9TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 8 :: F. DOUGLAS BROWN on GEFFREY DAVIS
Urgent Care: the necessity of brotherhood & poetry
- or brotherhood through poetry
Let’s start here. I’m driving to visit my sick mother. She is in a rehabilitation center recuperating from a surgery we now know that she will never recover from. As I’m driving, more pressing than my mother’s illness is the eruption of my son’s own sickness. Driving to her has me reeling from a strange conversation with him fifteen minutes prior. During our phone call, little of what he said made sense and he jumped from topic to topic — and he was upset, then loving, then unrelenting. It was as if he was speaking in tongues, that moment when the holy or demonic or drug-induced takes over a body. Logically I know that it was the last one, due to an epilepsy disorder he still suffers from. However, in the moment, it felt as if he was coming for blood: mine. Actually, away from mine: “Maybe you should stay away from us for a while, dad. Maybe… I don’t know.”
In the fifteen-minute wake of that conversation, I too, feel a range of emotions. What right do I have to be upset? Wasn’t I listening? How could my son be that cold and hateful? In this moment, I am adrift, floating towards self-destruction. And so I muster as much strength as I can and call the poet Geffrey Davis for help. He understands hatred toward a father.
As luck would have it, Geffrey is twenty minutes away from doing a reading. He’s outside getting some air, and lucky for me, he answers the phone. And here is when care and concern turn a corner for us. We had been fast friends since our meeting in 2012 at the Cave Canem retreat. From there we became each other’s editors, writing partners, collaborators — ink brothers. Despite all we walked toward after our meeting (poems, awards, books, collaborative workshops and readings, whiskey, laughter), the reason for sharing a Cave Canem term, and our ultimate brotherhood, culminated in Geffrey leading me away from my distress as he talked me to tears, yet safety nonetheless.
2. or poetry through brotherhood
Of poetry, the deceased poet Reginald Shepherd says that it “rescues nothing and no one, but it embodies that helpless, necessary will to rescue, which is a kind of love[…], love for the world and the things and people in the world.” If Shepherd’s assertion is correct, then perhaps the poet can be seen as separate from the poem, and/or the love that resides within the poem, and/or (God forbid) the acts poets commit in the world off the page. If Shepherd’s assertion is correct, the learning of the poem belongs to the reader only. By learning, I mean there is an expectation that the poet gives a lifeline of words waiting for a reader. Thus the poem’s urgency is only yearning, a dangling wire — all spark, searching for a transformer or outlet. I cannot wholly embrace a fracture of head and heart between a poet and a poem, or a passivity between the transmission of ideas. But let’s assume Shepherd reached out from the grave to remind me of this: Davis, and not the poem, heard and fed me. True facts: I was in distress; I did not seek his books nor his prosody; I needed him, the care his sound advice and keen wit contain.
However, I’ll argue that my impetus to call was not our relationship. I could have called my own brothers, my wife, hell, I could have even called my son back to verbally duke it out. I called Geffrey because he has, as an agent of poetry, detailed the palpable anger of a son towards a father whose actions outweigh his intentions. Yes, our friendship makes us accessible to one another, but I know his work, and through it, his act of presence was the real savior that afternoon, as it is for the many who have read his work. Through his work, “love for the world and the things and people in the world” become evident, and eventually, lead us to safety.
3. or love, baby…urgent love
My students noticed this about Davis’s work before I had ever made that call. After one particular reading of Davis’s poem “King County Metro” from his first collection, Revising the Storm (BOA 2013), a student commented on the juxtaposition of the poem’s structure and Davis’s narrative. “It is as if the couplets are keeping together a life that is running out of control,” the student suggested just as we delved into the formal aspects of the work. This poem is a journey into the circumstances of birth, as it takes readers on the bus ride where the speaker’s parents meet. The speaker (who we assume is Davis) makes slight remarks about a father’s antics and style “(if you can call it that): disarming disregard.” We ride this way, with bits and pieces of history and foreboding, breadcrumbs of information scattered on a bed of couplets until the poem reaches the volta:
Two of four kids will arrive
before he meets the friend who teaches him
the art of roofing and, soon after, the crack pipe —
the attention it takes to manage either
without destroying the hands. (12–16)
I have watched kids’ heads poke up from their desks at this moment, which I call the poet’s move from “camerawork” to “heart-work.” Here Davis, and not only the poem, presents his heart, his messy and vulnerable heart. As the poem hits this bump, both Reginald Shepherd and my student are correct, no one gets saved. In fact, if we are following the journey of the poem, turmoil and angst will follow. Yet, the poem is anchored to the poet through adroit formal skill. When any poet’s skill takes this leap, there is an abyss of fear they speed towards. However, that darkness is more a hole for a glorious seed, because something blossoms — extends and rescues a life beyond expectations. When Davis states this truth, it is not an exhale, but really an unraveling. In that undressed moment, the poet finds cleansed skin and fresh bark.
As stated, this turn, this volta marks Davis’s move from “camerawork” to “heart-work.” “Camerawork” is what we notice, the visuals and descriptive language; language that roots us as we grapple with a subject. “Heart-work” is what connects the writer to the reader. It is the blind journey within where both are vulnerable. It is when stakes reach a high (perhaps its highest) measure, and there’s no turning back — there is no fucking turning back. We find ourselves on the cliche rope bridge dangling across a vast darkness. Davis takes us there with his keen camerawork, but his heart-work leads us across thinning and rotting planks, and back to solid earth.
All the poems in Revising the Storm move this way, some with and some without a resolution. In Davis’s latest work, Night Angler (BOA 2019), the three title poems are replete with Davis’s incisive skill at detailing a scene. However, the camera/heart-work in every poem seems to employ this as a means of searching, or as a means to resist resolution. I don’t mean to suggest that the arc of any poem crescendos at a resolution, nor do I mean to take Reginald Shepherd to task (no one should). What I mean when I say “searching” or “to resist resolution” is that in Davis, poetry activates something within us to do something off the page. This is the life work of humankind that takes three poems’ worth of effort to begin.
