By CJ Stobinski
Contributing Editor

In July 2015, my grandmother was diagnosed with stage four gallbladder cancer and was given nine months to live. She battled for her life until May 10, 2017, and lived mainly symptom free until the last month of her life, not even losing her hair during chemo. She saw another great-grand child come into this world, got to finally walk down the aisle at a grandchild’s wedding, and enjoyed another birthday and Christmas season, which she loved so much, that nobody but herself believed she would see. I read this at her funeral on May 16, 2017.

“I’ve gone back and forth since hugging my grandmother’s still warm body a week ago whether I should read this or not, but it’s been said nothing haunts us like the things we don’t say.”

I’m sorry for your loss. It’s this stupid thing we say to each other when someone dies and you can’t think of anything else to say. I’m sure more than one of you has said it today, maybe said it in this funeral home before. I’m sure I’ve even said it myself. It’s a way for us to retreat inward and protect our hearts from injury, from fully feeling something.

There’s a quote from my favorite movie (The United States of Leland) that’s stuck with me for over a decade: “I think there are two ways you can see the world. You can either see the sadness that’s behind everything, or you choose to keep it all out.” Another character says, “I recall when our lives were unusual and electric. When we burned with something close to fire, but now we sway to a different rhythm. Lives lived without meaning, or even directed hope. The passage of time measured only by loss. Loss of a job, loss of a minivan…a son.”

To me, a life measured by loss is one of the saddest existences imaginable, and my grandmother’s life will never be measured by loss. Humanity is so afraid of showing each other our hearts, of being vulnerable, raw. On October 11, 2014, I attended a funeral for my work manager’s husband. He was a master carpenter for the restaurant group and he renovated the restaurant I work at in February of 2012. They met, fell in love, and he proposed the summer before I started in 2013. Shortly after, he found he had stage four brain cancer. They got married despite everything and fought like hell. His showing was on their first wedding anniversary.

I sat through that funeral 11 days after learning that I was living with HIV, completely resistant to the idea of medication at the time, and wondered, what will people say about me at my funeral. The resounding voice in my head was, “Wow, this guy’s a DICK.” HIV forced me to examine my life, look in the mirror and see that it was anger, resentment, and bitterness I was carrying around from past childhood traumas which was slowly killing me on the inside, not HIV.

After I went on the news two years ago to advocate for People Living With HIV, my grandma reached out to me in my birthday card to make sure I was okay, all the while dealing with her first rounds of chemo. My grandmother was selfless. Her instinct was not to warn my younger sisters to not drink out of glasses after me as one immediate family member did. It was not to tell me I was sick for taking a single pill a day, as another family member did, a pill which gives me both a life expectancy of 70+ and an undetectable viral load I’ve maintained for over two years now, which brings the risk of transmission down to zero. Her instinct was to love without limits and expectations.

She once called me out of the blue. I was sitting on the floor of the dorm I lived in the year I went to college in Pennsylvania. I had decided to leave and not return so I could figure out my path to the person I exist as today. I hadn’t told anyone yet, but knew all the people who would look down upon me for leaving, for not living the life they expected me to live. I didn’t tell my grandma I was leaving, but she told me, “CJ, you can be whoever you want to be, whatever you do, I believe in you.” She had no idea how much that meant to me, how much it will always mean to me.

When I returned home, the person who needlessly warned my sisters told me I broke my mother’s heart by leaving school. It’s funny how we talk about people who live their lives to their own standards. When they’re alive, we call them hard-headed, stubborn, inappropriate, embarrassing even. When they’re dead, we say, “They did things their own way.” If we spent more time respecting that a path different from our own is not wrong, just different, maybe we could all coexist a little more peacefully.

In January, I traveled with Youth Across Borders to Honduras to a home for children living with and affected by HIV. Sixty percent of people with HIV in Central America live in Honduras, where 10% of children are born with HIV. Traveling to the second most impoverished country in the western hemisphere, naturally people asked, “What did you go to help them with?” But, you see, I went to Montaña de Luz, the Mountain of Light, next to the village of Nueva Esperanza, New Hope, to learn from the children and the people of Honduras who nurture their lives.

They taught me that money is not the only currency worth something in this world, that a smile, laughter, kindness, and looking someone in the eyes when you speak to them are worth their weight in gold and diamonds. Above all, they taught me that the one true universal language in this world is love.

They had this prayer in capilla every morning that I loved. I’m not much of a prayer, but whether you praise the Sun, the Moon, Vishnu, Allah, Jesus and his father Yahweh, or you oscillate towards The Big Electron, the core message is love: it doesn’t punish, it doesn’t reward, it just is. Anything further is a perversion. I like to say, “You can be certain you’ve created God in your own image when God hates all the same people you do.” My friend Emily would just say, “If it’s not LOVE, it’s a LIE. Emily 1:1” I still have some work to do obviously.

The children of Montaña de Luz prayed to Jesus Christos, who is really just the embodiment of love—love is above us (bring hands up above in an arch), love is below us (bring hands to shin-level in arch), love is in front of us (bring arms parallel to the ground in front), love is beside us (pull hands to torso and slide down), love is behind us (bring hands behind you almost parallel), and love is inside our hearts (bring hands up to your chest). Then repeat the hand motions.

My grandma was my favorite person in this world, because the only expectation she had when I was with her was that my heart was beating inside my chest. I didn’t see her very often in the last two years of her life, because frankly I’ve felt like a stranger when I’m around most of my family, that people are afraid to even speak to me, and it was easier to stay away.

