Forum Chat
Michael Brasier interviews poet Dave Malone | April 2025

MB: Dave! Let’s have a look at your catalog—Tornado Drill, You Know the Ones, O: Love Poems from the Ozarks, and View from the North Ten—as well as other books and short films. When you started piecing together Bypass, did you have a theme in mind? How did the process from beginning to end look?

DM: Hi, Michael. Thanks for this question. I did with Bypass what I tend to do with all my books before they are books. That is, I print up a large number of poems that I’m currently satisfied with, which typically, and hopefully, numbers between 90 and 100 poems. I lay each individual poem out on the hardwood floor of my home and then begin to order them by color-coding and placing them into piles thematically. With Bypass, certain themes emerged, such as youthful adventures, small-town life, and the wisdom of age (which I still aspire to).

MB: Many of your poems in the collection have nostalgic awe embedded within them, like finding a dust-covered photo album in the attic. For example, from “The Last Supper”:

At sixteen I was asked
to preach at our country church.
From “Knocking on Doors”:
We were fourteen or fifteen
the lot of us.

From “Great Aunt”:

Autumn morning too cold
or its own good. The day
she buries her last sister.

In fact, these three poems welcome your readers into Bypass’s collected experience. Do you often find that the words you scribe become more reflective of your life the older you get?

DM: Yes and no. How’s that for a poetic answer? But first, thank you for your apt metaphor about an old photo album in the attic, and thank you sharing those excerpts. Now that I’m in my fifties, I definitely find myself taking a look from time to time at my past, and much of that past was shaped in rural Kansas. Some of it was shaped by my time on the family farm in the Ozarks, and some of it was shaped also by church youth group in my teens.

I can look back with a lens that can illustrate the nuances of those experiences. In one of the excerpts you shared, yes, you have the poem’s speaker, a teenage knocking on doors, but what is really happening inside the young person’s mind is what I wonder about. That particular poem closes with the idea of aloneness, inside a church building, where the speaker finds a “temple” of solitude, which is not what one typically expects to happen when you’re on a pamphlet-sharing expedition to invite townsfolk to revival.

MB: You’ve solidified yourself as a bona fide poet, a staple in the growing lore of Ozarks literature, but do you see yourself as a poet or a storyteller first? Is there a difference?

DM: There is a difference—wait. Or is there? If I had on my marketing hat, I’d say I’m a storyteller or multi-hyphenate creative. But if I had to give a no-time-to-think-about-it response, I’d say I’m a poet. Poetry is my first love. Writing screenplays is my second love. Over the years, I’ve dabbled in nonfiction and fiction, and I’ve written four or five novels. And yet, I always come back to poetry—and also screenwriting and filmmaking.

With regard to poetry, in 2009, I started writing more poems, submitting to literary journals, keeping an Excel sheet tracking my submissions, and I began to see the fruits of my labor. I began publishing poems, and since then, I’ve published six books. So, for any readers who struggle with multiple interests, I might suggest that you pick two genres to work in primarily, maybe three, but I’d be careful not to get carried away. To work in two genres, for instance, helps flex your writing muscles in the same way that athletes who cross-train perform better respectively in each of their athletic areas. I write better poems because I write scenes and dialogue in scripts. I write better screenplay scenes because I’m aware of how language moves, stops and starts, and how it’s capable of extended metaphor. By moving back and forth in each genre, I build muscles.

MB: Recently, you did a presentation at the Ozarks Symposium titled “For Love of the Game: Celebrating the Legacy of Sport in the Ozarks through Poetry” which celebrated sports in the Ozarks. Many of the sports-themed poems you read appear in Bypass, and they are some of your stand-out pieces; whether it’s a golf caddie’s grass observations, the smallest player air-balling a three pointer, or finding a baseball card in the trash, these moments not only highlight an aspect of sports, but they spotlight a point of view unlike anything we’ve read. Did you play any sports growing up? What is it that urges you to create art specifically around sports?

DM: Thank you for attending the symposium. For those who may not know, the Ozarks Symposium is a gathering of scholars and creatives who present on a myriad of topics relating to Ozarks’ culture. It’s a laid-back conference, though scholarly just the same, and it’s a heckuva lot of fun. Thank you for your observations about sport in my poems. I did play a variety of sports growing up.

