How Editions Mean: Walt Whitman Redesigns his Book

It's Walt Whitman's birthday, and today Sally Keith and I read at the Library of Congress to celebrate. I was especially delighted that the Special Collections Librarian had prepared a display of marvelous materials: editions, correspondence, and rarities such as a volume of the Calamus poems combined with Whitman's letters to Peter Doyle -- a most telling combination -- actually signed by Doyle! And printed in an edition of all of five copies, in the early years of the 20th century; those must have been intended for a very special audience.

I have a reproduction of the first edition of Leaves of Grass from 1855, but my copy doesn't do justice to the subtlety of the original: the gold lettering on the cover, with the title branching into roots at the bottom of the letters, and the embossing on the cover are more subtle and handsome than I knew.

But what really excited me was seeing the 1856 edition, which Whitman had boldly self-published after the first edition of the previous year sold not a bit. I'd always assumed it followed the same design, but far from it: the new version is small and thick, and it's been trans-formed from a coffee table book for the parlor to a sort of testament -- a volume smaller than the average contemporary paperback, but quite thick. And still green. Just the thing to fit in a good-sized pocket, and looking very much like a testament, which leaves me thinking about how the poet must have understood his book differently, after that year. The new design seems to reflect a new sense of purpose; by 1856, Whitman was going to get that thing into readers' hands.

The misery of self-googling

This morning I made one of those mistakes it seems nearly impossible to avoid now and then.  A Whitman fan asked me about some essays I've published -- parts of a book-in-progress -- and I went searching to see if I could find links to them online. In other words, I googled myself, at least in reference to some particular pieces of prose. If you even a shred of a public life, self-Googling is risky business.  You may turn up a pleasant surprise or two, but it's almost inevitable that you'll stumble upon something you'll wish you hadn't read.

I found myself reading responses to an essay I published in GRANTA, a piece called "Insatiable" that centers on  Whitman, Bram Stoker, the character of Dracula, and the notion of desire as a continuous hunger for what the world has to offer, a hunger that can become boundless and self-perpetuating. It's a frank essay; I'm working, in this book, on a kind of liminal turf between criticism and memoir, and in order to use this method of reading (looking at one's own life through the lens of the poems that matter most to one) I have to talk about my own experience, and place it on the page next to what I read. I am finding this a peculiar balancing act, exhilarating when it works -- and then, every now and then, I find myself thinking, Oh, why am I talking about me?

To my considerable surprise, "Insatiable" was chosen for THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2012, a nifty honor that brings a wider readership. So there I am, in a widely distributed anthology that many people teach, talking about my own sexual adventuring, and the sometimes uncomfortable feeling of "feeding" -- like the hungry poet or the ravenous Count  -- on the energies of others. As one who has written often in affirmation of desire, and on the transformative powers of eros, it seemed important to examine a darker aspect. Why would Bram Stoker say that he based his famous character on "The Good Gray Poet"?

I myself don't think I said anything terribly shocking, but then I live in an urban gay culture in which frank talk is an everyday matter. There's nothing in my piece than isn't mentioned in "Howl," or in the writing of many others. And yet there are elements of the essay that seem to trigger a fair amount of discomfort for some readers, and thus the dollop of online vitriol I wish I'd skipped. Reading it feels like sipping a little dram of poison.

So I find myself trying to think through some of the questions the experience raises.

First, why do I care? I know perfectly well that -- as the wonderful fiction writer Gladys Swann once said -- if you stick your head out of a hole someone will either give you roses or swing at you with a baseball bat. It's in the nature of putting work out into the world, and therefore one just has to find ways to ride out the rough spots. My nature is to more-or-less dismiss the praise and pretty much memorize the condemnations, an old habit and not a useful one; because I know this about myself, there are negative reviews of my work I've never read, and don't plan to. Those voices get stuck in one's head, and truthfully I say enough negative things to myself already,

What I read today were tiresome, homophobic screeds. I know on a broad level there is nothing personal about homophobia; someone who's disgusted by the content of my work isn't disgusted with me, per se, but with me as a representative of a loathed, unacceptable category. But it feels personal, especially when one is writing openly, speaking with the sort of vulnerability that feels to me required for the making of art.