When I got a great job finally not in a restaurant last year with Toledo/Lucas County CareNet, helping those less fortunate than me access life-saving health insurance, the two people I hoped would be grateful told me they didn’t believe my job should exist. My grandmother may have felt the same, but she just smiled and said “I’m happy for you CJ.”

It is said the single biggest regret people have on their deathbed is that they wished they had lived a life true to themselves, rather than the one expected of them. My grandma embodied this and wished to cultivate it wherever she went. She was never afraid to tell someone who thought “their shit did not stink” the truth.

I just finished a three-week program at a yoga studio where I’m certifying as a teacher this summer, and the first day I met a woman named Diana Patton. Just sitting in a circle with her I knew I was supposed to meet her. She asked us a question from her memoir, Inspiration In My Shoes. “Have you lived the best day of your life?” She added, “It’s when you decide that this life is your own, and you’re not something someone did to you, that you alone are responsible for your happiness.”

The next morning, I was meditating in the aerial hammocks at the studio, wrapped in a silk cocoon, looking up at what looked like wings reaching to the ceiling, and all I could think was, “Why would anyone choose to stay a caterpillar?”

Have you lived the best day of your life? Have you decided that this life is your own? Have you forgiven the people that hurt you? Have you forgiven the people who did not have the courage to apologize to you? Most importantly, have you forgiven yourself?

“I forgive you Chris (my mom’s husband), I forgive you Katie (my older sister), and Mom I forgive you, I’ll always forgive you.”

I know that my grandmother died with a satisfied mind. A week ago she decided to withdraw care and enter hospice. I got to the long-term care facility she’d been at for a few weeks just as the woman from hospice was talking about her morning transfer, and my grandma asked, “What now?” The worker said, “There’s a nice pond.” She was supposed to have five to seven days. Figuratively, my grandma said, “Fuck that shit, deuces wild bitches.”

I know this because the next morning I started my Mysore yoga practice at 5:30 A.M. with a prayer for peace for her, and I was stronger than I should have been on that mat. Right before I lay down in Shavasana, also known as Corpse Pose, I looked out the window and saw the sun was breaking through the clouds and I swear I heard her say, “You don’t need me to believe in you anymore, because now you believe in yourself.”

My mouth trembled with trepidation as I laid down to rest and I felt her peace wash over me. I was not surprised when my mom’s name appeared on my phone 20 minutes later, calling to tell me my grandma passed between 5:00 and 6:30 when I was practicing.

If you were at her 80^th birthday party, she said that she was going to beat this, and if you told me you believed her I’d call you a liar, because I saw the look on all your faces, and knew the look on my own. Doris Jean Akens, Smith, and later Larrow proved us all wrong, and beat this in her own way, on her own time. She saw so much life beyond what was expected, but in the end, she knew the truth that scares us the most: that nothing and no one in this world is worth holding onto, not even one’s life. She knew that, eventually, it’s just time to let go.

I got her this giant amaryllis for Christmas 2015, what was expected to be her last. It’s first bloom was the new moon in April last month, and she passed on the full “flower” moon on May 10th in Scorpio, her sign, and that I find peace in.

So please, don’t tell me you’re “sorry for my loss.” I gained a 26-year lesson in how to be a badass, how to love without expectations, and ultimately, how to let go. Instead, tell me about the time she convinced the county snow plow to give her a ride home from the bar in a blizzard and fell out of the truck three sheets to the wind. Tell me about how many times she told you the same story about shitting her pants that she loved to tell so much. Or please, tell me how funny it was to watch me dance and karaoke at six years old to Clarence Carter’s “Strokin’” at Larrow’s Town & Country, the bar she owned. “Cue the music….just kidding.” Just be real, raw, authentic, show me your heart.

My grandmother’s life will never be measured by loss, but by the life, love, and support she gave unwaveringly.

To close, I’d like to read a quote from the book, The Painted Drum, by Louise Erdrich, that has given me strength over the past few years.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself, you tasted as many as you could.

For Doris Jean Larrow
November 7, 1935-May 10, 2017

Contributing Editor CJ Stobinski is an activist and advocate for the HIV community. He serves as a Youth Ambassador for Youth Across Borders, as well as Youth Ambassador for the social media campaign Rise Up To HIV. He has competed in races wearing the campaign’s No Shame About Being HIV+ tee shirt since May 2015. CJ is currently on his Undetectable=Untransmittable Racing Tour, educating people about undetectable viral loads, and bringing people’s knowledge of HIV into the 21^st century. He is a Certified Community Health Worker in Toledo, Ohio, working as a Referral Assistant for the Northwest Ohio Pathways HUB, combating infant mortality and adult chronic health conditions. In his spare time, he loves to cook, play with his two fluffy cats, train for his upcoming triathlons, and is pursuing a yoga teacher certification.

For the month leading up to World AIDS Day on December 1, 2016, the HIV Here & Now project will resume the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day feature. A new poem every day by a different poet from November 1 to December 1, 2016. We know you will enjoy this brief return of the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day.

A Poetry Squawk
By Michael Broder
Author of Drug and Disease Free and This Life Now

I do believe some much-needed Squawk relief is quivering on the horizon, but I hate seeing these weeks go by without a fresh Squawk, so yes, okay, I’m going to Squawk again myself.

I’ve been doing various kinds of poet mentoring lately, and I keep telling my mentees about my favorite craft essay of all time, “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry” by Gregory Orr, which you can find in the excellent book, Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, edited by Gregory Orr and Ellen Bryant Voigt.

One mentee asked me whether their highly story-centered poetry was inconsistent with contemporary poetic standards. Made my day! And so, for my own Squawking pleasure if not yours, I reproduce here an appropriately edited version of my comments to them.

