after #YOLO, after AIDS

Bad Gay Poets Now

My time in the gay poetry archives is coming to an end. So there will be fewer and less frequent posts on the particular topic of gay poetry for the future, but, to conclude the series, here’s a non-comprehensive tour of some books from the past few-to-dozen by today’s gay poets. There are surely some people in this category who aren’t terrible, and God do I look forward to learning who they are, but none of them seem to have made it into my reading pile!

Let’s start, land acknowledgment-style, with Tommy Pico, a Native American, er, NDN, poet whose book was blurbed by Sherman Alexie I suppose out of native nepotism:

She’s serving Orville Peck Presents Kiss of the Spider Woman on Ice.

How many poems and stories are gays of color going to get out of whites’ microaggressions? You’re welcome for the content, is all I’m saying.

This pile of nothing was midwifed, it turns out, by my least favorite lesbian:

Gassing up losers at talks and via blurbs of course is what literature is all about, and white gays are just as bad as lezes and Indians. Here’s Mark Doty and Wayne Koestenbaum (two very different tastes! although Richard Howard plugged both My Alexandria [which kind of sucks] and Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender [which, I regret to say, because I find Koestenbaum’s whole deal crazy annoying, does rock] back in the early 90s so maybe the girls are friends—I hope Pico hasn’t ruined the term for you—IRL?) effusing:

How do these wise and heartful poems go?

I sat on the rooftops, and kicked up some moss, ‘cause a few of the verses have got me quite cross… I know it’s not much but it’s the be-est I can doooo, oh sorry, was thinking of a better poem. Well, this isn’t awful, right. I mean eros-arrows is terrible, of course, and just another case where pop music is doing poetry better than the poets. This is pompous (“we know lack” “the demurgical tear”) and proud of having finished freshman year somewhere—there’s some silly faux-dramatics in the enjambments (the nests… of chaos!!! could be read in the voice of Trimph the Insult Comic Dog saying “X…. for me to poop on”) but however mannered and sententious it’s not as bad as what’s coming!

This is Taylor Swift, this is Rupi Kaur, on their worst days, from the depths of their drafts. Can I sue Doty and Kostenbaum for breach of blurbal contract?

Poets are liars, as Plato (“and the rest” [sung like the line of the Gilligan’s Island theme]) told us, and here they go lying again:

I like Brian Blanchfield, at least I liked his Separate World, which felt very gay spooky and had a gentle sort of parataxis that didn’t seem purely experimental and technical, but even the lines quoted in the blurb are bad! (this is in fact so often true of blurbs and reviews that I wonder if these aren’t meant to be taken ironically). Christopher Nealon, whom I’ve read arguing stupidly that Ashbery is all about capitalism, has an even dumber inner blurb:

Now again, this last quoted couplet is just so dumb you have to wonder if Nealon isn’t pulling our legs (and wtf is ‘Ovidian’ about that earlier line?). I will agree that the following could be written off as “Californian” and that I am seeing it nap on the beach:

These poems do manage to perform being woke and carefree, in a smirking studied Ziwe-esque mode, which is I suppose a balancing act. And I’ve never been able to be either PC or chill so kudos. And they’re even reaching for erudition, such big words alongside the pop culture references. With skills like that, well, it’s no wonder she’s on year 12 of serving pizza.

The double tone of being both irritatingly frivolous in a camp diva-boots-sis way while also reminding the reader that you have the just right political opinions and are very worried about the state of the country pervades a lot of contemporary garbage, like this book-length exploration of the intersection of exercise culture and race, capitalism America etc:

Makes ya think, doesn’t it?

This loser also blurbed one of the worst books of gay poetry I’ve ever read, a sonnet cycle dedicated to clearing the name of Gaetan Dugas, published by Nightboat:

Between a vast ocean and a landscape of redwoods sits a disco where the ghost of Gaétan  Dugas dances and fucks. This is the scenery of Eric Sneathen’s tender, sexy, and unnerving cut-up sonnets, which treat their ghost to a long overdue full-body eroticism. -Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué

As Goldfrapp sings, “I’ve got a rocket/ You’re going on it”—take that nonsense into outer space.

Nightboat should be commended for having published Donald Britton’s poetry (delicate, tender, Ashberrian in the sense of being very much about feeling/thinking-as-weather, or vice versa), but otherwise they’re running dreck from Steve Abbott (who did Soup magazine back in the 80s, publishing guys like Robert Gluck), Ojeda-Sague and Brian Teare, who here blurbs Nightboat editor Stephen Motika’s book:

If… then… well, maybe the premise needs to be disputed! I admit I don’t get ‘projective’ poetry and at some point need to read Charles Olson and come to an understanding, but I look at Motika’s work and the desire to learn more flees:

uhuh.

No surprise that Motika praisingly interviews Teare him, or that I don’t care for Teare either! Check the link for one from the volume the publication of which had Motika interview him.

Blurbs reviews and interviews aren’t the only form of gay delusion. Here’s a poet who charges $250 to consult on other writers’ manuscripts, which I guess is actually less of a scam/findom-kink than Greenwell’s online classes about saying yes to life by rereading Giovanni’s Room, but which look very expensive indeed when you read her poetry:

This actually goes on for several more pages but if I posted any more I’d feel owed 250 dollars myself!

There is a thing of gay male poets, maybe especially skinny white ones, telling us that they fuck. Like, yeah, I know, it would be more surprising if you didn’t, although that still wouldn’t be interesting. I’ve already made fun of Alex Dimitrov and Richie Hoffman for doing, in their different styles (off-hand and boring-breezy; mannered and boring-stilted), endless ‘I fuck’ poems, so I’ll just complain about one more tired-ass Mark-Wunderlich-impersonator handsome fucker:

But what of me, reader?

I’ll end with one that is at least terrible in a way that surprised me, and in its dumb way updates O’Hara’s “Autobiographia Literaria” for plump weebs (the author is an Asian Studies prof at Cornell, lol):

I can imagine this guy hitting it off with Bryan Washington, refreshing Japanophilia the way one ‘refreshes’ a room by blasting it with Febreze. But I’m sorry honeys the last word on gay hello kitty appropriation was already said here:

You can be an adult man into little girl Japanimation pink sprinkles garbage and still serve cunt; I suppose part of the wager of poetry is that there is a way to serve cunt with/about anything. Why isn’t gay poetry serving?