Risky Essays

The same disability that keeps me from being able to listen to poets reading aloud also keeps me from listening to music.   I would rather learn a song from YouTube than listen to a CD; consequently, over the past few years and especially since the pandemic began in late winter 2020, I've learned many scores of songs.  I learn songs collaboratively by texting song ideas back and forth with the people in my erstwhile band, and because we have no dates to prepare for there is no limit to the number of songs we can try to learn.  Songs like "Who Knows Where the Time Goes," Besame Mucho," "God Loves a Drunk," "Dancing Barefoot." The problem is remembering I ever learned them.  I make lists of songs that I should be able to remember the words to and so on, but it's always more fun to learn new songs than to review the songs on the lists. I sometimes lead jams with a harmonica player and a percussionist, and I am usually the one who remembers and le...

Much or even most of my poetry is autoerotic - a celebration of my sexiness to myself.  When I write verse about my own prettiness, there is a perplexing question of audience.  Society makes erotic self-enjoyment shameful and queer -- I, a biological male, enjoy in myself what turns me on in a woman. Because my writing about my sexuality is queer and may be regarded as shameful, I assume it might be embarrassing to my family, so I feel pressure to publish it only in a way that keeps it hidden.  In this time when gender-policing has gained the office of US President, to openly publish my autoerotic poetry might seem to require more courage than I have. There's also a question of discretion--who would really want to read it? My writing about my self-admiration probably does me very little credit with almost anyone, so should I not hide it completely by refraining from publishing at all? But erotic self-admiration may be my deepest truth.  The sensual and sensuous part ...

In the last ten or so years since I returned to the writing obsession of my adolescence, I have created a number of books.  I have two large bags of books I've made but never finished giving to people.  My latest books are printed from pdf in color by a wonderful and helpful Fedex employee named Amy at about a ten-dollar unit cost.  I have made books for others too, including for a coffeehouse reading series and for a Facebook poetry group, and my approach with those books was to sell them for a contribution to a charity, which in one case was a organization providing gender-affirmation counseling to GLBT youth.  With the books of my own work, my fantasy has been to give them to anyone who wants one (kind of a stretch, maybe) and just ask the person to give ten dollars to a homeless person.  I've known poets who were very aggressive about distributing their books, but I am bashful about it. Self-promotion feels incompatible with the impulse behind the writing, w...

Even though I have written hundreds of "poems" and published many or most of them on a Google blog, I have always been reluctant to submit them to magazines or book publishers. I've been discussing this issue with my therapist for years. While there's an undeniable sour-grapes factor, what it comes down to is mainly disinclination (laziness and ineptitude) and a sense of futility: I don't believe in my heart that I would be successful. I'm also pretty sure that no amount of success would be satisfying and worth the effort--there's the sour grapes factor. I felt very much the same thirty-some years ago when I was working on my vita and sending job applications to colleges and universities in hopes of getting interviews at the MLA convention. It's interesting to think of the different capabilities required by the different activities associated with writing. Composition itself is a bit like puzzle solving--something done alone by oneself. Editing is part...

My poetry is a celebration of auto-eroticism. I get immense pleasure from looking at my own body, especially my feet. My self-pleasure is chemical--it makes me feel excited and happy every day, and I believe that I partly owe to it my good health. When I was a child, I was embarrassed by my feet and tried to hide them whenever possible. I've come to believe that my childhood hatred of my feet was an internalized social imperative to deny prettiness (femininity) in myself, and that this denial prevented me until well into adulthood from enjoying the prettiness of my feet and being sexually stimulated by them. Now this self-pleasure inhabits all my days. My book, Pretty Yokel,  is an exploration of this pleasure in myself. 

Some time in 2015 I became the co-host of Jim Rogers's poetry series New and Nearby, which ran from September through May at Trotter's Cafe (which became Tillie's Farmhouse). A good friend of Jim's, Scott Banas, had volunteered to take New and Nearby on when Jim left, but Scott soon moved away, and, having stepped in to be helpful, I became the sole host of the series. Ironically, when I first attended a reading in the New and Nearby series, I felt alienated. I read as one of two principal readers at the series shortly thereafter, and I must have been in the habit of going to the events. It may or may not be unusual for the person running a poetry venue to be a bad poetry listener, but I have to admit to being a bad poetry listener myself - only a few readers ever really got my attention (one was well-known and lamented community member Mike Finley).  What was personally valuable to me about running the series was that I could have my musical groups open for the poet...

My yokel poems are mostly about coming out to myself as transsexual. The whole fairy-elf project is a thought experiment to explore the possibility of transsexuality for myself. I first started thinking about transsexuality when I attended Youth Traditional Sing weekends in the middle of the last decade and was asked to write my preferred pronoun on my name badge.  I was forced to experience the discomfort of writing "he-him," and the next year I realized that "they-then" felt much better. My sexuality has always been focused on female images, but, most of all and more and more queerly, on myself as female, or as a man with girly feet. My fairy elf character is queerly a woman with a penis (mazdo) that was really a vagina all along. Eroticism itself is queer when it refuses to be rapey--in our Judeo-Christian society the only acceptable kind of eroticism is rape.  Whoriness is healthier because the woman takes the initiative.