Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobob Press, 2017), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Ohioana Book Award, and Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013). As a new poet who was fortunate to take a poetry class with Allison through the Stanford University Continuing Studies program, I wanted to find out more about Allison and her new collection of poetry, Outskirts. This interview was conducted via Zoom on December 10, 2024, and edited for clarity.
~Molly Mayhead
MM: Allison, thanks so much for meeting with me. I thoroughly enjoyed your poetry class through Standford’s Continuing Studies program last spring and look forward to getting to know you a bit better through this interview.
APD: Thanks so much for interviewing me. I love to talk about poetry.
MM: First question: Could you describe your creative process? As somebody relatively new to the poetry field, I love to hear a variety of perspectives.
APD: Sure. So, for me I write all at once and then sometimes go really long periods without writing at all. I don’t worry if I don’t write every day. I can go months without writing and then write all day if I get a chance. Sometimes I’d just like to lock myself in a room and write, which is hard to do now that I have kids. I’m not an every-day writer but I read every single day. Sometimes poets may worry that if they don’t write every day they aren’t a writer. That’s too much anxiety. Normalize whatever you are anxious about. Over a span of six years, I had two kids and a miscarriage. I wrote when I could. Many people have life events—like being a caregiver for a parent, or being a parent—that make it impossible to write every day. It’s a privilege to write every day, not a necessity.
I write on a laptop now. We had one computer in the house when I was growing up for six people—I remember reserving time on it to work on my writing. Now I keep a notebook/journal with ideas, and I compose and revise poems with a laptop.
MM: It’s refreshing to know that there is no set way to become a poet or a writer. I had a professor when I was working on my Ph.D. who told us we had to write every single day or we would be failures. It’s probably not realistic for most people to write daily. And then we need to find people to read and respond to our work on their schedule. To that extent, how do you feel about the revision process and receiving critiques of your work?
APD: I’ve been in 20+ workshops at the university level and remember crying after the first couple because it was hard to take that criticism. I’m very critical of my own work, often my harshest critic, but it took a while to get comfortable with other people critiquing my work. Now I am very grateful for feedback and feel that workshops are such a gift. It’s great to have someone outside your head telling you something doesn’t make sense or isn’t working. I appreciate workshops.
MM: How do you know when a poem is finished?
APD: That’s such a great question. I just know when it is finished. It’s a great feeling, and it doesn’t come around often. I edit poems a lot. And sometimes after they’re published, I keep editing. It’s just a feeling. I just know when it is done. It’s like finishing a puzzle. The last piece just clicks in. A poem is finished when I am happy with it. I’ve been working on one of my manuscripts for 10 years. I am just now starting to feel happy about it.
MM: Line Study of a Motel Clerk, your 2017 collection, received a great deal of acclaim. Why did you write it? What do you think it contributes to our understanding of geographic place? Of workplace? Of gender roles?
APD: I was talking to the great poet Rosanna Young Oh one day about this. We are both oldest daughters and wrote about our families’ businesses. I felt like it was my obligation to write about the trucking motel. It was a huge responsibility to write this project. I want people to walk away with a view of families’ small businesses and how they are part of their community. The uniqueness of the region and small businesses are interdependent. Gender—There are lots of narratives in the Rust Belt, and they are often about males in the labor sector. I set out to explore how businesses and gender roles interact and how gender roles change across generations. I want to emphasize how much the women in my family made the businesses possible. All the women in my family’s businesses had to be tough; they had to have charisma to work in those businesses. And they were really caring. They set an example for me. I aspire to their toughness.
MM: You have a new collection of poetry called Outskirts, which contains both lineated and prose poetry, thus making it hybrid. Why the hybrid model? Are there unique challenges to writing in the hybrid style?