Story-centered poetry is not at all inconsistent with norms and standards of contemporary poetry—whatever that actually means (fodder for another Squawk and yes, I’m going to keep capitalizing Squawk). Very established, in fact, as one type of contemporary poetry. People often make a distinction between “narrative” poetry and “lyric” poetry where narrative poetry tells a story and lyric poetry expresses thoughts and feelings or uses language in a relatively abstract way. I don’t really buy that distinction. I think it’s more of a spectrum. Which brings me back to Orr’s “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry.”

Orr talks about poetry living on a sort of matrix in which story, structure, music, and imagination are the four quadrants (temperaments). Any poet finds their comfort zone somewhere on this grid, with sort of a primary “temperament” and at least one secondary temperament. All poems, according to Orr, have all four elements to one extent or another.

It’s fine to be a “story” poet by temperament, but to be the best poet they can be, a story poet needs to figure out how to integrate the other temperaments. It gets a bit more complicated because the temperaments are divided into two pairs, finite (story and structure) and infinite (music and imagination). Ideally, any poet’s secondary temperament would be of a different kind from their primary temperament. Story and structure are finite (meaning they tend to set limits on the poem), so these types of poets would want to try to cultivate music or imagination (which are limitless qualities, according to the way Orr uses these terms). And vice versa.

For Orr, and I think for most of us poets, music means things like rhyme, alliteration, assonance, rhythm, and simply the sounds of words themselves—short words, long words, sequences of words, balance of vowels and consonants, where stresses and pauses naturally fall, etc. Imagination may  be the squidgiest of Orr’s terms, but it’s also the one I am most intrigued by. He divides imagination into concrete imagination and abstract imagination. Concrete imagination is what we usually call “imagery,” sensual or sensory language, actual things and how they look, sound, taste, smell, or feel to the touch. Abstract imagination is thoughts, feelings, beliefs, ideas. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” (Whitman is the quintessential modern poet of abstract imagination).

Personally, I think I may be a story + abstract imagination poet. Maybe this poem is a good example.

Only you can say what your combination of temperaments is as a poet. If you buy what Orr is selling, and you feel that your primary temperament is story, then you want to push hard to cultivate music or imagination, either concrete or abstract. That doesn’t mean you pay no attention to structure (stanzas and fixed forms like the sonnet or villanelle and so forth); just keep in mind that your stories already structure your poems to a great extent, so you may not want to push too hard on the formal type of structure, it may render your poems overly “finite” and lacking in the dimension of infinity lent by music and imagination.

And that’s about where I left it with my mentee. If you haven’t already done so, get yourself a copy of Orr and Voigt’s Poets Teaching Poets and read Orr’s “The Four Temperaments” for yourself—it’s not much longer than the overview I’ve given here, but it’s infinitely richer in the original Orr. And think about your own poetic temperaments. Then go out and Squawk.

Michael Broder is the author of Drug and Disease Free (Indolent Books, 2016) and This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. He holds a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from New York University, and a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the founding publisher of Indolent Books and the creator of the HIV Here & Now Project. Broder lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and a backyard colony of stray and feral cats.

A Poetry Squawk
By Emari Digiorgio
Author of The Things a Body Might Become

I learned early that one does not bring poetry to people. It’s already there. Or here in Atlantic City, backlit by casino glare, it’s a silver dollar wedged in boardwalk pilings.

Even if people don’t call it poetry, they’re writing or singing or making music. They’re telling stories and delighting in language.

When I lived in New York, I could find a reading, or five, any night of the week, and because I was in a graduate creative writing program, people who read and wrote and valued the life of the creative mind surrounded me. Members of my MFA program were my community.

When I graduated and moved to southern New Jersey, I grew nostalgic about readings at the Bowery and late night poetry conversations at the Kettle and brunch workshops at my friend Gavin’s apartment. I was quick to assign my longing to New York, as if the place itself fostered community, but then I remembered being invited to a workshop in the East Village and being patronized and attending lots of readings where I was not treated as part of the in-crowd. So it wasn’t New York that I was missing but the people who supported my writing.

I was returning to South Jersey and Stockton University, where I had completed my undergraduate degree, so I knew the literary landscape. If I am honest, I will admit that I had my doubts about the no-scene scene. True, there were pockets of activity: a visiting writer series at the University that brought in four to six writers throughout the year and a few inconsistent open mics at local coffee shops. The region’s literary highlight was/is the long-standing (and fantastic) annual poetry and prose retreat The Winter Getaway, organized by Peter Murphy.

Instead of retreating to my apartment with my then twenty-year-old cat, I attended the inconsistent open mics, and at some point, I quieted my own wistfulness long enough to listen to what the members of the preexisting communities wanted. People wanted to share their work. They wanted writing prompts and workshops. They wanted these events to be free and well organized. They wanted to feel welcome and to improve their writing. I wanted the same.

The primary thing that separated us was that I had access to resources: I taught at the local university and could book space on campus or at any of the satellite sites, I knew poets I could invite as featured readers or to teach workshops, and I had experience teaching poetry outside of the academy.

Why not use these resources to help build the community we all wanted? But where and how to begin?

I chose to start in the classroom.

I have taught creative writing in community settings since 2004 to a variety of populations, including disabled adults at Goldwater Memorial Hospital; youth in the pediatric units of Weill Cornell University Medical Center; cancer survivors and caretakers at the South Jersey Chapter of Gilda’s Club; and elementary, middle, and high school students in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island, Newark, Middlesex, Bridgeton, Galloway, Atlantic City, and Cape May Court House, among others. In 2005, I was formally added to the roster of New Jersey’s official Teaching Artists.

