By Maia Henderson, Hendrix College ‘21
Geffrey Davis is a professor, poet, and author born in Seattle, Washington. He is a professor of poetry in the Program in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas and is the author of two books of poetry, Revising the Storm and Night Angler. For his vast contributions and admirable poetry, Davis was awarded the 2020 Porter Fund Literary Prize on October 22, 2020. The prize is presented annually to an Arkansas writer whose work merits enhanced recognition as Davis’s poetry does. I was honored and pleased to have the opportunity to virtually see and chat with Davis on Zoom a few days before the ceremony, about his life and this distinguished achievement. Henderson: As noted from the Porter Fund Website, fellow poet Sandy Longhorn notified you of your award. Can you tell me a little bit about that moment? Were you expecting it?
Davis: I knew of the prize but I didn’t even think that I would be available, or you know, considered for it. So, it was a very surprising and wonderful bit of news to receive and also from Sandy, who I’ve had overlap with in various ways. To have the news come from that friendly source, one of the first people to sort of reach out and to make me feel welcome in the state, it was extra special.
How did this journey start? What happened along the way that we are now gifted with such an amazing talent such as yourself?
That’s very kind of you. I can remember where I was sitting when I signed on to a journey I think other people saw before I did. So, if you ask my mom for example, she’ll tell you “oh he’s been writing since he was little,” and she’ll bring out poems and stories to back it up.
I actually went the way of sciences originally. I wanted to be a zoology major, a photography major and study wolves is what I wanted to do. But it was the summer between high school and college, and I had a bunch of friends who were writers. And one of them, we were hanging out in my room and he was just like “how come you don’t write, “and I didn’t really have an answer to the question. So, he gave me something to write with and a piece of paper and we sat there quietly, and we wrote. And I wrote this poem and I showed it to him and… it was just his reaction. I used to go by G back then and he said something like, “G’s writing fire!” Or something like that. I looked at him and I admired his writing and so when he responded that way, it was a kind of listening that I had never experienced before.
So, it was that contact with a reader. I had a reader being like “Oh, I heard something” and I was like “wait, what? From me?” And I just never stopped. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote. It was that contact that instigated me signing on to what other people will tell you was happening earlier. But it wasn’t conscious for me, it wasn’t a commitment for me until that summer… 2001.
I can remember where I was sitting the day this felt like it began for me.
How long have you been teaching?
Well, I’ve been at Arkansas since 2014 so this is going on my seventh year as a professor. And I started teaching in grad school so… 2006 or 2007 – something like that. I started teaching at the college level as a graduate student. I had a graduate teaching assistantship and so I taught my first college class before I took my first graduate course. Which felt very weird. As a first-generation college student it felt, really risky. I remember thinking “I don’t think I should be up here teaching these people.” But eventually I fell in love with teaching. Teaching was the thing that kept me in grad school, actually.
As a professor, I know you come in contact with many talented and determined young people so, what advice would you give to other young men and women like your students, who have an interest in one day reaching the heights that you have?
It doesn’t happen in isolation. I know that seems counter-intuitive, maybe, and I mean all of it. I know you sit alone, by yourself when you’re writing. But even then, you’re collaborating with memory, you’re collaborating with other voices that are in your head, you’re collaborating with your literary influences, you’re collaborating with what you hope for vs. what you fear, you’re collaborating with the idea that started the poem and the idea that’s going to sort of take the wheel… like there’s so much collaboration. To think about embracing and deepening, that’s just the start. Collaboration is a very dynamic, robust, diverse endeavor. Just understanding that is the start.
But also, and maybe more importantly: to have mentorship. Like a team of mentors. No one source should be all your mentorship. Again, I’m a first-generation college student, so when I got to college, I didn’t even know what was possible.
I had to be comfortable enough in the intellect that I brought to a space that I wasn’t familiar with, to show the places where I was uncertain. If I had one gift that I lucked into, it was that I’m not ashamed of the things I don’t know. I decided accidentally, very early, it doesn’t serve me to cover up what I do not know in college.
I was never apologetic about asking for people to fill in the gaps and the tools, asking questions. What I had was a diversity of people nudging me and letting me stumble. And it always feels like stumbling. I had a diversity of healthy nudges.
In many ways this prize for me feels like an affirmation of all the people who took a chance, and who took the time and the care to nudge me in a direction that I wasn’t able to imagine.
You need people who will cheer you on and be like “Keep going. Your thoughts matter. Your questions matter. Your intellect matters.” And then you need other people who are like “I think you can think sharper. I think you can think in a more historically recognized way. I think you can add something to that thought that will make it more contextual.” You need both. And sometimes those can’t be the same people. Very well said. I am definitely going to be taking jewels away from this conversation for my own journey. Describe your writing space. When you are in the zone, what is that like?
