Literary Magpie

Here Comes Trouble: Sitting Down with a Big Idea

2012-01-18T11:41:00.000-08:00

Recently, I read a conversation that the poet Stephane Mallarme had with the artist Degas. (T.V.F. Brogan) Degas complained to Mallarme that he was having trouble coming up with noble sentiments or profound thoughts to put in poems. Mallarme replied that poetry isn't made out of ideas; it is made out of words. How many times have I wanted to write a poem about X, you know, THE REALLY IMPORTANT THING, only to have nothing come. There are some excellent poems that are polemic out there, but a great majority of terrible poems that have something to SAY!

This calls to mind a quote that I garnered while reading Carl Phillip's essay "The Case For Beauty" From his book of essays The Coin of the Realm. In it Phillips states, "The point about beauty is to see it. The point of the poem I not to say anything about beauty, but to enact the vision of it."

The third strand of my musing came to me watching a BBC series from 2008, Wallander. In the episode "Sidetracked"the protagonist has a discussion with his father, a painter. The father says, "When you were little, you asked me why I painted the same thing over and over again. I couldn't explain it to you then, but every time I sit down to paint I think, 'Maybe today I will do something different,' but when I start painting, it is always the same; landscapes." (paraphrased from memory)

When writing, I often resist "projects" because I have come to find that I can only sustain them for roughly twenty poems. I don't like to be bound every day to hammering out yet another "project poem." Sometimes they work, but often I find myself with only a half dozen serviceable poems out of a pile. This is not to say everything I write is gold. Most often the majority of my scribbling comes to naught. But for myself, I find that sitting down and letting the poem that wants to be written come of its own accord is more successful. The poem is more complex and often surprises me.

Every time I sit down with something really important to say, my own passion derails the making of a good poem. I, like Mallarme, freeze up when I think, "Today I will write a poem about SUFFERING/WORLD HUNGER/SPAYING AN NEUTERING YOUR PETS etc.

Allowing myself to write whatever comes during my writing time is where my best poems are born. This is not to say that all of my poems are "inspired.' There is a seemingly endless amount of revision that comes after. Sometimes I compose with strictures in mind or attempt a poetic form.

The longer I write, the more I find that there is an intuitive relationship between me and my poems. When I am doing my best work, I allow the poem to dictate its own form and language. I stop trying to get in the way and let it happen. While this may sound mysterious, I know that others of you are nodding your head in agreement. After all, we as writers, ideally strive to be in service to the words on the page. That is when we are our best, our brightest, and most fully writers.

Please tell me your own experience about sitting down with a big idea? How does your writing process differ?

Instead of Resolutions, Action: The 30 Day Writing Challenge

2012-01-09T16:10:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine, three weeks into January, told me that he had resolved to work out in the gym for the coming year. I asked him how it was going and he said, "Well I am going to wait until February, so that all of the New Year Resolution people drop out and it isn't so crowded."

While funny, the observation cuts close to home. How many years have I resolved that THIS would be the year I ate better, worked out regularly, made a savings plan, or spent an hour every day writing. What happens? I do well for a month, maybe two months and then...kaput. All of my resolve is lost to my old bad habits. I do my best to pretend as if I was never filled with naive gusto to begin with. I practice my smug grin in the mirror as other people tell me about their resolutions. You know, the smile that says We all know how this will end.

I have another friend who says, "I can be an angel for exactly three days." By this he means that no matter how good his motivations, how strong his intent, after three days he is up to his old behavior again.

This year I didn't make any resolutions for 2012. I made some notes for what I would like to see happen, but I didn't set my sights on them too hard. I know myself. In the past, I have been prone to big gestures which then I regret fulfilling. We've all been there.

This year I was asked by a fellow poet to join her in a 30 day writing challenge. Every day, I would write something new and post it on a blog with fellow writers. We would also briefly comment on one another's work. This is NaNoWriMo on a poet's scale. There are no word counts. The only rule is that you must have written or revised what you posted within 24 hours of posting it.

Things have been going well. I feel some pressure, but I am not overwhelmed. After all, I don't have to write a perfect poem by sundown. I don't even have to write a whole poem. The goal is to put words on paper (screen) every single day.

It also helps that I know I can bail on this project after 30 days. I can do almost anything for 30 days so long as I know I can revert to my old ways afterward. It is my hope that this 30 Day Writing Challenge will encourage me to continue to write after I reach the end of January.

Even if I fail to write every day afterward, I will have generated some new material with which to work. So I encourage you--no matter what your art is--to give yourself a 30 Day Challenge of some sort. Perhaps this will help you to complete some project you can never find the time for.

The point is to take small, consecutive action every day. To create.

Welcome 2012!

2012-01-01T11:09:00.000-08:00

Thank you dear readers old and new for sticking with me into the new year. I am grateful for you!

2012 will bring some new things to this blog: new author interviews, more talk about books, and hopefully some more pictures. I haven't posted many original photos in the past, but everyone likes to look. If you have any ideas of what you would like to see or read on this blog in the coming year, please let me know.

One big item to look for at the end of February and the beginning of March is AWP or the Associated Writers&Writing Programs annual conference in Chicago. My chapbook The Geography of Removal, will be coming out and I will be doing a signing and a reading. I will also update you about the amazing conference itself.

Up soon, an interview!

Happy Holidays to You Readers!

2011-12-25T12:47:00.000-08:00

May this season be filled with cheer for you. Or if not cheer, then wonder. Or if not wonder, than at least a decent slice of pie.

Thoughts on May Sarton, Solitude, and Struggle

2011-12-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

In a recent letter from a friend, he discussed his love of May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude. This was one of the first books I read when I began to think about writing. Solitude spurred my love affair with May Sarton. In her writing she is disarmingly honest about her struggles with personal relationship, her own difficult temperament, and her love-hate relationship with isolation. She revealed to me how writing can capture (through close observation) both the suffering and wonder that exist within a person.

I share Sarton's love of cats, her fondness for cut flowers, and for living on one's own. But my real kinship to Sarton comes from her writing about her own anger, mood swings, and tempestuousness. Beneath her proper exterior, she was often at odds with herself and the world around her. Who among us can't relate? So often we are encourage to put on smile, a good front, and to play along nicely with others despite what may be happening below the surface.

Aren't we, as writers, also torn between the ideal writing life and the one we are given? May Sarton lived in several houses in New England. When she wrote Solitude, she was living in a white farm house whose property included trees and a path down to the sea. I longed for such a house of my own in which to write without interruption. To write without disturbance. To take long walks between writing sessions and think out the tangles I had gotten myself into. To hear the roar of the storm, the thunder of the sea, and to be gloved in the white muffle of snow! Can you see where this is going?

Clearly, I am not going spend my entire life in a house agog with nature and my creative genius. There are names for folks like this: recluse and shut-in. We all have a friend or two who drops off the map from time to time. Perhaps they are also socially awkward. When they emerge from their social hibernation, they are a little too gregarious and bright. They may or may not have a smile like Jack Nicholas did in the shining. But we long for isolation in which to write, don't we? We dream of the perfect writing retreat to escape from the big, bad world. If only we could "get away" THEN our writing would get itself done. THEN we would leave behind the writing slump we have been in like so much snow melt off a sun-warmed roof.

May Sarton struggled with these things in her journal. How life intrudes. How despite our best efforts, sometimes we scrub the floors to avoid putting words on the page. Or perhaps, how we have put off scrubbing our floors for so long working on our writing they demand to be scrubbed. She captures a woman whose inner life is as dynamic as the changeable and tyrannical Maine coastline's weather. For this I am grateful.

May Sarton's writing career spans poetry, memoir, novels and even a few essays on the writing life. If you haven't read her yet, I encourage you to do so. From Journal of a Solitude:

"When I talk about solitude I am really talking also about making space for that intense, hungry face at the window, starved cat, starved person. It is making space to be there."

Reflecting on the Title of Rafael Campo's book Landscape With Human Figure

2011-11-27T19:44:00.000-08:00

I have been writing for several years now about my predicament of being both queer and rural. On one hand, I love living where I do. There is not a thirty mile commute to work in gridlock traffic. I rarely have to wait in line for more than ten minutes to buy anything. And there is the endless wonder of the landscape in all four season. Yesterday, I watched a four point stag pursue a doe through the neighborhood oblivious to cars, people, or front lawns.

On the other hand, it gets very lonely. I am the only out gay male in my department at a school of 12,000 students. My university doesn't have an LGBTQI organizaion, it settles for a Gay-Straight Alliance. And if I want to go out dancing with other men, then I better be prepared for a ninety mile drive north on a two lane road without shoulders. But this isn't a post about my desire to dance and cruise other men.

It is getting dark earlier every day and I am anticipating more and more snow. The weather and the landscape are resuming their annual emphasis on bareness and deprivation. I can't help but also reflect on the lack of like-minded queers here. There is no one I can call up and meet for a latte and a gripe session about how every event here is at least 60% or more ally attended. The events feel more queer friendly than queer once LGBTQ folks become the minority. But I wonder if I would be any better off in a larger city?

Two Idaho folks have given me this article because they know that I am gay and a poet. The subject matter is relevant, but the content is not. I have never been beautiful/fit/fashionable enough to feel like I belonged in mainstream gay (therefore urban) culture. The elitism and privilege that oozes from every part of this article is appalling.

Idaho folks, please do not think of me like this.

So I struggle. I wrestle with what it means to be a radical minded queer in a rural environment. The internet helps, but it cannot become the entirety of my culture. No amount of reading of blogs and books will stand in for a diverse and trangressive queer community. Rural queers are usually told to do one of two things: 1) Move or 2) Create their own community.

The first option refuses to acknowledge that any life other than the urban (or suburban one for that matter) is valid. The second fails to acknowledge that a community is made up of more than two or three individuals.

But despite this, some LGBTQ people choose to remain right where they are.

I loved growing up in rural Montana, but it nearly killed me. The landscape was heartbreakingly beautiful, but the attitudes of many people who live there were just as heartbreaking. Some of these issues get dealt with in my forthcoming chapbook, The Geography or Removal due out in February.

Updates and Some News

2011-11-15T20:54:00.000-08:00

I am starting to realize as I write edits on poems for my chapbook, that I will judged by readers on poems that I wrote a long while ago. This publishing business takes so long that our "current" work being seen by readers can be several years old. It is humbling for sure.

It is my job as I edit them to make the old poems a good as my new skills allow. Progress!

Look for my chapbook, "The Geography or Removal" published by New Sins Press to come out sometime in February. (More likely the latter half of February.)

Also, I am stepping down as nonfiction editor of the literary magazine 5x5 after the December issue. I am doing this so that I can step up as POETRY EDITOR in the new year!

A special thanks goes out to Mishon Wooldridge for all of her hard work over the past two years as poetry editor. She has given her heart and soul to make 5x5 not only endure but shine. Thank you Mishon!

As poetry editor, I will be looking for readers for 5x5 starting in January. This is something that you can put on your CV for community service AND you will get to read some great poems.

I have some things coming out in journals at the turn of the year, but am waiting to hear back about Spring.

Stay tuned. A real post will come soon.

Memory and Effigy

2011-10-26T13:48:00.000-07:00

I recently read a draft of a poem that had the line "Why recently, I am so drawn to dilapidation."

If you read my recent post, you will know that I most whole-heartedly agree with that statement! Again and again, I am being drawn to images, places, and people that are past their prime. Whether you want to call it dilapidation, beautiful ruin, or even something melodramatic like the gorgeous flaw, the fact remains that what is imperfect is far more interesting than something seamless and perfect. Perfection has its place, perhaps with Plato or in heaven. But here on earth, what garners my attention in writing are flawed characters, broken dreams, and the imperfect world of objects.

Who wants to read about St. Blandula's struggle-free life, where she was always immersed in the divine and never tempted? Not me.

There is an impulse within all of us to look back at the past through rose colored glasses. We call this nostalgia or the "good old days." History shows us again and again, that people like to recall a semi-mythical past in which their culture was at its greatest. The ancient Greeks (specifically Hesiod) called this their Golden Age, an age where men "lived with the gods without sorrow." There is a reason that the good stories from Greek mythology come later, at a more flawed stage of mankind. Where would our fairy tale princesses be without the long climb up to the castle throne?

So it is with each of us. When we begin to write, we may want to edit out the very parts of our stories that make them the most compelling. We might want to avoid the unpleasant or embarrassing aspects. Or even believe that our memory is absolute fact. That hazy world of the "good old days" beckons us, whispers in our ear to return, and ultimately to enter into an idealized, struggle free piece of writing. We become the lotus eaters that Homer warned us about. In other words, boring.

We, as writers, need to ask ourselves what we truly wish to show in our writing.

Miriam-Webster defines an effigy first as, "an image or representation, especially of a person" but then more interestingly as "a crude figure representing a hated person." We immediately know what we are interested in hearing more about. Give me enemies for $1000 please.

The word effigy comes from Middle French and Latin, meaning to form or to shape. It has a connection to the word dough. As a former baker, I know intimately, what it means to shape loaves for the rising and baking process. So it is with writing.

As you begin drafting or revising your pieces, I encourage you to write straight at the heart of imperfection. Dig deeper into the flaws of your characters and narratives. Is is through these cracks and brokenness that our strongest stories find their way into the world.

Guest Blogger Chelsia A. Rice on Writing and Same-Sex Families

2011-10-19T10:49:00.000-07:00

Boolean Searching

In 2001, I started college to pursue my dream of becoming a writer. I wanted to get an education that would help me write my experience of being raised by two moms in suburban Oregon in the 1980s and 90s, but even then, in my formative years as an academic, I knew I needed to look to other writers with similar experiences in order to see how they crafted their stories before I wrote my own. The problem: I didn’t know of any. I didn’t know that any existed.

At a Women’s Conference in the winter of 2002, I found my first book that depicted something close to my experiene. Displayed above the rest of the books was Heather Has Two Mommies: the 10^th Anniversary Edition. It stopped me dead in my tracks. With one hand, I reached out to the glossy cover picture of a little girl frolicking in the grass with her dog and with the other I covered my mouth. The tears came faster than I could compose myself, and I turned away from the bookseller as to not have her see me crying. As I tried getting myself back together amidst the crowds of women passing through the conference, I clutched the book to my chest and thought of the little girl in my past that never knew there were others like her, that never saw her experience in her own books, ever.

Finding that first book inspired me to search for more narratives like mine. I started small. I wandered through my community college library and found little to nothing in their stacks. I shifted my search to the bigger county library and spent hours looking through their catalogue. Still, finding nonfiction written by children who grew up with queer parents was challenging. I didn’t know what search parameters to use. I started simple:

“Children of same-sex parents.”

I got one hit: Zack’s Story: Growing Up with Same-sex Parents by Keith Elliot Greenberg.

I was thrilled, but as I wandered over to the Children’s Library, I already knew that Zack’s Story would be nothing like my own. Still, I picked it up and took it back to the computer to search again.

Same-sex[and]parents[and]children[and]essay?

--No Entries Found—

Children[or]kid[and]gay[or]lesbian[or]queer[and]parent?

--330 results—

Listings available? Many that in no way related to my experience, including Gunfighters of the American West, Say Hey: a song of Willie Mays, and the Indigo Girls album, Retrospective.

Well, Indigo Girls, I guess that’s kind of close.

I tried again.

Same-sex[and]parent[and]children[or]kid[not]goat[and]nonfiction?

--No Entries Found—

Searching was become too complicated. I gave up.

Nothing.

I returned many more times, and each time, a similar routine. What initially turned up were parenting books geared towards lesbians and gay men, and a couple of sociological titles that examined whether or not gay and lesbian parents were good parents. And while I was pleased that there were books to convince unsure readers that same-sex parents were just as qualified for the job as heterosexual parents, I was looking for nonfiction narratives from the children in those families.

What further complicated my investigation was that I wasn’t just looking for narratives of children raised by queer parents, but narratives of children who were raised in homes with queer parents who were addicts, had mental illness, or were engaged in domestic violence. Consider, now, the search parameters narrowed:

Kid[or]child[and]lesbian[or]gay[or]queer[and]addict?

--No Entries Found—

Children[and]queer[and]parent[and]domestic[and]violence?

--No Entries Found—

Same-sex[and]mental[and]illness[and]children?

--No Entries Found—

No matter what I plugged into the computer, nothing I wanted came up. Needless to say, I was frustrated. So, over to the reference librarian I went.

“Excuse me,” perhaps I said, “Do you know of any books about adult kids who’ve grown up with queer parents?”
“Hmm…” the librarian hummed as her fingers clicked across the keyboard. Then clicked again. And, again. Finally, she turned the monitor in my direction and we looked down a list of three books, none of them necessarily relative to my search, most of them I’d seen before. “Well,” she said, “if you look in the general area around these books, at books with the same call numbers, you might find something.”

I climbed three flights of marble stairs to the top floor and found myself buried in stacks on the backside of the building. When I found the call numbers, I ran my fingers back and forth down the rows of books. Then, I found one: A collection of essays titled Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgendered Parents by Noelle Howey and Ellen Samuels.

I took the book home and read it in two nights. It, too, did not necessarily contain narratives that echoed my experience. It was time to ask myself why.

First, although I am not the first child in history to be raised by same-sex parents, I’m on the front end of the what some people call the “gayby boom,” so the voices of children like mine are just emerging; we are just beginning to make sense of what it meant to grow up in the midst of the gay rights movement, and under severe political and social scrutiny. Second, while my mothers were lesbians and addicts who were struggling with mental illness and often fought viciously with one another, they were my parents, and we were a family. Their struggles were not a result of their relationship, and their relationship was not a result of their issues. Many families, regardless of their composition, struggle with issues such as these, and my searching for narratives that strictly reflected the lives of children from gay and lesbian headed households severely limited my options. Years later, I turned to the voices of writers who shared my experiences, regardless of the parent’s pairing, and I realized another reason why I never found what I specifically looking for.

These writers, much like myself, don’t want our stories to be shelved in the LGBTQ area in the back of the women’s bookstore, or categorically placed next to sociological examinations of diverse families, and while I’m thankful that these distinctions exist and that there are books available that fall under these distinction, my story and the stories of others like me, do not exist in order to be read by just one specific audience. The stories of our families are very much like those of our heterosexual counterparts, and they need to be recognized as such and read by many.

These days, ten years after my initial search for stories like mine, other books are beginning to appear, and the catalogues are beginning to blossom with stories from the children who grew up with same-sex parents. We can only hope that we will soon find them beyond the confines of shelves relegated to the LGBTQ genre.

Chelsia A. Rice earned her MFA at the University of Idaho and her writing has appeared in Pointed Circle, The Broken Word Anthology, NervyGirl Magazine, About.com and various other publications. She lives in Helena, Montana where she teaches writing, chases deer out of her back yard, and throws the ball for her wiener dogs in her off time.

