Poetry Centered
Poetry Centered
Geffrey Davis: The Drive to Connect
Geffrey Davis selects recordings that reveal the bold, risky, and relentless work of attention and connection that poetry undertakes. He shares Lisel Mueller pushing against the limits of human understanding (“What the Dog Perhaps Hears”), Carl Phillips exploring change as more than calamity (“Continuous Until We Stop”), and Ross Gay asserting that pain and grief live alongside gratitude (“Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude”). Davis closes by reading his poem “Inside the Charged Dark,” paying tribute to his mother as the model of inquiry in his life.
Find the full recordings of Mueller, Phillips, and Gay reading from the Poetry Center on Voca:
Lisel Mueller (October 28, 1981)
Carl Phillips (November 1, 2012)
Ross Gay (January 19, 2017)
Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.
Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:Welcome to Poetry Centered, where you'll hear recordings of poets reading and speaking about their work, selected and introduced by a contemporary poet. This show comes to you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and our online archive of poetry readings called Voca. My name is Julie Swarstad Johnson, and I'm the Poetry Center's archivist, here to say hello. We're delighted to be back with six new episodes. You can look forward to a new episode every two weeks, with a break for the holidays in the middle. We'll have episodes hosted by Valerie Hsiung, Diego Báez, Abigail Chabitnoy, Mackenzie Polonyi, and Kwame Dawes. But first, to kick off this new season, we're joined by Geffrey Davis, a poet, editor, and professor at the University of Arkansas. He's the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, One Wild Word Away, which came out earlier this year, and is also available as an audio book. For today's episode, Geffrey chooses recordings of Lisel Mueller, Carl Phillips and Ross Gay, exploring through each the bold, risky and relentless work of attention and connection that poetry undertakes. You'll hear him take up that same work in his own poetry at the episode's end. Geffrey, welcome, and thank you so much for being our host today.[MUSIC PLAYING]
GEFFREY DAVIS:Hello. This is Geffrey Davis, and I'm recording this at my desk in the Ozarks of Northwest Arkansas. The first recording I'd like to share is Lisel Mueller reading"What the Dog Perhaps Hears." I love to share this poem with students, and have been doing so for over a decade now. I love how Mueller, a German born American writer, upends our idea of quiet. She does this in part by tuning her speaker's ear to a rich, kinetic soundscape of all the life reaching just beyond the limits of our human hearing. Now, this particular recording was made on October 28, 1981, a year my parents were likely, unbeknownst to them, starting to set my own life into motion. So now I'm kind of delighted to think of Mueller's voice as resonating back then with one particular birth that nobody yet could hear on its way. I also love how Mueller here plays with a balancing act that we might call poetry's ambition. On the one hand, a willingness to sharpen, or admit with compassion, the real limitations of human understanding. And, on the other hand, a daringness to transform or even transgress those edges of human perception. To ignite or borrow, through imagination and invention, the kind of expression that could create a new heat. By wondering the moving dramas unfolding beneath our grasp, Mueller's speaker is kind of smuggling those more-than-human insights into our own capacity for change. In her brief introductory remarks, amplified by what unfolds in the poem itself, I think Mueller is making some really crucial claims for the quiet importance of changing how we listen to the world. She speculates that hearing anew can lead to new emotions. Emotions, as she says, we could barely feel before, or that we couldn't feel at all. I think this is how poetry becomes a technology for deepening intimacy. By translating the possibility of shared feelings into the possibility of shared connections. For turning a changed sense of hearing into a changed sense of the world and our interconnected places within it. Maybe what I'm trying to say is that I see this poem as a celebration of our unwillingness to relent for the next possible connection humming just around the corner of awareness. So here is Lisel Mueller reading"What the Dog Perhaps Hears."[MUSIC PLAYING]
LISEL MUELLER:I get mileage not only out of my kids, but also out of my animals, out of my pets. And this one was inspired, if I can use that word, by the fact that I realized one day how different our dogs hearing obviously was from our hearing. How he was scared by sounds that we could barely hear. And sometimes, things we couldn't hear at all."What the Dog Perhaps Hears." If an inaudible whistle blown between our lips can send him home to us, then silence is perhaps the sound of spiders breathing, and roots mining the earth, it may be asparagus heaving headfirst into the light, and the long brown sound of cracked cups, when it happens. We would like to ask the dog if there is a continuous whir, because the child in the house keeps growing. If the snake really stretches full length without a click, and the sun breaks through clouds without a decibel of effort. Whether in autumn, when the trees dry up their wells, there isn't a shudder too high for us to hear. What is it like up there, above the shut-off level of our simple ears? For us, there was no birth cry, the newborn bird is suddenly here, the egg broken, the nest alive, and we heard nothing when the world changed.[MUSIC PLAYING]
