Pansy Poetics

Microreview: On "Nocturnal Omissions" by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard and Eric Norris

2012-01-25T11:12:00.007-05:00

There's something inherently weak in a critic who refers to something as a "guilty pleasure." You can't help but imagine what pressures are weighing on them to feel they have to qualify their liking in such a guarded way. With Nocturnal Omissions: A Tale of Two Poets, Eric Norris and one-time porn star Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, have written a pseudo-autobiographical epistolary novel-in-verse comprised of frenetic, bawdy emails written during a two month period. Why feel guilty liking it?

The book begins with the poem "La Fin de Temps" in which Dillard boldly declares his intentions: "I want to supplant your blood with my sperm and/plant a garden of teeth upon island and crest." The next page features a response poem by Norris called "The Day of the Apocalypse." Here's a sample: "I creep forward like the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear, smelling my way to Dover.". And then Galvin's reply appears as the next poem "Petit Dejeuner au Lit." One of the lines asks "...will a hot stream of piss be mine and a fleshy scone of rubicund jam?"

Nocturnal Omissions might be one of the more intriguing books of 2011. Not quite camp, not quite comedy, it feels (sort of) like an extended in-joke-- except one that you do weirdly want to part of. Sometimes the experience is like watching a really amazing high-school variety show; it's sloppy, and you spend a lot of time simply admiring their gusto, waitng for them to stumble into the next fun bit. Sometimes it can take a bit too long to come, but you know it will. This book is even as overlong as most of those shows-- as it should be-- part of the fun is their refusal, conscious or not, to conform through compression. They feel entitled to their space and their excess, the thought of acquiescing to someone else's rules doesn't even seem to occur to them. It's 165 pages, and you get the sense they wouldn't mind if you didn't go straight from beginning to end. Go ahead and wander around. Do what you want.

The pronouncements of love and lust ("But you, precious halfling, when you grin and dance before me, even the possums mumble how tasty you might be in a pie or stew") makes the humor endearing in an uncommon way. You get the sense they're writing parody, or self-parody, or something reminiscent of an idea of parody, but you're not quite sure. The call-and-response poems document the minutiae of gay life ("I wore a wife-beater out in public today, for the first time in some years--the diet has worked"), possibly sincere philosophy ("Love is a misnomer, for it implies duality, purports two disparate parts intertwined"), and critiques of well-known contemporary poets ("I do like dogs. I detest Mark Doty.")..along with other things ("This week I had implanted my first bionic tooth--a titanium screw into my lower mandible; I have felt no pain...).

When you read lines like "Don't think me cynical if I find love incredible," you can't help but read this as a warning to the critic. in fact, the book transforms itself into something critic-proof. When they reference Sappho, Housman ("the best"), and Shakespeare, you don't feel the allusion are a nod to the audience, an insistence for approval, like the kind of poem the University of Chicago press goes ga-ga for. It's thrown into the poem because they felt like throwing it in; they like books because they do, not because they should.

As Bryan Borland's still new Sibling Rivalry Press (already highly regarded) continues to take off, you can't help but hope he doesn't begin to only publish more mainstream authors, like the precocious Saeed Jones and the established Matthew Hittinger, but also takes in what ultimately be the more unexpected projects from people who don't seem to have MFAs or the most embarrassing sort of Ph.D. (yes, you can still purchase one in creative writing if your multiple-choice skills are intact.) Flawed and wholly undisciplined as it may be, perhaps an integral part of its strength, the unstoppable joy of writing surfaces in Noctural Omissions, which is perhaps the most radical act of all.

Gavin Dillard's and Eric Norris' Nocturnal Omissions: A Tale of Two Poets is available through Sibling Rivalry Press.

Microreview: On Neil De La Flor's and Maureen Seaton's "Sinead O' Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds"

2012-01-22T16:45:00.004-05:00

Neil De La Flor's and Maureen Seaton's Sinead O' Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds is the kind of poetry book that most often never wins awards: it's too creative. Their collaborative effort does something most authors working together don't have the gumption to do: refuse to tidy up their poems in a way that everything becomes seamless and you're left saying to yourself, "This poem feels like it's written by one person. Everything is of a piece." What's the point of reading a collaboration if it doesn't feel messy, busting open with too much talent? Why believe less is more? Sometimes more is more. For good reason.

The rambling, blessedly moronic litanies are obviously perfect vehicles for collaboration. They makes lists and a lot of other things. You can imagine a pair of poets trying to outshine the other as yet another burst of creativity jettisons its way through the Internet. However they divvied up the work for their collaboration is ultimately irrelevant. What matters is the end results, and this book is so wonderful. Take a look at some of the zingers. Here's one from "Metempsychosis": "I believed ellipses were Lilliputian prints of panini recipes" Another from "Words of Mouth": "They say Beethoven's maid died of lead poisoning. If she ate paint, it would be a thread of gold through turquoise, swan's blood, a violin silence." Or the entirety of "The Archaeology of Christendom": "The sorest spot on my head is a temple./I have bra cups in multiple sizes."

These brilliant comics know every joke is ultimately a throwaway, every poem a vehicle for urgent nonsense.

Neil De La Flor's and Maureen Seaton's Sinead O' Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds is available through Firewheel Editions.

Microreview: On Andrew Demcak's "Night Chant"

2012-01-21T20:42:00.002-05:00

Consciously oppressive and morose, Andrew Demcak's new book of poetry Night Chant labors to create what could in lesser hands seem like a queer rewriting of Sylvia Plath. Demack knows better, although he, too, creates a dreary atonality through intriguing word choices. Often the work he does here feels strained, but in a good way; he doesn't want any of his triggers to produce a baldfaced narrative. The titles of his poems --"Rent Boy," "Crossing the Water," "Troll," "Child Killer"-- seem irrelevant; they feel like a random noun someone uttered to rev Demcak up to show his skill. And there's more than a solid amount of ability here.

For a significant portion of the book, Demcak strains to deconstruct a noun, and then asks us to help him reassemble it. In the better poems, we feel the labor of that strain--the diction and metaphor pushing the subject in a way that force it to become something one can perceive as new. Here's some of the fun play in the personae poem "Oedipus Rex": "His lips had lost their sphinx,/ that tired jinx, that nag./...Midnight's middle was not an empty room./My cock was the answer to the riddle." Or the curiously askew final couplet in "Orgasm vs. Rainbow": "Orgasms are bluster, quick mouthfuls, ogling eyes./But you have rainbows for days after denouncing the clouds."

Occasionally, he doesn't feel like he's straining quite enough; he doesn't deserve the release. For example, in the less striking poem "Eros": "Inferno, bright flame, the spasm of flesh./ Halos blazing sparks ignite: orgasm."

Demcak's book sometimes feels over-long (close to ninety pages); the exertion required for reading such a lengthy book feels slightly greedy, especially since some of the poems like "Mirror at Forty" and "In Solitude" could be easily edited to highlight some of the best like "Eavesdropper, 1990" and the daring "Mishima Fantasy.". But still, it's hard to find any place in the the book where there is anything that resembles "a merciless desert here, this page."

Andrew Demcak's Night Chant is available through Lethe Press.

Microreview: On Hansa Bergwall and Timothy Liu's "The Thames & Hudson Project"

2012-01-20T21:07:00.006-05:00

You could say that Hansa Bergwall's and Timothy Liu's chapbook The Thames & Hudson Project is the best chapbook explicitly fashioned out of a queer mid-life crisis. As they declare in the prose polemic that begins their project: "...the notches left on your belt that once made for salacious stories to aggrandize tumescent vanity feel less consequential as your body ages, as the face you greet each morning in the morning no longer speaks to the who and the what you've been for all the men you've dallied with, even written about." In one of the most painfully beautiful poems, "You, Under My Window," we see a presumably older narrator who finds a vitality in the search for a space relieved of solipsistic desire as well as a cowardly acquiescence to the beloved. The poem begins: "The oak turned red while you sung./How boring." It leads to a final couplet which reads: "When my wrinkles/smoothed and my nose pugged, I ceased/being me. Go ahead and make love/to your magic. I am not there."

In so many vital ways, this is a book obsessed with ethical compromise. It's elegantly instructive in how a poet can explore restlessness within the lyric: the relationship between the "I" and the "you," sex and the lust, reader and writer. Always self-reflexive in their own deliberately melodramatic illustration of the erotic, the authors avoid easy thematics. From the poem "Without You," the poets write: "Without you I am the diorama's/glassed-in air, the dew drop/that never falls into a time lapse photo..." Cagey and open-hearted at the same time, Bergwall and Liu disclose their dissatisfaction with unchallenged, plain depictions of homosexual lust and sex. What they come up is not so much solutions, but a relentless, and often comic, inquiry into the gay lyric, never losing sight of what may, in the end, be the most necessary imperative to the poet and reader. As they write in the poem "Under Your Window, 3 AM: "Do as you will./I am here/to serenade you."

Hansa Bergwall and Timothy Liu's The Thames & Hudson Project is available through Fields Press.

Microreview: On Charles Jensen's "The Nanopedia Quick-Reference Pocket Lexicon of Contemporary American Culture"

2012-01-19T19:37:00.014-05:00

Almost feeling like a game of Tetris, there’s a lot of fun in watching Charles Jensen shift and slide the sounds and meanings of words in his new chapbook, The Nanopedia Quick-Reference Pocket Lexicon of Contemporary American Culture. With suaveness, Jensen manages to create puzzles through prose poems that wind up feeling as solved as an aphorism and as open-ended as a sweet riddle.

One of his best, “Reaganomics,” begins: “The color-coding trends toward the blue collar.” It ends with bleak comedy: “Dollars trade hands. Those young boys take one for America. It’s a chaos theory: a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing; a moving car blowjob goes suddenly, horribly wrong.” Indebted to Stephen Dunn’s Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs and James Richardson’s Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten Second Essays, Jensen refuses those authors’ flat diction which always verge on sounding like a USA Today article.

Here’s where “Frenemies” begins: “Tragedy makes the shape of an O with his mouth and sooner or later, you know some teenage boy thinks, Round peg, round hole. Here’s where the same poem ends up: “...everybody loves a loose Tragedy, but comedy doesn’t get near enough play. The difference between Hamlet and Hambone.” Serio-comic, Jensen’s chapbook reveal a great aptitude for the making of worthy prose poetic games.

Charles Jensen's The Nanopedia Quick-Reference Pocket Lexicon of Contemporary American Culture through MiPOesias.

The Holiday Spirit of Kindness and Goodwill.

2011-12-23T01:15:00.010-05:00

Maybe the holidays are the time for cruel behavior and unexpected lashing out at attempts at cheerful comradery. Scrooge telling carollers they should be boiled in their own pudding and the like. I guess my unwanted holiday gift was being blindsided by a particularly unexpected mean-spiritedness. The only thing that was unusual was that it was by another gay poet --one I respect and have vigorously supported in the past. I wouldn't address this at all, except for the fact that I've rather cruelly been placed in a public position where I have to defend myself somewhat not on terms of my art but on terms of the personal.

For me, Facebook is an opportunity to be silly and also to convey messages in an expedient way, especially when you're bored and have nothing much to do (like the holidays). For three years, I've had a congenial correspondence with a certain poet. In those three years on this blog, while I more often spend time promoting and praising interesting and new gay poets (as those who actually read my posts rather than skimming them for negativity or taking someone else's word for what I do here will know), but I've sometimes written reviews of books where I found them middling to fair to not-my-cup-of-tea (note, that's the books or poems, not the authors themselves-- I don't write about people who don't in some way interest me or who I respect, even if I don't always personally like every single piece that flows from their pen). Over that time, this person wrote me a number of responses, often affirming my decision to do so, in both personal emails and Facebook messages.

A few days ago, though, I wrote a status update in which I joked that I was bored and that I needed to get off Facebook or I would start "harrassing people." He wrote comments on my Facebook account which encouraged me in a charming way to stay on and that I should do so (i.e., my joke about "harassing" people). It was a fun thing to see. Then afterwards he wrote as a status update on his account saying that he was drinking a glass of wine, and I said tongue in cheek, "I bet it's white, faggot"--offering what I felt to be a camp (if tired) response. In case it's not obvious, I'm not a straight person, nor a high school jock bullying Kurt from "Glee," nor Tracy Morgan threatening to stab his gay son in the head. While there's a definite debate to whether gays (and other minorities) should comically "reclaim" slanderous words, it's hard to imagine that the context wasn't absolutely clear. In fact, there's a long history of prominent gays reclaiming such words comically. The name of this blog is even "Pansy Poetics." Perhaps there's a silent contingent that feels that title's also "going too far" but in three years I have yet to hear from them, including this person who suddenly wishes to publicly chastise me as some sort of bigot.

Anyway, this person who I thought I was on good terms with said that his wine was indeed red. Later on, we joked about something else. I was never told during the actual conversation I was out-of-line or that my throwaway mock-Boys-In-The-Band moment offended him; if I had, I would have deleted it in a heartbeat and apologized. I don't go around spewing the word "faggot;" it's generally not my style of "camp" even if I feel like being camp. Yesterday, though, a handful of people suddenly started writing me that this man was upset at me for some reason, and was making an issue of it on his Facebook page. Not knowing what was up or why, I looked on his Wall and found out that I was indeed mysteriously de-befriended.

This person never wrote to me directly and said what's up. Nothing. Instead, I heard reports that he posted a slur on me on his account publicly stating that I "had gone too far." Using the word "faggot," he apparently now said, was way beyond the pale for me, so, goodbye, get lost, sayonara.

I was (and still am) hurt that if he was offended he didn't just remove the post and privately tell me he felt it was misguided. I'm not claiming we were best friends or anything, but, really.

I wrote him a response saying that I was sorry, that I thought we were being silly, and why did he not write me before he took a drastic action. No response. I wrote him again and gave him my phone number and said we should talk on the phone.

All I got was an email saying that I didn't know him as a person, and that word was unacceptable. His account was not a "gay bar." It was a space for him to do professional work, among other things. I was an interloper. He would not change his mind.

But it's my career, too, after all. And publicly charging me with bigotry and "going too far" while blocking me from being even able to defend myself at the source doesn't seem to me like the most "moral" or responsible behavior, either.

Needless to say, I am very hurt. But I am not writing this post really to document this exchange, but instead to use it as a vehicle to address a concern about how some otherwise well-intended gay men cruelly marginalize others under the guise that they are acting in a moral fashion.

Any undergraduate from a Queer Studies 101 class could tell you that sometimes marginalized groups of people take back derogatory words by using them themselves--the pink triangle, for instance. "Dykes on Bikes." The term "Queer Studies," itself. Openly gay comics like The Kids in the Hall's Scott Thompson would go out of business overnight if the word "faggot" was verboten to gay men. Etc., etc., etc. And obviously, the role of camp comes into play, especially when talking about something as petty as drinking.

When people have objected to something I've written it's almost always been on these grounds: be polite. The unmistakable desire to protect middle-class etiquette is a result not of good manners, but a desire to protect the status quo, to ensure that insiders (whether it's schools, presses, aesthetic decisions, etc. etc.) maintain their control. Are we sure this isn't itself a type of homophobia-- the "behave yourself" and act like the "good" gay man? Maybe someone doesn't want profanity on their website, fair enough. But it's the impulse here to take it farther than addressing it when it happened, removing it, and contacting me privately about it that bothers me. Instead, it was a public upbraiding; this is what happens when you step out of line.

I'm not going to belabor the obvious, at least not here (too late, you probably say).

What shocks me in this particular case, though, is this person has almost everything one could ask for in terms of their poetry career, but suddenly feels the need to take a friendly conversation and use it to meanly clobber a friend who's an insignificant poet with an admittedly obscure blog over the head. There is so much fear about saying anything "negative" that the community shuts down.

I find it shocking when some gay poets claim that they don't believe in criticism, that (as I sometimes get leveled at me) critics are by their very nature just jealous writers. My huge question to these people is, how many people are actually doing reviewing these days? I sure as heck don't get paid for it, nor am I giving Poets & Writers a run for their money in terms of readers. I do it because I love it, and maybe someone, somewhere might discover a work by a gay writer they hadn't seen or considered or get jazzed by discussing the merits of an established poet's recent works. And why on earth does one become a writer, if one doesn't want people to give you their take? I feel writers want to share the excitement of finding what's new and intriguing, and sometimes discussing what doesn't work and why. I'm not sure why anyone who just wants eternal positivity and praise should be a writer, rather than, say, becoming a cult leader instead.

I think that the reason some gay poetry can seem so homogeneous (and I will boast that I've read as much gay contemporary poetry as anyone, from the "big" books to the small ones I'm constantly seeking out, sometimes being one of the few adding to online bookstore's sales numbers) and that that's why the same aesthetic decisions and lines of inquiry can sometimes feel so much the same.

When I first started my blog, I was recovering from a serious, near-fatal depression--I needed to find ways to be more active in my attempts to find community. I think that a lot of people are too cynical about social media. I have found over the years that Facebook, for instance, has enabled me to be friends with people that I otherwise never would have met. Starting a blog about queer poetics also introduced me to a slew of gay men who were now people I was corresponding with. When I was depressed, it was about the same time I published my first book; for some reason, I felt words didn't matter. They didn't yield anything. Connecting people in such an immediate and expedient way restored that faith.

I never expected anyone to read the blog. Why would they? All I was doing was writing about books of poetry by fellow gay men. I quickly found out when I shared an ambivalence about a gay poet that people do read a blog. I know from the Sitemaster that my blog has been read by more people than anything else I've ever written. That's not saying much, but, hey.

When the blog began, almost immediately, I received angry emails from gay men: how dare you criticize other gay men? There's more than enough people already against us. I could talk about which works I liked and loved and was happy to discover all I liked until I was blue in the face, but if I said something negative, it got all the attention, emails, comments, etc. Rarely did some of these responders want to discuss the specifics of a particular criticism if there was a criticism in a review, but instead wanted to talk about what a "negative" person I was being. Regardless, for me, open discussion has always been a good thing.

To come full circle, for what it's worth, I said a lot of good things about this poet who won't now talk to me. I felt though the need to make myself transparent, and thought that it would be more conducive for myself and the queer community, whatever that is, to provoke and get a more genuine conversation going.

Over the years, I have found out a number of things. Once I made an attempt to read all the Lambda award nominees in Gay Male Poetry--I corresponded with the poets who were up for the award. It shocked me that many of them said they hadn't read any of their competitors' books. Wasn't anyone simply curious? Instead of criticizing one another in a circa-1970's style circular firing squad conversation about the pros and cons of minorities "reclaiming" slurs like the F-word, why don't we encourage everyone to support our gay literary community by genuinely buying, reading, and actively and energetically discussing the works?

Needless to say, as if it bears repetition, how much I am dismayed that someone who I've talked to over the years, sent emails to, received emails back from, talked about other poets with (the same poets I wrote about publicly) but would just cut me loose over a dumb joke that might as well be gathering dust in the eight-million- gay-men-have-used-variations-of-it hall of fame.

I don't think that's the crime though. In past emails he said that he wanted to hang out with me at AWP, but he said, jokingly, it might "hurt" his reputation. If one wants to talk about a degrading, demeaning, and inappropriate "joke," one might start there. What did I do that I'm a risk to someone's reputation? I kept a blog documenting my opinions about gay art. (And I buy all the books by gay poets myself. Only four times in three plus years did I receive a copy, and even then, I always made sure to buy yet another copy to support the press.)

The fact that an unknown poet like myself could pose a threat shows how bad the situation is. I've always wanted to be a part of a community that provides checks and balances to one another--why else write about other books? Anyway, sorry if I've inconvenienced anyone's reputation. To paraphrase Scrooge, perhaps I should just be de-friended and decrease the surplus population.

Happy Holidays!

On the Lambda Literary Awards, Saeed Jones, Aaron Smith, and Glenn Sheldon

2011-12-02T18:10:00.005-05:00

Dear Mr. Richard Labonte,

I recently read a mass email that you sent out, saying that you extended the December 1 deadline for submissions to the annual Lambda Literary Awards. You reported that you would be contacting publishers who you thought had worthy entries. There are three poetry books that I feel need to be entered. I am afraid that because they are chapbooks and not full-length that their publishers might feel reluctant to enter them. Chapbooks are often marginalized and often unfortunately seen as merely a gateway to a full-length book. I feel that they should be considered as a self-contained product. That's why I believe Sibling Rivalry Press, Winged City Chapbooks c/o. New Sins Press, and Rocksaw Press should be contacted. They each produced a fine chapbooks that I feel could easily become a finalist. The three chapbooks include Saeed Jones' "When the Only Light is Fire," Aaron Smith's "Men in Groups," and Glenn Sheldon's "Biography of the Boy who Prays to the God of Foreheads." Please don't marginalize chapbooks. (If Frank Bidart's chapbook "Music Like Dirt" can be a finalist for the Pulitzer surely these chapbooks could be at the very least considered for a Lambda.) Immediately below are my microreviews of these works.

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Much anticipated, Saeed Jones’ chapbook When the Only Light is Fire lives up largely to its hype, particularly the first half. Stand-outs include the personae poem “Kudzu” (“And if I ever strangled sparrows/it was only because I dreamed/ of better songs”) and “Boy Stolen Evening Gown” (“I waltz in an acre of bad wigs.”) His deftly compressed series of poems about the murder of James Byrd, Jr. act as an affirmation and a successful extension of Lucille Clifton’s famous work, “jasper texas 1998” Who could forget her line: “I am a man’s head hunched in the road./I was chosen to speak by the members/of my body.”? Here on his own terms, Jones writes with a similar defiance in “Jasper, 1998: I”: ...”but I speak/(tongue slick with iron)/but I speak/in the language of sharp turns.” His very few less successful poems deal with bad sex, jilted lovers, dark lonely nights. There, he ditches his technique, strong line breaks, sharp turns of phrase, for baroque setting. Take the poem “Room 31”: “Cigarette smoke/is the smell of the last couple here,/the ghost of their stains/still/on the sheet,..” More of a sign of youth than anything I bet, these minimal, disposable scenes will be replaced no doubt by more earned and honorable sadness. Regardless, don’t miss out on this exciting debut.

Saeed Jones' When the Only Light is Fire is available through Sibling Rivalry Press.

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I was not a fan of Aaron Smith’s first book Blue on Blue Ground. It felt canned and amateurish. (“There’s a different kind of loneliness/in the city, one of thousands of people rushing away/...and streets that at night are forbidden like desire.”) Over the years, I’ve been reading his new work online, and have been awed by his transformation into one of our more accomplished comic poets. One of my favorites is his inspired rewrite of Berryman’s Dream Song 14, “Life, friends, is boring.” Here’s an excerpt from the poem called “Open Letter”: “Your choice of socks is boring. (So is the way you walk!) You eat boring bagels with butter (not cream cheese) and your breath reeks with boring, boring coffee and morning stink.” Not only here, but in a number of other places in the book, he proves himself to be the master of the parenthetic expression, using them to provide an odd, inspired sincerity. The closure of the poem “Hurtful” reads: “...I hate you/more for: That you can eat French fries/and not exercise.That everyone you let/be close to you has to need/you. Strangers gawking/because you’re radiant (and you are radiant!)” By far, my favorite poem in the book is “Diesel Clothing Ad (Naked Man with Messenger Bag)” which is essentially an ekphrasis at heart: “So what if the woman’s hand reaching/for the bag pulls the bag/back and we see his dick,/that one ball hangs lower/than the other,that he shaves them. So what. So what..." The poem continues to use stanza breaks, spacing, and anaphora to embody the motion of the bodies in the actual ad. The only criticism I have is his unfortunate use of the second-person from time to time. Smith is too gentle a poet to succeed in such a control move. You can feel him overextending, which results in a cuteness and an unsuccessful sadistic gesture. We don’t want to live out his occasionally frivolous clichés. From his poem “Lucky,” Smith writes: “Who knew they’d punish you for knowing/your turquoise shirt went perfectly/with black sweatpants and turquoise/Chuck Taylors?” All in all, Smith’s chapbook is full of some of the most inspired comedy of the year.

Aaron Smith's Men in Groups is available through Winged City Chapbooks co/New Sins Press.

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Admirably eerie, at times angry, and other times necessarily sentimental, Glenn Sheldon’s Biography of the Gods of Foreheads freaked me out in the best sense. In this current, troubled moment of history, we often overlook the power of allegory. Only a poet as skilled as Sheldon can triumph over ‘war-worn amnesiac bats.’ The book is divided into six sections, each one revealing more nuance to his inquiry into youth, artistic process, and an abstracted politics. Unlike so many books of poetry, Sheldon refuses to write flat journalism. The book feels influenced by someone like Jeanette Winterson, blending a sort of magic realism with unrestrained metaphor. As Sheldon writes: “The boy’s attic shrinks into the space of this poem, still size of a room with green flourishes of jungle,/industry of generational anarchy./The pages are chiseled...” By the end, the boy finds himself: “Deeper into himself but flying higher, desired/as an image to be stained in glass, he occurs:/epiphany of currency and blood’s sexy blues.” Sheldon’s words are never ‘too fast, too flung,’ His words and the ‘fantastically small spaces between them’ broke my heart-- and mended it, too.

Glenn Sheldon's Biography of the Boy who Prays to the God of Foreheads is available through RockSaw Press.

Reviews of Christopher Hennessy's "Love-In-Idleness" and Jee Leong Koh's "Seven Studies for a Self Portrait"

2011-11-26T16:03:00.006-05:00

Cautious, sometimes overly so, Christopher Hennessy's Love-In-Idleness seems influenced more by the fixed knowingness of Alfred Corn's poems than the loony spontaneity of Wayne Koestenbaum, even if he does seem more invested in the latter. Referencing everything from Nietzche to Linnaeus, from Icarus to Gethsemane, it doesn't take long to realize that "Love-In-Idleness" employs a politics of academic elitism to push his book forward. This isn't meant as a criticism; in fact, quite the opposite--it often grants the book an appealing old-fashionedness. In a poem entitled "A Split Secret," posed as the story of St. Sebastian's lover, you can get the sense of Hennessy's finely crafted verse. An archer hits St. Sebastian with an arrow, which causes his lover to remark on his beloved's physical body. The lover pontificates if the martyr is beautiful "Even now?/Even branched/with arrows, skin bleached/but with a constellation/of red puncture ticks/Yet so little blood...And martyr is an ugly word--/a split secret, a coward's thumb.” In another poem, “Ghost Boy,” also ostensibly sincere in its intentions (perhaps even autobiographical?) Hennessy writes to his father: “I’m left imagining a grim-faced child pressing the ghost/of his palms against the glass/a boy who sees the rumor/of his future in the black glass.” Surely, if you talk to older gay poets, many would tell you that they felt compelled to embed their writing with classical and Biblical allusions. Bias against gay material allowed, to an extent, for them to tell their own unique story as long as they affirmed that they weren’t going to ditch canonical touchstones in the process. Now, with some civil-rights advancements, the compulsion seems to be a lot less overwhelming. It’s pretty much a choice. And Hennessy proves he's able to use both the past and the contemporary to successful lyric effect. Look at the firm, even if slightly too comfortable, ending from “Icarus on the Moon”: “...I’ll be seizing/ecstasy, a flying wild man—no one’s son./ No gravity. Only libido, my breath causing/new eddies of atmosphere. The moon-so close-/like all things desired, more or less there.” Now admire the truly great final lines to the poem “Blood in the Cum,” which takes the time to define its own title as “the scarlet ribbon/in an egg’s albumen, a mistake of embryonic petals/coiled at its center.” Hennessy might occasionally approach his material in a tentative way, but his poetry reassures us that he has the ability to travel where he chooses next.

Christopher Hennessy's "Love-In-Idleness" is available at Brooklyn Arts Press.

