Wrought

I published my first two books before I let my job and relationships take over so much of my time. 

Then, a  few years after my second book came out, my editor, Herb Scott, and the founder of New Issues Press, succumbed to cancer. The loss felt sharp. He was remarkably kind, funny, a captivating storyteller, modest, wise, and devoted to the necessity of poetry. He championed my work--and the work of many others--even when my writing was difficult, prone to shifting from discursive logic to the logic of dreams (real and imaginary), and full of misdirection. 

I regret that my shyness kept me from reaching out to him when he was ill. I never fully expressed my fondness or gratitude for him directly, fearing I might scare him away, interrupt his rest, or disturb the fragile prospect of remission. I was always so scared and so wrong.

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I am a queer writer in many senses of the word: a writer who imagined that I never fit in and spent a long time coming out. I had nothing against coming out, but at 30, I disliked attention, especially to the private, most intimate aspect of my life. Now, I see queerness as a metaphor, embracing what is different, uncertain, unpredictable, raw, and untamed. My definition is  loose, open, and nothing like the daily, routine life that sustains me. However, I hope readers can share a sense of difference, or multiplicity, as a lens. What can we change if we cannot see the whole of our transgressive, sexual, and sensual selves? And beyond that: if we cannot see the  beauty in multiple forms of "difference,"  a beauty that eludes the minds of current leaders, who may or may not break us all.

When I write, I think about sound, music, landscape, fear, anger, memory, my body, and the ravages of living inside this particular country, which equates the production of "things" with selfhood and money over the need for community, equity, institutional change, and the means to live healthy and thoughtful lives through language, work, creativity, and the natural world. I think about book banning, banning drag, transphobia, neo-Nazis, and the KKK, who have crept shamelessly out of their indistinct caverns. I think about our country's trade in weapons instead of social services, refuge, food, medical care, and personal safety. We surveil women's bodies instead of their circumstances, thus fail to provide adequate food for families, or adequate health care for women, predominantly poor women, trans women, women of color, and children—despite a surplus of food production and state-of-the-art medical knowledge. We do not insist on reforms to a racist criminal justice system, yet we call ourselves a democracy and celebrate freedom. We live in a propaganda machine. When legislators can limit women's choices and bodily autonomy, they have quietly decided that women's lives and personal decisions are less important than biological functions. But all this, we know.

As a poet, I turn to an interior world that cradles this snarl of American life, which preoccupies me and catches on an intimate and "other" unsung language in ways I cannot articulate directly. At the same time, I cannot write without thinking of New Jersey and the small house where I live, or, in contrast, the West (especially New Mexico), where my wife and I visit each year for the radical change in horizon and air. Wherever we are—at home or traveling—I watch the landscape: in my yard in New Jersey and the rural areas surrounding the town, and then in New Mexico, where we hesitate to go inside-- though even interior space pulls light from the atmosphere.

In New Jersey, I get out to the garden on the first warm days of spring and quiet myself through the repetitive movements of digging, planting, or weeding. I put my hands in the dirt, use my fingers like sifters to scatter a thin robe of soil over seeds, or dislodge limestone, sandstone, or gravel. During the spring and summer, my garden opens to color in phases, sometimes planned, sometimes unplanned, and sometimes re-designed by quiet messengers:  bees, squirrels, rabbits, and birds. Due to a mild winter last year, a strange breed of Dahlia sprang up in a bed, the seeds carried from the patio and deposited in the middle of daylilies, gaillardia, and tickseed. Dahlias will do this if you plant the seeds from the flowers; they reinvent themselves as lovely, delicate offspring, looking little like the parent flower.

Out west, we find blue and astonishing vistas. According to our tour guide at Georgia O'Keeffe's house in Abiquiu, New Mexico, O'Keeffe fell in love with the landscape out there when her train made an unexpected stop. My wife and I discovered New Mexico, then Taos by accident--perhaps when we found a hotel next door to an art gallery. Now we travel East to West and back: from the small farms and rural foothills of New Jersey to magnificent space, the soft yellows, blues, lavenders, and reds of the desert springing in clefts between pools of tiny pebbles, sand, and dirt, along with gorges and mountains that stretch for eons beyond our finite smallness.

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I often think about my wife and how well we relate to one another in our small corner of the world--wherever we are. I think about our lifelong sense of otherness, as well.  Perhaps imaginary, but also a bond. When I got sober years ago, I went to 12-step meetings and heard the somewhat caustic phrase “terminally unique," a characteristic shared by drinkers. I knew it applied to me and that none of us are unique. Yet we have built our shells out of distilled grains, and there we half reside.

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In New Jersey, I am back in the garden. I kneel on the clay and rocky soil and pull weeds bare-handed from the dirt, grappling with stones, the impacted and parched soil, the ground ivy, sorrel, spits of grass in the garden beds, and mountain mint, which I pull selectively from the bee balm and hydrangea. I wonder how to keep the wild rabbits, deer, and groundhogs from feeding on my seedlings (I am not so generous). I think about immigration, the terror of borders, false piety, and how I should define myself in my whiteness. Whose land is this?  Who are the ghosts? How else do we steady ourselves on this precipice of subjectivity, identity, history, stolen land, political madness, homophobia, racism, rising sea levels, genocide, and all of that groundless loss or rage annexed to our tentative but bristling aliveness?   Perhaps the latter is the crux of our sexuality: that love and fear and fury, and that need to turn toward the other,  no matter their gender, with what tenderness we can sustain. 

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Sometimes I dream that I open my mouth to speak, and nothing comes out. There is something wrong with my voice.

