Coming Out

Below is a video of a gay man coming out to his dad over the phone:

I wish everyone who came out could have an experience like this one. Mine wasn't. It was Thanksgiving, 2008. I told my dad I was dating someone and that his name was Ryan. My dad moved to the other side of the couch and turned the television's volume up. Later that afternoon, when my baby cousin spit up over her mom, my dad nudged me and told me that I never did that because I was a swallower. I nudged him back and told him I still was.

Jokes aside, it was a solid two years before my relationship with my parents returned anywhere near a stable place. Since then, coming out has become easier, and is something I do all the time. Whenever I meet someone new, I feel the need to drop the word "boyfriend," to make a joke about being as queer as pink peanut butter, or to act more flamboyantly than what I'm predisposed to, just to signify to that new person who I am. 

In poetry, I find the need to come out constantly, too. Like the Beatles who claimed every song they wrote was a political song, I feel every poem I wrote is a queer poem. For a reader who didn't know me to assume that my work wasn't queer (as our culture teaches us to do) would be to bypass the reason that poem exists. A queer perspective is the center of every poem I write, whether or not that poem confronts love and sex. If I write about a house, it's queer because the domestic sphere is different in a queer poem. If I write about death, it's queer because community and religious rites associated with death are different.

I think poets face coming out often, and not just the queer ones. Most poets stay in the closet (when asked what they do, they answer, "I teach"). We squirrel away in our little communities, and for the most part are ignored by the rest of the world. It was awhile before I could adopt the word "poet" as an identity. Even now it sounds a bit pretentious, a bit turtle-necked and forty-year-old Merlot to me, but coming out as a poet is another thing I'm getting used to. 

Crush, Hack, Calendar, Frost

Another semester, and my ducklings seem particularly lovely and smart. I'm having them read Richard Siken's Crush this week as their first adventure into the long poem (which my class is themed around). As I teach them about the long poem, I find my own poems are growing smaller and sparser and quieter. I've been reading a lot of Octavio Paz and now I can't seem to stop writing about abandoned houses.

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Hacked the manuscript up one more time. I'm making October 1st a hard deadline for sending it out. I have a list of ten or so open reading periods and competitions for this year, and I'm starting to have second thoughts. The more I read other first books (mainly, the more I reread Crush), the more I think maybe it's not ready yet.

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Since everyone keeps on asking for my opinion on the MFA rankings (read sarcasm here), here it is: I found Seth Abramson's rankings on his blog to be invaluable when I began to think about MFA programs. Not the rankings or the vote system themselves per se (I didn't even apply to the Iowa workshop, which is the top ranked school), but just how much information (stipend, teaching load, size, etc) was compiled into one place made a huge impact on my decision. Calling the methodology into question isn't an unhealthy practice, but the attacks directed toward Seth and the staff of Poets & Writers I find to be troublesome and childish. Laura Eve Engel writes more elegantly and in-depth on this topic here, and I find her post to be one of the best I've read on the matter.

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Some friends and I got to discussing who we'd want to be included in a poet bathing suit calendar. I'm making my wishlist.

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The weather has dropped, and now's the season for many late night walks. There are herbs (dill, rosemary, thyme) drying over our windows, and pickles pickling in a crock. The forecast mentions frost and an alleviation of migraines. Everything, it seems, is preparing for winter.

Escaping the Pen

It's been nearly 3 weeks since my last entry! I'm headed down a slippery slope.

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After a stint in Maine and a stint in Georgia, I'm back in Madison for awhile and have been working on my syllabus and manuscript pretty non-stop. I feel like there's a 2-3 poem gap in my current draft of my MSS (which is now well past its 20th and best rendition), and so I'm hoping to write toward these. The way it usually goes is I'll write 6 poems and half of them won't be any good and the other half might make it in. We'll see.

I met with some brilliant friends and we swapped manuscripts and gave each other feedback. They advised me to cut a few poems that I've known for awhile needed to go. I've been hesitant because just over a year ago I thought one of them was the best poem I had written to date. It seems strange to drop it from the book when other poems are staying that feel weaker to me but are more thematically aligned. Oh these tough decisions! My hope is that Andrew the Llama will be escaping his pen in a future poetry project, if not this one.

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I reviewed Melissa Stein's Rough Honey over at Devil's Lake.

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Lately I've been feeling this very intense urge to go on a trip of some kind, to see more of the country. I feel like I'm getting to that age where one starts to become too bogged down by responsibilities to just go. Twenty four, and I already feel trapped by adulthood. So I've started planning a tenting / road trip for the end of the school year when I move from Madison to Athens. Via the west coast. Stops include but are not limited to: the Tetons, Yellowstone, Cathedral Arch, Zion, Big Basin, hot springs, Spider Rock + Canyon de Chelley, and Big Burgess. 

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In an hour, my friend Liam will be in Madison for a visit! We've been friends since I was a freshmen at UMaine-Farmington. Here's a picture of us cleaning our bathroom back in carefree days:

The Waiting

Earlier this year, I planned on spending the summer working on a new writing project, as summer begins to wind down, I ended up writing more poems for the first MSS and trying to get back into that headspace. It's been good. I've been adding new poems to the middle section, the one that to me feels the most lost. These poems don't "fit" thematically as cleanly as I would have allowed myself in earlier drafts. I'm hoping these poems will reach further, or take the reader to more unpredictable places, or mature the book as a whole (cue Jackie Wilson's "Your Love Keeps Lifting Me (Higher and Higher"). Who knows. It'll all be different in another few months. I'm trading manuscripts with some brilliant friends in a few weeks, and I'm looking forward to hearing what they think (but not as much as I'm looking forward to reading their manuscripts).