***

One of the most ambitious and overlooked book of this year is Jee Leong Koh’s Seven Studies for a Self Portrait. Even though presumably autobiographical, don’t expect any mushy confessions here. As good as anything I’ve read this year, Koh’s poems are curiously distant... but in an enticing and exciting way. The true excellence of the book is contained in a long poem called “A Lover’s Recourse,” a homage to Roland Barthes, stretching for forty-eight pages, written entirely in ghazals. Tracing his relationships with lovers, the father, and his own writing process, Koh never resorts to easy theatrics but to open-ended imagery: “Love is not a house. It is always on the move. What does a lasso have in common with a house?” And: “What is this world?/A ship or a shiptearing rock?/And does the lighthouse look anything like the sun?” Like his peer Rigoberto Gonzalez, he regularly inserts a peculiar word to upset what may seem like a more ordinary image (although there is a more ferocious velocity in Gonzalez's poems.) Here Koh does it with the word “itch”: “I hope perfection does not lie in quietness./A poet builds his house in the fading of a bell./The fading is a fault but silence is an itch./Most endurable, Jee, is the unrelenting bell.” There’s a somberness that pervades the book that feels inherently risky; its confessions are checked with measured images and an eerie equanimity. His obsessions are clear and multi-layered. You don’t have to look much further than the trope of the pigeon, which moves consistently through the long poem and the book in general. From “A Lover’s Recourse," the following lines appear: “He does not wish to choose between a dove and a dove./In Jee’s ribcage contracts the muscle of a pigeon." In a shorter poem with a strategically overly familiar title “The Pigeon,” Koh reaches the graceful end : “This is not a rat ironed flat on the road. This is/a pigeon. See the white fluff still not completely blackened. Affixed to the ground, the animal ruffles the light./Hard to tell the difference but it is a pigeon./Hard to tell the difference but it is still bright.” In yet another completely different poem, ”Unless,” Koh travels toward his obsession: “Every face is a closed door. Every tree is a curtain./The smallheaded pigeon brings no message to me./The bright air gives way but doesn’t give entrance.” Intriguingly unobtrusive and obsessive at the same time, Koh’s book grasps the sublime as any other book I've read lately. I truly hope it’s found by more critics as the end-of-the-year retrospective lists are announced, and prizes awarded. This book deserves attention.

Jee Leong Koh's "Seven Studies for a Self Portrait" is available for purchase at Bench Press.

On Rigoberto Gonzalez's New Collection "Black Blossoms"

2011-10-30T17:13:00.003-04:00

I believe the dead listen to us. After his poetic mentor, Ai, died, Rigoberto Gonzalez wrote quite movingly about her: "Even in my third book (which I dedicate to her memory) I can still detect traces of her influence--we shared a love for the dark and disturbing narratives and gave them homes on the page."

Never mawkish in his elegiac statements regarding Ai, Gonzalez has always appeared respectful and honorable. No doubt Ai appreciates his prose tributes, but I strongly believe what would matter most to her is the development of his poems. With Black Blossoms, his new collection, Gonzalez has performed the ultimate tribute: he has made his poems better than hers. I have no doubt she is still listening and learning from his work.

As an undergraduate, I was introduced to Ai in my first poetry workshop. I remember reading Cruelty and The Killing Floor and being shocked and relieved that someone could write about lower middle-class people with such determination. Ai truly strove to have an empathetic imagination and risked the potential failure and the predictable criticism that comes with it. I can still remember various Ai dramatic monologues: a boy who has just murdered his family; an aborted fetus; James Dean. Over the years, when I've returned to the poems of Ai, I've grown more ambivalent about her work. It's too easy to say that the poems are sensationalistic, exploitative. It is one of inevitable dangers of writing persona poems; it's a pretty boring knee-jerk liberal criticism--you're exploiting a certain class of people. However, truth be told, sometimes Ai did just that.

Gonzalez's poems, though, offer a generous and urgent corrective of her occasional limitations. Through his extraordinary use of figurative language, he reveals that a wholly self-conscious aesthetic can triumph over a flat, journalistic one. To defend Ai, I think that her desire to tone down the language was most likely the belief that understatement works best when dealing with sex and violence. By rarely, if ever, challenging this assumption in her work, her books become somewhat repetitive. Through what I see as honorably defying Ai, Gonzalez reveals the breadth and depth of what a personae poem can do.

One of Gonzalez's recurring trademarks is his obsession with similes. Due to spiritual reasons, I've always been suspicious of them. Why not accept the fact that everything in this universe is on some level uniquely its own? To imply that something is "like" something else is to ungenerously take away from the thing's specialness. But in Black Blossoms, Gonzalez's book, which consists largely of persona poems, the figurative language is used less to compare but to show a different side, a nuance, or a shocking oddity of and within the same thing.

In the poem "Flor de Muerto, Flor de Fuego," Gonzalez exhibits this masterfully. Here's the opening. Pay particular attention to the two similes embedded in the rhetorical questions:

        Cempoalxochitl. Marigold. Flower,
the scent of cold knuckles delights you, as does

         the answer to death's riddles:
What's the girth of the hermit tongue once it retreats

         into the throat and settles like a teabag?
What complaints do feet make when they tire of pointing

        up and fold flat like a fan of poker cards?

Or take notice of the unexpected similes in the poem "Floricuatro":

Every birthday you eat a year off your mother's life--your mother plucked
in parts, petal by petal like the schizophrenic daisy, stares down as her heart

bubbles out vulnerable as yolk.

The list could go on indefinitely. But I must add one last one which is the opening of "The Mortician's Daughter Dies Each Night":

"When my father laughs my stomach scatters in the wind like hay."

Teabags, a fan of poker cards, a schizophrenic daisy, yolk, and --yes!-- even hay. What an odd and fascinating list of things juxtaposed in a single book of poems. By inserting these sort of images in a book that deals significantly with the grotesque, decaying bodies, political injustice, and violence, Gonzalez's relies on similes to create an intimacy with the reader (you might not understand mental illness, but you can imagine a daisy!).

At the same time, he pushes the reader away by forcing them to remember that all they're doing is reading a poem with strategically artful language. The self-consciously slippery poetic language acknowledges that these personaes, these "scoundrels" (to use Ai's word) cannot be captured. They haven't found a home in life or on Gonzalez's pages. He's acknowledging them in a supremely graceful and ethical way. Also, he gives the grotesque, the tragic some sort of relief. Rather than affirm the horrible with a comparison to a grotesque object, he offers the reader a kind of momentary solace; he doesn't want to add insult to injury.

Another prime example of how Gonzalez achieves this is through metaphor in the poem entitled "Mise-En-Scene." After the title, it appears "after Lizzie Borden." Then the actual poem begins:

You are not a woman
   you are not a ghost,
or the shrill that makes the neighbor's hounds abort.

You are not a space between buildings,
   not wind tunnel or porthole
through which the indigent cat slips in and out of its coma.

You aren't the hermetic door with its back to the street,
   You are not the center.
You are not the interruption of the window

surprising the postman as he skips the tin mailbox once more.
          Every person in this house has died.
You buried your mother with a plum pit in her throat...

This poem is merciful. Gonzalez allows the narrator of the poem acknowledges his own failure in his need to "capture" Lizzie Borden. Gender is but only one of ways Gonzalez does this, creating a wonderful, peculiar jitteriness

You are not the dress
       that opens from the outside like an iron gate,
you're not the stupid woman

with her finger shoved inside her mouth.
       When she goes up in flames
she will melt into the fruit bowl.

You are not the fire, you are not the bowl.

There's what I like to call a discursive lyricism operating in Gonzalez's poems. Although the poems are long-lined (at least much more so than in his last book, Fugitives and Other Strangers), Gonzalez interweaves just the right amount of figurative language with a necessary talkiness in the speech of these tragic personaes.. To limit, as Ai did, your characters' speech into "chopped" prose, isn't fair--they deserve the space, a large enough space, to explore their thoughts, motivations behind their unsavory actions. Paradoxically, as the personae of Marisol in "The Mortician's Bride Says I'm Yours" says, "Sound is death because it's /irretrievable and every time I speak I die a little more."

If it wasn't sacrilegious to insist, I would say that through the splendor of Gonzalez's poems, he allows them to live once again in every delicate, precarious way they deserve.

Rigoberto Gonzalez's Black Blossoms is available for purchase at Four Way Books.

On Gay Male Despondency: A Square-off Between James Cihlar and Alex Dimitrov in The American Poetry Review

2011-10-22T21:05:00.012-04:00

James Cihlar

Alex Dimitrov

In the September/October 2011 issue of The American Poetry Review, and only a few pages apart, there are two poems which deal with the issue of gay male despondency. With the frustrating, even if successful, queer movement, exhaustion and depression occur in both the private and public realms. Very rarely do gay poets make this emotional state the subject of their poems; its something that occupies the edges. These days, it could be seen inaccurately as total resignation and not empowering. This is unfortunate for gay male poets who are in desperate need of new subject matter. Going to your first drag show, or seducing the football jock, can only go so far.

Alex Dimitrov's "Darling" and James Cihlar's "The Projectionist" approach the topic in different ways, and with varying degrees of success. The latter poem is the superior of the two; it not only has a more sophistical stance and curious tonalities, but it also avoids the sometimes overly-familiar feel of the former (a shame, since the poet in question there has produced much more interesting work).

Dimitrov's poem seems to use the subject of gay male despondency as a predictable pose rather a line of inquiry. Pose and artifice are not necessarily bad things-- they can be invigorating-- but here it needs a boost. "Darling," I'm tempted to tell this poem, "have a Red Bull."

More on that later, but first, the poem with what you could call the more "effervescent" despondency(!). Deadpan is a pretty hard thing to do well. And perhaps, it's impossible to deal with the subject of despondency at all without some sort of use of this device. The title of Cihlar's poem "The Projectionist" is an obvious key on how to read the poem. The projectionist refers not only to the limitations of the escapism of movie-watching, but also a psychological coping mechanism. Here's the opening:

Is it pathetic to see the insides outside?
Matthew Arnold thought the sea was sad,
then he realized it was him.

I don't know how the world works,
how a friend becomes a stranger,
what a murder looks like on the face,

a hurricane. Brush lightly as you pass.
Sometimes an age just ends.

The poem is essentially a litany. What is exciting is the way it doesn't overwork the typical strategy of creating (what the writer thinks is) a sneakily revealed emotional crescendo resulting in a far-fetched epiphany. The poem just seems to "happen," much in the same way he declares life does. With grace, he constructs a strategically blithe inevitability:

...Celluloid culture
becomes cellular culture.
Anita Hill's college students

didn't know who she was.
We all get ahead on someone else's pain.
Once you start rewinding,

you have to go back to the beginning.

Unforced and unhurried, the poem's refusal to judge human nature, while at the same time, offering a comic disappointment toward what it entails, guides the poem to its charged closure:

We all get ahead on someone else's pain.
Once you start rewinding,

you have to go back to the beginning.
Everything we touch becomes infected.
I won't end like that. No rosebud,

no I don't give a damn, no lovers on the beach.
Dial it back to Paul Henreid in a white dinner jacket.
It's good to feel generous.

Does the "generosity" refer to the actual mission of his job in that he is in charge of offering these transcendent moments? Because he is the one who changes those reels, "dialing" the footage back night after night, he gives audience after audience the pleasure of projecting their desires upon these characters. They gain by the rote nature of his profession, making his job as something other than benign drudgery, but a useful, unappreciated "generosity."

To a certain degree, the poem's casual open-endedness allows for a mystery, something special created in what could be viewed as a despondency a gay writer sees in the world.

In the same issue of American Poetry Review, Alex Dimitrov's poem "Darling" is showcased. The title immediately announces that the poem will at least be in part about queer affectation. This could be a fun idea, if the poem lived up to that promise with inventive word choice and less middle-of-the-road syntax. Dimitrov begins with a clear yet uninspired image of gay male despondency: "The days fall out of your pockets one after the other./Soon you'll need a new jacket with tougher leather/..."

The five (unrhymed except for the first) couplets that make up the poem continue in the same vein. We're given the stereotypical images of loneliness: "Soon you'll bring/the old books into your bed and sleep easy/and alone. It must be December again." Unfortunately, the laconic, deadening pose never reads as if its in tension with anything else--diction, imagery, larger philosophical inquiry, tangents, etc. This causes the poem to feel self-satisfied. It revels in its own despondency, but unfortunately yields only what feels like an unproductive self-romanticization.

A little affectation is not necessarily a bad thing. Having lived in Western New York for seven years, I actually crave it--there's only so much rural earnestness I can take. However, the poem doesn't own it. And if you're going to draw from the old and oft-used well of "winter" and "sleep" and the like, it would be good to drop that bucket down deeper, bring up something with a little more depth of cold and dream.

Here's the closure of his poem: "With heavy black boots/in a calm procession of darling and honey--they walk up and down the narrow streets of your heart." (Does any gay man use the word "darling" anymore? It oddly dates the poem. You feel the poem was written by someone in the Violet Quill Club, not the Wilde Boys.)

It's a shame, too. Dimitrov has written some really good poems. I happen to like "Passage" which appeared in the July/August 2011 issue of Boston Review. He manages to reference both Hart Crane and Orpheus in a way that feels contemporary and sincere. It's difficult to do. I hope his book, Begging for It, which is coming out from Four Way Books, avoids the sort of phoniness in a poem like Darling. Or else wildly polishes the idea of artifice and phoniness until it burns. Dimitrov has the talent to do it-- let's see if he does.

On Michael Montlack's Debut "Cool Limbo"

2011-09-25T18:02:00.013-04:00

You’ve got to applaud a gay man who dares to sport a retro cover on his first book of poems. He’s willing to give away his age. Once you acknowledge the past, in a campy way or not, you run the risk of fumbling towards a dim nostalgia. Michael Montlack’s first book of poems, Cool Limbo, avoids that fate, revealing a giddy sophistication. His book is laid-back and silly; its best moments, of which there are more than a few, is showboat-y... and with good reason.

The issue of age comes up more than once in Montlack's poems, disclosing a preoccupied self-awareness. Take the poem "A Golden Girls Prayer." It begins:

so that in old age I might...

ever coordinate my outfits
(complementing even those of roommates
and random houseguests passing through)

The best lines include specific allusions to the TV show. How can you resist this couplet? He writes: “so that[in old age] I might.../just once say, 'I'll be out on the lanai.'"

Not only does he inquire into old age, but Montlack also fiendishly investigates our childhood toys. He has a lot of fun in the poem "If Hello Kitty Had a Mouth":

Maybe she’d just meow.

Or maybe she’d still be mute after all.
Perhaps give us the silent treatment
out of sheer spite.

She could become a feline AIDS activist.

What’s great about a bunch of Montlack’s poems is that they are largely a series of unapologetic over-the-top comic riffs, jokes. He thankfully doesn’t balk at his own pettiness. Once in awhile he seems to lack the confidence in his conceits and turns to unnecessary pathos for closure. This “Hello Kitty” poem should accept itself as joke, exactly what the title promises. I wish he didn’t feel the need to humanize her situation. Why anthropomorphize at the end in order to give the poem a false gravitas? He writes:

And sure, she might secretly want them
to beg her not to leave.
But she’ll know she’s done right
when they so cheerfully say nothing,
nothing at all.

There’s a plethora of punchlines in the book that makes that minor flaw essentially disappear: “...the best beauty is mute” (“Peter Berlin”); “Will you/be the mosquito netting/draping my honeymoon bed...” (“The Slip”); “So take a course in Arts & Crafts,/buy a glue gun or sewing machine./The support staff has been promoted!/Your court gesture is now the Queen.” (“’Uh, didn’t you get the memo?’”); “My tough leather headbanger well hid the lace/only I glimpsed as she kept my straight face.” (“Running with the She-Wolf.”)

He also manages to enliven some tropes that I thought were long beyond resuscitating. I feared what was in store with a poem entitled “Bringing Straight Friends to a Gay Bar." Knowing all too well the familiarity of the convention, he doesn’t pause to creatively reveal that such an act “is like showing photos of the trip to Africa/you will never be rich or brave enough to take./Here are the gazelles, you could say, pointing/at the horny bar backs.”

Like any good comic, you can feel Montlack's impatience, his restlessness to move onto the next gag. What makes the collection impressive is his panic to keep us laughing is wholly unnecessary, yet makes him and us fully energized.

Michael Montlack's Cool Limbo is available through NYQ books.

On L. Lamar Wilson's Poem "Dreamboys"

2011-08-14T16:21:00.013-04:00

One of the wonderful things in writing on this blog only about gay writers is that I can delude myself into thinking that the poetry world is containable, manageable. It’s similar to working on an anthology: if your topic or formal issue is narrow enough, you can exhaust a group of writers you want to include. Exclusion can have its benefits. Because there are only so many gay poets with books, it gives me time to surf the web and read literary magazines, searching for poets who are still emerging, who I believe will grow to become even more exciting presences on the poetry scene.

Almost all of the poets I review on the blog I have never met. I don’t even know what a gay poet looks like. L. Lamar Wilson, who as far as I can tell doesn’t have a book yet, is someone I know only through his poems. And as time goes by, I have no doubt he will have in his own way a career as substantial as Eduardo C. Corral and Matthew Hittinger, two emerging poets who have recently had their books accepted by significant presses.

One of the poems that first brought Wilson to my attention was his poem “Dreamboys.” This poem first appeared in the literary magazine Rattle I was truly impressed at the way that he rewrote Theodore Roethke’s "My Papa’s Waltz" with an energy as compressed as Yusef Komunyakaa or Heather McHugh. In the first three tercets of the poem, he manages to reference both the Roethke poem and the musical Dreamgirls, adding an explicit queer matrix to the former through the latter.

The setup, as I read it: the narrator’ brother was apparently once conflicted toward him as a result of his gayness. Now that his own son is displaying queer mannerisms, he’s forced to do “penance” and provide a protection that he never afforded his brother. To further complicate this family dynamic, in this "waltz", both brothers, straight and gay, come to the painful realization that they are both limited in the ways they can parent this young queer child. Here’s the opening:

My nephew waltzes beside his father,
The man who was the boy who made Faggot!
A reason not to flinch. His neck a merry-

Go-round, our boy rears back, waves
His pointer in my face, jabs his other fist
Into his fist & wails: Watch yo’ mouth!

Watch yo’ mouth, Miss Effie White!

So much has been written about the thematics of Roethke’s poem: is it purely a sentimental image of a somewhat drunken father and son dancing or is the celebration a disguise for abuse and alcoholism? If you should choose to read Wilson’s poem as an answer to that debate, the poem straddles a similar ambiguity.

Here, though the opposite side of the continuum is not violence, but the knowingness of one’s ineffectuality. The nephew’s showboating causes the narrator’s brother to be transported into the past. As Wilson writes: “In my brother’s eyes, I see/The pain of remembering when I crooned Don’t/Tell me not to live. Just sit & putter. Life’s candy/& the sun’s a ball of butter” (i.e., lines from the showtune "Don't Rain on My Parade" made famous by Streisand and, to a new generation, Glee's Lea Michele). At the same time, the narrator and his brother “applaud” yet at the same time “feign” laughter at the nephew’s queer antics.

The young gay child is also given more agency in this rewriting of the Roethke’s poem as as he sees “beyond the veil shrouding/His father’s eyes. Realizes this isn’t/How brown boys win favor.”

The young queer child is given the scruples to see through the romanticism and into the unfortunate realities of race and sexuality. What is especially rewarding in this poem is that the gay narrator admits his own helplessness in the matter—he’s as lost as helping his brother’s son as his brother was with him. The nephew “Searches/My eyes for answers.

In this time when nearly every gay male couple seems to be thinking about adoption, there’s an understandable refusal to address gay male frustration at our sometimes ineffectuality in being able to protect or reach a younger generation of gay men from the very hurts we once experienced. Through the bleak closure of this poem, Wilson begins to address it. You don’t need to go much further than the poetry spotlight on the Lambda Literary website to see other examples of such exciting complexities from L. Lamar Wilson that will build an undeniably great first book.

On Craig Moreau's "Chelsea Boy"

2011-06-29T17:20:00.009-04:00

Craig Moreau’s new book of poetry Chelsea Boy feels as if it's nostalgic for someone else’s nostalgia. Moreau knows that he isn’t part of the heyday of wild sex and drugs which once embodied Chelsea. This distance doesn’t stop his overdetermination to see himself as a descendant of a missing subculture. It creates a weird disconnect in a book that wants to see itself as edgy and contemporary.

For a pretty much straight-up first person party boy memoir, the most surprising aspect about Chelsea Boy is that it is so sexless, almost virginal. This may be the most disappointing difference between the past and present iconic Chelsea Boy figure. With AIDS, Chelsea Boy has become frigid. In his prose introduction, Moreau writes that there were two guiding questions for him in his writing: “What is a Chelsea boy to you? And, do you consider yourself a Chelsea Boy?” Having read Chelsea Boy, my greatest fear is realized: it means a lot of preening, a lot of talk and not much action.

What’s the point of being beautiful if you’re not going to offer a piece of yourself to everyone who wants? Or conversely, what's the point of coveting a Chelsea Boy if he's not going to spit in your face? That’s the central problem with what Moreau admirably labels as autobiography: he’s a nice, resepectable guy. He’s pretty careful in his dealings with other men and not very mean. I always cringe when you ask someone what his worst flaw is, and he says, “I’m too giving.”

But Moreau is too generous. He doesn’t have enough fun with unabashed narcissism. Instead of giving us vain, indulgent narratives about sex and drugs –two impossible, thankless things to be writing about—he creates a series of poems entitled “Chelsea Boy Survival Guide” which contributes to the structure of the books. He's so sweet he makes the time to pose questions of etiquette. He lets the music rest.

Here’s a look from “Lesson #2: How to Build a Puzzle for a Broken Heart”:

Go to K-Mart and look
for however many pieces
will fix your broken heart.
(I recommend 1000+, ages 15
and up, preferably with a
Thomas Kincaid painting.)

Purchase a 40-ounce beer,
one with a name you don’t want
to remember, written in bold
lettering and sounds vaguely
Latin American.

This passage is emblematic of the writing in Chelsea Boy. At best, it's inoffensive and serviceable. The modest wit hides potentially intriguing subject matter, namely, a more explicit dialogue between the past and present Chelsea Boy figure in gay culture. It’s odd that the lore involving the Chelsea Boy needs to be transformed for Moreau into self-help. At points, Moreau feels as if he transforms into a queer Tony Robbins. This move toward self-help feels as dated as the origin of the Chelsea Boy figure itself.

His contrived literary allusions perhaps are a result of his anxiety about his subject matter. Rather than reenergizing the sex-and-drugs tropes, he feels compelled to give pedestrian tributes to literary giants. Here's a stanza from "O, Whitman":

I love you for being civil war peacemaker, above so many
boys at their last hour, not for your love of their sculpture
or even their spirit, but for their being—-leaves of grass
burnt by fire, and how I wish to lay aside you, both
as ash and apple.

When he does write about sex, as in the poem Rawhide 54, he uses obvious metaphor:

The water dish outside
is only for dogs--and thank gods
you're here. Where else
would I go to get a drink
when I'm not wanting to drink
cranberries, but still needing to take
my collar off and feel bitter
on my tongue...

In spite of its sincere intentions, Chelsea Boy ends up committing a fatal error: it gives sluts a bad name.

Craig Moreau's Chelsea Boy is available through Chelsea Stations Editions.

On Michael Klein's "then, we were still living"

2011-04-27T19:16:00.011-04:00

In his new post-9/11 book of poems then, we were still living, Michael Klein creates the most involving mis-en-scene I’ve seen in a long time. Rich with various intellectual inquiries, the book could arguably be seen as a commentary on the potentialities and limitations of the mediums of film and poetry.

How does one ethically portray unmistakable tragedies and their aftermaths? In fact, you could claim that the poems’ deliberately blurry focus, their poetic abstractions, reject the rigidly staged domestic narrative with its concrete particulars.

It should be no surprise that I find Klein’s obsession with light as playing on the same field Stanley Kubrick did in Barry Lyndon. The film—my favorite Kubrick--is known for the director’s choice to use only natural lighting. In an early poem, "The playwright," dedicated to Mara Irene Forbes, Klein writes: “She was talking about the mystery happening to/the artist as necessary light.” Light as poetic process, as an unforced ars poetica. You might even call “Day and Paper,” dedicated to Jean Valentine, a complimentary theory of art. According to this poem, Klein's philosophy was engendered at an artist’s colony in Vermont. As Klein demands: “take that excruciating/collapse of light over day/over paper/and use it/when it feels most useless.”

The book’s closure ends with two poems, both revolving around light. In the final poem, Klein offers what a brilliant poem should: an opening for more. I don’t think too many poets have the courage to offer as much white space, a welcoming of light.

The poem “More light” features the protagonist (oh! How I want to say Michael Klein himself!) engaged in remodeling the kitchen. The banality of the act encourages the narrator to feel ephemeral joy in domesticity. With self-satisfaction, lesser writers would end the poem there—not Klein.

...indiscriminate joy finds us
and enters us

how it however briefly
releases our whole pasts
as a swimmer...

mild astonishment
around the eyes
ready to take the dark

as breath, as if to say
he'd seen the other world
less terrifying and with more light than this one.

The line break between “dark” and “as breath” conjures up several unexpected meanings. The narrator’s generous decision to extend the simile of the swimmer in such a way allows him to transform him into a heroic entity (“ready to take the dark”)—almost like a modest superhero. At the same time, the dark itself morphs into breath, refusing the dark/light dichotomy. This breakdown offers plenitude: breath, “the other world” as well as the maintenance of this one, and yes, even “more light.”

Light figures into a good number of poems in other ways, even unexpected ones. In the fun poem “Five Places for Sex,” which is written with a disproportionate number of end-stopped lines, making the poem look like a crude movie script, emphasizing the action—alas, even this formal strategy does not limit Klein’s gentle, perhaps understandably sentimental, philosophizing:

In the pornos, people don’t think about life

and death as it pertains to sex

They think that life is the empty room between cum shots--

cum shots—ticket shots—like streetlamps that come on

the same time every night.

Almost shocking, they are

if it weren’t for them lighting up the dark boulevard.

The strategically odd syntax and line breaks once again creates possibility: is the mundane—symbolized by the streetlights—sexualized (“that come on”)? If streetlights are alerted with regularity as much as a body against against another body, is Klein normalizing those come shots, and--hence-- porn? Is Klein using the streetlights as a comparison with the cum shots, or the empty room (a metaphor for life, the “empty room”)? Does it matter? Isn't it ultimately significant that sex is being spotlighted, taken out of the night, but not against it either.

The awkwardness of sex (and words) can render figurative language troubled at best, even if enjoyable, providing something like light. Like grace—something that Klein’s book offers in serious quantity.

Michael Klein's then, we were still living is available through GenPop books.

On Ed Madden's "Prodigal: Variations"

2011-04-17T11:38:00.030-04:00

Poet Charles Jensen has always impressed me with the way in which his own work invests in different sorts of beauty. If you should read his work in magazines or his debut, First Risk, you can’t help but feel an aesthetic restlessness that serves him well: from narrative to lyric; domestic to meta-fictional; or even drawing upon Stein to destabilize the definitions of commonplace words.

It’s no surprise that we should be excited with what he will bring to Lethe Press as their new poetry editor. Lethe Press’ book designs are always stunning, their content always charged and necessary. I can't think of an author who wouldn't be happy with their product.

I love that Jensen chose, as a first book under his tenure, one that is completely different than his own style(s) and content. For me, this is always the true mark of a superior editor, and one Jensen should be commended for. I think he’s doing a great job already.

Jensen's first choice is Ed Madden’s Prodigal: Variations.

It is a very respectable, polished collection with more than reasonable aims: trusting incredible line breaks and wonderful sound to re-energize commonplace tropes of a gay man’s attachment to an abusive father, the rural life, and the Bible with, of course, a tortured ambivalence. It upsets me that it will receive much less attention than Michael Walsh’s weirdly anorexic The Dirt Riddles, which deals with many similar themes. Will Walsh's book stay more in the public eye than Madden's because it is distributed by a university press over a smaller, predominantly gay one?

You can feel the steadfast sincerity that Madden brings to his poems. It’s a hard thing to fake. At the same time, his words never fall into the pitfall of sounding merely earnest. Here’s a fairly emblematic selection of openings. From “Rock collection”:

His uncle taught him how to find them—
after light rain, best time to walk

the rows, find the flaked flint
in dark dirt, cream or pink stone,

a scrape or point in the wet furrow....

From “The secret gospel”:

The sound of rolling stone pushed back the darkness:
a grinding, as of grain and grit inside a mill.
The room filled with light; a man
stretched his hand toward another,
causing him to stand, the shroud unwinding.

From “Ghazal”:

I sing old hymns while you drive.
Neither of us believes them anymore.

What do you make from a piece
of driftwood found at dry lake?

The wind whistles through bare limbs,
a song of renunciations.

There’s nothing wrong with these lines. A lot of the poems in Prodigal appeared in great national magazines, as they should have. Madden is setting himself up to be a master stylist, which he succeeds in doing. He pushes the material as far as it can go in terms of craft. There's no denying the enviable style, a content of its own. Here is the end of “Rock collection”:

He left a cigar box of rocks in the closest—
arrowheads, fossils, an agate he’d found

in a mound of wet gravel, before
it was dozered into the dirt road,

glitter driven in the ruts, the ditches
lined that spring with bundles of pink phlox.

The passage is amazing--the fun of the word "dozered," for instance. Without any qualifications, Madden has an excellent ear for the combination of sounds and letters. I happen to own Ed Madden’s debut, Signals, and there seems to deliberately be nothing here, in terms of content, as tricky as “Roots: An Essay on Race” or fun set pieces like "The Mutter Museum." This smaller scope allows Madden to focus on sound, and this decision is a bold choice. It seems that with this book, he’s trying to master his rhetorical skills, struggling and succeeding with music, through material as rich as the soil he describes with careful, repetitive precision.