GEFFREY DAVIS:The next recording I'd like to share is Carl Phillips reading"Continuous Until We Stop." Now, I have many qualities. One of those qualities is stubbornness. Like many, in certain contexts, that stubbornness can work for me. Like, say, when I'm drafting or revising a new poem, holding out for some minor or not so minor development that I choose to believe is still on its way. If I can just resist the alluring satisfaction of the poem's first light's. But when I'm reading the poems of others, more often than not, I find that my stubbornness works against me, can manifest, consciously or unconsciously, as an inability or unwillingness to receive the work on its own terms. And so I love it when witnessing a poet read their work becomes an occasion to remove such readerly resistances in me. Carl Phillips is one of those poets whose work changed for me the moment I heard it aloud. Call it conversion, call it clarification, but listening to Phillips score his own lines, immediately and irrevocably deepen my capacity to be led by his poetics. To go increasingly how his lyric syntax guessed. Working harder to stay inside the discovery state of feeling half lost. The mid kinesis of wonder and association. What someone brilliant and dear to me calls Philip's architecture of thought. James Longenbach described this quality as, quote,"the sound of a mind alive in the syntactical process of discovering what it might be thinking." The Phillips recording I've chosen, among other things, concerns itself with sussing out the bewilderment of transition, its speaker striving to parse the realities of change, in part by shedding some predetermined ideas of the calamity we are taught to believe change itself will entail. Or maybe this is the life lens that I bring to the poem. This Philips recording was made on November 1, 2012, during the early months of a uniquely singular transition for me, that of becoming a parent. Some of which entailed anxiously questioning how to know whether I was breaking or renewing my family's cycles of tragedy. Although I'm just now discovering it in the midst of more major relational shifting in my life, having left the very long and painful relationship that led to my son's arrival. And so navigating once again that disorienting process of dismantling the many myths and meanings that can keep us from surrendering to risk. From stepping further into what we hope, without yet knowing, is the start of a new freedom. So here is Carl Phillips reading"Continuous Until We Stop."[MUSIC PLAYING]
CARL PHILLIPS:This is called"Continuous Until We Stop." But when I came to what I'd been told was the zone of tragedy, transition, it was not that. Was a wildering field, across it, the light steadily lessening, and the tall grasses, waving, deepened their colors. Blue-green or a greenish blue-- hard to tell, exactly. Was like when the body surrenders to risk, that moment when an unwillingness to refuse can seem no different from an inability to, though they are not the same. Inability, unwillingness. To have said otherwise doesn't make it true, or even make it count as true. Yes, but what does the truth matter now, I whispered, stepping further inside what, by then, was night, almost. The tamer animals would soon lie down again, and the wild go free.[MUSIC PLAYING]
GEFFREY DAVIS:The third recording I'd like to share is Ross Gay reading "Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude." Now, Ross Gay is another writer whose own scoring worked to unlock something about the poetry I couldn't hear before. By orchestrating a cadence of curiosity, I'm now grateful to say, I can't unhear. I admire so much about this self-consciously long-winded title poem of Gay's 2015 collection. I love the speaker's risky insistence on renewing his faith in our ability to extend and sustain our attention. I love the way certain things return to reward that attention, creating prismatic echoes of understanding. For instance, how the honey left behind by a mournful pile of dead bees, sings to the honey that the speaker spoons into our tea. Which then sings to the bee shadow cruising the page that the poet is writing upon, and so on. I really delight in giving this voice to student writers, and watching their early, awkward attempts at making sense of Gay's disarming rhythms. For instruction, I will often point them toward a recording or two of him reading his work aloud. And now I'm happy to have this particular recording to share because it has woven yet another appreciation into my long existing admiration of this poem. In this recording, made on January 19, 2017, Gay invokes an emotion that I hadn't quite realized had so much to say in the poem. Notice how, midway through his reading, a rougher energy makes itself heard in Gay's voice. Is it anger? Is it frustration? Is it urgency? My initial instinct was to grow worried when I first recognized whatever this energy is. What had upset his heart that day? But then I grew grateful for what I may be heard, because I think Gay's refusal to resist this energy, as well as his tearfulness toward the end of this recording, reminds me that our rougher emotions can and must share the throat with grief. Can even prime the voice for a new kind of gratitude. I've been known to describe Gay as one of our healthiest poets. What I'm trying to celebrate with this label is his model of attunement. The way his poems seem concerned, often directly, as you will hear in this recording, with the toll a reader pays to come along with the speaker. How he not only weighs the psychic cost of that attention, but also takes up some of the emotional aftercare that might need to follow rapture. In this way, I see Gay as giving us permission to take the time and space necessary to manage having our heads and hearts rearranged, making sure we feel safely held on the other side of a new reality. Softening the bell of change without arresting any resonance we might carry with us off the page. So here's Ross Gay reading"Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude."[MUSIC PLAYING]