APD:. Oxford American has published several of the poems. The collection consists of lineated, lyrical poems and then a space and then a prose poem. I had a conversation with Ryan Walsh—we were talking about writing about labor, about people who aren’t poets. We considered whether we have an obligation to write with “narrative clarity when the subject isn’t oneself.” There is a question of accessibility, of clarity. They last thing I want to have happen is for somebody to say, “You wrote a poem about me, what the hell does it mean?” When I write poetry I have always been stuck between lyrical and experimental and straightforward prose. Using both allows me to bridge both. It kind of felt like cheating, to write a hybrid manuscript. It made saying what I wanted to say easier. The visual space between the poems signifies the balance between both worlds. The form provides for a more abundant mindset that allows the poet and reader to move from and between what might be perceived as abstract, experimental poetry and more vernacular language. Two different forms of poems on the page represent the different modes of how I think. The space between them on the page is both a miscommunication between them and generative space that connects them. I started the project by asking myself what can I get out of being both a lyric poet and a more straight-forward prose writer at the same time.
MM: What is Outskirts about?
APD: First and foremost, it’s about the Rust Belt and other areas around the world that have gone through deindustrialization. It’s also about General Motors Lordstown and the automotive strike. It’s also about being a Jewish mother in the Rust Belt, raising kids in the same kind of culture I was brought up in. There are also ekphrastic poems in conversation with LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs of GM Lordstown workers. As a whole, the book is a kind of moving between places, like my move from California to West Virginia. The collection traces how we can move between modes of telling and navigate different ways of speaking. The book is trying to move into an abundance mindset that people can be many different things without having to choose between them. The movement itself is meant to feel autobiographical rather than performative. The white space between the poems is meant to be a pivot point. Are the two discussions rejecting each other, or are they joined at the white space? The white space is always going to be its own section, a moment of reckoning in terms of themes, different modes of language.
MM: You have an interesting statement on your website: “If you are struggling, know that I care about your art and health that I’m committed to working on ways to make our field more equitable.” What exactly do you mean?
APD: Websites are very performative spaces, where people say something like “here are all my successes,” and that is often such bullshit and is depressing, especially if you don’t have the same successes. So, I’m calling out the performative nature of my own website, of my own hypocrisy, while also acknowledging that most poets also must rely on websites and social media since there is very little investment in PR for poetry. I want people to know I care about their mental health. It’s also important that we are all trying to think about how race and economics function in our field. I try to teach free community workshops when I can. Once I was nominated for a book prize, and I noticed that all of the nominees were white, so I sent an email to the sponsors asking them to look at the field more broadly. In projects I try to highlight voices that are historically repressed by the canon.
MM: In your opinion, are there any “must read” poems; in other words, a poetry canon?
APD: I don’t think there is one list for everyone, no. For me, the list includes Charles Reznikoff, Natahsa Trethewey, Harryette Mullen, Jack Gilbert, Rilke, Moyshe Kulbak, Joshua Gottlieb Miller, Shelley Wong, Rosanna Young Oh, Rebecca Gayle Howel, Kathy Fagan Grandinetti, Kimberely Grey, on and on. For me, reading Sylvia Plath and T.S. Eliot in high school was enough to get me into poetry, but for others, that’s not going to do it. I think providing range is always more important than providing any kind of canon. When I teach, I try to expose people to as many poets and poems to help them find what poets and poems mean the most to them, help make a difference in their lives. The kind of poetry that will help someone or change someone is very, very personal. There isn’t just one poem or book.
MM: What is one piece of advice you would give to a new or emerging poet?
APD: I like Philip Levine’s advice–try to just write the best poems you can as long as possible without kissing anyone’s ass. Publishing is a business, and many poets that are successful have—in addition to talent—good publicists and rich presses. Or a natural ability to network. In other words, do not necessarily base the quality of your work on if you make it or not. Poetry and publishing are separate. Publishing is a business. There is a difference between quality of work and what is published. Publishing is a factor of capitalism.
MM: What is one question you want somebody to ask, and what is the answer?
APD: I guess it would be like asking if I think poetry is important. I want to stress that poetry is important, and it gets lost in the field and the pressure to publish. Poetry changed my life and my students’ lives. To survive in the field—to put up with all the grossness and capitalism in the field—we have to be anchored in an absolute sense of wonder for art itself. I believe in telling my students that serious work is work done seriously. It’s not about the prizes or publication. Creating helps people process things. You are writing poetry because you need to write poetry. That’s its own reward.
MM: Thanks so much for your time and thoughtful answers. I look forward to reading the full collection of Outskirts when it is published.
