Rejected! #3

Variations on a Fire Escape — Rejected by Beloit Poetry Journal on February 2, 1995

These are poems rejected by journals, in chronological order by response date from earliest to most recent—the diametrical opposite of my series Pub Crawl, which features poems published in journals in the same kind of chronological order. As with my other series, there are personal notes and craft notes. Roll your eyes as much as you like—that’s what Rejected! is all about!

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Variations on a Fire Escape

A few words go a very long way between us;
as they must, since not much time
remains for more than this.

I saw you standing on the fire escape,
arms spread wide to meet the sun,
head tossed back, shoulders
flirting with the shadows,

as if you could elude the waning day,
or “time” and “again” could become one,
or time could stand still between lovers,

not knowing what tomorrow brings,
nor caring where yesterday we walked—
like phrases:  not quite nonsense,
but with a logic and connection

not at all designed until they meet
in composition; improvised, like my blues—

no melody planned, but only trusting
our sense of intervals.

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Rejection History

• Beloit Poetry Journal 02/23/95

• The Bridge 04/03/95

• Gettysburg Review 05/17/95

• Boulevard 02/02/98

• Evergreen Chronicles 10/28/99

• Brooklyn Review 12/31/00

• Barrow Street 10/08/05

• Words on Walls 11/20/08

Current publication status: Appears in my book This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014)

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This poem may or may not be part of a sequence called My First Ten Plague Years. Or it may simply be one of my “plague years poems.” You’ve seen others before and will see others again. The plague, of course, is not COVID, but AIDS. The years, of course, are not the 2020s, but the 1990s. The AIDS epidemic began in 1983, and I have stories I could tell, poems I could write, about how the burgeoning epidemic affected me in those days, when I was a mere squirt of 22. But I myself tested HIV-positive in 1990. My three most beloved men died in the 1990s. And I started writing “grown-ass” poetry in the 1990s.

Those three most beloved men—I will never tire of telling the world—were Anthony Ibrahin Salinas (1956–1994), Juan Marcos Betancourt (1968–1995), and Rand Snyder (1960–1996). Tony, Randy, and Marcos. My guys. There are poems about all three of them. Well, sort of. For thirty years now, I have said I was too angry at Randy ever to write a poem about him. And by “about him,” I meant the “real-life” him. The way my Tony poems and my Marcos poems include biographical details about the actual Tony and the actual Marcos and my actual relationships with them. But the truth is, when I wrote “Variations on a Fire Escape,” the imaginary man on the imaginary fire escape was, is, and always will by Randy. That first stanza is, most definitely, addressed to real-life Randy.

When I wrote this poem, Randy was alive. By the time I included this poem in my book This Life Now, Randy had been dead for eight years. So, yeah, when I wrote this poem, not much time remained.

As I write this, I am reminded of something my dear friend Julie Enszer once said to me. Shortly after This Life Now came out in 2014, Julie, David Groff, and I were invited to visit Brandon Judell’s creative writing class at City College on the same day, to read our work and take questions from Brandon’s students. It was a wonderful experience for which I will always be grateful. After class, Julie and I took the City College shuttle from campus to the nearest subway entrance. Julie told me that when I read my poems about the men I had loved and lost, the thing that struck her most was the “setup,” the explanations I gave to David’s students of who these men were, what they meant to me, and what happened to them. She said I came alive while talking about Tony, Marcos, and Randy sort of “off the cuff” in a manner that was quite distinct from the energy of the my actual poetry readings. Distinct, and perhaps even more powerful. Julie urged me to write a memoir about these men that I loved during that time in my life.

Julie was right, and I knew it. But I never did write that memoir. Which doesn’t mean I won’t. You might think, well, if you haven’t done it after all these years, what makes you think you would do it now? I can answer that in two words: my divorce. In this post-marital time of my life, I am experiencing a creative resurgence. This Substack newsletter, indeed, my embracing of my Beachcomber Mike persona, is part of that new whatever it is that I am going through. Less a transformation, I would say, than a return to who and what I really was, who and what I really am, now that I am free to be myself again. This is not the time or the place to go into that in detail. I suspect, however, that my marriage—how and why it came to be, how and why it ended—is one of the things I will be writing about in the coming years.