ROSS GAY:And I'm going to read you one more poem. It's called "Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude." It takes 10 minutes to read, which means it takes 10 minutes for you to hear it. So if you need to shift, shift. There's two things about this poem that I want to tell you. One is that part of it starts-- it starts in a dream, but then the second part, it goes to this community orchard in Bloomington called the Bloomington Community Orchard, which is this sort of experiment in neighborliness. An experiment in caring for people you may not know. There's a hundred trees, there's a hundred or more fruit bushes, there's all kinds of complementary plants. But there's this place where we have decided to try to figure out how to grow food for each other, and to have the sort of conversations about growing food, which are really conversations about taking care of each other. That's in Bloomington. Come. Please, come. And the other thing is that there's this kid who was not yet a kid in this poem, named Aralee. Aralee was the idea of a kid, and now Aralee is like a three-and-a-half-year-old kid."Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude." I'm very glad to be here. Feels lucky to do this today. Friends, will you bear with me today, for I have awakened from a dream in which a robin made, with its savvy wings, a kind of veil. Behind which it shimmied and stomped something from the south of Spain, its breast a flare, looking me dead in the eye from the branch that grew into my window, coochie-cooing my chin. The bird shuffling its little talons left, then right, while the leaves bristled against the plaster wall, two of them drifting onto my blanket while the bird opened and closed its wings like a matador giving up on murder, jutting its beak, turning a circle, and flashing again, the ruddy bombast of its breasts by which I knew upon waking, it was telling me in no uncertain terms to bellow forth the tubas and sousaphones, the whole rusty brass band of gratitude not quite dormant in my belly. It said so in a human voice, bellow forth.[LAUGHTER] And who among us could ignore such odd and precise counsel? Hear ye! Hear ye! I am here to holler that I have hauled tons-- by which I don't mean lots. I mean tons of cow shit and stood ankle deep in swales of maggots swirling the spent beer grains the brewery man was good enough to dump off, holding his nose, for they smell very bad, but make the compost writhe giddy and lick its lips, twirling dung with my pitchfork again and again with hundreds and hundreds of other people, we dreamt an orchard this way, furrowing our brows and hauling our wheelbarrows, and sweating through our shirts. And less than a year later, there was a party at which trees were sunk into the well-fed earth, one of which, a liberty apple, after being watered in, was tamped by a baby barefoot with a bow hanging in her hair, biting her lip in her joyous work. And, friends, this is the realest place I know. It makes me squirm like a worm, I am so grateful. You could ride your bike there, or roller skate, or catch the bus. There is a fence and a gate twisted by hand. There is a fig tree taller than you in Indiana. It will make you gasp. It might make you want to stay alive even. Thank you. And thank you for not taking my pal when the engine of his mind dragged him to swig fistfuls of Xanax and a bottle or two of booze. And thank you for taking my father a few years after his own father went down. Thank you. Mercy, mercy. Thank you for not smoking meth with your mother. Oh, thank you. Thank you for leaving and for coming back. And thank you for what inside my friends' love bursts like a throng of roadside goldenrod gleaming into the world, likely hauling a shovel with her like one named Aralee ought, with hands big as a horse's, and who, like one named Aralee ought, will laugh time to time till the juice runs from her nose. Oh, thank you for the way a small thing's wail makes the milk, or what once was milk in us, gather into horses huckle-buckling across a field. And thank you, friends, when last spring, the hyacinth bells rang and the crocuses flaunted their upturned skirts, and a quiet roved the beehive, which, when I entered were snuged two or three dead fist-sized clutches of bees between the frames, almost clinging to one another. This one's tiny head pushed into another's tiny wing, one's forelegs resting on another's face, the translucent paper of their wings fluttering beneath my breath, and when a few dropped to the frames beneath-- honey. And after falling down to cry, everything's glacial shine. And thank you, too. And thanks for the corduroy couch I have put you on. Put your feet up. Here's a light blanket. That would be really nice today.