These teaching experiences, Stockton University’s “undisciplined” liberal arts tradition, and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program led me to create GIS 3307, Why Poetry Matters. As a capstone General Studies course with a mandatory service-learning component, undergraduate juniors and seniors of all majors study international and American poetry, learn how poetry can be used as an agent of change (socially/politically/medically), and examine the ways in which poetry has been taught to foster a love of language and writing. Working in pairs or small groups, students offer one-hour poetry programs to underserved populations for six weeks.

Over the past nine years, my undergraduates have facilitated 65 six-week community writing workshops in Atlantic and Cape May Counties, working with a variety of populations including homeless youth at Covenant House; incarcerated teens at Harbor Fields Correctional Facility; children and teens through Family Service Association’s Partial Care Program; and youth at Stanley Holmes Community Center, Martin Luther King School Complex, and the Atlantic City Police Athletic League. As much as these programs offer young people an opportunity to express themselves and to share their stories, they also serve as a bridge, establishing true relationships between the undergraduates and the workshop participants. Everyone emerges a little changed.

While I was starting my literary citizenship mentoring undergraduates and providing free community workshops during the academic year, a local librarian, Aubrey Rahab, was starting her own open mic. Though the series was evicted from multiple sites, she was committed to finding it a home, and her passion and perseverance for creating a safe space for writers of all stripes was exactly what I was looking for. I committed myself to attending that series, even when it was held on the playground behind Ventnor City Library. When the series finally found its home at Stockton’s Dante Hall Theater, it was renamed World Above. As Aubrey accumulated additional duties as Director of the Northfield Library, I gradually found myself introducing the guest poets, hosting the open, and soliciting readers for the series. As I become more involved in planning the events and hosting them, I realized we could do a better job welcoming new voices and bringing in more diverse guest poets. In January 2015, Aubrey gifted me with the series.

To attract guest poets and to appropriately reward them for their travel and talent, I started asking the University and private donors for money. I began advertising the series in the local paper, through social media, and on the Poets and Writers calendar. I also restructured the reading itself, starting it with the open mic (and requesting that everyone read only one poem less than two minutes long). This order ensured that the feature would have time to answer questions and sell books and that individuals wouldn’t feel intimidated by the guest poet or arrive later to only participate in the open mic. I enlisted the help of the wonderful poet and teacher Barbara Daniels to write a monthly take-home writing prompt that we could distribute between the open and the feature, encouraging everyone to stay and to give everyone a literary parting gift. And I started inviting the guest poet out to dinner before or after the reading.

My hope is that each of these changes has made the space more inviting for monthly participants and for guest poets. Offering guest poets a modest honorarium and dinner (and my air mattress, if necessary) shows that we value their work and time, and more poets are willing to travel to Atlantic City for a two-hour reading. A more diverse group of guest poets has led to new attendees, and the stricter open mic rules curbed any of the over-sharers and encouraged more individuals to share their work. Similarly, the monthly prompt provided a mini-lesson for those who were interested.

While I was working with Aubrey Rahab on the World Above series, she and I met to talk about running a monthly intergenerational poetry workshop at the Northfield Library. The library had a vibrant programming calendar, and I knew from my own experience offering creative writing workshops to older adults that there was demand for a monthly program. Again, I wanted to secure funding for the series and applied for and received internal funds through Stockton’s Center on Successful Aging. Not only have we been able to host fantastic guest poets each month (including Diane Lockward and Lois Harrod), but we’ve also been able to assemble participant work into a perfect-bound anthology and to celebrate their writing with a reading and book release party. In the three years I’ve facilitated the series, monthly attendance has increased by 40%, several participants attend the World Above open mic and featured reading in Atlantic City, and two individuals have started submitting their work to regional/national literary journals.

No one encourages you to be a good literary citizen. In fact, many writers and my own mentors have warned how service to the literary community can and will distract from your own writing time. This is true. But I’m also capable of distracting myself from my writing with activities that don’t sustain my creative life (i.e. Facebook or a multi-step process for dry-frying tofu). I can’t tell you how many hours I spend mentoring students and helping them with their community poetry projects or facilitating World Above and A Tour of Poetry. I don’t need to know; for me, the trade-off is a community of which I am excited to be a part.

Emari DiGiorgio’s debut collection, The Things a Body Might Become, is forthcoming from ELJ Editions. She is the recipient of the 2016 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York and has received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Rivendell Writers’ Colony. Her poems are forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Compose, Glass, The Indianola Review, Opossum, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Redactions, RHINO, Southern Humanities Review, and Split Lip. She is an Associate Professor of Writing at Stockton University, a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, and the host of World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ.

A Poetry Squawk
By Michael Broder
Author of Drug and Disease Free and This Life Now

The first words of poetry I wrote as a grown-man poet were “Before you say a word.”

As a boy in love with writing, I wrote poems and stories. But more stories. And in any case I put the pen down for about 10 years, beginning at age 18. (Fodder for another Poetry Squawk.) When I resumed writing, it was stories. And my fiction writing energized me for several years. But at a certain point, fiction began to feel more like lies. Perhaps because my fiction was mostly autobiographical. I wasn’t inventing a character. I was donning a mask. And that came to feel false. And in response to that feeling, I thought something like, “I wish I could just say it.” It, meaning whatever I really meant. And when I sat down with steno pad and green felt-tipped marker to give it a shot, it came out as a poem of direct address: “Before you say a word, I am yours.”

