On Enid Shomer and The University of Arkansas Press

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"

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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"

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"

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

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

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