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Number 284 February March 2000 Turning the Paper Sideways: An Interview with D.A. Powell SAM WITT & SEAN DURKIN Copyright © 2000 Poetry Flash D. A. Powell, known to his friends as Doug, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and recipient of a 1997 Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation. He now lives in San Francisco. While in Iowa, he wrote a remarkable series of poems about survival, memory, and coming of age during the AIDS crisis that became his first book of poetry, Tea, published by Wesleyan/University Press of New England in 1998. The book's format is as original as its poetics. The short, wide pages (nine inches wide by six tall) allowed Powell more than the usual freedom for a complete train of thought per line; he used the long, amply spaced lines to augment his subject: "marginality, borders, and space…love, sex, death, nature, family, and religion." The cover is lush, even jarring, with modern sketched tea cups on bamboo print, and a red and gold patterned spine. Robert Hass wrote of it, "D.A. Powell's Tea is on the move, it reads like a handheld camera. It's writing that's willing to be as strange as it needs to be to get at experience, and the effect is both disturbing and exhilarating." D.A. Powell's second book, Lunch, will be published by Wesleyan in the fall. This interview was conducted June 4, 1999. ---Editor When you were in junior high and high school, did you have an idea that you were gay? It wasn't a physical attraction at that point, was it? DA: No, not physical in terms of sexual, but in terms of my affections or longings. I think that did compound my feelings of alienation living in Yuba City. I don't know that I necessarily put together, though, that the cause of my alienation was my queerness. I think for a long time---you can see that orchid beginning to open---I had this displaced feeling of otherness. That's why I think I was so attracted to other cultures. A lot of my closest friends were Mexican, and I assimilated into their culture. A lot of my friends were African American, and I assimilated into their culture. I joined the Black Student Union; I had this feeling of otherness that was captured in the language or the culture or the writings of other people, but I hadn't encountered queer writers yet. So I thought I was Black, or Mexican, until I came across Tennessee Williams, and realized "Oh, that's it, I'm queer." And then it made sense, because I liked boys. Did you know this going into Yuba City? DA: I didn't know it going in. I didn't know I was queer, although I knew I liked men. I think I discovered it early enough that I could go "Oh, hey, that's it; now it makes sense." Not that it helped. I didn't really have a lot of problems around my queerness, like many other people do or have had. Were there gay bars then? DA: Well there weren't gay bars, no. The end of the seventies there was actually a huge flourishing of gay culture in the United States. There was much more acceptance of gayness, gay people. There was much more acceptance than there was in, say, the mid-eighties. There was a lot going on culturally across the United States that opened up the avenues of tolerance. Was that part of the overall seventies culture? DA: I think it had to do with the timing, yeah. There were a lot of people coming of age at that time. We were the last of the baby boomers, and many of us who were queer came out very early, because there was an avenue for it; there was a community, even though it was still fairly cloistered. There was a huge private party circuit because there wasn't a gay bar [where I lived in Yuba City], although there were establishments that had largely gay clientele. So you went to parties. You were invited to somebody's party, and then you became hip to the circuit. And this was all through high school for you. DA: Yeah, beginning my sophomore year. So I met people and became much more interested in my social life than I was in my school life. School didn't hold any surprises for me at that time anyway. I was already intellectually ahead of everybody, and I didn't feel like there was anything else that they could teach me. I spent a lot of time going to the library at the junior college and checking out books, or to the public library. I'd check out video tapes; I'd check out records. Had you already developed an interest in poetry at this point? DA: I had developed an interest in literature. Poetry was not the first genre that grabbed me. I was interested in literature, I was interested in music, and I was interested in plays in particular, in drama. I read plays. I read Tennessee Williams first, because that was where I saw that flash of identity, in the plays and in his memoir. My mother, who was like the accidental tourist at that time, happened to be shopping. She always bought schlocky books, and I read a lot of my mother's books. I read The Thornbirds. I was a voracious reader. I also read a lot of horror fiction, and I read a lot of existentialists. It's weird because now I can hardly read, but in those days I read book upon book upon book. I had this hunger for literature and for knowledge. My mother was out shopping, and she knew that I liked Tennessee Williams's plays, and she bought me his memoir. Was she aware of who he was? DA: Not at all. Clueless, clueless. She just bought it completely by happy accident. And it was wonderful. I mean it wasn't like he was overtly discussing his sexuality, but it was even better than that, he was simply telling the story of his life, and that life included relationships with other men. I also read Edward Albee, who is not overtly queer in his literature. But it's interesting to me that there was something there that seemed and felt so similar to my psyche; it's like having a third eye that I read his plays as queer. I read Shakespeare. Who else? I read whatever plays I could get at the local bookstore at the mall. It wasn't like they had a huge selection, but they had the complete plays of Sophocles, so I bought that and read that. They had that collection of four plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, and I'd already read his novels and Being and Nothingness, so I read those plays. I read A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry. Oh, I'd go to the library and check out the best plays of whatever year, so I read Little Murders by Jules Pfeiffer, David Rabe, I read Neil Simon. I mean I wasn't very particular. I'd just read whatever was there that was considered the best. It wasn't until a few years later that I developed my critical faculty enough to realize that I did like this but didn't like that. But at the time I just read everything. Peter Schaffer: I read Equus, and I adored that, and so I'd seek out his work. Lillian Hellman; I liked her plays a lot. And in 1977 there was that movie Julia, that was based on part of her autobiography. So I went out and bought her autobiography, Pentimento. I loved that book. Were you writing plays at this time? DA: I wrote little short plays. I remember the first play that I wrote and put on; my friend Kate Hixon and I did. It was called Dr. Jekyll and Heidi. It was based on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, except that instead of turning into the evil Mr. Hyde when he drank the potion, Dr. Jekyll would turn into Heidi, the little girl from the Shirley Temple movie who lived in Switzerland and yodeled. Was this ever put on? DA: It was put on. We were in high school at the time. We got an F on it for Drama final. Why? Was it flawed in any way? DA: It wasn't flawed; it was really ahead of its time. It was on the cutting edge. The problem was that we weren't particular favorites of our Drama teacher to begin with. One of the things that I added to the play was a scene that took place entirely offstage; it was in a men's room. And Dr. Jekyll, who had by that time lost control of his ability to keep from changing back and forth into Heidi, was offstage in the men's room. But before he changed into Heidi&emdash;you could distinctly hear&emdash;we had recorded a sound-effects track&emdash;Dr. Jekyll having a long whiz. But that wasn't the part that disturbed our Drama teacher. While Dr. Jekyll was taking a whiz, he was whistling "Send in the Clowns." And that was our Drama teacher's favorite song. So I think that was what earned us the F. We were poking fun, having a little jab as it were. So, does that answer the question about…we weren't even talking about plays, were we? We were talking about the parties, and… DA: Poetry. Well, this is how I discovered poetry; I liked drama. I was a really strange kid. I was very into cinema. I watched, on Saturday mornings, on PBS, great classic films. I would watch Truffaut, and Fellini, and Bergman, and Cocteau, and then I started watching Great Performances, because they had a lot of wonderful plays. And there was a play called When Hell Freezes Over I'll Skate, by a playwright named Vinnette Carroll, a playwright and director. She also did Your Arm's Too Short To Box With God, and Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope. Anyway, When Hell Freezes Over I'll Skate was a pastiche of poems by various African American poets: Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen. I saw this play, and I was so enamored of it; it was a wonderful staging of these poems. I remember thinking, "Gee, I thought I didn't like poetry." But there were all of these great poems. So I went out and bought at the local bookstore an anthology called The Black Poets, edited by Dudley Randall (Bantam, 1985), and a lot of the poets whose work was in this play, were anthologized in there. I read it cover to cover. And in fact read it and re-read it, and that was my first foray into the genre of poetry. There were two other books of poetry that I bought, within probably a year after that. One was Shakespeare's Sonnets, and the other one was The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot. That was probably a year after I bought The