What is summoned up by random nastiness on the net is my own old, stubborn, never-to-be-entirely erased sense of shame. How could it not be? In a time and family where I grew up, the particular transgression that seemed written on my face was somehow simultaneously invisible and declared completely unacceptable. That was written in my nervous system very early on, and to this day there are moments when I feel a kind of internal tensing, a cringe, when I pass a guy on the street in tighter-than-anything pants and elfin boots, carrying aloft a shining aura of gayness. I used to think my response was some relic of internalized homophobia, but when I looked a little deeper I understood that what I felt was fear; I was afraid that boy wasn't safe; he was too visible, too endangered; to be like that was to be hurt.

Probably one of the ways I've responded to the climate in which I grew up -- and to that sense of worthlessness programmed into me -- was to make myself charming. Not an unusual strategy, to seek to overcome prejudice by making oneself likable in spite. There are times when I've viewed this, especially as a performer, as a political strategy. I speak and read in high schools sometimes, and it feels like a kind of mission, not entirely apart from the work of poetry, to say to those audiences, Here I am, a man who loves other men, committed to being direct and emotionally forthright with you. I know from experience that this can change attitudes, and that it can mean the world to a queer kid in Ft Worth or Omaha, who's never had anyone like me show up at school before.

But there are clear dangers in the quest for approval. Allow the decisions one makes about one's work to be shaped by what an imagined audience will enjoy, or worse, approve of?  In that direction lies sentimentality, false witness, and the denial of complexity. You simply have to put in the poem or essay what the piece requires; there is no way around that, though sometimes I wish there were. Actually, that moment when I find myself saying, somewhere into a draft, "Oh, do I have to say this?" is often a crucial one: when I begin to resist what I'm writing, when it feels unnerving or overwhelmingly charged -- well, that's when it's beginning to work.

But one price of that is living with a degree of disapproval, something I find easier to do in some parts of my life that others. When I go out traveling as a visiting poet and memoirist, giving readings and talks,, no one says anything homophobic to me. I'm sheltered by my position,  by politeness and social convention. If there are undercurrents of prejudice, I don't have to hear them. But go online, take a lok
at the anonymous comments, and there are. I'd be curious to hear about the ways others manage this, or fail to; it's a sticking point, and probably a potential place of growth, too. How not to be sideswiped by the nasty stuff,  how to accept a little battering and move on?

The single obvious conclusion: no self-Googling, particularly before noon.

Jan de Heem and the Auras of Objects

I'm really grateful to Anthony King at The Kenyon Review for a) coming up with a resoundingly smart and engaging set of questions for me in response to STILL LIFE WITH OYSTERS AND LEMON, and b) persisting for months in asking me to answer them, long after most people would have given up.

The result is a beautifully presented interview, complete with terrific images of de Heem's paintings. The Munich still life I talk about in the text is here -- the one with the crucifix and skull. The original is quite large (say three x three, maybe four x three) and the background is blacker than in appears here. It's not easy to find an image of this turbulent, strange painting, which I am pretty sure I have more to say about, and I'm thrilled it's here.

Here's a toast to editorial persistence, and thanks again to A.D. King. You can see what I  mean at
The Lessons of Objects: An Interview with Mark Doty.

The hurricane, Fire Island, the old house, and a short essay on falling

1.

     Yesterday was the first day that people who own houses in Fire Island Pines were allowed to go back out to the island since Hurricane Sandy struck. (Writing that sentence reminds me that I wish that

indelible storm had been given another name -- "Sandy" seems so light and inconsequential a moniker for that vast, slowly spinning disc of trouble that passed over our heads, changing the course of many

a life beneath it.)

