“Interstate Highway System” : Eight Questions for Adam O. Davis
“How will you live with and within yourself under the umbrella of America?” – Adam O. Davis, The Best American Poetry 2021
This question was the spark for the award winning poem, the “Interstate Highway System,” a poem that inspires a deep wanderlust in the reader as well as reflection. The author of this poem, Adam O. Davis, grew up in Tuscan, Arizona and got to know Scotland, Utah, France, New Jersey, and California throughout his youth. A talented writer, Adam Davis got an an A. B. A. in creative writing from the University of California-Riverside and then went on to get an MFA at Columbia University. An up and coming work by Adam O. Davis is his second poetry collection, titled the “Interstate Highway System”, along with the title poem “Pyrrhic Symphony”, which recently won the Raz/Shumaker Book Prize from Prairie Schooner. This new work is set to be published by the University of Nebraska Press in September of 2026.
I noticed that you are a photographer. Do you see this aspect of your life influencing and inspiring your writing?
I’m a deeply visual thinker so poetry and photography feel like two sides of the same artistic coin for me. Both crafts begin with stricture: framing the image, framing the words. What exists within that frame is a language that has been arranged to communicate a particular emotional truth to the viewer or reader. Given that, it’s no surprise that my poetry has Imagist inclinations as I’m always looking to present an image that strikes with the lightning-quick clarity and precision of a photographed image, and this interplay between these two types of languages is why I use photographs as section dividers in my books.
The enjambed lines “saw God in the face of a forest / fire” really stood out to me, while this pattern is consistent I wondered how this technique contributes to your meaning?
The poems I love best are the poems that surprise me at every turn, so I’m very conscious of using enjambment to create suspense (a literal cliffhanger) and, through that suspense, surprise that results in delight–a new image, a new idea. Jericho Brown is a master of this, as was William Carlos Williams whose linebreak in “The Red Wheelbarrow”–“a red wheel/barrow”–never fails to put a smile on my face. The straightforward verve of breaking up a household name to yield something so suddenly alien…what a privilege to be able to make language new again.
When describing the meaning of your poem, you talk about growing up in numerous places such as France and Utah. You said it summed up “How will you live with and within yourself under the umbrella of America.” When writing the “Interstate Highway System,” how was this question a part of your writing process? Was it influenced by your different environments?
Travel demands that you humble yourself before the world, that you acknowledge your tininess as you attempt to find words (which you may or may not have given the country) to express yourself in the hopes that someone will honor that expression. Poetry is no different–it demands that you humble yourself before the blank page where, with luck, you’ll find yourself, as Wallace Stevens wrote, “more truly and more strange.”
You use the word “iconography” in a compelling way. It comes across to the reader as a moment of change, your outlook on the world undergoing metamorphosis, causing you to weep and find your eyes “ever blue.”What do you want your readers to take away from these language choices?
Particularly in a moment when the poem shifts–say, in this instance, the volta or leap–it’s important to me that the poem communicate this new intelligence not only physically (the linebreak) but linguistically. What I love most about poetry is how it allows the writer and reader to luxuriate in language, to recline into sound and, in doing so, surprise with its newfangled accuracy. I could have just as easily written “I checked myself”, but what new understanding would that have led to? Everyday speech is designed to be throwaway–shorthand sounds for momentary needs that we can understand as quickly as we can dismiss. In this way, I’m against solution-oriented language–what I want is language that complicates the issue, that arrests the ear and eye so that you have to stop and think about why and how such things are said. As the superlative poet Kimberly Johnson once said, “Poetry never simplifies an issue; it complicates it.” So why not have fun with that complication?
I feel like music and poetry often go hand and hand. Have there been any musical artists or songs that have sparked inspiration for one of your poems? If so, which one(s)?
I often remind my students that poetry is music. It derives from an oral tradition so sound is central to it. Hell, it’s why we refer to poems as lyrics and poetry as verse–so why not engage with its musicality? And while I’m not someone who agrees that lyricists–even the great ones–are poets (for more on that, check out Glyn Maxwell’s excellent take in his book, On Poetry), I was drawn to wordplay through music, particularly the wry country-western storytelling of my youth (Cash, Rogers, Parton, Miller) and then, in high school, Soul Coughing was particularly important to me with their “slacker jazz” stylings snaking around Mike Doughty’s spoken word phrasings.
You received an MFA in poetry at Columbia University. How might you respond to the accusations in essays like “The Discursive Situation of Poetry” by Robert Archambeau which basically say that MFA programs kill creativity in poetry?
I haven’t read that essay so I can’t comment on it directly, but the argument against MFA programs is as old as MFA programs (not unlike the yearly op-eds about whether poetry is dead–spoiler: so long as we’re worrying about whether poetry is dead then it’s very much alive). That’s not to say there isn’t validity in Archambeau’s point, but given the state of our union and world, there are worse things than people dedicating a few years of their lives to something as restoratively human as reading and writing. When I first arrived at Columbia by way of Riverside, Alan Ziegler explained to me and my new peers that the MFA program was nothing more than an academic version of a type of writing community that had existed for a very long time, such as the Lost Generation in Paris or the Beat Generation in San Francisco. Now it’s true that every community has a dominant style, so I can see how some might find their creativity constrained or even railroaded by whatever micro-zeitgeist is present, but ultimately a writer has to determine for themselves what influences they’d like to engage or disengage with.
If you were me interviewing Adam Davis, what question would you ask regarding your experiences in poetry, and how would you answer it?
Great question! And surprisingly difficult to answer, but perhaps what poetry has given me? My life would be so much poorer if not for poetry–it’s a craft whose practice has supported me through dark times and in whose practice I find succor, surprise, and purpose. I feel deeply fortunate that my work has found an audience, but the most important thing about the work is the work itself. Nothing compares to the creative moment, the act of creation, the understanding that you’ve brought something new into the world. What a gift.
As kids, we often read poets like Shel Silverstein. As we grow, the poetry we read changes, and we become poets who study William Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Has there been a poet who has defined your adulthood for you? Do you think there is value in how poetry evolves as people do?
The miracle of poetry is that you can return to a poem that you’ve read countless times and discover new things in it. It’s a symbiotic relationship–so long as the poem is read it’s alive and so long as you read it you’re alive too. John Berryman remains a constant literary companion, as do so many others. But, to your point about Shakespeare, one of the surprises of adulthood is how much richer Shakespeare’s work has become. I always enjoyed it, but it wasn’t until I began teaching it that I finally fell in love with his work. As Hamlet would say, those words, words, words! Their timeless verve and wit, not to mention the unending pathos and love and terror and hope they contain. It blows my mind to think of the number of centuries they’ve weathered to entertain and astonish readers, and it heartens me to know they’ll continue to do so for many more centuries to come.