Finding Inspiration Where You Least Expect It

Posted on September 20, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post by Sophie Allen

In college, it gets easier and easier to narrow down your area of study until you’re just taking the courses that interest you and are pertinent to your major. I thought this would mean taking classes on writing, writing, and more writing, interspersed with occasional reading. While all those pursuits are useful and valid, I find myself writing pieces that don’t feel right and don’t feel like mine.

For context: I love trivia. I have a great memory for useless information, words that look good on a page and feel good coming out of my mouth, and historical tidbits to bring up if a conversation stalls. If I have a choice, my writing is always as precise as I can make it. I research extensively, even if I just plan to reference something in passing. In my poetry, I’ve made use of a lifelong fascination with Greek mythology, and if I write about the human body, it will always be anatomically accurate.

So it’s certainly worthwhile and useful to take classes about writing and how to do it well, but sometimes, it’s better to learn about something else and let that inspire your work. I’m struck by inspiration for my strongest work in non-creative writing settings. I found out that poetry could be about whatever I wanted and I ran with it. Most of my writing is autobiographical, but I love reading highly specific poems about things that might not always be considered poetic. Take “It’s Not Like Nikola Tesla Knew All of Those People Were Going to Die” by Hanif Abdurraqib! Is it really about Nikola Tesla? I have no idea, but I love it! What a great title! What a fascinating way to talk about love and death and Tesla! Abdurraqib is a great example of a poet who brings his knowledge of other areas to poetry to great effect, and oh man, I could write a whole blog post about it, but suffice it to say his writing is loaded with highly specific content that makes it that much greater.

Another great example is one of my favorite poems of all time, “Having a Coke with You” by Frank O’Hara. It doesn’t matter that the poem isn’t really about art, but mentioning it enriches the piece immeasurably. I didn’t know what the Rembrandt painting the Polish Rider was before reading the poem, but I’ve walked past the Frick Collection in New York City a couple of times since, and it always makes me think of O’Hara.

The places I’ve been and the things I’ve learned impact my writing significantly, and the more I know, the more interesting my writing can be. I have a friend who writes gorgeous poems whose descriptions of plants are always scientifically accurate, and another who has travelled so much through the Midwest that every city she describes becomes its own vivid, realistic world. I haven’t spent much time in the Midwest, but I’ve written poetry about New Orleans, New York, and Dublin. I plan to write more.

The point I’m trying to make is that all that stuff they tell you in high school about being well-rounded is true. I want to learn everything I can, both for learning’s sake and for how it can add to my writing. I can write about the process of glass shattering when a projectile hits it, or the things you can use instead of a hammer if you can’t find one when you need it, or how to say “I’m sorry” in five languages. Giving it form and making it technically proper might require a writing course, but there are so many amazing things in the world and I plan to write about as many of them as I can, however I can.

Sophie Allen is an English major at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is an Opinion/Editorial columnist at the Daily Collegian, the independent student newspaper at UMass. In her spare time, she enjoys reading murder mysteries and writing poetry. In the future, Sophie hopes to write for late-night television.

Indolence, Politics, and the Good Gray Poet, Part 2

Posted on September 11, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

Walt Whitman and Harry Stafford, 1878.

A Blog Post by Reuben Gelley Newman

To see the first half of this two-part post, click here.

National context undeniably informs the poetry we create, and America’s conflict and social upheaval during the late 19th century often intersected with Whitman’s personal life and poetry. He tended wounded soldiers in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, bearing witness to the turmoil it unleashed. Readers both lambasted and celebrated his overtly hetero- and homo-erotic poems, which inspired British intellectuals to advocate for acceptance of homosexuals in the 1870s and 80s. Although he outwardly denied any homosexuality, he had relationships with men almost 40 years younger than him, including George and Susan Stafford’s son, Harry, whom Whitman met at a printing shop. (There’s an obvious power imbalance considering the age gap and Whitman’s cultural status, and it’s impossible to tell exactly how equitable the relationship was. From letters, it seems like it was relatively consensual, if tumultuous, but we should probably still be skeptical.)

Drawing on these rich and complex experiences, he wrote obviously political poems, such as his elegies for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain, My Captain.” His erotic poems, including the famous homoerotic “Calamus” ones, were also socially conscious in their disregard for Victorian prudishness. But his expressions of indolence — particularly during his time at the Staffords’ farm in southern New Jersey — can hardly be political, right?

I’m not so sure. Today, I don’t feel as if “indolent” poems, or poems that express joy more broadly, get all that much traction in the poetry market. (Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities seem like exceptions to this.) But reading Specimen Days, I wonder if indolence, in the sense of “love of ease,” can be a counterpart to and part of the political.

