On Greg Miller's "Watch" (Part One)

I never want to go see the Grand Canyon. There's so many postcards of it. Who needs to see it in person? Why should I see something the world has already has seen? That's what I kept thinking when I read gay poet Greg Miller's "Watch" (University of Chicago Press, 2009)--one of those double meaning titles that feels like default wit. Except the trips he or his protagonist seem to have taken have been a bit more expensive.

What's with the University of Chicago Press? The press has always been sort of dull. One of the few exceptions is Bruce Smith; Miller and Randall Mann could learn a thing or two from him. Smith's wild, eccentric rhymes feel so much younger than the rote hard rhymes of Miller.

And why is this press obsessed with gay poets who are aces at scansion. Do you immediately have a shoe in the door if you can master hard end rhyme? Is this what academic queer affirmation action has been reduced to?

Get over Thom Gunn, guys! He's so 1993. For the University of Chicago Press, Joshua Weiner edited a collection of Thom Gunn essays, assembling a few good ones, one great, making it a worthwhile anthology. How many pieces really matter in any compliation? That's the fun of reading an edited collection--you feel like you're the editor when you separate even further the special from the dross.

You would think that a reputable university press, they would be looking for some aesthetic diversity. That's one of my goals with this review: to encourage University of Chicago to include a more diverse aesthetic range. If I was an editor there, I would say their books feel dated even before they're released.

With rhymes or no rhymes, Miller's poems that aim for a meditative , transcendent quality, perfunctorily weight down with high culture/literary allusions. It's like reading a Sam Hamill derivative crossed with a Richard Howard travelogue.

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Here's the opening of the poem "Lost" where Howard wins out:

A cloud from the Cape's base stalks us catlike
making fantastic shapes rising and stretching,
white megalithic pincers and mute O's,
until the wind turns again and I'm lost
I hear the breaking waves, one warbler, then
the drone of an engine scuttling the cliff.

Miller's trademark meditative poems here, emblematic of a lot of his work. You think that if you really are "watching," privileging descriptive pictures of this world that you, as a poet, would see something a bit more idiosyncratic.

Unfortunately, Miller allows himself to become a pretty decent tour guide, taking us to a stop where "Churchill summered here. Napoleon spent/the night once in a small, freestanding room." And then, of course, things culminate "At dusk in the Greek theatre I watch/stars piece the cobalt dome and I hear wings." It's the ultimate middle-class epiphany: your summer vacation becomes a moment of spiritual transcendence, making you feel guilty about the trip most people can't afford. Which perhaps is an unfair thing to say. But what surprises me about this book is how much seems so self-content with itself. You can't help but wonder what redemption Miller could find in Disneyworld.

At the same, there's nothing wrong with having money, but what feels like a sham is its narrative arc. Why does the pathos for his father's illness in the first part of the three-section book seem to drive the protagonist in his spiritual journey? Worse the poems are poor. Here's the second stanza of "River":

My father's legs were swollen.
His once thin ankles barely fit his shoes.
His heart no longer fed his body
Toxins and liquids began to drown him.
His swollen doctors didn't see
He couldn't breathe.

The lines are as flat as the poems of the shockingly overrated Patrick Phillips--there's only so much of this father-son suffering we can take. As Miller himself writes "Maybe artless misery's what's true." Maybe. But this is taking it to an extreme.

Autobiographical or not, it feels creepy to make the father into such a cipher when he seems to be the impetus for the journey in the rest of the book. Why not eradicate and immediately transport himself into all these foreign countries

I am always suspicious of middle-class poets who travel to faraway places and bring back a bad slide show and spiritual transcendence. Why not create a series of poems simply about indulgence? Why justify it? There's nothing worse than a significant friend who takes up your time with six hundred photos of their trip to Ecuador or Hong Kong. And then apologizes for taking up your entire afternoon.

SOMETIME TODAY: ON GREG MILLER'S "WATCH"

On Houses and Homes

My partner and I are the only people in our department who do not have a house. I've always wanted a house. A house is a good thing. This is obvious. More poems need to say the obvious. They need to say a house is a good thing.

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My partner's mother had two houses. One of them burned to the ground. It was a weird thing when my partner received the phone call. It felt like one of those things that only happens in the movies. "My house burned down," he said. It wasn't his house. It was his mother's. But still. In a family, a house is a house. It was a good thing that his mother had a spare.

*

My family never lived in a house. We lived in a trailer. I remember complaining even back then that we didn't have a house. "Shut up," my mother said, "You have a home. If you have a home, you don't need a house."

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I like when people tell me how much their house costs. It almost feels like we're trading social security numbers. It feel like they're sharing. Maybe they only tell me because they know I don't have a house.

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I like when people invite me into their house. Somehow I feel special.

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Until gay men can get married, it is impossible for them to have a home. They can only have houses.

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People who have houses or homes have almost all the time been nice to me.