Black Poets anthology. And the reason I bought Eliot was that he had been mentioned in a critical assessment or a critical overview of existentialism. I remember that I was in a Walden bookstore in Citrus Heights, at the Sunrise Mall. I saw T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Other Poems, and I picked it up, and I thought "Oh, this is mentioned in Colin Wilson's The Outsider; I should read it." And I opened it and started reading the very first poem, which is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": "Let us go then you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table." And I thought, "Wow, this is brilliant." So that was all the poetry that I knew: Eliot, that slim volume, Shakespeare's sonnets, and all of those amazing poets who were in The Black Poets anthology. So when I set out to start writing poetry---well, not that I set out to start writing poetry---but when I attempted to write poetry, those were my models. I'll also say that the very first poetry that I ever wrote was not in favor of poetry; it was against it. How so? DA: Well, I was on the debate team in high school. And I didn't particularly like the debate coach. This was right after Proposition 13, and the debate coach that had been there the first year that I was in debate, the woman that I really liked, had been laid off, due to budget cuts. And they took someone who was teaching Special Ed, and had her teach speech and debate. Was she patronizing in any way? DA: I just didn't much care for her. In retrospect I would say that she was really a good coach. And one of the things that she did in order to increase the chances of getting trophies is that she encouraged all of the people who were on debate teams to also enter individual speaking events. Because I wasn't a single speaker---I was a debater; argument was my strong suit---I didn't sign up for one for the tournament that was coming up. So she went ahead and signed me up for an event, without my consent. Because she was the coach, I guess she could do that sort of thing. So, since she knew that I loved literature, and I was always writing little stupid short stories, and scenes in plays, and things like that for the school paper, she signed me up for an event called original prose and poetry. This is a speaking event where basically you recite, or read, your own prose or poetry. And I was agin' it. Why? DA: Because I was a contrary warrior. If you don't like the person, then you don't like anything that they do. And if you don't like what they do, then you do something to sabotage it. I was a very willful and also conniving young person. I decided that what I would do was that I would write something that was reprehensible, so that I wouldn't actually have to give the speech. I stayed up the night before the event and wrote, oh, probably fifteen poems, the first poems I ever wrote. Do you remember any of the lines? DA: Oh yes, I remember quite well. The collection was called "Fun and Death." I liked Woody Allen's book Without Feathers at that time, and that's a kind of Woody Allenesque title. The poems were about death, and other kinds of things. Oh, I will say there was one other influence too, the songwriter, Jacques Brel; I really liked his lyrics. You know, Jacques Brel wrote about the underbelly of life, prostitutes and whores and drunkards and things. So the titles of the poems were things like "In Defense of Defecation," "I Sing of Maggots," "Necrophiliacs Prayer." I mean they were just vile little poems. Sophomoric? DA: Sophomoric, yes. Or actually they would have been junioric. I had a good time. Well, I stayed up all night writing the damn things, and then I went to the event. Do you remember any of the lines of the poems, or a stanza or two, just to give us a taste? DA: Sure. This one's called "In Praise of Phlegm." Even now, can you recall, how oft You stood before a crowd and coughed, And your speech was lost amid the laughter Because you couldn't wait till after? In the dark recesses of your throat, A portion of your tongue was coat, Was that, of which I write this hymn, That wondrous sticky mess called phlegm. Perhaps in time the best of us May rid ourselves of snot and pus But while such mortal things may die, Phlegm lives on for you and I On floors, on walls, in pools of spit, In hands, on chairs where old folks sit; The torch burns bright, it ne'er grows dim, That lights the river of truth, our phlegm ahem.  That's sort of Shakespearean in theme. DA: Perhaps, yes. I was a natural. That was the thing; I wrote poetry very well. My coach, right before the event, asked to see my speech. She looked at it; she was horrified, and she wasn't going to let me go on. And I was quite relieved. I think she saw that and decided to call my bluff, and she forced me to compete anyhow. I placed third, and she said, "You know, with a little work this could be something." She sent me to the state qualifying rounds, and I actually placed first and would have gone on to the state finals, if it weren't for the fact that I was flunking all my classes and my teachers wouldn't sign out for me. But that was my first success with poetry. And I had done it completely wrong. Let me ask you this. You were flunking all your classes. How did you reconcile that with your intellectual development? DA: Well, I had already decided that public education was not the only avenue to success. That, in fact, the point of public education in that time was: 1. to keep children out of the workforce until age eighteen; and, 2. to get them up to the minimum standard that was set by the Addison Wesley Proficiency Test, that was the standard at that moment. And I had already tested as far as I could on that test; I was already at whatever was high. I felt like I didn't give a goddamn what my grades were. I sense there was a lot more freedom for the individual student in the seventies. DA: Well, we had an open campus, so I could come and go; I went more often than I came. We had a smoking area, so I started smoking when I was probably twelve or so. I would go out to the smoking area, and you could always buy a joint for a dollar. I even heard that people smoked joints in class. Does that sound extreme? DA: It sounds extreme. It depends what class. I mean if it was PE, yes, you'd just go under the bleachers. But we definitely weren't smoking it in biology. I don't know if things were looser; the kinds of trouble that kids got into those days were less. Not many people were playing with guns or knives. I usually forged a lot of my own notes; I ran away from home a few times too during that time so I wasn't necessarily always around. I didn't care much whether I was passing my classes or not. I think that everyone at that point had just kind of thrown up their hands. And my parents were just hoping to get me graduated and into college, and then they were leaving the country, so it didn't matter to them. I managed to graduate, and then I went off to school at San Jose State. I lasted there for two semesters. I hated it. Then, I dropped out, and I started going to the junior college in Marysville. So after that point, when you won the event, you were writing poems. DA: Well, not really. I wrote a few, but most of my models for poetry---aside from Eliot and Shakespeare and Jacques Brel---were African American poets, so a lot of my early poetry was Black. When did you come to Gertrude Stein? DA: Well, let's see. I'm trying to think now about poetry in general, because, like I said, I wasn't writing a whole lot of it. I was still interested in being a playwright. In fact, when I was at San Jose State I took a play writing course, and there was a course called "Modern Poetry." I signed up for it because I thought it would be an easy elective. I figured, "Well, it only covers contemporary poetry; it's all modern stuff; I've read the Black poets, so I've already read half the curriculum. How difficult can it be?" We read all of these poets that I'd never heard of, many of whom I didn't think much of. There was a lot of shorthand talk. I don't know if poets are aware of how poets talk about poetry, but it's really annoying if you are an outsider, because it's all kind of shorthand and code, jargon, and poetry was at that time talked about in terms of movements. "Well, this is the Black Mountain Movement, and this is the Fugitive Movement." I thought, "Well, it's all white poetry." There wasn't a whole lot of difference that I could see, except that some poets were interesting, and most of them weren't. I did manage to find a couple of poets out of that course, and a few poems that I liked. One of them was D.H. Lawrence. I liked his poems, at least the ones that were in that anthology, "The Elephant is Slow to Mate," "Tortoise Shout," "Snake." There was Sylvia Plath; I liked her very much. I liked some of the poems by Yeats, although after the discussion in the class, I realized that I guess I didn't understand them at all. It was hard. I think I got maybe a D or a C+. I really tried in that course, but I just didn't do well. So I thought, "Well, I guess I just don't know a hell of a lot about poetry after all, and I guess I don't really like it." It was a turn-off. But then after my theatre period, I went to school at Sonoma State. And as an elective I took a poetry writing course. I had to take a writing course, a genre, and I figured poetry would be the best because it's the shortest. There wouldn't be a whole lot of work. And I started writing poetry and my professor at that time was [poet] David Bromige. At the very end of the semester we had to turn in a little portfolio of the writing we had done, and on mine he wrote that I was one of the rare students that he had had of exceptional promise. And I was so encouraged by that I continued to write poetry. That must have taken you by surprise. DA: It did take me by surprise, but pleasantly. Of course, years later, I realized that David wrote comments like that on everybody's paper, because he liked to encourage people to write. It has nothing to do with talent. It only has to