     Alex and I lined up with a couple of hundred others just before ten at the ferry dock. The entire Sayville police force seemed to be in attendance -- there to prevent looting, I guess, though the process of checking the credentials of the passengers felt a bit haphazard, perhaps mostly to create a show of authority. Technically, I'm not a property owner any more; I sold my house a few months ago, but the tenant I'd rented it to for a long season just moved out at the end of October. Then Sandy happened. So it was only yesterday that I could actually get there to retrieve some furniture and boxes of things that hadn't been included in the sale. 

     Some of the men on the boat (and the passengers headed for the Pines were, it almost goes without saying, 98 per cent male) were somber and apprehensive; some already knew their pools or decks were gone, and were making jokes about it. "My pool," I overhead a guy beside me say, "is part of the big pool now."

     It was a relief, when we swung open the wooden gate, to find the house looking untouched. The old garden was wildly overgrown, and a moraine of fallen twigs and slender oak branches made a long drift across the walk. The new chimney cap Paul and I had installed was gone, and in a while I'd discover that the rubber piping system that used to kind-of-sort-of heat the little swimming pool had blown off the roof, too. Not bad, under the circumstances.

    The inside of the house looked like a hurricane had hit there, too. The tenant hadn't been able to finish moving before the evacuation of the island, and so the big main room liked like one of those disaster photos of a house wrecked by flood: clothes, DVDS, dog bowls, gadgets, kitchen stuff -- everything everywhere, in no visible order.

     So we got busy, moving the fellow's stuff off the couch and chairs we were taking, wrapping up the glass top of the coffee table, and to my surprise we started actually enjoying ourselves. There was something good-spirited about it -- partly that we were finally bringing a long process to an end, partly that the new owner would be the one to take care of everything else. Partly that it was somehow the whole thing felt lighter than we'd imagined. The house was a revenant of a gone relationship, something of a hold-over, and the process of finally cutting loose from it might have been emotionally fraught. But it wasn't.

     At least not till I went to the attic. We didn't know, until Alex swung the trapdoor down, that half the folding stairway had fallen away; what looked like half a ladder just hung in the air, four feet off the floor. We found a stepladder so that we could climb up and look. Just a few boxes up there, and we found a flashlight so that we could look into the far corners and make sure we hadn't missed anything. That's when one of us laughed, and we stopped and talked about how surprised we were that this all felt easy, and fine. Perhaps that was what jinxed it.

    Alex went off to work on something else, while I looked into each box to see if it was something I'd want. I carted them down, carefully, one at a time. I didn't know what was in the last, rather weighty one, so I opened it to look: a collection of Moroccan tiles bought a long time ago, beautiful thick ones, orange and blue, geometric. I'd planned to use them someplace and never did, and now they could find a home, maybe someplace in the garden?

    I lifted the box, started stepping down one rung at a time, and around four rungs down my right foot arrived at the gap between wooden rung and stepladder, and I probably already know what happened. 

Something about that space between solid matter was enough to make me step unsurely, and then I was  falling backwards. I hesitate, beginning to describe that moment --  seconds, the duration of that descent from ladder to floor, but could I ever do them justice? 

2.

    It's a commonplace, the idea that an unexpected event like an automobile accident or a fall causes us to experience time differently. It's like Zeno's paradox: the distance between launching and arriving seems to keep dividing in half, becoming longer, because the anticipation of getting where you know you're going is so terrifying.

    It occurred to me later that my descent seemed so long because my thoughts were so complex. I knew I was going to land on the small of my back,  where I've had disc problems in the past. I thought I might break my back. I was acutely aware of the condition of helplessness; I could do nothing to stop this, or even moderate the damage; I do nothing. I was aware of the box which had been in my hands and now was in the air just above me and was likely to land on my hips, aware of the weight of the box. I was aware of my own voice in my own mouth, calling out not a word but just a loud, outrushing exhalation. I didn't think of the Bishop poem in which Aunt Consuelo cries out from the dentist's chair, though I think of it now -- a sense of dislocation. Was that my voice? And I was aware of Alex running toward me from the next room, and that I was striking the wall, and sliding down it, and then there was a sharp, ferocious blow, which I thought was the box striking me in its descent, and then I was possessed by the pure terror that I was about to experience unimaginable pain, and then I did.