Only the Appearance of a Whole

2011-09-25T21:37:00.000-07:00

This weekend has been filled with a small accretion of idea bits and fragments, that have sort of reached a critical mass in my head. If my mind were a junk drawer, it would be time to clean it out.

One thing that struck me this weekend was my tendency to pick up old books, even if I may never read them. A great example of this is a book I got first published in 1939 called Cowboy Dances: A Collection of Western Square Dances by Lloyd Shaw. This book is filled not only with photos of the dancers, but diagrams for dancing groups and a whole commentary on what music may be appropriate to listen to. More intriguing is that the foreword is written by Sherwood Anderson, the author of the novel Winesburg, Ohio.

On Saturday, at the Farmer's Market, I saw a half dozen elderly couples square dancing. It is one thing that I have always wanted to learn, but never gotten around to. Do young people square dance these days? Perhaps buying older books on subjects that intrigue me is one way to give form to my countless aspirations.

Right now, my friend is taking her elderly father through Montana on his "last tour." At the age of 88, she doesn't think that he will be able to make another foray into the Big Sky State where he spent the first half of his life. She said that they were stopped in Ekalaka, Montana which is a town that nearly touches the divide between North and South Dakota. I went to another book that I have to learn a little bit more about where they were at. In Montana Place Names from Alzada to Zortman published by the Montana Historical Society, I learned that Ekalaka is named for the niece of the Oglala Sioux chief Red Cloud. She and her husband opened a store and saloon there in 1885. The town is currently a whopping 410 people.

Over the weekend, I stopped at the small town of Garfield, Washington in hopes of eating at a BBQ joint and cafe run by an elderly couple. I haven't been up that way in about five months. When I arrived, the place was closed. Instead, I ate at Grumpy's Bar and was told by the woman at the counter that the elderly woman was ill and her husband spent a great deal of time taking care of her so the restaurant folded. Another place that I enjoyed visiting has faded off the map.

This morning I drank my coffee out of a cup I bought from the Steamboat Rock Restaurant in Grand Coulee, Washington this summer. It was perhaps the ideal small cafe. The woman who was our waitress had worked there for 36 years. The decor was replete with wagon wheels and knotty pine paneling. It probably hadn't been remodeled since 1960, and this was a positive thing. Although things looked worn, they were spotless. I bought a cup at the counter, because I know that someday soon, this place will probably also slip into history.

And that is what this post is really about: the way that life continues to slip into the past.

How elusive our points of reference can be. Memory too continues to shift inside of us. My recollection of the ham and egg sandwich I ate at the Steamboat Rock Restaurant will continue to haunt, even though it was perhaps the aura of the place that charmed me. I begin to long for such things, especially when faced with the fact that I will most likely not be back to that part of Washington for years, if at all.

And this is where writing comes in, at the end. Through writing, I am able to capture if not the actual moment, at least a texture of it. If not the exact shape, then at least I can sketch its gesture in words.

Writing, can sustain us, even if all else recedes

Winged City Chapbooks, Contests, Publication!

2011-09-18T09:50:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, I received and email from the folks at Winged City Chapbooks (an imprint of New Sins Press) that they had selected my manuscript "The Geography of Removal" as their annual contest winner.

Thrilled could be used to describe my reaction. Perhaps squeeing might be a better aural approximation.

I had submitted "Geography" at the beginning of February and to three other contests/publishers. I got a "no" from two of the publishers earlier in the summer. One thing I try to do with submissions is to forget about them as often as possible. I have a list of who I send things off to. I might even write on the calender "Check with Journal X" three or four months out from the date I send things off, but otherwise I try not to think about where my work is at. After six months I was thoroughly surprised.

Now things heat up. I found out this week that my chapbook will be released at the end of February, just in time for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference (AWP). This means that I will be in Chicago for the conference and to do a book signing at the New Sins Press table.

I will keep you all informed as things progress. Thanks to New Sins Press and thanks to all of my readers for your continued encouragement and comments.

New Places to Find My Work: RFD Magazine

2011-09-13T08:54:00.000-07:00

The Fall 2011 issue of RFD Magazine is dedicated to Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter. My essay about Whitman, Montana, and Allen Ginsberg "Stranger if You Passing Meet Me" can be found therein.

RFD Magazine is that began in 1974 after "The Whole Earth Catalog" refused to print anything about gay men. Originally aimed at reaching rural gay men, RFD has since expanded to include the the Radical Faery Movement and the larger LGBTQ community.

It is the oldest reader-written quarterly for gay men in the world, now entering its 37th year of print.

Copies are available here: http://www.rfdmag.org/

Notes from the Invisible Man: Erasure of the Queer Narrative

2011-09-05T17:12:00.000-07:00

I recently had a lively exchange with a fellow poet about women getting it on with other women in poetry. In the poems, the speaker or narrator (as far as can be surmised about such things) identified as heterosexual. The poems under discussion were brave for their honest discussion of secrets and sexuality--experiences that get swept under the rug or locked up in gray metal boxes labeled shame. I commend these poems for telling.

That said, something still bothered me about them. Not the poems themselves, but the way in which “queer” content was being told by straight narrators. Human sexuality is a variegated and prismatic animal, and I acknowledge that any rigid construct of sexual behavior is prone to exception and failure. Although many poems, stories and essays in this category are not aiming for it, by their very nature they intend to provoke or shock a reader with the content. They are written to a heterosexual audience. Primarily, they are received into a heteronormative tradition that sees them at odds with the accepted narratives and boundaries

Further spurring my cantankerous brain was that my poet friend recommended a book by an (assumingly heterosexual) author wrote about someone gay dying of AIDS. I want to acknowledge that the book had great literary merit. It was moving. It still unsettled me.

HIV and AIDS are by no means a “gay” disease. The AIDS pandemic as they say, is everyone’s problem. But the context of the book was viewed through the lens of the AIDS-crisis in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The bad years. The plague years. The days of ACT-UP, PWA, and the introduction of the new cocktail drug therapies. The book is told through the lens of a heterosexual who lost a homosexual family member.

What I am grasping my way toward here is that too often, (I will go out on a limb for controversy’s sake and say most often) any visibility that queer narratives get by heterosexuals are from heterosexual authors. (David Sedaris aside, because he is really Erma Bombeck come back from the dead.) As a queer man, my narrative about the queer experience, my own lived truth is given second place for a heterosexual narrative which touches, but does not encompass my life. As LGBTQ people, we come to know our own stories in literature written by queer authors AND we usually read what the larger heteronormative culture has to say about us. It is expected for us to read and to know what author X and Y have to say about queers. But we aren’t given the same equity.

Most heterosexuals remain ignorant of queer authors. They don’t read our books. They aren’t really interested in doing so. Why should they? Heteronormative culture doesn’t expect to find anything about our lives to reflect anything of their own. Isn’t this the great argument mainstream gay culture makes about same-sex marriage, “We are just like you!”? Who are we lying too?

When my heterosexual friends recommend books (by straight authors) with gay themes to me, I am happy for it. There is usually an expectation that I should know about the book already since it is “about me.” When I go on to recommend a book back by a queer author, I am usually met with a blank stare. “Who?” my heterosexual friends ask. “I have never heard of that.”

And without me, they probably never will.

Recent Searches That Led People to My Blog (Borrowed from Eduardo C. Corral)

2011-09-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

These are key search words for finding my blog:

battleship game pieces

amos lassen

black and white portland maine

assaracus poem

"ian denning" (in quotes no less!)

gay face smiling

A Small Photo Essay to Get You Through the Week

2011-08-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

It is the first week of classes and I have been spending my time between getting a bunch of preparatory work done for teaching my Composition and Rhetoric class and trying to be as unproductive as possible. In lieu of a thoughtful and provocative post on writing, I thought that a small photo essay might be nice. Here are some of the things that I saw this summer:

This is the famous two-headed calf of Waterville, WA. Born in 1964, sadly, he lived for only ten days.

Lovely scroll work on the back of a chair in my hotel room.

Look kids, a jackelope!

An old industrial bridge, no longer open to the public near Chelan, WA.

I didn't eat here, but the sign combined with the amazing red lamps inside made me want to stop.

Dry Falls. During the Ice Age this waterfall was 40X larger than Niagra Falls.

More stunning vistas at Dry Falls.

Grand Coulee Dam. Me looking down 400 feet to watch the schools of sturgeon feed.

Grand Coulee Dam in the distance. So much water!

The obligatory shot of me in a deep sea diving mask.

A look at the lake created by Diablo Dam.

The rainbow edged window at the Sage Baker in Uniontown, WA.

A game I did not buy at a rummage sale.

Notice the text, this is an advertisement for a men's apparel store. Your guess is as good as mine.

An Interview with William Reichard

2011-08-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

William Reichard is the author of four collections of poetry: Sin Eater (2010); This Brightness (2007); How To (2004). All three were published by Mid-List Press. He was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and An Alchemy in the Bones (New Rivers Press, 1999) won a MN Voices Prize. Poems from This Brightness and How To have been featured on NPR’s “Writers Almanac.” He has published one chapbook, To Be Quietly Spoken (Frith Press, 2001) and edited The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s: A Gay Life in the 1940’s (Univ. of MN Press, 2001). Reichard's anthology of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice, was published by New Village Press in April 2011.

Jory Mickelson: I get a sense in reading your work across several books that the landscape informs your poetry. You currently live in the Midwest, but not all of your poems are set in the heartland. Could you talk a bit about how your environs shape your poems?

William Reichard: This is something I've thought about since a friend of mine from North Carolina told me, several years ago, that she thought that the northern landscape and the seasons here play a significant role in my work. At that point, I hadn't thought much about the place of geography in my poems, but after that, I saw it everywhere. Having grown up in a place like Minnesota, where there are such extremes in the weather - we had the highest temperature in the U.S. last week: 103, and six weeks previous, it had been spitting snow - it's difficult not to get wrapped up in the seasons. The weather here can kill you - freeze you, burn you, a tornado can erase your house, your neighborhood, even your life. This makes everyone here, by necessity, sharply tuned into what's going on outside. I've always loved these extremes. I think they're very beautiful, and it's hard to imagine living away from a place where the environment does change so drastically in the course of one year. The changing seasons lend themselves very naturally to poetry, taking on the metaphorical work of exploring the ways in which people relate to one another, to their environment, even to themselves. I don't take on these metaphors in a self-conscious way (I hope!) and I have to watch myself while I'm writing, more so editing, to make sure that these themes don't dominate my work. It's easy to slip into this mode, too easy, and I want my work to take on more than just the weather, dramatic and beautiful as it is.

I've always felt the strong impact of the landscape around me. Each new place I've visited has left some kind of mark on my psyche, and this has translated through into my written work. Some places, like the Marin Headlands in Northern California, and the Black Mountains in North Carolina, are deeply important to me for many reasons. These are connected to what and where these places are, geographically-speaking, but also to the people there, and how these people have influenced my life and work. I grew up in rural Minnesota, in a small farming community, and so I relate to the land in that way as well, as someone who lived in a community whose fate is largely determined by the success or failure of the crops each year. Seeing the land and the environment as a living thing is important for everyone, but perhaps you have to have depended on the land for a living before you become so intimately connected to it.

JM: What poets who write about place catch your attention?

WR: So many poets write about place, so it's hard to pick a few. I guess the first poet I read who has a close connection to his geography is Robert Hass. His book Praise had a profound effect on me, the way he melds together the natural and the spiritual and makes it look so easy when it's not easy at all. Mark Doty's first four books of poetry are deeply connected to the natural world. As he writes about his lover, Wally, falling ill and dying, he re-inscribes Wally's vanishing body into the landscape. In this way, Wally never really dies. The poetry becomes very spare by the 4th book, where the work focuses the seaside landscape, it's spare quality, and it becomes a metaphor for grief and loss. That work is very much like Elizabeth Bishop's, and I admire her work as well. Some of Linda Hogan's poetry takes on this task, fusing the natural and the spiritual.

JM: I would like to say that I grew up conscious of how my fate was tied to the weather because my great grandmother was a dry land wheat farmer in North Central Montana. I can't. Truth be told, I grew up in a rural town in the mountains of Western Montana that is lush by comparison.

What does living in an environment of extremes and such large contrasts do to your work? How else has the idea of drastic change entered into your own writing?

WR: As a gay man in a heterosexist society, I'd say that I've lived in an environment of extremes and large contrasts all of my life. It's been impossible to avoid, whether as a closeted teenager or as an out man. People tend to feel strongly about what they're afraid of, what they don't understand, what their ideological upbringing has told them is wrong. As a member of a minority group in the US, I've experienced these extremes firsthand, felt the sting of that fear and lack of understanding. That's not to say that I haven't also experienced wonderful extremes as well - feeling safe and celebrated within LGBT communities, within literary and arts communities, with my own family and with my family of friends. People can run so hot and cold. As humans we all have to learn to navigate such extremes. But some of us have to learn the geography of such extremes more deeply, in order to survive.

Looking back at my own writing, I see that I've always dealt with such extremes in my work, whether focused on the climate and landscape, or on the dramatic range of human interactions. In a sense, this is what every writer and artist does - focus on those moments of slippage, of contrast and confrontation - otherwise, we wouldn't have any good stories to tell. I can't remember the last novel I read in which everyone was happy and no one had to deal with adversity - that would make for a very boring book. I've dealt with sexual and social identity, poverty, death, AIDS, loss, and love, among many topics. Joy and happiness as well. Those moments of change, of contrast, are the moments when we really know we're alive because, for better or worse, they cause us to change and adapt. Though they're not always good experiences, I'm grateful for such moments.

JM: I like the idea of “moments of slippage.” I sometimes feel the writing process is that way, a grasping toward something that I don’t necessarily understand or see clearly.

Let’s talk about LGBTQ identity and communities. For a variety of reasons, I have a somewhat different worldview about what it means to be queer than those even ten years younger than myself. Do you feel that your writing has a gay or queer sensibility to it and what does a sensibility mean to you?

WR: I do feel that my work has a gay/queer sensibility, and by sensibility, I'm talking about a lens through which I see the world, a "filter" of sorts, that's been shaped by my experiences as a gay man in this time and place. I think about the idea of lenses and ideology a great deal. Partly, this is because of the work I do, teaching college-level seminars on creative writing and social justice in the fall, and visual/performing arts and social justice in the spring. Much of what I do is based on the presumption that everyone has a lens through which we see the world. This lens is shaped by lived experience, by belief systems and values we get from our family and community, and by the ideas and beliefs that we come to on our own. For those in majority, lets say white male middle class heterosexuals, the need to examine one's lens often isn't necessary. That's not to say that such people don't consciously examine their own lenses - they obviously do - but the need to do this, being compelled to do this in order to survive, isn't usually a necessity. Such people live, for better or worse, in a culturally conditioned "default" state - the thing we're all supposed to be, supposed to want to be. For me, growing up in a poor/working class family, growing up gay, it was never a question of whether or not I wanted to be in a position of always looking at my own lens, always questioning it. I had to do it. And frankly, I'm grateful for that, in hindsight.

So back to the question of my work having a gay/queer sensibility. Yes, it does. It has to, because whether I'm writing poetry based on my lived experience or writing poetry that's pure invention, I'm always writing out of the position I occupy in the world, and my sexual identity, among many other things, informs my perspective. Some of my work is very obviously gay/queer. My love poems, for instance, are always addressed to other men. I don't believe in leaving gender vague or neutral in my work. I know some writers who do this, in order, they say, to make the work more available to any reader. This seems, to me, like a subtle or not so subtle form of self-loathing. I don't really see this in the work of writers younger than me, but do see it in work from the last century. (It seems very strange to me to write that - the last century - but it's accurate even if it's a bit uncomfortable and makes me feel like some kind of antique.)

JM: Do you find your own lens of what it means to be a gay man different from others around you or younger than you?

WR: In terms of my own sense of what it means to be a gay man, and how this compares to the way younger gay/queer poets see the world, I do think that there are some big and important differences. The first difference is the very unapologetic way in which younger writers approach their identity in the world and in their creative work. They are very comfortable being who they are, using that in their work, and this makes me very happy. I guess I'd say I come from a kind of "bridging" generation. I was born in 1963. I was alive when Stonewall happened (though a small child). I was a young adult when the AIDS pandemic started. I was around for the "culture wars" and the dismantling of the NEA and the heyday of deconstruction and queer theory in the academy. The way that younger poets approach the world - I had to come to that, I wasn't born into it. I had to decide in a very conscious way to approach my sexual identity in my work. It was almost like coming out twice - once as a gay man, and again as a gay poet, or rather, a poet who is gay. As I said earlier, this is expressed very naturally in my work, and it's one facet of the person I am. Writing from this position, using my own lens when creating my work, didn't come easily. It was a struggle, just as it was an even greater struggle for gay/queer writers who came before me. I was able to build on what I inherited from them, and in turn, my students build on what they get from me. It's a lovely thing, I think.

JM: The idea of gay/queer identity within poetry (and writing in general) has been in my mind quite a bit. I finished the great essay “Boon and Burden: Identity in Contemporary American Poetry” by Carl Phillips recently. Also the kerfuffle with the 2011 Pioneer Award given to Edward Albee at the Lambda Literary Awards who went on to say, “Any writer who happens to be gay or lesbian must be able to transcend self,” and continued by saying, “I am not a gay writer—I am a writer who happens to be gay.”

What do you have to say about the claim that we are now living in a “post-gay” or “post-queer” world?

WR: These are complex issues, and I struggle with them. When I first started writing poetry, I wrote a sequence of poems titled "A Faggot's Lexicon." In the poems, I took on the names that have been used in derogatory ways, in the past, to attack LGBTQ people. Names like "sodomite," "faggot," "fruit," etc. I wanted to do the work that so many since have done in reclaiming the word "queer," to transform the words from weapons used against us into banners we could proudly fly. I guess I was taking on the labels I'd been given, names I'd been called since before I could even articulate who I was or how I would live my life. The process of writing those poems helped me gain back some of the words and some of the power I felt I'd lost by living in such a myopic society.

Western culture, and American culture in particular, seems dead set on labeling everything. It's a kind of taxonomic drive that I understand intellectually, but can't stand emotionally. If you can name something, label it, then you can control it. Look what we do to people who don't fit conveniently into the categories we've created - they're destroyed, pushed out of society in order to maintain some misguided perception that the world has a fixed and "right" order. It doesn't. Nature is big and expansive and slippery. You can't contain or control it. Some people might find this concept frightening, but I take great comfort in it. We live in mystery, and as poets or artists of any kind, that mystery, the urge to give words to what lies just beyond our reach, is our raw material. I think I knew I was a poet when I realized language couldn't contain or describe everything, but I still had to keep trying.