An argument can be made that “Variations on a Fire Escape” never deserved to be accepted by a journal. An argument can be made that it is incomplete, or not structured very well, or both. I mean, the speaker starts by suggesting that he has something very urgent to say to the addressee; and yet, we don’t ever seem to find out what that urgent message is. Instead we get this little vignette about the beloved standing out on a fire escape, which the speaker then proceeds to interpret in what one might call a figurative manner—and one might call it that in a tone of subtle if not outright disparagement.

All of that being said, I knew exactly what I was doing. I wanted to write a slippery poem. A poem that riffed on itself. A poem that free-associated. A poem that lost its train of thought. It starts out with something to say and never gets around to saying it, and indeed says a bunch of other stuff instead. The other stuff is often kind of vague and oblique and the reader might not quite get it. I thoroughly enjoyed writing this poem, and it says exactly what I wanted it to say.

☞☞☞The news-you-can-use craft stuff☞☞☞

What undermines the poem, I think, is its structure, or its lack of structure, or the slipperiness of its structure. Since the poem is kind of slippery in its verbal trajectory, it needed to be roped in a bit, corralled, so to speak, on a formal level. And indeed, for the manuscript of This Life Now, I tightened up the structure. In the book, the poem appeared as follows:

A few words go a long way between us;
as they must, since not much time
remains for more than this.

I saw you standing on the fire escape,
arms spread wide to catch the setting sun,
head tossed back, shoulders
flirting with the shadows,

as if you could elude the waning day,
or time and again could become one,
or time could stand still between lovers,
not knowing what tomorrow brings,

nor caring where yesterday we walked,
like phrases, not quite nonsense,
but with a logic and connection
not at all designed until they meet

in composition, improvised, like a blues—
no melody planned, but only trusting
our sense of intervals.

With those four quatrains bookended by two triplets, the poem, I think, coheres a lot better. In addition to making the structure look and feel more orderly on a purely visual level, the revised structure creates a kind of stanzaic enjambment—that is, a continuity of thought from one stanza to the next, as good old fashioned enjambment creates a continuity of syntax from one line to the next.

☞☞☞Late-breaking craft news-you-can-use ☞☞☞

In addition, there is one verbal edit to the poem, one changed word, that makes a huge difference. Did you spot it? I did not, when I was first writing this post, so this paragraph is not in the emailed newsletter version, only in this online archival version. Funny thing is, I recognized the need for this edit while I was writing this post, and kicked myself over that one wrong word. As I often say when I inadvertently hit up the same guy for the third time on a gay hookup app, at least I’m consistent. Now, ten years after the publication of This Life Now, I made the same edit in my head as I was writing this post, not realizing that I had actually made it in print.

And the edit is: the change of “my” to “a” in the final stanza.

“Rejected” version:

in composition; improvised, like my blues—

This Life Now version:

in composition, improvised, like a blues—

Ah, I see there is also a change of a semicolon to a comma. Good job, Beachcomber Mike.

Changing “my blues” to “a blues” does a lot of work here. It depersonalizes the statement; that is, makes it less a statement about the speaker, and more a statement about the world, in this case, the world of music. That world, its music, the blues, clearly has an impact on the speaker, and is important to the speaker, but it is not autobiographical or self-referential per se. That shift of focus from internal (the speaker) to external (the world surrounding the speaker) allows the reader to keep their focus on the action the speaker is describing, rather than on the speaker himself. It lets the poem be more about the relationship between the speaker and the beloved, rather than a revelation about the personality of the speaker. It lets the poem be more of a “we” poem than a “me” poem. Of course, it’s the speaker’s account of “we,” subjective, biased, and inevitably imperfect; but those “flaws” or limitations to the account reveal the speaker to the reader in a satisfying way, rather than distracting the reader away from what the poem truly wants to be about.

☞☞☞A postscript of sorts… ☞☞☞

There’s also another verbal edit, in the first line of the poem, where I deleted the word “very.”

“Rejected” version:

A few words go a very long way between us;

This Life Now version:

A few words go a long way between us;

That edit was suggested by my ex when I was preparing the poetry sample for my application for admission to the MFA program at NYU in 2003. I had a tendency to use that very type of “very” in a number of my early poems. This edit improves the poem on the level of music (to reference once again Gregory Orr’s four temperaments) rather than on the level of story. As I have noted in previous posts, I consider myself to be a poet primarily of story (one of Orr’s two “limiting” temperaments) and music (one of Orr’s two “limitless” temperaments). A glitch in the music can distract the reader from the flow of the story, perhaps irretrievably, so I hereby give this edit its due.

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