For poets from marginalized backgrounds, or even for Whitman — who, as I said in Part 1, was disabled later in life, though hardly “marginalized” — perhaps writing openly about pure joy or indolence could be empowering. Recall the definition of “indolent” that reads “free from pain.” Freedom from pain, of course, is virtually impossible for any human to experience, and that kind of indolence might be even rarer for marginalized poets. Still, “Indolent” writing could serve as an important contrast to taut, emotional poems that explore political situations or recount injustices against the speaker. It could also simply exist by itself. Although it’s important to be aware of the political, no one has to write “political” poetry. It’s a political choice to write a “nature poem,” say, whatever that is — but it’s not necessarily a bad choice.

And that brings us back to Indolent Books. As Michael said, “indolent” refers to some of our “slowly progressing” poets. (Although not all of them are slowly progressing—take Logan February, who has published two chapbooks and whose first full-length collection is coming out next year!) But Indolent’s mission is also strikingly political. Look no further than our online projects What Rough Beast and HIV Here & Now, and our mission statement:

Ultimately, Indolent publishes books the editors care about. The main criteria are that the work be innovative, provocative, risky, and relevant. Indolent is queer flavored but inclusive and maintains a commitment to diversity among authors, artists, designers, developers, and other team members.

Does this political mission mesh with the historical definitions of “indolent” I’ve discussed? I don’t know. What I do know is that “indolent” and “political” poetry have coexisted for centuries, since well before our good gray poet. As Whitman realized, literature can be an escape, a fantasy, and a utopia: a place free from pain. But his optimistic vision of America was also grounded in political reality. I think such grounding is deeply necessary for poets, both personally and collectively. We need not be optimistic, of course; our poems can turn grief into anger. But whatever our viewpoint, through writing our own hurt and our nation’s, we might begin to free ourselves of pain.

In addition to interning here at Indolent, where he edits the blog, Reuben Gelley Newman is an undergraduate at Swarthmore College. His work appears in Alexandria Quarterly, What Rough Beast, and HIV Here & Now, and is forthcoming in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, 2nd Edition.

Indolence, Politics, and the Good Gray Poet, Part 1

Posted on September 6, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

Related image

A Blog Post by Reuben Gelley Newman

I’m here to talk about indolence — not just your typical laziness, idleness, or slothfulness, but indolence. The adjective “indolent” derives from the prefix “in” and the Latin word “dolens,” meaning “hurting,” “suffering,” or “grieving.” In the 18th and 19th centuries, an indolent ulcer or tumor was “painless” (OED), and, seemingly, that morphed into Merriam Webster’s current definition of “slow to develop or heal.” But since the same period, “indolent” has also described humans: “averse to exertion or toil”; “slothful, lazy, idle” (OED). Why, then, is it the name of our press?

Michael Broder told me he “often used it to mean something like moving at a relaxed pace.” He applies the idea of “slowly progressing” to poets: writers who, for whatever reason, take a longer time with their poetry than many — and, possibly even because of that, produce excellent work.

Interestingly, the noun form of indolent has other connotations, including the more positive “love of ease,” and, in obsolete meanings, “freedom from pain,” and “a state of rest or ease, in which neither pain nor pleasure is felt” (OED). And here’s where “the good, gray poet” of American democracy, Walt Whitman, comes in.

I’ve been doing research on Whitman’s relationship to his paralysis later in life. After a paralytic stroke in 1873, Whitman was debilitated, and his conception of himself as such comes through in his 1882 prose memoirs, Specimen Days (available on Project Gutenberg if you’re interested). Much of the memoir recalls his visits to the farm of his friends, George and Susan Stafford, in southern New Jersey, where he spent a lot of time idling about in nature. One passage, titled “Summer Sights and Indolencies,” reads:

June 10th.—As I write, 5-1/2 P.M., here by the creek, nothing can exceed the quiet splendor and freshness around me. We had a heavy shower, with brief thunder and lightning, in the middle of the day; and since, overhead, one of those not uncommon yet indescribable skies (in quality, not details or forms) of limpid blue, with rolling silver-fringed clouds, and a pure-dazzling sun. For underlay, trees in fulness of tender foliage—liquid, reedy, long-drawn notes of birds—based by the fretful mewing of a querulous cat-bird, and the pleasant chippering-shriek of two kingfishers. I have been watching the latter the last half hour, on their regular evening frolic over and in the stream; evidently a spree of the liveliest kind. They pursue each other, whirling and wheeling around, with many a jocund downward dip, splashing the spray in jets of diamonds—and then off they swoop, with slanting wings and graceful flight, sometimes so near me I can plainly see their dark-gray feather-bodies and milk-white necks.