Meticulous yet never fastidious, Madden's second book of poems Prodigal: Variations takes the familiar trope of rural gay son-father relationship and turns it into something we can't live without. Madden writes: "The crow is a bruise/on the green hedge, it shines." That's how I felt about this book: painful, illuminating, necessary spectacle.

Ed Madden's Prodigal: Variations is available through Lethe Press.

On Reflecting about the Young Gay Suicides

2011-03-12T10:32:00.003-05:00

When you’re gay and young, there are words you cannot say, or at least, may be afraid to say, or taken on additional meaning when someone else says them. Faggot, queer, homosexual, cocksucker, gay, etc. etc. Because of the dangers of these words, you are inevitably impacted as a writer. Vocabularies are charged, dangerous, if not fatal. You cannot “happen” to be subjected to these loaded words. You are these loaded words. You cannot “happen” to be a gay poet. You are a gay poet. To pretend you “happen” to be a gay poet is essentially to be still in the closet, dealing with your own self-hatred.

*

Once I came out in college, I joined a Speakers Bureau in which three open queers were sent to classrooms to tell Human Sexuality classes what the "homosexual lifestyle" was like. Whenever I went to speak, I admired the way the other speakers said how their lives had “got better.” They gained a significant other, went to more parties, and developed a greater number of friendships.

When I came out, I said, it was strange, nothing much happened; I was still waiting.

How long have you been waiting? someone asked.

Four years, I said.

The class asked, but didn’t your life get better?

I said, not as far as I could tell. Nothing much happened. Maybe I missed something.

Once one of the other speakers took me after class and said that if I couldn’t at least pretend to be more well-adjusted that I should stick to help making floats for the next pride rally.

*

My freshman year of college I joined a speech team—you had to perform what would amount to a serio-comic after-dinner speech in various classrooms, competing against other students. There was someone who ranked you on content and delivery ---three different judges, three performances. The only reason I participated was you traveled on the weekends to other colleges. Translation: I didn’t have to accept that I had no one to hang out with on Friday and Saturday night.

My speech was about not being "The Ideal Male." It was all a huge self-deprecating joke about my weight and effeminate nature. Not once did I ever use the word gay. Or homosexual.

I remember the first time I competed. I knew it was well-written speech, even if unfinished, and I predictably forgot an entire section, making it far shorter than the time requirement.

I was a disaster. I didn’t care about my scores. I just wanted to go home—I was already planning what I would do as my two other roommates went to Bible study and then came home and watched The Blues Brothers. They did this every weekend night. I can still remember huge patches of that movie by heart. Ask me sometime to recite it to you.

But something weird happened. I won the tournament. I was shocked. I thought there was a miscount until I kept winning tournament after tournament. I ended up a national champion in After Dinner Speaking for the American Forensics Association. Look it up.

After the season ended, a speech coach from another team came up to me and said, “Next year you’re not going to be able to play yourself. That is the reason you won after all. It was a smart move. No doubt you knew most of the judges would be gay. How could they deny you a trophy based on your content?”

“But I never said I was gay,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said.

*

A few week ago a friend came up to me and said, I heard all you teach is gay material. I was upset and went into my office and examined all my syllabi. Here are the books I’m using in my classes this semester:

Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line by Sean Thomas Dougherty
This Noisy Egg by Nicole Walker
Red Fort Border by Kiki Petrosino
Teahouse of the Almighty by Patricia Smith
The Tunnel by Russell Edson
Recyclopedia by Haryette Mullen
AM/PM by Amelia Gray
The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso

And two anthologies:

Seriously Funny edited by Barbara Hamby and David Kirby
Great American Prose Poems edited by David Lehman

As far as I know, none of these anthologists or writers are gay/lesbian. I felt the need to emphasize this fact to my friend. “Look,” I said, taking out my syllabi, “Here’s the evidence I don’t just teach gays and lesbians.”

“Evidence?” my friend said, “Evidence for what?”

*

In the wake of these recent publicized suicides (though, unfortunately, it may be a misconception that the problem is simply getting worse-- and not that it's been this bad for a long time) Dan Savage now has an important project titled "It Gets Better." For this project, members of the GLBT community, both famous and not-so-famous, make videos telling about how their lives have changed and improved since their youth. The project is intended to give young GLBT people hope and offer the idea of a better world to those contemplating suicide.

Does "it get better"?

Ask me now. Even for me, chubby, geeky, I have found happiness with my partner, and I found love.

Things aren't perfect by any means, but they sure as hell are better than they once were.

And despite all the words and all the stupid shit gay people hear in our lives, that's enough reason for anybody to live.

Due to my need to work on other projects, this blog will be on temporary hiatus. That's why this is a repost.

On Jeremy Halinen's "What Other Choice"

2011-02-10T19:06:00.002-05:00

In 2010, there weren’t very many better books –gay or straight—than Jeremy Halinen’s What Other Choice, which deals with that taboo topic: explicit gay male rage, sometimes evolving into queer-on-queer cruelty.

If there’s any justice (and I believe there is), Halinen’s book will be nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.

One of an incredible number of stand-out poems includes "My City," which admirably deranges the gay male-best female friend trope. The average poem develops a rocky yet fairly congenial three-way triangle between a gay guy, the aloof male that he's dating, and his female BFF. It ends on an earnest, not sincere, passage where everyone acts reasonable—a quality that queer art and gay male life needs to avoid.

What I love about Halinen's poem is its gross intensification of the queer rage towards the woman for intruding in his affairs. Smartly, Halinen focuses only on the rage. There is no desire to offer expository material; he ditches the narrative arc, if not the story itself. Immediately with droll gallows humor, we get truly shocking, unbridled rage:

When I think of what I know about Spokane,
I think of beating my boyfriend’s best friend
in the Safeway parking lot one evening,

between a Honda Accord and a cart return.

The poem turns on a dime at this point and any preceding comedy dissipates. Jealousy becomes a desire for literal and deeply disturbing violence. The gay male is so angry that his fantasies overstep the boundary of already worrisome imagined violence into a desire to rape, rhetorically, and physically. This poem functions as a critique of gay male misogyny— something demanding of insight:

…It was a sort of
violent surprise
that a bloody nose could turn me on

so much I’d almost wish I were straight enough
to take her home...

Or in an even more aggressive statement later in the poem:

My knuckles reveled in the moment, in the wetness
I’d always known she hid in her.

The connotations in these lines accumulate and amplify one another: “turn me on,” the disgust with the female body (the verb “hid”), and, of course, “to take her home.” To take her home and do what? The inference is unavoidable: he even wants to invert his homosexuality to become a misguided sexual aggressor.

By offering minimal characterization in the poem, Halinen suggests that the problem of gay male misogyny doesn't entirely lie in a particular psychology of a particular homosexual. Instead the hatred may in part lie in the pressure that gay men face often having been denied love so long and sometimes only in particular private spaces. It may seem like a slight extrapolation, but that the imagined psychotic violence happens outside--often where gay male couples are not allowed to show their affection to one another. The fact that his boyfriend and his best friend could engage in an intimacy that he couldn't necessarily reifies his anger. His violent fantasies are pointedly located specifically near the type of grocery story where a lot of heterosexuals display open gestures towards their own nuclear family. Is it really any surprise that in these confines a homosexual male may have to check his own jealous anger? Yet Halinen still evokes the element of surprise by taking it to violent extremes. Misogyny is equated with language that might equally describe a gay bashing.

I’m always suspicious of gay male poetry that alludes to classical mythology or the Bible; gay men need to find their own metaphors rather than seeking ones they know will lead to a perfunctory affirmation of their own education. Yet Halinen’s collection is so strong that when he ends a great poem “Or” with reference to Odysseus, it feels downright necessary. In "Or," a possible definition of gay-on-gay sexual violence comes to the foreground. The poem’s opening: a gay male narrator is waking up from being “cast/in alcohol-and-GHB-/induced sleep.”

And then the charges are disclosed: the narrator's trick is “still/unaware of what/he’s done, blood/and shit and lubricant/and what he left/ to mark, as if it/were his...”

We never know the exact context of this sexual encounter, and perhaps it doesn’t matter, but it does trigger something much greater than a victim narrative. Instead of seeing his experience as a justified sob story, a narrative about the fear of HIV, the narrator uses this experience as a way of exploring an odd, warped, careful, and perhaps correct philosophical explication of the events.

So original with warping common gay tropes, the poem does what more queer writing needs to do: it tells and doesn’t show. In a world where only just recently, with the repeal of the military's statute, gay men can begin to tell. Which is good. If we want to save our young gay brothers (to the best of our ability) from killing themselves, we need to start telling and and telling and telling some more.

Through a rigorous speech act, the poem opens up a space for the gay male mind trying to make sense of the confusing and tenuous boundaries between sexual aggression and coercion, desire and desperation.

The narrator’s engagement in such issues results in profundity, not one of conclusiveness, but of admirable exasperation:

...as if his flesh

had been a hook,
barbed, that had been,

by me, caught,
as if my body

had been the trap,
the transparent net

lurking
in the fish’s mouth,

and he’d been lucky—
and what other choice,

finally, did he have—

The narrator’s empathy is a horrible thing. In this intellectual inquiry, he decides on a “compassionate” reading of the events. That, though, doesn’t keep him from taking a certain glee in how he’ll anticipate his revenge, something he doesn't need to set in motion, because it already is. The narrator realizes that after the gay man pleasures himself from his transgression (“...yielding no doubt,/an elation stained/with sorrow), he will suffer genuinely sustained loss:

...no less

stinging, loss
of six men—

by Odysseus
as he passed, safe

himself, through
Scylla and Charybdis,

unaware of his ship’s
forthcoming wreck.

Herein lies the narrator’s justifiable nastiness (a word meant neutrally, not pejoratively): he conjures the perpetrator’s loss to be more than a minor one.

Through the literary allusion, the loss becomes an epic one with all-consuming psychic after-effects for the trick, who now may feel distant from those consequences. That’s why the allusion works: it’s embedded as part of the “telling” of the poem’s argument rather than “showing” unnecessary erudition on part of Halinen.

I could happily write about so much more of this book. I would make the claim that “Where There’s a Fist, There’s a Way,” “My Cock Is Climbing Mount Everest,” and, perhaps my favorite, “Note,” prove to be the best poems in an already amazing debut.

Jeremy Halinen's What Other Choice is available through Alibris.

On Rane Arroyo's "White as Silver"

2011-01-31T15:40:00.028-05:00

One of my literary heroes, Rane Arroyo, who died last year, gave his last reading at SUNY Brockport, where I teach. It was obvious that he was sick, but he made the trip with his talented poet partner Glenn Sheldon. (Within my next few posts, I’ll be talking about Sheldon's new chapbook Biography of the Boy who Prays to the God of Foreheads.)

In an earlier post, before I struck up a correspondence with Rane, I talked about how joy permeates his poems. In his eleventh book of poems, White as Silver, published after his death, it is obvious, if you read the poems autobiographically, and I do (and I’m sure Rane wouldn’t have minded), that the joy, even during sickness, was still present and thriving. Here’s an excerpt from “Even Tricksters Get the Blues”:

I have been sick all day and finally my body and house
are quiet. Is not quintessential a word that hides quills
to avoid questions? Saw a slow show about Whitman’s
vexed aging, read Ritsos’ last bitter poems and wondered

if Anna Akhmatova was forced to use her fire poems
as kindling in her last years? How quixotic I thought
Death was after I read the Romantics—before AIDS,
war(s), my friends stolen in broad midnight. Better

that I eat this banana bread my lover made or think
about not thinking, but not like in Buddhism. I do not
think this world is an illusion; I have eaten mangos,
have been transparent in a sudden cloudburst, and have

watched the doctors strap me down so I would not
loosen tubes by movement...

As in my other post about Arroyo, I felt queasy about offering a critique of his poems. Sometimes it’s better to leave the work alone. I offer this post then as simply an encouragement to sample his new book White as Silver. As in the work of Agha Shahid Ali, my teacher, Arroyo’s poems in their own way do very little wrong. Arroyo is a genuine writer: he wrote, and he wrote some more, and then even more. For me, I’ve always seen the prolific as the most generous: they want you to read them, and they expect you to pick and choose whatever you want; they allow you the opportunity discover the masterpieces among everything else. Rane never rested on his laurels. He just kept on going. That was one of the most amazing things about his trip to SUNY Brockport: he was sick, but that didn’t stop him from delivering hands-down one of the best performances from a poet I have ever seen.

Let's end this post, appropriately, with Arroyo’s “Poem To a Poem Written to One of My Poems”:

We agree there are poems
and scars. It’s that old
who came first: the chicken
or the cha-cha-cha? I’ve yet

to meet “innocent readers,
although once someone
wrote to ask me if I remembered
marrying her in a past life,

and I didn’t, don’t. What is
written astonishes because
most of the world escapes us
Then we find a poem and

a scar. Sometimes, there is
only one of them. I am “wrong”
often and why I have poems
and not just one. Like scars.

Rane Arroyo's White as Silver is available through Cervena Barva Press.

2011-01-28T19:27:00.001-05:00

Why the Creative Workshop May Need a Formal Mid-Term Examination

2011-01-17T10:36:00.013-05:00

Reading published works has always taken a backseat in creative writing workshops.

I’ve done more work this past year to combat that than I ever have in the past. I've been free to make the undergraduate creative workshop into something other than a congenial, even if critical, discussion of other students’ written work. I can't imagine doing the same routine for thirty or so more years.

Even if you assign a book or two or three, what pervades the classroom is a desire to get to what students see as The Important Stuff: talking about their poems.

Who can blame them? I love to hear people talking about me: why should students be any different?

In order to stop that tendency, at the beginning of the course little to no creative writing work will be assigned. It will almost all be reading.

For the first half of the semester, all we are going to essentially be doing is reading published work in class. These books include Rane Arroyo's Buried Sea: New and Collected Poems, Haryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary, Russell Edson's The Rooster Wife, and Ketjee Kuipers Beautiful in the Mouth. (Two of those four are published by BOA--I believe in supporting local presses as much as possible.) David Kirby and Barbara Hamby's anthology Seriously Funny is also a required text. Again, there will be little to no creative writing exercises.

When it's time for midterms, they will be taking a two-day midterm. (I teach Tuesday and Thursdays for 90 minutes.) They won't like this, but they'll be going through the same hoops as students to do in their literature courses. Part One of the midterm will consist of the following:

1. defining vocabulary words such as "enjambment," "stanza," "litany," "metaphor," etc. etc.

2. matching poets and titles of book to lines of poems discussed in class

3. offering a short passage(s) of a poem and instructing them to write about particular formal strategies in relation to the content

Prior to the exam, students will be assigned three poems that contain examples of skill sets that I consider integral to writing good work, and will want to see employed in the second half of the semester when we do have "normal" workshop. They will be assigned to write their own poem, emulating one of the assigned poems in terms of their formal strategies. For example, let's say a poem contains a litany and anaphora; they will be forced to do the same.

Of course, people could argue this limits the students. But I believe that undergraduates are sometimes offered too much freedom and never learn to master anything definite. These are the skill sets I want them to engage. Each of the poems will force a student to "play" with their own work in a rigid way with consequences (ie. their grade on the midterm):

1. being able to create an idiosyncratic detail. This means to be able to:

a. using strong nouns and verbs
b. draw upon the five senses
c. demystify abstractions through concrete detail
d. don't equate description with simply illustrating gross situations (ie a messy dorm room, a friend puking, etc. etc.

2. following the odd trajectory of their mind through

a. making imaginative leaps from one "thing" to another "thing" (ie Robert Bly's Leaping Poetry)
b. vary syntax in intriguing, even if flawed ways

3. experiment with the line as opposed to the sentence

a. break the line in ways that create a sense of simultaneity, surprise, delayed disclosure, etc.

We will go into the computer room and they will have 90 minutes to complete the poem. I think this part of the exam forces them to also reflect about their own writing process. I guarantee that most students complete a group of three to four poems for workshop in less than 90 minutes. Here, they will be forced to slow down their process--this is an important thing. The reason why we spend so much time as creative writing teachers in saying "show, don't tell" is our students are never mandated to pause. Abstractions are automatic writing. Taking time to catch your breath is a good thing.

It also forces them to rewrite. If you have 90 minutes to complete a poem and your teacher isn't going to let you leave until class is up, what else do you have to do?

They also get to watch their classmates, how other poets are working. Comparing yourself with someone else is natural. They may realize their own work habits need to improve.

It gives me a way to see exactly where my students are at and how successful or not I may be as a teacher. If a lot of students don't do their best, I need to adjust my pedagogy.

I know some creative writing teachers may say that this criterion prioritizes a certain type of poem. Which I say yes, it does. What creative writing teacher doesn't believe in the necessity of abstractions? However, any creative writing teacher who believes that more than 30 % of the students can immediately identify the difference between abstract and concrete language is delusional.

This is my new experiment for the semester.

On Shane Allison's "Slut Machine"

2011-01-04T08:26:00.012-05:00

Shane Allison’s Slut Machine forces a question: can the writing of formal verse by a queer poet function like an act of homophobia? Is that iambic pentameter, blank verse, rhymes –all those formal elements- nothing more than a prissy way of “cleaning up” the messy emotionalism of poetry, forcing it into a cramped and tidy closet?

But like any good radical, Shane Allison wants it all, to have it both ways. If the "traditional values" of all those formal structures build a kind of closet, then the risk and energy in those same poems ultimately break free of that constriction.

Look at “Sonnet in Orange Avenue Projects”: “I got jealous when he tried to get under Makeeba’s skirt:/Boyish hands up girlish thighs./No one cares about sexual harassment in the projects.” Determinedly shabby, barely organized, Allison’s sonnet has no time to leisurely walk through the restrictive formal transitions---there’s too much at risk. At the end of the poem, Allison writes: “He promised not to tell,/But kids break their promises like pencils in the projects.”

One of my brilliant former students and I had extensive conversations about issues of race, gender, and publication, explaining her great frustration. When a white gay poet deals with race, he may sometimes receive more accolades than an African-American who deals with similar subject material. For certain critics, the white poet is seen as brave, dealing with topics writers of his own race often ignore; he’s applauded for being brave and risk-taking. At the same time, the poet of color’s material may be obliquely dismissed as predictable and expected. The underlying current being: what else is he going to write about? That may be one of the reasons why white writers still sometimes receive better jobs, awards, and fame than their peers of color. Perhaps even more importantly, certain critics still often respond more positively to poets of color who create austere victim narratives. It gives the appearance of being charitable.

But here’s a funny, lacerating excerpt from Shane Allison's poem “It’s a Boy.” What is remarkable is the way that it simultaneously seems to embrace and reject through humor the traditional victim narrative:

Polyester shirt with the butterfly collars:
His afro glistened with the coconut grease under the canary-yellow sun.
You look just like your daddy, boy, Ma would say
She fed me Skinner’s fried chicken.
Okra and mashed potatoes instead of strained carrots, peas.
Instead of baby formula, I got Tahititian fruit punch in my bottle.
I pulled a hot iron on my thigh;
It took the skin right off.
I don’t remember Ma scream for help.
Did the house smell like burned flesh?

At one-hundred-and-thirty pages, Slut Machine can feel a bit overlong, especially since Allison relies too often on litanies with uninspired anaphora. Sometimes those poems stretch over two or three pages. And like a good number of gay poets, Allison gives us at least two found poems comprised of gay personal ads and bathroom graffiti. Unfortunately, you can’t always tell the difference between the found poems and the poems that deal with his own sexual inquiries. Here’s some lines from “Love & Romance,” taken from the personals:

Massive muscular guy wants sensual bottom sissies for autumn
Uncut suck off
Dominant jock seeks 2 straight white boys
Well-hung good-looking hot bottoms for
Enthusiastic daddy suck buddy.

In flatness of language and understatement, the poem doesn’t differ much from “Tongue”:

My tongue purple from grape soda
My tongue newly pierced
My tongue forked and wicked
My tongue down the thick shaft of his veins
My tongue through a glory hole

Yet even with more similarity than difference, Slut Machine’s overindulgence is welcome. Rather than creating a nimble 48-64 page book for the average poetry contest, Allison jettisons those expectations for something more personal: an enjoyably vast, even if occasionally somewhat monotone, inquiry into racial and sexual politics.

In fact, you could claim that Allison’s decision to take up space simply to take up space is a political move in and of itself. With so many publishing houses ignoring the writing of queers, why not talk about whatever you want for a long as you want, given the opportunity?

I had never heard of Shane Allison, who has written six books of poetry. And I’m more familiar than many with very small queer presses. It’s unfortunate evidence of the marginalization of the gay publishing world. More people should hear about poets like Allison. Shane’s obvious self-satisfaction, his refusal to shut up, is nothing short of inspirational.

Shane Allison's Slut Machine is available through QueerMojo, an imprint of Rebel Satori Press, or by clicking on the book photo at the top of this review.

On Nepotism, Low Self-Esteem, and Compelling Manuscripts

2010-12-14T13:55:00.005-05:00

The thing about writing a bad review of someone’s poetry is they might not like you.

But for me, I always think that when someone has something negative to say about me that they might be onto something. There is no greater comfort than when someone doesn’t like you for the right reasons. When my partner of fourteen years stops me in the middle of an argument and says, “When you fight, you’re crazy and insincere,” I know that he knows who I am. I love him even more. He loves me for the right reasons.

*
Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were also right. No one really likes to read their own reviews. They want either a thumbs up or thumbs down.

*

A friend of mine invited me to her class to talk about my published memoir.
I then told them about a bad review I got. My memoir is written in short vignettes, ranging anywhere from a mere paragraph to ten pages.
“One review said that the vignettes became monotone to a degree and ended the same way too often,” I said.
“Did your low self-esteem get even worse?”
“If you truly have low self-esteem, you don’t really notice. Your life is already a piece of shit.”

*

The personal note “Very strong. Compelling ms” could simply mean, “Thank you for paying your submission free. Send again next year.” Or it could simply mean it’s a strong, compelling ms. As three hundred others are.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

*
Anyone who denies happiness or legitimacy to someone who got their book published through their contacts is mean. Everyone knows somebody who knows somebody. It might even be more difficult to get published if you have a lot of friends. People know you’re going to be there no matter what. What’s wrong with publishing your friends? Who else are you going to publish? Your enemies?

*

I know it's hard to believe, but I hate cynics. I’ve been going at this poetry publication stuff for a long time. And all I know is that there are a sizeable number of legit contests. And you don’t always need connections. And you can just write good poems and good things can happen.

One of the most exciting times in grad school was watching a poet named Eliot Khalil Wison’s career grow into something big. He had no connections. He always wrote on and off, but never sent things out. One day he got bored and sent a few out. They were immediately accepted, so he wrote more, and those got accepted. Everything was happening so quick, and then he completed a book, and got that accepted, and then he won an NEA, a Bush Foundation Grant, and a Pushcart—

He didn’t know anybody. He just wrote the poems.

On Dante Micheaux's "Amorous Shepherd"

2010-11-23T17:30:00.024-05:00

In the debut book of poems Amorous Shepherd, Dante Micheaux offers an elegy to pioneer African-American gay poet Reginald Shepherd. Micheaux tells him that "you deserve/something radiant...," and then adds, "...if I am to be true/to my aesthetic, elegies should/be more epistle and less ode." It's an intriguing if confusing sentiment: Does Micheaux see it as an act of kindness to letter-write to the dead, so the spirit doesn't need to respond right away? What can you do if you are the listener? Ignore the speaker or offer a quick, spontaneous, and most likely insufficient reply?

As in the case of the great Shepherd elegy, entitled "Goodbye, Curmudgeon," and others, Micheaux does his best work when he resists his friend Shepherd's influences: Shepherd's haughty lyricism and reliance on Greek myth.

One of the best poems of the book "And If I Break You Are You Mine?" shows off Micheaux's writing at its best. Michaeaux writes: "If you were here, it would be different/somehow; I wouldn't be held back,/separated by the ocean..." With the most subtle of line breaks, the placing of the "somehow" on the next line, Micheaux transforms what could easily have been a banality into a comic exasperation and a tragic disappointment. In the final of the three stanza poems, Micheaux declares: "I'm just an ordinary demon outside/your door; it will be me or another,/so I'll ask the question again." The line break that initially separates the door from the more general outside becomes a threshold, intensifying the threat. These subtleties are sometimes abandoned when he deals with broader historical material.

At the same time, I was also troubled by an elegy to 15-year-old Lawrence King, who was murdered for being gay. Micheaux creates the "The Boy in Highheeled Boots" as an ode: "If you want cute boots, you have to buy/the expensive kind, you said--/and I bet that's where you've gone; to a shoe store in the valley..." This opening leaps to a comic childhood memory of a friend who answered the door in his mother's "mock-croc pumps." The poem then comes full circle with an ending too conclusive in its sentiment: "When your classmate let the bullet fly,/you clicked those $30 knock off heels./Now you're back where you belong." Micheaux seems too eager--perhaps understandably so-- to put the events to rest. Perhaps a letter, the sheer messiness of that sort of composition, would have created more satisfying ambiguities than an overdetermined ode with a far too pat ending for the event it describes.

Sometimes these more tepid moves infest his poems that deal with Greek myth. In "Pentheus Up in Drag," Micheaux writes: "I'll show my mother how to be a queen./How to sit exemplar. How to decree with a nod or a slow blink." You can feel the impact of J.D. McClatchy or Richard Howard--it's difficult for young gay writers not to succumb to the lure of inserting mythical poems into their books. When those older writers did it, it was almost necessary; it gave the queer poems a sense of legitimacy. By asserting classical allusions, the poems anchored themselves into the History of Literature and made them more defensible. Now those choices seem at times less erudite and more a failure of imagination. Why not invent our own myths?

Often Micheaux excels when dealing with explicitly sexual material. In the poem "Analingus," the speaker pontificates about how he learned fellatio: maybe he "...watched his addict mother being coaxed/into it by a john or learned it the way/most things are passed down: in secret." What ultimately becomes a seedy aphorism has a low-down enjoyably gossipy feel. Another strong example is the poem "Daddy-O", dedicated to a Venus Thrash: "She's real smooth/parquet smooth, smooth like danger,/Great Uncle Chooly/smooth, brown skin on a/backside smooth...creeping through the/window smooth,/panty-dropping smooth..." Here, he relies on silly rhythms for fun and a liberated coherence, instead of more general thematic inquiries.

Micheaux's better poems make me want to read more. Whether Micheaux champions the ode or the letter is insignificant, his chief focus should be on establishing his own myth-making, as he does in his elegy to Shepherd. In one of my favorite passages in the entire book, he tells his dead friend how he feels: "...you lived/in Florida and, as much/as you loved your quiet life,/you died in summer/and I just couldn't be bothered,/and it was The Panhandle no less,/and you shouldn't have been there." Direct yet blithe, Micheaux offer tough-love in a more poetic way than any of the hijinks of some overexposed Greek gods ever could.

Dante Micheaux's Amorous Shepherd is available by clicking on the book image (above) or through Sheep Meadow Press.

On Jason Schneiderman's "Striking Surface"

2010-11-06T11:28:00.038-04:00

With so many people scurrying for an English department job, and creative non-fiction vacancies the most available, you see a lot of poets padding their resumes with unimaginative memoir. Not very many applicants truly move beyond the idea of creative non-fiction as autobiography. It’s easy to make the useless claim that “good” creative non-fiction blurs boundaries, or even worse, that the genre can’t be truly defined. It’s an embarrassment to hear someone claim that they don’t want the label to pigeonhole them or ask why allow your art to be categorized, packaged, and then ignored anyway.

One of the many wonderful things about Jason Schneiderman’s second book of poems Striking Surface is that it single-handedly provides new areas of exploration for the genre. I can imagine that some people may say the book is too prosaic or frigid, but those people would most often be the typical anti-intellectuals, afraid of anything that doesn't offer plot and characterization. The irony is that the most heartfelt poems in Schneiderman's book are the ones that don’t deal with trademark autobiographical subjects, or in fact, avoid the blatantly personal altogether.

It’s easy to identify the collection’s best poems: “Susan Kohner (Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life),” “Pedophile,” “Carmen Miranda,” “Symbolic,” “First Mouse,” and “I Love You and All You Have Made.” His gutsy elegies to his dead mother try to recast the elegy as schtick —an ambitious, but unsatisfying, project. I do hope another poet, or even Schneiderman, continues that intellectual endeavor. I love when characteristically pejorative words find new meanings and reveal unexpected value.

