The Secret Life of This Life Now #20
20th in a series of brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
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I don’t think this series is going to succeed in selling out the 100 or so copies that remain of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. But I started this and I’m going to finish it, all 31 installments, one for every poem in this slim full-length or—to quote a well-known poet who reviewed the book for a notable review—“fat chapbook.”
My offer still holds—Both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fireside-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Order yours now!
This is post #20 in this series. We go through the book poem by poem, reading a snippet and chatting a bit about the context and creation of the poem.
Nearing the end of the “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite” section of the book. The next poem in this section—20th in the book overall—is “Ommatidia.” Below is a snippet from the beginning of this 26-line poem.
What about a good old-fashioned ich-du type poem, like the old days, Budweisers and brown paper bags, high-school sweethearts and gym-class heartthrobs, the bad skin, bad teeth, never saying, always doing, the art of the locker room drive-by....
Ommatidia are units that make up the compound eyes of arthropods, including insects, crustaceans, and millipedes. So from the get-go this is a creepy poem. The first couplet alludes to the poet’s identification with second-person poems addressed to an object of homoerotic desire. Man, this is such a good poem! It’s so chilling. Even just these eight and a half lines. That’s all I have to say about it, on a craft level at least.
In terms of its place in the poet’s story, the poet’s portraiture of himself as a “young sodomite,” well—What can I say, there was a lot of yearning for straight male friends in middle school and high school. In the latter part of the poem, the speaker maybe gets a little “handsy…” but if you want to read that kind of smut, yuh gotta buy duh book.
This feels like a good time to go back to the dry-run-for-a-memoir vibe that we indulged in early editions of Secret Life. When we left off the bio stuff in Secret Life #18, I was breaking the hearts of high school girlfriends who did not understand why I stopped dating them. I was gay but not out. I was secretive. I was scared. It was the late 1970s. Less than a decade since Stonewall. Sodomy was still illegal in many states. And what would my mother think?
So anyway, I go off to college in 1979. Columbia. Full ride on a Pulitzer Scholarship. I live on campus in university housing. John Jay Hall. Room 1228. My floormates like me! Columbia is not yet co-ed. It is rumored during pot-hazy dorm-room card games that 20% of Columbia’s all-male undergraduate population is gay. “There are five of us in this room right now,” Dave Rubin says, a Dorito poised at his lips. “So statistically one of us is gay.” I say nothing. Believe it or not, I’m butch enough to escape suspicion. Sort of. My floormates get the memo over time. I am the butt of some gentle ribbing by some I count as actual friends, and it feels good. I don’t have to hide, but it is in nobody’s interest to make it a big deal.
I think that’s as far as we need to go for now. We have eleven more installments of Secret Life to cover the following 20 or so years.
À la prochaine.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes my second book, Drug and Disease Free, and 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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