In 2026, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Geffrey Davis discusses his curatorial approach and his own creative work.

Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, editorial director at the Academy, and I’m here today with the Guest Editor for January, Geffrey Davis. Geffrey is the author of One Wild Word Away and the winner of the Academy’s James Laughlin Award for his 2019 collection, Night Angler. Geffrey, welcome and thank you for joining me.

Davis: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Poets.org: Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for January?

Davis: Yeah, so I find roles like this somewhat ironic when I think about where I started, which is to say very apprehensive to [sic] taking these sorts of roles on. I used to really shy away from them. And in fact, I’m currently the editor of Iron Horse Literary Review, and that role started by having a conversation with the editor-in-chief about my apprehension, which lasted for a long time until I had the great fortune of being a panelist on a judge for a national fellowship. And there was just an ungodly amount of writing at first that was overwhelming and challenging. But as I sort of sat in and began the reading process, I became increasingly grateful for just how much writing there was. And the only way to work through that was to take a seat and watch almost like a train of poetics pass by and to have this instinctual response. And I realized how grateful I was to have that seat and this kind of insight to the current moment of letters and poetics.

And so I hope what people get from this month of curation is that approach, that I’m trying to give you a sense of these little dips into the ongoing work that’s happening right now, a nation of writers trying very hard to put us into conversation with ourselves and with each other. And so that’s the sort of philosophical approach. Pragmatically, I also was looking for gaps in the Academy’s database through the various communities that I’m really grateful to be a part of. And so most of my choices are folks who don’t have, or who didn’t have, entries or poems on the website.

Poets.org: I’m so glad that you kind of demystified your editorial process a little bit. I don’t think that anybody.... Well, I shouldn’t say anybody. I think that a lot of members of our audience don’t understand how much care sometimes that I think a lot of our Guest Editors put in and how much care that we at the Academy put in to selecting Guest Editors. There are a lot of people out there who still think that we choose the poems internally [laughs], and we don’t. The whole reason why we have Guest Editors, and have since 2018, is because we want to make the curation as eclectic as possible. And also we need that breadth of editorship to ensure that we can address those gaps, and there are many, as there are in any archive [laughs]. There are many gaps and we address them by having the Guest Editors.

So now that you’re done [laughs] reading poems for your curation, if you could direct readers to one poem in our collection at Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?

Davis: Yeah, I would direct folks to Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Song.” And it’s a poem I return to and teach quite a bit. And one of the core reasons that I keep returning to this poem is because it’s a poem that, every time I return to it, often my first reaction is one of awestruck silence. Like I don’t know ... or there’s so much about that poem that I don’t immediately understand. And I think there’s a lot of good work for returning to that feeling of being centered by a voice and then slowly starting to work yourself from underneath that immediate, silencing awe.

I also love how that poem is building a world of its own belief that it barely believes, but needs to believe. And so watching that unfolding live is something that I often mourn we don’t have, or I don’t yet know how to always work into my work or into books. I wish more books and more poems could show their work of becoming, and that’s a poem that I think is quite stellar at showing its own belief coming alive.

And the beginning of that poem gives me chills every time I start it: “Listen.” And then where it ends, too, reminds me that’s one of the roles of poetry, or one of the things I return to poetry for is a technology that teaches me how to hear a song that I’m suffering from. And often what’s at the heart of that suffering is an experiential suffering that I think often our impulse is to mute or move on from, and that poem is so insistent on turning us back into its suffering and that that’s the core of the song. I can go on and on about this poem, but yeah, that’s why [laughs].

Poets.org: That’s really lovely phrasing. What are you reading now?

Davis: So just leading into this curation, I was blurbing several books. Gratefully so. Another privileged seat to have to be able to see books coming into the world. And so I got to blurb Robin Becker’s Midsummer Count, bless Robin Becker, which is a new one selected. Ángel García’s Indifferent Cities and Kelli Russell Agodon’s Accidental Devotions. And also Joseph O. Legaspi’s Amphibian. So those are books that folks should be on the lookout [for].

