Philomath has just become the first poetry book ever to be nominated for the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize for a best first book.

Two Roads: A Review-in-Dialogue of First Books: Amanda Moore’s “Requeening,” Paul Tran’s “All the Flowers Kneeling,” and Devon Walker-Figueroa’s “Philomath.” Los Angeles Review of Books, Victoria Chang and Dean Rader

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The American Poetry Review Podcast: Episode 1, with Devon Walker-Figueroa

A Freeing Space: Our Seventeenth Annual Look at Debut Poets

Excerpt from Poets & Writers - Jan/Feb 2022

How it began: A place, a people, a state of mind, a set of experiences that haunted me. 

Another way to say it: I never set out to write a book called Philomath. The first lines of what would become the book took shape in a candlelit basement in Salem, Oregon, where I was bartending at the time. I’d scribble lines of poetry on guest checks and either stuff them in my apron or under the register drawer until my shift ended. 

What would become the title poem of the book came along a couple of years later in response to an undergraduate poetry assignment given by Michael Dumanis at Bennington College. Michael had lit a fire under my heels and given me a new sense of the poetic line by introducing me to poets such as Shane McCrae, Samuel Amadon, Olena Kalytiak Davis, C. D. Wright, Kiki Petrosino, and Lucie Brock-Broido. With their voices fresh in my ears, I set out to write a poem that captured something of the essence of a world I’d passed through, or which had passed through me and left significant traces of itself. I called “Philomath” my “hometown poem.” And I’d go back and write more poems in this mode during my grad years at Iowa and a couple of years beyond. 

The rest was just longing—to hold on to and preserve what’s receding from my consciousness; to connect with others in ways I can’t seem to when I’m physically in their presence; to estrange myself from what I “know”—and regret, which is also just a form of longing, I suppose, for the past to be other than it is.

Inspiration: A single-wide mobile home decorated with painted saw blades. Russian ballet teachers and Oregonian loggers. Harpists and cowboys and Gloucester’s leap. Vacation Bible School. Microwave dinners and ghost hunters. Lorenzo Ghiberti’s bronze reliefs on the Baptistery doors in Florence. An illuminated tank at the Oregon Coast Aquarium that’s full of moon jellyfish in their medusa phase. Loitering in art museums and used bookstores. A Season in Hell and The Divine Comedy. György Ligeti’s Atmosphères. Also, the voices of so many different people. I was a bartender for a number of years, so I got to hear a lot of tongues wag—that was a gift. Such blues and gossip and intoxicated babble. Those voices, their stories and syntactical tics and slang, they stick in my head until I metabolize them and then they find some phantom presence in a poem, the way everything we eat, in its way, becomes a tiny part of us, a bit of ATP flitting through the bloodstream, though we don’t see it happen. Which is to say, inspiration might be inevitable and often occurs when we aren’t looking or don’t yet feel it animating us. 

Influences: Jorie Graham’s poetry found me at a crucial moment in my life, and my admiration of her swift and breathless movement and fearless images, which also often double as portals through time and space, has never faltered. The hypnotic abundance and onrushing music of Nathaniel Mackey’s “Mu” and “Song of the Andoumboulou” poems helped me to stop imposing so many arbitrary limits on my poems and enabled me to listen more closely to the poem as it was taking shape, to sense where the lines, and not just I, wanted to go. Lucie Brock-Broido’s daring and polytonal sense of line, intimacy of address, and elastic diction that reaches back in time and deep into the present moment all at once, was life-changing for me as well. The ballet and modern dancer Sylvie Guillem has greatly influenced my work, too, not just in terms of what I strove for in ballet, when that was my profession, but how I now approach sculpting the human form and moving through language on a page. Her versatility is astonishing, her ability to shift seamlessly from machine-centric to animal-centric movement styles and to evoke the ethereal and the earthen in a single step, not to mention her balance, surreal flexibility, and breathtaking lines—all of which continue to enrapture me and shape how I move through and with art. 

Writer’s block remedy: I’m a big fan of denial when it comes to “writer’s block” or “burnout.” I like mostly to pretend it’s a made-up thing. But for the moments when my head is overcrowded with data to the point of being numb or I just can’t convince myself with my flat-earther approach to burnout, for the moments when I feel so far from the words as to be exiled from them, I try a two-pronged approach of returning to my roots—that is, the poetry I read that first led me to respond to it by writing poetry—and then simultaneously reaching far from my own sensibilities and seeking out works that challenge any aesthetic I might have settled into. The idea being this: Find the roots in order to move the roots, to transplant your writer’s mind, as it were, so you can draw from the strength you already have but also draw in new nutrients from soil you haven’t leached out with endless searching and absorbing and reabsorbing. To me, it’s all about the reading—whether what you’re reading is the page in front of you or the room in which you sit.

Advice: Don’t stop or pause your writing just because you’re trying to focus on getting your first book out there. The continuation and development of your creative process need not be disrupted by the apparent completion of a single work.