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, & 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, & insist instead on the gnocchi, on the Diet Coke & peach rings, on the monthly playlist as a documentary artifact of a specific weather.
He has written over 700 poems since & 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," & "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 & 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, & Alex Dimitrov. He is equally in conversation with Björk (whose Vespertine he keeps returning to), Talk Talk's Laughing Stock, Lana Del Rey, & the documentary instinct of the monthly playlist, which he has kept since his senior year of high school.
Artistic Statement
My poems live in the small overlap between Midwestern flatness & astronomical scale—between the gas station & Cassiopeia, between a Slurpee on the hood of a car & the marine layer lifting off some imagined Pacific dock. I am interested in what happens when the domestic & the cosmic are placed in the same frame without comment.
Across the Visions & Interpretations sequence I've been building one long ecosystem. Animals appear and reappear: a yellow dog, twin fawn, a brown trout slipping through black jade, a fox who wanted to be a ballerina. They are not symbols. They are visitors. I treat them with deadpan calm because the encounters feel that way to me—a deer in the backyard at dawn is genuinely an audience with the secrets of the universe and her maker, and pretending otherwise would be a lie. The fable form lets me say true things about grief & medication and queerness & the body without staging them.
I am interested in endings. In the joke that lands and then keeps falling. In the line that stops a poem the way a car stops at a county line. In the moment when a fox lights a Lucky Strike Red and weeps & you have nothing to give her. That is the whole project. The pretending is not a consolation prize. It is the thing.
I am from Ukraine & from Champaign & from Bloomington & from a forest cabin in central Indiana & from the back room at SOMA with seventeen lamps. My heart is very open & I have everything to give.