I understand Albee's comment about how he is defined. We could look at him and say, he's a product of another generation. He's self-loathing. But I don't think that would be accurate or fair. I take his quote to mean that being gay is one aspect of who he is as a whole person. We don't define heterosexual people only on the basis of their sexual orientation, we don't say, he's a straight writer. We could, but that would be reductive. I don't think Albee could deny that being gay defines, in a major way, what he writes about and how he writes it. His sexual identity is part of what forms his perspective, so how could it not play into his work? I take his quote to mean, I want it to mean, that he's a multifaceted person and so shouldn’t be defined by single label.

I don't think we're living in a "post-gay" or "post-queer" world. I think we're living in a world that has been made to stretch, by the hard work of countless LGBTQ people, to accommodate and even celebrate what is gay and what is queer. For me, the "post-" labels give an impression that we're past all of that, through with the need to consider these parts of an individual’s identity. I think that we always have to consider all pieces of an individual’s identity. Things get lost, otherwise. A friend of mine used to have a poster that featured photographs of famous LGBTQ writers, and the caption, "Unfortunately, history has set the record a little too straight." It was a comment on the practice of erasure, taking away certain facts about an individual that might interfere with the way in which you want to perceive them and their work. That seems so lazy to me - simply ignoring what you don't want to know so that your vision of the world isn't upset by inconvenient facts. I guess I'm contradicting myself here. Earlier, I argued that labels were bad and confining. Now I seem to be arguing that they're good and empowering. This isn't my intention. Maybe what I'm trying to get at is a sense that labeling, naming to control, being labeled, is a negative action, while naming oneself, proudly taking on the names you call yourself, is a positive one. I wish I could give you a very succinct and orderly reply to this question, but it's messy, and sometimes, messy is good.

JM: Messy is probably for the best. And now for something completely different. Your poetry would lead me to believe that you spend a goodly deal of time around cats. When I read your third book, This Brightness I kept thinking back to this fall when I had the good fortune to hear Edward Hirsch talk about his poem “Wild Gratitude” which was inspired by one of his favorite poems “Jubilate Agno, Fragment [For I Will Now Consider my Cat Jeoffry]” by Christopher Smart. Do you know either of these poems? Would you care to comment on the cats that appear in your poems and/or being a cat person?

WR: I do know the Christopher Smart poem. It's great! I've always been a cat person. There were always cats around when I was growing up, and for whatever reason, our family cats tended to gravitate toward me, or maybe it was the other way around? There's never been a time in my life when I haven't had at least one significant cat. For 19 years it was Max. He was somewhat of a misanthrope, but loved me, as I did him. Right now, my partner and I have two cats. They're sisters, from a litter of kittens my sister Rita's cat had eleven years ago. They've been with us since they were kittens. They have very different natures. Alice is a lap cat, loves attention, loves to be held, to sleep on the bed. Gertrude is wildcat, always playful, not quite a lap cat, but one who loves to be near you, to sit in proximity to you, and when she's in the mod, she'll jump on your lap.

Mark Doty has a poem called "Beginners" in which his grade school class receives reproductions of various objects from a museum, to keep in the class for a period of time. The object he writes about is a reproduction of a statue of an ancient Egyptian cat deity. The poem explores secrets children keep, and the cat becomes a silent witness to whom the narrator confesses his secrets. Cats have always served that purpose for me. I read somewhere that cats record our history. They watch us and remember everything, but give nothing away. The perfect companions! I didn't consciously set out to put a lot of cats in to the poems in This Brightness, but they are certainly there! After the book came out and I realized just how many cats populated the work, I was a little embarrassed. I was afraid that people would think I was a crazy cat man, hoarding dozens of animals in some run down house, something out of the six o'clock news. For me, the cats take on a metaphorical role, representing both the good and the bad in all of us. Animals, in general, play a significant role in my work. I think the way a society treats its animals is a pretty good gauge for measuring the way that society values life, values those in the society who have little or no power. I don't believe our society is making the grade.

JM: One of my vows to myself when I started writing was that I would never publish a poem about my cat, but you are making me rethink that decision. I got my very first cat six years ago and am now a cat person for better or worse. I only have one (so far).

So the weather and whiskers aside, where else do you take your inspiration for your work? It may be the most asked question to writers, but what brought you to poetry and continues to bring you back to it?

WR: What inspires me... That's a big question for anyone. I suppose the answer I give depends on the day. It's always changing. Human relationships inspire me - the way they function and frequently don't function. Nature. Television inspires me a great deal. I know I'm supposed to hate TV, but I don't. I watch a very eclectic mix of things - I love any kind of documentary. I love shows about things I don't understand - the workings of the universe, exploration of the oceans and of deep, hidden caves, indigenous cosmologies, migration routes of flamingos and monarch butterflies. Some sitcoms are great. Some dramas. Old movies inspire me. Spiritual belief systems of all kinds are fascinating. Ghost stories are a favorite. Really, anything that can teach me something I don't know is a great source of inspiration. Poetry is a kind of exploration, a search for something you know you'll never quite find, but you keep looking anyway.

I came to poetry in a kind of backwards way. I did all of my graduate work in creative writing in fiction and creative nonfiction. But as time went on, I found myself less and less satisfied with my work. It became less about traditional forms of narrative and storytelling and more about the wonderful details of the stories - the engagement of the senses, the captured moments, the snapshots of emotion and idea. My last term in the writing program at the University of Minnesota, I took a poetry writing course to fulfill a graduation requirement. It was like I'd been sitting in a dark room and someone turned on the light. I could see, and things suddenly made sense. I never really went back to prose. I still tinker with a story now and again, and I do work on essays, but poetry is how I make sense of the world. And this is what keeps pulling me back into poetry - that deep-seated need to try and make sense of the world. I know I'll never find it, but I have to keep trying.

I'm very inspired by music, visual art and the performing arts, and by other writers. Frank O'Hara has a poem titled "Why I Am Not A Painter." I've always loved that poem. He talks about how much he loves visual art - he was a curator at MoMA - and how he wishes he could paint. But he can't. I feel the same way. I love all forms of visual art, and I collect art (it's often more affordable that people think!) and I know a lot of visual artists. In my other life, the one I'm not living as a poet, I'm a painter or a photographer or both. I know that living with art, surrounded by it on the walls of my house, always spinning through my mind, has a profound influence on me as a writer. I have a visual memory - that's how I recall my own experiences, how I navigate when I'm driving or walking - and I always write, initially, from an image that lodges in my head and won't leave. After letting it sit there for a while, an hour or a day or two, I start to work with it.

My relationship with music is harder to describe. I've studied the trumpet and the violin, and can't play either. I can't actually read music. I've tried, but somewhere between seeing the notes on the page and moving my fingers to produce those notes, something gets lost, the message is interrupted. So, I've settled for loving music. I'm not picky about the form, the style, or era. I love Bach and I love Sigur Ros equally. I've always known musicians as friends, sometimes as lovers. It's difficult to put into words how music influences me. It's about a pure emotional reaction, a deep-seated feeling that I want desperately to express - music evokes such reactions in me - and so I turn to music when I'm feeling stuck, when the images and words aren't coming. It's like a jump-start directly to my heart.

JM: I tried playing the trumpet and failed as well. I remember how much I hated practicing every day, but I never felt like I got better. I remember that for the elementary band concert, I just pretended to play so I wouldn’t screw up the songs.

You like ghost stories? I think haunted house movies may be my favorite genre of horror film. If I remember correctly you had some poems about a spiritualist or medium in your book How To didn't you? Can you tell me a bit about why you are drawn to ghost stories. Also how the poem "Bird as Ghost" came to be in your book Sin Eater?

WR: I LOVE ghost stories. I've loved them since I was a small child and I'd watch ghost stories on TV. When I learned to read, I went first to ghost stories and tales of the supernatural. In 4th grade I was sent to the high school library to find books for myself - I'd more or less used up the elementary school library and was hungry for more. I remember walking the long distance from the high school back to the elementary wing with a huge volume of Edgar Allan Poe in my hands. I'm not sure, now, that that was the best reading material for me at that age, but I was hooked.

I'm drawn to ghost stories for many reasons. The part of me that's fascinated by the mysteries of the natural world, by science, is drawn to various theories of time and space, the question of whether time is linear or if all of what we experience as time - past, present, and future - exist simultaneously. One theory here is that what we perceive as "ghosts" are really just other threads of time intersecting with our own. The part of me that's fascinated with the history of religion and spiritual beliefs is drawn to the idea of a deathless soul, a part of each of us that goes on, and the beauties and pitfalls that await us now and in some great beyond. Some of the poems in my books do deal with these issues - the "soul" poems, "Bird as Ghost," and "My Ghost" in Sin Eater. A series of "Hypothesis" poems in How To. Maybe I'm some kind of frustrated cleric? A psychic once told me that in my lives previous to this one I’ve been a priest, a shaman, various "holy" people. Perhaps it's the experience of these lives that carries through into this one that makes me write about ghosts or souls. "Bird as Ghost" is a melding of my interest in the natural world and in the spiritual realm.

JM: I think that your “Hypothesis” poems may be some of my favorites. In This Brightness, I was curious about the final section, when you wrote from the persona of Marsden Hartley. Can you tell me how you and Hartley crossed paths and perhaps what generated the sequence of poems?

WR: The Hartley sequence came about by chance. The Weisman Museum at the Univ. of MN has a very large collection of Hartley's work. I came across the work when I was fishing around for thesis topics. I thought it would be interesting to write about the work of gay men who wrote and also worked in visual media - my idea focused on the ways in which gay artists used their work to encode their lived experience in an age when being openly queer was not an option. Hartley was a poet as well as a painter. He published books of verse and art criticism. Around the time I was looking for a thesis topic, the Weisman started to organize a large Hartley retrospective. I connected with a curator at the museum and delved deeper into Hartley's work. I found I loved his visual work, but his poetry... not so much. In the end, I realized that I didn't want to write about him from an academic perspective because of the visceral way in which I reacted to his paintings - I didn't want to step back from the work and critically analyze it, I wanted to jump deeper into it. So, I found myself responding to him in a creative way, writing poems about him, his work, his life and the friendships he had with other cultural luminaries of the time - Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Mabel Dodge, etc.

From that point on, the poems flowed out with ease. It seemed very natural to me to creatively engage with Hartley. He spent so much of his life alone, seeking real connections with other men, looking for love, and then running away from it. I wanted to try and get into his head, and through him, into his paintings. The poems were written within a relatively short period of time. I had the good fortune to get a grant to work on the poems - it allowed me to fly out to Boson and then drive slowly up the Atlantic coast, visiting the places Hartley lived and worked in Maine and Nova Scotia. I'd never seen the Atlantic when I started to write the poems, and I felt I had to actually see the environments I was trying to write about in order to authenticate my work. The trip was fantastic, and it gave me even more to work with in terms of landscapes, cityscapes, and subject matter. Once the sequence was drafted, I spent a long time revising it, looking for the final form of the poems. I settled on the prose poem format because that provided me with the greatest range of possibility in terms of the narrative structure of the work.

JM: There is a lot of talk about the prose poem—what it is or isn’t. What it must have or must avoid. How to tell if one is successful or not. The prose poem has been around for more than a century now, but it still seems (and perhaps only in America) to be a bit of a newcomer or a home wrecker in poetry.

WR: I love the idea of the prose poem as the home wrecker of American poetry! It does seem to puzzle some people. It's not that we don't have excellent poets working in the form. You could argue that Whitman's work is a form of prose poetry. I guess our culture, in general, likes things to be very clear. It's either A or B, 1 or 2. Kind of like going for an eye exam when the doctor keeps flipping the lenses back and forth and asking you which one is clearer. I read a quote by the French poet (and filmmaker and visual artist and designer, etc.) Jean Cocteau. He was asked why he wasn't as recognized in the U. S. as he was in the rest of the world. He replied that in the U.S. the doctor for your left foot can't look at your right. That, to me, sums up why prose poetry could be perceived as the evil stepchild of poetry. It's more than one thing at a time, occupies a space that's between given spaces, and this makes some people uncomfortable.

I love prose poetry. For me, it's the perfect blend of what's best in poetry - the focus on the image, the detail, the fragment, the moment - and what's best in prose - the sense of something happening, a narrative, a progression from one point to the next, a story being told. But there are certain expectations with prose regarding narrative, story, whatever you want to call it, and these expectations don't govern prose poetry, or at least they don't need to govern it. Prose poetry deals in fragments, luminous moments, and though the overall form still needs to be as concise as possible, it can be rangy in a way that more traditional poetry forms usually are not. I love that about the form - it's open territory - and I find that incredibly freeing.

Earlier I discussed my Hartley sequence. It didn't always exist in its finished, prose poem form. It started as free verse, but never felt right. I took it through so many iterations before I realized what it needed to be. I played with the line breaks, the stanza breaks. I knew I was working with a narrative, but I wasn't limited by Hartley's biography or a traditional art historical analysis of his work. I was looking for something in between. The prose poem form, in the way it inhabits this space between, was the perfect form for the piece. Once I'd found that, I knew where the poem needed to go, and finishing it was relatively easy. I've always worked in the prose poem form, and I probably always will. Maybe that's just the frustrated short story writer in me trying to find a way out. But I think it's more to do with the way the prose poem resists easy categorization. As a queer man, that's been my own experience in U.S. culture - people try to put you in a box, but you always find a way to slip out of the confines and if you're lucky, create your own definitions. So maybe that's what prose poetry really is in the world of U.S. poetry - the queer kid - the beautiful, elusive queer kid - not there to wreck poetry's home, but to push its walls out just a little bit further so there is more room for everyone.

JM: I keep coming back to a quote by David Wojnarowicz from his journals, “The possibility inherent in impossibility.” I feel that this could easily apply to the prose poem.

What are you working on right now? What kind of writing projects do you have in the works, or are you not a writing project kind of guy?

WR: I'm not sure what I'm working on right now. I guess I'm in limbo. Sin Eater was the third book in a trilogy, and that large format provided me with a lens through which to focus my work for a long time. I didn't realize how comforting it was having that larger project until it was finished and I found myself staring at my notebook wondering, now what? I'm writing with no particular focus, just seeing what happens. It's a little scary because these are the times when I doubt myself the most, when I start to think maybe I've run out of things to write about, or at least run out of the ability to say anything new or interesting. I know we all go through this, so I won't allow myself to wallow in this state for too long. I try to remind myself that as writers, we're always writing, even when we're not actively putting pen to paper. Sometimes we're on "intake" and sometimes we're on "output," but we're always working.

In April, New Village Press in Oakland published my anthology, American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice. This was another big project I'd been working on for the last couple of years, and again, it gave me something to focus on - if I was having trouble working on my own poetry, I could always turn to the anthology. It's fantastic having the anthology out there. I'm very passionate about the power of literature to create change and advocate for justice, and I think the work in the anthology proves how work that is, first and foremost, of the highest quality usually possesses the power to change minds, to get the reader to see the world through other eyes. It was my desire, as a teacher, to find work that has the power to transform, but isn't preachy or polemical, that made me undertake the project, and it was my belief that such work is out there that made me see it through to publication. I'd love to work on another anthology. It seems a shame not to, given the steep learning curve you face when you put together your first anthology. I'm sure I'll do another such project.

I'm also tinkering with essays and some short nonfiction. I love reading essays and creative nonfiction, and I think there's a deep connection between poetry and the essay form. Maybe it's an associative approach to ideas and images, a way of looking at the world that allows you to put unlike things together in order to come up with something new and whole. I'm very taken with the work of W. G. Sebald. There's something about the way he approaches ideas and narrative, a very liquid quality that allows him to move so effortlessly from one topic to the next, one memory to another - it's just beautiful. When I read his work, and the work of other writers like him, I feel that there is hope for all of us - I'm grateful that there are minds out there so unhampered, so full of imagination that they make almost anything seem possible. There is so much pettiness in the world these days. It's ugly and it's exhausting. Writers like Sebald are working on another level, not denying this world, but seeing it within a greater context.

In terms of my own writing, I'm content to just write for now. I'll send out work to journals, but won't try to force myself to come up with the shape of a new collection yet. I know that this will come when I'm ready. I am a project kind of guy, when it gets right down to it. I guess my current project is just letting things be, seeing what happens next. Whatever the next collection is, it will need to be different from the last four. I'm not talking about radically changing my style or abandoning my voice, and I don't honestly believe any of us can do that in any organic, real way. I'm talking about growing as a writer and a thinker, stepping off into new territory, and simply continuing to learn. I never want to stop learning. It's how I know I'm alive.

JM: Thanks for such a great conversation.

Digging into the Heart of Writing

2011-08-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

For the past three days, I have been watching men in my driveway dig deeper and deeper into the earth. It has something to do with an underground power line that has been defunct for a better part of a year. The problem in getting the line fixed is that it’s buried below more than four feet of earth. An even greater obstacle is that there happened to be a heated driveway on top of that. Think of the heated driveway as an incredibly expensive, complicated crust placed on top of a pie. It’s summer and somehow easier to see a pie metaphor from June until September.

So the men have been excavating underneath the heated driveway, delicately, nearly tunneling their way out of the light and into the secret depths of the earth. Think of trying to locate a spicy whole clove in the center of a just set peach pie, by digging into the side of it, but making sure that you never disturb the perfect golden crust just centimeters above your spoon.

Writing can be just like this—the delicate searching for an ideal word, image or phrase just out of grasp. A blind reaching into the dark after something that we can only sense somewhere ahead of us. So often, for me writing is a stretch or leap into the unknown, a wrestling with an angel in the dark. Let me be clear that not all (or even the majority) of my poems are angels, fallen or otherwise. But it is rare that I ever see my opponent clearly.

Sometimes writing can be an act of excavation. Only after going deeper and deeper do I finally catch a glimpse of what I was digging for. In the case of the men outside, it was a snarl of black utility lines that looked so much like a clustering of black snakes, eager to slide out of reach of the shovel. There are times when I am so frustrated, dirty, and fed up with writing that I want to throw the shovel into the ditch and bury the whole project. Nevertheless, somehow, I always keep on digging, if haltingly toward my goals.

While at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, another poet asked me why I wrote poems, why not some other genre. The answer I gave him was immediate and without thought, “Poems allow me to access my inner life.” My certainty surprised me. Poetry, after a handful of years, has become the way in which I make sense of my inner and outer world. It is the eye through which I order my universe.

A poem usually begins as a question or conversation that I am having with myself. The words and images arise from that unmappable center I call the inner life. Others may call it the unconscious, the higher self, the muse or the soul.

It is the deep place where the sable snakes lie slumbering in the dark.

It is a single clove in a recipe that has scented your entire home.

That is where my writing, at its best, comes from and it takes a spade, a shovel, and a hell of a lot of sweat to get there.

Dream of the Unified Media: Jory Mickelson on The Cure's Disintegration

2011-07-29T09:36:00.000-07:00

Check out my mini-essay on music over at Charles Jensen's blog Kinema Poetics!