[LAUGHTER] Here's a light blanket. A pillow, dear ones, for I think this is going to be long. I can't stop my gratitude, which includes, dear reader, you, for staying here with me, for moving your lips just so as I speak. Here is a cup of tea. I've spooned honey into it. And thank you the tiny bees shadow perusing these words as I write them. And the way my love talks quietly when in the hive, so quietly, in fact, you cannot hear her, but only notice barely her lips moving in conversation. Thank you what does not scare her in me, but makes her reach my way. Thank you the love she is, which hurts sometimes. And the time she misremembered elephants in one of my poems. Which oh, here they come, garlanded with morning glory and wisteria blooms, trombones all the way down to the river. Thank you the quiet in which the river bends around the elephants solemn trunk, polishing stones, floating on its gentle back. The flock of geese flying overhead. Into the quick and gentle flocking of men, to the old lady falling down on the corner of Fairmount and 18th, holding patiently with the softest parts of their hands, her cane and purple hat, gathering for her the contents of her purse and touching her shoulder and elbow. And thank you, too, the cockeyed basketball court on which in a half-court, three on three, we oldheads made of some runny-nosed kids a shambles, and the 61-year-old after flipping a reverse layup off a backdoor cut from my no-look pass to seal the game, ripped off his shirt and threw punches at the gods and hollered at the kids to admire the pacemaker's scar grinning across his chest.[LAUGHTER] Thank you the glad accordions' wheeze in the chest. Thank you the bagpipes. Thank you to the woman, barefoot in a gaudy dress, for stopping her car in the middle of the road, and the tractor trailer behind her, and the van behind it, whisking a turtle off the road. Thank you, god of gaudy. Thank you paisley panties. Thank you the organ up my dress. Thank you the sheer dress you wore kneeling in my dream at the creek's edge, and the light swimming through it. The koi kissing halos into the glassy air. The room in my mind with the blinds drawn, where we nearly injure each other, crawling into the shawl of the other's body. Oh, thank you when I just say it plain, we fuck each other dumb. And, you. Again, you, for the true kindness that has been for you to remain awake with me like this, nodding time to time. And making that noise which I take to mean, yes. Or, I understand. Or, please go on, but not too long.[LAUGHTER] Or, why are you spitting so much? Or, easy, Tiger, hands to yourself. I'm excitable. I'm sorry. I'm grateful. I just want us to be friends now, forever. Take this bowl of blackberries from the garden. The sun has made them warm. I picked them just for you. I promise I will try to stay on my side of the couch. And thank you the baggie of dreadlocks I found in a drawer while washing and folding the clothes of our murdered friend. The photo in which his arm slung around the sign to "the trail of silences." Thank you the way before he died, he held his hands open to us for coming back in a waft of incense, or in the shape of a boy in another city, looking from between his mother's legs, or disappearing into the stacks after brushing by. For moseying back in dreams where, seeing us lost and scared, he put his hand on our shoulders and pointed us to the temple across town. And thank you to the man all night long, hosing a mist on his early-bloomed peach tree, so that the hard frost not waste the crop, the ice in his beard, and the ghosts lifting from him when the warming sun told him, sleep now. Thank you the ancestor who loved you before she knew you by smuggling seeds into her braid for the long journey, who loved you before he knew you by putting a walnut tree in the ground, who loved you before she knew you by not slaughtering the land. Thank you who did not bulldoze the ancient grove of dates and olives, who sailed his keys into the ocean and walked softly home. Who did not fire, who did not plunge the head into the toilet, who said, stop, don't do that. Who lifted some broken someone up. Who volunteered the way a plant birthed of the reseeding plant is called a volunteer, like the plum tree that marched beside the raised bed in my garden, like the arugula that marched itself between the blueberries. Nary a bayonet, nary an army, nary a nation, which usage of the word volunteer familiar to gardeners the wide world made my pal shout, oh! And dance and plunge his knuckles into the lush soil before gobbling two strawberries and digging a song from his guitar made of wood from a tree someone maybe planted, thank you. Thank you zinnia and gooseberry, rudbeckia and pawpaw, Ashmead's kernel, cockscomb and scarlet runner, feverfew and lemonbalm. Thank you knitbone and sweetgrass and sunchoke and false indigo, whose petals stammered apart by bumblebees. Good Lord, please give me a minute. And moonglow and catkin and crookneck and painted tongue and seedpod and Johnny jump-up. Thank you what in us rackets glad what gladrackets us. And thank you, too, this knuckleheaded heart, this pelican heart, this gap-toothed heart flinging open its gaudy maw to the sky. Oh, clumsy, oh, bumblefucked, oh, giddy, oh, dumbstruck, oh, rickshaw, oh, goat twisting its head at me from my peach tree's highest branch, balanced impossibly gobbling the last fruit, its tongue working like an engine. A lone sweet drop tumbling by some miracle into my mouth like the smell of someone I've loved. Heart like an elephant screaming at the bones of its dead. Heart like the lady on the bus dressed head to toe in gold, the sun shivering her shiny boots, singing Erykah Badu to herself, leaning her head against the window. And thank you the way my father one time came back in a dream by plucking the two cables beneath my chin like a bass fiddle's strings, and played me until I woke singing, no kidding. I was smiling and singing, thank you, thank you. Stumbling into the garden where the Juneberry's flowers had burst open like the bells of French horns, the lily my mom and I planted oozed into the air. The bazillion ants labored in their earthen workshops below, collard greens waved in the wind like the sails of ships, and the wasps swam in the mint bloom's viscous swill. And you-- again, you friends, for hanging tight. I know I can be long-winded sometimes. I just want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude over everything, including you. Which is awkward. Yes.