Here Whitman truly embraces indolence, in the sense of not just being “free from pain” but of being free, entirely, to observe the world around him, to delight in each and every thing. Take an earlier, more famous example from “Song of Myself”: “I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” Here, as in Specimen Days, a certain languor seems to renew his soul. Perhaps this is the kind of indolence Whitman craved — and needed — in an America that was fraught with political turmoil. Indolence might be something we, too, crave. But in a world that requires change, does our poetry require politics, and can indolence fit into a political poetics? I’m gonna go be indolent now, but I’ll have more thoughts for you on Tuesday.

In addition to interning here at Indolent, where he edits the blog, Reuben Gelley Newmanis an undergraduate at Swarthmore College. His work appears in Alexandria Quarterly, What Rough Beast, and HIV Here & Now, and is forthcoming in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, 2nd Edition.

Taking the Words Off the Page

Posted on August 28, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post by Larayb Abrar

I recently went to a semi-final poetry slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe that featured a line-up of three very talented poets. As their performances brought their word-play, rhymes and rhythms to life, I thought about the effects of saying a poem out loud, as opposed to directly reading it on the page. As a spoken word performer myself, I wonder: what does it actually mean to take the words off a page and manifest them in front of so many onlookers? What changes?

What comes to mind first is Aristotle’s rhetoric triangle that puts the text/context, audience, and writer in relation with one another. Traditionally, while the writer provides credibility to the text, they are often removed or at a distance from the audience’s engagement with a text. Moreover, while the writer’s influence may affect the audience, the audience cannot do much to influence the writer. Similarly, in the conventional understanding of the triangle, the text is a stand-still, frozen object. To perform a poem modifies this triangle, giving it a more circular nature.

As a poet gets on stage and not only recites their poem but acts it out, coupling it with hand gestures, voice inflections and changing rhythms, the writer and the text become almost inseparable. Simultaneously, audience members react to each line coming from the poet’s mouth by snapping their fingers, laughing, cheering or nodding along. This energy goes right back to the poet, affecting their delivery of the poem and even sometimes the content of the poem (text) itself. This morphing of the rhetoric triangle into a feedback loop isn’t only more engaging, but as 20^th century philosopher J. L. Austin would put it, it can also act as a gateway to seeing spoken word performances as “speech-acts”.

In describing language as a speech-act, Austin asserts that speech doesn’t only describe things in evaluative (true/false) terms, but that the utterance itself can create truth: it can make things happen. It stirs feelings, emotions, and reactions, much like a poem does. When the poet is on stage, even if they’re revealing something personal, they’re still creating a persona: they’re performing a role. Spoken word poetry is then similar to the way that the theatrical stage has potential to create a contested or imagined space, push social boundaries, and expose an audience to that performed reality.

To give a more concrete example of performativity allowing for social boundaries to stretch, in the 1960s a series of performative interventions took place right on the street. These performances were referred to as “happenings,” which is exactly what they were. The actors involved with these “happenings” performed out-of-context, often absurd material lacking any kind of plot, such as walking with boxes on their feet or emptying a suspended bucket of milk over their head. The point of these performances was indeed to push the social boundaries of what was considered acceptable. Doing it on the street, right in the public eye, allowed for these absurdities to be a part of everyday life.

In Blythe Baird’s 2016 spoken word poem “Pocket-Sized Feminism” performed on Button Poetry, she confesses, “Once, a man behind me on an escalator / shoved his hand up my skirt / from behind, and no one around me / said anything. / So I didn’t say anything, / because I didn’t want to make a scene.” Hearing Baird say this as opposed to reading it on a page suddenly makes it real. Not only do we get to witness her pain, but through her performance she is able to retroactively correct her error of not speaking out before. The performativity here normalizes this discussion of violation and, in real time, gives Baird the space to speak out that she previously did not have.

The interaction between poet and audience not only normalizes the speech, but also incites other actions, whether they be as small as a laugh or as drawn out as a blog post. So whether a poet is slamming about the current political landscape, illness, or even their beloved, it takes all of the emotion and perspective and truly puts the content out there. Performing gives the poet a direct, intense connection to the audience and an opportunity to create reality as they speak.

Larayb Abrar is a junior at NYU Abu Dhabi majoring in literature and creative writing. She contributes often to her independent college newspaper, The Gazelle. Her academic interests lie in post-colonial and gender studies. She has performed spoken word poetry at several venues in Abu Dhabi and occasionally dabbles in stand-up comedy.

A Fine Line: Bridging the Political and Poetic

Posted on August 22, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post by Jada Gordon

When I was approached by Indolent Books to help curate and edit poems for What Rough Beast, I was given clear guidelines for how to select them. The poems were to be “politically adjacent.” That is, while the poems may, and often do, reveal a clear political stance or perspective, we do not want political rants or diatribes or artless attacks on Donald Trump, his orange hair, his small hands, or similar pettiness. In short, we do not want doggerel. Rather, we want poems that portray what it is like to live in the current political climate. In the process of choosing poems to be published, I was stuck between two rocks and a hard place: I had to ensure we were caught up with the daily posting and that the poetry was “politically adjacent.” As I was looking through the poems in Submittable, I asked myself one essential question: “How can I identify if a piece is politically adjacent?”

