain, and one that I’ve held close, like a kind of talisman, wondering when I might be able to explore it in my work. And then, while working on this poem, suddenly it came into focus.

In my recent work, I’ve made a conscious effort to put more of myself—by which I mean “I”—into my poems. In Index of Haunted Houses, I only used “I” maybe three or four times. Part of that was evasion, and part of it was a conscious challenge to myself to not use confession as a way to garner readers’ sympathies. However, in avoiding “I”, there can be a tendency to lean into Whitmanian proclamations—not preachiness but grand pronouncements on the state of the world. I’ve been trying to move a little away from that by acknowledging that whatever social issues I might be decrying I am also part of.

INTERVIEWER

Grand pronouncements like you’re the one bringing the news?

DAVIS

Yes, exactly.

INTERVIEWER

Interesting, because the first line of the poem actually mentions the news, “Nine months of news / that is not news.”

And, of course, this turn to your memory of the fire brings a big shift in focus from the news. Can you talk a bit about how you actually move into the turn. For example, it is initiated by the direct address to the nurse. There’s so much energy in that moment, “Nurse, will you think less of me…” Reading that line after what you just said about falling into confession, I can see the discomfort (“will you think less of me?”) in confession. But tell me about how the nurse got in here.

DAVIS

You know how you’re sometimes able to say greater truths to a stranger in a professional capacity than you are with a close friend? I needed a figure in my recent poems who would demand such truths of the speaker and, in doing so, raise the stakes by calling his reliability into question. One of the interesting things about those lines was leaning into how the events of the past become the fears of the future, how much differently a child watches a disaster as compared to an adult.

Going back to the idea of confession, part of the tension such an act involves is the need to confess versus the fear of judgment for doing so. How can you confess when you know that judgment waits on the other side? After all, the confession is in your control, but the judgment isn’t, so it very much depends on the person or entity you would be unburdening yourself to, which in itself will change the nature or narrative of the confession.

INTERVIEWER

Of course, immediately following that line, you point to fear that “my blood is haunted by the memory of rain?”  This memory of watching a house burn down “without thought of the people // inside it”   And later, there is this amazing line where you have the speaker admitting to being “still warm with the memory of their home’s immolation” 

There’s something really powerful about a small child watching the house burning. There’s a sense of helplessness, but also a childlike distance and lack of agency or care. And it introduces something really interesting in the poem, an interesting tension around the pandemic. It totally changes the poem.

DAVIS

Before I had that volta, before I thought of integrating the memory into it, I felt like the poem had some interesting images but it didn’t have the kind of blood and thunder it needed to truly sing. It was missing the heart. And also a sense of spectacle, of witness. Part of what was running through my mind were the bike rides I took through the empty streets of San Diego during the pandemic. Everything was so terrifying and serene, so harrowing and fantastic. We were living through this apocalypse yet there were still these pockets of delight—I hate to even use that word—but there were no cars, no crazy drivers, and when I rode my bike through my haunted city I felt like a kid again, delighted to be free and alone.

But then I would stop and recognize the reality of the situation: The reason why the streets were empty was because we were losing hundreds, thousands of people a day to a virus we didn’t yet understand, not to mention all the other political and social strife we were experiencing as a country. In those moments on my bike the world was an Eden and a hell at once.

INTERVIEWER

Would you say that your memory of the fire was a positive one?

DAVIS

In terms of the spectacle of it, yes. It was deeply incongruous in its beauty—the one day it rains in Tucson someone’s house burns down—and I was, as a child, transfixed by it because I was only aware of it as an image, not an emotional reality, which is what drew me to explore that dissonance in the poem, wondering who the owners were and how they never knew I was there too.

INTERVIEWER

Earlier you mention the images in the poem. There are many that are so striking but they also feel quite earned and authentic. They resonate in many different directions. I’m thinking of the lines “the fear pulls through me // like la needle drawn by a magnet.”  Here, in the context of the child’s memory, my mind went to a memory of my own, of being in elementary school and doing some experiment with a needle on water, floating, and pointing north.

So, with the needle drawn by a magnet, in some crazy associative way I started thinking water even before you got to rain.

Of course, this is what readers do. We write the poem in our own image. My rain begins with the needle image…yours with your memory of it raining when the house burns down.

DAVIS

You know it’s funny, because in so many ways I don’t really understand my poems or what I’m doing while I’m writing them. But now that you’ve mentioned it, a needle in a cup of water is an elemental memory for me. But I wasn’t conscious of it at the time I was writing.

INTERVIEWER

There are many surprising moments in the poem that, like the needle image, feel so, so right, yet so unusual. And I’d love to know what your memory is of writing them, how you think you arrived at them. For example, about ten lines into the poem, you have a line “My rage is fixed                        like a fascinator on my head.”

What in the world made you think of a fascinator? Do you know?

DAVIS

My poetic process is very similar to that of the bats I mention in the poem—I’m working with sonar, with sound. “Fixed” sent me in search of a similar fricative sound and “fascinator” popped into my head.

