Friday - August 28, 2020 - From our poetry archives: “Darius Azmeh-Volpato” - Tom Davidson.

Walking through Manhattan this afternoon and feeling the end of summer, I was glad to remember Tom Davidson’s poem, “Darius Azmeh-Volpato,” from Issue No. 3 - Winter 2017-18; which carries three lines that captures the feeling of the weather changing as the time within one calendar year, elapses: “To stand before the coming season and wait in luxury / for the puffed-up owls, slippery foxes, and the mama wolf / while city life motors on happy in its nature / walloping with clubs the treasured stories.”

“Darius Azmeh-Volpato,” like the other poem by Davidson that was published in Issue No. 3, “Bobby Wiley,” is a persona poem, a description that Davidson coined.

An excerpt from the interview with Davidson, wherein he describes the process through which he creates persona poems, along with “Darius Azmeh-Volpato,” appears below. The portrait of the author, also below, by Alexandra Bildsoe.

All of our best,
Curlew Quarterly

__________________________

Alex: How do you think the concept of wonder plays into your process of writing poems? And by wonder, I mean this idea of unselfconscious wonder with the world, or with anything.

Tom: Wonderment. I think this is where I’ll have to bring up meditation, because meditation for me is an integral piece of the puzzle. I find that if I don’t get myself into a meditative state and if I don’t let passing thoughts and emotions pass me by, or run through me, then I cannot write the poem that I’m meant to write.

The only way that I can describe it is that I have to . . . almost empty myself of any fixed point of focus or anything concrete, everything has to kind of flow. And once I’m in that flow state, I can usually write the poem that I’m meant to write.

It’s a practice that I try to bring to other situations as well. For instance, when I’m meeting someone for the first time, whether I’m going to write about them or not, I consciously try to let the perceptions or the impressions, or the feelings and thoughts that I have about the other person just wash over me.

Some of them are prejudices that come from God knows where, judgments that come from God knows where, or it could even be a joyful thought. But whatever it is, whether it comes from inherited judgments of people, I let it wash over me and then I can connect with that person’s essence.

Usually I write down a couple of sentences about that person in a more documentary type fashion: what they were wearing and what they said to me. Then, if I can access that space of openness, when I didn’t see them in any particular way, then I can write these persona poems, but only when I’ve accessed that kind of place. Which for me is this kind of all-embracing place of compassion, where you’re completely compassionate toward the person, wherever they’ve been or whatever they’ve done and whatever they tell you, you can hold that space for that person.

This makes it seem like we’re talking about therapy in some way, I’m not. It’s about what’s going on in my mind and in my body. I’m not letting myself go to a place where I feel as though I’ve understood someone. I try to be that way with people that I write about, even when they’re imagined people.

Alex: I think that totally comes across in your poems. I was reading a few this morn- ing, and I felt like, whoa, I really just got sucked into another person’s world.

Tom: That’s what I try and do. It feels satisfying when you can . . . I don’t want to say sum up someone’s personality and encapsulate them, and I don’t even want to say that I’ve captured the essence of that person, necessarily. That’s probably too grand of a statement. But there’s just this moment I know that it’s entirely physiological or primal, where I feel like, yes, I’ve think I’ve gotten something about you, a little bit, in our small encounter. I think I’ve understood something, and I’m going to do the best that I can to put it on the page. But it doesn’t work out all the time.

__________________________

DARIUS AZMEH-VOLPATO

Mama, you are beautiful as a wraith.
Every morning the world shoots
Out of your corpse under
the wan light of winter
near where the children in the playground dismantle
daisies and hum sweet tunes
to the scarred ants and squelchy pond critters,
out of you gushes the plain windows,
knee-high fences, succulent lawns,
all your astonishing pages unbound,
whispered with intention on down
pillows late at night
when the ashes of our sleeping turn
back to body to fern to ocean jelly again,
and from the crevices in your bones seedlings hover
one hundred fold over children
and beleaguered school administrators
who long to retreat to your painted summer shacks
and attend to the drift of dandelions,
to stand before the coming season and wait in luxury
for the puffed-up owls, slippery foxes, and the mama wolf,
while city life motors on happy in its nature
walloping with clubs the treasured stories, coughing up
a lung defending the drone from the podium, too skittish
to pause for breath, not dwelling on the white sheet
an orderly once placed over your body, Mama –
the one woman who is unseen but heard whose
words alight even on steel girders, with so much love
to give I want to be as open as your body is
with its bulbous sockets out of which grow blazing lilies,
as open as we all want to be when we’re not snarling in time
with the beating heart of the beast scratching the ages on tombstones.