After posing that question, I thought of the current state of affairs we’re in as a country. We’re all stuck in a similar way. Politically, personally, and artistically, we have internal and external conflicts constantly pulling us in different ways. Politically, we live in a country that seems to be at odds. One half of the country believes in the President and the administration; the other half has absolutely no faith in the President and the administration—but then we have people caught in the middle. It’s a constant game of tug of war between two sides and we’re caught observing as artists—and in a twist of events, even choosing sides. As editors of a poetry series with a progressive orientation, how can curators deal with a submission that is “politically adjacent” and also happens to be politically conservative? That is a question that could apply to any publication, conservative or liberal/progressive. The lines of subjectivity, opinion, fact, truth and fiction are becoming more and more blurred. How do we as artists skate along the lines of poetry and politics? How do we express our perspectives without undermining our poetics? How do we merge art with politics?

This topic has been discussed many times, but I felt the need not only as a writer but as a reader to ask this question again. Artists have had a long history of being political through different artistic mediums. There are visual pieces such as Norman Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With in 1964, which depicted Ruby Bridges, the first black child to be sent to an integrated school, being escorted to school by the National Guard. Another painting, Dmitri Vrubels’ The Kiss (1990), shows Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German President Erich Honecker enthusiastically kissing each other. Lastly, poet Sharon Olds’s open letter to Laura Bush in 2005 explained why she wouldn’t attend the White House dinner in protest of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq War.

This long history of artistic resistance makes it no surprise that politics and poetry, like fear and faith, are inherently intertwined these days. With the Trump administration in full swing, there have been many artistic responses to Trump and the administration. However, as an editor seeking “politically adjacent” work for publication, I have to look for poetry that portrays life as we live it in the current political climate, but that does not descend into rant or diatribe. As writers observing this administration, people want to make their voices heard in opposition to those who silence them and a government that encourages that silencing. On the other hand, we seek work that utilizes all the resources of poetry. The feelings, thoughts, and emotions can and indeed should be present, but not at the expense of craft. It may be a fine line at times, but it’s all about a balance of creativity and message that successfully merges art and politics.

Politics is all about balance and messaging: the balance of the personal and professional life, the balance of catering to divided parties, the balance of different types of people that look to the politician to help them. Poetry is also about balance and messaging: the balance of poetic craft to tell a personal story. The balance of expressing thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and opinions in a way the draws the reader in rather than pushing the reader out. Politics and poetry have had their fair share of controversy that has made both mediums historically unique. Political moments like the Watergate scandal of 1974 and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (which faced and won an obscenity trial in 1957 upon publication) are landmark examples of that controversy.

Poetry is subjective. What, in the end, qualifies as poem as “politically adjacent”? What makes the merging of poetry and politics so enticing is that the reader experiences the poem as a conversation to which they have been invited rather than a lecture to which they have been subjected? There is no one way for the poet to balance their own creative objectives with the needs of the reader, just as there is no one way for the statesman to balance their own political agenda with the needs of the citizens whom they are elected serve. In both cases, it is a matter of craft.

Jada Gordon is a writer, editor, and poet from the Bronx, NY. She’s won the 2017 James Tolan Student Writer Award and published and edited the magazine for BMCC’s Writing Club, The Writers’ Guild. She’s also been published on WordPress and in Sula Magazine.

“Some Days It Seems We’ve Found It”: Jacques J. Rancourt’s “In the Time of PrEP”

Posted on August 16, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Book Review by Reuben Gelley Newman

In 1993, the black gay HIV+ poet Melvin Dixon, in his speech “I’ll be Somewhere Listening for My Name,” charged future generations, “by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us.” Jacques J. Rancourt’s chapbook In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018) not only takes up that charge, describing a present both startlingly different and unnervingly similar to Dixon’s past, but takes us to a somewhere where Dixon, perhaps, could be listening. In this somewhere, Rancourt can title a poem “I Don’t Go to Gay Bars Anymore,” then continue: “someone tells me & sure enough / another boards up.” In this somewhere,

The speaker both wants to live in that precarious Jerusalem — Rancourt’s San Francisco — and prays, simply, to live and to be seen. But this “holy city / swollen with light & sound…won’t last,” and its danger resounds through Rancourt’s tender, precariously balanced poems.

