Notes from the Octopus School of Poetry: An Interview with Denton Loving https://ift.tt/U7FiPOm
Denton Loving is the author of Feller, a recent book of poems from Mercer University Press that follows his second collection Tamp, which was a finalist for the Weatherford Award and recipient of the inaugural Tennessee Book Award for Poetry. His work has been published in River Styx, CutBank, Iron Horse Literary Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere. For over a decade, he co-directed the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival at Lincoln Memorial University, and he currently acts as an editor at EastOver Press and its literary journal Cutleaf, both of which he helped to found.
In Feller, Loving continues to pan gold from the streams of his thematic material, including but not limited to landscape, little histories, local symbolism, and the life of the heart. Sure, many other writers also mine these veins, but I think Denton does so sustainably; he will be seeing no class-action environmental lawsuits anytime soon. He also continues to expose himself as being a wildly generous and approachable human being, and his speakers end up in conversation with Jesus and Jeremy Wade, among others. The lines contained within Feller are as digestible as any but perhaps significantly more savorable, like good tapas.
After visiting him at his farm near the historic Cumberland Gap , I had the chance to chat with Denton about the legacies, communities, and artistic inputs that drive his work.
Denton, thanks for taking the time to chat with me today. I’m thinking we can start broad, hunt-down some specifics, and end with a soft advertisement.
Sounds good.
Usually I leave this question for the end of interviews, but since this is more conversational, I thought we could begin with it. What’s the aspect of Feller that you’re most hoping someone will bring up in an interview, and could you answer it exactly as you want to?
Yeah, let’s not start out with anything easy, right?
I think what’s most important to me, which some people have already asked about, is the connection to place and to landscape. I think that’s common in all of my work, and even apparent in my fiction. This book is different in some ways than Tamp because of how connected the poems are to place, to the idea of human connection and longing, connection with other humans, connection with the natural world. And even just the relationship that we have with ourselves, who we tell ourselves that we are, and how that’s impacted by the place where we live.
That’s so funny, because that was actually kind of my second question, which was—“Do you feel that Feller follows-up Tamp in any specific way? I’m curious if you see Feller as a discreet and new endeavor.” Oops, sorry, hold on.
[At this point in our Zoom conversation, I am solicited by a Jehovah’s Witness.]
Yes, okay, so you were talking about Feller as a successor, but also unique when compared to Tamp.
I wouldn’t necessarily describe Feller as a completely new endeavor. I think there are a lot of commonalities between Tamp and Feller, primarily that environment is so important. Tamp was centered around my dad, and about his death, and my processing my grief for him. Feller is very different in that sense. It’s more about me, I think.
Both Tamp and Feller are really personal, but there’s something about Feller that feels even more revealing. A lot of the poems were about things that I didn’t necessarily want to write about, but I felt compelled to write about.
I really noticed that while reading Feller. I think it has a more personal tone simply based on just how specific some of the topics of the poems were. The grieving throughout Tamp seemed to have a more universal aspect to it. This one feels singular.
And the grief aspect is what so many people, I think, connected with, or what they told me they connected with, after reading Tamp. But I was also really thinking a lot about mythology, particularly about the ways we mythologize the people we love. So some of the poems in Tamp were me writing about the mythic aspect of my dad, and trying to preserve that, or build on that. And I think there’s less of that myth-building in Feller.
Speaking of myth, though, I’m so interested in the ideation and creation of Feller’s prologue poems which, for those who haven’t read it yet, involve a bluebird protagonist and its relation to a particular red fox. Were these poems written specifically as a prologue? How did they find their way into the book?
I didn’t see them as a prologue until very near the end of the compilation and editing process. Those are some of the oldest poems in the book, and it’s really difficult for me to remember the exact spark that allowed me to start those, but I do remember that, after I wrote the first one, I was intrigued by this idea of a series of poems. It was the first time that I had ever written multiple poems that connected with each other, but because they were a series, and there were four of them, it was really hard for me to place them. I tried all these different ideas, and then I thought, let’s not even give them their own section. Let’s look at them as a prologue. That just felt much more comfortable to me when I thought about how a prologue is supposed to instruct the reader on how to come into the book, and how it should be framed.
This next one exposes my age, but based on the years I got to call my childhood, Steve Irwin meant little to me and Jeremy Wade meant everything to me. When I came across your poem addressed to him, I was just floored. I’d love to hear anything you have to say about that one.