Dream of the Unified Media: Jory Mickelson on The Cure's Disintegration: "Coming Out & Coming Apart" Plainsong I can feel the heavy wash of synthesizers vibrating their way out from the scratchy..."

Writing Retreats: A Report from Port Townsend Writers' Conference and Beyond

2011-07-25T09:29:00.000-07:00

I returned home last night from the Port Townsend Writers' Conference. It was a great week of workshops, craft talks and readings. I spent six days in the workshop of the poet Carl Phillips who had many things to say about kinds of repetition and pattern in poetry. The drafts of poems I brought to class are better for his comments.

In my workshop, I met some great queer writers including Ian Sherman and Steven Rydman, although not many among the sixteen of us were LGBTQ.

I am grateful for places like the Port Townsend Writers' Conference for giving writers a place to meet one another, learn from a wide array of faculty, and generally providing a space for members of the writing tribe to geek out. Not everyone shares a writer's sensibilities.

For example, the day I returned home I attended a BBQ in Bellingham in which a gentleman recounted how an aggressive duck would take bread right out of his hand. I said, "Be careful, you are going to end up like Leda and her Swan." Blank stares ensued. After I offered an explanation, there may have been mumbling about "useless pieces of information." I am not saying that all writers need to know their Greek mythology, but the chances that someone else will get the reference will be much higher among those who write.

There were many highlights to this conference including the poet Dorianne Laux reading a hilarious poem she had written about Dolly Parton. She said, "If you are going to write about breasts, you may as well go for broke."

Also, hearing a sizzling reading by the poets Cate Marvin and Erin Belieu who are also the founders of VIDA: Woman in Literary Arts.

A writing retreat is a great place to be, but it doesn't guarantee that you will come away from it with a stack of new work, a book deal, or the solution to the obstacle that has been holding your manuscript back all these years. A writing retreat creates a space for you to write. The hard part is realizing that what you put into that space is exactly what you will get out it. There are many people to meet and talk to at writers' retreats. You could spend most of your time socializing (and I did spend a good deal of time doing just that). You could visit from one cluster of writers to the next and never put pen to paper. A writing retreat is not a magical solution to your writing problems.

But it does give you the one thing all writers complain about incessantly...time. Writing retreats and conferences give you time away from your job, your family, your school work and the distractions of life to focus on your writing. Most of us lead busy lives and are always trying to carve out a piece of the day to do something more. If nothing else, a writing retreat allows a busy person to have more than an hour a day in which to labor upon the page.

Take some time today to spend with your own work. What writing project has been collecting dust, is stashed in the back of a drawer, or languishing in a lonely computer file? Take a moment to take it out and look at whatever it is that needs your attention. No, really look at it. Go and get it.

Now schedule to spend some time with it this week, no excuses. Carve out some time to let yourself work. Let this be your own writing retreat, even if only for thirty minutes at a time.

Off to the Ocean

2011-07-15T18:31:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

I am headed off to the Port Townsend Writers' Conference all next week. I will be ~~slaving~~ working at the conference and also taking a workshop from the poet Carl Phillips. I am thrilled to take the class and extremely grateful for the folks at Centrum who asked me to come and work.

I attended my first Port Townsend Writers' Conference back in 2009 on a fellowship from Western Washington University. There I met many great writers and had more than my fair share of fun. I am also happy to report that the three poems that I drafted there have all made it into print. (Yeah, I know it has been two years.)

Take a moment and check out this exceedingly productive and magical place!

http://www.centrum.org/writing/writers-conference.html

Writing with Decay and Ruin

2011-07-06T13:02:00.000-07:00

For some time now, I have been hypnotized by ruin. I don't mean the moral ruin that I was always warned about in church, but the ruin that comes to everything as the result of time. None of us is safe from decay.

My first lesson in ruin came from the continual round of seasons in Montana. The biting, frigid winters and the sometimes brutal summer sun baked and broke open anything that was left outside. Wood weathered, paint peeled and the asphalt split and fissured. Every year hard freezes pushed up a new crop of rocks into our garden. The elements stripped and cracked the paint from the picket fence, turning the wood gray. Potholes and crevices gaped open all the roads in town from the freeze-thaw-freeze of spring.

Ruined library books swollen with summer rain. Rusted cars that I buried in the sand pile only to discover years later. The small African frog who didn't last long as a pet, reduced to a perfect tiny milk-white skeleton three months after I exhumed its grave.

Growing up in a rural environment taught me that I too would one day be reduced to so many brittle bones in earth.

Perhaps this is one reason that the poetry of Richard Hugo appeals to me so strongly. He wrote about a landscape in decline. Boom towns became bust towns in a matter of years. Hugo's poems speak not only of rural decay, but also of the slow decline of the inner life. Hope slips away like so much snow melt in July.

I have spent the past two 4th of July holidays in Butte, Montana, perhaps one of the greatest examples of urban decay in the west. Butte boasted a population over 100,000 people from more than 75 countries in 1910. Now only 34,00 remain. Butte, once the copper mining capital of the United States is more relic than the "richest hill on earth." Nearly one dozen mining headframes dot the landscape. Uptown Butte displays its former glory in brick, weathered wood and fading advertisements. It is still standing, but just.

Ruin calls on me to mourn. Decay resonates with some inner part of me that whispers, "All shall fall to time." I admit that I am melancholy by nature, but urban ruin also elevates my vision. My imagination rises to fill in the crumbling walls, empty windows and fades signs with new life.

I begin to realize that as so many others have faded from these places, I will as well, but perhaps some writer or artist in the future will also wonder about me, in the same spaces--where I called to the past and it answered back.

I'll Be Back Real Soon!

2011-06-27T19:14:00.000-07:00

This blog is officially on Summer Vacation! Check back after the 4th of July for more musings on the news, reviews and interviews!

James Franco, Assaracus and New Poems in Print!

2011-06-16T20:13:00.000-07:00

Do you know about Assaracus yet? If not, let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time there was a gay men's poetry magazine from New York City called Ganymede that printed some very good poetry by well known and unknown gay male poets. It's editor and sustainer, John Stahl passed away in April of 2010, leaving the magazine unfinished.

Bryan Borland, a gay poet from Little Rock, Arkansas decided to pick up the cause. He founded Sibling Rivalry Press, whose mission is to "to be a bad influence on otherwise good kids." Sibling Rivalry press publishes LGBTQ poets and also produces the quarterly Assaracus, which takes it's name from the sibling of Ganymede.

Why did I bring up James Franco?

Well, Issue 3 of Assaracus features a special section of poems by gay men inspired by James Franco. If you don't think that Mr. Franco has much crossover to queer culture, you haven't been paying attention. He played the lover of Sean Penn in the movie "Milk." He played a young Allen Ginsburg in "Howl." Mr. Franco also appeared, in drag, on the cover of Candy, the world's first trans fashion magazine. Also, at this very moment (as you read these words) he is making and starring in a film about the life of the queer poet Hart Crane.

I want to let you know about Assaracus, because it is a great print journal that deserves more attention. I also am telling you all of this because I have a poem about James Franco in the issue.

My poem "Learning Through Osmosis: Asleep at Columbia University" is a pecha kucha, a form championed by the fantastic poet Terrance Hayes in his book Lighthead. This form is taken from a Japanese style of presentation where a person speaks on twenty different images for twenty seconds each. My poem focuses on twenty things that Mr. Franco has done. Needless to say probably spent as much time researching the poem as I did writing it. My title come from a famous photo of Mr. Franco asleep in a class at Columbia University in NYC.

Go ahead and buy yourself a copy of Assaracus #3 and take a look at my poem. You will be supporting a great press, an emerging magazine and (of course) my poetry.

On Making Lists

2011-06-06T16:16:00.000-07:00

There is a statistic going around that the “average” American has read one or fewer books in the past year. Although I find this terrifying, I know there are a lot of us reading fanatics picking up the slack.

Near the first of January, instead of making a New Year’s resolution, my good friend posts a list of all the books she has read for the year. She makes note of books that she reread and a total page count for the year. I felt inspired by her reading list.

I tried to think back over the month of December about all the books I had read. I was certain I could recall each book. I then tried to think back a month further. That’s when I ran into trouble. I couldn’t remember every book I had read and I wasn’t keeping track. Perhaps it is part of entering into middle age and that my memory is no longer as good as it was. Maybe it is the fact that I am in an MFA program and I sometimes find myself reading more than a book a week. Whatever the reason, I thought it would be valuable to keep track of my reading habits.

From January until May, I have been careful to keep a list of the books I am reading. I started noting the genre to remind myself, because even after a month I found myself wondering if some were poetry or short stories or something else. This can be tricky as I tend to read a good deal of hybrid work or “compressed genres.”

What did I find out?

First, I found the majority of the books I read were poetry. This makes sense because I am an MFA candidate for poetry at the University of Idaho. I was surprised though, because I read 35 books of poems in five months. Since I love statistics, let me break it down further. This means I read 6 books a poems a month or 1.5 poetry books a week.

I also found I read on average 12 books or about 1,250 pages a month excluding magazines, single essays and the like.

One other trend was that I found I decompressed by reading genre fiction and so far, almost entirely by a single author. Tanya Huff was my go-to author for reading where I just wanted to “have fun.” (I read five of her books over five months.)

I don’t know if you want to start a reading list or journal of your own, but I find it very useful. And of course, I know that some of you are curious to see exactly what I have been reading. Here is one month from my own list:

April (total page count 1,194)

1. Versed by Rae Armantrout (poetry) 121 pages.

2. Letters to Wendy’s by Joe Wenderoth (prose poems) 300 pages.

3. Mortal Geography by Alexandra Teague (poetry) 88 pages.

4. Montana Tall Tales compiled by Georgia Nation Carter (fiction) 50 pages.

5. Reading & Writing with a Cat Called Sidney by Carol Stem (essays) 34 pages.

6. Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open by Diane Seuss (poetry) 66 pages.

7. Butcher Bird by Richard Kadrey (fiction) 257 pages.

8. Men in Groups by Aaron Smith (poetry) 23 pages.

9. We know what we are by Mary Hamilton (short shorts) 36 pages.

10. Fair Play by Tove Jansson (Fiction) 120 pages.

11. Dark Rides by Derek McCormack (Fiction) 99 pages.

An Interview with the Amazing Elizabeth J. Colen!

2011-05-22T10:20:00.000-07:00

You can check out my interview with the poet and fiction writer Elizabeth J. Colen in the Spring 2011 issue of Boxcar Poetry Review. Her work dazzles and invigorates the mind.

Check it out!

Stay Tuned

2011-05-20T20:18:00.001-07:00

I am settling into my digs on the coast for the summer and am putting the garden in. I will be back sometime next week with a new post. I promise I haven't forgotten about you.

In Which I Finally Talk About My Own Work

2011-05-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

Clearly this is not my own work. It belongs to Peanuts Comics.

I made a few ground rules for myself when I started this blog over two years ago. Contrary to other poetry blogs which I have seen (and greatly enjoyed) I decided not to post any of my own work on here. That decision is based on two things:

1) Many places will not publish poems that appear on the internet, even if it is a private blog.

2) I am a slow writer and an obsessive compulsive revisionist. To post my work, I would have to get it "just right" and that never happens.

All perfectionism and publication hunger aside, I am always less interested in talking about my own work as a poet than talking about someone else's work. I love talking about writing and poetry so long as it isn't my own. I don't know why this is, but unless I am speaking to another working poet, I assume that most people could care less about how something gets onto a page. I imagine my writing process to be painful to hear for nonwriters in the same way it is painful for me to listen to my friends talk about software engineering. Please stop. Oh god, please stop talking.

This isn't to say that I am not a self-promoter. I willingly admit that I tell you where you can find my poems or me reading my poems all the time. If we are friends on Facebook, you have probably been spammed by me saying "Check out my poems in X_LITERARY_REVIEW!" To be a working poet means to also be a poet who gets his work out there and lets people know where to find it.

So, graduate school is done for the academic year. All the papers are written. All of the poems are revised. Everything has been handed in. I am going to take a break this summer. I don't know exactly what that means yet, but I need a serious break from the breakneck pace of read, write, revise, repeat!

I decided that for the first part of my summer break, I would focus on five or six poems that I have written over the course of the past two years. Although they were written at different times and under different circumstances, I feel that there is something the connects them all. A nonfiction teacher here would call it one of my "core narratives." Simply put, I am saying something in these poems, but I am unsure of what. I want to investigate this vein more deeply.

I have picked out six or eight books centered around the genesis of these poems to help me along the way; they are a good mix of memoir, biography, fiction and poetry. With any luck, I should come out the other side of all of this with new material for the fall. But, I am expecting that like all writing plans, this too shall go terribly awry from my vision of it and "do its own thing."

So enough from me for now. I am headed back to the coast for the summer. I hope to read my poems in a few places as well. Stay tuned!

Read Your Heart Out: On Giving a Reading

2011-05-04T23:47:00.000-07:00

I had the fortunate experience of giving a poetry reading with my friend and fellow poet David K. Wheeler on Wednesday. He and I met in a poetry writing class at Western Washington University several years back and both worked for the same independent bookstore in Bellingham, although not at the same time.

Giving a reading (and royalty checks) are what us aspiring writers dream about. There you are, book in hand, reading your favorite passages to a standing room only audience. They hang on your every word. The audience laughs in all the right places. You get a standing ovation. The reading energizes you and inspires you to continue writing. You are doing it for the throngs of people who adore your work. Right?

Yes and no. Yes, you want to share your work with people for the sheer joy of it. You also want to sell books. Authors and bookstores hold author readings to advertise and sell a product. In today's market, you as a writer are also going to have to be your own press agent and PR person.

First, you have to find a place to read, which can involve paying money. Hopefully you will be reading at a bookstore who is selling your books and they give you a space for free. But some bookstores do charge authors to do readings. Even if you don't pay for it, you are at the mercy of the person who owns or manages the space. They may not return your calls or emails. The space may be double booked for the same night. It happens. More than you would think.

Now you have a venue in which to read. How do you get people to come? In the days before social media sites, it meant spending a great deal of time on the telephone. I would argue, that a good author will still spend large amount of time calling people in the area to either come to the reading or help spread the word. Facebook event pages and e-vites are great, but really how much of a draw to your event do they create? I don't have any statistics to back up my claim, but I think that these sites bring in far fewer people than we expect them too. Honestly, I get invited to five to seven events a week on Facebook. It is easy to be overwhelmed and click No. No. No. all the way down the screen. An e-mail doesn't have the force of commitment behind it. Do send e-mails, especially the day before the event, but don't rely on them as your only form of advertising.

Another way to spread the word is through posters. When Dave sent me the poster he created, I made copies on obnoxious goldenrod colored paper and hit the streets with thumb tacks and tape. I live in a town with a small downtown core. Since this was where the event was being held, I focussed my attention to putting up posters near where the event would be taking place. Putting up posters blindly won't net very good results. Have a plan for where you are going to put up posters. Have a reason for putting posters where you do, otherwise you are spending time and money (and deforesting America) without real cause. Make every thumbtack count.

One thing about putting up posters for an event that no one talks about is etiquette. Don't be rude.

If at all possible, don't cover up events for other people. Usually bulletin boards are festooned with paper like a porcupine in a Post-It note factory, but try and make an effort to be conscientious. If you cover up someone else's event, you may get an earful from someone, or worse, the venue where you are holding your event will get angry calls about trying to "ruin" someone else's event. It also happens more than you would think.

Another thing to do is to make an effort to take down the event posters that you put up. Your mother was right when she said, "Pick up after yourself." Ideally, no one else should have to suffer the stab of a thumbtack from taking down your poster or look at your your advertising in a coffee shop weeks and weeks after the reading has passed.

Don't forget about the newspaper and community event spots on the radio. People do indeed read the newspaper, especially in smaller towns. Getting a write up in the local paper or even a list in the "Today's Activities" corner catches people's attention.

Don't also be afraid to use the connections you have. If you are in University town, contact and poster the English department, just be sure to get the approval of the administrative personnel first. If you attend a church or social organization of some sort, let people know about your reading--but do it in an appropriate way. The weekly newsletter or bulletin is great, but make sure you don't hound people about an event. If you come on too strong, they may start to look the other way when they see you coming.

The most important thing to remember about holding an event is to be grateful. Only eight people came to your event? Fantastic! You only sold three books? Amazing! Treat every single person who comes to your event with warmth and gratitude. They may not purchase your book, but they will remember your smile and your name the next time they hear it. Sincere thank yous go a long way in creating fans.

Readings are hard work, but they are rewarding for both the writer and the audience if you take the time and effort to do them well!

Thank you to the Nuart Theater St. Mark's Episcopal Church for your continued support of me and my poems; and especially to David K. Wheeler who gave me the opportunity to be his opening act.

Dave's debut book of poetry Contingency Plans: Poems was published last year by T.S. Poetry Press and is currently a finalist for the Booksellers Choice Award.

All Sorts of New Work: Poems in Print

2011-04-26T13:46:00.000-07:00

I thought that I would take a few minutes and update where you can currently see my poems.

I have two poems, "Lyra" and "Hades as Farmhand" in Barnstorm (which you can read for free online).

My poem "Middle Burnt Fork, Good Friday" won the Academy of American Poets prize for the University of Idaho. You can read a great article about it from the Ravalli Republic (again online and for free) or reprinted on the University of Idaho's web site here.

If you still want more, four of my prose poems "Her Tattoo as a Book of Light," "Torch Song: She Didn't Start the Fire," "Portrait of a Faceless Victim," and "Sending You a Letter I Wrote While Drinking" appeared in Ghost Ocean Magazine #3 (which again, you can read online.)

My poem "Photo Booth" appeared on the blog Ain't Nothin' back in January as well.

Last but not least, I have an interview with Elizabeth J. Colen forthcoming on the site Boxcar Poetry Review, a poem "I Can't Remember All the Stories" appearing in Knockout #4, and a long obsessive poem about the actor James Franco "Learning Through Osmosis: Falling Asleep at Columbia University" forthcoming in Assaracus #3 this July.

It's been a great year for seeing my poems in print. I hope the trend continues!

A Review of "Men in Groups" by Aaron Smith

2011-04-18T00:42:00.000-07:00

Three years ago, I dreamt about a gay poet who lived in NYC. In the dream, someone told me that I had to read his book of amazing poems. It doesn’t seem farfetched for one gay poet to be dreaming about another. I didn’t get the name of the book in the dream, thought I did I remember the poet’s name, a very common one. Because I am a firm believer in synchronicity, I looked it up. I found Aaron Smith’s book Blue on Blue Ground and I’ve been a fan since.

I had the opportunity to meet Aaron at AWP in Washington D.C. this winter and hear him speak on a panel called Unembarrassed Poetry. Again, Mr. Smith was acting as some kind of doppelganger in my life because he was standing in for Richard Siken. His poems and thoughts did not disappoint.

