"'What He Means': An Interview with Geffrey Davis" by Tommy Klein

Geffrey Davis says what he means, and he means for you to understand it. A repeated form for Davis’s poetry is the clarifying title, “What I Mean When I Say…” as a preemptive refrain, grounding most of his work in this desire to be understood. It is also open to the interpretation the reader brings with them. By “calling attention to the particularity of what I'm trying to say, I hope and I intend that to be an invitation to [the reader]: ‘now tell me what You mean when you say.’”
His poems are a window into the deepest corners of his life. They reveal what cannot be said any other way and what needs to be heard and understood. On September 24th, in the midst of a global pandemic, Davis joined me on the phone from the Ozark Mountains, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arkansas, to discuss his book, Begotten, co-authored with F. Douglas Brown. Davis described his work as an “ongoing attempt to keep open-ended the idea of what it means to be born.” We also visited his earlier collections, Night Angler and Revising the Storm, and how his personal relationships have a bearing on his writing. Through the process of writing Night Angler, Davis created “a healthy sense of breathing room from all the realities of who [his] father was and who [his] father wasn’t.” While writing Revising the Storm, he became aware of his family’s past struggles with starting conversations, and Begotten “is really trying to start some ongoing conversations with [his] son. Conversations that [he] doesn't know how to wait to start.”
Conversation is by nature an uncontrollable thing, fluid and changing moment to moment as each side grows and learns from the other. This is the conversation Davis is having with his son in Revising the Storm and Begotten: the ever changing and growing dialogue between a father and a son. He told me of a Q & A at a reading of Revising the Storm and how his son, who was in attendance, reacted to one of the pieces: “[My son] asked me essentially…‘why are you telling our story?’ It was a moment that I sort of asked for and I wasn't prepared for the sound of it happening. I told him, ‘This is the best way that I know, to check in with you and invite you to collaborate on the story that we're figuring out together.’”
We also delved into his take on being a poet in such a charged time as 2020:  “One of the things that we're struggling with is a very comfortable narrative of how our days and how our connections with people are supposed to play out, and we are in a radical situation where that's been completely altered. Poetry is the place that's given me a kind of permission to respond to the pacing that's in front of me; to not ask for a narrative connection of what happened before and what's going to happen next. I think poetry has really trained my attention, my ear, my heart, to accepting the fact that the narrative that you thought you were walking into may turn on you at any moment.”
This reality of uncertainty has seldom been so apparent than during the liminal moment we are currently living through. Davis has found that poetry and the art of writing have been central in his response to this fluid time, and he told me three important ways that, as writers, we can show up to the page: writing, revising, and reading: “At some point every one of those [things] evolves . . . I'll think I'm revising something and it'll turn into a new draft. I'll be reading a book, and I'll see a move that will open the door for a poem that either I'm starting or that I'm working on. Having a kind of flexibility and a willingness to call all of that work has made me not read into the actual writing that doesn't happen.”
In his process of co-writing with Brown, Davis learned to appreciate the levity of collaboration: “When I first signed on to [Begotten] . . . I saw it as a project that had a clear end . . . But what ended up happening [was] that project with Doug changed my whole perspective. It made me appreciate . . . how inherently collaborative any endeavor in the arts [is]. We got there first and foremost by playing. [The] lesson: play can be radical joy. [The] joy to be radical.” That joy comes from their playfully challenging writing style that encourages each author to push the envelope in each of their pieces: “There's a lot of love and support, but there's also kind of a ‘come get it’ and make sure you push yourself [attitude] . . . I wrote one piece . . . and I showed it to Doug, and he was like, ‘No, we have to go further. Doug has this great way of reinterpreting the bound. To be like, ‘No, no, we are out of bounds but let's draw a new perimeter around where you're at now.’” It is this shifting of the bounds that Begotten explores: “the ways in which you're always being born in every relationship that you enter into. It shifts who you are in the world and how you see yourself.”
Davis’s friendship with Brown grew organically out of a fellowship at Cave Canem, a foundation dedicated to the development of African-American poets. This and other communities have been nurturing young writers and fostering mentorship for decades. Some of the other programs Davis told me about are “Kundiman, which mentors and celebrates and helps encourage emerging writers who identify within the Asian diaspora. Cantomundo, which is Latinx driven, Lambda, which [has] a residency where they mentor and serve writers in matters of LGBTQ identification. There are these really powerful communities . . . that are built on an assumption of belonging.” 
Davis understands the importance of mentorship, lamenting that “people sometimes don't believe they need mentorship . . . I think about how small my world would be if it was only me doing the imagination of what's possible.” He confirmed my own suspicions that having people challenge and inspire you can make all the difference between being someone with just an idea and being a published author.
Mentorship programs can help writers find their audience, an experience that Davis described as a pivotal moment, and he insists that the audience is out there for everyone: “if you're convinced that [your] audience doesn't exist, then chances are there are other people who need it to exist and [you should] consider starting that community yourself.”
Before we hung up, Davis left me with a final piece of advice for writers struggling in this moment: “rest and recovery should be intentional.” In a time when so many things are uncertain and so much of what is certain is not very comforting, taking back the intentionality of your life can ground you. “Get your breath back” as his boxing coach would say, and, as Davis said to me, “You have to invent the rituals that are going to prepare you to go back into the fray. So make sure you get your breath back.”

Tommy Klein

Tommy Klein is the Fiction Editor for MORIA’s Issue Six and an Interdisciplinary Studies major with an emphasis in Professional Writing. He is also an actor, poet, photographer, and lifelong fantasy and sci-fi fan. Tommy is staying busy in quarantine by building a sound-recording booth in his bedroom closet and working on voice-over and on animation characters.