When I was nine, I got my first set of golf clubs, a Chi Chi Rodriguez set. Around that time, my father attached a basketball goal to our garage, and I would shoot buckets past dark. I played golf and tennis on the high school teams and then not long after got involved in city-league basketball, which I’ve played off and on over the years. One thing that has inspired me is reading great sports poetry and fiction. One of the first poems I recall enjoying about sport is John Updike’s “Ex-Basketball Player.” It’s just a real gem and has a Midwestern feel to it, with the poem’s protagonist as Flick Webb, who once scored enough points in one season to remain the county record holder many years later.

To me, writing is like sport. It takes discipline and endurance. You gotta want it and you gotta do it. One time, when I was on a writer’s retreat, I was spending a good deal of time loafing in the kitchen area. A fellow writer came up to me, cautioned me about what I was up to, and said, “Do the work.” She was so right.

When writing about sport, you have a vehicle in which to talk about the bliss and trials of humanity. If we think about Updike’s poem, then we read about the experience of Flick Webb, once a basketball hero now a guy working at a fuel station. Heroic still? You mentioned the baseball card poem. Well, what does an abandoned baseball card in a dumpster tell us? In the case of my poem, it tells us that the major-leaguer never hit over .250 and maybe had a disappointing career. That might seem like a depressing take, but the point is to live life fully and as richly as we can.

MB: Lastly, I would like to ask you for three specific answers:

1 - What is your current reading obsession?
2 - What is a book you recommend all aspiring authors read?
3 - Who is an underrated author on your recommended reading list?

DM: My current reading obsession? I have read two books that were absolutely astounding. For those who like nonfiction, I highly recommend Olivia Laing’s gem, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. It inspired me to write a great number of poems. And Andrew Smart’s book, Auto-Pilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing. For fiction lovers, the much-awarded James by Percival Everett deserves all those accolades. And for aspiring authors, let’s serve up a couple for aspiring poets, I have two recs: the anthology Poetry 180 and Ted Kooser’s Poetry Home Repair Manual. And two authors you all should check out, who at present are under the radar but won’t be forever, are Paulette Guerin and Despy Boutris. Thanks, Michael!

Four poems from Bypass by Dave Malone

Knocking on Doors

We were fourteen or fifteen,
the lot of us. Kansas kids
two hours from home
in another lonesome burg.

It was March after a deep rain
that left the daffodils standing
at attention and town huts
silver in the gloaming.

Alone, I hoofed it back to the church
before the other pamphleteers.
Inside the temple rose the pleasant
musty smell of a tired air conditioner

battling first heat—such a scent
of surrender, hanging in the wet air,
an hour I owned before the evening
candles were lit.

The Last Supper

At sixteen I was asked
to preach at our country church
and lifted a sermon from my great uncle
who hand-crafted picture frames
in his garage and preached on the side.

He knew about loss, his wife murdered
in a botched grocery store crime,
and he was too weak to cast
the first stone, not even in Korea
on the ambulance crew

before coming back home
to solitude and his garage
where it was The Last Supper
he framed the most,
the sideways face of betrayal.

Great Aunt

Autumn morning too cold
for its own good. The day
she buries her last sister.

Behind the country church,
with her back to the timber,
she sits straight in a crooked
funeral chair, its feet dug in
like leaning fence posts.

Unpinned, her white hair floats
in the wind, never falling back
in place, and her blue eyes
leave the entourage, hide deep
in the brown ridge past the steeple.

Half-shelled acorns crunch
like old cow bones beneath my boots
as I approach to give condolences
to this blazing lamp so unlike
the ghost in the ground.

I want to tell her everything,
tell her, she has to live forever.
Never leave the farm.
Never leave
me.

Baseball Card

When I was twenty-one, I worked
at a convenience store, the same
as any other. Coffee refills, gas,
fountain drinks fueled as if
by natural springs. One quiet Sunday,
I carted the trash to the dumpster
and stole a smoke break.

On top of the bin, nestled like robin eggs,
a pair of black bags had been delivered
by nearby duplex dwellers.
The herd of homeless had cracked
the top layer for food or clothes.
Clear of any wheeling beetles,
a baseball card lay prone
between bag and dumpster lip.

With bright blue eyes the player looked
off-camera. His last season’s stats
showed improvement in his game
though his lifetime batting average
hovered on the precipice of this garbage bin,
revealing he couldn’t hit over .250—
and I saw no reason to believe
he was a Gold Glove
capable of saving his career.

About the interviewer: Michael Brasier is a writer born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks. He is an editor of Skipjack Review. His fiction and poetry have appeared in journals, such as Moon City Review, Crack the Spine, The Phoenix, and also in the anthology, Paddleshots, compiled by the River Pretty Arts Foundation. When not writing on the banks of a Missouri river, Michael works as a copy and content editor for various publishing companies.