At the bookfair, I stopped at the table for New Sins Press and was delighted to find a new chapbook by Mr. Smith called Men in Groups. Perhaps this is the long way around to get to a book review, but I think the story is almost as good as the book. Because the chapbook is, well I will say it, dreamy…

Mr. Smith opens the chapbook with the poem “Lucky” about how the speaker in the poem was lucky to only be laughed at by a group of boys in a locker room. The violence in this poem is implicit, lurking just below the surface. The speaker recites a litany of things done to other kids, but he is “Lucky they never did that.” (to him)

The violence is right up front in many of the other poems in this book from “Psalm (Queer)” to the title poem “Men in Groups” to “Make Him Think You Could Pull a Gun.” The focus of these poems is what happens when men come together in groups—straight or gay men –and the consequences of these gatherings.

Smith uses his characteristically deft humor and dark wit to deconstruct daily encounters with urban life. In the poem “Open Letter,” he uses the anaphora “boring” to create a monotonous incantation which comes back to slap the reader in the face at the end of the poem.

This short, but strong book of poems closes with “After All These Years You Know They Were Wrong About the Sadness of Men Who Love Men.” Perhaps I am a sucker for a touching ending. Smith, far from being sentimental or gushy manages to navigate the feeling of triumph that a gay man experiences when he finally finds a home among his chosen family. “…you want / to remember this. You’ve waited / your whole life for them to miss you.” And in a similar way, you will want to encounter Men in Groups, because you have been waiting to read something this good for quite a while.

Aaron Smith’s chapbook is available from Winged City Chapbooks an imprint of New Sins Press.

Against "A Room of One’s Own"

2011-04-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

I have great respect for the writings of Virginia Woolf and her stake in the feminist movement, but the title of her book sprang to mind when I started to think about the writing life. There are innumerable books that discuss the writer’s life, the long and lonely journey on the page, and ultimately the inner turmoil writers go through. One of my favorite is Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life by Bonnie Freedman.

Everyone knows that a guitar can sound good, but that it usually sounds its best when accompanied by drums, bass guitar and vocals. Musicians working in concert with one another are greater than the sum of their parts. (Sorry, I couldn’t pass that pun up.) Although one man may create music for each instrument, it requires several music makers joining to create a complete symphony. My analogy comparing music to writing is not a precise fit, but it will lead the way.

I want to address collaboration between writers. Every time a piece of writing is workshopped in a class or sent to an editor, collaboration is taking place. Let’s move beyond this though. Take the idea one step further…

Two July’s ago at the Port Townsend Writer’s Conference, I attended a class lead by author Sam Ligon, who envisioned a collaboration between prose writers and poets. The requirements were that each segment shouldn’t be over 200+ words. In addition, each new section must use a sentence from the previous one as its first line. The pieces layered prose and poetry on top of one another, pulling a line or phrase from somewhere within the preceding section. I was paired with the talented prose writer Elizabeth Thorpe and we completed two separate pieces. As writers, we created a piece of work that neither of us could have envisioned on our own.

In a successful piece, there is a distinct tension between the prose and poetry. Each section not only builds on what has come before, but also adds something new or turns the phrase in a new way. Sometimes a piece like this can tear itself apart when the authors have varied ideas or agendas. And as in all writing, sometimes a piece of writing fails for other reasons. It does not gel as it should. Any writer who has been putting pen to page or font to computer screen knows that not every word sees the light of day. We sometimes give birth to ugly babies.

There are other types of collaboration as well. Since September, the poet John Myers and I have been giving one another writing assignments. They range from the simple to the complex. Make an erasure poem from an online quiz. Write an anti-Betty White poem that features both a vessel of some kind and William Shatner in blank verse. Clearly, we are strange individuals. What these writing prompts have done is taken me out of my familiar tracks—my habitual ways of thinking and writing. Only about a third of the prompts have gone on to be successful poems. These constrictions placed on me by another person have caused me to stretch my writing muscles and rise to the occasion. The things that I learn in writing these exercises come to play in my “serious” work as well.

You can take this further. If you are a prose writer or poet, you can collaborate with another individual on single pieces. My friend John has worked on collaborative poems with others in open source Google documents. Each person can access a poem at any time or even write on it simultaneously—even if they live on the other side of the world. As I have said, not every piece is a successful work of art.

Collaboration takes the artist out of the locked box of his or her head. It broadens the familiar envisioning process of the piece. Put simply, it ups the ante. It is one thing to do work for yourself, but another entirely to work with another person in co-creation. I encourage all writers to try their hand at joining their words with another’s. Take the chance. Risk wrecking what’s working for you to discover an entirely new set of tools.

Most of all have fun!

A Small Photo Essay from Idaho

2011-04-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

This blog has been filled with words, words, words lately. I am happy to write every week, or get someone else to write every week, but it would also be nice to show off some of the great things I am seeing in Idaho. Let me take you with me on a mini-road trip through the lesser known parts of the Palouse.

Just past Palouse, WA on Hwy 27 there is a barn that I have watched for most of the year. This fall, the roof was swaybacked. This winter, the barn was covered by snow and the roof was drastically lower. I guess the weight of the snow got to be too much, because now the abandoned barn looks more like a galleon rising from the winter wheat fields.

I am probably going to write some ridiculous pastoral poem about this barn in the future. It reminds me a great deal of my poem "The Old Payette Barn" that I wrote while attending WWU. The fictional barn was taken down piece by piece and reconstructed in a city park I doubt that will happen with this one.

I think what saddens me the most about these barns is that they will never be built again, anywhere. No one I know of but the Amish (and perhaps the Hutterites) are constructing these kinds of barns. What I love is that each barn in the Palouse has unique features. Modern architecture appears homogenous to me.

One of my other favorite things about the Palouse is that it is dotted with incredible cemetaries. I have now been to cemetaries in Dusty, WA; Palouse, WA; Garfield, WA; Farmington, WA; and Moscow, Idaho. This hand comes from a tombstone outside of Farmington, WA.

The graves in this area are amazingly well preserved. The earliest headstone that I have found so far dates back to the 1840s.

The older tombstones fall into three distinct categories based on their symbology: Freemasons, Odd Fellows, and Woodmen of the World. (The heart in the hand represents the virtue of charity.) Before the Palouse was filled with rolling wheat fields, it was forested. Palouse had a particularly large collection of W.O.W. gravestones.

I even managed to find a gravemarker from a gentleman who fought in the War of 1812, during which the Brititish marched down from Canada and burned the White House to the ground. (I've never seen an American flag on a tombstone this old.)

Even modern markers can be unique as is the one below.

On the way back to Moscow, Idaho I stopped in Palouse to take a picture of the Palouse River which is flooding its banks. Apparently in 1996, the river flooded the entire town. Here is the water much higher than I saw it last week.

My favorite part of the trip was stopping at the local animal shelter. I have been thinking that a new kitten may fix all of my MFA program woes. Critical papers and poems you say? No, I am turning in my marmelade cat for a grade. At the shelter, this is what was also up for adoption. His name is Harvey. (Not really, but I appreciate that it just might happen in these parts.) Welcome to the Palouse, just south of the Inland Empire. Stay tuned for future reports of what a writing life can look like.

The Dark City: Noir Then and Now

2011-03-28T21:45:00.000-07:00

I don't know when noir happened to me. Perhaps I got my first stirrings from my paternal grandfather's insistence that I watch the early and eerie Universal Studios monster movies with him. The fog, the dark villages, the cursed man alone in his plight--these were the precursors for my love of the fatalistic and dangerous cities of 1940s and 1950s film.

These films seem to embody everything that I love about cinema. Although there are several subcategories within noir films, most of them contain several key elements: an ordinary man who's life takes a wrong turn through an immoral act or chance, a beautiful and often dangerous woman, the disparity between the desperation of the poor and the desperation of the wealthy, the crumbling barrier between "everyday life" and the underworld, and a bleak fatalism.

What isn't to love? Noir had a short lifespan, perhaps only ten years. Although there are earlier depictions, many would say noir started at the end of World War II and died as people moved to the suburbs around 1955. Television transformed noir into pulpy crime dramas. The dark city underwent the Big Sleep.

I didn't come to really appreciate noir until my thirties. (Yes, I am older than 29.) I began to enjoy the movies I grew up viewing on afternoon television when I read the books that had inspired them. Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, James M. Cain's The Postman Always Ring's Twice, and of course Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.

Any book that begins with:
"It was about eleven o'clock in the midmorning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blew clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars." has me for good.

As a poet, I wondered how I could incorporate the things that I loved about noir into my own writing. And then the dreams began...

In the year before I started graduate school, I began to have dreams with strange narratives that were akin to David Lynch films. Never able to recall entire story lines, images, emotions and words managed to stay with me throughout the day. I decided that I would try to use prose poems to capture the them. What followed were my "Carbonite Dream" series of prose poems. Some of them based on dreams and others on the world around me. You can some of them here and a few more over here.

Noir continues to fascinate me. I look forward to reading and watching the classics and modern twists on the genre. Two recent books have delighted me with their adaptation of classic noir themes.

The first is Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim urban fantasy novel. Modern day Los Angeles is the setting for the story in which the main character literally crawls out of hell to exact revenge. Hard boiled doesn't even begin to the wonderful dialogue Kadrey brings to the page.

The second book is Kris Saknussemm's Private Midnight. The book is darker and far more sexual than Kadrey's. It was a challenging and uncomfortable ride through what the flap describes as "a psychoerotic noir fairytale." I don't know if that is an accurate description. I argued with this book aloud. "Did that happen or not!" The ending satisfied me, but it was hard to get there.

Noir hasn't finished with us yet, and I for one am glad of it.

On Sound and Vision: David Wheeler as Guestblogger!

2011-03-21T12:34:00.000-07:00

David K Wheeler is the author of Contingency Plans: Poems, from TS Poetry Press, and the album There There. He writes for two web magazines: The High Calling and Burnside Writers Collective. His essays have been featured at The Morning News, as well as in The Pacific Northwest Reader, an essay collection from Harper/Delphinium.

On Sound and Vision

Closing their 2003 offering, One Bedroom, post-rock quartet the Sea and Cake covers one of few singles from the first of David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy albums, Low. All things considered, their version of “Sound & Vision” remains fairly true to the original. Such unabashed homage, I don’t often gravitate toward in a cover. If I wanted something so straightforward, I’d listen to the original. However, it is plain to see that the Sea and Cake is much indebted to Bowie and his Berlin collaborator, Brian Eno; half of the band’s sound is comprised of synthesizers and uncommon percussion. At the time of Low’s production, grounding an entire rock project in synthesizers was certainly not taken seriously, if not altogether unheard of. The sonic experimentation that resulted in not only the (eventually) critically acclaimed Low, but “Heroes” and Lodger as well, was a revolutionary move for any musician, particularly one so iconic.

I must have surprised a friend after reading a poem called “Sound & Vision,” as unabashed homage as the final track on One Bedroom.

“I don’t think I’d caught onto your Bowie obsession before,” this friend commented, clearly forgetting Halloween 2007, when I dressed as Ziggy Stardust, circa 1973, Aladdin Sane. (To my dismay, the Will Ferrell / Jon Heder romp Blades of Glory released the same year, so I spent most of that night mistaken for a figure skater.)

Let me set aside, for the moment, David Bowie’s severe cocaine addiction at the time, and Low’s permeated sense of despair and “depiction, possibly a glamorization, of the kind of speed psychosis,” as Charles Schaar Murray of NME (New Musical Express) is reported saying in Marc Spitz’s relentlessly fascinating biography of the man, simply called Bowie. “Sound & Vision,” to me, presents as crucially self-aware for an artist who managed to shift both the look and the sonic landscape of rock ’n roll throughout his forty-plus years making music. Centered on Side A of Low, dead-center in his catalog of 23 LP’s, “Sound & Vision,” in the meta-narrative of the Bowie myth, acts as the concept around which ever other piece orbits.

Such a simple question he poses, Don’t you wonder sometimes / about sound and vision? seems almost rhetorical, as though he were seated in a workshop, peculiar spectacles whirring and buzzing about himself, the tinkerer. I want to answer, as both my hearing and my sight aren’t exactly up to snuff. In the poem, I rock out my eardrums at electronica shows and lament my steadily declining vision, and eventually concede I don’t know “whom I might blame but / myself for / losing both.” It’s no speed psychosis, but if I’ve learned anything from the Thin White Duke, it’s nothing good about blow in the long run.

In one of the earliest vignettes of the Bowie mythology via rock journalist Marc Spitz, George Underwood, a childhood friend, socked then-fourteen-year-old David Jones a good one over a girl for whom they’d both fallen hard. That punch would be the first of many alterations to the iconic Bowie look. This one permanent. Underwood caught David right in the eye, forever leaving it unable to dilate or contract.

I’ve always wondered about that eye, what it is he sees. Spitz calls it “oracular”; I’m not inclined to argue. What I will say is Bowie proves the human capacity to sublimate, to transform flaws into magnificence, because, in the end, he is just one man, imperfect and tragic at times. Still, both his sound and his vision remain unparalleled, inspiring me to assess my own flaws a bit closer. So when I open my poem with, “Everything I could want to know / I learned from David Bowie,” in a sense, I am asking, myself mostly, a simple, almost rhetorical question: Don’t you wonder sometimes?

(P.S. If you want to see Dave's photo as Bowie, you will have to friend him on Facebook.)

A Forray into Seattle's Pilot Books

2011-03-13T22:29:00.000-07:00

I returned to Washington's coast and spent part of my rain-soaked Sunday at Pilot Books. The bookshop is a small retail, almost loft like space in Seattle's Capitol Hill district.

What separates Pilot Books from other bookshops is that it only sells books put out by small presses. True, you can purchase a Copper Canyon Press poetry book here, but CCP is still a small press despite its national reputation.

There will be none of the issues that Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore mentioned in her blog post about independent bookstores at Pilot. Better yet, Pilot isn't afraid of chapbooks, uncategorizeable small booklets and experimental, cross-genre writing. (Hybrid and cross-genre writing fast becoming my favorite to read.)

I had originally gone in to try and purchase Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's which is a collection of prose poems composed upon the fast-foot chain's comment cards. I so enjoyed Billeh Nickerson's McPoems, a series of poems all centered on working at another fast-food chain, I was hoping to find another literary take on food service. Pilot was sold out, but I was assured it was "a brilliant book" by Summer Robinson, the bookstore's founder. I plan on ordering it.

What I found instead was Kate Lebo's A Commonplace Book of Pie (2010, Iron Curtain Press) a chapbook about pie including recipes in the back. I am going to be testing the recipes when I return to Idaho. Ms. Lebo also happens to be the poetry editor for the lovely, handmade literary journal Filter.

I also found that each genre had a used section (shelf) and picked up a copy of Justin Taylor's More Perfect Depictions of Noise (2008, x-ing books). In addition to the brilliant yellow cover and the fact that the author's name is the same as my partner's, the poems were quite good. Justin Taylor also co-edits The Agricultural Reader, whose name keeps popping up in my life.

Finally, I found the exceptionally fun book Our Starland /Dear Canada Council by Emily Hurst (2008, Conundrum Press.) This book features two illustrated novellas back to back--literally. I can't wait to examine my purchases in greater detail.

You won't find John Grisham or Jodi Picoult or even Sherman Alexie on the shelves of this tiny bookshop, but you will find a range of brilliant, strange and undiscovered books that the big stores don't have shelf space for. Every time I visit Pilot, I have come away with something I have not heard of, but am thrilled to have discovered. Along with the avant-garde, you will also find some great authors whose work I have talked about on this blog: Elizabeth J. Colen, Jeremy Halinen, CA Conrad, Carol Guess and Eileen Myles to name a few.

The next time you are in Seattle or online and hungry for great writing, Pilot Books is where you will want to stop. Say hello to Summer Robinson and let her recommend a piece of writing you might not see anywhere else on the West Coast.

A Longish Interview with the Handsome Poet Stephen Mills

2011-03-03T18:42:00.000-08:00

Stephen S. Mills has an MFA from Florida State University. His poems have appeared in The Gay and Lesbian Review, PANK Literary Magazine, Velvet Mafia, The New York Quarterly, The Antioch Review, The Los Angeles Review, Knockout, Ganymede, Poetic Voices Without Borders 2, Assaracus, and others. He is also the winner of the 2008 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award. He currently lives in Orlando, FL with his partner and his dog. Website: http://joesjacket.blogspot.com/

Jory Mickelson: Your poetry is filled with pop culture references, characters and images. How did this start? Where did your obsession (is it fair to call it an obsession) with popular culture begin?

Stephen Mills: I've always loved movies, television, and celebrity culture. As a fairly young teen, I would spend hours reading Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone. I always made sure to watch the award shows and I would try to see all the movies nominated, which was challenging living in the middle of rural Indiana. I don't know if it was a complete obsession, because I did lots of other things and as a young kid my parents didn't let me watch tons of TV or rated R movies. As I got older and smarter (I guess), I started seeing pop culture in different ways and began to analyze it and think about the greater implications of what we watch and are surrounded by on a daily basis.

This interest in pop culture didn't enter my poetry until much later. The moment I pinpoint as the beginning was during my second year of graduate school at FSU. It was my turn to be workshopped and I didn't have a poem that I really wanted to take. The day of the workshop, I kept trying to come up with something. I had just recently watched Interview with the Vampire and I suddenly came up with this title "Making Love After Watching Interview with the Vampire." I thought it was kind of silly, but I went with it. I wrote up a draft of a poem that was about a gay couple and their sex life that used the film and Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. I took it to class and the reaction from my workshop was completely unexpected. People really liked the poem and they gave me some great feedback. I felt like I had touched on something useful and unique.

After a few weeks, I realized that maybe there was more to this poem and I came up with the idea of writing a whole series of poems using Brad Pitt films that would all be about a central gay couple. This was truly a breakthrough for me. I started to consider the power of using pop culture to examine the inter-workings of our lives and relationships.

The colliery to that is does being a gay man have something to with your love of popular culture?

As for being gay, I do think it plays an interesting role in how I view pop culture. Many gay people view TV, film, music, etc. differently because we are always searching for a little glimpse of ourselves. We often read pop culture more closely because we are looking for a hint of something homoerotic or a little suggestion that some character might be gay. You learn to read codes. For many gay people, especially those of us who grew up in very conservative places, TV and film were outlets for seeing the way others live. The first gay person I ever saw was in a movie or on TV. This is why many gay people are drawn to writing about pop culture. One of the biggest influences on my work is Frank O'Hara, who was one of the first poets to really write a lot about pop culture. He loved to use movies, celebrities, and even the local art scene of New York City. David Trinidad is another great example. He writes a lot about the Hollywood divas of the 50s and 60s. While many people can love pop culture and write about it, I do think my gay perspective changes how I view it and use it in my work.

