The Secret Life of This Life Now #4
The 4th in a series of mercifully short essays about the life cycle of my Lammy-finalist first book of poems, This Life Now (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014)
The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from this section, see instructions at the bottom of this post.
This section of Beachcomber Mike is a memoir of sorts of how I came to write my first book of poems, This Life Now, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry (which that year rightfully went to Danez Smith).
This series of mercifully brief essays is a sort of a belated tenth-anniversary gift to the book that put me on the poetry map at all—albeit some tiny little corner of the poetry map. I had a lot of emotional turmoil over my first book when it came out in 2014. I want to share with you about those issues when we get to that part of the story, in the hopes that it may be of some interest or some help to other writers who have high hopes—as anyone would—for their forthcoming first book, and then, after the fact, find that the reality not only does not match their fantasy, but on the contrary causes them considerable pain, sadness, and distress.
Oh, and I would also like to persuade some people to buy a copy of the book, of which there are only about 100 copies left, and I have them all. See below for a link to get the book from me at the bargain-basement, fireside-sale price of $10.00, including shipping within the US.
The previous post ended with my turning at about the age of 30 from fiction to poetry as my favored literary medium.
So the format of this series is that in each post I share a bit about my poetry journey and we get a sneak peek at a few lines form the sequentially next poem in This Life Now. We are still in the first section of the collection—My First Ten Plague Years—which includes poems that touch on my experience of living with HIV after testing positive in October 1990. This is post #4 in the series, and the fourth poem in the book is “Instead of Names.” Excerpted below is the first stanza.
Now I wait in familiar locations—
the park, the promenade,
any place I think you might find me.Like my very first “grown-ass” poem, and many of the other early poems that followed, “Instead of Names” is about having or seeking sex with men in public places. When the speaker uses generic terms like “park” and “promenade,” the poet is thinking of specific places like Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and Manhattan’s Central Park, both of which had long established spots where men cruised other men for sex. That’s the term, by the way, in case you are not versed in gay slang—cruising. Also the name of a classic film, described quite well in Wikipedia:
Cruising is a 1980 crime thriller film written and directed by William Friedkin, and starring Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino and Karen Allen. It is loosely based on the novel [of the same name] by The New York Times reporter Gerald Walker about a serial killer targeting gay men, particularly the men associated with the leather scene in the late 1970s.
The promenade in the poem is a reference to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, with which I first became acquainted as a small child when scenes of it were often featured on The Patty Duke Show (a classics 1960s TV sitcom). I don’t remember how or when I learned that it was one of New York’s classic gay cruising spots. But by the age of 30 or so I was quite well acquainted with that aspect of the promenade (also referred to as the esplanade). One nice thing about it was that it was generally impractical actually to have sex there—at least in daylight—so, unlike other popular cruising spots, it was best for meeting guys and maybe sitting on a park bench and talking for a while and perhaps exchanging phone numbers and possibly making plans to hook up later at your place or his.
The “you” in this poem is no one in particular. And this foundational first person speaker, who is both the poet and not the poet, and who engages in casual, anonymous liaisons that may or may not actually have occurred in the life of the poet, shows up all over my early poetry and all over this book. Sometimes, as in this poem, there is not even a specific encounter alluded to, but rather, again generically, all encounters of a particular sort, real or imagined. Yes, that’s a good way of putting it. I think that is how I think about my early work most characteristically, and what I love about it the most.
That being said—by the end of the book, the “you” actually becomes “me”—that is, the speaker addresses himself. But you’ll have to stick around a while before we get to that poem.
A quick final word about the poetry-journey part of things before bidding you adieu à la prochaine. Maybe less about my poetry journey per se than my life journey in general. Those early 90s were quite an exciting time for me. I got fired from a job at a consequential advocacy organization. I took my six months of unemployment benefits and started my long-deferred freelance journalism career. I also did a bunch of freelance editorial work, most notably for Macmillan where I was an indexer at Collier’s Encyclopedia, a fact checker at Collier’s Year Book, and a copyeditor in the elhi (the term used then for K–12 textbook publishing) social studies department.
Of course, while doing all of that, I also dated lots of guys, had casual hookups with many more guys, spent a lot of time in a lot of sex clubs, and even fell in love a few times. You will hear more about all of that, and more about the writing of all the poems in the book, over the course of The Secret Life of This Life Now.
More next time.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...now. The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US. If you are elsewhere, I will probably need to reach out and ask you for some additional funds for shipping.
Scheduling Note: I am going to try to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:45am eastern time. Other new sections of Beachcomber Mike may be starting soon. I’ll keep you posted.
The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from a section:
1. Navigate to your account Settings page via www.substack.com/settings and click on the publication you want to make changes to.
2. Slide the toggle next to each section you'd like to stop receiving emails or app notifications from. A gray toggle indicates that notifications will be off for that section.