do with the foolish people who keep doing it. DA: Exactly. I was suckered into poetry. That was it. I got no encouragement as a play writing student, but I got tons of encouragement as a poetry student, so there I went. Gertrude Stein I had encountered, like I said, when I was in high school, I was an avaricious reader; I read everything. Especially the Modernists. I read things that were avant-garde, European literature. I wasn't that much interested in American literature aside from drama. Now at that age, you're reading avant-garde literature. Did that have anything to do with your interest in other cultures? How did you interpret that kind of work? DA: When I was freshman in high-school I read Colin Wilson's The Outsider. And I was an outsider. I felt alienated by society in some way. I hadn't quite put a name on it yet. Sartre's quite precocious for high school. DA: Yes it is, isn't it. In fact I think I was a big thorn in the side of my American Lit teacher, because I would write these papers that poo-pooed people like Steinbeck, and I'd say, "Well why don't we read anything really meaningful, like Nausea, by Sartre?" Yes, we had an adversarial relationship, American literature and me. Anyway, Stein I came across in the library. I was actually seeking her out at that time. She had been referenced by a number of people; that was usually the way I discovered writers, one usually led to another. I went to Stein, and I picked up The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and I read the opening paragraph, and I said, "This is crap!" And I put it back. Well, when I was at Sonoma State, in my first semester I didn't only discover that I was a good poet, or that I had promise as one. I was taking a course from a woman named Barbara Lesch-McCaffry. She was the affirmative action officer at the campus, and she taught a course called "Feminist Perspectives in Literature." Actually this would have been my second semester. My first semester I took a women writers course. This was how naive I was, I thought, "Oh, a woman writer's course; it's just a course about women writers." I didn't realize that there was this split in thinking. I was the only man in that in course. I didn't realize that you had to start thinking in terms of separation of gender, because I'd always read women writers as well as male writers; to me there had been no difference. It was strange to start thinking about how literature has been divided along gender lines. The woman who taught the course, and Barbara Lesch, who was the assistant for that course, were so encouraged that there was actually a man who was interested in women writing that they asked me---the next semester Barbara was taking over teaching the course of the semester---if I would be Barbara's assistant. I was an undergraduate. And they just wanted to encourage me to continue reading women writers and maybe thinking about them critically. I don't know. I guess they had great plans for me being a doctorate or something. I was Barbara's assistant in this "Feminist Perspectives" course; I was interested in Jewish women writers. We were reading women from around the world. Third World women writers, and in addition we were supplementing that literature with women from marginalized cultures within the U.S. So I decided that for my paper, I was going to take on Gertrude Stein, because she was somebody who challenged me. As I've said before, a few years before, I'd picked her up, read a little bit, put it away and said it's crap. But I knew that there was something there. There was this person, Gertrude Stein, who was constantly being referred to as the great, important personality, but not being addressed as a writer. So I went to the library and got all of the Stein books that were there, all of them, and I went up for the weekend to Occidental with my friend Chris, who was house-sitting up there, out in the middle of the country. There was nothing to do but read. I took all of these Stein books, and started reading, and realized that she was amazingly clear, very funny, and that she was this very important figure in terms of literature. So that was how I began my love affair with her. Over the next few years as I was an undergraduate and then a graduate student at Sonoma State, teachers who felt like they had to include Stein in various courses, but did not feel that they were as interested as I was to talk about her, would invite me to talk about Stein. So I kind of became the resident Stein expert. And in David Bromige's course---we were doing a course on the Modernist poets, and we all had to be one of the Modernist poets---I ended up being Gertrude Stein, which was interesting. We had to correspond with another one of the Modernist poets. I corresponded with Mina Loy, as Stein. We also had to write criticism on different poets, as our poet would have written it. I think I wrote criticism on Eliot as Stein, which is kind of interesting, because I loved Eliot first. But then, as Stein, I really was annoyed with him. What about Frank O'Hara? DA: Frank O'Hara I came to much later. I think it was toward the end of my undergraduate years. I always resisted poets that were thrust on me. If somebody told me to read somebody's work, I would usually pick it up, read a little bit, and throw it away. Frank O'Hara was never thrust on me, thank God. I think I was taking a course that was based on the Donald Allen anthology, The New American Poetry. Of course this was from David Bromige; I took all of my poetry courses from David Bromige. That was who taught poetry at Sonoma State. The course was on the Confessionalists, the Beats, the New York School, and the Black Mountain Writers. And I started reading O'Hara then. I read a few of his poems that were in the Donald Allen anthology. And I just thought he was the funniest poet I'd ever read. There aren't a lot of funny poets out there, really. There are a few. But generally, humor is not allowed in poetry, unless it's light verse, that kind of crap. Why do you think that is? DA: I don't know. I think poets are a sour and melancholy lot; they tend to want to write about serious things. Which is why I am not a poet, I am something else. Anyway, I came across Frank O'Hara, and I thought, "Oh my God, here's somebody who actually lives in the world in his poems." He's funny as hell; he's keenly observant; he doesn't take himself too seriously; he's not posturing. What really appealed to me in Frank O'Hara's poetry, which was already happening in my own poetry, was this sense that anything that entered the poem that was too poetic had to be undermined somehow. And so I was drawn to his work. I wouldn't call myself a Frank O'Hara expert; I admire his work. I don't know the oeuvre. I know Lunch Poems, and I know some of the other work. Just to illustrate his sense of humor, could you recite the poem about Lana Turner? DA: Oh, let me see if I have it. I don't know the poem by heart. I could paraphrase it. But you know the poem. Pretend I recited it: "oh Lana Turner we love you get up." Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurrry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headline LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up (from The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, edited by Donald Allen) Which you sample in Lunch. Could you speak about writing Lunch, the earlier version first? DA: Sure. Well, while I was David Bromige's writing student, I did a lot of different kinds of writing. At some point I became very frustrated with writing poetry because I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere, like I was really making a concerted effort to write good poems, and that I'd send them out, and no one would publish them. It was very frustrating. I got a few poems published, but not many. And I guess at that time, I felt like publication, number one, was a sign of affirmation, and that, number two, it should be fairly easy to publish because there were so many literary magazines out there. And so few good writers. DA: And so few good writers. You're putting words in my mouth. You can't do that. Anyway, I began writing bad poetry. I did that out of frustration and curiosity. I felt like, "Okay, I'm putting all of this effort into writing good poetry, and it's not getting me anywhere." And I thought, "Well, what would happen if I wrote bad poetry?" since there seems to be a lot being published, number one, and, number two, I wondered if writing bad poetry would help me to understand what makes a poem bad, and what makes a poem good. And so I wrote bad poetry, and I think that it hurt me a lot, because what happened was the bad poetry was quite successful. Lots of people wanted to publish it. Like, for instance, George Garrett, in his magazine Poultry. DA: Yes, and they understood the joke. And it was called Badism; I had my own movement. Chiron Review did two [poems]. For the novelty of it? DA: I think they were refreshed by the honesty of approach, and the put-on aspect. Which is very much in the tradition of people like Spicer and O'Hara. And also to a lesser degree Ginsberg. DA: And Ginsberg, yes. All of the queer avant-garde really. And also the Dadaists. It was in the tradition of Tristan Tzara. I read Tzara's "Lampisteries and Manifestoes"; in fact, I wrote my own Manifesto of Badism. I was quite serious about being bad, in the way that Tzara was serious about being Dada, and in the way in which Stein was serious about being cubist. Perhaps it was what Robert Duncan would call an "enabling fiction." But it allowed me freedom, and it was unfortunately successful, so I wrote bad poetry probably longer than I should have. How long was this period? DA: Two or three years. But you were writing Lunch at the same time, the earlier draft. DA: No, no. I stopped writing bad poetry after a while because what happened was I wrote bad poetry so well that eventually it became a lot like the bad good poetry that I would see in anthologies and magazines. And it didn't interest me anymore, because suddenly, it wasn't itself