Are you familiar with the poet Kenneth Fearing? He was hired by the government as a WPA poet in the early 1930s. He, as far as I know was one of the earliest modern poet to incorporate popular slang and even newspaper advertisements into his poems.

How did you come to poetry? Have you done other kinds of writing?

I'm not familiar with Kenneth Fearing, but he sounds interesting. I will check him out.

I've always wanted to be a writer even before I could fully write. As a really young kid, I would scrawl out these "stories" in old bank calendars my parents would give me to play with. The stories, of course, didn't make sense, but I would "read" them to my mother. In 3rd grade, we had to draw a picture of ourselves on the cover of Time Magazine and had to write a story about what got us on the cover. I made myself get on the cover for winning various Newbery Awards, which was the only literary award I knew about at the time because it is for children's literature. It is safe to say the desire and passion to write has always been in me, but I didn't always envision myself as a poet.

I spent much of my middle school and high school days writing novel length works and short stories. I wrote a poem here and there, but not much. My senior year of high school, I got a bit more into poetry after reading more and meeting a student teacher who encouraged me. My freshmen year of college I took my first ever creative writing course. It was a fiction and poetry workshop. When I turned in my final portfolio for that class, my professor, who became my mentor, told me I was a poet and I needed to know it "bone marrow deep." I took her advice and wisdom and devoted most of my writing time after that to poetry. I have written a handful of short stories since then and I also enjoy writing creative non-fiction or memoir pieces, but poetry is my home.

What keeps you coming back to poetry, instead of another genre?

For me poetry is the most freeing genre. Since I write mostly free verse, each new poem is a whole new adventure and I must find my way into it and figure out the form and shape of it. I also love the compression of poetry and how you can convey so much in a simple line or two. It is the challenge that keeps me coming back again and again.

I was first introduced to your work through a review of your poem “Against Our Better Judgment We Plan a Trip to Iran.” Steve Fellner reviewed it on his blog Pansy Poetics (http://pansypoetics.blogspot.com/2010/04/on-stephen-s-mills-poem-against-our.html). I was wondering if you could tell me more about how this poem came to be written.

First of all, I am very thankful to Jeremy Halinen who accepted and published this poem in Knockout last spring. I am also thankful to Steve for writing such a thoughtful piece about it. The poem actually came about from a picture that was in The Advocate in the summer of 2005. It was an image of two Iranian boys (they were both about 16) with bags over their heads and ropes around their necks. They were about to be hanged for sodomy charges. The image was so startling and terrifying that I couldn't stop staring at it. I cutout the image and saved it. Months later, maybe even a year, I came back to that image and wrote the poem "Iranian Boys Hanged for Sodomy, July 2005." It ended up winning the Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award in 2008 and was published in an anthology. After I wrote that poem, I kept thinking about the issues facing gay people in Iran and the helplessness one feels as an American. I felt there were more poems to write on the issue. This is what inspired the poem "Against Our Better Judgment We Plan a Trip to Iran."

Also, why do you feel that this poem got as much attention as it did?

It can be hard to determine what makes a poem stand out to people, especially when you wrote it yourself, but I think this poem has a rawness and honesty to it that you sometimes don't find in more politically charged works. The poem isn't preachy. It is angry and maybe even offensive to some. The speaker doesn't have all the answers and the ending begs more questions than solutions. It gets at that American desire to save others, but also at the selfishness and sometimes insensitivity we have as members of this society. I'm extremely happy that it got attention, because it is a great example of the work I do and the things I care most about in poetry. Plus it is an issue worth discussing and thinking about even if it is a painful one.

Let's talk a bit more about activism. What current issues or concerns to you have for the LGBTQ community right now? Do you think that poetry can "do something" in the face of those issues?

My biggest concern for the community is a lack of education. So many people out there don't know the history of the gay rights movement or gay history at all. Many also don't know the clear facts about the lack of rights we have as gay people in this country. Something very strange has happened with gay rights. It is almost the opposite of the civil rights movement. In the case of civil rights, the laws and rights often came before social acceptance of black people in society. Gay rights has moved in a different direction. Gay people are more socially accepted. We are on TV. We are in movies. We are politicians, teachers, police officers, etc. This doesn't mean things are perfect, but it is more widely accepted on a social level, yet we still haven't won many important equal rights. This has created an apathy and misunderstanding in a lot of people both gay and straight. I have educated people countless times about the fact that you can still be fired for being gay in 29 states in this country. People always look at me in shock and typically don't believe me until they look it up. I'm talking about well-educated and accepting people. We have somehow created a world where people can't see the complete injustice that they are faced with on a daily basis. This is very dangerous and allows for the right-wing movement in this country to gain even more power. The facts remain that we have a long road ahead of us.

As for poetry, I do think it can "do something." As a lover of literature, there have been countless poems, stories, and novels I've read that have completely changed me and my outlook on life. In my poetry, I attempt to shed light on many issues people are very uncomfortable with. By doing that, I know many will turn away from my work and not accept it or value it, but I also know there are people out there wanting and needing poems like mine. In many ways, I try to write the poems I wish I could have read as a younger man coming to terms with being gay.

I heard a recent statistic that of all the money that goes into funding the queer community, only about five percent of it is spent on LGBTQ arts. Is it important that queer people support queer artists? Is this a ghettoization of queer people, and is that dangerous or are we beyond the need to make distinctions gay/straight/lesbian writer or book? Is it just a form of marketing?

All arts need support, so I would say that it is vital that queer people support queer artists. That doesn't mean that you support people solely based on their queerness, but also on the quality of their work. I often feel like I'm in the minority on this issue, but I don't have many problems with the label of "gay poet." No matter what I write it is from my perspective and I am gay. I may not be writing about something gay, but it is coming from me. I don't think we are in a place in society to completely remove these labels. On a very practical level, it can really help people find your work when they are seeking out gay poets.

Having said that, I don't consider my work to be for a gay audience only. I think instead of feeling the need to remove labels and assimilate, we should be encouraging people to read outside of their box. The speaker in my poems is almost always coming from a gay perspective, but my poems touch on a range of issues, feelings, and themes that many can connect with and enjoy. I always it find it interesting when straight people seem to think they can't or shouldn't read gay work. I read straight people's work all the time and I learn from it, enjoy it, and am moved by it. I think of these labels more as facts. I am gay and I am a poet. These aren't going to change.

I like this. In a talk, Eileen Myles said that (and I am paraphrasing here) that as queer people we widen the range of human experience. We record an outsider's point of view from our work and that is one of the things that gives it great value, the ability to stretch the scope of possibility.

Who are some poets who have influenced and changed you or your work?

As I mentioned earlier, Frank O'Hara is a huge influence on me. He showed me a different way of approaching poetry. He wrote so much from his own experience. His poems are grounded in his life in New York with his friends, and yet they connect to much bigger themes and can really make you think. Richard Tayson is also a big influence on me. He is a contemporary poet and one of the first I read as a young man in college that really got at the inter-workings of a gay relationship. His poems made me realize how raw and direct my poems could be, but how they could also have a great beauty to them. Tony Hoagland is also an influence. I was encouraged to read him in grad school by my thesis advisor who thought I could learn from him. What is interesting about Hoagland is that we are both concerned with the personal in connection to the wider American culture, but he comes from a very different point-of-view, so our poems are similar, yet so different.

Who are you telling other folks to read?

I love to recommend books to people and I often do. Most people don't have trouble finding or reading older poets, but so many have no clue about contemporary poets and books. I read as much contemporary poetry as possible. I just finished Matthew Zapruder's newest book Come on All You Ghosts and it was amazing. I highly recommend it. I also always recommend David Kirby, Carl Philips, Denise Duhamel, and Kim Addonizio. I've recently fallen for Randall Mann as well. I could go on and on, because there are a lot of great poets and books out there.

I heard Matthew Zapruder read recently in Washington D.C. His reading and his work are fantastic. What are you currently working on?

I am currently sending out a new manuscript that I recently completed called He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices. I have my first book, which I co-wrote with Bryan Borland, coming out later this year. It is called The Hanky Code. I have new work in the winter issues of The Los Angeles Review, Mary: A Literary Quarterly, and New Mexico Poetry Review. I'm also always working on new poems.

You sound like a busy man. We saw Allison Books collapse in a sense, it no longer prints books--only does e-publishing. Print book sales are falling as ebooks are on the rise. Where do you think the publishing industry is headed right now?

These are all great questions and important ones to consider. Publishing is changing, but I am not fully convinced that the print book is on its way out. I personally don't own a e-reader and I don't like the idea of reading a book on an electronic device. If you look at most of these e-reading devices, they still don't offer many of the books I read or am interested in reading. They still cater mostly to very popular fiction and non-fiction, which means they don't cater much to the queer audience. It is hard to be a small press these days and some are turning to e-publishing, but there will still be a demand for actual books. Part of reading, for me, is the experience of holding a book in my hand. It is about the feel of it and the smell of it. Reading something on the screen just isn't the same. On the other hand, I do think that literary magazines can really gain some power and recognition from going online. My favorites still publish a print version, but have a very strong presence online.

Is reading still vital part of queer culture or are LGBTQ people no longer reading?

Reading is still vital and I believe still thriving in queer culture. It is often in books that we first discover glimpses of queer life and I think reading, for many, was a part of their coming out experience. There is a lot more diversity out there in books than perhaps any other entertainment medium. We have to help continue to produce work that some young boy or girl can discover and connect with and realize there are others out there just like them.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

I want to thank you for asking me to do this interview and for helping to continue the discussion about poetry and the gay arts scene. Since leaving grad school, I have found a real sense of community in connecting with other gay poets through my blog, Facebook, and Twitter. While I have my technological reservations at times, I’ve greatly benefited from everyone I’ve met, so I encourage people to reach out to those poets they’ve read and enjoyed. There’s nothing like getting a quick note from someone who actually read a poem of yours and was moved by it.

Thanks again for doing this interview, it has been great!

Book Notes on Pop-Up Book of Death by Chad Helder

2011-02-22T13:48:00.000-08:00

Paperback, 124 pages
From Queer Mojo (a Rebel Satori Imprint)
December 2010
ISBN: 9781608640263

I have gotten to know Chad Helder in the past year through an interview and correspondence. He was a guest blogger back in October as well. If you have missed either of these or want to know more you can check them out here:

Interview: http://jorymickelson.blogspot.com/2009/10/oh-horror-interview-with-poet-chad.html

Guest Spot: http://jorymickelson.blogspot.com/2010/10/something-spooky-from-literary-magpie.html

One thing becomes readily apparent when reading Helder's poems; there aren't a lot of people writing about the topics he covers. Nightmares, horror films, repression, and suspense are the stock and trade of the Pop-Up Book of Death. "Fear of Spiders," "Fishtank Wolfman," and "My Paperboy is a Vampire" are just some of the poems you will find within the shadowy covers of this book. Although the tone of some of these poems are humorous, there is a great deal at stake. Helder is earnest in the best sense of the word "something of value given by one person to another to bind a contract." And make no mistake, reading a book of poems is a kind of contract between the author and the audience.

The first seven poems in the book are exactly what the title promises, an imagined pop-up book. My favorite things are the interactive portions in which the poem says "Pull the tab:" and then describes what actions follow. These poems also have "A fun activity:" to try, such as "Bury a friend in the fetal position." They reveal not only the range of imagination that Helder possesses and his concision with imagery, but also the way in which he uses humor to talk about dark things.

I was surprised by the number of poems involving dogs in this book. I have to admit that I have a grudge against dog poems. Billy Collins and Mark Doty write much good work, but they are perhaps the greatest sinners in regard to writing about man's best friend. Although Helder is sentimental about his dog, some of his poems surprise and even seem to violate the dog-poem conventions. In "Ghost," for example, the speaker's dog comes back to him from the dead. In "A Boy and His Dog," the speaker dresses up in a dog costume. The dog becomes something else, "Her image, her symbol, the idea of the white dog / filters my secret."

The secret is revealed in the poem "Instead" in which Helder comes into his stride. One of the longer poems in the book, "Instead" acts as a map for how to read many of the others. The idea of sexuality and monstrosity blur in many of the poems (as it often does in horror movies), yet "Instead" tells about an friendship ruined by budding sexuality in plain terms. It opens with the lines "I wanted to be your best friend in the fifth grade, / your best friend and more." Later the poem continues:

But something mysterious
from beneath
began to gain
definition and momentum,
as threatening as
a whale breach, so I pushed it down,
and it sounded into the depth again,

The boy sublimates these feelings by getting a puppy because "a dog is much safer than a boy." I have yet to find coming of age poem, as a gay man, the resonates with me more than this one.

A little past half way through Pop-Up Book of Death are three poems that stand out for their change in placement on the page and imagery. "Undertow," "The Rapids and the Raft," and "Babel" appear to be the shuddering undead heart of this collection. The language of these three poems is more lyric and abstract. The narrative isn't given neatly, but is scattered and broken. I was so curious that I had to email Helder and ask about them. As it turns out these three poems used to be part of a single "very long poem." They stand alone just fine, but their likeness in tone to one another is unmistakable.

There is something in this book for most readers. The horror fan will finally find poetry that speaks to him or her. A casual reader will be disarmed and drawn in by the use of humor. Queer readers will find new representations of themselves. In short, Pop-Up Book of Death is entertaining and uncomfortable at the same time. It will stay with you just as long as your reoccurring dream about the man behind your bedroom door with the knife.

Happy St. Valentine's Day from Literary Magpie

2011-02-14T10:59:00.000-08:00

I hope every one of you who read this blog know that Literary Magpie loves you! Here is a valentine of distracted tabbey cats and a song by one of my favorite vocalists from the 1930's and 1940's.

Literary Magpie Celebrates 100 Posts and Much Much More!

2011-02-09T14:40:00.000-08:00

This is a good road marker for Literary Magpie, one hundred posts. Although one hundred is an arbitrary number, it does mark a continued effort to blog. This thing started on July 30, 2009. An interview with the author Carol Guess went up and the rest is history.

I primarily intended this blog to showcase interviews with queer authors and book reviews, but as time went on it came to include news, guest bloggers and a lot of personal commentary. One thing that I have not done is showcase my own poems directly. This will be the case as long as the blog continues.

Things have been moving quickly in the past few weeks. I attended the AWP conference in Washington D.C. which allowed me to see the Hide/Seek portraiture show at the National Portrait Gallery. The show gave me an incredible sense of weight and loss. There is so much art and evidence that has been lost over the years. The visual documentation of queer life is often ephemeral at best. I was extremely grateful to have seen pieces from the late 1800's onward gathered in one place.

That said, I was disappointed that the video piece "A Fire in My Belly" by David Wojnarowicz had not been put back on display. You can view it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM_80zif-5w&feature=related

Included in the show was a video from 1971 called "Pink Narcissus," which everyone I spoke to about it had seen. How was I not aware of this video's existence? I watched about half of the video while at the Portrait Gallery. It has inspired me to begin working on a new project in addition to my own poems and Literary Magpie. I will keep you posted. If you want a sugary, glittery taste of uber-gay goodness, check out this: NSFW

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhuOGAGmXY0

Coming up in the near future are some exciting new authors I "discovered" at AWP, some queer literary magazines that you will want to read and support and more interviews with LGBTQ authors, editors and publishers.

Here is to 100 more posts and especially to YOU for all of your support! Keep reading!!!!

Guest Blogger: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

2011-02-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

I used to think that independent bookstores supported independent authors, and independent presses, but now I’m not so sure. So many independent bookstores have become little more than showplaces for the NPR circuit, endlessly parading the same authors on their front tables, or if not the same authors then the newest authors to win the same awards and maybe even come from the same schools or the same schools of thought. These are the wrong independent bookstores, the ones I’ll still support rather than shopping at Borders or Amazon, but the ones that long ago ceased to think independently.

Don’t get me wrong -- there are plenty of amazing bookstores left, or at least a few scattered here and there -- the bookstores that actually do the job of building community on radical ideas, challenging norms of style and substance, exposing their patrons to new ways of thinking, showcasing books that most people haven’t heard of, but need to. But these bookstores are definitely in the minority, and rarely gain the kind of acclaim that the big independents wield, the tastemakers, the ones where the prestigious authors read, in between their NPR appearances.

I might as well add that the snooty independent bookstores don’t tend to carry my books -- even, sometimes, the stores where I read! To tell you the truth, sometimes it takes me a while even to ask, it’s too depressing when they look at you in that blank pompous way, but hello -- now I live in Santa Fe, these stores need to order my books, right? So, at the larger independent I found myself mentioning that I’m an author who recently moved here, and I’d love it if they’d carry my books. The person working there said let me give you our consignment brochure. I said what about ordering them without consignment? He said that’s the only way we do it.

So I took the consignment brochure home, and the first thing I noticed was that it’s a program for self-published and print-on-demand titles. None of my books are self-published or print-on-demand, so I’m wondering what it was about me that made the employee decide, without asking, that I wasn’t “legitimate” enough to be another kind of author. Was I too close to his age, or too much of a freak? Too young in appearance to be a “real” author, or too queer? Not that there’s anything illegitimate or fake about self-published or print-on-demand titles -- the more, the better! But, the truth of the matter is that my books are put out by the exact publishers that independent bookstores were started to support.

Anyway, I did read that the consignment program gives you 60% of cover price, instead of the usual 7.5% that you would get from a publisher, so that sounded all right. Until I noticed that they make you pay $25 for six months, in order to shelve four books. $25 doesn’t sound like that much, except that they might not sell a single copy. And, even if they do sell all four copies -- let’s say your book sells for $15, so you get $9 per copy, but then that really means you only make $11. Does that sound fair?

It gets worse. For $100, they will feature you in their email newsletter, and allow people to order your book online from the bookstore’s website. That’s like giving them $100 for nothing. I even signed up for their email newsletter over a month ago, and I haven’t received it once! But, here’s the best part: for $200, they will arrange a reading in the store with two or three other local authors, space permitting. That means that the big independent bookstore in town is charging self-published and print-on-demand authors up to $800 for a reading. And, presumably making more money off you when people come to your event and buy things! They create all these scams to pretend that they’re supporting local authors. But, they only support local authors who pay them more than the authors will probably ever receive. This is what independent bookstores have become.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (www.mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is most recently the author of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights 2008).

Stay Tuned: Coming Up Guest Blogger Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore!

2011-01-29T11:36:00.000-08:00

She will tell you exactly what's on her mind.

Upholding a Literary Tradition for the Third Year in a Row: Postcard Poems

2011-01-23T16:20:00.000-08:00

For the past two years I hand sketched postcards for that most dreaded of holidays: St. Valentine's Day. I think I am one of the few people who insist on keeping the S-A-I-N-T on the holiday. I don't insist for religious reasons, more for tradition. I am perfectly aware that the story of St. Valentine was most likely conflated with some horrible then contemporary bodice-ripping tale, but the Church changed the names and then... A saint has nothing to do with our modern greeting card and candy driven wallow in pink and red excess. Do Americans do anything but excess? Holidays, War, Debt.

