Bio

maddox dempsey is a poet & playwright from Champaign, Illinois—currently based in Bloomington, Indiana. He writes at the scale where people actually live: the farmer's market, the MARATHON gas station, the intersection of Seventh & Indiana. Into these specific American locations his poems admit visitors—a beaver on a limestone bluff who wants to meet a real Marlboro Man, a fox going blind who wanted to be a ballerina, an alien shopping at Dollar Tree for the trip home. The encounter is the poem. The gesture is to feed them, and to let them leave.

maddox works in a mode he thinks of as the cosmic mundane: an argument, made poem by poem, that meaning does not have to scale up to be worthy of the cosmos, & that depth of feeling is not a problem to be solved but the condition of being faced. His poems refuse the twin seductions of transcendence & of ruin, and insist instead on the gnocchi, on the Diet Coke and peach rings, on the monthly playlist as a documentary artifact of a specific weather.

He has written over 700 poems since middle school and completed four manuscripts at Indiana University (Visions & Interpretations I–IV). Visions IV, the current manuscript, gathers two dozen poems including "The Wave That Crushes Shells Into Sand Crushes Me Too," "The Cowboy," "For a Flame Called Indiana," "Twin Fawn," "On the Hood of a Car with Blue Razz Ice," and "I Come Here to Watch the Boats Dock & Disappear Into the Distance as the Water Waves Like a Vision While My Vraylar Dissolves Like Blue Cotton Candy." A companion sequence, QUANNNIC, stages first contact at the farmer's market and concludes it at Dollar Tree. His play The Parking Lot Gospels keeps company with the poems.

His influences include Denis Johnson, Dorothea Lasky, James Tate, Frank O'Hara, Wisława Szymborska, Larry Levis, Mary Ruefle, and Alex Dimitrov. He is equally in conversation with Björk (whose Vespertine he keeps returning to), Talk Talk's Laughing Stock, Lana Del Rey, and the documentary instinct of the monthly playlist, which he has kept since his senior year of high school.

Artistic Statement

As a poet interested in the ordinary surface of American life—gas stations, farmer's markets, the Dollar Tree—I am often looking at the point where that surface is interrupted by a visitor: an animal who speaks, an alien who shops, a figure who arrives, is briefly faced, and leaves. I write from the conviction that meaning does not have to scale up to be worthy of the cosmos, and that depth of feeling is not a problem to be solved but the condition of being encountered. The work I am trying to make is one in which the reader is not asked to transcend their life in order to find it significant. The gnocchi is enough.

To do this, I am often watching what I think of as the dance between the specific and the strange—between the named product on the shelf and the unassimilable thing that walks in next to it. The brand name, in my poems, is not decoration; it is an act of fidelity to the real, a way of insisting that the encounter is happening here, in this economy, at this price point, on this bus. The animal fable, the alien visitor, the pretend-you-are-my-cowboy gesture—these are not motifs but procedures. They are how I stage the refusal of two seductions I find equally false: the seduction of species-level transcendence, and the seduction of ruin. A mentor once told me the universe is bent toward destruction. I cannot agree. Maybe just for him.