As part of his time at Hopkins as Chaffee Visiting Writer in the Writing Seminars Department, poet David Bottoms read selections from his upcoming collection, Working the Heavy Bag, on Tuesday.
The poet is from Canton, Georgia, and much of his poetry is closely tied to memories of his hometown and his childhood.
Bottoms, who is Poet Laureate of Georgia and currently holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University, has had his poetry described as regional and realist.
Bottoms started with his “bird poem” — as “all poets have a bird poem” — though his was less traditional in its tone.
Rather than a eulogy to the blithe skylark, he presented a darker “re-evaluation of the American vulture,” as he called it, in his poem “Under the Vulture Tree.”
The poem was inspired by a surreal vision of a tree seemingly covered in construction paper with abundant pink fruits dangling from its branches that he saw when cruising down the river in his speedboat.
As his boat drifted closer to the strange form, he realized that it was actually a group of buzzards perched on the tree.
The poem that resulted was a perceptive transcription of this experience of misinterpretation and, eventually, clarity and understanding.
“I saw for the first time / its soft countenance . . . like the faces of the very old / who have grown to empathize with everything,” Bottoms says with delayed wonder as he drifts down the river.
His thick Southern accent, emphasized more with each passing line, shows the audience his Georgian roots.
The second poem Bottoms introduced as his “daughter poem.” “My Daughter Works a Heavy Bag” is a nostalgic piece about fatherhood, as well as the naive unawareness of gender.
The poem, Bottoms explained, was about watching his daughter, who was the only girl in the karate class, go after the punching bag as the boys laughed at her struggle.
The speaker tries to take a detached view as he watches his daughter literally attacking the punching bag, while withstanding the derision by her peers, as a testament to her forthcoming tussle with growing up.
The poet’s fourth selection came from an experience in school, when, on the first day of class, he was assigned to a desk that had his name — Dave — carved into the top of it.
It was, he realized later, the desk that his father had once sat at when he was in high school.
Because of the coincidence, Bottoms breaks into the school through the window, armed with a hammer and a flashlight, to “reclaim” his property.
The experience is recorded in the poem simply called, “The Desk.” Here, Bottoms reflects on his relationship with his father and what it means to carry the name of another person.
The weight of living up to the seemingly prophesied title comes up only at the end, when he ponders the motive of his actions.
It’s only when the desk is safe and sound in his house — “the oak scar leaning/against my basement wall” — that he even thinks about what it means to “own my father’s name.”
Bottoms then chose two pieces, “A Chat With My Father” and “My Father Adjusts His Hearing Aids,” which also address his father, who, before his death last year, alternated between periods of lucidity and confusion.
His father “has gutted his hearing aids,” cutting his hearing aid with his pocket knife out of pent-up frustration, in a motion of rejecting one of his five senses in favor of another — the silence that reigns in his father’s life, that rests tranquilly “around his shoulder, is my mother’s arm.”
This poem functions in a similar vein as his other works in that it also carries the tone of nostalgia without the hopelessness that it could so easily fall into.
“Homage to Buck Cline,” his final selection for his talk, was a lighter piece about adolescent spontaneity from his 2004 collection Waltzing Through the Endtime.
He called it a moment of the “imp of the perverse,” to borrow Poe’s term, which is the impulse to do something immoral or mischievous, contrary to logic and reason.
In this particular scene, the teenage Bottoms acts on his little demon when he tries to speed by Buck Cline — the feared chief of police in his small hometown — parked in the shadows of the Canton General Store and duck safely into his garage about 50 yards away.
In planning his daredevil feat, Bottoms imagines himself as “some Romeo, Don Juan / some small-town Lothario” about to “run the light in his father’s Impala.”
Again, Bottoms evokes the divine name of his father, when Buck Cline pulls him over — his stunt unsuccessful — and asks for his license bearing his name, which is also his father’s name.
At the end, there is a significant shift in tone, from defiance and arrogance to respect and praise, as he calls the officer “Saint Buck.”
Bottoms’ talk clearly showed the grace and beautiful simplicity about Bottoms’s poetry that makes it quite accessible to “non-poets,” in spite of its regional specificity.