3.

     Okay, now the temporal experience starts to get murky. Even as I'm narrating the moment above, trying to be faithful to the experience, I start thinking about Elizabeth Bishop, who certainly was not on my mind as I fell. I've been reliving the experience since it happened; it rises up in my awareness like a wave, and I feel myself tense, and that awful fear returns. I've seen the same thing happen to Alex, interestingly, as a witness; in the 24 hours since, I've seen him doing something else then experiencing a kind of paroxysm of a related kind of pain -- as if he is physically re-experiencing his own powerlessness, and the terrible moment of seeing me hit the floor, and then sitting beside me while I cry for a long time.

4.

    Was it a very long time? I don't know. I was flat on my back, and somewhere down there was the eye of the storm, an awful fire. Though it wasn't burning. I don't think there's a word for what it was, or if there is it's not something I'll find now, just a day later. I was moaning loudly, Alex was telling me to go ahead, let all that out, and also to breathe. 

  

    Almost blinding physical pain comes in tidal waves, and with each one I have to stop thinking, breathe, accept that it is there, let the tension in my back and pelvis go a little. I'm aware of our situation: we're on an island where there's only one boat more, leaving in two hours, there's no doctor, there's no help except perhaps the police, and if they come they'll move me and make me scream. We're still getting our stuff ready and this the only time it can be done and I don't know if Alex can do it alone, and if we can get back how I can sit in the car, and I'm thinking about these things in between spasms or pulses of pain. 

    Then Alex says something like, "The house bit you," and I begin to cry in a different way, from another place within my body, because he has tapped into the metaphoric current that has already begun with me -- how this house represents some last hope around my last marriage, how that hope fell into dust, and now the loss, guilt and rage I've not wanted to allow their hour have struck me down. I am cursing the house and the old marriage and saying now this is the end, this is really where it ends. All this feels like a release of pain, letting this out in sobs and shudders, but there is always a wave of fresh pain behind the last one.

   

5.

      In a while I begin to slow down, to still. When I remember my terror the muscles seize and the pain is fierce, but then I can let it loose a bit, slowly. I am not breathing so hard. I can move in and out of thinking metaphorically, come back to the event as just itself, and it can also be the fall from the hope that any marriage is, too. I begin to think I have not broken anything. I am worried about being hit by the box of tiles and what this did to me, and Alex says, "You weren't hit by the box." I am shocked by this; of course I was hit by the box. But no -- it in fact skidded down the hallway, and I came down on one curved metal arm of a framed mirror I'd bought years ago at a flea market in Houston. Alex was afraid it might go through me, but in fact it hadn't broken the skin. I had composed the story of my fall incorrectly, though for me it will always be the box of tiles, a box of the past, that gave me that heavy blow.

6.

     I can walk today, slowly, and sit up in bed briefly. Medication has the swelling going down and has granted me a long sleep. I've been talking to the dogs, and I drank a cup of coffee. What I cannot do is write any more of this. Though, as I have been spilling out this deposition,  I have hurt less: telling the story seems to release something, at least in part, and I'm heading back to sleep. Next installment: aftermath, and hurricane. 

To celebrate the publication of THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2012, which I'm wildly proud to have guest-edited, I wrote a little essay for Publishers' Weekly. It's just out today, but since I know lots of people don't see that journal, I thought I'd post the piece here. "Best of" collections are always lend themselves to a bit of contention, and many people aren't aware of the process of making such a thing.
So here goes, for the curious:

When David Lehman invited me to take on the project of guest editing the Best American Poetry 2012 – the twenty-fifth edition of the annual anthology that appears in September of each year, bringing forth jubilation and curses among poets throughout the land, I was intrigued. I spent some time, just now, choosing that word intrigued.  Delighted – though I was, as well as honored and pleased – seems to lack complexity. What I want here is a word that combines pleasure with a degree of challenge, a nuanced acknowledgement that one doesn’t really take on such a task lightly, without thinking about just what you’re getting yourself into.