That began a period of some ten years in which I wrote primarily what you might call classically lyric poems, poems of love, longing, and loss addressed to a second person, addressed to a you. I’m a [trigger warning: pejorative term for sexual minority reclaimed in a reverse-discursive gesture of self-empowerment] FAG, so my addressee was…well…not really anyone is particular, and yet little pieces of a lot of young men. It was sort of what I was supposed to have been doing in writing fiction: inventing characters. For some reason (which reason you’d think I would identify in this squawk but I’m not sure I can), I could do it more easily in verse than in fiction. Perhaps because it was a you. Perhaps it was easier for me to reimagine you than it was to reimagine me.

I believe my attraction to the lyric poem of direct address was a legacy of my life as a classicist, i.e. a student of Ancient Greek and Roman language, literature, and culture. Cf. Sappho, Fragment 31, which begins (the translation is my own)

He seems to me to be equal to the gods,
that man who sits across from you
listening to your sweet voice…

The poem goes on the explain how “that man” keeps his cool, while the speaker, on the other hand, totally loses her shit—heart pounding, speechless, burning, blind, deaf, sweating, trembling, pale, she feels as if she is about to die.

We don’t really know who the speaker is—how much it is Sappho and how much it is not. And we don’t really know who “that man” is. To me it is has always felt like a generalization or a hypothetical, not any specific real-life man. It does seem to be a man, as opposed to a woman, because Sappho uses a masculine form of the adjective “equal” in line 1 and uses the word “man” in line 2. On the other hand, until quite recently, writers often cast their same-sex desires as opposite-sex desires to defy censorship or persecution. So who knows?

But more important, for my purposes here, is how these indeterminacies serve the poem. This goes back to what Poetry Squawker (and my husband) Jason Schneiderman wrote a couple of weeks ago about poetry and autobiography. In fact, when I asked him to write that Squawk, I was struggling with this Squawk. Jason wrote about how autobiographical detail can work in a poem if it serves a purpose larger than autobiography. Or as Jason put it, “If it’s a meditation on a theme, good. If it’s just stuff that happened to you, bad.”

Agreed. But something else, too. Something more specifically about the poem of direct address. I’m not here to say what makes a good poem or a bad poem, or what makes a poem good or bad. But I am here to say that poems of direct address may be more successful, may be more satisfying both to poet and to reader, if the poet generalizes both the “I” and the “you” of the poem.

Let me state right off that by “generalize,” I do NOT mean you should eliminate specificity, especially not specificities of race, ethnicity, class, sex, or gender. This is not about Aristotelian “universal in the particular.” This is NOT about making all poems White People Poems. Rather, I am talking about generalizing from the poet’s own experience, which is, of course, always specific, and always racialized, classed, sexed, gendered, etc. But even intersectionality can be generalized as a matter of poetic craft.

As I write this, I’m thinking about a particular poem of my own, “Instead Of Names,” which appears in my first book, This Life Now. The first stanza reads

Now I wait in familiar locations—
the park, the promenade,
any place I think you might find me.

Now, This Life Now is chock full of poems addressed to a second person. The “I,” however, is not the same in all the poems, nor is the “you.” And by that, I do not mean merely that they refer to different real-life people, although that may be the case, too. What I really mean is that the “I” varies in how much it is or is not me, the poet, Michael Broder. And the “you” varies in how much it is or is not any particular “you” (Randy, Marcos, Tony). And if that’s not already freaky enough, the “I,” and in particular the “you,” can change on successive readings. And even freakier yet—I, the poet, Michael Broder, can understand the “I,” and especially the “you,” in a particular poem differently over time.

The reader soon learns that “Instead of Names” is describing a cruising scenario (cruising, as in men in public places looking for other men to have sex with; it’s a thing from before the Internet). The speaker, it turns out, is not waiting for any absent beloved (slash) old boyfriend at all, but rather for what we used to call a “trick,” someone to have sex with just this once, right now, in this park or, well, maybe not right there on the promenade (although if I remember correctly, there was this one time on the Brooklyn Heights promenade…). The “you,” then, is the guy the speaker encounters: “When you arrive / I sidle up….” Okay, fine.

Or is it? Later we read, “For a while you stay and I think it’s what I wanted….” So, wait a second, when did this all happen, exactly? It didn’t. Or it did, but the poem is not referring to any one specific time, any one specific episode of cruising, any one specific trick. This is just a sort of thing. The sort of thing that happens (to wit, the very first word of the poem) now. And when, precisely, is “now”? (Not to be confused with “How Soon Is Now,” a classic Smiths song; the Smiths—it’s a thing from before the Internet). (But I just stopped to listen to “How Soon Is Now” and the song and the poem are TOTALLY RELATED, so, there’s that.)

So, this is all very nice explication de texte, but I fear I’m losing the thread about autobiography versus generalization and the poem of direct address. To keep it in terms of my poem “Instead of Names”—Yeah, I, the poet Michael Broder, cruised for sex in parks, promenades, and other public places. Successfully. I mean, there was the having of sex. Sex was had. In public places. By me, the poet Michael Broder. And that more than kind of makes its way into this poem. So you could say that’s autobiographical. But that’s not really the point (or as the poet once said, “That is not what I meant, at all”). The poem, it turns out, is really about that very first word: Now. Before, the speaker was intimately connected to people he knew by name. Now, it’s different; casual, anonymous: No names—This is what we have instead of names.