anymore, it was just a lot like regular old poetry. So the line between parody and what was being parodied was suddenly blurred, and all of a sudden you were just like everybody else. DA: Right. And I couldn't have that. You might have had a thriving career if you'd kept going. DA: Could have, but it was really disconcerting. So I thought, "Well, I'll have to begin again." Which is what I always do. I just throw everything away and say, "Okay, what should a poem really contain?" And what should it contain? What makes a poem a poem? DA: What makes a poem a poem? What I was interested in was I wanted to write poetry that was personal and based on my experience of the world, but I didn't want it to sound like prose, which is what I felt like a lot of poetry at that time sounded like. And I didn't want it to be in sentences. I didn't like sentences for poetry. I liked them perfectly well for prose. I didn't want poetry that was sentimental or schmarmy, or so personal that you felt like you just wanted to throw up, but I wanted it to be personal. It was a dilemma that I set up for myself. And I thought, "Well, how can I have what Eliot calls the objective correlative; how can I always have objectivity in a poem which is a personal history?" And so that was when I started writing the poems in Lunch. And the devices that I used to subvert my own narrativity were things like cut-up, collage, chance operations. So you had a whole series of rather non-conventional, almost Dadaesque geneses for poems. DA: Right. But at the same time, it all had to cohere, so there were some failures there, but some of the poems were quite good. I imagine your experience writing bad poetry was helpful. DA: Sure, because it helps to lend an objective distance. I was also very aware, at that point, of certain pitfalls of bad things that can be in poems, and was able to go back and take those things out when I'd accidentally put them in. So you wrote a version of Lunch, and you sent it off to the National Poetry Series, and what happened then? DA: I sent it off to the National Poetry Series, and was a finalist. That was in 1993. It took me about two years to write the poems that were in Lunch, and I published a few. I was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. I didn't win, but it was very encouraging. But the important thing was that it affirmed for me that I was on the right direction as a poet. Now, that affirmation is important in any art form, but it seems especially in poetry. Could you comment a little bit about that? Where do you get your affirmation from, is it your peers? DA: I've been getting a lot more affirmation lately, so it's easier to pinpoint. I've been getting a lot of reviews, and those are nice; those certainly are affirming. I think mostly for me the affirmation comes from readers. Ordinary readers, not people who are reviewing it, and not necessarily my peers, although that's nice too, but really to have a readership. I think in particular to feel like your work has mattered to somebody's life is important. Anything else is just gravy. When I was in Iowa, reading, after Tea came out, there was a man who came up and asked me to sign a copy of the book, and to sign it using a quote from the preface to the book. The quote was "This is not about being queer and dying, It is about being human and living." And the man was a healthcare worker, and he was caring for someone with AIDS, and I was signing the book for that person. That meant more to me than getting a MacArthur Fellowship, which I haven't done. Not that I would look $250,000 in the mouth, but that's not why I'm writing poetry. I'd like to talk about Tea for a while. First of all, before we talk about the success of it, could you speak about how you hit upon the form for one thing, and what it was like living in Iowa while you were writing those poems, the subject matter. DA: Well, that's a lot of questions. Oh, after I wrote Lunch, and got all of that affirmation, I had a lot of good things happening in my life at once, in all sorts of different ways. I got a raise at my job; I ended my relationship with Scott, which had been just a nightmare for the final portion of it, the final portion being the entire relationship. I finished my M.A. I just felt like, at that moment, life was really good. The terrible thing was that, since life was going along so well, I didn't need to write a poem at that moment. And that moment lasted for a year and a half. I had no reason or need to write. I felt like I was affirmed as a poet, and I would write when the time came. I had been accepted into the Iowa Writer's Workshop, but initially I didn't go because like I said, my life was just going along fine. It was enough of an affirmation to be accepted into the workshop; I didn't see any reason to change my life at that point, to go off in search of this M.F.A. I had just finished an M.A. And then, oh, it was winter time; I was having a bad day, and I thought, "God, maybe I should have gone to the Writers' Workshop." I wrote to them and said, "Thank you for accepting me into the program, and I'm sorry I didn't show up when I said I was going to." And they wrote back and said they wanted me. I mean, they didn't write back and say WE WANT YOU, they said, "Congratulations, you've been…" Actually, they said the same thing they'd said before; they were a little bit forgetful. So, I thought, "Well, maybe I should just go to the Writers' Workshop," and I did, and I hadn't written for a year and a half. So when I got to Iowa, I decided it was time to start writing, because they're going to expect some poems, and I'm not going to have anything to show them. I was staying at the Econolodge in Coralville, Iowa. It was my first day in Iowa For most poets, there's always something unfinished in the drawer. There's always an unfinished poem. And this was a poem that I had been working on, and had stopped writing, a year and a half before I got to Iowa. It was about my breakup with Scott. I started anew. I began over from when I had stopped writing the poem. And it just wasn't quite working. I was trying to write poems the way I had written them for Lunch. And something had changed in my life. I didn't know what yet. I knew that there was something different, that the poem needed more space somehow, or something, that it couldn't be just say, a five or six beat line, it had to be more like eight or nine or ten. I had taught poetry writing at Sonoma State. And when I was teaching poetry writing, I was immediately struck by---in my student's writing---the conformity of it. The way in which, if you saw a poem, it would generally be about two inches from the top of the page, and it would end about an inch from the bottom, and it would go in about an inch and a half on each side. And I thought, "Either everyone thinks that a poem is the same thing, or the shape of the page has something to do with the fact that those poems are all coming out looking about the same." And so I had this idea; it was an idea that had come to me while reading other work. My idea for my students was that they should write on different kinds and sizes of paper, on different surfaces, in order to override that editor in their mind that was causing them to write poems that all looked the same. It was a very interesting exercise. I had a student who carved a poem in a candle. And of course that has a spatial limitation to it. I had a student who spray-painted a poem on an American flag. I had students who wrote poems on toilet paper with soft pencils. Did it take up the whole roll? DA: No. I would have applauded that. But the thing was that they were doing really interesting things. And that medium---like McCluhan says, the medium is the message---the medium on which they worked often suggested, or forced, changes to the work. The examples which I had brought in to them were people like Kenneth Patchen, and Etel Adnan's wonderful book The Arab Apocalypse; I brought in Apollonaire; I brought in David Bromige's book Tight Corners and What's Around Them, which was originally written all on three by five cards. I brought in Bob Grenier's work, because he had been working with handwritten poems. And I brought in Olson, who used every bit of the eight-and-a-half by eleven paper. I brought in all kinds of examples to them of ways in which writers had subverted that page. And of course I brought in Whitman, because he was working in an age that was pre-typewriter. And his sense of the line was very different because of that I'm sure. Stein, who had done automatic writing… Anyway, all of these things I had taught my students were there in my head, they'd been there all along. And finally, duh, I said "Hey, I need to change the size of my paper. I need to change the way in which I'm thinking about the margins, so that I don't have this little editor in my head saying: stop at the end of the line, stop at the end of the line, stop at the end of the line." I had a legal pad, one of those big yellow pads, and I turned it sideways, so that I wouldn't be stopped by an edge, and that was the way I wrote the first poem for Tea. And did this grow into a way of talking about the AIDS epidemic, which takes up so much of Tea? DA: Well yeah, you're jumping ahead, but it did. I didn't know it was going to. Really, the first poem was just about my breakup with Scott. It had nothing to do with AIDS. As I began writing more poems, then I realized that there were limitations to what kind of subjects could be written about in that form. Also, because I was in Iowa, I felt a disconnectedness to my life, particularly everything prior to Iowa, and I think that reaching back into the past brought up subjects which were informed by or inhabited by AIDS. Those were the subjects that began to foreground themselves. Also, the encouragement of my peers and teachers can't be ignored either, because they definitely encouraged, or lauded, the poems that were in some way informed by the AIDS epidemic. So that was how the book came to be about---not about AIDS, but it definitely was stained by