Happy New Year!

Due somewhat to psychic pain that still simultaneously zaps my strength and energizes me, that fills me with contempt and sadness and teaches me love and compassion, I started this blog.

My partner of going on twelve years describes it best: “I thought you were sick. But you’re really just an asshole.” Thank you for never pitying me, partner.

Of course there were other factors in creating the blog: my desire to write a long essay about one of my gay poet heroes Mark Doty; to show my respect for Reginald Shepherd; to make myself visible after Proposition 8 said to gays everywhere: you should die; to redeem myself to the young gay men I failed in the worst queer literature course ever taught. I’m sure there are others reasons, too.

There are many, many people I would like to thank. But I hate naming names; I always forget one and then feel like a jerk.

I never thought anyone would read my blog. It’s nice to know a few individuals do from time to time. In the beginning, I just hoped that the gay poet/blogger pioneers that I look up to would maybe glance at it. And once in a while when I get sad, I make myself feel better by imagining them. I hope that maybe when they have a little time away from their busy schedules, they take a brief look at my words .

There are many things I’m proud of. The most significant is that I like to think that I contributed in small part to the disappearance of what became the most dangerous blog in our literary community.

Even though I appreciate the praise, I embrace the people who have challenged me and annoyed me and even hurt my feelings. You’ve kept me honest.

And most of all I’d like to thank all the gay poets I’ve named on my blog. I haven’t necessarily liked your work, but that’s not really important. It’s all in the spirit of poetry and love and words. And if you haven’t realized that, it doesn’t matter. Your words made me love you in such a way that I wrote about them. It’s one of the only ways I know how to say I love you, and that love, for me anyway, doesn’t need to be reciprocated. That’s what makes it love.

An Open Letter to Bill Henderson, Editor of Pushcart Prize Volumes

I always hate it when poets are cynical towards other poets who brag about being nominated for a Pushcart Prize. I like it when someone's happy. It makes things feel better. "Who isn't nominated for a Pushcart Prize these days?" a friend said recently. This was he truth: me.

But my friend misses the point. There is something special when you're singled out. When you say in your introduction that you received more than 7,000 submissions that means a hell of a lot of people have been singled out. And I like that. What can it hurt? I've always found it cool when a lit mag posts its nominations. And a lot of them do. Your annual volume has offered the hope to so many writers of their work being made even more visible. And, for me, anyway, maybe because I am a gay man, visibility is always better than invisibility-- in all realms of life.

*


In graduate school, my best friend said that she had two goals: to be nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appear in Glimmer Train. Glimmer Train has always freaked me out. Does anyone really want to see someone's childhood photo next to their published story? It's creepy.

But a Pushcart Prize feels like a normal, good , healthy thing.


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Here are the some things that concerned me about your introduction that makes me fear that your amazing project is losing its integrity and even worse its necessity:

1.) I fear that you might find yourself charming in a cranky, old codger way when you say that on-line magazines aren't as significant as print ones. You write, "Another lust that consumes our culture today is speed, not the drug but the electronic version. This is especially deadly to writers. One demand vanity publishers will zip out your efforts, no questions asked (and usually no readers found)." This feels at best hypocritical and at worst mean. Your volume, I always thought, was meant to be for the magazines that no one sees. Those very small presses.

There are, as far as I can tell, no stuff from the electronic version in this volume. For a man as energetic as you are, I cannot imagine that you haven't had curiosity at what's out there in that cyber world. If you haven't, I don't think you've looked hard enough.

2.) And then there seems to be an annoying glorification of old age itself: "The electronic juggernaut drives their frenzy for renown and is very destructive, particularly to young authors. It takes years, maybe a life time, to figure out what you want to say and how to say it."

The most revealing statement: "Because you can burp out a poem or short story online, you will not immediately join the ranks of the immortals."

That's true, but another reason is that your volume has grown committed to publishing people who have been around forever. Or the few, same young people have been published volume after volume after volume. Or you choose judges that I thought were already dead. This year it was Rosanna Warren (a poor woman's Linda Gregerson) and Wesley McNair (who I met once and loved. He was a true gentleman, something there needs to be more of these days.) See. I'm already writing their eulogies.