And so, yes, it’s a poem about AIDS. Sort of. I mean, for me, all those classically lyric poems of direct address about love and loss were about what it was like for me to be me, in my late 20s (slash) early 30s, living with HIV, facing not only the possibility (slash) probability of my own imminent doom, but also what it was like to be, for all intents and purposes, perfectly healthy in this world of gay death, dying, and ongoing, immeasurable, seemingly insurmountable grief. And for me, for whatever reason (which reason I said many paragraphs ago I did not think I could identify), these poems had to be poems of direct address, poems to you. I mean, there’s no reason a lot of those yous could not have been hes:

Now I wait in familiar locations—
the park, the promenade,
any place I think he might find me.

See? Perfectly fine. Or is it? Clearly, I, the poet Michael Broder, did not think so back circa 1995. “I saw you standing on the fire escape” could not be “I saw him standing on the fire escape” (“Variations”). Nor could “the dark hole you sleep in beneath your parents’ house” have been “the dark hole he slept in beneath his parents’ house” (“Tony Poem”). In fact, when I was writing “Tony Poem” (which took YEARS), an often very wise teacher said the poem did not work with a second-person addressee, not because Tony was dead, but because Tony, wherever he was, as a poetic fiction, as a person in the poem, already knew all of the biographical details about Tony. So my recounting to Tony the details of his own life did not make sense and tended to push the reader out of the poem. I didn’t buy that. Maybe because I grew up with a mother who had no problem accusing you repeatedly of wrongs you committed 30 years earlier (and, I mean, in the second person, imprecations of direct address, to be sure). Maybe because I believed that Tony, wherever he was, LOVED hearing me address him directly. Could not get ENOUGH of me talking about him. And WANTED me to refer to him as “you,” a poetic memoir, or memorial, or elegy, of direct address.

Mostly, I think, I wrote poems of direct address because I wanted intimacy. And of course, a poet can write an intimate poem in the third person, letting you, the reader, in on the secret of him, her, them, or it in the poem. But that did not work for me, at least not in the poems I was writing then, the poems I was writing then about a new kind of now that, at least in the opinion of my Muse, demanded a return to some very ancient poetic traditions.

Michael Broder is the author of Drug and Disease Free (Indolent Books, 2016) and This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. He holds a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from New York University, and a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the founding publisher of Indolent Books and the creator of the HIV Here & Now Project. Broder lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and a backyard colony of stray and feral cats.

A Poetry Squawk
By Michael Broder
Author of Drug and Disease Free and This Life Now

I’m not supposed to write the Poetry Squawk. Other poets are supposed to write the Poetry Squawk. But I’ve failed to line up a Poetry Squawk for today. So I’m writing the Poetry Squawk.

And I’ve decided to write about Writing While Old. Which I am. Old. And writing. While old.

Indolent Books—whose guiding tenets include diversity, inclusion, innovation, provocation, and risk—started as a home for poets over 50 who did not have a first book. That mission expanded; but Indolent remains a press on the lookout for poets over 50 who write worthily but have managed, despite their best efforts or because of them, to stay under the publication radar.

But this post is not about me being an old fart publisher, or Indolent books having an eye out for old fart poets. This post is about Writing While Old.

Writing While Old is a thing. Because Everything While Old is a thing. The other night on Better Things, the quirky and wonderful and wonderfully quirky new sitcom by Pamela Adlon (who just turned 50 ), Adlon’s character, Sam Fox, asks her gynecologist after a routine exam, “Have I shut down down there? Am I a man yet?” She has not, as it turns out; in fact, her gynecologist tells her, she has “the reproductive system of a 16 year-old.” So the episode turns out to be about Sam’s dealing not with aging out of reproductivity, but with the persistence of fertility, much to her surprise, and even to her chagrin, as she expresses a fervent desire to be done with fertility: “Please tell me I’m close to being a man,” she says, “no more periods.”

It’s fascinating to me that Adlon’s character (written by Adlon) talks about menopause in terms of becoming a man. Aging out of womanhood and into manhood by becoming infertile and non-reproductive (or as a virologist might say of a virus, replication-incompetent). Interesting, too, that this episode of the series is called “Period.” A term of punctuation, yes. Also, though (here comes my inner classicist), a Greek rhetorical term that means “the way around,” from the prepositional prefix peri– (around) plus the noun hodos (road).

While period is etymologically a Greek term, the notion of periodicity was probably more crucial to Latin rhetoric. The Roman statesman and orator Cicero may be said to have perfected the periodic sentence (from the Latin noun sententia: thought, idea, or opinion), which is sort of like the blade on your food processor, with two curved, wedge-shaped wings that meet at a central hub. The classical Latin periodic sentence starts, be it with a shout or a whisper, incomplete, tantalizing, arresting, like Gypsy Rose Lee peeling off one glove. Clause by clause it unfolds, blossoms, such that maybe you know where it’s going, or you think you know where it’s going, or you hope it’s going where you think it’s going. It appears to be opening outward, but in fact its force is centripetal—seeking the center. Then it hits the hub, comes to a pause, a bare momentary standstill, like a ball you toss up, at that infinitesimal moment of stasis before it comes back down. But it’s not coming straight back down; it’s rolling down the side of a mountain, gathering momentum, speed and force. As it hurtles towards its conclusion, the sharp point on the other side of the rotary blade, the Latin period resolves all its syntactic cliffhangers, ticking them off one by one in reverse order, so you comprehend the hub of the sentence first, then each wedge of this verbal color wheel gets its complementary opposite—red its green, yellow its violet, blue its orange, until it reaches it rhetorical climax, its Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? moment.