INTERVIEWER

Did you question it when it popped in? Or did it seem perfect to you on first thought? I ask because for me as a reader it is perfect, the way we fasten ourselves to our own rage and the way it fascinates us…like we can’t turn away from it.

DAVIS

I appreciate you saying that—and now that you’ve put it that way, it strikes me that the rage is operating much like the housefire as an object of destructive fascination. To answer your question, I didn’t question “fascinator” at all—it just felt right.

INTERVIEWER

Another is the “jeremiad’d” line, “All while all the kids jeremiad’d on gigs / bring us supper”  Turning jeremiad into a past tense verb here adds a note of righteous anger without specifying who is angry at whom. At the same time it reads like the kids have had this thing, this thing that is kind of elemental and biblical done to them and they have been sacrificed.

DAVIS

Yes, that one again came from sound, I was working with the heavy vowels of “kids” and “gig,” but I’m also always looking to retool language, in this case turning a noun into a verb.

INTERVIEWER

The poem is written in alternating one line and two-line stanzas, but also with a lot of white space worked into many lines. How did you arrive at this?

DAVIS

I’ve always been interested in the poem as a vessel. Eduardo Corral has spoken at length about this by comparing the poem to a liquid that you fill different glasses—that is, the form—with.  Pour the poem into a brandy glass: How does that look different compared to a Martini glass, or a highball, or a fishbowl? And then how does that form or that new form impact the experience of reading the poem?

I arrive at form fairly late in my process. Initially my poems are just blocks of prose that I shape as I revise, and finding the form involves a lot of listening to the poem. What is its visual mood? How can this be conveyed through its physical presence on the page? With this poem there was a sense of reckless consistency, so couplets felt right but they couldn’t be just couplets. The lines needed space, needed some jagged edges, a form that would honor the sense of constriction and openness that was a reality of the of the pandemic while also coming apart at the seams.

INTERVIEWER

There’s also a sense of empty space in the landscape of the poem. A passengerless cruise ship on a vast ocean, a desert where the house is burning.  What is it about space and desert emptiness? They seem important.

DAVIS

I spent the first five years of my life in Arizona. After that I moved around a lot between the US and Europe, spending my formative years in Utah and then my undergraduate years in Riverside. The throughline here is the desert—three deserts, I suppose: Sonora, the high desert of Salt Lake City, and the Inland Empire, each of which feel abandoned in different ways.

For me, the desert is a place to dream. In the absence of everything, you’re forced to imagine something, and often that something is what happened to those who dreamed in those places before you. Whether it’s an abandoned waterpark in Barstow or Mesa Verde, the ruins you find in the desert enforce dreaming—or haunting. When confronted by the detritus of previous civilizations you have to acknowledge what may come of your own. It’s a masochistic enterprise that’s often mistaken for a very specific type of American pride—that of the stubborn pioneer who’s looking to carve an empire out of an inhospitable place, telling themselves it may not have worked out for anyone else but it’ll work out for them. Some might call that hope or optimism while others might say it’s a failure to accept reality.

INTERVIEWER

Hope, optimism, a failure to accept reality…I’m reminded of your having talked in the past about having to break your poetry in order to make it become what it can be.

DAVIS

Definitely. With my first book, which took me about thirteen years to publish, I had to understand that, regardless of how I felt about the poems initially, or what they were doing, or where they had been published, they weren’t doing the work that the book needed them to do so that the book could exist on its terms. I had to humble myself before the book, really listen to it, so that I could understand what it, rather than the poems, needed to be. Maybe a good way of putting it is that I needed to allow the desert in. Instead of packing it full, I had to leave space for mystery, for the reader’s imagination, for the ghosts of the words that once were there. That’s why so many of those poems have a fragmentary feeling, because I had to break them apart. So once I made room, even though the language was sparser, the book was operating at a higher frequency than what was before.

INTERVIEWER

Can you remember what got left out?

DAVIS

So much, though now it’s hard to remember what. But when I did it, after I got past the pain of scrapping so many stanzas or lines I thought I couldn’t do without, I realized that the poems were much stronger without them. I had to look at every poem and find its heart and then ask if everything surrounding it was necessary. More often than not, the answer was that it wasn’t.

INTERVIEWER

I forgot to ask this earlier and I want to make sure we get to.  There are some lines here that make me think of Eliot’s “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock”

DAVIS

Which ones?

INTERVIEWER

Let me find them:

Could you tell me who you like to read. Who have been influences on you?

DAVIS

There are so many, and not simply poets but musicians and directors and photographers and painters, but to keep things succinct, what brought me to poetry in the beginning was Gerard Manley Hopkins along with John Berryman, Julio Cortázar, and Sylvia Plath. And, yes, absolutely, Eliot.

It’s funny that you mentioned “Prufrock.” I feel like poets have certain poems that are cornerstones for them, ones that they hold in reverence and that they’re always trying to rewrite. “Prufrock” is one of them for me. That register, that cadence, that reckless sampling of literary histories and personal tragedies. And the sound, the generosity of the language and the gorgeousness of the way that thought unfurls through it. It opens in new ways every time I read it.

INTERVIEWER

The gorgeousness of the thought unfurling… a good place for us to stop.