“The Night Angler” [1.0] examines, by moonlight, the search for an ideal fishing hole and “dream-fish” boon. However, as we wade with the speaker through water and darkness, then a rich cascade of moonlight, it becomes apparent that this is, after all, just a search. And like any search that requires driving into the deep, we are brought to a place where our primal olfactory and auditory instincts stand at attention:
I begin casting
toward the far, cloaked bank: all ear,
all fixed on the grim swish of my streamer
threshing back and forth — a mad bat parting
night air. In time I will lead my own boy
into the precision of this contraction
inside the throat this animal alarum in the dark. (8–13)
Here Davis guides us not only through the dark of a watering hole but through the dark gaping throat of a fish. This swing towards teaching/parenting initiates the poet’s theme: love. It is love that brings us all here, and it is to love that we will return leading our loved ones. Loved ones learn the lesson. They hold the place sacred. They pass it on down their own line.
As mentioned, Davis is a poet who understands how anger festers within a son. Davis knows how anger and hatred get passed down the genetic line as well as love. This is a slow revelation through poems of hurt and anger so visceral, I should have called after my first read, “Hey man, you all good?” Through the work of poetry, perhaps Davis attempts to rescue himself by facing his own shadows. Thus the volta is not a poetic trick, but the willingness to look into the mirror.
If one can accept Carl Jung’s notion of “The Shadow,’’ then there is a dark which resides within us all; a repository of fears, anger, unwillingness which Jung himself called the “aspect of the personality as present and real.” By the time we reach “The Night Angler” [2.0], one begins to know what love this poet has grappled with himself. By this time, we must put the book down, walk a bit. If you smoke, you’ll light one up, exhale, and do what Geffrey jokes about with me in real time, “man, you betta fix yo life.” “The Night Angler” [2.0] is a poem so scant, one can miss its brilliance, its instruction on and off the page. A poem that makes you do a double-take on the book (“yo life”). It is a contrapuntal that acts as a prayer, “Lord/ Let this man… teach another to move/ through the nothing/ that begs to be feared” (8–10). But when a boy must use the bathroom in the middle of the night, it is this father that comes to his aid. And still, we are searching, by way of “the glory light of the fridge” (5). Each contrapuntal direction the reader traverses lights a lyric of fatherly tenderness and slim, yet urgent, sacrifice.
At times, I am the poet who favors process more than the poem itself. Here is where I find my greatest learning: in the grooves of fixing and fine tuning language. In this swing of correction and grace I become a little less and more at the same time. My vulnerabilities become evident once stated and less in the shadows of my psyche. On that public page, even in a draft, at least I can see them and choose what to deal with. And I’d rather you, the reader, deal with the third “The Night Angler” poem that closes the book. What I will say is that here is a poem that wants to close the loop of all that brought me to call Geffrey. Here is a cool headed response after years of teeth grinding and anger. It is a sectional poem, that are epistolaries written to Davis’ son. Each section works as an apology, or an admittance, or a pleading, or as a bridge to fine tuning the language to heal. In this poem the process of creating a fully thought-out journey of poem is really the journey of self reflection and healing.
As a poet/father, I cannot escape a few lines from “Of Being Numerous,” by George Oppen:
…is it not
In fear the roots grip
Downward
And beget
The baffling hierarchies
Of father and child (21–27)
Baffling indeed, in ways that not only challenge, but stifle fathers to do nothing, often repeating or layering injuries inflicted on their offspring. This is what makes the moments in Night Angler so vital. At times, it feels as if Davis speaks directly to my own folly as father, as do the poems of many poets Davis admires: Sylvia Plath, Li-Young Lee, Cornelius Eady, Stanley Plumly, Jericho Brown. But in Davis acknowledgement lands as an active participant of not only a failure, but an active participant willing to change their ways. In Davis’s verses, one is pulled to their feet to urgently perform the duties the world requires of them.
Davis the agent of poetry reassuring the way a Bill Withers song eases, “I see the crystal raindrops fall/ And the beauty of it all/ Is when the sun comes shining through.” Through Davis’s poems, even with his deep consideration of pain, comes a redemption that makes living through it all worth the struggle. And this is the type of rescuing I wish Shepherd could have witnessed in poetry: “Give it time,” Geffrey’s phone conversation advised. “If you’re doing everything you can to be a better father, he’ll come around because he loves you.”
Works Cited:
Davis, Geffrey. Night Angler, BOA Editions, 2019.
— -. Revising the Storm, BOA Editions, 2013.
Oppen, George. Of Being Numerous. 1968. Reprint George Oppen: New and Collected Poems. New Directions, 2008.
Shepherd, Reginald. “Why I Write.” Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, University of Michigan Press, 2007. Reprint on Poets.org https://poets.org/text/why-i-write, 2008.
Washington, Jr. Grover. “Just the Two of Us” featuring Bill Withers. Winelight. Elektra Records, 1980.
F. Douglas Brown is the author of two poetry collections, ICON (Writ Large Press, 2018) and Zero to Three (University of Georgia, 2014), winner of the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize selected by US Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith. Brown, an educator for 25 years, currently teaches English and African American Poetry at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, an all-boys Jesuit school. He is both a Cave Canem and Kundiman fellow and his poems have appeared in numerous publications such as the Academy of American Poets, The PBS News Hour, The Virginia Quarterly (VQR), Bat City Review, and The Southern Humanities Review.
When he is not teaching, writing or with his children (Isaiah, Olivia, and Simone), he is busy DJing in the greater Los Angeles area.