Older age can feel like a period in the punctuation sense, an end, the end of fertility, aging out of replication competence, drying up, fading, withering. As young poets, we bear every verse like a child, we conceive it, gestate it, give it birth, and rear it. And that seems to make sense to us when we are young poets, when we are in our reproductive years, when we are having our period, or as Adlon’s character puts it later in the episode, giving an impromptu speech at a women and girls empowerment program at her daughter’s school, when we are “bleeding.” As older poets, we may have stopped bleeding, or we may have atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, slow, sluggish blood. Just as we saw our youth as a metaphor for our poetry, we may come to see our older age as a metaphor, too, and our poetry may suffer, our sense of being poets, our sense of being competent to write poems. I know I struggle with that seemingly inexorable paradigm creep, that the aging and increasingly infirm state of my body, and even of my mind, may become, may already be one with the decrepit state of my creativity, my poetry.

So what do we do? What’s the secret to Writing While Old? I dunno. I don’t know where this is going. I hope it’s not going where I sometimes, where I often fear it is going. This is probably not a one Squawk topic. This is probably just the initial throat clearing of a much larger, longer, louder, more plaintive and wailing squawk.

But I can offer a few suggestions. Some pretty self evident so I hesitate even to make them. Keep writing. Keep reading. Keeping submitting work to journals. Keep working on manuscripts and imagining them growing up and getting out of the house and moving into their own homes on printed pages between two covers in people’s hands. Go to readings. Read in open mics. Socialize with younger poets, so you know what direction they are taking poetry in; and socialize with older poets, poets your own age, poets who share your concerns about aging, and poets with whom—don’t underestimate the importance of this—you can bitch about younger poets: about how they are (sometimes?) getting valued for their youth and beauty, their taut bodies and their robust and regular menstrual periods, as much as for the accomplishment of their poetry.

And one last thing: read Plato’s Symposium. It’s about a lot of things, but in part it’s about philosophy as a creative and reproductive process. In the speech of Socrates, this philosophical creativity is posited as homosexual and opposed to heterosexual biological reproduction. And that’s fine, as far as it goes. But you can also apply what Socrates is saying to other realms, to other binary opposites. You can apply it to age versus youth, for example, instead of (or in addition to) homosexual versus heterosexual. And you can apply it to poetry instead of (or in addition to) philosophy. In fact, for the ancient Greeks, poetry and philosophy were never far apart. The Greek word sophia, wisdom, was often applied specifically to the wisdom of poets, as we see for example in the odes of Pindar. Once we are willing or able to view wisdom as an aspect of poetry, it’s not a huge leap to conclude that old age, which allows for the possibility of accumulated wisdom if not its certainty, may in fact be a very ripe environment for the ongoing creation of poetry. And that the period at the end of our youth, the age at the end of our period, may be the point at which our poetry has just reached its centripetal hub, the point at which it begins to spin out towards it periodic conclusion, gathering force, resolving its syntactic cliffhangers.

At long last, have you left no sense of decency? Perhaps not, in the sense of decency as standards of propriety and literary decorum. Perhaps, as older writers, we are finished with that. And perhaps that’s a good thing. For poetry. For Writing While Old. When the universe shuts down one period, perhaps it opens another.

Michael Broder is the author of Drug and Disease Free (Indolent Books, 2016) and This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. He holds a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from New York University, and a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the founding publisher of Indolent Books and the creator of the HIV Here & Now Project. Broder lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and a backyard colony of stray and feral cats.

A Poetry Squawk
By Noah Mendez
Poet whose work appears in Defining Myself: Transmasculine Experience Through Poetry

In my experience, there are two common pieces of advice you’ll get about writing poetry: (1) write about what you know, and (2) write about what you don’t know. In the first half of my writing development, I tended to go more Tumblr style: combining the fantastic with extensive metaphors and overly obvious sentences. But as time went on, I realized I was slowing down in my writing process and bumping into writer’s block, even as I continued to have experiences that were definitely worth incorporating into my poetry. I was blind to all the memories and childhood moments that would actually be relatable to my audience, and yet I was still wondering why most of my work didn’t seem very popular with readers.

This all changed when my boyfriend David (not his real name) broke up with me two days before my birthday. I was taking solace in the arms of my best friend and I mentioned that I was slightly happy about the whole situation, because then I’d never have to tell David that sometimes I felt like a boy. Eventually, those feelings of sometime became full time, and I slowly started coming around to the fact that perhaps I was a boy. In order not to get overwhelmed by these feelings of confusion, internal denial, and budding discovery of men’s fashion, I turned to my writing to let out all the thoughts and questions I had for myself. Like, what was the etiquette for men’s bathrooms, what name did I want to go by, and how would my friends and my lovers take my transformation even as my physical self didn’t change? I put all my fears and worries into poetic verse, shying away from fantasy and into almost biographical prose. My writing ended up evolving with me: from internal disgust and fear at myself and my situation, to acceptance and careful exploration, to advocating for my right to co-exist in the world, as well as the right of others.

Being a trans male has led me to realize that my own life experiences are worth incorporating into my writing and toying with to create a both relatable and entertaining piece that touches people’s hearts. I did a poem at a slam last spring on being trans and having sex, and afterwards I had a fellow contestant come up to me and tell me their boyfriend was moved by the poem. These days, I mostly stick to writing about romance and life and how specifically I navigate that while being a male with the body of a female. I think it has made not only my poetry better, but my life. I see life as a masterpiece, and through the art of writing, I’m just filling in the canvas. I can only hope others will enjoy the outcome as much as I enjoy the process.

Noah Mendez’s work has appeared in journals including The Phoenix Rising Review, Brouhaha Magazine, The HIV Here & Now Project, Thank You For Swallowing, and Three Drops from a Cauldron, as well as in the anthology Defining Myself: Transmasculine Experience Through Poetry (Boundless Endeavors, 2016). He has performed at Urban Word and the Apollo Theater. Noah is a first-year student in forensic psychology and English at Syracuse University.