I'm also looking forward to the fall when all the journals and book competitions and reading periods open. And then the waiting, the dreaded waiting.

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Brandon left for Georgia, and since, I've been trying to fill that part of the day I usually spent with him. I can usually keep myself busy to about 6pm, and then after that I start pacing or bugging my roommates to watch even more reruns of RuPaul's Drag Race or Arrested Development. I don't usually like watching TV but it makes the time go by faster. Part of me is excited to reconnect with people I haven't seen as much as I would've liked. And I'm hoping I'll read and write more and be even more productive (because reading and writing for 8 hours a day was child's play). Still, despite all this, I'll be glad when June comes and all of this separateness is over.

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Interview with Tracy K. Smith at DEVIL'S LAKE

I ask Tracy K. Smith some questions about Life on Mars over at Devil's Lake. You can read it here.

" I started to realize that space and time and the distant future were becoming metaphors for American life, for a sense of American destiny, for the evolution and decline of the culture we belong to."

A Scattering of Flashcards

After deciding against it, I've changed my mind about applying to Ph.D. programs in the fall. I was discouraged, initially, to learn that one of the programs I hoped to apply to (the same school where Brandon will be attending) wants a 95 percentile on the GRE, which felt very much beyond my reach. I did very average the last time I took the GRE. I don't test well at all, and despite being a poet, my vocabulary is pretty conventional. Like Frost, I prefer the common language, the every man's speech. 

But I was elated to discover that the GRE has been revamped, and starting this fall, will no longer (among other things) have analogies and other out-of-context vocabulary, which will help substantially. So I've been spending the last few weeks studying vocab. I've got various stacks of flashcards littering my room. I also re-read D.A. Powell's Cocktails, which is one of my favorites. Here's a sample of the list of words I made from its final section:  Pyx. Dhisced. Tonsure. Cowls. Spurtle. Anaphylaxis. Exuviae. Heparin. Sigmoidoscope. Intubation. Viaticum. Orval. Exsiccated. Berm. Mammillated. Carbuncled. Byssus. The list goes on and on, and even though not all these words are ETS GRE - type words, it's been fun to push myself in that way.


I've been so comfortable using such pedestrian language in my poems, and reading a book as great as Cocktails presents me with the challenge of using these more dazzling, specific words. Additionally, I've started a six month challenge to read a book from an international poet a week. I've read so little of the poetry canon, and most of what I've read has been published in American post-1980. I've read the anthologized work of earlier poets, and all of Whitman, and a scattering of modernists, but when it comes to international poets, I fall flat after Lorca and Neruda. Week One,  I read Mahmoud Darwish's Eleven Plants, translated by Fady Joudah (whose Earth in the Attic I loved). Initially, I struggled with how little narrative elements there were (no characters, no setting), but I grew to love it. I'm too drawn to the narrative sphere of poetry. Sometimes I need to let poetry be poetry, to make strange leaps, to make more sonic sense than linear and comprehensive sense, to deal more with the heart than the head. Here's a great sample from the third section of Darwish's poem "The 'Red Indian's' Penultimate Speech to the White Man" that does just that:

                                                         ...You will lack the lily of longing, you will lack, white ones, a memory that tames the horses of madness and a heart that scratches the rock to burnish itself on the violin's calling....you will lack the confusion of the gun: if murder is imperative, then do not kill the animals that have befriended us, and do not kiss our yesterday you will lack a truce with our ghosts in the barren winter nights and you will lack a dim sun, a gibbous moon, for the crime to appear less festive on the movie screen, so take your time to kill God"

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The restaurant out of which I catered for burned down this past week, and so once again I'm unemployed. I have a tutoring gig lined up for August, and since I'm headed to Maine and Georgia for most of July, I think I will enjoy the time to learn new words, read new poets, and write better poems.

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In other news, I had a birthday, which I celebrated with good people, champagne, and shortcake. Last night, I went on a sunset bike ride (on my new peugeot!) around the shore of Lake Mendota, and onto a peninsula which is a breeding ground for lightning bugs. This week, many of my housemates leave, and the cats continue to bring them parting gifts of rabbit hearts, livers, and heads.

Summer of Weddings

I'm sure I've been to more weddings in the past month than I have in my entire life. I started a gig catering weddings out of a nearby restaurant. The  pay's good, and I really like spying on all these weddings. That's what it feels like, too, spying. I get the same thrill as one gets out of driving by houses at night and seeing how stranger's laid out their kitchens.

It looks like the only weekends where I won't be catering are the weekends where I'll be attending weddings. Going to so many weddings has transformed me into a middle-schooler who can only think about what I'd want my wedding to look like. Cupcakes instead of wedding cake. Whitman instead of the Bible. But oh wait. I can't get married. Maybe I'll have an Alice in Wonderland "Un-birthday" theme, except it'll be an "Un-married" party, and we'll serve unwedding cake.

It's looking more and more like New York will pass gay marriage in the coming weeks, which will be good--if nothing else--as a morale booster in gay politics. It seems that ever since we lost the gay marriage battle in Maine in 2009, it's been one disappointment after another across the country.

During the month of June, Beloit Poetry Journal is hosting a symposium and discussion on gay poetry and aesthetics on their blog. I've been trying to formulate some thoughts on this, as it's something I think about a lot, but I haven't been able to articulate much yet. Mostly because what I have to say seems either overtly apparent, or concerns my own personal experience, in which case this blog would be better suited. Or my diary, for that matter.