Hello friend! Today is the book excerpt post that comes from a poetry book! Danita Dodson’s Trailing the Azimuth is a beautiful collection of poems that portrays the ancestral identities of an Appalachian home place that Danita is from and Native American storytelling. I am looking forward to reading all the poems and sharing about them in the future. Meantime, I have Danita here to give you a glimpse of the book and tell us about her!
Get to know the author: Danita
Welcome back to Armed with A Book, Danita! Tell me and my readers a bit about yourself!
I am a poet, literary scholar, and teacher. Though Trailing the Azimuth (2021) is my first book of poetry, I have been writing and teaching others to write for many years. I am also the co-editor of the pedagogical volume Teachers Teaching Nonviolence (2020). Much of my writing has been informed by my reading of great authors, especially in my PhD in English at the University of Southern Mississippi, where I specialized in 20th-century literature. My work has also been informed by my travels. Combining a love of scholarship and diverse experiences, I have been a Fulbright-Hays fellow in Turkey, a professor in Nicaragua, an amateur archaeologist in the Southwest, and a Spanish teacher in Appalachia. I live in the Cumberland Gap region of East Tennessee, where I teach English and Humanities as an adjunct professor at Walters State Community College.
What inspired you to write this book?
At first, I began by loosely pulling together some of poems, not really with a plan other than to write a book of poetry. However, when my nephew visited me in December 2020, he inspired a poem that appears in the collection, “December Azimuth,” which was written on the day after winter solstice began and which led me to contemplate how we are all attempting to seek the light and find our way in a complex reality impacted by a global pandemic. Then, as I later began to organize the poems, I found that the word “azimuth” kept coming back to me, and I recalled again that conversation with my nephew, during which he had described how he navigates the wilderness in military field exercises, using a compass and a map to chart the azimuth—in other words, to find bearings in the puzzling wild and to seek the direction toward which to walk. The context of the book then begun to take shape. The idea of the azimuth is woven intricately into the fabric of the collection as a key symbol and theme, representing the various trajectories for both physical journeys and those allegorical ones we all make through the wildernesses of life.
How long did it take you to write this book, from the first idea to the last edit?
It took me about a year to conceptualize, write, arrange the poems, and edit. However, many of the poems in the collection were raw pieces of writing that I penned many years ago at different times of my life, which I had to polish to make pristine and publishable.
What makes your poetry collection unique?
This collection is multifaceted, drawing energy from different aspects of my background, or my “walks” in life. Thus, I have placed the poems within the context of my experience with hiking, not only in my native Tennessee but also in other parts of the world. While there are individual poems out there based upon the concept of walking a trail, or one or two anthologies that collect the poetry of multiple writers, there is nothing quite like I have done. Due to my own diverse experience and unique voice as both an Appalachian woman and a citizen of the world, I allow readers to travel vicariously with me as they understand, as author Tim O’Brien says, how “All writers revisit terrain.” My practice of revisiting terrain is a chance for readers to see the beauty of cultures they might not have considered before, or even to look again with wonder at the places and faces where they live. For example, the poems in the “Tennessee Trails” section mention literal historical trails in East Tennessee, like those carved by Native Americans on the Warrior Path and Daniel Boone on the Wilderness Road, as well as the journeys made by my ancestors to these hills, but I also write about such cultural trails left behind in Tennessee by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Myles Horton at the Highlander Folk School during the Civil Rights era. My “terrain” also includes poetic revisits to places outside Tennessee, which have all informed the person I’ve become—for example, the “Outbound Treks” poems recapture my walks in places like the Southwest, while the “Global Footsteps” poems have been inspired by memories of living and working in Nicaragua, Jamaica, Guatemala, and Turkey.
Who would enjoy reading your book?
This collection is intended for a wide audience, for we are all “travellers” on paths that influence who we are. Because of this, I envision Trailing the Azimuth much like I do the forest—open and far-reaching—so my readers would hopefully come from many walks of life: poetry lovers, adventurers, spiritual seekers, lovers of culture and the diverse human experience, people who love nature, those who appreciate history, travellers to new and varied places, both lay and academic readers, both progressive and traditional readers, and just curious minds.