I also find myself reading more sci-fi in my free time. It’s a genre that I’m turning to more and more. I didn’t just finish this, but it’s a book I keep thinking about and it’s Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark, is just a breathtaking novel. And in fact, the first two or three chapters left me weeping such that I had to call someone close to me and ask someone for emotional support. So we read that book together just because it was so beautifully heartbreaking. And I’m really looking forward to his next book, which is a continuation of that world.

I also recently finished Samantha Hunt’s The Seas, which is a really gorgeous book, and currently started Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence. So that’s kind of what I’ve been poking around with recently.

Poets.org: Some members of our audience might remember that Joseph O. Legaspi served as Poem-a-Day Guest Editor in January 2022. What are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?

Davis: Yeah, so I’ve recently had this really productive writing season that I’ve entered after some quietness on the page. And the thing that’s driving that the most is I’ve been working on this form that I’ve been calling “the chamber,” and it’s essentially like a dialogic soliloquy, which is maybe an unnecessarily fancy way of saying a poem that’s the mind in conversation with itself. And they’re built by two half sonnets with two voices that are sort of taking different vantages on a theme or a tension, and they borrow a lot of repetition instincts or habits from the pantoum and the sestina. So it’s kind of a mashup of sonnet, pantoum, sestina.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about Echo from Ovid, or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the trouble of speaking, especially trying to make connection with a beloved or someone that you desire to deepen your relationship with while not being able to initiate your own voice. And so that myth, I’ve been thinking a lot about that myth, and how do we respond to the trouble of not being able to start a conversation. And I think the pantoum and the sestina and the echoes of this sort of echo-sonnet form I’ve been working with is my way of responding to this moment where we seem to be really grappling with the echo chambers of our own creation. And so it’s a form that’s helped me metabolize my own participation in that tension.

Poets.org: The echo is a motif in one of your poems from your debut collection, Revising the Storm. The poem is titled “My Last Love Poem for a Crackhead, #23,” in which you write, “Some nights I hear my father’s long romance / with drugs echoed in the skeletal choir // of crickets.” It ends, “Let me decide / that he never lied or stole more than necessary.”

This reminds me a little bit of the end of Robert Hayden’s poem, “Those Winter Sundays”: “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?,” which is one of my favorite poems. So both poems start off with this examination of the father, right? But then that becomes an opportunity for the son to examine himself and his own spiritual inheritance. And I’m thinking about this in the context of what you just said about wanting to be in connection with the beloved. Can you talk a little bit more about the genesis of this poem from your debut?

Davis: Yeah, that’s such a brilliant observation and connection. And that poem, too, is also one of my favorites and something that I was struck with. That poem is fourteen lines, and I often think about it as a hesitant or quiet or even more … I don’t want to say broken, but its relationship to the sonnet has always really interested me, it’s possible relationship to the sonnet.

And it was a poem that gave me a lot of permission to write about my father in a certain way. Having a really strained relationship with him. I didn’t think forms like the sonnet were available to me. There’s a kind of predictable … sure, it’s very committed to love, and this is a figure I was trying to figure out how to love. And so thinking about Hayden’s poem as a complicated sonnet was really helpful for me.

And you also have me thinking about the ways in which my ... I used to say about that book that every poem felt like it was either directly about my father or that his presence was hovering over my shoulder, nodding or shaking his head at what I was writing. And what you’re saying is making me think about that there’s a kind of echoing reckoning that that book had to take on. As much as I wanted to radically turn away from whom my father was, I couldn’t do that and not risk ... or turning away from him radically was maybe a fallacy, and what I really had to figure out was how to pick up where he left off and echo against who he was, or echo away from who he was, or even sometimes echo into who he was, which is someone who taught me so much about love.

Yeah, I really appreciate that connection. I’ve been writing the echoes for a lot longer than I realized. This form is making me differently aware of it, but I’m really grateful for that connection.

Poets.org: Wonderful. And I’m grateful for this interview. Thank you so much, Geffrey …

Davis: Yeah.

Poets.org: ... for your time and for your curation.

Davis: Yeah, thank you so much.