it. How many people do you know---not that it's a matter of numbers---but could you name a few of the people who have died in your life? DA: People that I did know. Yes. My wonderful friend Ken Penny, who was a great companion of mine. We went out to the bars in Sacramento all the time; we'd go there on three dollars, and we'd have a night's entertainment. Mostly by getting picked up. He was a very close friend of mine, and he had moved to Michigan, and was diagnosed with AIDS. He was living with his parents, and he actually came out to California to see me before he died. His appetite wasn't very good. I cooked for him and forced him to eat. That was at a time in the AIDS epidemic when AIDS had been around for a while. When it first came along, people were so afraid; it's like, you don't want to touch somebody who has it, you don't want them to breathe on you. The fears. Early eighties. Could you talk more specifically about how the AIDS epidemic was received by the gay community, here in California? DA: Oh sure. Well, when AIDS first came along, the first thing we knew was Kaposi's Sarcoma, which was 'the gay cancer'. And there were so few instances of it. I was an officer of the Gay Student Union at Yuba College, and went to a student conference in Sacramento. And there was a guy speaking there. His name was Sandy Pomerantz. He was an AIDS expert, or not really even an AIDS expert; it wasn't called AIDS yet. And he showed slides and talked about the disease that was appearing on gay men. And I remember Ernie Brown was there, the owner of a gay bar in Sacramento called the Mercantile. And he raised his hand, and he asked Sandy Pomerantz if there were people coming into his bar who had that disease, because he felt like he had the right to know, as a business owner, and he did not want them in there. That was the attitude: if somebody has this disease, they should not be out in public. They should not be around other people. There was a lot of fear and negativity; within the gay community, people were very prejudiced, and they were AIDS phobic, if you could use their own terminology against the gay community. They were in fear of their own mortality. I remember early on, people who maybe had AIDS, or maybe didn't, but if it was rumored or speculated that somebody was sick or had AIDS, they were completely ostracized. I had a friend who died, and no one knew what he died of. What was his name? DA: That was Andy. Andy buried under a hunter's moon… (To quote the poem from Tea: "[to end and to open with a field: andy buried under a hunter's moon. deer born of headlights]") DA: Andy Moore. That was the first person in Yuba City that I knew who died of AIDS, and that was the beginning of 1985. Was there a climate of panic? DA: It wasn't panic the way I'm sure it probably was in the bigger cities, but in Yuba City it was more a climate of intolerance. I think the way in which a community reacts to AIDS is probably in some way an outgrowth of how it reacts to anything. And since Yuba City was a town of intolerance, that was how it reacted to AIDS. In San Francisco it was more a feeling of tremendous loss, probably panic as well. When I moved to Sonoma County, which was in the fall of '85, there was a growing feeling of panic. And I think that really took its strongest hold in '88 or '89. That sense that, "O my God, it's everywhere. Everyone has it." Sonoma County was the county that was hardest hit by AIDS in California during those years. Why do you think that is? DA: Well, it was a resort area. The Russian River was to San Francisco as Fire Island was to New York or Key West was to Miami. A resort area. Lots of play. Lots of anonymous sex. Also, Sonoma County was a county that was wealthy enough to bring in lots of resources, and to find lots of ways to work with and against the disease. So there were people from San Francisco who, when they got sick, moved to Sonoma County, because the resources were better. When I was living in Sonoma County, I worked for a man named Lewis Freedman. He'd been a club owner in New York. He had owned a place called Reno Sweeney's. Lewis was my boss. He ran a place called The Sweet Life Cafe, and I ran a poetry series there. In fact, I ran the poetry series there before I started working for him. I always liked the cafe; it was a combination antique store and coffee house. I was at a party once where there were a lot of poets, and I got a little bit tipsy, and I said, "Well, you know, there ought to be a really good poetry reading series here in Santa Rosa." And everyone said, "Well, yes, that's all fine and good, but who's going to do it?" And I said I would. And so I knew that this space was right for a poetry reading series. It was a coffee house, located in the downtown area. It was quiet. I knew that Sunday evenings was a good time. I approached the owner, Lewis, and asked him if I could run a poetry reading series in his place; and he, to my surprise, was actually very receptive. And so I started having poets in there. I had people like Paul Mariah, who is also gone now; he was the founder of Manroot Press; they were the first people to publish a critical volume about Spicer. Paul published many people's earlier books. He was the first person to publish gay poetry as gay poetry. He came in and read there; Etel Adnan came and read there; Robert Peters, the wonderful critic and poet from UC Irvine, Cole Swensen, Steven Ratcliffe, Bob Grenier, Ed Mycue, Susan Kennedy and Mike Tuggle. It's a great area for poetry. Poets would come up from the San Francisco area, and Lewis was always really supportive of the series. He had been a pianist for a number of years, and backed up people like Phoebe Snow and Janis Ian. Anyway, he got sicker and sicker and eventually had to sell the place. And about a year after that, he died. There was a nice obituary for him in the San Francisco Chronicle. The gentleman who purchased the cafe after Lewis died shortly after he did. It was a domino effect there for a while. There was a period in the late eighties and early nineties where there were just a lot of funerals to attend. Some people I knew really well, and some I knew for only a short time. My friend Victor, when he died, his family didn't have the money to bury him. Originally---he had been a veteran; he was in the Viet Nam War---the Veteran Services were going to donate the money for his cremation. But after they got the death certificate, they decided that they weren't going to cover the costs of his cremation. And I don't know if it was because he died of AIDS or not. But it certainly made everyone suspicious. Even though I wasn't living in Yuba City and hadn't been for a long time, I was still very tied to the community there. The community of queer people and avant-garde artists. There was a number of people who all lived in the same area. I saw some of them recently, people I hadn't seen in twelve years, and it was like not a day had gone by. But we pooled our resources. I think I put in fifty dollars; my roommate Ralph put in fifty dollars, whatever we could afford. We got the money together and paid the cremation costs ourselves. There were people whose families couldn't afford those kinds of things. We'd have garage sales and yard sales or whatever, to raise the money to bury people. All of the experiences of that time came back when I was in Iowa and became part of Tea. How was that connected to the form? Did you ever feel tyrannized by the form? DA: How was the death connected to the form? Or was it? DA: It was, but…the long lines of Tea are made up of short bits, of fragments. I felt like my life at that time was putting together the broken bits. Making a whole out of something that had been shattered. A line is a complete unit. It's supposed to be a representation of a single breath. And I felt that, by pulling the line longer, stretching it into a longer breath, I was giving a little bit more life to some people who had very short lives. If I'd written very short lines about their lives, I felt like I would have just surrendered to the epidemic that took them. Also, just pushing into the margins of the page was a way of giving a larger vision to the subject. And I felt like once I began to focus on the elegies---the loss contained in AIDS---that the form seemed so right for it that not much else could go in there. The first dozen or so poems that I wrote, I think four or five of them were elegies, so everything that came after that was in some way or other related to them. What did you say about the tyranny? I was just wondering if, by the time you were completing the form, did you ever feel tyrannized by it? DA: Well, there were a number of times where I felt trapped by it. I was very lucky early on in the project of writing Tea to have the support and encouragement of some of my peers and instructors; because there were times in writing it where I felt like I was trapped, and I kept getting pushed back into it. People would say, "Go back and write more." Jorie Graham was wonderful. There was a moment where I felt like I had no more to say, and I had written probably not even half of the book at that point. And she posed a number of questions for me that made me go back in. There were of course some things which she said which were just wrong. I remember at one point when, oh, we were talking about this poem about my friend Kenny. "[kenny lost in the mineshaft among silver stalactites. his irises bloom in darkness]" DA: Yes, Kenny lost in the Mineshaft. The Mineshaft is a leather bar in New York, but what I chose for that poem was some images that were from Virgil's Aeneid. The section in which Aeneas goes down into the Underworld. And I remember Jorie said, "Oh, yes, everything you write is about the Underworld, and there are just different circles and different levels, and you have to just keep exploring all of those different circles." And of course, when you're having a conference with Jorie Graham---she's wonderful; she's very encouraging---and you walk out of there, and you're inflated, and you think, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." But quite quickly I realized that the idea of the Underworld which she was inviting into the poems was not specific to the Aeneid. It was specific actually to Virgil leading Dante, and it was Dante's vision she was interested in---a Catholic vision, one of punishment, in which everyone in the Underworld was suffering for something they did wrong. And I thought, "Oh no no no, that's not it. In Virgil's Underworld, everybody's there." I remember reading in my little dictionary that I had; I looked up the word 'hell', and the definition in my dictionary was, "Hell is a world in which the dead continue to exist." And I thought, "Oh, well that's exactly what I'm in! The dead are continuing to exist for me! Wherever they are is not hell. That's where I am. Wherever they are is this other reality." So I rejected the notion of writing a kind of "Inferno," and after that talk I went back up into the world, and wrote a number of poems which were about my relationship with the living, and about my relationship with Scott too. So I kept balancing between what was death and what was life. So, one pole of Tea is obviously the contemporization of the classical notion of the afterworld. DA: Well that's one small portion of it. Another big portion of it is a kind of Christian theme, an incorporation of spirituals I guess from your childhood, a lot of them Black spirituals, a lot of gospel. DA: From the time when I was Black. And there's a Christian vein---not necessarily white Christian---which runs through Tea, and I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about that. DA: About my Christian veins? As it relates to the notion of communities. DA: This is the dangerous thing in Tea, that it does invite a Christian reading, and that is because…for a long time I rejected Christianity. In some ways it rejected you? DA: Well, Christianity never rejected me. The way in which Christianity is applied in the world, the way in which my grandmother lives Christianity, the way in which her organizations that she funds practice Christianity is not Christian at all; it actually takes more out of the Old Testament. It's all about vengeance and punishment. There's no redemption whatsoever. And there's no love. I felt like Christianity was of little or no value to me. But once you've rejected something and put it out of your mind, then you can go back to it with some objectivity, and little by little I realized that, in fact, if I rejected Christianity because of my feelings towards those institutions and those practitioners of Christianity, then what I was doing was, in effect, allowing myself to be pushed out of it. Rather than me being the one that rejected it, I was being forced out. It's like saying, "You can't be in the club." I felt like, once I had really thought about it, I have all of the Christian values that I was imbued with through my reading of the Bible. It was something that I was raised with. What are the qualities? DA: Christ says "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." This is the whole of the law, and the prophets. The rest is just commentary. Those are the two fundamental things that you have to know: to treat people the way you would want to be treated, and to love people the way you would love yourself. I think that I've got those values more instilled in me than, apparently, Jerry Falwell and any of his cohorts do; because, to love, you have to look beyond all sorts of things. You have to look beyond anything in the person that you might disagree with. And you have to have compassion, and you can't be judgmental. You can't judge someone and love them. Even St. Paul says that, and he's a homophobe. I felt like it's more radical for me to go back into the church and to say, "I am a Christian," than to just turn my back and say, "Okay, well, I'll be something else." I'm not going to be something else; I'm going to be who I am, and uphold Christian values. So, those values become part of the text because there's a way in which---oh, when my friend Victor was being eulogized---in fact, I did the eulogy, but there was a Catholic priest there too for the family. And the priest said during the course of his talk, "And God will forgive Victor his sin." And I thought, "What the fuck? Here's this priest that's being paid by the family to come here and say some words of comfort." I thought, "Whatever you think about someone's life, you don't have the right, whether you're a priest or the Pope, you don't have the right to sit in judgment." That is biblical, you know? "Judge not lest ye be judged also." It's interesting that in your elegy for Victor in Tea, that starts "the thicknesses of victor decreased…," at the end he's transformed in a way. DA: Right. That's a kind of Hindu undoing of his pisspoor Christian burial. The words you use at the end are "radiant mariposa." DA: Well, mariposa is butterfly, but it's also 'faggot'. So you can be both. Tea seems to be a book of transformation, in a Christian sense as well. DA: The transformation is Christian when it can be, and if not, I'll certainly go to other sources. Going back to Lillian Hellman, one of the wonderful things in her autobiography, that has stuck with me all this time, is that she says when she was growing up, her mother taught her that if you need to talk to God, you just go to the closest church. It doesn't matter what kind. If I can't get someone to heaven through Christianity, I'll get them there some other way. It's not important. That's sort of Sikh. DA: It is rather Sikh. The important thing is the enlightenment of the entire world, not just yourself. So this transformation has to do with a theology of survival. DA: Well, it's a pragmatic theology. It has to do with practicing the simple arts of justice and love and forgiveness, and it has to do with disallowing elements such as punishment and judgment and persecution. And I feel like in Tea that I was actually very kind to fundamentalism. I gave it plenty of places to come in, but I wasn't combative with it at all. I think the only place where I was really direct with the fundamentalist notion of the universe was when I was writing about my grandmother. And all I said was, you can have your heaven---"go on to glory kind stranger." (Tea, page 32) You're a nice person, but I don't know you, is what I said. As soon as I started to walk, "with our first stumbling steps we followed the heathens next door." "([our family was tolerant of even anti-christs. but gramma had the recessive gene. now a lemon]," Tea, page 32) A lot of people misread that poem. DA: Well, I don't necessarily think they misread it. They had a strange reaction, and I think their reaction was entirely defensive, and I think that's fine. I mean, who can tell you how you talk about or to your family? I can love my grandmother without liking her as a person. And I certainly have fond memories of her despite the fact that she has contributed to a campaign of hatred that has helped to kill people that I love. There is a strange kind of complexity to the world, that you end up being in bed sometimes with people that kill you. Not directly but indirectly. I had a brief relationship with a former mercenary. That's a terrible thing, I'm sure. But he was a very nice person. One thing I did want to touch on, is, in reading Tea, there's a very strong historical element, and, the way I read it, it's a bit of a time capsule, for a certain era. In writing Tea, are you trying to archive that period? DA: Well there was a little bit of that, like, somehow, if I don't put all this stuff in it'll be lost. I felt that way about the people, and then there were the objects, and other sorts of things that found their way in as well. Does it ever feel like you're chronicling what, at one time, might have seemed like was going to be an erased generation of people? DA: Gay men from, say, age thirty-five to fifty are a population that has been dangerously thinned. Much of Tea is so intensely personal, I felt like it was just about me; but at the same time, I did feel like I was writing for a lot of other people. Probably some of the pain of writing the book was that I felt sometimes like there were a hundred people standing over my shoulder. They just weren't there. Do you have survivor's guilt? DA: I suppose I would have, if I didn't have AIDS. [Laughs.] There's probably some survivor's guilt; overall I always just felt lucky, like, "Whoa, God, glad I'm not dead." You talk about a lot of things that don't seem to exist anymore in the same way, particularly things like disco…the eighties gay scene which is markedly different now, I would guess, just from reading your book. DA: It was a different era. You can't help but have a certain nostalgia for the past. But I think it's more than nostalgia; because, most eras, times, communities, cultures, pass naturally away. This was one that was almost chased out of town. The people died rapidly. The music was publicly harangued. The culture of disco wasn't just Gay culture, it was African American and Hispanic culture, too; it was a hybridization, but it was definitely distrusted and abused by the dominant white, heterosexual culture. And so disco went underground, and transformed and transmuted into all sorts of other musics. It survived. Queer people survived. People who had come out of the closet went back into the closet. The promiscuousness of the culture survived, although it's not always been necessarily a sexual promiscuity. We're promiscuous in other ways. How? DA: Promiscuous in our spending, promiscuous in our tastes, promiscuous in our applications of our cultural interests. Promiscuous in our loves, without being promiscuous with our bodies. About a year ago you wrote a short essay about the co-optation of queer culture. DA: Queer culture has always been co-opted by heterosexual culture, non-queer culture, the un-people. What happens is, because queer people have had to hide in plain sight, they have developed ways of signifying queerness without being overt. And what happens