Enough imperialistic woe for a moment. I started two years ago by hand drawing and coloring post cards for my friends. I loved getting valentines in elementary. We make "mailboxes" out of white paper bakery bags and adorned them with our names and a myriad of misshapen construction paper hearts. It was the one time of year that a young gay boy like me could put pink on something and not be beaten up for it. I wanted to recapture that feeling from childhood, not the secret pink feeling, but the other feeling, the valentine card adrenaline rush. Each postcard had a poem on the back and was sent in the mail to the people who had signed up to participate.

According to my LiveJournal, I sent out 41 valentines in 2009 and that number jumped to 60 in 2010. I decided to set a goal of 100 this year. I will mail out 100 and attempt to hand out the rest for the locals who want them. I invited 300 people on Facebook, but if I sent that many out by post it would cost me nearly $100 in postage. I love you all, but not that much. So be one of the first 100 to sign up.

This year, I sketched six designs and I am very happy with four of them. Three are nature themed and three are man-made objects. I won't say more because I don't want to ruin the surprise.

I only write one poem per year for this event. I stole the idea from the poet Ted Kooser who put 26 or so of his poems together in a book. He said that he had to stop sending the valentines out to beautiful women because of postage costs. I send mine to boys and girls and genders in between. St. Valentine's Day is the one time of year I can send my straight crushes valentines and they thank me for it.

This holiday has gotten a bad rap. If you are single (like I have been on this holiday) you can still get a card. I think this is a day to remember those we love regardless if that love is of a romantic nature or not. I have suffered with other veterans of this holiday (having been dumped twice on or in near proximity to the big day). St. Valentine's Day, I reclaim you for the forces of good cheer!

Here is to wild third-grade enthusiasm, mad non-kissing crushes, and to how I can ensure that some people in America who won't read a poem on their own will read one poem this year!

Correspondence and Post in a Digital World

2011-01-16T14:10:00.000-08:00

What good is a letter sent by snail mail these days? Don’t get me wrong, most of us appreciate hand written letters. They are such an unexpected pleasure to receive in an age of tweets, text messages and e-mail. It takes time to put pen paper, label an envelope and hunt for stamps. It’s much easier to post “Have a Great Birthday!!!” on someone’s Facebook wall cross one more thing off the To-Do list.

A letter has an aesthetic pleasure for certain, but I would say it weighs even heavier than pleasure. We know a great deal of what we know about earlier writers and poets from their letters. Where would our conceptions of the spare writing Elizabeth Bishop be without her correspondence? I could never imagine her having a torrid love affair in South America from her gem-like poems.

The letters of John Keats is where we poets get the idea of negative capability (the poet’s capacity for accepting uncertainty and the unresolved.) He didn’t lecture on it. Keats wrote letters filled with his ideas about poetry. Letters to a Young Poet, a correspondence of ten letters between Rainer Maria Rilke and an aspiring writer have informed other aspiring poets for nearly a century.

In the “old days” letter writing was the main means of communication between artists about their lives and their craft. In today’s digital age, with the impermanence of e-mail, I wonder what records writers will leave for history. I don’t know about you, but I don’t save most email or print it out for posterity the way I bundle letters together in a box. They simply disappear back into the internet’s invisible sea.

This fall my ex boyfriend sent me letters that I wrote to him twelve years ago while he was in Spain. He thoughtfully saved my correspondence long after the relationship ended. The box I received contained 70-80 cards and letters totaling almost 250 hand-written pages. I was twenty-two and in love.

I was writing a memoir piece about this same period in my life. My memories were supported, amended, edited and contradicted by what the letters contained. From September of 1998 to June of 1999 (after reading the letters) I have a very good idea of who I was and what was happening in my life. My memory failed to illuminate so many people, situations and experiences that would have been lost without this correspondence.

Letters continue to have value in our age of rocketing technology. They remain a physical artifact when so much of our words are becoming digital ephemera. This post isn’t to encourage or chide you to turn back the clock and being writing letters again (yes it is), but to highlight what I have learned from firsthand experience. I will continue to write my friends few and far between who write me back. I want to know about myself someday far in the future and I know my memory is a hazy lens at best.

It's the First Week of Spring Semester and So I Give You "Spring" in January

2011-01-09T12:52:00.000-08:00

I am off to a busy week, so please stand by. Next week I have an amazing guest blogger, so sit tight and enjoy the photographs. They were all taken from my porch in Bellingham this afternoon.

New Year means New Poetry in New Journals!

2011-01-02T13:25:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to announce that four of my poems in the "Carbonite Dream Series" are now in Issue #3 of Ghost Ocean Magazine.

Read the whole issue for free online at: http://www.ghostoceanmagazine.com/

Click on "Current Issue" and then you will see my name under poetry.

I am doubly pleased to see that Kathleen Rooney, one of the co-founders of Rose Metal Press also has some work in this issue. I first spoke to Kathleen when Rose Metal Press published Carol Guess's book Tinderbox Lawn back in 2008. As a writer, it is nice to see your own work next to those other writers that you admire.

Take a moment and stop by to read the poems. They are inspired by my love of noir, dream sequences and that every murky form the prose poem.

Reading in the Gap: High Culture vs. Low Culture, Indie Music and CornNuts

2010-12-27T08:00:00.000-08:00

The longer I am in my MFA program, the more I notice a distinction between what my classmates and I are reading and what members of my extended family are reading. While I was finishing Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and Zak Smith’s memoir We Did Porn, my relatives finished the third book in the Twilight series and worked through Work Song by Ivan Doig. Admittedly, I was reading for a contemporary memoir class, but these are books similar to what other MFA students would be recommending.

To a lesser degree, I noticed this working at an independent bookstore. We had an Indie Next bestseller wall that featured the top ten fiction and nonfiction books in hardcover or paperback. The books shuffled their order each week, but it often reflected what was selling with the major publishing houses as well. In short, this wall was our bread and butter as a bookstore. “Steig Larson? Let me take you to the bestseller wall.” Many of the people who worked at the bookstore read and enjoyed these books, but they also loved other ones; books that didn’t make anyone’s bestseller list. We hand sold our favorite books to one customer at a time. “Many people are reading Tom Clancy, but let me tell you about the best legal mystery novel written in ten years…”

Is there a gap between what us “literary folk” and the common people are reading? Yes. A recent article in Slate.com addresses this divide at length. http://www.slate.com/id/2275733/ The headline asks “Which One Will Last?” I don’t think that the divide is so extreme. The world of literature won’t end up as either a Costco table or an experimental genre anthology. Journalism loves the term ‘culture war’ with or without an election happening.

My brother told me a joke this week, “How many indies does it take to screw in a light bulb?” The answer? “You probably haven’t heard of it. It’s an obscure number.” At times, the world of literature and academia can feel like that.

For Christmas, I got The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time by David Ulin. Clearly, someone who values books and literature is the intended audience. This essay probably won’t find a home in the home of those who own all of Tom Clancy’s novels in paperback. Ulin is preaching to the choir. I could give this book as a gift to my family and friends, but I wouldn’t expect most of them to read it, let alone have it change their reading habits.

We all know where a well-meaning gift book we have no interest in ends up.

I am a poet, but I don’t just read poetry. The books that kept me reading during my middle school years were epic fantasy novels. The books I read in-between my “important books” are urban fantasy, noir thrillers and X-Men graphic novels. I am reading in the gap between the next bestseller and a discourse on the modality of time in Shakespeare’s plays. I want to go to a poetry reading where there are bowls of CornNuts served with the glasses of cheap red wine.

I don’t know where the future of literature is headed, but I hope it continues to remain diverse and offer something for every reader.

Guest Blogger: Poet, Artist and Mad Biolgist John Myers

2010-12-19T11:35:00.000-08:00

John Myers is a poet and developmental biologist who lives in Missoula, Montana. His manuscript, Cider Kit, was a finalist in Omnidawn’s 2010 Book Prize. He blogs at http://www.ineffectualeffigy.blogspot.com/

Writing is like collage, for me, and I work in both media. Writing is about recombination and surprise for me, and, because I have a background in science, experiment. What happens if I move this line down here, this bandage of wind into the hat. I think about wolverines when I write, of chased brass and sleet. But my favorite form of creativity is collaboration, whether it be visual art, conversation, or writing. If I were to tell you this poem is governed by three main rules, what would it be? Which operations could someone follow, not knowing this poem, and come to a similar stance with repect to language? I like to think. I like to write.

I grew up in Pennsylvania, went to college in Ohio, at Oberlin, and finally moved west three years ago to attend graduate school at the University of Montana. My job now is as a habilitation aid in a group home for persons with developmental disabilities.

I'm gay and I'm an artist, and what does that mean? I don’t think it’s much different than anyone else I know, because I believe everyone is creative. How do I embrace that I like to build it and what happens after I've built it. The joy is in the making and in the attending for me and this morning in Missoula it's snowed. The trees are covered and my car is a diamond patent pending. My task today is to cobble together a collage or a show. So I look up weird party favors on google images. My process likes to be open to chance and I love new ways of letting chance in. This is one reason why I love to collaborate. I collaborate with poets locally one on one and further away using gchat or googledocs. Maybe this blog post sounds like I work for Apple, how much I mention their products. I find pleasurable anything that allows greater expression. I enjoy solitude and the large spruce outside my window here.

Seemingly so in the air, I didn't start writing until after I graduated from college. I began writing as an experiment and because I like it, I still do. I was worked in a developmental biology lab at Case Western Reserve University and studied poetry with Sarah Gridley, a radically kind and radically intelligent poet who encouraged me to apply to MFA programs.

My poems compass my affections, the way my collages are nothing like my sense of sight. Visual art is something that comes to my like a magnet comes to metal. The materials are there for me and I use them. I hope language thinks of me that way. The atlas, I'm told, is compliments of you, and, I agree, is adorable, not that I'm putting it up on my wall or anything, rest assured. My favorite? More than a hand but less than a fever. An attitude in language is like a weal or cleavage, both of which mean two different things that contradict one another but one is left feeling satisfied and true.

Some of my favorites are Elizabeth Bishop and Cesar Vallejo.

Should I Stay or Should I Go? The Berlin Wall and Mixed Metaphors

2010-12-13T17:51:00.000-08:00

Let me start out by saying that my situation is nothing like the division of Germany after WWII. I have not been separated from the rest of my city, country or had my freedoms restricted by a totalitarian regime. But the metaphor of wall may work.

Some of you know that I have spent the past eight years living in the tippy-top of western Washington in the city of Bellingham. It is hard to get much more northerly without bumping into the Pacific Ocean or Canada. The year after I graduated from WWU I grew a little antsy. I let myself dream about living somewhere else. I also applied to graduate MFA programs, which allowed me to dream a little more concretely. I took the Edward Abbey approach to choosing my program: "Nothing east of the Mississippi."

So time passed and I heard back from the schools. The University of Idaho and I began courting and that is where I ended up. Moscow, Idaho. Population roughly 24,000 hardy souls. Incorporated as a city in 1887 and sitting at 2,579 feet above sea level, Moscow is where I have a temporary address. However, I am not a resident of the state of Idaho. Now you may be asking yourself, "Why is he telling me all of this?"

Allow me one more digression. When I moved to Bellingham eight years ago from Missoula, MT, I never thought I would get over calling Montana's "garden city" my home. Around year six, I'd been away long enough (most of my friends had moved and things had changed ) that Missoula didn't feel like the place I came from anymore. But for some reason, Bellingham didn't sit quite right as my home either.

In the four months that I have lived part-time in Idaho, I am starting to remember all the things I loved about Western living that I had forgotten about: friendly people, short lines, little traffic and an abundance of space to breathe in. Coming back to Bellingham now feels cramped, busy, noisy and more than a little grubby. But Idaho isn't my home either. I catch myself saying of both cities as "I am headed home to..."

So I am a drifter. I am a city divided. There is no "center" to my sense of geography. I don't know where I will be headed to once I finish up my graduate program in Idaho, but I hope it is to a place that sings to me and calls me to call it home.

While in Bellingham, all I did was write about Montana. Now that I am in Idaho, my writing has become jumbled and confused. I am investigating dreams, the imagination and popular culture. The landscape in my work is largely internal. Perhaps when things settle down, I can start to write about Bellingham and the good and bad things found there.

I have a place to hang my hat. What I need now is a place that feels like home. Center. Connection.

Why are You Still Wasting Your Time with This?

2010-12-05T15:46:00.000-08:00

Second year MFA candidates read from their work at what people at the University of Idaho call a “symposium.” It is a chance for writers to showcase their work and share just what they are up to in their writing lives. After reading, students are asked questions about the pieces. There is also a potluck style meal and drinking.

Last night three students read from their work. Mary Morgan read her nonfiction essay inspired by Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.” She composed fifty-two notes attempting to define or distinguish was made an essay, well an essay.

In the piece, I observed that she set up a very clear dichotomy between herself as a writer and essayist and the people she interacted with. People in bars, mutual partygoers, clerks in bookstores and even her husband “didn’t get it.” The essay appeared to be an attempt to answer the question they all asked her: well what exactly are you writing?

I asked Morgan about this dichotomy. Whom is the essay intended for? Why is there such a divide in the piece? Is your audience the same people who give you perplexed looks when you say you write creative nonfiction?

As a poet and writer myself, I know that all writers consider their audience. This concern extends beyond “How do I market this?” or “Who is likely to publish this?” The real question is who is going to read this and ultimately, “Will my work last beyond myself?”

Being a writer and explaining what you do can be mildly frustrating on the best of days. There is a sinking feeling in my heart much of the time that the nonwriter will “never really get” what I am up to. Even close to home. My partner isn’t a writer. He doesn’t read much beyond magazines, the newspaper and things from the internet. The statistic that one in four Americans didn’t read a book has come home to roost on the pillow next to me. (I am actually outnumbered in my home because the cat did not read a book last year either.)

Sometimes we fight about reading and writing. He has told me, “Your blogging is like me entering contests on the computer.” He has also said, “Writing is good for you, everyone needs a hobby.” What he fails to see and I often fail to explain in a nonhysterical manner is that my blog has something to do with me being a professional writer and that my hobby is more something far more serious.

I don’t know how to tell my partner that writing is in my hardwiring.

I cannot illustrate my obsession, my NEED to put words on a page and rearrange them to him in a clear fashion. He landscapes, but he does not get angry if he is not able to put a bulb in the ground. He enjoys watching action films, but he won’t feel as though there is a bomb going off in his chest if he doesn’t see a car chase once a week.

What I write is an extension of who I am. What I write and revise is an act, however clumsy, of creation. So I ask you this week, why do you write? Whom are you writing for and how do you explain it to others?

And for you nonwriters, I also saw some quail today in the snow.

Guest Blogger author 'Nathan Burgoine shares about Queer Youth and the Arts

2010-11-24T15:45:00.000-08:00

‘Nathan Burgoine is an ex-pat Brit living in Ottawa, Canada with his husband. His works appear in FOOL FOR LOVE (Cleis Press), edited by R.D. Cochrane and Timothy J. Lambert; I LIKE IT LIKE THAT (Arsenal Pulp Press), edited by Lawrence Schimel and Richard Labonte; 5×5 Literary Magazine; and I DO TWO (MLR Press) edited by Kris Jacen. He has two more upcoming short stories appearing in BLOOD SACRAMENTS (Bold Stroke Books), edited by Todd Gregory; and TENTED (Lethe Press), edited by Jerry Wheeler.

In today’s blog, the role of Jory M. Mickelson will be played by ‘Nathan Burgoine.

You might be wondering “What’s with the apostrophe?” I get that a lot.

The answer is my grade eleven English teacher. She was the first English teacher to really catch my attention and introduce me to new authors and genres. In those days I was still using my full first name but when I decided to drop the first two letters – that’s a clue – I put the apostrophe where it belonged, mostly as an homage to the woman who had opened my eyes to the joy of language. I think she’d appreciate it.

She was also the teacher who handed me my first gay character. She loaned students books from her personal library, and recommended titles she thought we’d like. She had an uncanny sense of what we’d enjoy. I’m not entirely sure she intended it to be the event that it was and I’m a little embarrassed to say I can’t recall the title or author of the book. What mattered, however, was that there was a capable and strong male character who happened to be gay. He was a marine, actually, if my memory serves. He helped a woman save a child from some nefarious evil plot – and did so while being gay.

I was terrified to answer any questions about the book when I gave it back to her. I don’t recall what I said when she asked me if I liked it. It was a defining moment for me as a gay kid. Here was someone like me represented in a fictional world for the first time.

It seems like such a small thing now, but the impact was incredible back then. That I ended up having my first boy kiss later that year was in no small part built on that tiny shred of confidence I’d gained from reading that book.

With gay suicide awareness making headlines recently, I saw something on Facebook that illustrated this point far stronger than my own experience. Take a second and watch this youtube submission to the “It Gets Better Project” – though I should warn you to keep a handkerchief handy. I’ll wait for you to come back after.

[Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/user/JonathanSmith86#p/a/u/0/a3J9ge_vyFk ]

See? I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Michael Thomas Ford at the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans, and I can only imagine the impact of this video on him. Books have power – I daresay if you’re reading this you’re likely in agreement with me – and sometimes I think we forget how much good we might do with them.

We’re represented out there a lot more than we were. There were no Kurt Hummels on television when I was young. I cannot believe some of the amazing things I hear from people about high school gay-straight alliances. It’s fantastic. It’s also urban. Those far flung rural areas like where I first encountered that gay character don’t have high speed internet access. They don’t have youtube.

But they usually have a library.

I wonder if there’s not a way to get those books and magazines and poems into the hands of more of those young people who need them – and I don’t think I’m overstating by using “need.” I think you need to see yourself represented in the world before you will believe you can – or should – be a part of it.

Those young adult books out there with gay characters – which I never found until after I was working in books and past my own young adult days – need to be where they were intended to be: in the hands of young adults. Teens and tweens are reading more than ever before. Teen fiction is one of the hottest markets out there right now – which means publishers are paying attention to it – and when I find a title that illustrates our existence in a positive light I’ll often take a moment and track down the author and thank them.

There are some fabulous young adult books out there, and more on the way – I’m personally itching to read Greg Herren’s SORCERESS later this month – and every one of them has that potential to be in the right hands at the right time.

Here you are, right on the page, says the book. You’re okay. Do you remember the first time that happened to you?

When I’m flush, a copy or two of these awesome teen and tween books will also usually end up in my local library, where I hope they end up in the hands of one of those young adults who happens to be feeling like they’ve got no place in the world. After all, I’m an adult now. What adult doesn’t enjoy proving to a teenager that they’re not right about everything?

