3 Questions with Davi Gray
Davi Gray (they/them) is a poet, a writer, and a storyteller; they are queer, trans, nonbinary; and they live in North Minneapolis, within the traditional homelands of the Dakota. You can learn more about them by visiting their website davigray.com
Associate Editor Zack Lesmeister talks with Davi Gray about their work from Issue 74, out now!
Photo by Anna Min
Your poem, “You Can't Put Prison in a Poem,” suggests that the portrayal of prison life in mainstream media fails to capture the true complexities and realities of incarceration. Can you elaborate on some of the nuances or aspects of prison life that you feel are overlooked or misrepresented in popular culture?
Everyone who ends up in prison gets there with ideas of what it’s like based on everything they’ve seen or heard. Those things, violence, gangs, politics, sexual assault, inmate-vs.-guard conflict, are part of life while incarcerated, but they vary wildly among facilities, and it’s generally a much smaller proportion of time than is shown in media.
It doesn’t take very long being locked up to realize it’s just your life, and you are going to live it one day at a time, and you have to do the best you can to survive it. Humans are curious, and smart,and get bored quickly, and—as people do anywhere in the world, under every imaginable condition and some that aren’t—find ways to deal with that, which shows up in all possible ways, startling in their brilliance, originality, often humanity, and sometimes violence. But the violence is often a direct result of the narratives we all propagate in the broader culture.
The poem ends with a powerful assertion that the current state of incarceration doesn't have to be the only reality. Can you share your vision for a more just and humane approach to criminal justice, and how do you believe poetry and art can contribute to shaping this vision?
Incarceration is a symptom of much larger systemic failures, and to the extent that we can address those problems directly—giving people ways to access housing, food, healthcare (physical and mental), childcare, diapers, and meaningful remunerative work—we truly make every single one of us safer. That’s a far more complicated and nuanced view than many people want to deal with. I believe most of us want a better world for everybody and are willing to work toward that, but feel helpless and frustrated over the failures of the current system and at a loss for how to change it.
I want people to know there are better ways to live, but it will take work on everybody’s part, and an important part of that work is reshaping our narratives to reflect the deep and painful truth, which is that every human is human, that what hurts you hurts me and vice versa, that we all deserve a duty of care, and that we can make a better world for all of us, but only if we believe we can.
That is where art lives and breathes, in the form of poetry, literature, film, music, visual art, performance art, and the art of everyday relationships between people. Art is where the world can change its mind.
Is there anything you'd like to share about your poem that we don't know?
It’s written “after Juan Felipe Herrera” inspired by his poem, “You Can’t Put Muhammad Ali in a Poem.” The influence is, of course, most obvious in the form, but it’s more than that. The original poem—this is a pale reduction of the substance, as all prose explanations of poetry are—talks about what having Muhammad Ali in a poem would (does) require of readers, and inflict on them, as well as both the limits and the power of poetry. I hope that my own poem honors its inspiration.