It’s always annoyed me that the term "creative non-fiction" was most likely invented as a way of marginalizing scholarly writing. You can still hear the underlying arguments from the artistic camp: we academic and create writers may be both engaged in non-fiction but artists don’t rely on that theoretical gibberish-- what those hacks study who can’t get their own art published. We. Are. Creative.

In the excellent poem "Susan Kohner (Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life)," Schneiderman analyzes the issue of race in the film. The four-sectioned poem begins with the guiding question:

If it’s true that what it means to be black
is inextricably bound up with what it means
to be white, that whiteness is ultimately
a byproduct of the production of blackness,
then what should I have learned
about Sandra Dee and Lana Turner?

As the poem continues to evolve, the poem becomes more special for not only what it includes, but what it chooses to omit. The poem doesn’t rely on a more predictable analysis of white liberal guilt—its self awareness comes through in the faux self mockery of lines like these:

I’m a bad person, always wanting
the expedient, the practical, the easy.

At the end of the movie,
when Sarah Jane comes home

for the funeral, and the flowers
are everywhere, and Mahalia Jackson

is in full voice, I want Sarah Jane
to go-to get back in her car,

to go be white. She fought so hard
for it. It seems like she ought

to get to keep it.

It would be incorrect to see this poem as one that could be as effective if written in prose. Or as one too many critics claim about more discursive poetics works: “it’s prose broken into lines.” As if brokenness is a bad thing, or that brokenness can’t be of value still. Here, there is more than a singular instance, of the break advancing and complicating the line of inquiry: the “wanting” signifies an attachment to the camp element of the movie; the intriguing cross identification with race and gender; a simple advance of the fun machinations of the plot; and a smart disclosure of his own complicity in the subtle, aversive racism. Furthermore, the line breaks intensify the complications of these feelings with the sense of simultaneity it creates.

Schneiderman’s poems show a way of subverting that limited way of thinking, producing poems that are a hybrid of the artistic and theoretical. Perhaps no other poem in the book does this better than “Pedophile.”

It deals with a narrator and his presumably graduate school friend who are engaged in an uncomfortable political discussion: should a thirteen-year-old boy convicted of a crime and given a life sentence, tried as an adult, be able to have legally consensual sex with a grown man?

His friend argues yes: “...if killing someone is the kind of adult action that makes you an adult, then what the hell is a blow job.”

What is remarkable about this poem is that it doesn’t merely present what some people may see as an intellectual-gamesmanship argument based on a hypothetical, but, as the poem continues, does something completely different. It reveals the paranoia gay men internalize involved in talking about the subject--the self-censorship created in talking about certain subjects, precisely because of homophobia. If a gay man mentions the word, there is always the fear-- even by gay men themselves-- foisted on them through years of bigoted false accusations, that their gay identities will be conflated with such an act.

As the poem evolves, the narrator forces himself to disengage from the valid intellectual inquiry. He can’t help to give in to an unethical and unkind pathology of his friend. Irrationally, the narrator struggles with the idea, even though there is absolutely no evidence for any sort of assumption, that his friend, Kevin, may be broaching the subject for personal reasons. The tragic-comedy of the self-enforced queer anti-intellectualism is summed up in the deadpan closure: “I’m also wondering how I can get out of this conversation. There’ll be no more coffee dates to discuss Derrida, at least not with Kevin.”

In the second section of the book, eight different elegies to his mother, Schneiderman goes for a sense of artlessness, which he may understandably be trying to convince himself is a form of emotionalism. He writes, “...I can grieve/you forever. But I wanted you here in the middle/of my book. Not a complaint about what I lost/or what it feels like to lose it. But you. Your smile./Your denim dress.” Schneiderman’s implicit exasperation with being unable to capture "the real" through the mundane feels a bit false. In these elegies, he seems to be trying too hard to create a counterpoint to the more intellectual endeavors in the book.

I prefer the parts of the elegies which are deliberate schtick—a simultaneous embrace and dismissal of dealing with the emotional matters at hand. Here’s an ending to one of the sections: “...I Asked if Dad knew/you were punishing him, and you said, No,/he just thinks I’m lazy. And I said, “How’s/that working out for you, and you said, Just fine.” With these particular elegies and the consideration of Schneiderman’s strengths, the punchline offers a tragic-comic resolution to the grief, or at least temporary relief, and what more can you ask for, when speaking to ghosts? I think when he relies on pure wit, the desire to entertain, he honors the ghost of his mother much more effectively than when he attempts to coddle her spirit with mushy sentimentalities—a deliberate false, even if sincere, artlessness.

Aside from those minor problems, I can say that Schneiderman’s book is one of the most exciting I’ve read this year. And I hope that award committees which often find themselves wary of intellectualism for intellectualism’s sake, find that the act of rigorous thinking may be the most sincere kind of emotionalism of all.

Jason Schneiderman's Striking Surface is available by clicking on the book image (above) or through Ashland Poetry Press

On Jericho Brown’s Poem “Contrast”

2010-10-25T02:45:00.009-04:00

One of the exciting things about being a critic is when you find a poem that you’re enthusiastic about by a writer you had previously dismissed.

This is what recently happened to me with gay poet Jericho Brown.

Without qualification, I can say that I thought his book Please was one of the most over-hyped books the year it was released. I admittedly had nothing more than a tepid response to what I felt were its fairly ingratiating representations of bad sex and domestic abuse. The book’s organization of the extended conceit of a recorder seemed mannered, much in the same way as Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris, which brought her to fame. With Brown, you have the recorder (poet) playing songs (poems); with Gluck, you have the gardener (poet) planting flowers (poems). People seem to like books that flaunt their cleverness in guiding them through easy metaphors, and their obvious transitions, and definite circular natures. Brown does it through his musical allusions and self-consciously labeled and organized sections reflecting that of an album.

People got really angry by what I wrote, and I wasn’t exactly sure why the defenses were so stern and automatic, especially since I had said some equally unfavorable things about other poets.

But I shook it off, and tried to read the book again—maybe I had missed something. I did, and still couldn’t find anything that really engaged me. The poems seemed at best fine.

Now much time has lapsed. In a recent period of boredom, I found myself surfing the web for a gay poem that I could focus on. I came across a poem entitled “Contrast” that appeared on Verse Daily. It first appeared in Copper Nickel. I almost ignored the poem because its title is at best forgettable.

But the first three couplets intrigued me:

I want to relax, but it’s April.
My students cross and un-

Cross bare legs as if one must
Take a turn holding the other

Down. Earth opens into 18...

Combined with the metonymy of the legs, the line breaks amplify the actual physical motion of the bodily restlessness. The raw sexuality submerges and emerges itself in a fun lurid way. And then it allows itself to transform itself into something larger with fierce lyricism. Here’s the rest of the poem:

...Earth opens into 18
stems, each limb, every stem,

Battling the next, all erect
Enough to win. I live with

disease instead of a lover.
We take turns doing bad things

To my body. We share a house
But do not speak. Both eat

What I feed. Spring is a leg
And can’t be covered. One day,

I was born. That was long ago.

This admirably compressed lyric manages to revitalize pretty familiar tropes: the seasons, suppressed sexuality, rebirth through its sardonic sense of humor: referring to spring “as a leg,” the welcome nastiness of “doing bad things/To my body,” nature’s erectness not necessarily achieving its full virility, but it being enough “to win.”

And the final two lines are near perfect. The penultimate line takes on two different charged meaning depending on how you read it. You almost (and I do) want to insert what could be seen as an implicit “for” between the beginning and ending fragments so that it “And cant be covered for a day”—claiming that nature, sexuality can’t be repressed. This reading accentuates the final line as more of an unreserved declaration, a claim devoid of longing.

This offers a bold ambiguity in its closure: is the birth being longed for or is it being boldly rejected? And if one is to read this as an AIDS poem, one cannot help but applaud the poem for managing to offer these two seemingly contradictory feelings. It subverts the idea of AIDS as simple disease, and perhaps, even of an empowerment, a defiant rejection of the sentimentality of rebirth.

It’s funny, when I read this poem to a friend, he asked me if it changed my opinion of his book. In keeping with the spirit of the poem, I told the truth: no. The past was not born anew; it was still the past. All I can say is I hope this is the future of Brown’s new work, because I like this present.

Jericho Brown's Please is available through New Issues Poetry & Prose or click on the book image (above) for more information.

On Reflecting about the Recent Young Gay Male Suicides

2010-10-10T11:54:00.009-04:00

Blobby, or, Some Random Notes on Critical Reviewing

2010-09-29T10:29:00.005-04:00

How many poems in a collection need to be excellent to receive a favorable review?

Three? Seven? Four excellent, the rest between good and middling? Six very good, one excellent, the rest irrelevant? One that looks like it could be near perfect (with some specific revisions), the rest irrelevant? Or just some proof, no matter how meager, of potential to create a perfect verbal object?

And what about a first book? Should the criterion be different? Could it be for a debut that all you need is three that look like they could be excellent (with some revisions), the rest irrelevant?

In high school, some kids wanted to be actors or doctors or policemen. I wanted to be a critic for Consumer Reports: the idea of testing all the incarnations of a Something was irresistible. It was as if you had the chance to complete that divine task: finding the Platonic Ideal of Something.

I can still remember the day my partner and I both had different reactions to the movie Happiness. It was when we had a long-distance relationship and we both saw the movie in our respective homes. I had finished first, and told him it was a masterpiece—a word I think anyone uses with embarrassment. He was just finishing the film, and told me to hang on. He put the phone down and I could hear the dialogue to the closing scenes—I imagined him experiencing the ending for the first time, and I became incredibly jealous. “So what’d you think,” I said eagerly, to which he replied, “I hated it.” Usually we agreed, and when we didn’t, we could certainly understand why. I said, “Let’s play a game.” Scene by scene, we went through the movie, each of us watching the film from the beginning, stopping and starting, citing what we liked and what was an imperfection. It turned out we agreed about everything. Everything he didn’t like, I didn’t like. Everything I liked, he liked. For me, the sublime moments eclipsed anything weak; for him, the weaknesses deflated the sublime moments. For me, both reactions seemed eerily sensible.

In high school and college, I competed in speech team—you wrote an eight to ten minute composition and performed it in front of a judge who ranked you. Three different times you did this, each for a different judge, and if your scores were high enough, you went onto a semifinalist round. Of course, you wanted to do a good enough job to make it to the finals where you were judged simultaneously by three different judges you never had before. Once I won. I was so proud. My coach looked at my scores and said, “That’s remarkable”—I figured that she meant that all the final round judges had ranked me highest. That wasn’t the case. “You won without anyone thinking you were the best,” she said, “You won because you had the highest average of all the competitors. Everyone else was voted the best and the worst by at least one judge.” On the way home, I threw my trophy in a dumpster across from the school.

My favorite movie reviews are by Pauline Kael, who was once the film critic for The New Yorker. In three different reviews, she uses the word “blobby” to describe a character, and once to illustrate the walk of a dog. That’s become my test for a great critic: can you use the word “blobby” and make it seem like the most accurate, necessary word?

On My Contribution to the Huffington Post "What is the State of American Poetry?" Symposium

2010-09-17T16:01:00.014-04:00

Anis Shivani asked me to contribute to the "What is the State of American Poetry?" Symposium on Huffington Post. I wrote something for him. A week after I gave him my piece, his own controversial article appeared: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/the-15-most-overrated-con_b_672974.html

Here's what I wrote:

When talking about the current state of American poetry, two things must be addressed: gay civil rights and health insurance.

When Proposition 8 came into existence, I wanted to do something. I wasn’t sure what. My partner and I are geeky and agoraphobic. For better or for worse, we like to stay indoors, and aren’t really into marches and parades. We’re chubby, too. Too much outdoor activity and we’re beat.

This is what Proposition 8 says in the federal government’s words: you do not exist.

As a poet, I found that one of the ways to say that homosexuals do matter was to create a blog that focused exclusively on the words of gay male poets. Fight words with words. That’s what I did. I named my blog Pansy Poetics.

I only encountered one problem: gay poets didn’t like me. A good number of them hate it when you criticize their own. And a good amount of the time, I was doing just that.

Some of my experiences with the blog revealed even more explicitly the problems with the poetry scene in general.

Early on, I wrote about one of the most powerful (gay or straight) poets in America: National Book Award Winner Mark Doty. Several of his highly political poems from his book Atlantis will be remembered for awhile, as they should. I can still remember how much reading those poems affected me. My creative writing teacher showed me his work, and I thought, “You can actually write about homosexuals. And make them complicated and beautiful.” And so I tried. He was my inspiration. However, for some time now, I’ve found myself becoming impatient with his almost sole focus on the domestic sphere. With such an emphasis, there’s a curious lack of class-consciousness. It seems his poems are closing themselves off from the outside world and he’s more interested in his excursions with Paul, vacations, houses, and cute little dogs. The political force has all but vanished. If he writes another poem about the wonders of his partner and him receiving a massage, I’ll have a sit-in protest at his Provincetown digs.

I wrote on my blog about my issues with some of Doty’s later poems. Within less than 24 hours, a number of gay poets sent me angry emails. I understood the motivations behind them, the furious questions they raised: how you can hurt one of our own? With all the abuse we endure, do you have to create more?

My answer: yes.

The American gay and lesbian movement is showing signs of returning to life in some aspects—it’s very interesting to see both new and old-school style protests emerging in various parts of the country—but at times the movement can still be frustrating. Obama called for us to push him on certain issues, and we haven’t pushed hard enough. White middle class contentment is still often a major problem. It is well-known that gay activists didn’t marshal their energies soon enough to create a definitive force against Proposition 8. Certain poetries reflect this sort of white middle-class ennui. The Doty Aesthetic reflects this inertia. You could predict our political failures by reading his most recent work, and vice versa.

No doubt in the gay poetry community, Mark Doty’s artistic choices reign supreme. Stanley Kunitz and Richard Hugo have left their mark even on gay poets: white middle-class concerns embedded in straightforward, journalistic narrative. We like to think gay poets might use Cavafy or Frank Bidart or Wayne Koestenbaum as contemporary touchstones, but that doesn’t often seem to be the case. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but when it’s the prevailing mode of queer poetics it’s an undeniable problem. Airing a community’s dirty laundry may be the only way to go to get things riled up.

This past year gay Latino writer Rane Arroyo passed away. He created poems that were every bit as good as Doty’s, but he never received even close to the same amount of national and monetary success. It’s not like Arroyo wasn’t using traditional narrative/lyric modes. Perhaps what blocked that from happening is his overt humor, more incisive and inclusive politics, and lack of self-righteousness. Both Doty’s Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems and Arroyo’s The Buried Sea: New and Selected Poems were released the same year, but Doty’s received all the attention, garnering a Lambda Award win and the National Book Award. Look at an excerpt from Arroyo’s “The Defense of Marriage”:

Sex, but no wedding is the 11th commandment
 for us, legally defined Sodomites, sinners
 in designer angst. One young man in

  psychic Speedos and nerd glasses runs
 on a Caribbean beach looking for any man
 to kiss--but he's too shy to join any group.

  He stumbles and looks up: a UFO crashes
 to land by him. Out come the dead:
 James Dean, Ramon Navarro, Monty Clift,

, Jim Morrison, Rudolph Valentino, Sal Mineo 
James Baldwin, Renaldo Arenas (no, no rest 
for you in my poetry!). It's a family reunion.

  They kiss him--some as lovers, as brothers, 
as friends, as real human beings. Just for 
the hell of it, let's put our Santana to play  

his guitar on a pink yacht while Michelle
 twirls on deck on a tuxedo: suddenly mermen
 bubble up, kissing. Jean rides a dolphin and  

and then looks up: the sun and the moon
 rush to kiss each other. It's the end of
 the world! That's how much power we have.

What’s fun about this excerpt is that there is an explicit naming of governmental discrimination (“legally defined Sodomites”), a generous multicultural compendium of poetic influences, and an unapologetic sincere flamboyance.

It may seem that the argument of the Doty Aesthetic is a silly one. Are Arroyo and Doty really that much different as poets? And I would say my point exactly. I would argue that often any kind of straying from one of the grandfathers of gay poetry causes problems. It’s also undeniable that passive, unconscious racism within the gay community stifles some voices as opposed to others.

Poetry does pay. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant of what is going on. Publications means books means readings mean jobs means grants means fellowships. Means health insurance. You could ask anyone in an MFA program confirmation of that fact. With the job market the way it is, you need at least a book of poetry from a high-profile press to even be considered for a decent job. And I’m probably underestimating what the current requisites are. Everyone is striving to move beyond the current situation fledgling creative writing teachers are in: working part time at several colleges with no health insurance. You want to be hip but not too hip, idiosyncratic but not a rabble-rouser.

In the last two years, one of the most celebrated books of poetry by a young gay man is James Allen Hall’s Now You’re the Enemy. Along with his teacher Mark Doty’s Fire to Fire: Selected Poems, Hall’s book won (in a tie) a Lambda poetry award that year. I was ambivalent about the book. I admitted that reaction in a review and immediately received a couple of emails telling me that I was jealous. On one hand, I thought that Hall’s sporadic comedic poems made for an exciting debut. Who can not want to read a poem which turns the ostensibly confessional poem on its head with the hyperbolic title entitled “Portrait of My Mother as the Republic of Texas”? Instead of exploring his talent for comedy, however, he included a lot of poems that were morose reflections on relationships between son and mother. You couldn’t help but pity the personae of the gay son, doomed by his oppressive, promiscuous, troubled mother. Most heterosexuals are well-meaning. They want to appear concerned, especially when the gay poet manipulates the reader through his descriptions of a doomed gay child.

I was hoping that after his first book, Hall would stretch his wings and explore the comedy. Perhaps he received too much praise from heterosexuals (and even homosexuals) for the pity party. In the July/August 2010 of The American Poetry Review, a new poem by Hall appears. It’s called “Premonition” and here’s the opening: “If you don’t believe foresight is a curse, then I wish you’d love a man,/ knowing he won’t love you back. Then you won’t kiss him/ in the restaurant. You’ll keep your hand out of his./ You won’t believe him when he says you’re beautiful./None of us is beautiful when we see what’s coming. Trust me:/don’t spend the night...”

When Hall was an MFA candidate, Lorrie Moore’s collection of short stories “Self-Help” was popular. The collection impacted many female writers like Pamela Houston with its broad tragic-comedy, second person voice, and limited view of female/male relationships. The men were aloof or cheaters; you always pitied the woman. Hall reinvents these tropes through the insertion of two men in the formula sans the comedy. But then the poem takes an even more frustrating turn. In the eleventh and twelfth line, Hall foreshadows the conclusion of the poem with “Don’t love/the tenderness in his voice at the moment of impact.” Impact is the key word. Even though the syntactical structure is clunky, it turns out that the “you” of the poem is told to scamper away from his trick as a result of a tragedy any undergraduate might include: a car crash. As Hall writes, “Ease shut the door./Just because you see what’s descending, even now-the boyfriend/dead in the crash, his body halved through the shattered windshield,/ the man you love unconscious behind the wheel...”

The poem thinks it’s smart for tricking us into our expectation that it’s going to explore, even if in a heavy handed way, the issue of promiscuity and other interlocking issues such as barebacking. Instead the poem is a trick about thinking a trick is going to make your loss bearable, something Doty himself has rehashed to death.

I’m harping on this poem, not because I think Hall doesn’t have promise, but because I feel his poetic moves are reflective of what numerous gay writers are doing to receive publications (i.e., health insurance): putting the queer into a pitiful situation. Someone has to be mean to not love you if you’ve worked so hard to be a victim. Gays can’t gain any political traction if they’re too busy acting surprised about what any gay man already knows: men are often cheaters and liars. This is hardly a revelation (about either straight or gay men) and will probably be a subject of poems until the end of time. But there’s an added dimension when a gay poet writes about this subject—and goes no further—than when a straight poet tackles the nature of men, distant, cheating, or otherwise. Heterosexuals can love, betray, cheat, and redeem themselves all within a legal framework that gays and lesbians can not. When we want the same privileges heterosexuals flaunt, there’s an urgency here in our current political environment that makes stopping at simply the emotion of “pity” unacceptable.

It seems that many gay poets are also afraid to have fun, which may be the most threatening thing of all. One overlooked, somewhat recent book includes Christopher Schmidt’s The Next in Line. Impacted by someone like Harryette Mullen as opposed to Stanley Kunitz, Schmidt’s prose poem “Top/Butt” threatens to be sexual and silly: “Born of sunlust, bus runs to sub-Boston porn moor, horny homo zoo. Looks stun. No frumps, no fops, just buff studs burnt brown. Luc, uncut, hunts cut cock...” Schmidt goes on later: “Our two gods mushroom. Todd pulls Luc’s hood. Luc flops Todd, rubs Todd’s rump, drums Todd’s knott, churns Todd’s rut, tugs Todd’s butt.”

Queer writing doesn’t always need to be tidy with an easily digestible theme. As in the case of this poem, unique, arbitrary, and ostensibly euphonic notes resist the silence most queers allow to happen.

One of my concerns is that with the popularity of the Doty Aesthetic, more gay poets might continue find themselves trapped in certain old-fashioned, aesthetic conventions. In the last two months, there has been considerable focus on gay poet Michael Walsh’s The Dirt Riddles. It was the 2010 winner of the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. The book consists of a streamlined autobiographical narrative dealing with the poet’s childhood on the farm, his relationship with father, and various homosexual experiences. Here’s some lines from Walsh’s poem “Grounding II” that are emblematic of his content and aesthetic: “Once, he let me touch that fresh ink, /barbed wire around his arm./ I feel the strands turn electric/ where they crossed veins, /drew his pulse deep to the surface.”

Some critics have commended the book for destroying the myth of a homo-free countryside. It’s almost like people are playing “Where’s Waldo?” Look: the homosexual is in San Francisco. Look: he’s in the pastoral. (Hasn’t anyone ever heard of James Schulyer?) Look: there he is protesting Proposition 8. Oh no, I take that back. His back hurts too much to carry that sign. Someone give him a massage!

What’s eerie about the book is that it feels like it could have been written by poet Richard Hugo. Which bums me out. I’ve tried to put Hugo’s 80’s classic The Triggering Town out of my mind. I’ve always been surprised that the book hasn’t been taken to task for its eerily imperialistic leanings. Even a poetry critic as smart as Joshua Corey lets it off the hook in that regard. Hugo states that “the poem is always in your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another....With the strange town, you can assume all knows are stables, and you owe the details nothing emotionally.” He goes onto emphasize: “You must take emotional possession of the town and the town must be one that, for personal reasons I can’t understand, you feel is your own town.”

Hear how closely Walsh parrots Hugo’s eerie plan for colonization in relations to the dichotomy of city/country and the body. As quoted in a Literary Lambda on-line interview, Walsh says: “I’m trying to expand my vision into cities. That means writing about how cities are like barns and otherwise bringing the rural into contact with the urban in strange ways.”

At the same time, there is hope for gay poetry. Gay poet/blogger Saeed Jones is producing wonderful work that keeps popping up on the web.

Here’s an effectively jittery excerpt from a poem of his called “It Means Something Different in Arabic”:

Once, I threw a towel over my head and pretended I was Mary.
My aunt told me that pretending was blasphemy. A burnt cross
was lit in my chest that day, but they say my name
first appeared in reluctantly opened love letters
flown in from Japan smelling like cherry blossoms. Sweet
and sick and begging to be taken back. I come
from hastily signed divorce papers. I believe all the stories
of who I was: Custody battles are where I learned to dance.

The poem’s self-referentiality doesn’t come off as a gimmick, but as an appealingly desperate comic attempt to discover a point of origin. Jones doesn’t have a book out yet. No doubt in time he will. Other exciting and up and coming, not quite yet first book authors include Alex Dimitrov, Eduardo C. Corral, Matthew Hittinger, Rickey Laurentiis, etc.

A lot of people bemoan the shrinking amount of space allotted for literary criticism in print newspaper and magazines. I don’t feel that bloggers and people involved in new media are compensating for that loss. Is the popular Ron Slate’s blog “On the Sea Wall” much of an improvement, if any, over Logan’s New Criterion poetry reviews? If these critics, both solid in their poetry careers, solid commercial success behind them, can’t offer rigorous criticism to the poetry community at large, it is no surprise that queers quake in their boots when forced to review their peers.

Logan’s reviews are notoriously, uniformly negative. The tiny pleasures comes from his next clever or not so clever put down of an established poetry icon like Sharon Olds or Louise Gluck or Robert Pinsky, et al. In his somewhat well-known review of Frank O’ Hara, he shows how necessary it is for queers to take up the job of critiquing their own. Published in 2008 in the New York Times, Logan says about Frank O’ Hara’s poems: “O’Hara wrote about a homosexual life with a cheerful nonchalance rarely matched since; Allen Ginsberg by contrast was slightly lugubrious about sex.” Enough said.

On the other side of the continuum, Slate, who is exponentially a better poet than Logan, uses his blog to feature “reviews” on contemporary books that read like second rate ads for the book. If he didn’t already prove himself as a compelling poet, he’d look like a sycophant. In his post on August 16, 2009 he include a review of editor Joshua Weiner’s anthology At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn. Slate mentions a few of his favorites, but doesn’t offer that much more. On July 20th of this year, Slate reviewed Mark Doty’s “The Art of Description: The World into Word.” At the end he tells us: “his essays are alive with wonder...”

What both of these critics lack is what produces the most intriguing essays: a tortured ambivalence. With absolutism, there’s nothing at stake in the over-determined predictability of the opinions.

But on the poetry blogs, there cannot be enough good things to say about Rigoberto Gonzalez. Much to his own detriment, he has tirelessly spent time promoting marginalized authors and small presses. Not only does he write so many reviews, he has during his tenure as a member of the National Critics Circle spotlighted so many worthy poets. I sometimes get nervous when someone is so generous that their own works gets overlooked. My favorite work of his: his first book of poems So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until it Breaks, Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa, and his zippy young adult novel The Mariposa Club. Poet and critic Jason Schneiderman has produced some of the most provocative and thoughtful essays I’ve read about poetry, period. His American Poetry Review essay on James Merrill is amazing. I can’t wait until he assembles a non-fiction book. To tide us over, his new book of poems Striking Surface is coming out from Ashland Press this year.

I am excited to witness whatever the gay male poetry community does next. Whatever its flaws and missteps, there is such promise here, promise not just for poetry, but for actual political change.

On the Role of the Literary Magazine In My Life (An Introduction)

2010-09-11T10:13:00.011-04:00

The first time I saw someone reading Shakespeare in public, they were laughing to themselves, and I hated them for it. I remember myself as an undergraduate wanting to be that sophisticated, so I grabbed As You Like It from the bookshelf, and mouthed the words to myself, and no laughter came out. I wasn't even sure what the characters were saying. I knew I'd have to get the CliffsNotes anyway, so I trudged across the room and found them. I read the plot synopsis, understood the frame of the scene, and read it again. I still didn't cackle, even guffaw the slightest bit. I sat there for a whole hour and was confused.

But in a way it didn't matter. I was in the presence of something larger than myself. I felt the same giddy feeling when my undergraduate poetry professor Laurence Lieberman handed me a copy of Mark Doty's Turtle, Swan, and told me that as a young gay man, I would be interested in it. This happened after I criticized a poem by a female author in class, because I found its presentation of homosexuality offensive. I was probably being oversensitive, but that's who I was at the time. No apologies. I didn't read Doty's book right away; it didn't matter--all I needed to know, once again, that something beyond me was happening, and maybe if I read more books, many, many more books, I would be a part of it.

As an University of Illinois -Urbana-Champaign undergraduate, I didn't have many friends really, and I wish I could say that it was because I was queer. It wasn't--I was a geek. All during my undergraduate years, I worked at Kay-bee Toystore. I wasn't a good employee. I perpetually claimed that I had an ingrown toenail so I didn't have to walk through the aisles and straighten the boxes. My alliance all that time was with a black stool stored just for me behind the cash register.

When I got off work, I'd go to the library and pluck whatever book off the shelf whose cover looked interesting --I like to judge a book by its cover and never liked to read what was inside first-- let it be a surprise. Also: I don't like reading standing up; it feels weird. Like I'm being disrespectful or something. I always lie on my stomach. My partner reads rocking in a chair. I'm on the couch; he in his Lazy Boy. He reads a lot of old detective pulps like Raymond Chandler and Cornell Woolrich, I read lots of brief memoirs and poetry magazines, the shorter the better. Maybe this is one of the reasons why we've stayed together for fourteen years.

One day I wandered into a library room that housed all the literary magazines. I can still remember how beautiful and mysterious it looked. Each one was in its own little cubicle. It was strange. The magazines were never stacked on top of one another. There was only one mag per space. They covered the bottom of that space, selflessly, never unknowingly, and resting, never ever being forced to stand parallel to the cubicle's short wall.