is that those fashions, or linguistic turns of phrase, those elements that make queer culture, get bandied about in the arts---because there are a lot of queer people in the arts---they get bled into the host culture, and then what happens is you get a lot of cross signals. For example, back in the seventies there was this thing called the hankie code. Do you know about the hankie code? Only from your book. "[I wore the green bandanna as often as I could. cheaper than planefare. less baggage]" (Tea, page 44) DA: Handkerchiefs worn in the back pockets were ways of signifying one's sexual desires without having to go through any dialogue, which was useful in many ways, not just to get laid; it was also a way of avoiding harassment from the police. All sorts of things. All of a sudden one day, overnight, the Gap, Miller's Outpost, all these clothing stores came out with colored bandannas. Was this someone's idea of a joke? DA: No. What happened probably was someone who lived in New York, or San Francisco, or some big city that had a section like the Village or the Castro or Halsted Street saw people walking around with colored handkerchiefs in their back pockets and said, "Oh, that's really neat. That seems to be very in here. I bet it would catch on in, Peoria, say." So they mass-marketed all of these handkerchiefs, with probably no real awareness that they were doing something queer. The next thing you know, every place you go, someone's got a yellow hankie in their back pocket. Kind of confuses the signals, doesn't it? DA: Exactly. And so queer people had to abandon the hankie code. "Well, we can't use that anymore," because you just never know. You walk up to someone and say "You wanna go home?" And they go "Whatd'ya mean? I'm not queer!" So that's a good example of how the co-optation of queer culture has happened. I think now we're reaching an era where once again, even more so than the end of the seventies, queer culture is being embraced by the world. Queer people have more advantages than ever before. We're on TV all the time. You can't turn on a TV show where there's not a queer person. We're the African Americans of the 1990's. We're being embraced. I just hope that come next decade people don't turn their backs on us the way they did on Black people. For now, it seems to be very hip to have a queer person in your TV show, in your apartment, whatever. It's like, "O boy, look at all the queer people!" And so there's been not just the standard kind of co-optation, which is where people take up queer fashions about a year or two too late; now, they're doing it simultaneously. People, without realizing what they're doing, are blurring the definitions between queer and un-queer culture. But I don't think that means that people are bisexual just because they're wearing black jackets. An optimist might say that's symptomatic of greater integration. Do you think that might be true? DA: It is symptomatic of greater integration; it shows that queer people are more accepted, that people aren't drawing lines. I don't know if it'll last. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. I don't know if it means there are going to be more queer people in the future. Obviously, we'll never go away. I think that if the Kinsey scale is true---that the world divides itself roughly into halves, and there's one small section which is entirely heterosexual, and one small section which is entirely homosexual, and the rest is somewhere in between---if that's true, then at some point we might see a society with that kind of demographic. But I don't think that is necessarily true. But the only way you'd know for sure is if there was absolutely no societal prejudice against queer people. And there's still quite a bit out there. So it's a kind of wait-and-see thing. I don't know if I'll ever see it. I don't know if it's something that's going to happen in my lifetime. Let's face it, there's just a lot of cultural stumbling blocks in the way, not even necessarily overt prejudice or homophobia. Most of the world still thinks in terms of heterosexuality. You donated a portion of your royalties to the Larkin Street Youth Shelter, correct? DA: Yeah. Can you talk about that organization a little bit, and the culture of gay runaways for a while, because it's a big part of Tea. DA: Larkin Street Youth Shelter is an organization that works with children, young people, who are runaways, queer people, primarily, although not necessarily so. But it's usually youths who are runaways and who are living on the streets and prostituting themselves. There are a lot of young queer people who leave home because of sexual intolerance, and who find themselves with no means of support and who, by hook or crook, have to support themselves by prostituting themselves. There were times when I was younger when I had limited options and had to prostitute myself. It's something that is not very far beyond my life. When I walk past these kids on the street, my heart goes out, because I know where they're coming from, and so I wanted to do a little something. I mean, it's nothing really much, in the grand scheme of things, but these are lives which are in peril. They go out on the streets. They don't know a lot. They get wrapped in drug use and abuse and prostitution. Many of them get AIDS; many of them don't know to seek medical treatment. They're children dying. I just wanted to do something for them. On to Lunch. I had this question---why did you break from the form of Tea?---but now that you've explained the chronicle of Lunch predating Tea it seems like an inexact question. How did you feel going back? DA: Even if I hadn't started the Lunch project first I would have broken from Tea. How did it feel? DA: How did it feel? It felt fine. Tea was excruciating to write; it was a difficult form to write in. And it was a difficult world to inhabit. The world and the form became married for me, the subject matter and the length of the lines. Those poems were really difficult, not just in terms of the emotional weight of them, but it was a hard struggle to get them to flow, to fit right, to scan well, to move together. Also it was a project that was begun and ended in Iowa. And I felt like it was geographically contained. There was a kind of flatness of vision to those lines that was married to the landscape. Landscape was very important for Tea. When I went to Iowa I thought of the place not in terms of the fertility and expansiveness of the prairie. I thought of it really in terms of the deforestation and death of land. That's something that begins early on in Tea, and is carried through where I talk about "solving the problem of the open field…" (Tea, page 34), and "how his body stood against a thicket…." (Tea, page 62) The deforestation of America is something that has always been a troubling subject for me. I felt that deforestation that embodies American progression, American pioneering, is also the same kind of deforestation---it's the same kind of widespread clear-cutting that happened with the AIDS epidemic. So those subjects are married. When you get to the flatness of the landscape and how it looks embedded in the flatness of the lines, all of those things seem so intertwined that when I returned to the coast, the city, everything's a little bit shorter, everything's a little bit faster, everything's a little bit neater. And the landscapes in Lunch tend to be a little bit more exotic. You have atolls, coral islands. DA: Yes, there's a lot of water in Lunch. It's almost as if you've left behind the barrenness of Tea. The wasteland aspects are rejuvenated. DA: Let's face it, Tea is a pretty pisspoor meal. You don't get a lot. Lunch is a little something different every day. You have poem in Lunch, and the first line is "the sad part of living is eating and dying." Talk about the metonym of food and the ritual of lunch as it relates particularly to those last poems as you start talking about the medications you're on, about your life living with AIDS…. DA: Oh, did we say I have AIDS yet? Just want to get that in there. Like I care. Lunch is in part about living with AIDS. The thing about Lunch is that it stretches far before AIDS. It goes back into my childhood. Lunch is a way of explaining my life in context, not as a queer person, not as a person in the AIDS epidemic, but Lunch is explaining my life in the context of being a person. A Doug. My life as a Doug. And it goes into every corner I can imagine of my life. The reason that I call it Lunch, the reason that I think of lunch as the overriding subject or metaphor or whatever you want to call it, the thing, the title, the introducer, the host, is that I was fascinated with the subject of time. Time is something which is a continuum, and yet we don't treat it that way. We always chunk it up. We all spend our days in different ways, but we all have this little chunk of time that we call lunch, where we may or may not have lunch. There are lots of things that we do with lunch that aren't necessarily lunch. I conceived of these little square bits, like little square meals, little bento boxes, little lunch boxes, and the poems were all kind of square, and masticatably small. You could take them all within a lunch period and digest one, and originally I thought I'd have fifty-two poems, one a week; you could read it on your lunch hour and take it apart and maybe chew it around all day, or all week long, and next week go back and have a different one. Originally I thought it would be about lunch and about time and those sorts of things. Then of course I began living with AIDS and my medications. Which also have to be swallowed. DA: …and which also have to do with time, and schedules. And there was this super-imposition of a schedule that, while other people at my work were having their lunch hour, I was using it for calling doctors and scheduling blood tests, and in some cases I would be taking my medication at that hour---when I first started taking my medication---because that was the time of the day that I could manage to actually get