            Poets, by nature, favor anarchy, or at least resist consensus. When anything smacks of the official or the imprimatur, you will find them muttering in the lobby, grumbling in the vestibule, or cursing under their breaths outside the door. Poetry thrives on the unofficial, the unnoticed, the neglected, the unauthorized. Ask Emily Dickinson.

            But on the other hand, the solitary nature of our art makes us long for company, and every poet wants to be heard. Even as private a poet as Dickinson wanted to be read, which is why the terms fame and publication occur again and again in her work; she was summoning her audience into being, even if it took some time for them to arrive.

            This contradiction – the fact that we poets tend to be poor team-players and that we very much want to be loved – is what causes us to react so strongly to the Best American Poetry. We are fascinated by it, and love to criticize it. It is widely read indeed; a number of younger poets who are now well established, a National Book Award winner among them, have told me that one of these anthologies was the first book of poems they ever owned. And it is widely bashed as boring, dominated by insiders, or beside the point.

            But I was also aware that here was a chance to point readers toward 75 wonderful poems (each volume includes exactly the same number). I happen to think this is a particularly vital moment in American poetry, and that poems of great formal variety and genuine ambition are being published now in many venues, from big-ticket journals to small enterprises that open up like mushrooms after rain and often close just as quickly.

            I mean ambition in the best sense of the term – that the best of our poems are grappling with the hardest things to say: what it’s like to be awake, to be a thinking and feeling person in these vexed, dizzying hours. Maybe it feels no more difficult to be human than it did in, say, 1650, but I remain deeply convinced of the urgency of speaking in our times, of naming where we are. That was why I said yes to David’s offer; I wanted a chance to demonstrate the liveliness, emotional vigor, intelligence and wit our art offers just now, an array of gifts to the culture that all too often go unopened.

            What I hadn’t imagined was the sheer tonnage of verse that would almost immediately descend upon my post office box, and continue to do so from January to December. In truth, no one can read every poem published in America in a given year, mainly because it would be a superhuman achievement to find them all. But Lehman has assembled a remarkably efficient and thorough means of getting work at hand to his guest editor. I began very early on to put some poems in a “probably maybe yes” pile, and David read these with enthusiasm, venturing an opinion now and then before sending me another envelope, box, sack, sled or howdah full of poems. Sometime I’d read a little at a time, grabbing a few poems between phone calls or before making dinner. Some days I’d set aside long, indulgent bouts of wandering in journals for hours. Plane trips and train journeys were especially good, though it meant I was always traveling with an extra bag, usually a cloth tote stuffed to the brim with poems. Read, winnow, recycle, hold back the best, repeat.

            Here is what most surprised me: I read more poems than any reasonable human being would ever read in a year’s time, and it was fun. Joyous, bracing, the kind of pleasure that gives you energy rather than robbing you of it. Sometimes I’d read for a couple of hours and think, oh why not, an hour more. I’d think I’d had it, then notice the cover of a journal I hadn’t seen before, and before you know I was deeply immersed again.

            Of course there were times I looked at teetering piles of photocopied papers and stacks of magazines, or remembered the five new online journals I’d just heard about, and felt overwhelmed, mildly resentful, and a little ill. But the truth is, whenever I started to read, these feelings passed, often remarkably quickly.

            Because, of course, contemporary American poetry is actually terrifically interesting – especially if you approach each poem as if this one might be masterful. This could be a miraculous marriage of sense and music from a poet you’ve never heard of before.  Or it might be someone I’ve been reading for years, appearing with a poem impossible to forget.