[LAUGHTER] The little suds going down your collar behind your glasses. Soon it will be over. Which is precisely what the child in my dreams said, holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea, and the sky hurtling our way like so many buffalo, who said, it's much worse than we think, and sooner. To whom I said, no, duh, child, in my dreams. What do you think this singing and shuddering is? What this screaming and reaching and dancing and crying is, other than loving what every second goes away? Goodbye, I mean to say. And thank you. Every day. Thank you.[APPLAUSE][MUSIC PLAYING]
GEFFREY DAVIS:I'll close by sharing a poem of my own. But before I do that, I want to express my thanks to Julie and Poetry Centered for this enriching opportunity to search through the Voca audiovisual archive. Truly, the most challenging part of this project was choosing just three of the many treasures I found there. And I hope, dear listener, that you'll consider spending some of your own time there, tracking down some new and old sounds to cherish. The poem I want to share comes from my third collection, One Wild Word Away, which was published by BOA Editions in April 2024. I've found that, what you know about a book before it's been published, and what about a book after it's been published are two very distinct knowledges. My sense of this new book has been further complicated by the fact that I killed it along the way. I am deeply grateful for the bright and tender chorus of folks who helped usher it back from that erasure. Especially since, now I see this book, in so many ways, as a record of my coming home to myself. But I'm learning that a voice you've killed, or let be killed, might have some surprising things to say to you once it finds its way into the world. The poem I've chosen takes on another thing that I'm learning. Despite the frequency of my attention, feeling drawn to my father, especially to his struggles with addiction, as a child, it was my mother who modeled the kind of inquiry that would go on to help me to write poems. This is, "Inside the Charged Dark." Dear mother, your early lessons got me to bear the fearful sounds that faith can make while clearing its throat. I remember the hard man who reaped our purpling Timothy grass each spring, unbuttoning his tan jacket to show a gray kitten, gunky eyed and nestled against fleece lining. I remember reaching with hesitation while saying her new name. As she grew into a cat, I have no memory of feeling her claws. Maybe that was when I started begging to keep buried in me what can hurt. I would never see her outdoors again, but she must have answered the barn cats singing to her readiness for life. You gave me the word "pregnant" and a story for the act on its way. I remember it was night. I remember trusting your insistence to leave her alone to the bodywork, as we prepared a towel box in the nearby privacy of the closet. You drifted toward sleep, and I forget how many times I rose and returned her to that darkness before submitting to her urge to burrow beneath the low canopy my knees were making of my blankets. In bed with this restless wonder, I heard a sound I knew, but not. Because it seemed to come from some strange shore I couldn't find. Until I could. The mewing blindness of her first kitten's head transforming the old boundary of her body. I cried out. Certain she was becoming my failure to keep her locked inside the charged dark. My betrayal breaking her into something I still don't have the words. Without language or understanding, I'd made a hideous world. I was hideous and crying. Then the warm safety of your hush was suddenly there, softening the cave of uncertainty at my ear, leading me back into my chance to see. I would survive looking a blessing in its full face before believing I deserved the voice of light.[MUSIC PLAYING]
JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:Thank you so much, Geffrey, for your poetry and for your insights into Voca. Your idea of poetry as a technology for deepening intimacy is one that I'm going to keep thinking about. Listeners, thank you so much for joining us. We truly only make this podcast because we know you're out there listening. Thank you for sharing your time with us. Join us again in two weeks for another great episode hosted by Valerie Hsiung. Check out the show notes for links to the full recordings that you heard portions of today. And remember that Voca, the archive these recordings come from, is available to you wherever you're listening from, anywhere around the world. It's now fully captioned, and recordings from the Poetry Center's reading and lecture series are added on a regular basis. Thanks so much for joining us. And until next time.
ARIA PAHARI:Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world-class library collection of more than 80,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center library and buildings are housed on the Indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui. Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari, that's me, and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, The Poetry Center's audio visual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.[MUSIC PLAYING]