So, that’s one of a series of epistolary poems in the book. Some are written to dead people, some to living people, and to real people in my life. The Jeremy Wade one came about as a happy accident, I think. His show, River Monsters, is something that has been in my consciousness for a long time. It’s one of those shows that, when you pass it on television, you have to stop to see what’s happening. And I remember one episode that just fit so perfectly with some things I was already thinking about.
That’s the thing I would want to say about the epistolary poems throughout Feller. I like working in the epistolary form, but finding the person to write the letter to often helps articulate what it is you’re trying to say. Wade was just the conduit for me to get to what I was working with in my mind at that point.
What are some of those specific things that lined up really well?
In the television show, Wade’s looking for a monster whose eyes turn red when light shines on them. So he does an experiment where he shines light into some other species, maybe a shark, and the eyes turn an eerie yellow color, but they don’t turn red, as in the myth.
And I was thinking about that aspect, and came across the term tapetum lucidum, which is Latin for “bright tapestry.” And that reminded me of the Bayeux Tapestry, which is also something that I’m very interested in.
Which is also so funny, because if the Jeremy Wade thing wasn’t already so specific to me and my experience, the Bayeux Tapestry is, like, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I’m equally obsessed with it.
Well, that’s probably a lucky accident, but I’m glad about it. But that’s part of what writing a poem is about: allowing those accidents to happen, and finding surprising connections.
We’ve already talked about place, but it really does seem to do a lot of the backseat driving during your writing process. I wanted to prompt you with a famous passage by Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Slightly abridged, she wrote “The gaps are the thing…The gaps are the spirit’s one home…The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God…Go up into the gaps.” Obviously, your home near the Cumberland Gap played a large role in Tamp, your previous collection, and I’m wondering if you think your relationship to that specific setting changed between collections.
Yeah, I think when I was writing a lot of the poems in Feller, I had the benefit of knowledge and perspective that I hadn’t yet earned in Tamp.
Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the Cumberland Gap in relation to the notion of settling within a threshold. As you mentioned, you live permanently in its shadow, in its vicinity. But almost everyone else to whom the gap was meaningful saw it as a doorway, a place simply to pass through, and not necessarily to stay in. I’m just curious if there’s a way that you see that tension appearing in your work?
I’ve lived here since I was four years old. But it’s impossible to think about the Cumberland Gap without thinking about it in that transient sense, especially because of my ancestry. I’m related to Daniel Boone’s wife, and my family, the Callaways, were also with Boone when they trekked through the Cumberland Gap 250 years ago this year. So my family has used that passageway, moving back and forth for centuries. Here, I’m presented with all of that at once, and so much of Feller is about transformation, about transitioning from one state to another.
We could go back to the poems about the bluebird and the fox. The fox, in folklore, has a lot to do with that space in-between the real world and the fairy world, or the world of magic. And even the fact that there’s this relationship between the bluebird and the fox is sort of transient, not quite real: something that you can almost see through, but not completely see through.
Okay, advertisement. Anyone who stumbles upon this interview will surely first see the cover of Feller, which is adorned with a quite prominent cephalopod. This, of course, is a reference to one of the collection’s later poems called “The Octopus School of Poetry,” but it will also certainly be the book’s primary attention-grabber. The conceit used in the octopus poem is lovely and undeniable, but I’m curious about how you made that connection. Do you often think about figurative language that clarifies your understanding of your own poetic practice?
I think about figurative language, definitely. As you know, I came to poetry as a fiction writer, so using figurative language was one of my weak spots, and maybe still is. It’s something I have to think about and actually try for. That poem, “The Octopus School of Poetry,” came late. The collection was almost entirely put together, so I had that benefit of knowing what the book was mostly about. Then a friend and I were having this conversation about octopuses, and, like all these other portals we’ve talked about, something just stuck in my mind.
The central tenet of that poem is the fact that an octopus has three hearts, and it just came to me that I thought, you know, “The Octopus School of Poetry” would make a great title. And I actually had that title before I had any part of the poem. That’s really unusual for me, because I’m not very good with titles. Some people, you know, always start in the middle. They have this situation, and then they have to both figure out how to end it and also how they got into the situation to begin with. And I think the poem works in the same way. And so I just thought, okay, I’ve got this great title, let’s see what we can do with it.
Feller was published by Mercer University Press on August 5, 2025. Whenever you next visit your local bookstore, be sure to keep an eye out for errant mollusks.
POETRY Feller
By Denton Loving
Mercer University Press
Published August 5, 2025
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