Beauty-Gate, Synchronicity, and History

If you haven't been following the conversation that's been happening in the gay male poetry community about beauty, aesthetics, class, race, and privilege you can catch up with most of it HERE.

C. Dale Young has done a great job of collecting the multiplicity of voices and views on his blog. (Thanks C. Dale!)

In the time between the end of the spring semester and now, I have been in a Benedictine monastery, to Missoula, Montana, and am now nestled in a town on a bay shadowed by an active volcano.  I have also been reading.

While I have many opinions about beauty and aesthetics, I will let others enrich the conversation that is now happening.  Instead, I would like to share a quote that I came across tonight while reading Samuel Steward's pseudo-novel Parisian Lives.

Chapter 32: July 19, 1939


"The privileges of beauty are enormous.  By its mysterious alchemy the truck driver becomes a king, the delivery boy an emperor.  We are the willing subjects of the one to whom it is given.  He can trample us with his boots, demand outrageous tribute, and we forgive him everything.  We voluntarily blind ourselves so we can no longer see our ruler's arrogance or treachery or inadequacy.  He is baffled to see us prostrate before him.  Come, he says--rise and look into my face.  We turn our blinded eyes upon him an feel the warmth and radiance of his presence, and in our trancelike mindless state we do his bidding like a captive Trilby* before her master."

Whether true or not, I felt it was something to think on further, my quarter to keep the music playing.

*Trilby O'Ferrall, the novel's (titled Trilby, published in 1894) heroine, is a half-Irish girl working in Paris as an artists' model and laundress; all the men in the novel are in love with her

Not one but TWO interviews with me about Slow Depth!

"Time" by Sara Cannon

This has been a great week for getting word out about my chapbook Slow Depth.


The first interview was with a student journalist at the University of Idaho for the school newspaper the Argonaut.  You can read that interview HERE.

The second interview is by my friend and fellow writer Sannion on his blog The House of Vines.  You can check out the smart questions he asked me, including "Is poetry dead in this country?"  Go Here.

I am blessed to get so much press for my small chapbook!  Thank you to the Argonaut and Sannion.  If you want to order a copy, you can go to the publisher's website Winged City Chapbooks.

Dreaming James Franco and Hart Crane

Last night, I managed to finally hunt down and rent a copy of Broken Tower, James Franco's art house, biopic picture about the poet Hart Crane.  I didn't have any expectations for the film to be good or bad, but I was excited to see the figure of Hart Crane get some screen time.  When was the last film about a modern queer American poet made?  (Not involving Franco.)

Hart Crane has been looming large in my consciousness the semester.  Reading Federico Garcia Lorca's Poet in New York, got me wondering if Crane and Lorca had ever met.  I found one account of that meeting involving whiskey and a room full of sailors.  I also found Philip Levine's poem "On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane."  While his poem has it's merits, like heterosexual writers will, he veers away from the queer vitality of that meeting entirely.  The poem negates any chance of desire or tenderness between the poets themselves or the drunk sailors, "Let’s not be frivolous, let’s/ not pretend the two poets gave/each other wisdom or love or/ even a good time."  Why does Lorca and Crane having a good time have to be considered frivolous?

Levine's concern for the poem is imagining his relative in the room with them.  It's Levine's poem and his prerogative and a good poem for what it does.  But in the hands of a queer author, this same material could do more.

But back to my semester with Crane.  I wrote a draft of an elegy to him.  I revisited his poems.  I saw Broken Tower.  While the film wasn't entirely to my liking, I enjoyed a good portion of it.  Hearing Franco read Crane's work aloud was heartening.  It followed me into bed and worked its way into my dreams.  Not in the way you are thinking...

Instead, lines from Crane's poetry narrated my dreams.  They hovered over my head.  They broke apart and formed new combinations in the somnambulant air.  I have been wondering about how to reconcile certain aspects of my thesis and thanks to Franco and Crane, I think I may have an idea of how to shape it.  Crane's words acted as a numinous spirit, guiding me.  

As often happens, I have to do some of my writing while asleep or watching television or walking or  reading for hours on end.  The work of writing happens all the time, not just when I put the pen to the page.  

Interview! Interview! This time I am interviewed!

Book lovers, please stop by poet and all around nice guy Eduardo C. Corral's blog LorcaLoca to see an interview about my chapbook Slow Depth.  It's strange to be on the other side of the interview table!

CLICK HERE!

How Contemporary Are You?

This week, I was reading the poems of the the poet Nazim Hikmet and was thoroughly surprised by his use of modern words where I wasn't expecting to find them.  Granted, my familiarity with modern poetry of the Middle East is limited, but when a reader compares the poems of Hikmet to that of Mahmoud Darwish, Hikmet comes off as very modern.  (This is not to say I like one or the other better!)