At the time, I didn't know how or why exactly people submitted stuff into literary magazine, or even what those magazines did. Why not just put all the stories and poems in books with hard covers or with definite spines? Why leave things scattered in so many small parcels?

It ultimately didn't matter. There they were, and most of them had shiny covers. It was like I was inside and outside at the same time. I could hide in the dark spacious room while pretending the magazines' gloss was something like sunlight.

(To Be Continued)

On the Resurrection of Queer Literary Magazine "Bloom" and Jeff Oaks' Poem "Little What"

2010-09-05T11:00:00.022-04:00

Gay poet Jeff Oaks' unrhymed sonnet "Little What" combines the deranged syntactical variations in Karen Volkman's early prose poems and the eerie, terse imagery of Henri Cole's work. In a great, brand new issue of Bloom, a magazine focusing on queer writers, Oaks' work stands out, eclipsing a number of his more established contemporaries. I've never heard of Oaks before, but I have no doubt I'll see more, hopefully in a full-length book. His poem is one of the best I've seen this year.

Here's the opening, the octave:

In the darkness. What a sonnet. When muscle
grunts, gives, accepts, resists, suck on breath,
even aches. But is not broken. What is going up.
Not a wrong way. What is going in. What is darkness
but unseen. Where are those nerves? There. What
a sonnet. Like a bed with a penis. Growing harder.
Like a hallway after grief. A curse and a whisper,
an awe, out of which the wolf arose. On your lap.

So often I've heard people have a knee-jerk response to poems that call attention to their own making, as if such conceits don't have a history in and of themselves. It's the same sort of feeling I get when someone describes Billy Collins as a bad poet. Their so-called criticism stems from a fear of actually thinking through other aspect of their ideas. The title of the sonnet can be read in a number of fun ways: is the speaker shocked that his trick would even insinuate that his endowment is "little"? Or is the endowment so little, that it feels like nothing, is nothing, is a what.

This ambiguity moves throughout the poem: Why exactly is the speaker's mind drifting (racing?) to the making of a poem during the sexual act? Is he bored? Is it a result of the sublime moment, an eagerness to contain the pleasure? In the fifth line, this masterful, deliberate ambiguity spotlights itself through the line break: "....Where are those nerves? There. What/a sonnet. Like a bed with a penis." I have rarely seen a gay poem that deals with the comedic awkwardness of sex with such odd grace.

The poem takes a darker turn in the sestet, conjuring up Cole's poetry in a number of ways, such as the evocation of the wolf, (and even later his flower imagery), as well the thematic of desperate sexual activity and the ecstasy in such dumb need. I've always thought of Cole as one of our best poets, gay and otherwise. His poems contain an honorable sadness; honorable is the key word. It would be wrong even if tempting to describe them as lacking self-pity or being about self-pity--they're more complex than that.

Perhaps Oaks' poem is most reminiscent of Cole's poem "Homosexuality". I'll quote that sonnet in its entirety:

First I saw the round bill, like a bud;

then the sooty crested head, with avernal eyes

flickering, distressed, then the peculiar

long neck wrapping and unwrapping itself,

like pity or love, when I removed the stovepipe

cover of the bedroom chimney to free

what was there and a duck crashed into the room

(I am here in this fallen state), hitting her face,

bending her throat back (my love, my inborn

turbid wanting, at large, all night), backing away,

gnawing at her own wing linings (the poison of my life,

the beast, the wolf), leaping out the window,

which I held open (now clear, same, serene),

before climbing naked into bed with you.

I think it's a near perfect sonnet. How many other poems have used the parenthetical expression to greater effect? I could see a gay critic using the word internalized homophobia to describe Cole's ambivalence towards sex and love in the poem. But I think that would undermine the self-awareness of the narrator, his own employment of the self-created melodrama "(I am here in this fallen state.)" not for its own sake, but as a vehicle to intensify the inquiry of what and how we use sex. What is also remarkable is that final couplet: love does triumph without anything less than equanimity: the conjoining of the I and the you, the last word in the poem. Sentimentality isn't a bad thing; sometimes it's what is necessary.

Oaks' sestet possesses a similar trajectory though instead of using the duck, he uses the construction of the sonnet itself:

Clicking behind, on the finally down the dark purple
each man sits on quietly, secretly. A hyacinth. That
strange boy dead, transformed into petals. My
God. What a sonnet, what a little song of nails.
Slap it. Wolf it down. Slip it in, sing on. The mouth
shivers and opens to be a moan, that moon.

Whether or not you might think that this poem invokes baldfaced tactics that obviously reveals a less mature poet: the obvious play on the word wolf, for instance--you've got to be envious of Oaks' description of the sonnet as a "little song of nails." In fact, when comparing the two poems, you could make the claim that the Oaks' less subtle and subsequently less dramatic comparison is ultimately what makes it a deft companion piece to Cole's poem.

(And it can't go without saying that when asked, What do you prefer ultimately a bed with a penis or a duck?," always choose the duck.) This is less a criticism than a statement of fact that these two poets are at different points in their career. For some reason, the speaker in Oaks' poem feels younger. In the gay community, where youth is often prized above all else, it is commendable that Oaks' narrator poem talks to Cole's. Not to also mention that in youth, you're still reaching for that "moon," but as you grow older, the earth-bound act of lying in bed with your lover is equally stimulating, significant.

It is crucial for me to emphasize that Oaks' poem "Little What" did appear in Bloom. Having disappeared for three years after its initial appearance, it has been resurrected. Please buy a subscription. It really matters that you do in order to keep gay and lesbian publishing alive and well. Here's the link: www.artsinbloom.com

On The New England Review's and Ploughshares' New Creepy Practice of Charging Fees for On-Line Submissions

2010-08-29T14:10:00.016-04:00

It seems that a possible new trend within the world of literary magazine is the charging of on-line submissions. Two magazines, New England Review and Ploughshares, have begun this practice, and with their huge reputations could impact other magazines to do the same. It should be said that if you are subscriber, you don’t have to pay. If you send by snail mail, you don’t need to pay. For Ploughshares, it costs three dollars. I can't find out how much it costs over at the New England Review.

Ploughshares claims they are charging the fee to be able to continue to give money to the authors of accepted poems. In other words: the people who don't get the pub need to pay for those who do. As they say on their website: "This fee will help us to continue to pay our contributors." This is shocking from a magazine that I respect and claims to be interested in social change.

Of course, the most significant argument in defending this practice is that the magazine could face definite extinction if it doesn’t find ways to increase revenue. It is an important fact. It would be a sad fate.

However, then the magazines have an ethical responsibility; they must ensure that at least 40 % (or more) of their contents include work by unpublished or emerging writers. I am defining emerging as a writer who has publications, but no book. If a magazine can’t at least meet that percentage, then they are engaging in unethical practices. Their chances of getting published should be reflected in what the charge for submissions is.

I am suspect of any magazine that does not include 40 % unpublished or emerging writers. If they are uninterested in supporting unpublished and/or emerging writers, they should not ask for submissions fees. Take Five Points. They only publish established writers. And usually their worst pieces! Which does provide for great entertainment. I hope they keep it up.

A popular train of thought is that magazines can do whatever they want. It’s their magazine after all. For me, this is such a cop-out. Magazine editors have a responsibility to hold themselves responsible for the way they treat potential writers, especially when claim they’re interested in submissions.

Some people say that it’s a “tiny” fee. I don’t know how much the New England Review's is. Ploughshares is three bucks. It may be a tiny fee if you have a tenure-track job. But when you are a graduate student or working-class, chances are it isn’t—three bucks add up really fast. You send to six different magazines with submission fees, and there’s eighteen dollars.

Let’s face it: graduate students make up most of the submissions. And most of them are struggling financially as it is. To take money out of their pocket, when they’re struggling means that you don’t have a conscience. The editors of these magazines themselves should be decrying the situation. They should encourage their publishers to go on-line, perhaps. It’s not the end of the world. But taking money from hard working students is. With the current depression, it is inexcusable.

Needless to say, these same graduate students are not in a position to argue—their future livelihood may depend on these reputable magazines. Who isn’t going to want to have a poem in the pages of the New England Review or Ploughshares? I’ve been sending to these places on-and-of for a decade or more. In the past month, I bought a gift subscription of Ploughshares for a friend. When I first came to Brockport for my tenure-track job, I immediately purchased subscriptions to Kenyon Review and the New England Review.

The literary community is small. Trust me. I’ve paid the price for opening my mouth on a blog I’m always surprised anyone would even glance at. People don’t like people who have opinions. And some editors would say in advance that, hey, they do so much work for nothing, keep them out of this. No one should be excused from the discussion. And also, it’s so prestigious to be an editor of a lit magazine. I would love if someone included me. I like finding new poets, new poems. But I don’t expect them to pay for our newly formed friendship.

Addendum: Since I posted this, I thought perhaps a submissions manager could be created in such a way that working class people and graduate students could identify themselves privately and be exempt from paying the fee. All others could pay perhaps even a slightly higher fee if this is a system that will come into play. I know I'd be willing to do that. I'm indebted to the literary magazines for my salary and health insurance and do my best, not all the times successfully, to purchase as many small press books and magazines as possible.

On Paul Lisicky's Poem "The Little Songs" and James Schuyler

2010-08-20T14:50:00.015-04:00

Amidst the strident push for gay marriage, Paul Lisicky’s prose poem “The Little Songs” admirably dares to be about gay male relaxation; his rhetorical effects are more than a little reminiscent of James Schuyler, arguably the most important New York School writer. The deliberately slight poem even evokes the momentary, yet ultimately insignificant doubt that queer men may actually have towards tying the knot. This James Schuyler impacted poem feels genuine, partly because-- not in spite of-- its willingness to explore the banality of gay male life.

From the title alone, "The Little Songs," you see that Lisicky avoids a convention in gay male poetry-- the loud, flashy, even campy title. The sentimental title seems unconcerned with announcing its self-importance; it doesn’t feel the need to overachieve and create something over-determinedly memorable. Strategically flat, the opening sentence reifies the rhetorical effect of that title: “Three notes into the song, and I’m cooked.” The next sentence, though, creates an image James Schuyler would be proud of: “And I know myself as well as I know the inner life of a sunflower stalk.”

The poem's plot is as simple as can be. Paul has pleasant thought about the interconnectedness between him and his partner. It consists of a remembered pastoral setting, "yesterday, in the woods" --another Schuyler trademark-- and traces Paul's internalized thoughts.

Almost immediately after the sunflower line, Lisicky deftly provides another Schuyler moment: “...just like I never knew until now that you sing to keep yourself lifted when the light in you wants to go down, down. Should I tell you that? Oops.” For a poem to not sound kitschy after an "Oops" you know you've got something special.

Later, Lisicky writes: “But I completely get it why any of us might need to say those are your fingers, your shins, and your habits, given the mighty temptation to merge.” This broad claim undoubtedly gives voice to the ephemeral yet very occasional doubt gay men have to the opening up of the institution of marriage. Will it simply cause gay men to lose their distinctiveness, their own self-identities?

Like Schuyler’s “The Morning of the Poem” the subject here doesn’t pretend that it is of vital interest. This creates a challenge and reward for the writer: How do you create even the slightest tension in a poem that admits that on some level it can be disposed of? The reward is that the poet, such a Lisicky, offers a fairly rare generosity: the poem allows the reader to relax, and enjoy the comic sublime without guilt or demand.

In the sentence, "And how many times a month do we hear; Are you guys related? No, we're from Fire Island, though I never find the sass in my to say so." This provides an intriguing ambiguity: are we to think that the people-- perhaps unknowingly-- conflate the lovers as a result of their own unconscious homophobia (they're blurred together, indistinctive as anything other than homosexuals)? Or is it a way of complimenting them, implying they look complementary, like a perfect couple? Obviously, it must be one of these--in real life, Lisicky and his lover look nothing alike. Whatever possibility it is, or perhaps it is both, Lisicky punctuates the thought with typical unobtrusive humor: "Damned if you do and damned if you don't."

Never self-aggrandizing, polite, yet calm and assured, Lisicky's "The Little Songs" is one of the most generous tributes to Schulyer I've read in some time.

On Emanuel Xavier's "If Jesus Were Gay"

2010-08-12T11:50:00.020-04:00

With a title that recalls the brouhaha over Terrence McNally's play Corpus Christi and is obviously meant to engender controversy, you wouldn't expect performance poet Emanuel Xavier's book If Jesus Were Gay to be shy. It's generally not, though at times, it can be surprisingly, steadfastly reticent. As a gay Latino poet, Xavier reveals his anger at the homophobia of distant relatives who "don't give a flying cono about me/because blood is supposed to be thicker than arroz con dulce..."

His undeniably necessary and significant rants at a white supremacist society comes through most vividly in his throw-away lines: "TO THAT GUY FROM PHILADELPHIA WHO FELL IN LOVE WITH ME AFTER ONLY ONE KISS AND WISHES HE NEVER MET ME/Why is it that white people can't deal with adversity?"

Yet from time to time, his poems suffer from a limp didacticism: “...what you create/thrives on your self/destruction, I pray/with your dreams bloodied on my hands.” Amidst all the broad claims of loss of innocence, drugs, hustling, it seems Xavier has sometimes yet to fully realize the power of his poem’s quick comic tangents.

In contrast, in a longer piece, “Dear Rodney,” his thumbnail sketches of his tricks enliven: “...He also happens to be a yoga instructor. This is definitely one of the pro’s of gentrification.” And: "The next evening, we crashed Cumalot's "Rocky Horror Picture Show" party by showing up with hoodies and pretending we ended up at the wrong party." Perhaps the expansiveness of prose allows him to surprise himself in interesting ways.

It's probably not fair, but whenever I read work of a performance poet, I hold them to incredibly high standards. How many David Antins-- one of the most important poets in the latter half of the 20th century-- can we have? (He's not gay, but he does look like a daddy bear on stage!) Using an occasion and an audience he creates a "talk poem," thinking aloud, creating a long, ostensibly rambling poem in simultaneously controlled and spontaneous ways. Here's a link to one of Antin's poems:

http://bostonreview.net/BR26.2/antin.html

Xavier's anger towards Latino culture, homophobia, white society can occasionally be ultimately too polite, reigned in. But when he exchanges self-pity for a silly egotism, his poems become more energetic and appealing. In a poem called "The Mexican," Xavier writes:

When a legendary wordsmith introduced us for the first time
It was as if the Virgen de Guadalupe
and all the orishas
Had sanctioned the meeting

...Until I met your vato
Estupida,
This poem could have been epic

And indeed, with a greater inflation of his own self-importance, a more precise tracking of his reckless consciousness, he will transform himself into a unique paradigm of wonderful poetic immodesty.

For more information on Emanuel Xavier's "If Jesus Were Gay" and Queer Mojo/Rebel Satori Press, visit:

http://www.queermojo.net/

http://www.rebelsatoripress.com/products/If-Jesus-Were-Gay%2C-Emanuel-Xavier.html

On the Question of Critical Passivity

2010-08-04T18:50:00.008-04:00

Amidst all the hoopla surrounding Jessica Smith's post regarding the potential vitriolic nature of comment streams, not very many people have mentioned what is for me was a truly dangerous political statement. Most people have addressed her claim that after receiving a positive review on Silliman's blog she felt she endured psychological damage due to some of the comments to that blog post. After she received that mention, and sold 200 copies as a result of that singular post, some people said hurtful, vengeful things in the comment stream, making it near impossible for her to write poetry or partake in the poetry blogging community. She suggested that poetry bloggers consider rethinking having comment streams.

But I don't want to focus on all that. What I want to focus on is a particular statements made in passing during this controversy: in her discussion of how a particular small press possibly lost its momentum to publish as a result of comment stream defaming their reputation, Smith writes:

"I cannot stress enough how important chapbook and zine publishers are to the growth of experimental writing and how much time, money, and effort go into publishing a single issue or single chapbook. If you are not such a publisher, you have no right to complain about anything related to publishing. If you think something ought to be done differently, do it yourself– with your own time, money and sweat."

What I find most disconcerting here is the anti-intellectualism contained within this statement. I have nothing against Jessica Smith; she seems like a very nice person. But to advocate for a critical passivity simply because you don't know the complicated ins and out of publishing makes me nervous, and the fact that so many people seem to be complicit in advocating for this sort of repression makes me sad and anxious.

On this blog, I do go out of my way to focus on unknown authors and small-press books. One of my goals is to find unknown or lesser-known poets and small press books and give them attention (So often the books that receive gay awards are at least from university presses or there is a direct line of inheritance from the writer to a huge figure in the field).

Another motivation for me is to offer critiques of major poets who I feel need to be reassessed for failures in regards to politics. This is why I haven't talked much about D.A. Powell or Henri Cole on this blog: they are supported by significant presses and almost always deserve the attention they get.

My attitude in life is that it's pointless to love someone/something who everyone else wants. I focus my love on people who haven't been fully appreciated (or at least not yet). That's how I prove to myself how amazing of a critic I am: I can see what most other people fail to notice. Everything is ultimately about me, thank God!

I suppose I have violated Smith's comment when I gave a somewhat unfavorable review to a book that was released by the amazing Lethe Press. I have liked (a lot) a number of their other titles. But I did feel this particular book was lacking and said so. For me not to do so as a reviewer, even though there was some considerable anxiety in being unable to advocate for the book, would be an unethical decision. As a teacher, I see the review as a pedagogical tool--first, for my students who inspired me to create this blog. How can I expect my students (or anyone else) to think critically about a book if I tell them to silence themselves because they haven't produced a book themselves? Also, if, when your writing is out there, you don't want to be open to criticism-- even if it can be, yes, sometimes unkind and thoughtless-- I'm not sure why you're in this profession.

Presses are responsible for what they introduce to the world. Smith may not realize she's condescending to the very presses whom she supports and publishes. To ask us to safeguard small presses simply because they're small presses is a dangerous form of pity.

What her comment fails to realize is that breaches of etiquette are usually a symptom of larger institutional and individual inequalities. It is unfortunate that so many wonderful (and even not so wonderful poets) can't get published. If your book is read --let alone sells 200 copies as a result of a singular blog post, as what happened to Smith --you've been loved, with all the puzzling, questionable, horrible things that come with it.

Proposition 8 Ruled Unconstitutional.

2010-08-04T17:59:00.003-04:00

"...The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice." -- MLK

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-mew-prop-8-10042010,0,7711145.story

http://www.scribd.com/doc/35374801/Prop-8-Ruling

http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2010/08/victory-proposition-8-overturned.html

http://www.towleroad.com/2010/08/its-in.html

http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/16935/prop-8-is-overturned

http://www.americablog.com/2010/08/breaking-prop-8-is-unconstitutional.html

On Chip Livingston's "Museum of False Starts"

2010-07-31T20:53:00.033-04:00

Similar to Lethe Press, Gival Press primarily appears to invest in gay and lesbian writers. In looking at their publications, I see several interesting new poets. What is upsetting is that these small presses often don't receive more attention from queers themselves. Recently I was talking to a friend of a friend about the trouble he was having finding a publisher for his first book. He said to me, "I'm holding out before I go to a specialty press. I'd prefer somewhere legit first."

I don't think there's anything wrong with a writer wanting to receive a substantial circulation. At the same time, it doesn't mean that such statements should go without criticism. It upsets me that books from places like University of Chicago and University of Arkansas receive so much attention from gay men, each repeating the same praise almost verbatim, determined to give those writers as much access as possible to awards, reviews, and interviews. But some of these same gay men rarely actively support small press queer writers. If Chip Livingston's Museum of False Starts from Gival Press came from one of those larger aforementioned two presses, I guarantee there would be many more well-deserved accolades from mainstream sources. Are there gay poets out there who may claim that they possess anxiety about sending out their manuscript when the real issue is that they only want to send it to the most high profile contests?

After reading two of the National Poetry Series winners, Carrie Fountain's Burn Lake and Colin Cheney's Here Be Monsters, it becomes more difficult to claim that the high profile contests necessarily reveal the most interesting work. The former is buoyant, but fails as a result of its consistent, ultimately unarresting deadpan and its faux interest in dated 1970s ecological feminism; the latter feels like a book that would win a contest -- it's ostensibly inevitable leaping between the personal, mythic, and historical feels like the sort of moves that one associates with "Good Art" when it may actually been indicator that the poet hasn't truly found his subject matter yet. Both are perfectly fine, forgettable choices.

How many times have you heard someone praising a book for the reason that he "simply manages to capture what it feels like to be a gay man." I have no idea what that means. As I tell my students, if I can "relate" to your work, you should probably start again.

I can't relate to the work of Chip Livingston, who Alfred Corn describes as "Native American" and "cosmopolitan" in his blurb, any more than any other writer. But still. I know a good poem when I see one.

One of Livingston's best poems "Coon Was Here, 1985" deals with naming, and mixed heritage. Imagine how a lesser poet may have easily shortchanged the elegy through clumsily attempting to interweave the various names of the deceased. Here's the opening:

I never called you Coon
though that was home Ricky
brother I still think is God
& pray to bound by half our blood.
Mom's firstborn by a non-Indian
you came out blond & blue eyed.

I got my Daddy's Choctaw eyes.
And eyes are what made Poocha call you Coon.
Crazy bastard with all your Indian
names...

The line break between "Indian" and "names" complicates the nature of identity, the difference (if there is one) between who someone essentially is and what one is called. Does the naming actually change one's essence?

The poem continues: "...On your headstone it says Ricky./ But wolf is what you carried in your blood./Poocha took it straight from God./And whose eyes are bluer than God's?"

What's remarkable in this poem is that even with all of the various juxtapositions of identities, Livingston keeps the framing story intact, and when we notice the names, it feels simultaneously orchestrated and spontaneous. This is no small feat. Here's the rest of the poem:

Yet you put Mom's mascara to your eyes
& burning them you tried to brown your blood.
Fisting them tattooed you like a ring-tailed coon.
From then on Poocha never called you Ricky.
But named you Coon, 'cause you were an Indian.

Then named you again in secret in Indian
& told you how your grandma bet the wolf in his eyes
& won. I miss you so much Ricky,
I swear to God.
I thought you were smarter than a damn raccoon,
letting a bunch of rednecks doubt your blood.

By 17 you'd made spilling blood
a ceremony & finally learned to kick ass like an Indian.
You even hung a coon-
tail from your Pinto's rearview mirror. Eyes
still red from dope & daring God
behind your bangs. Then you did it Ricky.

You made the papers as a Richard.
But I want to write your name in blood
on the wall behind Geronimo's spirits where God
took you to rest with the Indians
through a western door where no one sees your eyes
& no one calls you Coon.

I'll write Coon was here & sign it Ricky
call you God & mix your blood
to pain forever closed your Indian eyes.

What is so impressive about this poem is that it is not a victim narrative on any level or a narrative about self-empowerment, which would definitely limit the psychological complexity of the poem as well as its politics. Instead, through an expertly tight narrative, Livingston's personae shifts the naming of his friend so quickly, sometimes through a single line, that we can feel his self-justification, accusations, and, of course, loving tone. It is also a more uncommon elegy in that the narrator doesn't try to completely demystify his friend's inner world.

One of the wonderful aspects of Livingston's book is the occasional indecisiveness of a particular narrator. You can always feel these narrators spinning their wheels, trying to find a balance between the appropriate and genuine thing to say... which aren't always the same things. According to these poems, Livingston proves that indecisiveness can be a form of openness, and as a result, a kindness--it allows for possibility rather than just finality.

My favorite poems in Livingston's book are the ones where he creates silences within the lines themselves--it seems that formal strategy allows him to juxtapose abstraction, odd images in a way streamlined narrative doesn't always allow. Often, for a lot of poets, the rhetorical strategy feels more like an uninspired pose -- a lot like the trend to put a space between each line of the poem for no apparent reason except possibly to make the poem feel longer. Also, silence seems to be a scary thing for a lot of poets. So many feel the need to write incredibly long discursive poems contained in one monolithic block of text.

Here's one of my favorite of Livingston's poems, "Creation Myth":

Crawfish’s idea digging the mud up
But who thought up Columbus

Mud a man can sail to flown through fog
And down down into mountains

My own breath part of that naming
Esakitaumesse Fuswalgi Chebon

Until we got the hang of marrying down down down

Not the very best idea remember Atlantis
All that water first deal with birth mother

Never in SF at the same time in case it happens again
Never play piano under water listen to piano music
under water never

There are legendary comparisons how could it be
The Christian reincarnate of a drowned woman

Listen if you think it’s noisy in my head

For more information on Chip Livingston and Gival press:

http://www.givalpress.com/

Gival Press, LLC
PO Box 3812
Arlington, VA 22203
givalpress@yahoo.com

Dear Paris Review...

2010-07-21T17:46:00.012-04:00

Dear Paris Review,

I recently received a letter that you un-accepted my poems "Villianelle for My Pit Bull (who Died)" and "Rallying Against Feminism While the Moon is Full." I didn't quite understand what that meant until I talked to two other poets, JC and DN, who told me at first it might be a joke, that they didn't receive a letter and there was nothing to worry about.

As you know, they, too, soon received letters. Like me, at the time JC and DN were both dressed in their finest tuxedos, nervously standing at the mailbox waiting for the big day to arrive, for the mail carrier to grandly march up the walk, and to see our names joined for eternity with the name Paris Review splashed across the cover of the latest issue. Instead, the mail carrier grimly handed us a letter with black borders. "I'm so, so sorry," she said as she turned and walked sadly away. What could this be? Where was the issue that we had all dreamed was forthcoming? Our fingers trembled as we tore open the envelope. "It's not you, it's me," the letter read.

Oh, dear, dear Paris Review. I know you know that your magazine is one of (if not the) most respected literary magazines in the country. And here is the proof: even my father, who has always had bad eye sight and who would tell you that he never read an entire novel from cover to cover in his life, knows what the Paris Review is. It's right up there with the Saturday Evening Post. In fact, when my father was growing up, he always had to sit in the front rows of his single room schoolhouse grade school classroom, squinting to see the black board. His teacher, a true humanitarian, took him aside one day, and said that he could tell my father was struggling to take the notes.

This kind academic slipped my father the most recent issue of the Paris Review (my father still keeps it under his bed next to a well-thumbed copy of the Sears-Roebuck catalog) and said, "Even if it takes one full month, read this magazine from cover to cover and you will know all you need to know about the state of literature in our country." It took my father two full months. My father still says after all these years that what he learned still holds true today. I asked him what he meant by that, considering that he hadn't read a single piece of literature since that time. He winked and said it was a secret that I would have to learn myself one day (He also said that the aforementioned teacher told him not to worry, that he would, indeed, give him an A that year, no matter how wholly incorrect his exam answers were... this teacher is now a famous dean at a prestigious mid-American University).

So, dear Paris Review, I was shocked that I received that flimsy un-acceptance letter. Couldn't you at least send a singing telegram as you did for a friend of mine with the bigger reputation than mine? As you know, the job market is fierce, and I did put on my resume that I had two poems coming out in the Paris Review forthcoming. I don't have that many publications to my name --most people getting jobs these days have at least three books, I have only two full length-books, and I've even heard talk that some departments are now requiring three books, an "artsy" black-and-white author photo with your chin tilted at just-the-right angle, and your own reality television show, even to get a job interview.

Anyway, I called the university to which I applied; I wanted them to know that my resume had changed. The head of the department was out, helping to install the new, smaller cages in the adjuncts' office, so the secretary said that she'd relay the message. When I told her about me being de-accepted from the Paris Review, she gasped--literally, gasped-- "why, when I was in grade school, the teacher once slipped me a copy of the Paris Review and told me to re-write the whole issue in shorthand so that I'd understand the state of secretarial work in our country," she intoned. She also said that she didn't want to tell me this, but the job committee was currently taking notes at a meeting where they were discussing my application. "They want you, I think," she said. Guess what made me make the cut?

That's right: your magazine, the Paris Review.

She went on to say that nothing else really mattered in my case. Not my teaching experience, not my letters, not my other publications, etc. It was simply those three little words that every English department spends its formative years desperately longing to one day hear: The. Paris. Review.

So, Paris Review, and I really don't mean to belabor my distress, but, if I may, here is the thing that really bothers me: the poems had originally been accepted by RH. Did you know that he was editing the Western Humanties Review after teaching for a stint there? The backlog was four years, and, of course, weeks before my poems were about to be published in an issue, the editorship changed hands. RH tried to make it up to me by saying the poems would be published there. It was a three year back- log though for people who he had already told had a spot in the Paris Review. "Poets always commit suicide," I was told, "And I do give privilege to the living."

This made me happy. Not only because I was on two different anti-depressants, but because I knew I could actively eliminate some of my competitors. I found out who graduated from Columbia in the last few years--those were the only people who got into the magazine--and then sent them chain mail.

