 Brevity is overrated. I love a fine tweet as much as the next gal, but occasionally, I wish more poets would dare to be oceanic, to swarm and envelop me with their words instead of throwing a small polished stone in my general direction.
John Paul Davis is a great poet to read in moments like these. There's a Whitmanesque quality to his poems, effusive and generous – and characterized by endless fascination. Like Whitman, Davis is enraptured by the people he encounters, and inspired by them. I first met Davis a few years ago in Chicago: he was my neighbor, and we also worked creatively together. During those times, what always came through for me first was his curiosity about other human beings, how he sparkled and leaned in when he had a question or a quip, and how much he cared about representing the people he knew well. His poems have the same emotive engine: they expand, and thrum. Davis is a fascinating, underrated poet. Please enjoy this small example of what he can do. * In Praise Of Loud Women Starting with the ones at the poetry open mic shows but not just those under the spotlight, also the bartender with the lightning-sharp laughter who hushes the chattering men camped on barstools when the next reader taps the microphone & unfolds the looseleaf from her pocket & there's the ones with glitter eyeliner & skin-tight mini skirts on the subway filling the car with with the nasal music of their hopes & gossip while we tunnel beneath the East River toward Brooklyn & thank you for all of them, they have made my favorite days like that Saturday moving from bar to bar with Lynne & Tish & Syreeta giving me the side eye & Lizz met us & the stories only got louder, & I consider myself lucky to have so often heard Marty's hard-earned wisdom & prosody reverberate through an entire room & Rebecca's warm contralto speaking fragments of Chekhov, Elizabeth in arms about some new political injustice on tv & Chelsy, who bit my wrist to let me know she liked me & even Alecia rattling my mobile phone with her anger, her name will never stop meaning light & could I have listened to her with more of myself & Paige, famous for starting arguments on the internet called me delightful & Rae's Ohio drawl ricocheting up & down the river assuring me I was home & Mahogany's redbone Oakland syllabics making everything into song & Emily Rose trying to talk some sense into my thick head late on one of those bitterly cold Chicago nights driving & smoking with the windows down & Adri coaching me through the grief when I tell her what the doctors have said is happening to my stepmother who could make my short name multisyllabic when I was not my best self & who taught me to want to make the good kind of trouble & she is dying & no one knows how long she has & this unjust world will lose her unrepeatable voice, so many rooms will no long resound when her Southern vowels crest brightly as she tells some story, how will the world get by without her faith & her willingness to take on the small difficult work that brings about real change & I don't think I could have become a man without her, she required grace & patience & compassion & honesty from me & what will I do without her to trouble me & tell me, what trouble can I make to make & maintain space for such blessed loudness as hers, promise me that more loud talking big laughing bold troublemaking women are stepping in to fill the empty places, what kind of light can I shine when one such woman breathes to speak & what kind of ear should a stubborn know-it-all thick man grow what kind of silence should I be learning what kind of silence what kind of silence? * John Paul Davis is a curator of Page Meets Stage. He was a founding member of Real Talk Avenue, and is the former editor of Bestiary Magazine and Em Literary. He currently lives in Brooklyn. His website is www.johnpauldavis.org Comments are closed.
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