​Sometimes, I dream that my fingers are too big to punch the numbers on my phone, and I cannot see; my eyesight grows worse and worse. I dream I am stuck at a train station, and my bags are too heavy, and I cannot call my wife or my mother, and I have not memorized my brother’s phone number (I forget that it's stored in my phone), and anyway, my fingers are too big to press the tiny buttons. Not as if my family is lost to me, but that I am lost to my family. Such is my fear.

Many years ago, a well-known poet commented on the work I submitted anonomously for an award: “Perhaps the poet should really concentrate more on communicating. Or believing that it is possible,” they wrote. I wondered at how much this respected poet disliked my poems, so, of course,  I felt distraught and raw. Yes, of course, I had thought about communication (duh) but regarded it as a questionable possibility—for who's to say that a reader will read you "right"? There are so many ways to read. I thought about experimental poetry and Gertrude Stein and L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, critical theory, and the poetics I had read independently. In communicating, we often prioritize the discursive, logical, and temporal aspects of our knowledge, whereas I wished to express feelings/ideas/experiences that were tacit and not so easily ordered. My sense of the world is visual, tactile, musical, aural and oral, mutable, broadly political, dense, and uncertain. To change the imbalance in the world, we must change our language, and yet we risk misunderstanding or opacity. Poetry that I admire may be full of layered intelligence, subversion, and spiritual protection as we approach our inner lives through a tentative balance with external encounters. I cloak myself in my poems to create a thin fabric between myself and others as much as I divulge my secrets, intentionally or not.

When I say “inner lives,” I mean that poets can expose in metaphor, narrative, allusion, or other devices what has not been said but might be felt. I chafe at the poems that feel contained, that go where we expect them to go, that satisfy the reader’s need to frame the poet’s sense of beauty, loss, or mortality, often summed up at the end of the poem with a turn, a question, or a conclusion meant to stun us. On the other hand, reading Dickinson, who always stuns, I must balance her embedded contradictions--she is throat singing, allowing two or three tones at once to convey the unsaid, that wrenching and contradictory alertness. "I cannot live with you--/It would be life--."

​What if we do not always satisfy the reader's needs? If we encapsulate nothing but the sheer pleasure of composing something with sound and sensory understanding? We would still project language with meaning, such that imagism itself becomes a screen on which we project how we see the world now, not an exercise in descriptive and spare objectivity. "Rose, harsh rose, /marred and with a stint of petals, /meagre flower, thin, /sparse of leaf . . ." (H.D.). The image becomes subject to her feeling, or feeling-vision, a measure of imperfection, hunger, and cold. Finally, what if writing one’s intentions as a metaphor, that is, not communicating directly or obscuring one’s daily self, perhaps, could be political, a way to interrupt the business of creating ourselves as commodities? Of course, the brand or persona is a mask, but how many professional workshops must we see advertised in our digital space called "Building your Brand?" Must we become the products we once sold?

​A friend once sent me a quote from an essay by the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. The quote has been cited frequently in one form or another, but in the original essay, Winnicott writes:

In the artist of all kinds I think I can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of the two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found. This might account for the fact that we cannot conceive of an artist’s coming to the end of the task that occupies his whole nature. (“Communicating and not Communicating, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment.")

Overlooking the male pronouns—the language of the 1950s—the description of the artist accounts for inevitable vexations. Even as I dream, I cannot speak, yet I do not stop trying. Our hidden selves may contain the most taunting uncertainty, shame, conflict, memory, or detail in the urgent spaces we cannot, or will not, access or reveal, and yet we inch so close. I write to investigate a form of knowledge, an idea, or discover and recreate a piece of myself that I do not fully understand; or because my tongue stumbled upon a curious combination of sounds that skimmed these deeper scores. The poem performs an experiment, and I go where it takes me. But the coherence is in the vehicle, and the vehicle is me.  

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Of course, I think about my age and lost time: thirty years of working at a full-time job, and the  unending sense of exhaustion, even now, as if the experience clings.  My body reorganizes itself, softer in places. COVID is still so alive, like little fires sparked and flickering in a late-night campground as another acquaintance falls sick--albeit inconvenient more than terrifying. Still, we've taken off our masks and freely breathe.

I worry about the future and my financial security, and may the rich politicians sleep in hell. Social Security and Medicare. The stacked Supreme Court. Food issues/my ”disordered eating”  vs. poverty and food insecurity. Criminalizing women. Palestine. Ukraine. Sudan. In India, the National Day of Yoga will not make people submissive. The neighbor with a pressure washer. The lilies tell us about rain. Roses wonder about aphids and thrips. Self-criticism. That was a misdirection in words. Anthropomorphism, which some writers consider with disdain. (Though maybe everything has a spirit?) Undone chores. When my student called my earrings “bougie.”  The word “south.” The materiality of “scum” and “drought.” Canadian fires. The orange ring around the sun and my photo of the air that week. The genocidal erasure and exploitation of black, brown, and Native people of America and elsewhere, and certainly those with Indigenous roots in New Jersey (they have dispersed or dwindled so drastically). Yet the State is a construct only colonizers believe in. Rain is expected today. The Plenge archeological site in the Musconetcong Valley is not far from our town . . . This is an ancient country, yet "country" is an imaginary creation, and we cannot communicate with it. People came to the Musconetcong Valley at least 13,000 years ago with their stone tools, their fire knowledge, their dances and bones. They did not need a country or a state because the imaginary borders do not make food, birdsong, weapons, or art--they only generate propaganda. If the earth could be flat, could it be an irregular octagon? How do you get off the thread? How do you diverge from violence: verbal, institutional, racist, sexist, historical, national, or physical? Turn back the pieces we do not want and submit them to scorched earth. Cape them in fire.  Send them into orbit.

If you love someone, let time be slow.

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