Ah, Paris Review, much like our own current torn-asunder relationship, in high school, my father once left my mother for a mystery woman. When we found out who she was, we sent her chain mail every other day until she refused to send it on and something bad happened to her. If I should ever be interviewed, the way they do in the Paris Review, I will claim that writing chain mail by hand is, in fact, what pushed me into the world of poetry. Chain mail needs to be explicit and concise and direct. Just like a good line of poetry. And in each letter, you're dealing with the theme of death. Which, as any college Freshman can tell you, is always the stuff of good poetry.

Sure enough, after a few weeks of sending chain mail to Columbia graduates, I would get a call, saying, "You're getting closer." I never looked at the obituaries. I didn't need to.

But, alas, I never got close enough.

Sincerely,

A Forlorn Poet

On the Aesthetics of Sentimental Love in Francisco Aragón's "Glow of Our Sweat"

2010-07-16T15:10:00.011-04:00

Glow of Our Sweat

by Francisco Aragón

Scapegoat Press

P.O. Box 410962

Kansas City, MO 64141

ISBN 978-0-9791291-3-1

2010, 72 pp., $12.95

www.scapegoat-press.com

Sentimentality can often be a scary thing--I think for gay men it may be downright terrifying. By publicly fawning over a loved one, even if it is welcome and deserved, you fear that you may come off as cute. And who's going to be intimidated into giving marriage rights to people who are simply cute?

You can't rush through an extended romantic moment. You need to slow down and enjoy it. At the same, in the urgency of civil rights and momentum toward fighting initiatives like Prop 8, slowing down can be a dangerous (pardon the pun) proposition. And can't confessing a sincerity make the institution of marriage seem like nothing more than an institution of feeling, rather than one that precludes certain economic and legal rights?

I know that as a creative writing teacher I often find myself in a bind about sentimentality. One of the exercises I sometimes do in the classroom is to type up three different “poems”: two taken from the inside of Hallmark cards and the third, something from Pablo Neruda. I tell my students to pretend they are editors of a literary magazine and rank the poems in order of their aesthetic merit. Their least favorite is always the Neruda. This can be one of the several starting off points of the semester. At first, I used to shame them for their choices, proselytizing that eventually I would teach them the path they needed to travel on if they wanted to be artists. I can be self-righteous and silly. And then after a few years I realized that there can be an artfulness to sentimentality, that perhaps such a commodity is even necessary.

I confessed to my students that only on special occasions I would buy those Just Between You and Me cards, accepting that nothing else could satisfy my need of expressing my love for my partner. In fact, I would underline all the abstractions so my partner would take note of the similarities between the abstractions and my feelings. Of course, this can cause confusion especially when you tell your students to avoid generalities at all costs.

I would claim that Francisco Aragón’s new collection of poems, “Glow of Our Sweat” attempts to deal with these complicated intersections between the aesthetics of sentimentality and queerness. His poems provides a sentimental vision that never becomes cloying. The self-monitoring within the poems themselves and the book as a whole is a successful, unpretentious enterprise.

A good number of the poems are written in unrhymed tercets- a steady formal choice. In one of my favorite poems entitled “Words in Space” the issue of time plays into its theme. The author remembers a shirtless lover who recited Lucky’s speech at the end of Waiting for Godot. In a roundabout way, this flashback causes him to reflect on the same lover’s occupational stresses. Which led them to hooking up afterward. Here’s a key part of the poem:

after which we

met at Flanagan’s

for steak and beer

an hour or so

before your shirt

fell to the floor

before you

later put it

back on but I

prefer to dwell

on how

in the middle

of Lucky’s rant

you begin to twitch

and rise

so that I approach

and slip

you in again

Aragón’s approach to sentimental love is instructive. Not only does he shuttle between descriptions of love and lust, but he also struggles with an admirable desire to withhold certain details of the encounter out of respect for the beloved. Notice the way key words take on double meanings: the verb “dwell” becomes a way of intensifying a memory as well as occupying a body, a home. Also, there’s a similar tension embedded in the verb “slip”: slip takes on obvious sexual connotations, as well as a way of “slipping up,” revealing too much information. This poem, a speech act, juxtaposes the ethical obligation of privacy with necessary descriptions of sentimental love.

Here’s the rest of the poem:

while the words

the tears the stains

the years the stones

leave your lips

floating

down so blue so calm

each of them

beneath a little

translucent

parachute sweeping

into my ear

in that space

re-modeled Georgian

just off Parnell

At the end of the book, Aragón allows for a prosaic self-critical examination. I can’t think of too many poets who would within their own collection ask a question about the possibility of his poems failing to be “homosexual” enough: “My poems have been described as quiet. Is it possible that in some of them I am covering?” It’s a question that most gay poets end up being defensive about, overdetermined in their emphasis that no one needs to dictate what they need to create. I appreciate Aragón’s attempt to activate and broaden the discussion of political responsibility. He deflates the sentimental myth of the poet as apolitical.

At the same time, a number of his poems are translations or in direct conversation with poets now dead like Jack Spicer. Is there anything more kind than displaying love for the dead through bringing their poems and names back to life? Here is one of my favorite examples of Aragón's generous love, called “Arttalk”:

Fuck

portraying

the sun’s

Why don’t you paint

“petals of light.”

Make something

Darker, fun

and shut your mouth

-the remains

of a moment:

glow of our sweat

and I’ll kiss it

after Jack Spicer (1925-1960)

COMING SOON: A NEW POST

2010-07-14T20:02:00.001-04:00

On Not Assigning Homework in Undergraduate Writing Classes

2010-07-09T15:29:00.010-04:00

Because of my financial situation, this past year I found myself teaching summer and winter session, something that most teachers look down upon. How can you compress everything that you would teach them in a fourteen week semester in such a short time?

For winter session I taught introduction to composition; it met four hours a day for two weeks. For summer session I taught introduction to creative writing, two hours a day for five weeks. Before the classes began, I wrote my students and told them that there would be no textbook and no homework. All writing would be done in class, even the rewrites. This was my promise, and I told them I do not break my promises.

This was the deal: for introduction to composition, I would give them 8 hours (2 days) to complete a full-length 8 page paper. In introduction to creative writing, I would give them 6 hours (3 days) to complete a full-length 8 page story. During this time, they could talk to their peers or me to help them with their assignment. There were about a dozen students in each class.

This made homework unnecessary.

How much can you expect any writer, especially one who's young, to do at any given time? I get tired after an hour.

When I told a colleague that all their writing would be done in class, the teacher replied: "You're really making it easy on yourself." I was offended even though I understood their suspicion. For me, the most difficult part of teaching is making the trip to campus and back. I love being in the classroom; it's thrilling being around people and feeling everybody's nervous energy.

I explained that actually I was afraid that I would be the one who would suffer. I got nervous I'd get bored. Boredom causes me to act weird. In Brockport, everyone who sees me thinks I'm mentally ill. I walk around talking to myself gesturing wildly. That's my form of entertainment. It was the same thing I did in Salt Lake.

I'm a teacher who does not believe in group work, peer critique. It always seems to be a way for a teacher to not have to do anything. You know the drill: stick them in groups. No matter how hard they're working, even if you provide them with the most stringent guidelines, group work almost always has problems. It's understandably difficult them to be tough on each other's writing; middle-class etiquette is something that takes time to eradicate.

Before they worked on their own papers, we did exercises which taught them what I was looking for: being able to identify abstract versus concrete, specific language; what's a support paragraph; what is a specific scene versus summary. Only after I could see that most of the class knew these skills did we go into the computer room. I told them to get used to the room; they were going to write their whole paper there.

This is what surprised me with this experiment: they were the best papers I've ever received.

I think the act of being watched made them more self-conscious. This heightened self-consciousness made them more aware of the process of writing. Not only were they conscious of me watching them, but they were watching their peers. What a wonderful thing to see one of their peers erase a whole paragraph! It meant they could take the time to do as well. Without having to wonder whether or not they were wasting their time or that was a sign of their lack of skill. The recklessness embedded in the process of writing was naturalized.

Writing teachers love to claim that writing is a process and that it is not about product. That may be true. In any other place than in the educational system. Even when teachers require their students turn in portfolios, it's a phony emphasis on process--the student is aware of crafting each step (first draft, outline, note cards for research, annotated bibliography, etc.) to show their involvement (or lack thereof). Your students are being graded on a bunch of little products rather than one big one.

The only way to teach process is to actually have them write in front of you. Perhaps taking them into a computer room (where they will use the entire class time to write their paper over a number of days) is the only way to teach the two most important components of the writing process: Time and Speed.

SUNY Brockport is an amazing place to work. My students are often first-generation college students. They are balancing work and family and friends and extracurriculars and babies. Most of them are not rich. Of course, inevitably, as it is for everybody to some degree, they want to know, even if it is never said, "How long should I spend on this paper? This question does not arrive out of laziness, or at least not always. But a genuine curiosity. How much should we edit? When are we going overboard? When are we doing something that could possibly harm the paper? When do we let it go and accept that we've done as much as we can?

I'm no different. When I was first starting out as a poet, I wanted to know how many pages comprised a book. When I began researching contests, I found that the standard minimum was 48 pages. I made a promise to myself: I would never enter a contest with a book larger than 48 pages. I'm mortal. The publisher would be mortal. There isn't anything more selfish than taking up someone's time. Selfishness isn't always bad, but you've got to watch yourself.

One of my favorite moments occurred was when a student printed out part of their paper, read it, said, "That's stupid," and then threw it out. Which caused another student to say, "Is that a smart thing for a writer to do? Start all over again?"

"Of course," I said, "It happens all the time." After that, a lot of papers ended up being thrown into the garbage can.

Those are the sort of issues that a writing portfolio never really raise. Also: when you're a student you can't talk about your relationship with Time and writing, because a lot of mediocre teachers will see it as some sort of admission of quality and punish a student. (Once I heard a literature teacher exclaim, "A few of my students admitted that they didn't spend much time on their papers. I was so angry. I told the class I was angry." I asked if the papers were any good, and the same literature teacher said yes, and then she said, "I didn't say that, of course. They might get the wrong idea.")

There's always a lot of talk about showing students that writing is a collaborative effort; students are put into groups and write one paper together. This always struck me as a dumb idea. I've made it a mission to think of other ways the usefulness of collaboration could be done within the classroom. That's when I realized that having people working on their papers in the same space is collaboration. Knowing that you can turn to someone and ask for help whenever you need it is collaboration. That's where you find process: in the actual doing.

My students were also instructed that they could come talk to me if they had any questions about their papers.

I found that my students were more likely to ask me nuanced questions. They were told that I would not read their entire paper for them. But I said that I would answer any questions they had about particular issues. And they did come up to me, surprising me with their desire to know what usually would feel petty to them, like issues of syntax and diction and other micro issues. When students start addressing those concerns, it means almost always that they're unknowingly creating their own style. Think about the typical scenario: when you assign a student a paper, they take it home and write it. You get the paper, you read it, and then you conference with the student for 15-20 minutes. Of course, you're only going to have time to talk about macro issues: thesis, organization, synthesis of claims and evidence.

Allowing them to have constant access to you as they write the paper opens up the dialogue for a more complex and thorough discussion.

One of my favorite activities is watching cooking shows like Top Chef. Which shouldn't be surprising. As far as I'm concerned, the most important invention in the 20th century is the George Foreman Grill. What surprises my about these timed reality show challenges is how almost all of the chefs take until the absolute last second to finish their dishes. Until the clock has run out, they're always fussing with them, obsessively looking, trying to see if there's any last change they can make. That's how students are when you give them a boundary of time and let them perform in front of you and their peers. They, too, wait to the last second. But the waiting is not a result of procrastination. The time is spent on perfecting. Only one student in each class finished early.

I would like to emphasize that I always assign homework during full-length semesters. Because of the complexities of time in winter and summer sessions, I have no choice but to make different pedagogical choices. Some of these decisions may (or may not) eventually, to some extent, be incorporated into full-semester classes.

COMING SOON: A NEW POST

2010-07-08T16:55:00.001-04:00

On the Need for Solipsism and Steven Reigns' "Inheritance"

2010-07-02T16:48:00.008-04:00

One of the delights of reading autobiographical poetry is the thrill of being upstaged. Somehow the authors’ problems upstage your own, and you have no choice to relinquish your own personal tragedies and pay attention to their amusing failings. That’s the pleasure of empathy: while you’re feeling bad for the person, there’s the undeniable happiness in not having their lives. “Woe as you,” and “I mean really woe as you,” because “the last place I would want to be is in your shoes.”

Pity is never monotone. It also comes in many different shapes and sizes.

I always prefer large.

There’s a smallness to Steven Reigns’ poetry collection “Inheritance.” I could see some people arguing that what I’m claiming to be smallness is a thoughtfulness, a refusal to take up that much space, a special consideration of others. You don’t have to look any further than his reputable professional credentials for proof of someone who genuinely cares about others. He has taught numerous writing workshops to gay and lesbian youth. No doubt his studies in psychology will lead to important work if it hasn’t already.

The book deals with the usual: affairs with married men, drugs, wanting to be beautiful, etc. etc. What I was hoping for was that with these unsurprising, yet wholly dependable tropes, he would see his own problems as something grand. He’d want to upstage us with his own miseries. But he does something much kinder and somewhat less effective, at least in the realm of poetry: he thinks about us.

One of the poems includes a description of a friend at a gay bar who is intimidated by all the muscle men. Rather than obsessing about himself, and seeing where those obsessions go, he pontificates: “We are all slaves to a feeling/whose rival is self-love,/whose force is the desire to be loved.” What fun is self-obsession if you ultimately refuse to upstage your friends’ concerns?

I’ve always been more interested in solipsistic people. If you ask my friends, no doubt they’d agree. Their singular, blind-siding obsessions excite me.

Solipsism is something you can depend on; it’s sturdy and doesn’t waver. Us Democrats need more of it. We’d be much more powerful. That’s why the Republicans triumph: they refuse to even consider thinking of anyone other than themselves.

One of the better poems “Recipe Box” has a promising opening:

He had a large stack of the memorial cars handed from funerals,

friends and lovers stolen by AIDS

I had joked once,

that he might need a recipe box

to categorize and alphabetize the mounting stack.

The insensitivity refreshes. It’s one of the more rare points in the book where Reigns allows himself to be thoughtlessly callous. Unworried about offending, he lets himself become something large. More self-obsession might direct Reigns into odder, admirably unreasonable directions.

Memoirists often claim their writing to be cathartic. I’ve always been jealous of writers who feel that. When I write something, I feel sleepy. And all I have is a mess on the page.

Reigns’ certainly stays clear from any messes. He provides conceits, the thoughtful self-assessments, and universalizing. I have no doubt Reigns would say that the writing of this book was cathartic. I want more proof of that. A genuine emotional catharsis eliminates the chance for structure, order, reflection. It happily rushes toward us without a care in the world.

On Neil de la Flor's "Almost Dorothy" and the Generosity of Comic Imagination

2010-06-24T19:50:00.008-04:00

Evident from almost the first poem, Neil de la Flor's amazing debut collection Almost Dorothy brims with a rare generosity. Unlike a lot of comic poets, he doesn't hoard his punchlines for an attempt at an overdetermined closure. He's too good for that. More often than not, his first line is a joke, and so is the second, the third, fourth, etc, etc. There doesn't seem to be any fear if a joke goes wrong. And from time to time, they do, as, in the case, of all brilliant comics. That's where the generosity comes in. He doesn't pause and apologize; he just keeps on offering his comic imagination. The show must go on. And the guy has more than enough pizazz to continue without much of a hitch. And when something does go wrong, we're thankful--it makes him human, and root for him that much more intensely. The comics with the most seamless routines are almost always the least funny; you cringe at hearing them make their own drum roll.

A lot of the time, de la Flor is invested in the paragraph as a formal strategy. Here's a paragraph from one of favorites "T. Williams Talks to Birds or I'm talking to Birds":

A glass menagerie, glass menagerie, menagerie of steel, stainless steel, I've stolen my lines from the great Herodotus, or Hercules, I can't remember which was Assyrian. Istanbul is a city with great glass walls erected with the sweat of tigers, lions, and bears. The mighty walls, like skin of cats, are see-through. I see through, you see through. I am done with this cat business, the 9 lives of Nineveh, or 9 Visigoths, or Vishnu nude bathing on porcelain counter tops with margaritas in both hands.

This rhetorical strategy allows for what I like to call a lyrical discursiveness--the ostensibly ceaseless talking gathers its poetic momentum from surprising syntax and diction, odd leaps, etc.

And here's another example. It consists of the final three paragraphs from “Aphorisms for Frida Kahlo”:

Some say sadomasochism is a dirty word, but isn’t dirty a dirty word and merde? A sadist is just another form of disguise, someone who holds the Bounce and Snuggle in a dark corner of the laundry room.

With a frame bolted to the head with metal pins, a cyclotron can achieve stunning success in a single session of radiosurgery. In Spain, Salvador Dali masturbated with beans. Post-operative, monkeys can blink with half their brain removed.

At age 13, Khalo joined the Communist party. Inspired by the Mexican Revolution, she fell in love with a cactus and a pig. Shortly after her death, the hieroglyphs in Egypt were decoded. They all read, Diego.

It's often annoyingly said that the stand-up comic is in pain; the desire to get laughs is a plea for help, compassion. One of the things that's special about de la Flor's book is he doesn't encourage such readings. In a weird way, his book reminds me of early Steve Martin or Robin Williams, the sheer silliness of their acts. As Martin’s and Williams’ career progressed, they appeared in those quasi-serious films, which won him mainstream serious accolades, all of a sudden elevated to the role on an artiste. de la Flor has the courage to stick to his guns, and be an often pitch-perfect comic --this determination is admirable, and what makes his book stand out, and I hope that rare, bold choice allows his work to receive the love it deserves.

In a later post, I will talk about "risk"--that horrible word used way too often to praise confessional poetry. Rarely do members from different aesthetic camps use it to talk about formal strategies, or contents that don't evolve from individual psyhology. For a new gay poet, who no doubt wants to be read, it is a risky choice to mine the unabashedly comic, especially when it doesn't emerge from camp or self-deprecation--a quality too often praised in gay or female comics. Some straight people overvalue sad, humorless gay book--it makes them feel charitable for understanding, and a lot of gay poets play directly into this desire.

This is the one of the most risky books of the year--gay or straight.

I should disclose that my book Blind Date from Cavafy came out from the same press as de la Flor’s. I can honestly say that this had no impact on my opinions. In fact, the last two books that won the Marsh Hawk Press annual contest I found to be disposable. Michael Rerick’s In Ways Impossible to Fold and Karin Randolph’s Either She Was were bewildering choices. Thylias Moss-one of our greatest living poets-acted as a judge and chose Rerick’s book, and I am still perplexed. But that's the way contests go, I suppose.

Also: I love biting the hand that feeds me. It makes me feel alive.

On Tony Leuzzi's First Book of Poems "Radiant Losses"

2010-06-16T15:37:00.006-04:00

[It's always rewarding to write a post celebrating a local Rochester area writer who more than deserves the visibility. It is my pleasure to offer commentary on my blog regarding the debut of Tony Leuzzi's Radiant Losses. Also crucial for me to mention: the book is published by New Sins Press, created by the poets Glenn Sheldon and Rane Arroyo, one of my literary heroes, who recently passed away. Here's the link to the press: www.newsinspress.com

Undeniably one of the many salient, exciting features in Tony Leuzzi’s first book of poems Radiant Losses is his steadfast incorporation of the Fibonacci-based series. The Fibonacci form yields a hermetic nature, a certain distance from the reader, and perhaps even the creator, that doesn’t encourage applause—unlike a sonnet which asks you to admire its ostentation at end of every single line. There's a modesty in the form; it thrives on self-effacement -- the practitioner knows all of his precision will for the most part go unnoticed. His pride is in the doing.

With remarkable deftness, Leuzzi uses Fibonacci sequence: a six line, 20 syllable poem with a syllable count by line of 1/1/2/3/5/8. In short, start with 0 and 1, add them together to get your next number, then keep adding the last two numbers together for your next one. It’s a pattern repeated in nature, (most famously in nautilus shells.)

Appealing controlling, Tony Leuzzi's poems in his debut book Radiant Losses eschews expectations of certain gay tropes (first love, seeing a hot guy in the gym, an elegy for Joe Brainard), refusing to make them merely palatable to any demographic. This choice makes Leuzzi's poems remarkable, his content invigorated by the Fibonacci pattern. Here’s one of my favorite poems “Consolation”:

One
night
in June
a gay man
walking through the park
is bashed by three thugs who leave him
curled and bleeding in a bed of white anemones.

When
he
is found
and driven
to a hospital
the police are there to take his
statement: tell us, sir, all you can remember of it.

But
the
man sees
it backwards-
him alone, the thugs
returning, lifting him, pulling
their punches, skulking off behind the dying lilacs.

What I like most about the use of the Fibonacci sequence in “Consolation” is the way it acts as a meta-commentary on the way gay-bashings find themselves reported—flat, perfunctorily calculated, without any investigation or depth. To Leuzzi's credit, it’s also a smart move to take advantage of the look the Fibonacci form offers: the hermetic nature resists disallows any invasiveness from the reader—you’re forced to descend downward. A defiant thud becomes the punctuation, an all-too-real end to the unfortunate situation itself.

The third stanza’s strategically odd syntax and word choice further complicates the point-of-view of the victim. Is the man seeing “it” –the bashing—from his own eyes? Is he imagining how the thugs witness themselves and their act of violence? What about the game-changing line break in the final stanza after “pulling?” If the man is seeing the violence against him “backwards” that word "pulling" acts obviously as a description of the intensity of their behavior. But even more provocatively, the break also makes it possible that the thugs are “pulling their punches”—the gay man, as victim, is erasing the violence himself. Perhaps precisely because of the rote ways in which the violence is inhumanely rendered.

Here’s another one. It’s called “Point of View”:

A
bald
man in
an over-
sized army jacket
settles upon the scarred surface
of a bench in the park, then sinks slowly into sleep.

A
tall
boy with
tangled hair
bends before the man,
tweaks the lens of his thirty-five
millimeter, steps in once more, is about to shoot

when
he
and the
men are caught-
Quickly-by the frame
of another man’s camera
for the “Living” section of the local newspaper.

The fun of the poem reveals Leuzzi's impressive range, and the way the Fibonacci sequence can adapt to various contents, as in this case with the extended joke. Among all the line breaks and double meanings with the words "shoot", "caught" "frame" (the conflation of the sexual and the artistic), Leuzzi does something that is rare: normalize promiscuity. And Leuzzi ups the ante even more. He seems to be saying that not only are the sexual acts good, necessary fun, but also the thrill of getting caught is perhaps equally important, perhaps essential to certain queer lives. According to Leuzzi, perhaps engaging in what is named as a criminal activity, having public sex, is one of the more truly liberating ways to be "living." And who else would know such a secret except a queer author who is creating such vital poems.

On Charles Simic's Review of Koethe, Armantrout, and Hoagland in the June 24, 2010 issue of "The New York Review of Books"

2010-06-06T20:57:00.017-04:00

Note: While I am somewhat familiar with all three of these authors, I have not read these particular books. I am simply engaged in writing a review of the review.

There's something undeniably entertaining in the June 10, 2010 issue of "The New York Review of Books." Poet Charles Simic writes a review of three poets: John Koethe, Rae Armantrout, and Tony Hoagland. Even though he rarely explicitly compares them, Simic's ars poetica become all too clear and symptomatic of what may be wrong with a lot of the older poets who are trying to remain hip and current. Simic doesn't possess the unabashed panic of a poet like Franz Wright, who argues for a particular aesthetic in order to fortify his presence in a canon that was ruined a long time ago. But that doesn't make Simic's opinions any less troublesome, and perhaps even more so, because they seem, I'm sure to some, so reasonable.

*

Perhaps a part of that reasonableness comes from Simic's strategic choice to first talk about Koethe. It gives him an opportunity on one hand to pay tribute to the long tradition of the Romantic lyric, and to offer a critique that tries to make him look less stodgy for "admitting"--a verb that Simic repeatedly uses in sometimes mildly deceitful ways-- such a valorization. Understandably fearful of his views being seen as antiquated, Simic quickly says that there's no doubt Koethe "sounds like an older poet." But then Simic tells us that the advancement in Koethe's work is that he relies on the autobiographical for his intellectual inquiry into old age (!) It's good to know that the incorporation of a middle-aged white man writing about the drudgery of old age is a novel idea. John Updike, where are you?

*

Simic praises a poem of Koethe's that's so self-aggrandizingly sincere I thought the lines from the poem and the commentary was parody, ridiculing the self-involvement of middle-class, older men.

Here's part of Koethe's poem that Simic describes as containing "disarming directness"-- a positive quality for Simic. It's from a poem called "Chester":

Another day, which is usually,
how they come:
A cat at the foot of the bed,
noncommittal
In its blankness of mind, with the
morning light
slowly filling the room, and
fragmentary
Memories of last night's video
and phone calls.
It is a feeling of sufficiency, one
menaced
By the fear of some vague lack, of
a simplicity
Of self, a self without a soul, the
nagging fear
Of being someone to whom
nothing ever happens.

Simic praises the poem: "It trusts the language we use daily to convey the complex state of mind of someone getting up in the morning, vaguely troubled by the events of the night before and by the feeling that something is missing in his life." You have to wonder whether or not Simic finds pleasure in the poem because of its language-why isn't commonplace language just common?- or because the "aboutness" of the poem is easy to gloss. Simic essentially sums up his mild praise of Koethe as saying that there needs to be a few more inventive similes, a tad more figurative language, sharp images to add a "bit more range" to complement his "fine mind." This is an odd suggestion. It seems undeniable that Simic affirms Koethe's ars poetica, but inserts just enough (for some) criticism in the review to make himself seem fair. The self-monitored affirmation he offers here is much more unabashed in his critical comments of Hoagland, a hipper, younger, and more popular man.

*

Out of the three poets up for discussion he most admires Hoagland, but is sure never to mention that Hoagland may be operating from the same aesthetic-political camp as Koethe. It's no surprise that Hoagland is saved for last. As Simic says about Hoagland's poems, "It's all there." The question then is two-fold. If Hoagland is in some ways the antidote for Koethe and Armantrout's failings, then what is the "It" and the "There." The "it" seems to be definitely thematic in regards to Hoagland: "He is a poet aware of the hard lives most Americans lead to a degree rarely encountered in contemporary poetry. This is his subject. And so is his sense that something has gone deeply wrong." I found this somewhat odd, especially since it could be said that Armantrout's "aboutness" is essentially the same thing. Simic's main argument against Armantrout is not completely one of content (although her abstractions to Simic sure are troublesome), but definitely of form. Simic writes:

"Even her most admiring critic, Stephen Burt, admits in an essay on her work that her poetry is almost never unambiguous. 'The sounds and tones of its stanzas are memorably crafted,' he writes, 'but it's large-scale arrangement can seem opaque: it can be hard to know why four segments, say, of a thirty-two lines poem requires the order they have and not one another.'"

What is disconcerting about that pulled quotation is that Simic never engages Burt's take on the material, that she is engaging as palpable socio-political themes as Tony Hoagland. The possibility of that intertextuality is underminded by Simic's questioning of Armantrout's method: "As maddening as that can be for the reader, the parts of them are often interesting in themselves, so one is usually willing to put off for awhile the question of how they link up." It seems that Simic's unwillingness to accept the openness of possible readings of a poem is what's frustrating. The abstractions employed by Koethe are suitable, even if a bit bland, and never get in a way of one being able to making a definite thematic comment.

I always ask my students when they are assigned to read a poem to note the particular places where they are confused or bored or frustrated. A lot of teachers hate when students talk about those things, because it seems to be anti-intellectual. I would claim it's just the opposite. I love when students are being aggressively whiny ("I can't understand this poem and that's not fair"). They are usually the most fun to engage in class. There's tension, and I thrive on it as a teacher. It's revealing what Simic does after he quotes the Armantrout poem "Heaven." Here's the wonderful poem.

Heaven

1.

It's a book
full of ghost children,

safely dead,

where dead means
hidden,

or wanting
or not wanting

to be known.

2.

Heaven is symmetric
with respect to rotation.

It's beautiful
when one thing changes

while another thing
remains the same.

This is what Simic says, "If a single point of view and tone is suspect, how is one to sustain an emotion in the poem? I mean, how does one write a love poem or an elegy if one regards any sort of continuity as untrue to the fragmentary way in which we experience language and consciousness? As far as I'm concerned, it's the individual part of her poems that are memorable and rarely the whole poem."