The chapbook begins with the expansive “Love in the Time of PrEP” — a title echoing Gabriel García Marquez’s famous book — in which the speaker and his husband are haunted by a rainbow, a “broken spectre,” while climbing a volcano. Everything is refracted — space, time, history — and the poem transitions seamlessly between intimacy and reflection, ending with “two Berkeley freshmen” who

This poem is on one level a plea for remembrance, but it also values those freshmen’s naivety. The chapbook’s epigraph, from the queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, reads: “My approach to hope…can best be described as a backward glance that enacts a future vision.” Rancourt’s own “backward glance” links the boy’s foolishness with that of some gay men in the ’80s who contracted HIV. He sees, in the present, a world where those boys can act “as if none of this every happened”: a world both freer and scarier. And in the future, he envisions a world where, perhaps, remembrance of tragedy can foster greater appreciation of our relative freedom.

The chapbook’s cover, an untitled collage by the artist Barton Lidicé Beneš, depicts a little boy playing with HIV pills and birds — whose bodies are made of the pills — eating them. To me, this juxtaposition of pills and play evokes the freshmen’s naivety and recalls Dixon’s devastating quip: “As for me, I’ve become an acronym queen: BGM ISO same or other. HIV plus or minus. CMV, PCP, MAI, AZT, ddl, ddC. Your prescription gets mine.” Rancourt is not an “acronym queen” — though PrEP, as he notes, stands for “pre-exposure prophylaxis, a pill taken daily to reduce the chances of HIV infection” — but there is play in his danger, and danger in his play.

Indeed, the sheer joy of Rancourt’s language and imagery shines through despite the constant threat of death. “The jizz drifts like smoke” through the “holy Jacuzzi” in “At the Place of Bathhouses,” but “what has happened before / will happen again—the fog belt will roll in with the chill / of the dead…” The incantatory “Litany” takes its wordplay seriously: every line begins with the words “One man,” yet midway through the poem we read how “One man slept with ten men & survived / Ten men slept with one man & died.” Instead of confronting a homophobe, the speaker of “The Counter-Protester in the City” leaves his wedding cake topper on a bench nearby, while his younger self

In the Time of PrEP comes on the heels of a very different book addressing HIV/AIDS in the present, Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead. For Smith, the “us” is more specific: black, queer, and HIV+. But the book rings with a similar yearning for utopia: “please, don’t call / us dead, call us alive someplace better” (“summer, somewhere”). These books — along with many, many more by queer writers of all colors and genders — answer Dixon, who ends his speech with a plea to support gay and lesbian publishing, because, he insists, “our voice is our weapon.” Rancourt’s voice, with its wide-ranging depiction of grief, love, and history, is not only a weapon but a medicine. In “The Fall,” there’s a boy who, during sex,

Imagine Dixon’s name spoken back into the past, echoing throughout the well of history. Imagine his name spoken into the future, “a backward glance that enacts a future vision” where queer, HIV+ voices can thrive. I’ve only hinted at the importance of religion to Rancourt’s work, but perhaps we can think of his vision as, rather than mere “hope,” an act of faith. Though the litany of men Rancourt remembers remain chillingly nameless, he prays for them — and prays for a different future — despite their anonymity. In The Time of PrEP speaks queer identities to the past, present, and future. It searches for that somewhere we might never truly reach.

Dealing with Rejection as a Young Writer

Posted on August 14, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post by Sophie Allen

As an emerging writer, I’m used to form rejections, personalized rejections, and the worst kind of rejection of all: no response. Getting rejected is incredibly demoralizing, and I’ve dealt with it in a lot of ways, ranging from healthy to damaging to unreasonable. Normally when I get rejected I can take a deep breath, remember that rejection has little bearing on the quality of my writing, and move on, but sometimes those emails hit me where it hurts. I do not recommend crying in public as a pastime, though I have partaken in it before and probably will again.

In some ways, it can be nice to get a rejection. It’s a sign that someone is out there, reading your work, and you should keep pushing forward until the person who reads your work decides it’s right for them or their publication. It still hurts to know that a person sat down, looked at what you wrote, and didn’t want it, but at least you know you’ve been considered. Not hearing back at all can be devastating, especially when it seems easy to press a button and send a form rejection.

It’s difficult to see the value in one’s effort if there is no payoff, whether it comes in the form of recognition, readership, or money. Yes, I write for myself, but it’s still work, and it’s gratifying to have that effort noticed by other people. This could also be due to the fact that I was brought up under an economic system where people’s value is determined by their output, but that’s a different blog post.

It’s a comfort and a burden to know that there’s no objective measure of talent in creative areas. I try to remember this when I doubt myself; I have no guarantee that I’m actually skilled or doing anything right except what meaning I can take from my own experiences. It’s up to me to decide what effect other people have on my morale and perception of my own work. I would like to think that every poem I’ve revised again and again, that I’ve cried over, that came to me in the middle of the night was worthwhile and intrinsically valuable, but part of me only believes the published ones have merit.

