The Lightning Room with James Tadd Adcox

Five of James Tadd Adcox’s “Scientific Method” poems appeared in our June issue. Below, he and Simon talk about empiricism and constraint.

1. Your “Scientific Method” poems have appeared in a bunch of different places – what was the inspiration for this collection, and how big is it? I love that they all have the same title.

The inspiration was a constraint—specifically, I wanted to send some poems to Safety Pin Review, but didn’t have anything that fit the size requirement (small). And I like series of poems that have the same title. I like how the title shapes whatever follows it, and how so many things can be shaped in different ways by the same title. I think I have somewhere around 40 or 50 of these at the moment, but I’ve culled them down to a chapbook of around 30.

2. These poems seem effortlessly, perfectly concise to me – what’s your editing process like? Are the original drafts longer, and you cut away? Or are they painstakingly pieced together from the beginning, very carefully and deliberately?

Mostly, I’ve composed them in my head, generally while walking from one place to another. I’ve done some editing after writing them down, but most of the editing goes on beforehand.

3. I know moment-of-inspiration is impossible to nail down, but I’m wondering where the first gem of each of these poems comes from, as each seems to have a central line of inquiry at its core. Can you reveal anything about this?

I really like pop physics books, so that’s part of it. But I’ve tried to branch out some to biology, geography, etc, all of which have really good potential to spark a poem. I like doing research, but I specifically like doing the kind of research where I’m just looking for something that I didn’t know before, that grabs my attention.

4. Related: there seems, in the end, to be a formula here: direct observation (empirical data collected), followed by findings, implications. Can you talk about how you structure these poems? There’s something magical going on here and I want to hear you say it.

The structure is, just long enough for a single turn. Generally, that equals one thing, then one more thing. Or: observation, leap.

5. A lot of your work – we’re talking The Map of the System of Human Knowledge, the “Scientific Method” poems, your collaborative chapbook with Robert Kloss – seems to focus at least in part on knowledge and the means by which we acquire it, how the everyday world is defined. Is this a topic of particular exploration for you?

I suppose it is. How we put together what we know, and all the other ways we might put it together, instead. The way a single new fact can change an entire system. I read Nausea when I was a kid, I don’t remember much about it but I remember a moment when the narrator says something to the effect of, What would we do if suddenly tomorrow trees turned into great masses of bleeding flesh (or something equally disgusting, I think). The point was, we couldn’t do anything, except accept that this was how things were now: trees were now this other thing. The fact that they hadn’t been in the past would be of no use. And that one new fact would cause a great shift in the entire system of facts, even if everything else stayed the same.

6. If I were to broadly thematize your work (as I am in a unique position to do so, being Any Other Person), I would use the word “constraints.” What are you working on now, and where does humanity go from here?

I have a novel coming out from Curbside Splendor Press late this year, so I’m working on final edits for that. It’s about a couple trying to deal with the breakdown of their marriage, the wife by sleeping with an FBI agent who’s been hanging around the public library where she works, the husband by getting too involved with pharmaceuticals (and, eventually, human test subjects). It’s about people who know each other well enough to hurt each other particularly well, and, ultimately, I think, it’s about the power of codependency to triumph where love cannot. Appropriate soundtrack playlists would include The Mountain Goats, Frank Black, Whiskeytown, Los Campesinos circa 2012, the song “Broadripple Is Burning” by Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s, Stars, Thelonious Monk, and John Maus.