            If these criteria sound exacting, they are. Only 75 poems, out of many thousand, and that demands that the chosen few be distinctive indeed: gorgeous or possessed of a perfectly achieved plainness, startling or inevitable, uncommonly well made, grave, hilarious, wrenching, sly, urgent, arising from a profound need to speak.

            This returns me to the theme of ambition; each of the poems I chose, out of my dauntingly large “maybe probably yes” pile, is trying fiercely hard to get at something crucial, trying to find form and language for what might otherwise go unnamed.

            I know I missed things; no one can read that much without some good stuff slipping through the cracks, and I’m sure there were valuable poems that never crossed my threshold, sad to say. The nature of an anthology like this is that decisions have to be made quickly, within the bounds of the year; there isn’t time to spend months debating the value of one poem over another. What I was making, finally, is a snapshot of our moment, and a testament to the kinds of poems that move me and matter to me.

            I’m sure that my edition of the BAP will raise some hackles, as they all do – but I am also utterly certain that this is a readable, energetic, engaging sampling of an art I love. Like most committed readers of poetry, I’m always wanting to share poems I like, pass them on to anyone who’ll listen. That’s what this book is. Is it “the best of” anything? Who cares, really? To my mind these are 75 reasons to be glad to be alive now, when such art is being made.

COMPLICATED MIRROR

Tonight I saw Ira Sachs' new movie, Keep the Lights On, here in Chelsea. What a complicated, intense couple of hours! Because I have any number of friends who are memoirists or writers of personal nonfiction, I'm used to reading about people I know. Usually that's an experience of intimacy; one comes closer to the inner life of friends than one might be likely to in conversation. Not because so much is revealed, necessarily; it's HOW that revealing takes place -- not content so much as the way content is thought about, reflected upon, understood. Great first person writing is the clearest and best rendering of what it's like to be that person that the writer can create. So when I read, say, Nick Flynn or Terry Tempest Williams or my friend Deborah Lott, whose marvelous new memoir I have just read in manuscript, I have the experience of coming closer, feeling, as it were, the contours of the inner life. It's amazing. I just read an excerpt from Salman Rushdie's new memoir in THE NEW YORKER, and though it's in the third person it has curiously just the same effect; we enter the interiority of the character.

Film's a different beast altogether, and since I don't know a lot of filmmakers, I don't think until this evening I've ever had the experience of seeing a movie about people I know, or about characters based on those people.  I felt I was standing outside of someone else's house, looking not directly into their rooms but into a complicated mirror which possessed its own agency, and reflected the inhabitants in its own fashion -- so that they were artfully rendered, and unfamilar, and echoed the lives of people I know.

I want to talk about just one odd little aspect of this.  The film begins with two men meeting over a phone sex line (it's 1998, so internet hook-ups haven't happened yet).  There's a sweetness and lightness of touch during its first twenty or so minutes, as the guys become closer and more open to one another. I was caught up in the storyline, and suddenly there was one of the characters, in bed, reading my book ATLANTIS.

It didn't matter that I knew it was coming; Ira had asked my permission to use the book in his screenplay; because it's a book of poems largely concerned with the epidemic, it's a starting point for the two to have a conversation about HIV. Maybe I should have been prepared, but I felt two unexpected, contradictory things: first, I was tickled -- my book was in a movie! There was just something childishly delightful about the sense of validation. And it was a book from 1995, and there it was, alive, being read and discussed by two naked men onscreen. I loved it.

And I immediately understood that I had been in the suspension-of-disbelief zone, which is something that I truly love about the movies. The lights go down, the noisy previews end, the opening credits and music start to focus your attention, and suddenly you're allowed -- invited --  to relinquish your will, and allow your perceptions to be guided. We stop making decisions, when we agree to participate in a film. It doesn't matter to me one bit whether I am looking at, say, an opal-eyed dragon, or two men meeting and falling in love in New York City. Both are equally experiences of leaving the daily world, entering something other.

But there was my book, and there went the fourth wall. And then from that moment on I was required to participate in the film in a different way -- which could be a good thing, and is most certainly an uncomfortable one.