I had a poem published recently that I wrote in July of 2017. I’m very proud of it and I’d been sending it around for just shy of a year. Despite the numerous rejections I racked up since last summer, I still think this poem is pretty good and I think it deserved to be picked up; I’m extremely grateful that it was. But there are other poems of which I’m equally proud which might never be published at all.

For instance, I sent work to a journal recently and was told that a poem came “close” to being selected for publication. I still think the piece is pretty good and will continue sending it out, but it’s a little disheartening to see that someone liked my piece, but still didn’t think it was a good enough fit.

Still, it’s hard not to think of rejected pieces as bad poems, or at the very least, as not good enough, even if I know that a significant portion of the reading process relates to a publication’s aesthetic and its editors’ preferences. I think what I’m trying to reckon with as a writer with virtually no career experience is the idea that yes, I write because I love it, but loving something doesn’t pay the bills. There are a lot of things about this industry that need to change, and I’m not sure how to change them, but for now I need to accept that sometimes, everyone gets ignored. Everyone gets rejected. All I can do is work harder.

Writing Classics Queerly

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post by Reuben Gelley Newman

I’ve been thinking recently about the politics of writing a poem called “Ganymede and the Eagle.” You may be familiar with Yeats’ poem “Leda and the Swan,” which describes the Greek god Zeus taking the form of a swan and raping a human woman. But in the myth, Zeus also soared down from Olympus as an eagle to take a boy, Ganymede, to be his cupbearer. The story had obvious homoerotic subtext, and Ganymede’s name eventually morphed into the Latin word “catamitus,” a boy or effeminate adult male kept for anal sex by an older man, and the equivalent word “catamite” in early modern English.

Wait a second, adolescents “kept for anal sex by an older man?” Isn’t that child abuse? From a modern perspective, of course. From an ancient perspective, no. The Greeks in particular had a tradition of pederasty, in which young men were sexually pursued by older men and at least in theory received educational and moral mentorship as well.

This seems like a horribly unequal power dynamic to us, and it was. Many wealthy Greek and Roman men could have sex with women, boys, and slaves at their whim. It was also considered unmanly to bottom, or be in the “passive” role, and some poets dissed their enemies through sexual insults. For example, in one poem, the Roman poet Catullus tells his friends: “I will butt-fuck you and skull-fuck you, Aurelius, you pussy-boy, and Furius, you cocksucker!”

That’s a translation taken from a Huffington Post article by Indolent’s Michael Broder where he argues that this wasn’t hatred so much as camp. There’s definitely a debate to be had there, but the point is, however inequitable ancient Greece and Rome were, we can also recognize their queerness today. That’s what drives my desire to write about them.

Already, though, by thinking about it as “Ganymede and the Eagle,” I’m implying that Zeus rapes Ganymede like he rapes Leda in Yeats’ poem. I’m making it more familiar (if still horrific) to modern sensibilities by framing it as cis-white-God-rapes-young-innocent-boy. But who am I to do that? Is this how I’m sympathizing with the #metoo moment in an inauthentic way? And why do I need classics to do that anyways? Is classics just a bunch of Western canonical bullshit that writers are obsessed with?

I don’t have answers, but I can hint at some. I’m trying to talk about different ways queerness has been conceptualized across time, and how there’s queerness, in some form or another, everywhere. I’m queering classics, something poets like Carl Phillips and Reginald Shepherd have done for a while. I’m not at all the first to queer the Ganymede myth, either: see Jericho Brown’s powerful and chilling take here.

This trend fits into the broader paradigm of poets and other writers rethinking classics, as exemplified by feminist poems like Carol Ann Duffy’s “Eurydice” (available on Genius, of all places!) or epics like Derek Walcott’s Omeros. Because classical culture has influenced Western civilization in so many ways—both good and bad—I think this is important work.

But I’m trying to do it self-consciously. Right now, there are actually two poems: one a stripped-back retelling of the myth, the other a prose poem, weaving Ganymede in with broader concerns about Jewishness, queerness, and my own identity. They’re both ambitious, and I’ve gone through several drafts of each. In the first, I’m trying to portray Ganymede as more than just a passive victim, but I still wonder if I should write yet another poem in Ganymede’s voice, as Carl Phillips does with Leda in “Leda, After the Swan.” The second one has the potential to be too sprawling and disjointed, something I’ve worked hard against.

The joy of it is that I’m taking risks and asking myself the hard questions: about how poems can be political, about the politics of writing about classics, and about my own positionality. Although I feel like the poems are relatively finished now, who knows where they’ll take me? Their making, like the subject matter, is quite queer indeed.

Rap: The New Lyric Poetry

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post By Larayb Abrar

Editor’s Note: Starting today, we’ll feature a weekly blog post by one of our college interns on their experiences with poetry. Enjoy! — Reuben Gelley Newman, Intern and Blog Editor

When mining for poetic inspiration, I often turn to rap artists like Cardi B, Jay-Z or Kendrick Lamar. On the surface, their music might seem just like something to fuel a night of partying or to blast out your car on a midnight drive. We don’t think of Cardi B, with her flamboyant bright yellow fur coat and flaunting of her “red bottom” shoes, as belonging on the pedestal of “Great Literature.”