What’s something you hope readers would take away from it?
Since the poems cover a wide range of places, peoples, and subjects, I hope that the readers “walk” away from the book with a greater appreciation of the trails of life that they have experienced—both literal and symbolic. I hope that they can revisit memories and rediscover the beauty that has encompassed—is encompassing, will encompass—their lives.
Do you have a favourite quote or poem in the book that you find yourself going back to?
I find myself returning to the poem “Patchwork of Remembrance.” Though anchored in the allusion to quilts, a creative medium of storytelling used by Appalachian women, the poem is really about the multifarious memories of family—with all the beauties and the complexities, all the shining moments and the challenges. I, of course, had in mind my own family when I wrote this, but I also feel it could allude to the human family and the intricate ways that we are all stitched together.
Trailing the Azimuth
Trailing the Azimuth guides the readers down various trails through striking imagery, resonant language, and intensity of vision. Linked by allusions to the “azimuth,” the poems in this collection represent the search for direction in a world that is complex and uncertain, prompting the journey toward light and more mindfulness of self, others, and God. These lyrical compasses exhibit a multiplicity of style and subject informed by the poet’s travels, interest in hiking, and cultural awareness. Her multifaceted handicraft draws energy and empathy from everything in her background. Taking us along on walks within her own native landscape and around the world, Danita Dodson gives us verses about the ancestral identities of an Appalachian homeplace, meditations upon places like the Southwest that unfold Native American storytelling, celebrations of global journeys that rejoice both diversity and oneness, psalms that uplift the divine presence in nature, and poems that reveal healing pathways through COVID-19 by elevating memory, hope, and rebirth. Illuminated by Dodson’s unique voice as both a mountain woman and a citizen of the world, Trailing the Azimuth bridges physical and spiritual landscapes, offering readers a word-map as they traverse their own paths of life.
Content notes: None declared by the author.
Find this book on Goodreads, IndieBound and Amazon. Check out the trailer below:
Book Excerpt from
Trailing the Azimuth
Patchwork of Remembrance
Memories, like homemade quilts made
for everyday use from necessity and love,
spread benevolently over my being,
each stitch a trail to who I am, a vein
of life offering warmth on wintry nights,
pulsing calico sunniness to my awakening.
The entwined laughter and tears of the years
smell pervasively of the cedar-box love
that protects the embroidery of smiles,
that preserves the basting of heartaches—
a patchwork of knowing, of acceptance.
Familial ties, thick and thin, topsy turvy,
blood and water, flannel and silk, all
are sewn into the fabric of ordinary days,
gathered both by accident and by fate,
shaped by the needle that sometimes jabs,
tugged by the thread that always ties.
The Voices of Pots
As she looks upon the converging paths
of Santa Fe, weaving back 1,000 years,
she sifts through the conqueror’s blood
and once again finds her primeval voice,
the Clay Mother guiding her hands
as she holds a burnishing stone,
smelling the woods, hearing the birds,
feeling the coolness of air after the rain,
then the resonant warmth of sun rising.
She feels all these things in the clay,
sensing and unfolding braided stories
about Corn Mother, re-weaving magic
in a Santo Domingo geometry of lines
that will make new rhyme and reason
from clay dug, dried, crushed, and sifted
to remove contaminants and violence.
Adding temper with water, she mixes
in peace, then kneads the earthen dough.
This pot will be like a newborn person,
made from the earth, the core of life,
becoming a treasured part of a family,
then aging and returning to the soil,
to speak in discarded pottery sherds,
fragments that will tell a larger truth,
like the storytellers testify—
we all are the clay we knead and shape,
we all are the earth and the paths we walk,
we all are the stories we leave behind.
Interested?
Find this book on Goodreads, IndieBound and Amazon.
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Cover Photo by vaun0815 on Unsplash
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