The Secret Life of This Life Now #15
15th in a series of brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
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Now in my possession are the last 100 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. If I can persuade 100 or so people to make those copies disappear, this book will be blissfully out of print. I’m hoping these essays will pique your interest in snagging yourself a copy of this rare commodity.
This is post #15 in the series. We are in the second section of the book, poems about my childhood, aptly called “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite.” The fourth poem in this section, and the 15th poem in the book overall, is “Gladiators.” Here is the first one-third or so of this poem.
Kirk Douglas on the small black-and-white screen
in the bedroom I share with my brother.
Spartacus arrives in chains at the gladiatorial school.
The trainer puts him in the center of the circle
(loin cloth, bare chest).
Using brightly colored paints from wooden buckets
he marks on Spartacus’ torso
the location of blows that will kill a man with maximum
efficiency.This is a poem about a child who found himself erotically charged by the spectacle of muscled men being degraded and dehumanized on a small black and white TV screen. How confusing is that for a little boy?
If you want a peek at this boy’s emerging sense of shame and demoralization, you need to buy the book. I assure you there will be whips and Roman galley slaves.
The “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite” section of This Life Now began life as a sequence of poems that appeared in Columbia Poetry Review (that’s out of Columbia College Chicago) in spring 2008. As in the previous installment of Secret Life, I share with you here in its entirety a poem that was included in the journal publication that did not make the cut for This Life Now. Full disclosure, I just edited a number of lines in the sixth and seventh stanzas. As Paul Valery said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
Notes on an Elegy for Karen Carpenter Not a touch, not a kiss, only proximity to you, desire I can understand, accept. Lovers and Other Strangers playing on a double bill with Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice at the Oceana movie theater on Brighton Beach Avenue. My parents take my brother and me. The wizened ticket-man exclaims, “You’re taking him to see a movie like this?” “He’s very mature and intelligent,” my mother says. My father buys a box of Raisinets. We come in in the middle of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. I fall asleep during the part where they all go to bed together. When we see it from the beginning, I fall asleep during that part again. In between, we see Lovers and Other Strangers. The Carpenters sing the theme song, “For All We Know,” which becomes my favorite. I took a mellow turn that year, but the first 45s I'd made my mother buy me were raucous: Lou Christie, “Lightening Strikes” (1966) and the Jefferson Airplane, “Somebody to Love” (1967). My dad used to cut our hair, and I cried when he tried to touch mine, so they told me he was giving me a Beatles haircut. I said okay, but it had to be a Ringo haircut. Later, my taste in men, like my taste in music, changed. I liked it when John and Paul pursed their lips to the microphone together to sing “You, woo, woo” at Shea Stadium (on TV of course).
For better or worse, we are not quite finished with the burgeoning queer sexuality of the poet in the “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite” section of This Life Now. There are more adolescent gay crushes and awkward, fumbling interactions to come before we see our protagonist through his Stephen Dedalus years.
As you may have noticed, or maybe not, This Life Now sort of careens from the AIDS years of the poet’s 30s in the first section to his all-too-knowing childhood in the second section. In terms of the personal backstory element of these essays, that led me to jump rather precipitously from an AIDS conference in Yokohama in 1994 to a nuclear family saga that led from the pogroms in Eastern Europe to the Lower East Side of New York, from Long Island to Coney Island, from the 1910s to the 1960s.
You must have realized by now that I make these essays up completely as I go along and do not look back, or ahead, very much. I am nevertheless struck by the herky-jerkiness of this narrative riding along, as it were, beside the poems. As I’ve set before, these essays have turned out to be a dry run for a memoir. I look forward to figuring out the edges of this sprawling jigsaw puzzle as this whole process unfolds. Presumably we will eventually get to the AIDS conference in Vancouver in 1996 that dramatically changed the world of AIDS and HIV forever. And the launch party for LIT 2 at The New School on March 3, 2000, that dramatically changed my intimate-partner life dramatically and forever.
There, that bit of rambling gets me to a more respectable word count. Back next time with still more portraiture of the artist as a young sodomite in waiting. À la prochaine.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US.
Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:30 a.m. eastern time.
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