A Q&A About Pansy Poetics and a Coming Attraction

Tomorrow’s post will be entitled “The Myth of the Gay Poetry Community (Part One).” It will be posted sometime before midnight on Monday. My partner is sick. Everything takes me twice as long as the normal person. I'm a shitty caretaker.

Now he is sleeping. I’m bored. So I’m going to answer five questions that were backchanneled to my SUNY Brockport email.

Question: Why are you so angry? Do you think it’s because you’re not that attractive?

Answer: Probably.

Question: Charles Jensen and C. Dale Young don’t rip apart other gay poets on their blog. Why do you think you do? Don't you think people will stop reading your blog? Or be afraid to offer comments on your posts out of fear they may be associated with you?

Answer: I’ll do anything to get attention. According to my site meter, I get three or four hits day. I'm satisfied. As in response to your last question, I think it's homophobic. Gay men are stronger than that, I hope. I like queers who fight with me. It's more fun.

Question: What do you have against Jericho Brown and Mark Doty?

Answer: I admit I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time on his poetry. At the same time, I’m obsessed with my ambivalence toward such a highly acclaimed poetry. I’m much more interested in exploring my internal conflicts with poetry which has already received unanimous praise. Also Jericho Brown has not accepted my friend request on Facebook.

Question: You’re not inclusive. You never talk about lesbians.

Answer: Inclusiveness is relative. I plan to maintain this blog for one complete year. I will write about the dead and the living, narrative/lyric and the experimental, and try to explode the notion that gay men are all white, middle-class, and plain spoken. Aesthetic diversity is as important as cultural diversity.

Question: Why do you claim to hate domestic narratives when that’s all what you seem to write?

Answer: One of the selfish reasons I started this blog was to figure out why I have stopped writing poems. Why I no longer to feel a desire to send my second book out into The World. Although it is more or less completed and placed as a finalist in a few contests.

After my first book of poems came out, I went through a serious depression, one akin and worse than what C. Dale Young encouraged to spot sometime back in his blog. It was an important post. Go look it up.

This fact is not to encourage pity. But to simply further explain why I started the blog. I don’t need anyone else to feel bad for me. Self-pity is my favorite pastime.

Needless to say, I needed to change my life: meditation, music therapy, positive mental thinking, creating routine, trying to make more friends.

For the Poetry Foundation of America, Rigoberto Gonzalez wrote a post highlighting the need for more reviewers. At the time, this bugged me. I didn’t like the idea of thinking I had, perhaps, a responsibility to do anything for anyone other than myself.

Only through psychic pain, I realized I needed to do just that. My reviewing, writing about the gay poetry community, began somewhat as a complete selfish need.

I also would like to transform these microessays into a book about queer poetics.