*


The patriarch of my department tell me that we need to have a house. That's how he says it: "You need a house. Professors need a house. Especially ones who are full-time. Or else everybody expects them to go on a job market. And move somewhere else where they'll buy a house."

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A lot of people in my department tell me they struggle a bit. But they have houses.

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It always seems the nicer the house the less it feels like a home.

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We buy a lot of books, DVDs. Do we not have a house because we buy those things? Or do we buy those things because we don't have a house?

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Houses seem to have less stuff than homes.

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You feel less guilty spilling wine on the couch in a home as opposed to house.

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It's home, sweet home. It's not house, sweet house.

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Houses are more silent than homes.

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Homes contain less ghosts than houses.

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I never know what to say when I enter a nice house. Most people in our departments who have houses say when they enter another house, "What a wonderful house!" That's the etiquette, I guess. It feels like a bad thing to say even though you have to say it. It feels like saying, You have a lot of money. In fact, what else can you really be saying? It's not like you're saying, I like the way you arrange the furniture. You're saying I'm impressed at how much you spent on this house. At the same time, if you're out for dinner with someone who has a house, you can't say, You have a lot of money, coded or not. You have to say you have a nice house when you're walking through the immediate thresh hold: the door to the house. The doors to a house seem less open than a home. But there are always more visitors in a house.

*

Houses always contain more parties. Homes more get-togethers.

Due to the final week of classes, I will finally post something new by Sunday at midnight

On the Need for the Gay Male Poet to be a Repulsive Braggard

Recently a gay poet said to me that no matter how silly it may be, he wanted to create poems that would last forever. Ever since he started writing poems, he decided to edit out any words, any references that may "date" it. There was something admirably self-aggrandizing about such a statement. For the record, I think gay men need to be less modest. I want more self-serving bragging in the poetry world. Gay male poets need to brag in every single venue (on Facebook and blogs and conversations with friends and enemies) about every single accomplishment they receive: grants, reviews, publications, book contracts, the slightest mention in any magazine or newspaper, no matter how ostensibly insignificant). For a gay poet to be called self-aggrandizing is a sign that he may be worth exploring. I love Richard Siken’s poems that refuse to be aligned with the left-hand margin; their obnoxiousness in sprawling out all over the page. With all the hatred created in mandates like Proposition 8 (and New York’s recent denial of gay marriage), it’s important that queer poets take up as much space as possible. Lethe Press’ decision to make Charles Jensen’s book “First Risk” oversized is an act of love, a crucial political decision. It doesn’t fit conveniently in the stack of books on my bedroom floor. Its cover protrudes from the others. It doesn’t allow for neat piles. What wonderful self-aggrandizement!

Any gay male poet who desire to create timeless poems may automatically be, to a certain extend, a fraud. There seems to be something at least questionable, if not corrupt, in a gay male poet even considering the idea of achieving immortality through his words. It seems hypocritical to expect something like Proposition 8 to be banished due to its dangerous word choices; and at the same time, believing that any gay male poet’s words should become a permanent monument, inevitably anthologized. Perhaps gay male poetry should load itself with even more references to popular culture, proper names that make the poem a mere in-joke, meaningless factual accuracies (and inaccuracies), self-conscious references to friends in and out of the poetry world that already makes the poems dated. We should want our readers to feel like they missed something. This literary choice of making our own art obsolete may be one of the few potentially successful acts of resistance to a canon which excludes us and the laws that hate us.

Footnote: It seems that one of the most important queer presses has become Lethe Press. Which this year alone has produced two amazing gay male poetry titles: Ragan Fox’s “Exile in Gayville” and Charles Jensen’s “First Risk.” They seem to be producing wonderful books in every genre. With the death of so many gay bookstores, I hope that the queer male community supports its own presses. I know what my partner will be purchasing me for Christmas: books from Lethe Press. Here is the link to the press:

http://www.lethepressbooks.com/

On Gay Poet Randall Mann's Poem "Monday"

Recently appearing in the Washington Post, Mann’s autobiographical poem "Monday" focuses on a bad date with a beautiful, dumb gay man who was too lacking in cultural knowledge to keep up with him. From a cursory glance at the poem, it may seem unfair to raise any questions about its aesthetic or cultural politics. But the ending of the poem, an attempt to transcend its comic origins, reveals that the poem begs to be taken seriously. It wants to be seen as a work of art with a capital A. If Mann had the courage to make a simple comic rift, I would have left it alone. But he wants to go a step further, and as a result, so will I.

I have a two fold purpose in offering an analysis of this poem: 1.) to identify the ways in which gay narrative poets feel compelled to transform comic frivolousness into something tragic and the ostensibly meaningful 2.) the reasons behind that decision 3.) how critics unyieldingly affirm that decision through privileging the serious over the comic; thereby, marginalizing poets who don't depend on pathos for their work in terms of awards and grants.