Justin Spring’s “Secret Historian” and Wendy Moffat’s “A Great Unrecorded History”

2010-11-18T12:39:00.000-08:00

I drove seven hours in one direction for a book reading this past Monday. I have been following Justin Spring’s Book Secret Historian: The life and times of Samuel Steward, professor, tattoo artist, and sexual renegade for almost a year. When I saw that Mr. Spring was reading at Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle, I had to go. His only other West Coast appearance was in San Francisco.

Also Wendy Moffat read from her new book A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster. Her book is an exposition of Forster’s life as a gay man. It documents his sexual and romantic life that’s been ignored by previous biographers.

Both authors said that they had spent about ten years writing their books and met because their research crossed paths. Both were writing about gay social history in the United States during the 40s, 50s and 60s. Friends of Sam Steward and E.M. Forster overlapped although they had no recorded contact with one another.

Moffat said that it was a relief to find someone else doing work in this field, because it is a veritable blank spot in American history. The life of gay men prior to Stonewall remains largely undocumented due to secrecy, shame and its clandestine nature.

What struck me was the contrast between the books’ subjects. One was a biography of a very famous person from a new angle; the other was a biography about someone that is entirely unknown. Forster’s biography was written to highlight his life and how that affects the reading of his work. Steward’s biography was generated because of the fascinating life he led.

Samuel Steward was an English professor who left a life of academia to pursue other passions. He was friends with and corresponded with Gertrude Stein. He worked with Alfred Kinsey. He was the tattoo artist for the Hell’s Angels under the name Sam Sparrow. He wrote literary gay male pornography under the name Phil Andros. Sam Steward also documented his voracious sex life from early adolescence until a decade before his death in 1993.

E.M. Forster wrote and rewrote his homosexual novel Maurice throughout much of his life. At first he said he didn’t want it published while his mother was alive because it would upset her. After her death, he said he didn’t want to publish it because it would cause problems for his long-time lover, a married police officer. Maurice was published shortly after Forster’s death in 1970.

The reading was wonderful and I hope to be speaking with these authors in the future.

A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster
416 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
9780374166786

Secret Historian: The life and times of Samuel Steward, professor, tattoo artist, and sexual renegade
496 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
9780374281342

Coming Soon: Justin Spring, Samuel Steward, E. M. Forster, Elliot Bay Books and Seattle Live!

2010-11-15T23:21:00.001-08:00

New Poems in Print!

2010-11-05T10:26:00.000-07:00

Please take a moment and stop by to read four of my persona poems about the constellations at Orion headless: Poetry, Art, Found Objects. I am thrilled to have four poems picked up by a single literary magazine or website.

Stop by and you will encounter "Lyra" about Orpheus, a cranky "Orion," "Dorado" in which fish mysteriously multiply and a reflective "Herakles."

Thanks again to Sara at Orion headless for printing my work!

http://orionheadless.com/the-smallest-mysteries/#more-1318

Happy Halloween: Guest Blogger Chad Helder Shares the Books that Shaped Him

2010-10-28T14:09:00.000-07:00

Hi there Literary Magpie readers! I’m the guest blogger today (thanks, Jory), and I thought I would write about some of the books that “made me” (thanks to Nate Southard for the idea) as a way to pass along some literary inspiration and explain the origins of my weird books of poetry (Vampire Bridegroom and Pop-Up Book of Death), which will be released soon.

First there was Ai’s Cruelty and The Killing Floor. This was the very first poetry that I loved as a sophomore in college. I love the dark, brutal storytelling in these poems that take the form of dramatic monologues. I didn’t know poetry could be like this, and it definitely planted the seed of my literary obsessions. Ai was relentlessly brave with her subject matter and not at all afraid to delve into madness. She passed away earlier this year, and right now I am reading her final collection. Writing grotesque poems with mad narrators is one of my favorite ways to express myself (even if the subject matter is a complete fantasy).

Another major inspiration for me are Anne Sexton’s fairy tale poems collected in Transformations. The poems in this collection are a model for me because of the way they combine storytelling with startling metaphors, visual images, and scalpel-sharp wit. This book proved to me that poem-stories can be as rich as prose fiction (in a different--symbolic and visual--way, of course). In the Vampire Bridegroom, a lot of the poem-stories (that want to be horror movies) are modeled after Sexton’s storytelling in this book.

Strangely enough, another book of massive importance in my life is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. On the surface, this is a textbook on comic books in the form of a comic book, but this book has informed my poetry more than any book on poetry because of the ideas and theories it presents about visual storytelling, creating images, and how the brain makes meaning out of stories. In addition, the parts about how the brain connects gaps between comic book frames profoundly impacts how I make gaps between stanzas. I did write some comic books a couple of years ago, but now I am much happier and more comfortable writing story-poems that use a lot of the lessons I learned from writing comics.

Another huge inspiration on my writing is Li-Young Lee’s highly-anthologized poem Persimmons. I have taught that poem every time I have taught American Literature because of its brilliant, rich portrayal of identity. For me personally, I also love it because of the pastiche structure and image-based storytelling. The structure of this poem has influenced every memoir poem I have written, and that’s quite a few in both books--I am always trying to write my own Persimmons.

I am very excited to have two poetry books on the way: Pop-Up Book of Death from Rebel Satori/Queer Mojo Press (this book is more focused on dark surreal poems and memoir poems about the trials of Coming Out) and Vampire Bridegroom from Dark Scribe Press (this is my big horror genre book--lots of poems about queer horror and how The Closet creates monsters).

Thanks, Jory, for giving me the chance to tell your readers about my books and the books that have made me. Come and visit me at ChadHelder.com and HelderHorror.com!

Is Wearing Purple and Making a Video Enough? Queer Youth Suicide and What You Can Do About It!

2010-10-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

I keep thinking about the first season of RuPaul's Drag Race and her constant admonition at the end of the show, "If you don't love yourself how the hell are you gonna love someone else?" I always found those words quixotic because they came on the heels of the judges eliminating a drag queen from the competition--usually with RuPaul as the final arbiter. The world isn't a fair place and it often doesn't make sense.

I keep thinking about what RuPaul has to say in relation to the recent national media attention to gay teen suicides. This isn't a new problem. This isn't even an increasing problem.  The national media and straight America is just now becoming aware of what many queer people have known for a long time--being an LGBT junior high or highs school student is incredibly hard. Even   if you aren't aware of your sexuality yet, even if you aren't really queer--once you get branded as a "Faggot" or "Dyke" by your classmates it sticks with you. There is no escaping the names, the taunting, the intimidation, the bullying, the harassment and the violence that comes with being queer.

Growing up in a rural Montana town, I didn't have access to LGBT resources or culture. In my high school, there were books about homosexuality in the library card catalogue, but the books were not on the shelves. I checked. Repeatedly. The books were kept behind the counter and you had to ask the adult librarian to check them out. She was an intimidating woman. My parents worked at the school I attended. I never asked her for the books.

I tried to come out to a school guidance counselor. By my senior year I knew that I was gay and it was tearing me apart inside not to be able to talk about it or tell anyone. I didn't expect to find a boyfriend in high school; I was desperate to be honest about myself with someone. Anyone. Even the guidance counselor. I was told "Why don't you just wait to deal with that until college." College was years and miles away. There was no place for me at home or at school.

There was one gay student at my high school. He transferred in from a bigger city. He got harassed and beat up several times. He went to the principal of the school and to the superintendent. He was told, "You invite it on yourself. If you are going to flaunt your sexuality, expect to be beat up." That was my school's solution to creating a safe learning environment. The student transferred to another school. Then it was just me.

Remember, I came out before the Internet. Being queer in rural America meant total isolation. There were no gay people on television. There were no gay pride parades in my state. There were no gay publications for me to purchase or look at in a 20 mile radius.

When I graduated from high school and went to college, things got harder for me. I didn't meet any queer people. I got beat up. I was fired from a job for being gay. I ended up dropping out of school. I had been waiting to deal with being gay for two years. I was at college and thing were infinitely worse for me.

I am glad that the Internet is helping to get the word out about queer youth suicide. I am pleased to see national media, which has dismissed queer youth for so long, finally take notice. Dan Savage's It Gets Better Project is a good idea. The response has been phenomenal. Even the media says so.

I wanted to make a video for the It Gets Better Project, but the longer I thought about it--the less I could reconcile myself that telling queer youth that "It gets better...three, four, five or six years from now." That wasn't good enough for me. Isn't that what my guidance counselor in high school had told me? To wait? To hang on? I can't bring myself to tell queer youth to wait. I want to make a bigger difference.  Putting off a solution is no solution at all.

In response to Dan Savage's well intentioned project, another group wants to go further.  The Make It Better Project gives teens and adults tools they can use to affect change now. The website says "LGBT youth should not have to suffer through bullying at school. We can Make It Better NOW!" There are resources for making schools safer for queer youth and their lives better now instead of after they graduate from high school.

Please take a moment to stop by the website, explore what you can do to affect change now, donate money to the organization and spread the word. An LGBT youth may not be able to wait another three years for the harassment and bullying to stop.

Thank you for caring, no matter how you do it.

Jory M.-a once youthful queer

Coming Soon: A Post of Substance

2010-10-14T00:04:00.000-07:00

Graduate school and teaching is kicking my ass. I will post something of substance soon. Please stay tuned. But to hold you over, here is a picture of me reading some new work this past week at the MFA reading for the Hemingway Festival in Moscow, Idaho. (You can tell it is more noir poems because of my hat...)

Some Sad News: Reposted from Band of Thebes Blog

2010-10-05T19:52:00.000-07:00

I have been waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for Alyson Books to release the book Notes from the Sexual Underground, 1935-1975: The Selected Writings of Sam Steward (The Renegade Author Also Known as Phil Andros) by Justin Spring. At first it was due out in February and then June and now it appears that it will never be released by Alyson Books.

Reposted from Band of Thebes blog: http://bandofthebes.typepad.com

Publishers Weekly is reporting today that the nation's oldest lgbt book publisher, Alyson, will restructure as an e-book only publisher and Don Weise is leaving the company. The announcement may surprise bookwatchers who've noted Alyson has never before produced an e-book. They expect to release their first digital titles in 9 to 12 months. John Knoebel, v-p of consumer marketing at Here Media, has been named temporary publisher until a replacement can be found. Discussing the decision to abandon print entirely, Knoebel said, "There are just fewer places to sell books."

PW reports,

"Over the next few days Alyson will be reaching out to the authors it has under contract and whose books they have not published to give them the option of getting their rights back or moving ahead with Alyson's digital program. "We know authors are working in different circumstances," Knoebel said. "We hope some will stick with us." Alyson has about 24 authors under contract whose books have not yet been released."

Alyson's front list has been dormant for more than half a year, not having released any of their scheduled titles since late winter. Weise had spent the interim months trying to acquire the company from Here Media but ultimately the two sides failed to reach a deal. Weise released a statement calling the situation "heartbreaking," adding "even after offering a price that I believe to be twice the fair market value, we were unable to come to an agreement."

This makes me incredibly sad. Another publisher of queer books will no longer be publishing actual books. As the publishing industry changes and collapses at the same time, I wonder how authors will continue to promote their books if there is no physical book to sell at readings.

There is some good news (for me at least). Justin Spring had this to say on Amazon.com about his book:

"This book is not being published by Alyson, and never will be - as the editor of this book I'd like to let potential buyers know that a book of collected Sam Steward writings will be self-published via LighteningSource later this fall.

Alyson never issued a satisfactory contract for the book, and yet it continues to list it as an available title - which has created a great deal of confusion on the internet about the book's availability. None of my emails about the situation to Amazon have been successful so far, so I'm simply posting this message for the public good."

You didn't hear it here first, but I wanted to pass the word on.

Matthew Shepard: On Martyrology and Media Distortion

2010-09-27T16:31:00.000-07:00

I've been writing about Matthew Shepard, or at least the image of Matthew Shepard clouded by eleven years of martyrology and media distortion. If the gay rights movement has a patron saint, it is the smiling face of Matthew haloed by his longish blond hair.

Harvey Milk's face has been edited out of history by that of Sean Penn. Judy Garland has been demoted to an entertainer and actress. And Harry Hay, well ninety to ninety-five percent of queer youth have no idea who Harry Hay is.

Honestly, what else is there to say after eleven years? Everyone from his mother to gay rights groups, Fred Phelps to Congress has had something to say about Matthew. It's pretty much all been told by this point. Posthumously Matthew has several movies and even a poetry anthology. What is left?

I started writing about Matthew by accident. My ex sent me some old love letters that I had written twelve years ago. My ex was in Spain studying abroad during the period when Shepard was killed. In the letters, I am writing about the crime, the fledgling efforts for hate crimes legislation and how a 21 year old man in Wyoming sparked the anger and fear of a twenty-two year old man in Montana.

I even found a copy of the November 1998 issue of OUTSpoken: The Voice of Gay Montana covering the vigil held for Matthew Shepard in Missoula. The article included pictures from the candlelight vigil. It gives an immediate emotional portrait on the tail of Shepard's death. OUTSpoken, the author of the article Greg Kastl and Matthew Shepard have all passed into history. I suspect that only Shepard remains in the cultural conversation.

Trying to write about Shepard is like attempting to scale Everest. It can be done, but few do and fewer still scale the peak well. My writing began with a series of negations. I attempted to remove eleven years of media attention and popular culture from the lens. I don't think this is entirely possible, but the attempt was necessary. Who was Matthew Shepard before his death? Who was he at the time of his death before so many other people responded to it?

I may never answer those questions in my writing. Shepard might remain a cultural nexus point, unable to transform back into a 21 year old college student in Wyoming.

Timothy Liu said that writing a poem is in essence having an argument with yourself. In this case my poem is an argument with Shepard, both who he was and what he has become. What is straw and what is chaff after so long a time?

Coming Soon: A Post on Poetry, Prose and Matthew Shepard

2010-09-24T11:37:00.001-07:00

Book Notes on Elizabeth J. Colen's Money for Sunsets

2010-09-12T22:35:00.000-07:00

Paperback, 90 pages
From Steel Toe Books
July 2010
ISBN: 9780982416938

Reading Elizabeth Colen’s Money for Sunsets isn’t something that I could just once. After finishing the book, I needed to go back and reread the text with all the cues and nuances I picked up the first read.

Money for Sunsets has a persistent anxiety of certain danger. The end is near (now) ((maybe)). In her poem, “The Rules of Subduction” Colen urges the reader, “Read about tsunamis from a thick blue book. Read about the Big Ones, the ones that killed…” (10).

There is a luminosity to the voice that graces these poems. Call the voice adolescence or coming of age. Colen manages a self-doubt and bravado so compelling that I never questioned them coexisting within the same person.

After reading sections in this book, I was unable to sit still. The prose poems are filled with cars, travel, and motion. There is an energy, an immediacy that persists after you shut the cover. Someone (Auden?) said that poetry does nothing. Colen’s poetry says, “Go. Now. Faster.”

The musicality of the speech in Money for Sunsets carroomed off the page. In the poem “Take,” “Sweet, slow sound, her jaw rounding out the silence” (24).

This collection of prose poems is not only smart to the ear. There is a running commentary about the roles of women when conflated with money and power. In the poem “Synthesizer Approximating Strings,” Colen give the reader a hard look at violence against a sex worker, saying the forty dollars she was paid “buys here silence” (19).

Colen also gives a brilliantly scathing critique of oil and the implicit consumerism even in the best of us in her poem ‘The Next Cold War” “O’ my electronics never deceive me.” “My gas tank is filled with oil, my gas logs; oil, picture frames are wood or oil, but oil was used to make them…” (6).

Poetry this complex and urgent is a kind of reward for all the mediocre verse that I read.

Please do yourself a favor and buy a copy of Elizabeth Colen’s Money for Sunsets. Read it. This book is equally good read in a comfortable chair or pacing back and forth across the living room carpet. You can read it a second time, doing the other.

Let's Get Metaphysical: Marvell, Donne, Mark Wunderlich and Vaughan

2010-08-24T15:27:00.000-07:00

Perhaps my wires are crossed. I keep looking at this picture trying to figure it out. Is it an anchor and a shark? Where does the fin being and the metal end? There is no shark. It's a picture of two anchors lashed together with rope and chain. One is visible and the other is partially submerged in the water.

I thought that this was a good place to begin, this photo that is. I have been reading a lot of poetry. I am half way through Money for Sunsets By Elizabeth J. Colen. I have read and reread Mark Wunderlich's book The Anchorage. And then there are the four metaphysical poets I am reading: Herbert, Marvell, Donne and Vaughan.

The sound and style of verse in my head at the moment looks a little like the anchor. I began with Colon's self-circling prose poems. The intensity of examination to the language and structure of language is amazing. I feel as if in some of her poems that I can almost hear Paula Abdul singing "Two steps forward. Two steps back..." Rather than distract from the poems, this hyper-awareness contributes to the pressure and urgency they transmit. (I will give a full review of her book in September.)

I then shifted to an intensive read of Mark Wunderlich's The Anchorage, which won the 1999 Lambda Literary Award for poetry. His book has been our for long enough and reviewed extensively. I feel that other people have said what I have to say (and more thoroughly than I could at the moment) about the poems therein. I do want to comment on the shift in styles between the sections of the book. The book moves from tercets to finish with dense paragraphs of prose poems. Wunderlich's flowing lines and internal and off rhymes are a contrast to Colen's book. What I took away from The Anchorage was a watery image of winter light, sheets hanging on clothes lines and empty beds. His book was an extended meditation on the body and longing.

I almost feel as if Wunderlich was an ideal segue into the metaphysical poets who are very much concerned about questions of the body, the soul, longing and desire. The language and style of verse aside, I feel that there is something very modern about the metaphysical poets, especially Donne. I think that this is one reason that he continues to be popular; Donne remains witty four hundred years after his death.

What I love the most about the poets of 1600s England is the sheer music of their lines. It is a relief to hear some apologetically rhymed and metered verse after the barrage of free verse in modern poetry. The antique language and stilted phrases can come off as corny, but when I read the lines aloud and repeat them my tongue begins to leap from line to line.

Although some of the references in the metaphysical poems are obscure (and I am the sort to look them up) I find that their logic is refreshing. Poetry as argument. Poetry as a questioning on philosophical matters. Poetry as praise, satire and scorn. There is something delightfully straight forward about these poets that is missing in most modern poems.  Don't get me wrong, I don't think that poetry should have to have a clear arc. Half of poetry is that it means more than it says... Sometimes the sound is the sense of a poem. What I am saying is that there is a great obfuscation of meaning in modern poetry that is not found in earlier verse.

I am much less likely to memorize a Rae Armantrout poem than one by Andrew Marvell. The rhetorical moves and the music in Marvell are clear.

In my head these poems and prose poems are twisting together into a knot of sound and form. It is exciting even if the results remain hidden beneath the water.

I want to leave you with the opening stanza of John Donne's poem "Song" so that it can sing in your head for the rest of the day.

"Sweetest love, I do not go,
   For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
   A fitter love for me;..."