I have colleagues and friends who have a very disciplined practice. And part of me envies that. I’ve never really been that writer.
I trust a poem is starting when it’s louder than the other kind of focus that the day requires. I happen to be a poet but I’m also a professor, I’m a partner, I’m a father, I’m an angler. At any moment of the day, I feel a pull to be a lot of those things. Poetry has taught me that if you focus and commit to one kind of presence in the world, you may hear something that you didn’t hear before. You may do something you didn’t know you could do before. Rather than as we often do which is try to be kind of a parent, kind of a partner, kind of a teacher, and you try to juggle these things. And that doesn’t work for poetry.
Poetry will be that pull where it’s like “no, listen to me. I’m trying to tell you something
about your memory. I’m trying to tell you something about tomorrow. I’m trying to tell you something about your hands, about your voice.” And so when that happens and if I have the opportunity and the privilege, I’ll pay attention to get the poem going. And that can happen at any point. My son could say something or do something, I could see something out of the corner of my eye. It’s unpredictable. And for awhile, when I would write, every time I had finished a poem, it felt like it might never happen again because that pull wasn’t there. Over time I learned to trust that pull will happen. I don’t have to force it. In fact, if I try to force it, it doesn’t really work that well.
How did both Revising the Storm and Night Angler come into existence and would you say it was a difficult process to intricately detail such personal and cherished pieces of your life on these pages?
Revising the Storm, my first book, I think about as a sort of an archive for all the kind of growth as a writer and as a person that I was doing up until that point. It’s representative of where I was on a bunch of different fronts, with myself, with my father, and then my son is born at the end of that book. So it’s tough to know where that one begins. It doesn’t quite begin with that story I told about my friend who asked me to write. Since I was seven or eight, I had been asking questions. Trying to get traction on “what is going on right now?” Trying to get traction, trying to slow down the story, the drama enough to be like “can we make different choices because this doesn’t seem to be working?” And poetry was a place where I could slow down and return to some things and realize some things I couldn’t understand as fully when I was experiencing it.
So again, Revising the Storm just feels like an archive, or a document that reflects all that effort. That book was difficult in terms of the intimacy. I had a lot of questions. I couldn’t choose my obsessions. In fact, I tried. When I first started writing, my father appeared in my poems and I thought, “Oh no. He’s done too much. You don’t get to be in my poems.” I tried to resist him being a subject. Eventually I got over that and just accepted my obsessions.
But I did have those questions like, “who am I hurting?” So at the end of that book, in the acknowledgements, I have something like an apology. I can’t remember exactly what I said but it was something similar to, “I apologize for the liberal subpoena of creativity.” The fact that as poets we ask people to testify on our behalf of our version of the story. But what I hoped is like… no matter what, that this is about love.
With my son, I started this love letter when he was born. I thought, “I can’t wait to figure this out. I have to start using poetry to catch all the mistakes and hopefully the victories of what it means to be a parent.” And I couldn’t wait to start that conversation. And the ending of the second book was very clear in a way the first one wasn’t. I sent the first book out and someone was like, “We want to publish it” and I thought, “Oh really? It’s done?” I wasn’t prepared for it to be accepted. With this book, as soon as I finished it, I knew it was done.
The second book was more… a kind of urgency, like I’ve got to keep the work going of the first book. Have I survived my father? Have I given myself options to be somebody to my son that I didn’t think I could be? I had to keep the conversation going so I could feel comfortable in my own fatherhood.
I think two of my favorite pieces in Revising the Storm would have to be “The Discipline of Waking Love” and the one right next to it, “What We Set in Motion.” Is there a certain method you take when it comes to arranging your poems in these books? It’s been a while since I have put that book together and even with Night Angler I can’t say precisely, but I can tell you my process. So first, it is realizing that order is such a daunting thing to think about. If I go to a collection of poems and think, “Okay, what is the order,” I don’t know if I can handle that kind of task. But I do believe in these kind of lower order choices.
It’s a matter of finding a resonance of imagery or recognizing “oh, this poem knows something and accepts something that maybe an earlier poem wouldn’t.”
I’m trying to find a bunch of small decisions that lock in other decisions. And suddenly, all these things orchestrate the order. I believe in asking a bunch of small questions that tell me something about the order and then you step back and you think, “okay, I can live with that.”
I’m trying to be a reader of my own poems too. Not just the artist. I want a narrative. I want an emotional trajectory. I want it to be true that where that book starts is not where that book ends. I’m trying to change my own heart and mind through books and in order to do so, I have to find the place where I wasn’t ready to admit something that I needed to and hopefully by the end there’s a journey of emotion.