And maybe she shouldn’t be on said pedestal. Often, the best art comes from breaking the rules of tradition. If Cardi B were to publish her lyrics in a small chapbook, I can guarantee that she wouldn’t fully realize her persona of a woman who doesn’t take shit from anyone and isn’t afraid to push aside those who get in her way. Being a rap artist, like being a spoken word poet, allows the artist to create a persona and find new and unconventional methods of performance while busting some amazing rhymes. How often do we witness performances of strong no-nonsense women on TV, media, or even in real life? While Jessica Jones is a strong contender, characters like her are few. What about strong, no-nonsense women of color? Hardly ever. Similarly, Jay-Z and Kendrick take on the personas of hustlers who came from modest beginnings. Performances like theirs, which challenge the ways we understand femininity, poverty and power, are essential to creating new “normals” and thereby making great art.

This isn’t to suggest that rap music is all about the performance. While performance is a big chunk of it, the elements that give me poetic inspiration also include the musicality, the flow, and the aggressive, active subversion woven into rap music. To take two lines from the chorus of Cardi B’s 2017 single, “Bodak Yellow”: “I don’t dance now/I make money moves/Say I don’t gotta dance/I make money move.”These lines allude to her past as an exotic dancer at a strip club in order to make ends meet while she got a college education and paid the bills at home. In just these two lines she critiques the prevalence of sexual commodification in society, subverting the idea of a strip club as a place of male prowess and re-appropriating it as a place where she, the active agent, made “money move.” She cleverly structures the song to fold over itself with the repeating words, and these lines’ succinctness rival the lines of any traditional poet.

Kendrick Lamar accomplishes a similar feat in many of his songs, such as “How Much a Dollar Cost?” from his 2015 album “To Pimp a Butterfly.” In this song, he tells the story of his run-in with a homeless man at a gas station in South Africa who asks him for a dollar. The speaker refuses to give it to him because he thinks this man is a crack addict. After establishing the context of this narrative, Kendrick continues his monologue, in perfect rhythm and slant rhyme: “If I could throw a bat at him, it’d be aimin’ at his neck/I never understood someone beggin’ for goods/Askin’ for handouts, takin’ it if they could/And this particular person just had it down pat/Starin’ at me for the longest until he finally asked/”Have you ever opened up Exodus 14?/A humble man is all that we ever need/Tell me how much a dollar cost.” Tell me all this—including the biblical allusion at the end—isn’t enough to challenge the place of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues on most high school English syllabi.

Rap music and its musicians have created a subversive and creative culture of their own by penetrating the mainstream without becoming part of the “establishment.” Of course, Kendrick’s recent Pulitzer Prize win in April could change the way rap is currently perceived. While it is too soon to say, I can imagine rap music becoming a literary tradition similar to that of the sonnet.

Prior to informal poems becoming a serious subject of study, epics by the likes of Dante and Virgil dominated much of academic discourse. One of the first departures from this long-form style was by Francis Petrarch in the Middle Ages. Petrarch was a contemporary of Dante and Boccaccio. He was also heavily influenced by Virgil. Much of Petrarch’s work was based on that of ancient scholars and their poetry. However, Petrarch’s most famous work, the Rime Sparse, is a collection of 366 songs and sonnets, written in the vernacular. Through this fragmented piece, Petrarch attempted to tackle deep, introspective questions of identity, spirituality, and worldliness. This shift in form, in turn, allowed for poets all across Europe to explore humanist and confessional narratives previously untapped in the traditional epics.

Today, the sonnet is considered foundational to our understanding of modern poetry. But poetic traditions evolve, and the next step in the evolution may very well be rap or hip-hop. Both those genres retain the importance of rhyme and rhythm seen in the sonnet and many rap artists use the platform not only for textual expression of the personal or confessional but also for the physical performance of these narratives. Rap music could very well be considered new-age lyric poetry.

Robert Carr Reviews Madelyn Garner’s Hum of Our Blood

Posted on November 6, 2017 by spious

What Laughter? What Joy?

A Review of Madelyn Garner’s Hum of Our Blood

By Robert Carr

Some experiences require the passage of twenty years before you can write about them. This is the case with Madelyn Garner’s powerful Hum of Our Blood, published by 3: A Taos Press in 2017. In this collection, the author draws on her identity as a poet and as the mother of an artist, photographer Bradley Joseph Braverman. Brad died from complications of HIV disease in 1996, at the age of 34.

I write this review as a gay man, a poet, and a public health professional who has worked in the field of HIV prevention and care for over 30 years.