Hikmet writes about tank treads across unplowed fields "9-10P.M. Poems" and compares the sun's rays to nitric acid "Letters from Chankiri Prison."  It got me thinking.

I started to remember the poems of the writer Kenneth Fearing, whose "Aphrodite Metropolis" series anticipated using American pop culture in poetry by about 30 years.  Fearing's poems use words like "Pow!"  They encapsulate the 1930s and 1940s and this is their charm. Also their hindrance.  It is hard for a poem to remain "fresh" and timeless if a poem includes references to brand names from Chicago, 1938.

It also calls to mind a book of poems collected from Ancient Greece.  One or two of the poems made reference to plays in circulation at the time of the writer.  Unfortunately, none of those plays survived to the modern day.  The translator (with the best of intentions I am sure) substituted the titles of the original plays with comparable modern versions that an American reader would be familiar with.  For example, play X became "Gone With the Wind."  While I got the gist of the poem, the modern plays totally spoiled it for me.

So this is my writing dilemma of the week: Is it possible to include Facebook in a poem or Twitter in a novel and have it not feel entirely dated ten, fifteen, or fifty years in the future?  I realize there is no way to adequately answer this question, but I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions.

Follow up: What  "modern" or "contemporary" references have you found in your own reading that seem entirely dated now? 

The Writer On and Off the Page: Writing, a Public and Private Act

The end of February and the entire month of March have been filled with literary events.  I attended the Associated Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference in Chicago.  While there, I attended several readings and had an author signing with my press.

In March, I escaped Idaho for a bit on spring break and drove to Vancouver, B.C.  While there I heard my amazing friend Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore read from her new anthology Why are Faggots so Afraid of Faggots? (I find myself driving 8.5 hours to attend a reading this year!)

This month I also attended a thesis defense for a fellow MFA poet here at the University of Idaho, a talk by the immanent translator Willis Barnstone, and also had my own reading and chapbook release party with fellow poet Ciara Shuttleworth.

It has been a busy forty days.  Individually, these events invigorate my own writing and thinking about writing.  Collectively, it has been exhausting.  They have also made me consider the writer’s life both as a public and a private figure. 

In a discussion yesterday, a fellow poet said, “A writer is the kind of person who sits alone in a room to make sense of the world.”  The act of writing is solitary.  At its core, writing lonely.

So then what happens when a writer publishes his or her work?

Most often, in order to get the work “out there” a writer must make some kind of public appearance, whether that is online, at a bookstore, or in a coffee shop to read.  The reader, in order to promote their words, must become an extension of them in some sense. 

Your writing is an extension of your inner-world, but then you the writer must become an extension of your words in the public sphere.  Who is leap-frogging whom?

For many writers, this is a painful process.  I know that in my own experience, I dislike talking about my poems to others.  I also hate the cycle of self-promotion that occurs with the publication of a book.  That said, I am finding that having my chapbook come out is a great way to get a small taste for the hustle one must go through to promote a full-length book.

The poet Richard Siken is notorious for remaining circumspect about his own work.  He said in an interview, “You get the page.  I get the rest.”

What role does writing play in your life at the moment?  Have you experienced the divide between the writer as a public and private figure?  Do you have any advice moving from one sphere into the other?

Here and Back Again: An Update on Where to Find Me!

I feel like a whirlwind.  No sooner had I left for Chicago and AWP then I was coming back again.  I raced around this week unpacking, teaching my Intermediate Poetry Writing Class Richard Siken's book Crush (or more honestly, I didn't teach it, we talked about the poems in depth) and then started packing again for spring break.  This weekend I find myself in Washington state for a week.

In a similar way, my work has been flying around all winter and I am excited to see my poems in print.  But like my dresser, all of the drawers are empty at the moment.  I have to do laundry and I have to write some new poems.  What a blessing!  Here is to a spring of new words.

For the record, here is where you can find my poems and even an essay :

 I have an essay about Walt Whitman and repealing Montana's sodomy law in the Fall 2011 issue of RFD (#147).  You can get a copy of it here.

My poem "I Can't Tell You Every Story" appeared in the Spring 2012 Knockout Literary Magazine. I was thrilled to have a poem of mine appear with the likes of Todd Boss!  You can find it here.

I have EIGHT  poems appear in the Winter 2012 Issue of Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Men's Poetry (Issue #5).  Not only did they take two of my strongest poems, "The Year of Bad Friends" and "Who Am I to Tell You This?", but a stanza of the latter made the back cover!  You can get your copy here.

Last, but not the least, my chapbook Slow Depth is finally available from Winged City Chapbooks.  Please stop by and check out there other great authors as well.Getting to meet much of the staff and the authors of New Sins Press was a highlight of the Chicago trip.  Copies are now for sale here.

If you would like to purchase a signed copy, you can shoot me an email at interlucent@gmail.com