Also, a physicality is important. I will put the poems on the wall and move them around or put them on the floor. So, I believe that physical contribution is important to remember. It matters where you are when you are writing a poem and sometimes if you write a poem in one place and you revise in one place, I don’t know if that is always the best place to figure out the order. If you are at your desk writing and at your desk revising, maybe print some poems out and go to the park or put them on your wall and change your perspective. If you change your physical perspective, it will often change your intellectual and emotional perspective and your creative perspective.
As an author, what scares you?
I worry about, without intending it, every line could be risking somebody contemplating something darker about their life instead of lighter about their life. Especially as someone who writes a lot about darkness, I am terrified that somebody doesn’t hear the effort of me trying to transform my own experiences and darkness into something that is not quite dark or even something that’s light. In order to do that, I have to be honest about darkness. I’m terrified at every moment that someone is going to stop at the confirmation of darkness and use that to think about their own lives or understand their own lives. I can think of nothing more opposite of sacred than diminishing someone’s possibilities. I am terrified, in fact, when I think about it too much it brings me to tears. I’m not afraid of that fear. In fact, I stay connected to that fear because that is the thing, I trust to hold me accountable the most.
That is interesting because most times, when you ask people questions relating to fear and their own personal fears, it becomes something of themselves: “I’m afraid to be broke” or “I’m afraid to be unsuccessful.” The fact that your fear is almost surrounding the lives of other people is remarkable. I like that answer.
To trouble my own answer a little bit, I should add that when Revising the Storm got here, I had this wave of “what have you done?” The likelihood that I could get that wrong was suddenly exponentially bigger. I had a lot of anxiety. I didn’t understand what I was doing and then once it happened, I had to reckon with what it actually meant to go public. I had this dream where there was this book that had been written and it solved world peace. It was a graphic novel. In the dream, everybody I had ever known was in this auditorium looking at this screening, these panels of this graphic novel. And I spent the whole dream going up and down the aisles, taking in “Everybody’s here. Everyone’s fine.” I woke up thinking, “Thank God.” It broke this spell I had of feeling like I had to be accountable for every single context point.
I mean, I’m poised to be accountable. But readers are resilient too – just to balance that. I think if you are too anxious about that fear, you won’t risk speaking. And I don’t want that fear to silence me. So part of the effort to not let that fear which needs to be there, silence me, is to trust that readers are resilient. They are going to rise to their own occasions. They are going to do what they need to do with my words.
That’s not to absolve me of that fear but hold it at attention so I don’t silence myself or silence somebody else.
Besides your obvious talents, the fact you’re a father, a partner, and a professor, you mentioned you enjoy fishing, but what other things do you enjoy in your free time?
I enjoy working out. I started boxing when I was in grad school. You know grad school is very heady, you spend a lot of time in your mind. So boxing was a very important practice that I added. Boxing tends to be more diverse too, so having that soundtrack in my life – the sounds, laughter, and conversations that come of that space, do good things for my soul.
Also just playing with my son. Especially since he’s gotten a little bit older, watching how our play has evolved and we’ve started reading together a little bit more. Usually if it’s an embodied type of thing, if I get to be conscious of being in a body and also happen to be talking to somebody, that’s always a good thing.
When can we expect another project?
That’s a good question. I have been working on some prose, some lyric essays, and some personal essays. I’ve been writing a lot about rivers and streams, water systems. That act of writing has shifted recently. But I think those prose pieces about rivers and fishing, and friendship – I want to write about friendship and joy. I’ve been trying, with more intention, to sort of grapple with those a little bit.
What would you want the world to know about Geffrey Davis?
Wow. Maybe the short version is – I’m trying. I mean that as an invitation to hold me accountable. Nothing that I’m doing isn’t coming from a place of “I’m trying” – and I could be wrong. I don’t want people to give up on the fact that I have to keep trying. I’m not interested in a sense of “oh I’m safe now” or “I’m done recovering” or “I’m done surviving.” I want people to hear the fact that I’m trying. That’s what I trust the most: when I can feel myself trying and accepting that trying is always part failure, part success. I don’t need to be safe from that trying.
Thank you, Dr. Geffrey Davis, and congratulations on winning the 2020 Porter Fund Literary Prize. We hope that all Arkansans will take this opportunity to immerse themselves in Davis’ work. If you would like to gift your bookshelves with Revising the Storm and Night Angler, you can find them both here: https://www.boaeditions.org/collections/geffrey-davis. Also check out his website https://www.geffreydavis.com/ to keep up with Davis as he continues to listen to poetry’s call.
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