Garner shares powerful testimony in this collection. The poems are consistently evocative. What I admire, among so many things, is her simultaneous vulnerability and objectivity, her ability to relate to her son Brad as a mother—but also as a fellow artist.

Through these poems, Garner has found a way to bring her talented son back into the world. She has partnered with the dead—a challenge which I have been trying to understand and accomplish for most of my life.

Hum of Our Blood is skillfully organized into three core sections, tracing the course of Brad Braverman’s illness and the speaker’s response as mother and artist. Each of the three main sections opens with a triptych of poems, followed by a deep exploration of each phase in Brad’s AIDS diagnosis.

The book, through the order and titles of poems, succeeds in conveying multiples layers of meaning. For example, the first section “Triptych: Days of Diagnosis” includes the poems “As Ouija Board,” “As Etch-A-Sketch” and “As Playground Swing.” These titles introduce us to the horror of an AIDS diagnosis in the early days of the epidemic (before the availability of effective treatments) through the unlikely framework of the names of childhood toys.

An astonishing quality of Hum of Our Blood is the speaker’s readiness, willingness, and availability to inhabit the sexual life of her son. In “The Baths, 1982” we experience the throb of those years and that erotic milieu

…possessed cocks,

engorged and driven like pistons, exploding
in each pink-cheeked Mozart—creator

of complex études for four hands.

In the same poem, the speaker asks, in the voice of Brad Braverman, “How many times can I be kissed before I die?” This question opens a deep reality for many who survived the early AIDS epidemic. While reading Hum of Our Blood I found myself questioning the arbitrary nature of a pandemic. As a gay man who survived, I am now 58. Today, Brad Braverman would be 56. Each poem in this collection forces the reader, regardless of age, gender or sexuality, to evaluate meaning and value in their life. The poems express terror, but also call on the reader to find gratitude.

The arc of this collection is straightforward and elegant. We witness the transformation of the speaker and Brad Braverman in a series of lines with the power and concentration of epitaph.

In the triptych poem “Days of Diagnosis, As Playground Swing,” the speaker describes the young man, about to receive the fateful diagnosis, as ascending

…weightless—free—beyond the terror of what his blood tests will show.

Still fixable.

Deep into the collection, in the poem “What I Didn’t Know,” all has been transformed:

What laughter? What joy? He is unmendable.

Before his untimely death, Brad Braverman was an accomplished photographer represented by galleries from Los Angeles to New York. The book uses Braverman’s photographic images to extraordinary and heartbreaking effect. There are many examples, but perhaps none as powerful as the connection between word and photograph in the poem “Spring Lament.”

My womb, old empty pot, cannot replace
what it has lost, but I am ready to nurture
seedlings, tack clematis to trellis,
chase off aphid and beetles.

If only you will tilt.

These words are followed two pages later by a black-and-white Brad Braverman photograph of a paint chipped cast iron urn positioned in shadow. A sheet of white silk flows from the urn as if in strong wind. The connection between poem and photographic image is vivid, enhancing the narrative connection between mother and son. “Spring Lament” evokes “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” by William Carlos Williams, and we can imagine the speaker finding a parallel grief in Williams’s words:

Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.

Madelyn Garner does not flinch from describing the deepest grief and the tricks the mind plays in order to stay sane. In the poem “Schrödinger’s Cat” the speaker imagines a parallel world where Brad Braverman lives the life she had hoped for

My mind says Yes
to infinite copies of him coming
to the door, young
and transcendent with good blood,
bearing a kitten the color of shadows

Twenty-one years after Brad’s death, the author has found a vehicle for bringing the memory of her son to the door. She invites us to meet him, to appreciate their deep bond, and to learn from the power of their journey. These poems tap into a collective grief that remains relevant today.

Madelyn Garner

On a personal level, I experience this book as a gift. Reading and rereading the poems I found myself recalling my own mother, whom I lost 14 years ago. For years, from 1984-1994, she walked beside me at From All Walks of Life, the fundraising AIDS walk in Boston. She loved deeply, and she loved the young gay men that were in my life.

I will always treasure how strangers surrounded her on those marches. My mother became, in those moments, the mother of all those marchers. Men who had been rejected by their families flocked to her and she embraced them.

In this most personal of projects, Madelyn Garner has shown all of us that there are powerful women, powerful mothers, who still have our backs. This book is a healing force.

Publication details:
Perfect Paperback: 102 pages
Publisher: 3: A Taos Press; 1st edition (August 28, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0997201150
ISBN-13: 978-0997201154

Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, a chapbook published in 2016, and an associate editor with Indolent Books. Recent work appears in Assaracus, Bellevue Literary Review, Kettle Blue Review, New Verse News, Pretty Owl Poetry and other publications. He lives with his husband Stephen in Malden Massachusetts, and serves as deputy director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

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