Down to Sauget and all that hell
The bodies come the bodies go
Carrying things from fall to fell
To ashes ashes ring the bell
Dead wagon going coming slow
Down to Sauget and all that hell
Yellow grease bone chips a smell
A body never wants to know
Carrying things from fall to fell
Who cares what doesn’t render well
Until the wind begins to blow
Down to Sauget and all that hell
Dead wagon’s coming to sell
The bodies it picked high and low
Carrying things from fall to fell
I say fuck this villanelle
That can’t stop what’s got to go
Down to Sauget and all that hell
Carrying things from fall to fell
—
Misty Publications (July 2012)
NOTE: Overpass is available only
through the publisher.
A key thread running through my new book of poems, OVERPASS, is the plight
of a character dealing with metastatic breast cancer. Her name’s Overpass
Girl. The poem I’m posting here [“Sauget Dead Wagon”] comes late
in the book and expresses the frustration and anger that accompanies her battle
against a disease that will not let go. It also expresses mine as author whose work
has limited effect. A dead wagon, by the way, is a common name given to the vehicle
that travels the countryside, picking up carcasses of farm animals, and delivers
them to a rendering plant.
—From a Facebook post dated 5 July 2012
• Appears in As It Ought To Be (December 2010):
The Sestina Has Been Sinking
• Appears in Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal,
Issue 23 (Summer 2010):
Art Times
Consumer Reports (1)
Consumer Reports (2)
Midwest Living
• Appears in Verse Daily (22 September 2008):
Popular Science
“Steve Davenport has taken the slapdash lexicon of a mortally wounded industrial
base and stitched, jammed, jumbled and creased together this searing collaboration
of form and function.”
—Tyehimba Jess
“...brilliantly improvisatory as well as stunningly energetic and daring.”
—B. H. Fairchild
“Overpass creates a startling and delightful tension between its
richly gritty content and a craft that crashes through its own formal restraints
with deft use of wordplay, syntax, allusion, and joyful sound.”
—Martha Collins
• Appears in
Prick of the Spindle, Vol. 6.2 (June 2012):
“Davenport takes it on, love and grief, shared suffering, the blues,
and connects the personal story of Overpass Girl to changes and losses along the
floodplain of the Mississippi River....
“Dark as these poems are, they are also full of word play and plenty of fun.
They conquer the fear of death and pain with joy and rhyme. The repetitions in a
villanelle can be a kind of morphine....”
—Kathleen Kirk, The Poetry Cheerleader
•
Nine Poems and Three Fictions
A chapbook published online by The Literary Review, which includes
several poems from Overpass
• Two stories from the “Black Guy, Bald Guy” series:
Black Guy, Bald Guy
The Last Set of Machetes
• A story from a novel-in-progress:
“Bomb, Reporting From Inwit”
•
How to Write a Song: Part I
An essay in Industrial Worker Book Review (July 2012):
“Once I had a sorrow in the long middle of a stroke. Poet loses his place.
Syllable, saddle. Says Humpty Dumpty without words. Hickory Dickory Doc says to
poet’s wife your husband’s caught in a stroke. In the middle somewhere
falling. Away.”
•
Live and Local with Kevin Kelly
Illinois musician Bruce “Bruiser” Rummenie and poet Steve Davenport
talk about songwriting and share a live sampling of their newly released collaborative CD,
This Noise in My Blood (5 October 2012)
(This segment of the podcast begins at 26:19.)
•
A Night of the Longknives
Eric Miles Williamson reviews Davenport’s first book of poems,
Uncontainable Noise:
“Steve Davenport writes like Charles Bukowski might have written if
he’d had more talent or been able to hold his liquor better....
“[This] is a book I’d recommend for the National Book Critics Circle
Award if I were still on the Board, and it’s also a book I’d have given
to my gas-station-attendant father. It’s a book poets will either be jealous
of or admire....”
—Appears in “Industrial Strength,”
Industrial Worker Book Review (June 2012)