A Poetry Squawk
By Jason Schneiderman
Author of Primary Source and other books

When my mother read my first book, she said, “You were paying closer attention than I thought.” Then, over the years, before she died, she expressed her amazement that I was so comfortable revealing so much of myself.

When my older brother read my first book, he picked up on his one cameo in the whole collection, and tried to set the record straight: “I didn’t tell you that the word gullible means how strong you are; I said it was the sum total of a person’s positive qualities.” I told him that my memory was the same as his. I changed the detail because it made it a better poem.

Novelists are often assumed to have pulled their narratives from headlines or autobiographies (c.f. Philip Roth’s inability to set the Wikipedia article straight for The Human Stain), but the reader knows that novelists are making their own world, regardless of source material. Memoirists are expected to just recount what happened, with some license for hyperbole (I’m looking at you, David Sedaris), but not too much.

Poets end up in the middle. Because we work in persona, if we’re doing our job right, the reader feels an intense intimacy with the speaker of the poem, and how can that speaker not be the poet? Anyone who has tried to run a workshop will know how terribly difficult it is (but how necessary) to delineate between speaker and poet. Have you ever been in a workshop where you find yourself saying, “I think the speaker of the poem needs to break up with the boyfriend in the poem, because the boyfriend in the poem seems not to be as into the speaker, even though the speaker seems in denial about the ways the boyfriend in the poem is actually kind of a jerk.” I have. Not my proudest moment.

Readers also have to remain skeptical on both sides of the equation. You can’t assume that everything really happened to the poet, but you also can’t assume that everything didn’t. You have to stay in this gray space, where the speaker is and is not the author. I used to enjoy poetry gossip because it clued you in to who was being autobiographical and who wasn’t. Now I guess you just ask the poet on Facebook—if you want to know. Which much of the time, one doesn’t need to.

Since I have to offer some advice here, my basic rule for what makes a good poem is roughly the same as my rule for what makes a good memoir. If it’s a meditation on a theme, good. If it’s just stuff that happened to you, bad. My favorite memoir is Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, which is a meditation on what it means to be disfigured. Dave Egger’s Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a meditation on grief, loss, and responsibility for about eighty pages, and then becomes just stuff that happened to him (an unsuccessful audition for The Real World is a hard fit for a meditation on grief, loss, and responsibility). Grealy omitted the fact of her unblemished twin sister because readers would have seen her as a parallel version of her without cancer; the other Gwyneth in a literary Sliding Doors.

In Marie Howe’s masterpiece What the Living Do (Cornelius Eady, I have your copy, and if you want it back, let me know), a number of the poems seem to transcribe conversations with her brother before his untimely death from AIDS-related illnesses. Consider the ending to her poem “One of the Last Days”:

One of the last days, I told him, You know how much you love Joe?
That’s how much I love you. And he said, No. And I said, Yes.

And he said, No. And I said, You know it’s true.
And he closed his eyes for a minute.

When he opened them he said, Maybe you’d better start looking for
somebody else.

It’s almost impossible not to attend to the prosody of the poem—the omitted quotation marks, the sentences that start with “and”, the pacing and the lines. But it also proves, I hope, my earlier point about the double skeptic mind of a poetry reader. Starting with the assumption that this must be factually true, which is why it is so moving, is an insult; similarly starting with the assumption that this must be made up, or embellished or constructed is also an insult. The power of the poem lies in a messy nexus of craft, theme, history, biography, and love. There is no centrifuge that can pull these components apart, and thank God for that.

Consider this passage from Carl Phillip’s famous poem, “Singing”:

Overheard,
late, this morning: Don’t blame
me, if I am everything your heart
has led to.

Here is that moment where, as a reader, I don’t care if that’s factually true or not. If Carl Phillips actually heard that on the morning he wrote the poem is entirely beside the point. The thematic encapsulation is so perfect, only the most literal of readers would demand to know if Phillips actually overheard that line. And now that I’ve conjured this imaginary literal reader, it breaks my heart to think that he could be unmoved by this poem without knowledge that it actually happened.

Before I met my husband Michael, I had only written explicitly about people I knew a handful of times, only to be told some version of “That’s what you think of me?” Michael encouraged me to write about him, and we’ve had something of a love affair across five books (two of his, three of mine), and everything we’ve said about each other is true—but partial. When I was listening to Michael read poems about me at a reading in Atlantic City recently, I was deeply moved, but almost in the way that I would be if I weren’t me. In fact, the host asked me if I’d like to read a poem that evening, and I was honored, but I declined. I didn’t want to interfere with the version of myself that Michael was about to create.

My mother thought that I had revealed a lot more of myself than I actually had. For me the most embarrassing poems are not the ones that deal in autobiographical fact, but the ones that reveal my thought process and desires. I feel truly naked as a thinking and feeling being, not as a guy to whom things have happened. I’m rarely interested in biography, and while I don’t believe in the universal human subject, a poem cannot help but traffic in experience that is larger than authors themselves. To write autobiographically, experience has to be a mode of inquiry, not an end unto itself.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Primary Source (Red Hen Press, 2016) winner of the Benjamin Saltman Prize; Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press, 2010), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize; and Sublimation Point (Four Way Books, 2004), A Stahlecker Selection. He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2016). His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House. Jason has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.  He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004, and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in 2011. He is Poetry Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review and Associate Editor at Painted Bride Quarterly.  Jason Schneiderman is an Associate Professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York.