Do people really change ultimately for the better as they grow old. Look at Louise Gluck in this volume. She's been recycling the same issues over and over again--which just goes to you: psychotherapy never works. We need more drugs. And yes: no matter how you may resist, speed should be a choice. You can't tell me you didn't at least a caffeine pill or two when you went through the alleged 7,000 submissions you received.

3.) Don't quote people like Rosanna Warren who have the audacity to say that poetry at this historical moment "exhibits a blessed profusion not easily categorized-thank heavens-into schools..."

When you have conservative poets --not that that's necessarily a bad thing--like McNair and Warren doing the judging, you get a lot of what you expect: strategically flat, unadorned understated narrative. When people complain about the Best American series being rigged, I find it annoying. They're guest editors, what do you expect. Of course, people are going to publish their friends? Who else are they going to? Their enemies?

But with all these nominators, and screeners, and judges, you expect more difference.

4.) Who the hell is Diann Blakely?

I swear she must nominate at least half of the 7,000 submissions. I see her name reprinted at least a dozen times every volume. Confess, Bill. Have you succumbed to the conglomerates? And if so, does she have stock?

It makes me queasy that out of 60 of the award winners, they come from only 41 different magazines. I'm not going to get into a numerical analysis. You can make statistics mean whatever you want them to. To a certain extent anyway. Also: I'm too lazy to make a pie chart. But you know what I'm saying. It doesn't take much time to scan the volume and see that a lot of the small magazines aren't that small.

Your volume was a great thing, but now it's starting to date itself before it's even be released. Here are some ideas to rejuvenate it: a.) make a concerted effort to peruse those on-line magazines, or at least put them in the maybe pile. (I'll be happy if at the end of my life the Universe puts me in the maybe pile. It's fitting closure) b.) if someone's already won a Pushcart, maybe they should be ineligible. c.) reprint only one entry from a magazine for each volume.

With 7,000 or so nominations you can't have at least a few runner ups. And isn't the Pushcart Prize volume all about the idea of the runner-up. It's about those of us who have exerted ourselves, hoping secretly that we might move beyond the small presses into undeniable fame. But through our own egotism forget that coming close is all as anyone--even those who have, indeed, "placed"--can do.

COMING WITHIN NEXT 24 HOURS: An Open Letter to Bill Henderson

On Mark Doty's Essay "Bijou" and Techno-Necrophilia

In the most recent and boring Pushcart Prize XXXIV, the volume sports an exciting, if flawed, Mark Doty essay entitled “Bijou.” Although he never names it, Doty raises the possibility of a techno-necrophilia as a way of assuaging (if not eradicating) gay male grief related to losing lovers in the AIDS epidemic.

The essay begins with a wonderfully bold set-up. Doty writes about watching a 1972 porn film. The film follows an attractive man Bill who witnesses a woman hit by a car. Instead of helping, he grabs her purse and runs only to go home where he ends up, according to Doty, nearly ejaculating in the shower as he thinks about the image of her being almost (or actually?) killed.

The scene then ends abruptly. We never see him ejaculate. As Doty remarks: “just as he’s about to come he sees the woman in fur flying when the bumper of the car strikes her. That’s the end of that, the erotic moment is over, for him, and for the viewer, once the image returns.”

It’s a bit blurry as to what exactly happens in the film. Do we see Bill disgusted with himself for secretly being around by the image and then he stops? Does the director of the movie edit the scene in such a way that his stopping may be implied? Or does Doty simply guess that he doesn't finish? Could some viewers believe that he does, indeed, masturbate to the desired end point? It just is never definitively seen.

Isn’t it at all possible that the film is edited in such a way that we are meant to imagine what may be the most repulsive act to some viewers which they are indeed complicit in emulating: the idea of someone (and themselves by extension) getting off on the image of a (possibly) dead woman?

