Moon Beams #6 - James Davis May

My new friend, poet, and fellow runner James Davis May came my way through my old friend J.D. Isip's epigraph of a line of his included in his book Reluctant Prophets, which he also read on the 1st episode of “Moon Beams.”

Jim was cool enough to respond to my tagging of him on the socials, we started talking, and his cool factor went through the roof when he agreed to jump on an interview with me.

As if that wasn't enough, I was thrilled to see that Jim and I share a mutual love of running after reading his personal essay "A Pathless Wood" at Literary Hub.

We had loads to talk about in a very short time, including Czeslaw Milosz's charge to "passionate pursuit of the real," which has dovetailed well with Jim's view of the recent tendency for the seriousness of poetry to rise in tandem with stakes rising in politics as, in his words, "when the self is threatened, poetry gets a little bit more serious."

Jim also shared a geyser of a section from Shane McCrae’s poems about a hastily-assembled angel in his book Sometimes I Never Suffered, which you have to hear him read, and he summarized well: "I find the lines remarkable, I don't know exactly what to think about them, but I keep thinking about them."

Jim's most recent book, Unusually Grand Ideas, published by LSU Press, and many more are available at local bookshops, and he is currently at work on a new collection of poems, My Lost Saints, riffing on old and new concepts of sainthood.

I appreciate his time and energy tremendously, and am grateful to be seeing more and more poets drawn to and finding value in this project I'm just having too much fun building with and for the poetry community.

Pay, attention, engage hard mode, and happy trails, everybody.