But yet when talking about Hoagland he seems to contradict himself or at least show some visible gaps in his argument. He praises Hoagland for the exact thing he sees in Armantrout. Isn't channel surfing as unstable as any of Armantrout's rhetorical strategies. Pay attention to the following for Simic's sanctimonious position:

"Reading Hoagland's poems is like surfing channels on TV. On one channel they are showing a 1950s sitcom, on another, soldiers are running past burning and overturned cars; on still another, diamonds are being sold at a fabulous discount; there's a baseball game; a preacher is telling his congregation to consult Jesus on how to invest their money; and so one for hundreds of more channels. All this is beyond comprehension. No wonder there are more poems still being written about pine trees and trout fishing than about teenagers with blue hair, tattoos, and tongue studs."

And then he praises a Hoagland poem that deals with "this ignored reality." Here's some of the lines from "Food Court" that Simic uses to make this argument:

"If you want to talk about America, why not just mention Jimmy's Wok and Roll American-Chinese Gourmet Emporium?-the cloud of steam rising from the bean sprouts and shredded cabbage/when the oil is sprayed on from a giant plastic bottle wielded by Ramon, Jimmy's main employee, who hates having to wear the sanitary hair net and who thinks the food tastes funny?''

The poem goes on and makes a few digressions that make you think Hoagland is going to deal with the intersection of race and class in his poem:

...where two boys from the suburbs
dropped off by their moms

with their ghetto pants and skateboards
are getting ready to pronounce
their first sentences in African-
American?

Or class:

And the secretaries from the law firm
drifting in from work at noon
to fill the tables of the food court,
in their cotton skirts and oddly sexy running shoes?

According to Simic, Hoagland is writing about the mysteries of the world around us, "what we have avoided looking at closely"! Not only does Simic make that claim, but he also says that one of the purposes of this poem is "to liberate us from poetic convention." What liberation? We have the goofy, long, discursive lines; the flat, colloquial language, the predictable litany, etc.

Simic tells us that Hoagland has "too much sympathy to mock any of these people." But does he have the conviction to investigate far reaching questions? Here's the end of the poem:

Oh yes, everything
All chopped up and stirred together
in the big steel pan held over a medium-high blue flame

while Jimmy watches with his practical black eyes.

How are we supposed to interpret the word "practical"? Does it mean that the Chinese? white? owner of this hole-in-the-wall (or just plain mediocre) "American-Chinese Gourmet Emporium" has no choice but to sit with necessary resignation at his own fated future? Or is it a celebration that he's managing to support himself in a world "populated" by little groves "of palm trees maintained by the small corporation?" How does one make sense of that bizarre final metaphor? Is it saying that all of us of a different races, genders, classes are assigned to a "melting pot" and no matter how much we may try to carve out our own idiosyncratic self, we're doomed?

What is "practical" about Jimmy, the owner of this restaurant? That he has a quasi successful small business enterprise? Or that he has refrained from questioning his own role in the world? Or that he's a passive voyeur to the inevitable assimilation of various cultures, after all it's a "American-Chinese Gourmet Emporium?"

The strange thing about Hoagland's poem is that it creates less coherence than any of Armatrout's work he reviews. In fact, Hoagland predictably excuses himself from politicizing his poem with phony closure and the absence of that coherent "I" Simic so desperately craves.

It is no small surprise that what might also scare Simic off from Armantrout is, for him, her refusal to deal with the domestic. (Stephen Burt names Armantrout poems that deals with the domestic in his essay from "Close Calls with Nonsense" --maybe Simic would feel more comfortable if he re-read Burt's take on her.) The final poem Simic chooses to celebrate is a Hoagland poem about a father and son. The domestic should be written about, but I would argue that the poem is mean. Here's two sections of the poem called "My Father's Vocabulary":

In the history of American speech,
he was born between "Dirty Commies" and "Nice Tits"

He worked for Uncle Sam,
and married a dizzy gal from Pittsburgh with a mouth on her.
I was conceived in the decade between "Far Out" and "Whatever";

at the precise moment when "going all the way"
turned into "getting it on."

I don't understand why Hoagland doesn't put "dizzy" and "mouth on her" in quotations as well. Who sees their life like this? Are we supposed to be swept up be the cleverness of the language? Is Simic covertly telling us that Hoagland is more of a language poet than a language poet except that he can embed all that stuff in a conventional narrative/lyric as well?

Of course, pathos is used for closure to the poem which comes full circle. As Hoagland writes that the last time the narrator's father was alive: "For that occasion I had carefully prepared a suitcase of small talk." (Is this the sort of eerily forced language he wants so badly in Koethe's poem, the kind that would expand his "range?) Hoagland's poem continues:

-But he was already packed and going backwards,
with the nice tits and dirty commies,

to the small town of his vocabulary, somewhere outside of Pittsburgh.

The irony is simple. Hoagland's poem may seem to be more coherent: he's not interested in line breaks that open the meanings of the poems, they may not be divided into fragments, but the peculiarity of the language, his pathos-filled closures don't embrace any definite thematic either. Are we supposed to see that the poem's speaker by the end of the poem views his father's idiom as less distancing (no quotations or capitalization appear around the words tits and commies)? That his father's imminent death has transcended any alienation created by generational language difference which reflect ideological shifts? Or are we supposed to see the presumably working class life of his father as something he now can charmingly categorize as "quaint"?

The irony is that Armantrout's intellectual, framgmented inquiries provide a more definite thematic reading than Hoagland's superficial slick surface.

You can't help conflate Jimmy's "practical" eyes with that of Simic the critic here. All these various aesthetics, some more "exotic" than others are boiling in that saucepan. Simic serves the meal to himself, removing anything from his dish that looks odd, and then boasting to himself how he ate everything on his place with the utmost adventurousness.

On Inflated Grades (Part One)

2010-06-02T07:40:00.007-04:00

It's important for me to preface this post by saying that I don't teach at a Research 1 University, or in any sort of MFA program, but that I instruct at SUNY Brockport, a teaching college where students receive an MA in literature or creative writing. When I first received my tenure-track job, I thought (naively) that both a comprehensive college and a Research 1 university were the same. This was wrong. Where I work teaching and scholarship are of equal importance. At a Research 1 University, primarily only research is valued.

This isn't to say one is worse or better, but that both attract different sorts of students who have different needs. Here most of the time graduate students choose SUNY Brockport for a bump in their salary at either a middle-school, or high school. This is a good thing. The pursuit of more knowledge should be rewarded. No problem there.

I would be doing the same thing.

Most graduate students at SUNY Brockport do not plan on attending an MFA program or becoming a permanent creative writer--their focus is on teaching. Of course, I could cite a number of student in the program who are enrolled in the program for quite the opposite reason. But still. This isn't a critique simply; it is a description.

*

Some time ago, at a college similar to that of SUNY Brockport, I taught a graduate creative writing class and told my students on the first day that their grade would be based on their participation and writing. I said I would grade their writing in the following way: I told them each would present two stories or two batches of poem during the course of the semester. If they wrote at least a full eight pages or 4 poems, they would receive an A. I told them that the quality didn't matter in any way. I wouldn't judge them on that, even proofreading. All I was interested was in the generation of material. Everyone was also required to write a critique of every other person's work, and, of course, participate.

Of course, the quality of the pieces ranged from the sloppy to a-draft-away-from-publication. That didn't surprise me--that's the way it is in any workshop. What did surprise me was this: a high number of students came into my office to complain about my grading criterion. As one student told me, he felt "cheated." He stated that he knew someone in the class didn't put as much work into his writing as he did.

My response: So? Why does it matter to you?

"Because, it's unethical," he said. "I put more time into it."

This student told another teacher in the program how I assessed their work. The teacher was visibly upset. "Your grades are inflated," he said.

At so many college, there is a strange collective anxiety about ostensibly inflated grades, that we, as teachers, are not creating classes that are "rigorous" enough. "You see the evidence," they say, "look: the university's median grade is an A-. We should be ashamed of ourselves."

This sort of talk always concerns me: why does giving a high number of A's mean that your class wasn't rigorous? That you didn't give them enough to do? Why does giving a high number of A's mean that you are a "better," "more ethical" teacher?

Why do we never ask the following: that a teacher who gives extremely low grades might be a "worse, less ethical" teacher? That perhaps that teacher isn't making the grading criterion for the class transparent enough? That he isn't considering how he might not be succeeding as a teacher in some respects in helping a student achieve their potential? That perhaps he needs to grade on a curve, a choice that one might consider to be a way of inflating grades?

CONGRATULATIONS TO BENJAMIN S. GROSSBERG for WINNING THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD IN GAY MEN'S POETRY

2010-05-28T21:58:00.006-04:00

If I had my personal computer, I would say more. I'm borrowing a stranger's, because I'm on vacation and have no access. But I just wanted to quickly say how cool it is the judges choose someone who might not be as readily known as some of the other nominees, even though all of them are special in their own way.

Please purchase Benjamin S. Grossberg's "Sweet Core Orchard" from University of Tampa Press. Here's the link:

http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Core-Orchard-Benjamin-Grossberg/dp/1597320544

"El Dorado (Goodbye, Utah)" by Rane Arroyo

2010-05-23T09:37:00.004-04:00

Yesterday Rane Arroyo's poem "El Dorado (Goodbye, Utah)" appeared on Verse Daily. Here's the poem in its entirety:

El Dorado (Goodbye, Utah)

Mi amor, I'm surrounded by mountains.
I'm inside their ring, one never to know

a ring finger. I miss the pueblo of our
nakedness. A magnet pulls at me tonight,

the opposite of the Pacific Sea's name.
I tire of burying sunsets in this nuevo west,

of turquoise shops selling the wrong sky,
and of the search for El Dorado dwindling

into a hunt for a high; it's all a bare-bones
version of salvation. This isn't a tequila

letter or an abstract tourniquet. You may
only hear this as an echo, a cartographer's

mumble. Sometimes, I travel too far from
myself and need proof that I've not died.

How I miss your bed's golden myopia.
I'm even without moonlight's silver tonight.

On Steven Cordova's Poem "Across a Table" from His Debut Book "Long Distance"

2010-05-20T15:46:00.006-04:00

One of the more enjoyable books of the year is Steven Cordova's "Long Distance." The poems possess the graceful conviction to evaporate as you read them--there's rarely a desperate transition or forced leap in their trajectories. You sense the impact of an Eileen Myles in his work: the poems are unobtrusive, wispy—in a delightful way. Cordova's AIDS poems dissipate; they don’t strain to be remembered. He creates in HIV-impacted narrator who is admirably modest in his desires: he wants to share, from time to time, even entertain, but never with much self-aggrandizement.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the book is Cordova’s well-tempered, necessary re-envisioning of AIDS as the aggressively banal. This is the complete opposite of poets who insist on seeing the illness as never less than dramatic (and often melodramatic).

Cordova’s titles indicate his desire to determinedly, yet calmly investigate the unremarkable : “New Love,” “In Your Defense,” “Old Friend,” “Drinking Buddies.” Here’s one of my favorite poems “Across a Table” in its entirety:

“I’m glad you’re positive.”

“I’m glad you’re positive,

too, though, of course, I wish

you weren’t.” I wish you weren’t

either is the response I expect.

But you say nothing.

And who can blame you?

Not me. I’m not the one

who’ll call you after dinner and a movie.

You’re not the one who’ll call me.

We both know we have

that-what?-that ultimate date

one night to come, one bright morning.

Who can blame us? Not the forks

and not the knives that carry on

and do the heavy lifting now.

Unadorned, the poem speaks to the idea that AIDS has become rather undramatic and at the same no less significant. In its Cavafy-like flatness, the comedy-of-manners contained in the opening lines reflect a dilemma of the now. With the disclosure of HIV so common, how does one still find (or should they find?) a heightened significance in the exchange of statuses?

It’s telling that Cordova uses the word “blame.” Here blame is attributed not in any way to the mode of transmission; it’s connected to a failure in etiquette.

In the poem, Cordova employs two rhetorical question: 1.) “And who can blame you?” regarding his quasi-disappointment that his date doesn’t reciprocate the wish that his companion isn’t HIV-impacted. 2.) “Who can blame us?” – which functions most intriguingly as confirmation that the banality of a failed date is nothing that significant in relation to larger unions like oneself to their own mortality.

The “forks” and “knives”—the props for a dinner date –are more than sufficient to carry through what is the ultimate crisis of the poem: a failed date. The banal subject of AIDS is elided (yet not concealed) in perhaps the most whimsical of poetic devices: personification. This unforced poetic move is one of the now, not of the late 1980 or early to mid 90's.

In a future post, I'll focus on one or two of my other favorites: "Testing Positive," "The Last AIDS Cat," "At the Delacorte" "Old Friend", etc.

On James Allen Hall, Enid Shomer, Michael Walsh, Allen Ginsberg, Mark Doty, the University of Arkansas Press, Paul Zimmer, Ronaldo V. Wilson, etc. etc

2010-05-10T19:52:00.013-04:00

Dear Enid Shomer, the Poetry Editor of University of Arkansas Press:

First I want to thank you for doing what I consider to be extraordinary work in supporting gay poets--a lot of editors would be very wary of publishing more than one gay poet a year. They wouldn't even dare to admit to themselves that they do have quotas about those sort of things. You have published three gay men. Again, I can't say that about too many editors. I can guess you would say that these were the best manuscripts and you're not interested in the sexuality of the authors, that you just simply want the best work. A lot of editors claim that but most don't practice it. By far, that's the most important thing I'm going to say in this post. You have a great, well-deserved reputation within gay male circles and deserve it. I can't think of too many other mainstream (ie university) presses who would do such a thing, or have.

So, as you can imagine, I feel a bit guilty in critiquing some, if not any, of your decisions or your press. It has brought a lot of important new and emerging authors into the marketplace. At the same time, I think that everything is open up for critique, so this post is not meant as an aggressive attack, but as a way of creating a dialogue. I can tell from your comments on my last post that you may see me as a overdetermined to offer an opinion. While that may be so (my partner of 13 years would definitely side with you), I like to cause a little trouble. Trouble makes people self-conscious, and self-consciousness, I believe, is a good thing. I also think criticism is an act of creation: the ability to unpack words, decisions, catalogues, and so forth. I give you my word, that's my primary intent.

Even more importantly, though, no matter how personal this post may seem, it is not intended as such. I see my extensive critique about your press as a vehicle of talking about larger issues. I sound like someone who teaches freshman composition (which I do): begin with the specific and then the universal will emerge. In other words, the problems I examine are not particular to your press, but mainstream (ie university presses) in general. That is why I am giving myself leeway here.

I also want to make clear that it is upsetting to me that I'm offering a critique of a press that does care about queer authors. Why not attack the ones that don't? Because they don't listen. I'd rather offer opinions to those who do care than waste my time with those who don't. It may be unfair, but that's the best explanation I can offer.

I'm going to try my best in explaining why I think your press may privilege a certain type of gay poet over other types of gay poets. This is a tricky thing to discuss, because one may think on the surface that the poets --James Allen Hall, Eric Leigh, and Michael Walsh may seem like they're different poets. I would like to make the argument that they are not only of more or less of the same aesthetic camp, but also, how they essentially, to a degree, are creating the same poem. This isn't to say that they are good or bad poets (although I do receive by far the most personal pleasure from James Allen Hall and the least from Michael Walsh, but that is irrelevant).

My argument will be two-fold: 1.) articulate an anticipation of reasons why you might argue against them being at all similar and then refute those arguments in a congenial, non-aggressive manner 2.) offer examples of other gay poets who offer alternative aesthetics and contents in contrast to the sort of rhetorical strategies and material you seem to honor the most regularly.

1a.) You might say, "But, Steve, they're all dealing with different subject material: Michael Walsh (the pastoral); James Allen Hall (the melodramatic, and I do mean that descriptively, not critically), and Eric Leigh (AIDS.) On the surface, this might seem true. But if you look deeper, these authors actually employ the same sort of narrative arc in their poems: they always begin with the domestic which pervades all aspects of their books. I think this is particular troublesome in the 21 st century when gay men seem eerily relentless in their attempts to gain tolerance through presenting themselves as domestic creatures, or at least craving such comforts . As if by focusing on the limitations and potentialities of the nuclear family, they are essentially safe and non-threatening. These statements are not an attack against any one particular poet, but a description of a cumulative pattern of poetry in the gay literature scene, a problem that does not belong to one particular press.

1b.) Here's another reason why I find stressing the familiar--mother and father--a problem. It offers a socially deterministic view, a sort of self-pathology of gay men. Why so often to mainstream narrative gay poets feel the need to offer backstory to their lives. Why can't gay men allow themselves to act and feel the way they do because they are gay men. By privileging the domestic arc (here is what happened to me when I was young and this is why I act the way I do when I'm old), gay men are limiting their own agency. Not everything needs to be operating in a psychoanalytic frame work.

1c.) If I should say that the poets personaes' are asexual, and at the very least, non-threatening for the most part, I'm sure you could point to excerpts of the poems that refute this. For example, the use of the word "cum" in Eric Leigh's book. Or perhaps an example of the poem "Wish" from Michael Walsh's The Dirt Riddles: "When I kiss him, weed sour/and tomato green/after hours in this garden,/I taste the darkness/suspended between bone and skin/..." I would make the claim that the queer sexuality is almost always tastefully embedded in the poem, or used as a way to titillate a middle-class reader. The poems are never about or truly deal with what might be perceived as more raw sexuality in general or unconventional sexual practices.

1d.) I do not think you could deny in any way that these poets privilege unrepentantly the narrative. Conventional narrative is what matters. This is undeniably partly impacted by Mark Doty. Mary Doty is the driving influence here. Other significant writers like Timothy Liu (his more later work), Dennis Cooper, David Trinidad, Rane Arroyo, John Ashberry, Kenneth Koch, Wayne Koestenbaum, James Schuyler, Essex Hemphill, etc etc. and their contemporary influence play no role. Your press seems to privilege almost completely poems that Theodore Roethke could have secretly written. (I think when James Allen Hall uses metaphor and hyperbole he comes closest to doing something new, and that's why I like his work, by far, the best--in his portraits of his mother he simultaneously embraces and parodies the iconic mother figure in his poems. Those poems create a certain amount of envy in me.)

1e.) They are all very earnest poets. Whether it's Leigh's AIDS narratives or Walsh's pastorals about growing up on a farm or Hall's domestic tragedies, I sense that one of the reasons they may have cross over success is that they seem like the type of poet who is having an emotional catharsis on the page--no matter how much they may claim otherwise, or how true that is. People like to feel that they are witnessing the outpouring of a gay man's troubled, triumphant souls. And their aesthetic strategies encourage this reaction from their audience.

1f.) On the back of Michael Walsh's The Dirt Riddles, poet Paul Zimmer says in his blurb: "...Walsh, a poet who concentrates on meaningful particulars and who doesn't try to dazzle us with poetic footwork." Most of these poems for the most part consist of flat, journalistic language, like Theodore Roethke or Mark Doty or Stanley Kunitz. No Wayne Koestenbaum or Ashberry or Ginsberg like influences in this trio.

1g.) The poems are essentially humorless. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and yes, you could claim that there is some wit or the odd toss-away joke in the books. But if you read Michael Wash carefully, he is essentially a Andrew Hudgins ("cute wit" I would define it as)--which again I mean descriptively not critically. What I perceive to be the earnestness of the narratives seems to limit the potentiality for the truly irreverent, the tonally disconcerting, the slapstick, the self-consciously postmodern, the scatological, etc. These poets have a polite, quaint sense of humor. Michael Wash has a bit called "MOOO"--polite, appropriate comedy.

1h.) None of them are explicitly political. I do not like when writers claim that everything is political. If you elasticize a word like political to mean that every poem by its very nature is political, the word means nothing. Of all people, poets should know that. None of them address current events or particular discrimination, federal, state, or local, in any way. At the very least, it seems to me that the poets are way too invested in the ahistorical--which is often the case for gay poets: they're a bit too desperate to appeal to everyone. The problems gay men face, these poets, seem to say, are universal. That isn't the case.

1i.) I do not know if this is true at all, so you may simply want to discount it, and I don't mean this any more than as an observation, at least in this limited conversation, but it must be said: all the gay writers seem to be white.

2.) I'm going to now provide links to gay poets who subscribe to a different aesthetic camp. Rather than retype them, I'm going to provide links. I think you would concede that none of these poets are Theodore Roethke/Mark Doty/Stanley Kunitz influenced poems. You can see the influence of, say, A.R. Ammons, Haryette Mullen, Lorca, Ginsberg, Susan Howe etc. Another way of thinking about it is that they do possess "poetic footwork":

Christopher Schmidt

http://www.lapetitezine.org/Christopher.Schmidt.htm

Brian Teare

http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v4n1/poetry/teare_b/maclay.htm

Rolando V. Wilson

http://www.blithe.com/bhq8.4/8.4.07.html

Neil de la Flor

http://42opus.com/authors/neildelaflor

Saeed Jones

http://www.storysouth.com/poetry/2007/05/it_means_something_different_i_1.html

Emanuel Xavier

http://00381cd.netsolhost.com/poems.htm

And why does Mark Doty always have to be the influence, not someone, say, like Jack Spicer?

Jack Spicer

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19747

There are numerous other poets, such as Eduardo C. Corral and Matthew Hittinger, but I've written them already on my blog. You may want to check them out.

If you choose to look, these poets are doing something very different than the singular sort of aesthetic camp you may be invested in. I do not think there's any way you could argue that they come from a different lineage than the Theordore Roehtke/Mark Doty/Stanley Kunitz one you seem to privilege. Notice also the various contents: a bit more daring and ultimately to some respect creative. There are a zillion more that I've written about or will be. Their books are stacked near my bed: Steven Cordova, Tony Leuzzi, Francisco Aragon, etc etc etc.

It goes without saying that I am indebted to you. You're invested in bringing a marginalized group of poets out from the shadows. I am sincerely grateful. The three books you have chosen have helped me--they have made me think. Coming across the voice of a new gay poet is always useful.

But I would like if at all possible the way to consider my arguments in which I feel that you and your press may privilege certain aesthetic and certain contents.

With much respect,
Steve Fellner

P.S. This is all I'm going to say about these three particular poets and the press publicly. Anything else I'd backchannel you.

A TRIBUTE TO RANE ARROYO

2010-05-08T11:52:00.011-04:00

I just found out that Rane Arroyo passed away this Thursday. He is one of my heroes, as I wrote about him on my blog. He is one of the most important poets--gay or straight--in the nation today, blending the personal and the political in amazing, comic, and important ways. I think SUNY Brockport this semester is where he gave his last reading.

Here is the link to his dancing during the actual SUNY Brockport reading he gave:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1435132646332&ref=mf

This is the post I wrote about him on March 29, 2009. It is entitled "Writing Joy: The Truly Amazing Poems of Rane Arroyo":

Only the best poets can convey joy. Unabashed, authentic joy. Which is probably the most important feeling to express. In the queer poetry world, victim narratives and reductive identity politic still rule supreme. With the creepy way PoBiz (and the world) operates, how can one find the courage to display an emotion as natural and as generous as joy?

I don’t know.

But I believe that Rane Arroyo’s The Buried Sea, new and selected poems, accomplishes that feat.

There are not too many queer books (and books in general) that I find as ethical, generous, and as artful as his. I can only think of one book last year that gave me as much pleasure: queer poet Tom Savage’s Brainlifts. Both of these books transcend their label as queer literature and can and should have competed as finalists for national, mainstream awards...

Let’s look at these inspired openings from Arroyo’s poems:

You’re dead, but the skies are not.
This Ohio storm makes me think of your
blackening Chilean horizons. What use

is your name now in the not-now
not-here? Neruda. Ne. Ruda. Neru.
Da. It was a wonderful mask, no?…
(“The Visitor”)

And:

What I dislike about daylight is its
muscularity. What need to claim
everything, only to release it
at dusk, when man and woman need a
godparent? Do you notice how my
hands seem blue and yet I’m wearing no
sapphire nor do I play the piano?…
(“A Bolero, But Not for Dancing”)

And:

Yet another Puerto Rican
Buddhist. He wants to breathe in
peace while keeping his rice-
and-bean cooking skills, his accent,

his blue jeans from the Santana
years, his wine and rum collections
housed inside his head. Today’s lesson:
fireflies know they’re grasshoppers
illusory stars…
(“Breathing Lessons”)

And:

You’re still the island of the holy
palm tree. What can I offer to the man
married first to God, and then soon to
the wrong rib?
(“Almost a Revelation for Two in Bed”)

Perhaps a truly significant poet makes you not want to add anything to their words. You know their writing can do all the work. As a critic, you need to shut up.

Here’s an excerpt from yet another poem. From “Salsa Capitalism”:

…I live on a teacher’s
salary but salsa capitalism isn’t about
money or trickle-down theory of

Lorca’s duende. It’s about hearing
music to be spent inside our bodies,
rhythms’ richness, the dancing, our

now foreign tears’ rum, free will that’s
not taxed, kingdom come as crumbs…
(“Salsa Capitalism”)

And finally, here’s “World Citizen” in its entirety:

Charon doesn’t know a Cuban
from a Puerto Rican.
They are all firewood to deliver.

They’re as dead as everyone else.
Charon throws passports and visas
into the bloodied river.

He strips everyone upon landing;
then they truly disappear into
God’s dark imagination.

Charon rows back to us who,
while waiting for him on shore,
argue as if countries exist.

We’re naked without our flags.

On Enid Shomer and The University of Arkansas Press

2010-05-04T07:53:00.010-04:00

I always feel a slight surge of panic when I write a less than favorable review of a new book of poems by a gay poet--am I ultimately offering a self-critique as opposed to reading the poet on his own terms? am I jealous (yes--I have internalized that much-offered pathology used to immobilize anyone who has any sort of opinion)? and maybe, most importantly, have I overlooked the poet's best work? am I centering my critique around what even the poet would say is his lesser poems? if so, then that really isn't fair. How many poems does any critic really like in a book? I tell my students that if you're wowed by even one, then you should buy it. Without hesitation.

Once I posted my critique of Eric Leigh's book "Harm's Way" I felt that same sort of anxiety. A personal rule of mine: if someone should comment on a post, unless it's an extraordinary circumstance, I don't alter anything I wrote. But I felt a compulsion immediately after I typed that past review to reexamine the book once again. To make sure I had represented my views accurately. And upon reflection I can say that I was right.

It has become a joke, rightly so, in my classes of my use of the word idiosyncratic. In its own way, it is as useless as trotting out the word voice or tone, but I don't care. When students are at a basic level--unable to ask themselves why writing something like "I'm falling down a deep, deep, dark abyss" is maybe not-so-good poetry--you have to be brass tasks: a buzzword isn't a bad thing if it teases out the more peculiar idea within the more generic one.

That's my problem with Leigh's "Harm's Way" --I don't feel that I know who Eric Leigh is--and I don't mean that in terms of the offering of autobiographical material. For example, I think the longest poem in the book reveals Leigh's weaknesses. The poem called "The Dark Light of the Spring" is an eight page, five section poem-- which deals ostensibly with his father. With Leigh's choice to use the poem as a finale to the first part of his book, he corroborates how important this poem is to his project. Not to mention his using the phrase "sickness and health"-- a phrase repeated as the title in the final poem of the book.

"The Dark Light of the Spring" is a maudlin poem about a son and his brother who mourn what appears to be their father's suicide. Here's essentially the thesis of the poem:

An old story but one my father loved: Castor and Pollux,

one brother so unable to live without the other
that their father placed them side by side in the sky.
What he didn't share was this: the truth about stars

in the truth about men. Brothers. Us.

All the tropes of the poem mingle here: the motif of the stars and universe, the love triangle between the father-son-brother, the conflation of familial identity, etc. Leigh typically employs an aphorism when he wants to emphasize a point--he needs to tone that down a bit. A few lines down from the above quotation: "Proximity can be a trick of the light, intimacy/an ever- fluxing span..."

The poem is harmless--it's just difficult to tell whether or not Leigh is a poet or not--and I don't mean this as a quip. There's some potentially intriguing thematics in the poem. At one point, the narrator says:

"Horseshoes and hand grenades,"
my father always said, meaning, "close
but no cigar." Cliches were his home

remedy...

Is this meant as a critique of the narrator's own words? Isn't star imagery as banal as "close but no cigar." Or in a way am I supposed to see the narrator as jealous of the father--one of the best lines in the poem is that "horseshoes and hand grenades" and he has no choice but to attribute it to his father?

Am I supposed to read the final lines in the second section as a straightforward admission of his own writerly anxiety about his own work even though the lines are embedded in his memories of a father's funeral:

those funeral days when strangers

held us close, apologize for our loss,
as they struggled to anchor

letter to letter, word to sentence,
to forge their way like each of us must

to say something, anything, when nothing is enough.