Perhaps the film (like Doty himself) can’t show or name the taboo: a sort of techno-necrophilia is taking place. We are implicated in the “inappropriateness of the scene.” By watching another man being aroused by the dead, we’re vicariously having a sexual relationship with the dead as well. In the essay, Doty immediately confesses that he doesn't know how to categorize the film and name its intentions: "I'm hesitant to call it porn, since its intentions are less obvious that then..."

Doty does tell us that the film’s protagonist ends up out of the shower (after he may or may not have ejaculated) and back into his own bedroom where he looks through the contents of her purse again. He find an invitation for a “party? An event? Someplace called Bijou at 7 p.m. Then he’s walking in Soho-the old Soho, long before the art glamorous and even longer before the Euro-tourist-meets-North Jersey shopping districts...”

Doty further describes:

“He finds the address, goes in and up, and the movie shifts from the gitty Warholian vocabulary it’s trafficked in thus far to another cinematic tongue. An indifferent woman in a lot of eye makeup sits in a glass booth; Bill proferrs the invite; she gestures toward a door and utters the movie’s only line: Right through there. ‘There’ turns out to be a hallucinatory space, its dominant hue a solarized, acidy green.”

In this space, he ends up engaging in what may be best described as a weird, no-holds-barred homosexual orgy.

Perhaps the most important sentence in the essay appears after he completes the description of the film:

“It makes the viewer feel suspended in a sort of erotic haze, but whatever arousal I feel in imagining Bill’s complete submission to pleasure suddenly comes to a halt, as surely as if I’d seen that woman struck down in the crosswalk again, because I realize that all the men in the scene I’m watching are dead.”

My question is this: since Doty draws an analogy to one's (and his own) inability to masturbate to the visualization of “the dead” (the woman hit by the car, the gay men), what would it mean if one could overcome that taboo behavior? What if one allowed himself to ejaculate to these images?

It doesn’t needs to be said that the presence of technology grows in its sophistication and presence. This may be one of the cures of gay male grief: to use technology as a way of making the bodies of our loves appear and use those images as a way of getting off. This could be a healthy form of what I’ll name as techno-necrophilia. Religious conservatives love to group our sexual acts with anything that is seen as an abomination. I think we should take the word, the idea of necrophilia back from these same very people, and recharge the word with our own meanings, ways of survival.

Many, many years ago, over fifteen years, when I lost a lover to AIDS, I found myself with all this stuff: pictures, home movies, etc. I didn’t know what to do with it, and in my predictable impulsiveness, I threw it out. I couldn’t be reminded of his body. I had tapes of his voice on my answering machine and I kept those, playing them over and over again. I used them for a sensual experience. I was lonely and depressed, and I used his voice as a way of making me full of some sort of desire, even sexual.

I kept on thinking, I wish I could touch him. If only I could touch him. How many of us, as gay men, have thought to themselves, If only I knew that was the last time we would have sex? That question haunts us.

My response: Maybe by keeping my films of him, using them as sexual material, I would have had a sort of physical communion with him. I would have touched him and he me one last time and have been released from my grief, or at least on a more determined, expedient path.

Isn’t watching an image of the dead a way of possessing his body one last time? Is it an ethical and useful form of necrophilia created by our technological resources?

Can’t engaging in masturbatory activities with an image of our dead homosexual lovers, staring as close as you can at their flickering images, even touching the TV screen, and feeling them, provide a necessary release? Doty smartly says he wants to "revive" the phrase : to "have knowledge of someone." Their technologically created bodies are more than memories. You could say they are the real thing. They are the knowledge. You don’t need to remember. His body is right there in front of you. All you have to do is look at the screen and touch yourself and maybe even him. Indeed, you are with him at least one last time.

My Potty Mouth Interview with Neil de la Flor

He's not that hot, but I did an interview with Neil de la Flor anyway. (Pity fuck.)

And how could I not want to take a few swipes at my usual targets with the year coming to an end?

Randall, hurry up and win that Lambda so I can write my final rant about your poems!

Here's the link:

http://almostdorothy.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/steve-fellner/

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"