I have written about Mann's work before. In my previous post, I wrote about James Allen Hall. I am currently working on a longish essay about these two poets and a few others. This post is an attempt to explore my ambivalent feelings about them and the critical inception they have received. As narrative poets, they may appear to be on opposite sides of the poetic continuum, but, in actuality, they are relying on similar popular rhetorical strategies, which (justifiably and unjustifiably) result in them being the two most reviewed young gay poets receiving cross-over success. This analysis is crucial when so many other gay poets with so many other aesthetic camps are ignored.

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Here’s the more fun first two stanzas of Mann’s poem “Monday”:

While you wait for the J train, for work, think

of your new boyfriend, who loves apostrophes,

sizzle-pants, and you.

Who pointed out the "Andrew Lloyd Webber" house

.

and said his feelings have started to "Escalade."

You'll forgive him for now, smarty pants.

(Your last, the crisp progressive, declawed

his cat to save his Ethan Allen chairs.) Besides,

.

there's such promise, such furniture and new sex!

I do hope that Mann radically changed the details of his autobiographical experience. It would be unethical for him not to do otherwise since his date is living in the world.

Having said that, here’s the significant problem: its final lyric moment:

Look: wildflowers bloom in the streetcar tracks;

a syringe lies in the grass. It isn't

beautiful, of course, this life. It is.

Like some gay poets, you could make the claim that there’s a particular queer writerly anxiety in legitimizing their comic work with an unnecessary seriousness. He makes a leap from the playful to what some choose to seem as a profound worldview: there are the wildflowers blooming, a syringe laying the grass.

Perhaps the word “look” in the tenth line that bothers me the most. That damned imperative.

Am I supposed to look towards the sunflowers or look away from his satirical targets. If it’s the latter, I need to ask why Mann feels the sudden need to avoid his autobiographical comedy. Is there something else to see in them, something beyond the strategic caricature, that he allows himself to be distracted; or is it the former, he needs to ditch his comedy and towards that dreadful seriousness, those stupid looming wildflowers.

The world is beautiful and frail, Mann purports, emblematic of his characteristic ambivalence toward humanity. Mann is a comic, and his best work illustrates that. One of the rules of comedy: don’t apologize for your own jokes. The weak philosophizing is nothing more than a way of saying I’m sorry, I really am a serious poet. Or worse: see I'm more than gay. I can move beyond the camp. Queer poets need to see camp as something that could and should be honored as an end in and of itself.

With Proposition 8, I find this sort of philosophizing annoying. The world is not beautiful for gay men. It is a bad place where bad institutions (LDS churches) say that gay men are not equal. It's much more important to "flame on" than wallow in our own false, romantic perceptions of the world that lead to further middle-class inertia. How many gay poets does the Washington Post publish? And what is their stake in publishing a poem that allows a tired universality eclipse specific gay content?

Here’s a poem of his when he’s doing his better work:

AMERICAN (BATHROOM) GRAFFITI

Brent is a total fox and a mustache thief.

I’ve got amyls,
videos of dogs peeing,
and some time to kill.

What’s a mustache thief?
Like a turd burgler?
Or a butt pirate?

Please do not write dreamless prose.
It makes us feel awkward.

Free strong bad advice right here.

Fuck my fucking hole you fuck.

Flame on!!!

Mann feels no need to add on a closure that ultimately serves as an apology. Celebratory, tasteless, he offers a poem that no Washington Post would ever consider running. It's a truly gay poem. "Monday" ditches its queer sensibility, campiness, shallow one-liners, for an uninspired universality. You can feel heterosexual audiences saying, "Oh. That's what you were up to all along." And worse: we, as gay poets and critics, give them their cues.

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I'd rather read the poem against the grain, and make the claim that Mann is strategically parodying himself. While he insensitively (and I mean that descriptively, not critically) cruelly mocks the uneducated queer, ribs the middle-class one, he --the artist with the capital A--tries to justify his own disappointments with his what ultimately is a hyperbolic "literary" non-sequitur, rather than an artful extension of one-liners. It's the ultimate declaration of self-pity: your gay.com date went bad and now the whole world is falling apart. What’s a poet to do, but share it with the rest of the world?

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To draw the most embarrassing broad analogy, the critical reception of Mann’s work acts in the same way awards ceremonies treat films from the Coen brothers. (Who aren’t gay, unfortunately.) When they’re engaged in their best comic riffs like “Burn After Reading” or ”Ladykillers,” their work is ignored, but attach Cormac McCarthy and some pontification embedded in the narrative, you’ve got one of the most overhyped (Academy-Award winning) movies of all time: “No County for Old Men.”

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Needless to say, this is unfair nit-picking over a single poem. But this example is meant to prove a larger point: gay poets often feel the need to ditch their comedy in an attempt to be seen as an important poet. Which isn’t that bad of a thing: everyone wants good reviews.

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