Risky Essays

 OK, so I copied all of Doomed Yokel from my blog at johnwenstrom.com to a Substack page, and then published the page. Substack ignored all my soft line breaks, so, instead of 19-line villanelles, the Yokel Songs became 6 prose blocks with lots of internal rhyme. I rather like the Yokel Songs as prose blocks -- it's nice not to have to make people worry about the villanelle form. Next would be Woke Yokel, which bears witness to the demonstrations following the police murder of George Floyd  in Minneapolis.  Trans Yokel and Bardic Yokel won't be far behind. ____________ Well, I deleted the Substack Doomed Yokel post. It seemed confusing to me. I deleted all my Substack posts - some photos of poems from Yokel Comedian, and a post of my old Refuse the Abuse screed.  I have a problem with the self-promotional angle of Substack. I don't want to have ask people to subscribe to me. I have already "published" the eleven Selected Yokel Song books on my blog. They look goo...

Until the January 2025 presidential inauguration, being queer did not feel particularly courageous. I have spent much of the last ten years or so experimenting with the idea that I might be a trans woman--I don't know if I really am. I do know that I respond erotically to my own body the way I respond to a woman. My feet have received much of this auto-cathexis, and it is interesting that when I was a child I was embarrassed by and hated my feet.  Hating my feet and loving my feet are the same, except that loving my feet is both more fun and more disgraceful. I suppose I could enjoy another person jonesing on my feet, but it's enough for me to jones on my own feet. Responding sexually to myself, especially my feet, is my way of being queer. I wonder if the difference between queer people and straight people is that queer people give much more importance to non-aggressive sexual pleasure. For straight men, sexuality is supposed to be assertively and aggressively phallic. For str...

The Yokel Songs are a preposterously large body of work, spanning 2017 through the present End Times that began January 6 2021--more than seven hundred poems. I have written no new Yokel Songs since September of 2023 (about another 40 in winter 2026); however, I have spent many hours editing the eleven Chakra-lly-sorted Yokel Song collections and culling them--and then making separate collection out of the most erotics collections--the ones called Gender Affirmation in the End Times and  The Yokel's End Times Footsie Drag--and then restoring to the Selected Pretty and Selected Trans Yokel books many songs from the longer collections and from the Outtakes. I don't know if I could have created the Yokel Songs if I had been concerned with publishing it in conventional ways. Not planning to do so makes it easy for me to cynically and ungratefully neglect this work that the universe has given me. The idea of publishing some of it on Substack is intriguing, but I am uncomfortable w...