What's curious about this book is that in a lot of ways it's extremely similar (in terms of its strategically flat diction and tragic domestic family themes, its unyielding privileging of narrative) as James Allen Hall's book "Now You're the Enemy"--also from the University of Arkansas Press, edited by Enid Shomer.

No doubt that Hall has found his own idiosyncratic vision, but it does concern me that the editor Enid Shomer seems to championing the same sort of gay poets. Much in the same way as University of Chicago Press. On one hand, we have The Serious Chronicler of Family Tragedy (Hall is best when he isn't serious) and the other Anglophiles.

Do I think this is a bad thing? No. No, I don't. I can't wait to read Hall's new book, and I look forward to seeing what Leigh can create once he moves beyond this more automatic sort of writing.

When I was at AWP, I was genuinely thrilled to see how many gay books there were. But I am concerned that there's not enough self-reflection among editors (in this case Enid Shomer) of how and why gay men seem to be pushed toward certain set of aesthetics and contents in mainstream (for poetry anyway) publishing.

There are some presses that seem to know and appreciate the need for aesthetic diversity between gay poets themselves. Take Martha Rhodes from Four Way Books. No matter what you may think of the books: Tom Healy, C. Dale Young, and Jason Schneiderman are very, very different poets. I hope more editors/publishers follow her example. Rhodes knows what most people deny: diversity is more than cultural, it is also aesthetic.

Anyone who helps publish gay poets is cool by me, but I shouldn't be asked to be so grateful that I can't hold writers and editors responsible for making their arguments known so that we can avoid making the gay poetry scene as monolithic as it sometimes can be.

COMING SOON: A SECOND POST ABOUT ERIC LEIGH'S "HARM'S WAY"

2010-05-02T20:54:00.001-04:00

PLEASE SUPPORT THIS CONTEST!

2010-05-02T20:28:00.001-04:00

SEVEN KITCHENS PRESS announces the third annual Robin Becker Chapbook Prize for an original, unpublished poetry manuscript in English by a Lesbian, Gay. Bisexual, Transgendered or Queer writer.

* Prize: Fifty author copies.
* Submission deadline: Postmarked between March 1 and May 15 of each year.
* Eligibility: Open to all L/G/B/T/Q poets writing in English (no translations, please).
* Please note: Two manuscripts will be selected as co-winners of the 2010 Robin Becker Chapbook Prize: one by a writer with no previous book or chapbook, and the other by a writer with previous book or chapbook publication.
* Please read the guidelines carefully; the complete guidelines are posted on the Seven Kitchens site and we are not responsible for other versions of the guidelines that may be posted, in whole or in part, elsewhere.

COMPLETE GUIDELINES:

* Anyone who identifies as L/G/B/T/Q is eligible to submit to the Robin Becker Chapbook Prize.
* The manuscript itself need not address L/G/B/T/Q themes, though such work is welcome.
* The final judge for this year's series is Eloise Klein Healy.

Submit a paginated manuscript of 16-24 pages (not including front matter).

* Include two cover pages: one with the manuscript title, author name, address, e-mail and phone number; the second cover page should have the manuscript title only.
* Include a table of contents page, if appropriate.
* The collection may contain a series of poems or one single chapbook-length poem.
* Include, if applicable, an acknowledgments page for work previously published.
* Please include, on a separate page, a brief (100-150 words) biographical note, including a statement of any previous or pending book or chapbook publication.

The author's name must not appear in the manuscript.

* Collaborative works are accepted. Should a winning manuscript be collaboratively written, the author copies will be shared equally.
* All manuscripts will be blind judged, meaning all identifying material will be separated from the manuscripts as they are logged in.
* Manuscript titles and their log numbers will be posted on the web site [http:// sevenkitchens dot blogspot dot com] as they are received.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please notify us promptly if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere.

* Submissions must be posted between March 1 and May 15, 2010.
* The winning manuscripts will be announced on or before October 15, 2010.
* Manuscript finalists will also be announced, and may be eligible for publication.

Manuscripts will not be returned. E-mailed submission is preferred, but you may send via regular mail.

* If you are sending by mail, do not staple or bind your manuscript; please use a binder clip and mail flat in an 8.5 x 11 envelope.
* Please do not use expedited delivery services; your postmark date is sufficient to ensure your entry qualification, and we will allow 7-10 days for receipt of all mailed entries. Please use First Class Mail and consider spending the money you've saved on a chapbook from an independent press!
* If you are sending by e-mail, please send one document in Microsoft Word format (.doc, .docx or .rtf files are ideal); you must include the words “Robin Becker Chapbook” in the subject line of your e-mail.
* Include a $12 reading fee with each manuscript you submit (multiple submissions are welcome). Checks should be made payable to Ron Mohring, NOT to Seven Kitchens. Online payment may be made via PayPal to sevenkitchens at yahoo dot com.
* Each entrant will receive one copy of either winning chapbook, to be published during the winter of 2010-11. Please let us know if you change your e-mail or mailing address!
* Each co-winner will receive fifty copies of her or his chapbook. Additionally, the publisher will distribute ten review copies and will solicit online reviews of each chapbook.

Send your manuscript:
~by e-mail, as a Microsoft Word attachment, to: sevenkitchens at yahoo dot com; or
~by mail to Ron Mohring, Publisher; PO Box 668; Lewisburg PA 17837.
ABOUT THE SERIES: Initiated in 2008, this chapbook series honors Robin Becker, whose continuing accomplishments as a poet, professor, and mentor of lesbian and gay writers deserve wider acclaim. Becker serves as poetry editor for the Women's Review of Books and is a professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of six collections of poems, including Giacometti's Dog (1990), All-American Girl (1996), The Horse Fair (2000), and Domain of Perfect Affection (2006), all from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and of the chapbook Venetian Blue (Frick Art & Historical Center, 2002).

Titles in this series include Lost Lands by Judith Barrington, Postcards from P-town by Steven Riel, (2008), Inland Sea by Erin Bertram, and Scavenge by RJ Gibson. All titles are kept in print and are available for $7 each; please add $1 for shipping.

ABOUT THE JUDGE: Eloise Klein Healy is the author of six books of poetry, including Ordinary Wisdom, Artemis in Echo Park, Passing, and The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho. Healy's work has been widely anthologized in collections including The World In Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave and Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals. Her imprint with Red Hen Press, Arktoi Books, established in 2006, specializes in publishing the work of lesbian authors.

On Eric Leigh's "Harm's Way"

2010-04-29T19:09:00.014-04:00

Sincerely dutiful, gay poet Eric Leigh’s debut book “Harm’s Way” moves through themes that sometimes seem retro, as if it was catapulting us back to the early to mid 1980s, the beginning of the AIDS crisis. It doesn't offer retrospective commentary of that time; it feels a bit standoffish in wanting to talk to gay men about the now.

You can feel Leigh sometimes using the pathos of HIV-impacted lives as a way of giving his exploration of family some gravitas. The book's congenial arc gathers momentum even though it feels predetermined.

The final poem “Sickness & Health” exemplifies what’s wrong and right with the book. In a cross-cutting narrative, Leigh has his HIV-positive narrator reflect about his ex-lover and the myth of Persephone. There are some undeniable nice line breaks in its intertwining of myth and experience:

So much time to lose yourself in the glossy pages
of someone else’s sorrow, while you wait,
while you wonder why Persephone chose that one
flower out of all the glade? I do not know

his name, the man who infected me. I know his smile
and lacquered hair...

But why is Leigh writing this poem in a book published in 2010? At one point, he writes in the poem: “You were the nightmare/that we’d forgotten, the tragedy we were told/didn’t happen anymore...” Does that "anymore" refer to us now? In 2004? 1997? 1993? Time for gay men is a precarious thing; with rights being taken away and moving forward, hope for AIDS cures offered and then deflated, we often don't know where we are, as if we're in a busted time machine. And, as in the case of Proposition 8, we often find someone else guiding the control panel, hoping our final destination won't be where we had already landed: mired in federal restrictions that oppress us in crucial aspects of our lives.

Some critics may make the claim that Leigh is more interested in content than form, and no doubt they are right. Personally, I think sometimes our political situation is so urgent that we do need to resort to plain-spoken narrative. Sometimes you sacrifice creativity for immediacy. Leigh's impulses are good here, and I hope he will develop them further.

One significant problem with some of Leigh's narratives, however, is that they can occasionally seem interchangeable with Paul Monette or Essex Hemphill’s landmark work. In the poem “Watching the Virus Attack a Cell” Leigh falls into a popular default mode, making the poem a passive examination of the language surrounding HIV. Leigh writes: “Give me/the cold reserve of your language:/attachment binding, fusion/ You mean to help me understand/how something replicates, loves/itself enough to make more of itself.” Well-intentioned, the poem reads like the Spark Notes of Susan Sontag’s 1988 classic “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors.”

One could see Leigh's poems as a blend of James Allen Hall’s domestic narratives in “Now you’re the Enemy” and Mark Wunderlich’s “The Anchorage” which then, too, offered snapshots of silent daddies and drag queens. Here’s an excerpt from Leigh's “On the Day the Last Drag Queen Leaves Town”:

Truth is you’ll be just fine. Remember, a girl
In high heels can still win a race.
You’re just missing the way she knew you-
The way the tree stump loves the ax,
because the blade still sees a use in an old piece
of oak.

His analogy is sweet, but Leigh is working too hard to prove his artistic chops--a sign that he may at some time create some great work. But he's not there yet-- too many moments like that (unintentional?) allusion to Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree" bog down his attempts.

It may seem to be an act of unkindness to be so critical of a first book by a gay poet, especially one who is still trying to find his subject. With all the difficulties that queers still face in the publishing world, why criticize? At the same time, Leigh's book is filled with dramatic monologues, direct addresses, and second-person narratives; we can't help but think he wants us to react, and how ungenerous it would be not to respond.

In one of his AIDS narrative "Bel Canto for Beginners," Leigh writes:

My first love was a tenor who sang only my name,
stretching those two syllables to their breaking
until his mentor told him, "Right now,"
someone else is practicing-and he will win."

He made a sign of it and hung it in his room.
How many nights my eyes spied that sentence
from his bed.

Autobiographical or not, Leigh could benefit from that same advice. He just needs some practice. From reading a contemporary anthology like David Groff and Phillip Clark's AIDS anthology "Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS" Leigh could "spy" sentences and lines, and, yes, whole poems, that will encourage him to find other rooms--hospital and stanzaic--to nurture what could be a fine career.

On Stephen S. Mills' Poem "Against Our Better Judgment We Plan a Trip to Iran" from the most recent issue of "knockout"

2010-04-23T14:48:00.007-04:00

In the Spring 2010 issue of knockout, I came across a brave poem entitled “Against Our Better Judgment We Plan a Trip to Iran” by emerging poet Stephen S. Mills, who makes a complicated argument that addresses among other issues the controversial issue of bareback sex in the gay community.

In the poem, a middle-class man projects his apprehensions about going to Iran upon his partner:

You want to see the spot where they hang boys

for sodomy, want to feel the danger of being two men

together, of being caught in the act, one behind the other.

And the self-indictment grows as the poem continues in blunt and admirably unsparing ways:

...You are unmoved by my politically correct

pleas for respect to culture, to a religion that isn’t ours to have.

Fuck religion you say, and I want to agree.

Yet fear you long to be hanged, that the martyr in you

is desperate to get out, biting at your ribcage,

tearing at your flesh.

The final stanza of the poem develops the complicated theme:

But by morning you’ll back out, rip our plane tickets

into pieces, and we’ll lie in bed watching CNN,

fucking without condoms until everything burns.

You can’t help but admire the ambiguity of this closure: are we meant to see the “fucking without condoms” as an equivalent of “longing to be hanged”? Except that it takes place in ostensibly safe domestic sphere?

Or are we meant to consider bareback sex can be an opportunity for solace in a world that advocates for violence against gays. If people are encouraged to harm the gay male body, can bareback sex be seen as a form of queer radicalism—we’re risking the safety of our bodies in the way we choose.

It’s no coincidence that the poem ends with the word “burning.” On the most obvious level, the poem can be said to see bareback sex as a comfort in a world plagued with political national crises, leading perhaps to its imminent destruction: a burning from weapons of mass destruction.

But you can also see the “burning” as the result of a sexual disease, say, gonorrhea or chlamydia—which provides another ambiguity. Are we supposed to see the closure as an ironic reversal: American gays are in their own way causing their own physical pain as much as governmental sanctions in Iran.

Or again, is the gay male choice of engaging in risky sex an acceptable way of defending himself? If an aspect of sexual pleasure is to take your bodies to spaces it has never gone before, pushing your body beyond its past limits, cannot a secure private space where one can make choices, be oddly the most safe? Is the poem a refusal of the demonization of bareback sex as a necessary gesture of resistance against gay hatred or is it a critique of risky sexual activities that could lead to the destruction of the body, a self-imposed and misguided "marytrdom"?

What is remarkable about Stephen S. Mills' poem is that it doesn't take any easy way out, nor close off a conversation on bareback sex. In a mere three lines, a final stanza, he opens up a dialogue in a way that I haven't seen from a gay male poet. From his contributors' notes, he doesn't have a book of poems out yet. With as important and, dare I say, "risky" work as this, I look forward to it.

On Knockout, Jeff Mann, and Paul Lisicky

2010-04-16T11:55:00.026-04:00

You've got to hand it to editors Jeremy Halinen and Brett Ortler for daring to call their new magazine "knockout." I always think it's dangerous to give something a name that you could easily turn into an insult with a slight inflection of your voice. Knock it out of the ballpark. Or knock you out like a sleeping pill. But fortunately for the editors' sake, their magazine is dynamic and fun.

A lot of literary magazines, especially the predominantly gay ones, are sweetly boring. I usually end up giving up and just reading the contributors' notes. The same way I did craigslist personals when I was young and single.

Not only is the content excellent, but the magazine is "doing its part of fight suicide in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth population." Charity and beauty don't often go hand-in-hand, but these co-editors show us they can. As the editors tell us "five percent of the proceeds from sales will go to The Trevor Project, which focuses on helping the young people of our community.

Now I'm even more pissed off that I was solicited and then rejected!

But when a job's well-done, a job is well-done. I haven't read every single piece but so far I think that the stand-outs are Jeff Mann's "Here's to the Death of Our Enemies" and Stephen S Mills' "Against Our Better Judgment We Plan a Trip to Iran."

Do help make sure this magazine stays alive. Please buy an issue. If you're unhappy with it, I'll personally write you a note of apology. Even if you're not interested in the magazine, give something to their charity which does help queer youth. Here's the link for the magazine:

http://www.knockoutlit.org/

Here's the link for The Trevor Project:

thetrevorproject.org

*

On my Facebook page, I always switch my age from time to time, moving it back slowly, but sometimes too fast so that one of my students recently said, "You're just like Benjamin Button." Growing old is horrible. Yet old queer codgers need to stop whining that young queers aren't reaching out to them.

They are. Or at least they reach out to the ones not obsessed with proving their scholarly erudition. But sometimes it's even tough not to wonder "why should they?" Educational institutions still don't help GLBT students much. ROTC is still here, and domestic partnership isn't a reality even at a lot of institutions. School essentially teaches you to be a middle-class professional, fitfully dull and reasonable. Edgy, contemporary literature remains invisible, and rarely do we question if the stuff in the Norton anthologies hold any value for us.

*

So much gay literature dealing with growing older possesses a wistful thoughtfulness that borders on the ingratiating--spiritual transcendence is more than not an overrated phenomenon; we're stuck on earth--let's deal with it. And for a gay man to engage such questions regularly, you can't help but wonder if they are in some sort of denial. We're being killed. Don't abandon us for an angel who has the privilege of moving up and away.

One of the remarkable finds in "knockout" is Jeff Mann's "Here's to the Death of Our Enemies". It's a rightfully erratic sloppy sonnet, loosely rhymed except in the final couplet. Look at the opening:

Memorializing the banal or constructing wish-fulfillment
fantasies, these fill my forties. Men I'd like to rape, men
I'd like to kill. Weight Watches recipes, cat littler at Wal-Mart,
new varieties of gin...

Queer male rage is something not often explored, or even acknowledged.

For me, I always become nervous, perhaps unjustifiably so, about middle-aged wistfulness. My partner and I fought about the merits of Paul Lisicky's "On the Table" in the same issue, an honorable elegy to Arden, his dead dog. I was called a speciest for not valuing the poem as much as he did. And I fear he might have a point. "Would you question a poem about Gesundheit?" Gesundheit was the name of our pet bunny. She was sick at a pet store, and her cage was right next to the snake's, so I had no choice to buy her. Much to the shock of the octogenarian store owner. She sneezed a lot (the bunny, not the store owner), so we named her Gesundheit.

It's perhaps too easy for me to devalue the domestic and jump headlong into the public. Today the federal government allows us same-sex visitation rights, and we're supposed to jump up and down. Sadly, I thought those were already offered. We're further behind than I even thought. So it's a relief for Mann to write:

...Right-wingers dead, pious eyes grown black
with flies, heaps and heaps, and our apish executive branch
simmering among them , sweetly gutted....

Anger is something that always scares people. Some straight people value our victim narratives a bit too much. But perhaps gay men privilege them even more. To a degree. Or for different reasons. But still. What do we do with a cathartic fantasy of us causing the harm, rather than the other way around?

The spiteful cacophony, its jagged syntax is justified, its refusal to be tamed, necessary:

...More and more,
manner sleep, fail to fill the breach. The list of hate
grows longer. The skull smokes and churns, a dark ark,
More and more, out Elysium's illegal, our skin is bark.

Unlike some of the well-meaning gay older men, Mann restores these literary allusions in a way that is useful--his elders should pay special attention. It's a rare occurrence that a gay poet uses the literary allusion not to pander to straight audiences. If you're drawing on the classics, then your works contains a certain literary gravitas. I think it's important than Mann reclaims the classical reference--telling everyone with a ferocity we have to find new ways of living. The poem names the classical reference as a limitation rather than elevating it as a way of receiving dumb affirmation.

How Oliver de la Paz Ruined My AWP Experience, or, a Final Letter for Eduardo C. Corral

2010-04-11T10:52:00.007-04:00

dear eduardo,

because oliver posted on facebook that there were all these problems with transportation to the airport, i rushed here, and now i'm stuck here with about three hours to my flight. the good news: now i feel no guilt about giving him the cold shoulder in the hotel lobby. he needed to be take down a notch.

but enough of that. i have time so i want to supply you with some guidance for next year's awp. this is some stuff i learned and i think it might help you. i've never met you but you strike me as a sensitive person and i always feel the need to take care of sensitive people. i'm good at saying the obvious so a lot of this is obvious but that doesn't mean you should be any less grateful. here are some of the things. i don't mean any of them figuratively. all of this is literal, what actually happened, so don't think i'm trying to wax poetic:

1. you can be 34 years old and still be disappointed that you didn't get invited to the cool kid's parties.

2. the next morning after that kind of stuff happens, you'll go to lunch with your best female friend and tell her of this, and she'll say, "stop whining. think of yourself as rudolph the red-nosed reindeer and you'll feel better." and you will.

3. what matters is what's on the inside not the outside

4. if you make one special friend during the conference, thank god. usually, a special friend takes years to make. and make sure you stay in contact, you'll regret it later.

5. don't cut in line to get to the airport faster. as they say disney world, line-jumping is prohibited.

6. if you hear that one of your heroines would like to meet you and you're too shy to go, don't feel bad. somethings you've got to do when you're ready. take losing your virginity for example. and that really is ok. move at your own pace. ignore the peer pressure.

7. don't worry if you don't get to meet someone super popular, they have plenty of love and you'll meet them sometime later in life or the next.

8. don't tell people you spent time in a ward when what you really meant was an emergency room. they'll get the wrong idea.

9. don't listen to people who don't like awp. all it is is a lot of people getting together to share their words and try to convince other people that their words matter. yeah: people may be underhanded or not very nice or rude or backstab, but it's really ultimately no big deal. all anybody really wants at awp is love and sometimes you try to get that love in dumb ways. no one is building a nuclear bomb or commiting an act of genocide. they just want to be told that they're special. and they are. but sometimes you need to hear it. and that's not a bad thing.

with love,
steve

Call Me Mr. Faux Pas, or, Some More Bits about AWP (for eduardo c. corral)

2010-04-10T16:12:00.010-04:00

i asked one of my favorite gay poets if he was sending his book out. he said he was taking a break, it was expensive. i asked, "what's your salary?"
*
a gay poet who just had his book released from marsh hawk press approached me in the bookfair. I was walking around talking crazily on a cell phone. "are you really talking on the phone, asshole?" and lo and behold, i wasn't. Of course, I wasn't.
*
i wanted to introduce myself to every gay male poet here. that was my goal. it was a selfish one. i wanted to overcome my own homophobia. i have no gay friends, i always feel judged and the need to judge them back. (is that one of the reasons i started this blog?) in graduate school, an editor who is gay of a significant lit mag arrived my second year. all us grad students were at a retreat and i could feel myself wanting to hurt him. of course i didn't.
*
so i did the next best thing: when we started talking about poetry, i made myself become a vicious parody of the gay aesthete. i felt compelled to show him that i could see the flaws in all the queer male authors. i was so mean. i could feel myself becoming more and more gay. Except the way it was happening was dumb and pointless and i couldn't control it. or i didn't want to.
*
as this conference went on, i hid from gay men more and more. next year if i should come, i'll try to accomplish my goal again.
*
i like awp. next year i will attend at least one panel or reading.
*
i hate when a gay man says to another gay man in a platonic relationship that they want him or that they find him attractive. it always feels gratuitous even when they mean it.
*
tonight i'm saying a prayer for my sick brockport friend. she isn't feeling well, and i love her. i wish i prayed kneeling down. it feels like the smartest way to pray. i always say my prayer lying on my side in bed. which sometimes i fear make them less effective.

last call, last call, last call (yet even more awp bits) (for eduardo c. corral)

2010-04-10T11:46:00.010-04:00

once someone asked me during a game of truth or dare: "What quality would you want to be remembered for that you do NOT possess?" And this is what I said: to be able to dance. whenever i first meet someone, i always imagine what they dance like, and no matter what i think, it always makes me appreciate them in a way i hadn't expected. i wonder if people go to the final party/dance here.
*
the benu press reception went well. i always get nervous about those things. i forgot to brush my teeth as i always do. but no one seemed to notice. all i know is a nice number of good people showed. thank you all for coming! and for making me realize people won't resist me as long as i can offer them a free drink ticket.
*
this conference made me realize how much i miss people who are pretentious. i teach in upstate new york and my students are often first generation rural upstate new york kids. they're the furthest thing from haughty. this is a good thing and a problem. they reject poetry out of hand: it's not for the masses, it's elitist. they have a point, but i don't care. i want to help them become snobs. or at least more curious. can you teach curiosity? i think you can.
*
i went to the university of utah reception. i saw my first graduate creative writing teacher: melanie rae thon. this was at syracuse. during my first semester of grad school, i went through a serious depression (i didn't know that's what it was at the time.). i couldn't write. all i did was sleep literally twenty out of twenty-four hours a day, and eat macaroni and cheese. one time i went to her office to talk about a story and i started to cry. she shut the door, turned off the lights, and held me. i think of her as an angel.
*
are there any restaurants who serve great macaroni and cheese? it's my favorite food.
*
when i finally went up to melanie in the middle of the utah reception, i started to cry. it wasn't subtle. one friend from grad school said, "i forgot how sentimental you are." this is what i love about melanie: i just wanted to hold her and have a moment of silence with her. i didn't want to talk to her, and she knew that, what is there to say?
*
without words, i wanted to say i'm here in the world and i think of you. i would never have become a writer without you.
*
my weight is really starting to get to me.
*
i drank two nights in a row. the first night with my new favorite person and the second with a group of people and we went bar-hopping. i love hearing someone say, "last call." Last call! Last call. Do you hear it?
*
i think i might stay in the hotel tonite alone. i've run out of friends to hang out with and i need to stop drinking. the movie "daybreakers" is on pay-per-view-- it's the vampire movie starring ethan hawke. i love ethan hawke. "before sunset" is one of my all-time favorite movies. i like to watch it alone. that movie has one of the best ending ever.
*
my first undergraduate poetry teacher is here. laurence leiberman. how old is this man? he has a new article about hart crane in the latest american poetry review. i haven't read it yet. it's very long and dense looking. i can tell i'm going to want to read it with a pen in my hand and take notes. how does he still write these exhaustive pieces at his age? i said to him, "next time i see you, you better be walking with a cane."

on day two of awp (pre-benu press reception) (for eduardo c. corral)

2010-04-09T19:28:00.011-04:00

i met with my publishers today and they are the nicest people. they have restored my faith in the world of publishing. i hope when i become mature im like them.
*
the reception is from 7-8:15 pm in Mineral Hall E, Hyatt Regency Denver, 3rd Floor. feel free to come, take some food and drink and then dash away. no-strings. but plenty of fats and femmes.
*
one of my old friends from syracuse has a new book from university of pittsburgh press. she was married when i knew her. weve talked several times over the years and she made references to a lesbian partner. i thought she was joking. today she stopped at the benu table and told me that she was with a woman and they have two kids. i didn't believe her, but then she showed me the pics. it freaked me out. i felt this need to say, i like you. why would you choose this lifestyle?
*
i signed books alongside suzanne frischkorn today for the writer's center. i really like her. she smelled nice too which made me like her even more.
*
i hope my suny brockport friend is less sick.
*
one of my students sent me an email telling me she got a really nice handwritten rejection letter from passages north. i was so proud of her. she wrote the essay in my class. i like to take credit for other peoples' accomplishments

recap of day one of AWP

2010-04-09T09:16:00.021-04:00

I don't think I've ever felt more like Sissy Spacek in Carrie.
*
I was sent a text message that there was a slumber party at a famous gay poet's hotel room. When I replied, asking, "who is this?", no one answered or texted me back. I had another glass of wine. Curious, I called again, taking on the persona of a gay poet more attractive than me. I disguised my voice appropriately and left a message. Still nothing. I still believe that the homosexual who texted me is the Amy Irving type--he had a change of heart and saved me from imminent humiliation. If I had gone to the slumber party, a bucket of pig's blood would have crashed on my head and I'd be more of the laughing stock than I already am.
*
Speaking of laughter, I went up to one gay male poet who I've reviewed on my blog and he immediately turned his back. Very high school. Later, he was talking to several gay men about how they should create an AWP panel about the crucial role of Log Cabin Republicans in the literary community.
*
I had several drinks with a very charming gay male poet who said he hadn't drunk a single drop of alcohol in a year. Liar, I thought. Tragically, though, it was true. He gradually became nervous and maudlin (my favorite emotional states) and I felt the night was a total success. He's my new favorite person.
*
My new favorite person said earlier in the day (twice), "Tomorrow I'm going to tell people that you're not a complete asshole." I guess he liked me, too.
*
One of the woman writers I loved when I went to Breadloaf made me feel loved and comfortable (as she always does) I don't like my photos taken, but with her I didn't mind. Her spirit helped lessen my anxiety. It's weird how the simplest of acts can make an entire trip special. If only Carrie had friends like these, she might not have gone all telekinetic apocalyptic at the prom.
*
Much as it will shock everyone, I'm not an innocent in bad behavior either. One of my Brockport colleagues saw me and I hid. Apologies. No ghosts of Christmas present during my trip.
*
I miss one of my Brockport colleagues who I love and is sick and not here. I hope everything is going well.
*
Sometimes I get sad when I meet someone who I've only known from online. I feel vulnerable and want to say, I'm sorry. This is all I am.
*
I miss Phil.
*
It creeps me out when a gay male puts a post up on his blog and then his partner posts a comment three minutes later. Talk about gay co-dependency. Phil deliberately stays away from posting here (he's posted maybe three times in the more than a year I've been running this blog) and I know he's had to bite his tongue not to on more than one occasion.
*
I met a gay poet who has been published by the same poetry press as me, and he seems as unpretentious and ultimately goofy and kind as his poems. But then again, I talked to him for two minutes. He still could be an asshole.
*
One of my best friends is having a book signing today and she has been invited to one of those fancy secret dinners that only the best of the best get invited to. You need a special invite that you MUST bring to the event place. There's a musclebound bouncer at the door if someone's a fraud. See, John Gallaher, now I have proof those parties indeed exist! ...And when I asked the same friend if she'd get a drink with me after her dinner, she said, "don't you have someone you hang out with?"
*
I had dinner with the woman who published my first essay ever, and wrote an illness memoir I'm currently teaching. She said that based on my writing she expected me to be thin and have angular features (re: not fat). She looked exactly how I thought she would: she had a generous open face. I liked her a lot.
*
I am now going to have spinach omlettes and mimosas with my hotel floormate, Seamus Heaney. Okay, maybe not Seamus Heaney.