APD: Am I allowed to ask you any questions? I’d like to hear about your career, your advocacy work on behalf of faculty, and how you got into writing poetry. I guess that’s three questions. Let’s just start with your career path.
MM: Of course. Thanks for asking. I grew up in Oregon. I’m a first-generation college student, and I got my Bachelor’s degree in Language Arts/Speech with a teaching certificate from what was then called Oregon College of Education (it’s now Western Oregon University). I had competed in college on Western Oregon’s debate team and planned to teach high school speech and English classes. I had a professor/mentor who encouraged me to get advanced degrees. So, without seeing the campus first, I went to Indiana University on a teaching assistantship to coach their debate team, and I got my M.A. there. The first sign I saw when I got off the plane in Bloomington was “what to do in case of a tornado!” We don’t have those in Oregon. And I then went to Penn State, which at the time was one of the top schools for Rhetoric and Communication, and got my Ph.D. in 1988. I paid for it by once again coaching debate and teaching argumentation.
When I graduated, it was a bad year for jobs in rhetoric and public address. I interviewed in places that didn’t fit with my liberal Oregon background. One dean at a school in the South—he should have had a spittoon in his office—looked at my dissertation title (I’d written about Supreme Court sexual privacy cases)—leaned back in his chair and said something to the effect that their school didn’t tolerate public drunkenness or promiscuity. Yikes! I smiled politely, nodded, and knew that I could never teach there (not that I believe in public drunkenness or sexual promiscuity). Luckily, a job opened up at Western Oregon University for a speech coach (to replace my former coach), and I got it. It was kind of a “Welcome Back, Kotter” moment, if you are familiar with the 1970’s sitcom. I taught there for 31 years and retired in 2019. I am so glad that I retired before COVID forced online teaching. I would have been an unmitigated disaster.
While at Western, I taught a variety of classes: Argumentation, Rhetoric of the Women’s Movement, Freedom of Speech, Communication in the Legal Field, and Public Speaking. I was fortunate that I got to help design the new major the Dean wanted us to create. We had a great deal of freedom in choosing and designing the courses we wanted students to have.
APD: I would have loved to take all of your classes. What about your advocacy for faculty?
MM: That goes way back to when I was a kid, actually. When I was about four, my dad who was an offset pressman, pulled me onto his lap and showed me the “Union Bug” on something he’d printed and told me about the importance of unions in the workplace. He was a shop steward where he worked. So, it just seemed like the right thing to do to become a grievance officer at Western Oregon, representing faculty whose contract rights had been violated. I was always surprised that some of my colleagues didn’t think that unions belong in higher ed, that unions, at least in their minds, were “too blue collar.” The reality is that resources are limited, sometimes bad decisions are made, and faculty members need somebody to advocate for them. My work was, at least in the early years, mainly about women who had been passed over for tenure or promotion or had lower salaries than their male colleagues. Being a grievance officer was an extension of my work coaching debate and teaching classes about law and argumentation. I was much better at grievance work than I was at being on the contract negotiation team, which I found quite boring. One night we were waiting for the Management team to respond to our contract proposal. We waited more than an hour. I think I remember throwing pencils up to the ceiling to see if they would stick. I enjoyed enforcing the contract much more than crafting it.
APD: Thank you for doing important work on behalf of faculty. And, now, why poetry?
MM: I want to keep my mind active and learn new things. The day you stop learning is the day you stop living. After I retired, I finally had time to take classes. Poetry is different from any other kind of academic writing I had experienced. I saw an interesting class called “Poetry for Absolute Beginners” that the amazing writer, Shann Ray, was teaching through the Stanford Continuing Studies Program. I took it, and I was hooked! I’m now working on a collection of my own, as you know since you’ve kindly read and edited most of my work, about the people and places in Oregon.
APD: I think my daughter is waking up from her nap. It was so good to talk to you.
MM: I always enjoy our conversations. Again—thanks so much for taking the time for this interview!
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Allison Pitinii Davis holds a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing and has taught creative writing workshops at programs including Stanford University, Ohio State University, and Northeast Ohio Medical University.
Molly Mayhead is Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies at Western Oregon University. She has authored several entries about women leaders in American National Biography and co-authored three books about women’s political discourse. She holds a Ph.D. in Speech Communication from Penn State University.