it down and swallow it without anyone hearing me gag and possibly throw it up. What medication were you on? DA: At first I was on a combination therapy. The very first combination therapy that I was on included a medication called Retonivir. It's a medication that has to be kept in the refrigerator. I think that means there's something living in it. When you burp, it tastes like the inside of a metal ashtray that's been cleaned with bleach. I would have to take six of those all at once. It was like a meal, a meal of pills; it was pretty nasty stuff. I started throwing it up almost immediately after I started taking it. It just got to the point where I couldn't take it at all. And I convinced the physician that I would be better off on something else. Oh, and I was taking that in conjunction with something called Combavir, which is actually AZT and 3DT. And then I was taking Fortavase. So I got rid of the Retonivir, and then I started taking Fortavase with something called Viracept, which is a little hard, sticky pill, which kind of sticks in your throat when you take it. So I'd have to hold it in my mouth and let it melt a little bit so it would go down. I'd take it with Dr. Pepper because then I could stand it. Or apple juice. So I was taking Viracept with the Fortavase and the Combavir. Six Fortavase and five Viracept, and a Combavir. Twelve pills. A day. DA: No, at a time. Twice a day. I managed that for a couple of months, and then it just got to the point where I just couldn't do it anymore. I would throw it up. And then I would throw up just thinking about taking it. Especially the Combavir. The Combavir was nasty, nasty stuff. I'd have to lie down and let it settle for a while before I could get up and do anything. You can't live that way. You can't work that way. You can't function with all of that stuff. I mean, they're terrific medications; they're very effective medications those protease inhibitors. But I was just not able to take them. So I finally fired my doctor. And he works at San Francisco Medical Center. And you probably can't print all that because it's slanderous, or something. It's opinion. DA: My opinion was he was an asshole. He was certainly difficult to work with. Was he insensitive? DA: Yeah, he was insensitive. Now don't be putting words in my mouth. He always made me feel like it was my fault. The underlying attitude was that this was something that I had done to myself, and it was my fault that I was nauseous, and it was my fault that I couldn't take the medicine. He was a prick. So finally I just stopped seeing him. I stayed off the medication for a while until I got feeling good again; the ironic thing was that I wasn't sick before. I shopped around. I asked a friend who has been HIV positive for ten years; he recommended his doctor highly to me, and I started seeing her. And it's been a big difference. She put me on a series of medications that might not be the end-all be-all; they're not the wonder drugs of the nineties, but I can take them. And my viral load is down at undetectable. And that's with the new measurements. And that's great. If I can bring my T-cells up I'll be a happy guy, but at least I'm on something that I can take every day. I take it every time I have to. I don't fuss. There's still nausea, and diarrhea, and now I'm getting a lot of heartburn, but I'm going to stick with it. My liver enzyme count is high, and I have to watch that. I might have to go on another kind of medication that makes me crazy. There's a lot I'm willing to do to stay alive. That last section of Lunch feels to me like kind of an anti-epic; much of it is taking place on a cellular level, as much as it is on a cultural, poetic, personal level. Could you talk about that last section a little bit? How did you come to write it? DA: Well, I came to have AIDS, which in itself is a funny story. Throughout the AIDS epidemic, coward that I am, I never got tested. When it first came along very few people had it. In Sacramento, I think there were eighteen people who had it. There was no one that had it in Yuba City that anyone knew. A few people in big cities. And you just think, "Well, it's such a small population and they're going to die real soon, so they won't pass it on, and then it'll just be over." And then more and more people got it, and pretty soon people I knew had it, and after a while I thought, "O my God. Everyone has AIDS, and I must have it too." I lived that way for a long time, under fear that I was going to die, and nothing happened, and finally I thought, "Well, I don't have AIDS," and then I went off to school in Iowa. Finally, after writing Tea, which was such a tremendous process of thinking---not just about other people's deaths, but thinking about surviving, and thinking about the burden of knowing and not knowing about AIDS---it was just time. I was having lunch with Jorie Graham, right after I finished my thesis, which was nearly the end of the manuscript. I wrote a few more poems after that, that summer, but I was having lunch with Jorie and she said, "So, how is it that you managed through all of that time to not get AIDS?" And I said, "Well, I don't know that I did manage that. I've never been tested. It's funny that you bring it up because I was just getting ready to be tested this Tuesday." What did she say? DA: She was very sweet. She was quite worried, and hopeful. In fact, she went to church right before I went to get tested. She said, "I don't know if it helps any, because I'm an atheist, but I prayed for you." So I went and I got tested, and there was that long waiting period, and I went to get my result, and it was negative. It felt like a huge burden was lifted. Mostly it was terrific because I was at this juncture in my life where I just didn't know how to proceed, because I didn't know how my long my future would be. And I felt like I had one at that point. Then I moved to San Francisco, and I got on with my life. And the funny thing is I was a good boy. Something must have gone wrong. I don't know the way they do their test in Iowa. It doesn't really matter now. I went to a doctor for a check-up and he said, "Do you want to have an AIDS test?" And I said, "Well, yeah, you may as well throw that in." It was just so matter of fact at that point. I'd already had one. When I got the result, it was positive. Positive bad, not positive good. I hate that word positive. It's so miscast. So I laid around for a couple weeks and thought I was gonna die, and I didn't, right away. I will die at some point, but so will everyone. At least we're all in the same club. And then I thought, "Well, I've got to get about the task of living." So I went on the medications, and I'm doing quite well I think, considering. But there was quite a bit of anxiety and concern around my venture into the next segment of my life, the segment of my life that begins, "Doug with AIDS." Does it change the relationship of your mind to your body at all? DA: For a while I was kind of hyper-aware of things. At one point I was taking my temperature all the time. Finally, after I freaked out because I was running a fever, I decided I wasn't going to take my temperature anymore. Because the medications come along with certain side effects, and because there are things that happen to me, I'm more aware, yes. Those kinds of concerns are what went into the last section of poems in Lunch, and I tried to make the final section upbeat, but damn it's difficult! It's really hard to write something kind of happy about having AIDS. My friend Chris has this wonderful joke, and every time I think about it, I have a little chuckle. It's about this old man. He goes to the doctor. A seventy-year-old man. And the doctor says, "Well I've got some terrible news. You've got AIDS. And the worst part is, you have Alzheimer's." And the old man stares at him for a little bit and he gets up and he says, "Oh, my God. Well, at least I don't have AIDS." Sometimes I forget, but it's not very often. I have to remember that I have AIDS; otherwise I won't take my medicine. It's just like Thucydides said, "Those who forget they have AIDS are doomed to repeat it." Why don't you tell us about Cocktails, your new project. DA: I had the idea for the name of the collection before I started it. Once I had gotten Lunch and Tea I figured Cocktails was the natural extension of it. I don't think the drug cocktail for AIDS had even been invented yet when I had originally thought of the name, when I started writing Tea; so when was that? 1996. Maybe drug cocktails were around then but I guess I didn't follow AIDS therapy. There didn't seem to be any need. Anyway, I had the name already, and I thought that it was going to be about the flourishing night life of queer community. It was going to be about night time itself, the possibilities, the glamour. And of course, as I was writing Lunch, the idea of what Cocktails would be took a very different turn. Particularly with that last section. Also, I think Tea had already made me a more serious thinking poet than I was when I set out to write Tea. When I set out to write Tea I was just kind of a flip guy. And I flipped the page; then it became more and more serious. So, by the time that I had finished Tea, I already knew that Cocktails was going to have more somber qualities than I had initially anticipated. It was during the writing of Lunch that I began to envision the more expansive areas of the book. And it really it divides itself up into a couple of kinds of poems. Frankly, I don't know how they're going to work yet. That's still puzzling, but life is full of challenges. Are they longer poems? DA: Yeah, they're longer poems, and some of them are a kind of autobiography told through film. It's as if I'm taking films that already exist and reading them as my autobiography. There's a little bit of that starting to happen in Lunch. The poems about your father. "My father and I as fading Hollywood starlets…" DA: Oh yes, yes. That's true. There is that. I hadn't thought of those that way. So the other pole of Cocktails I happen to know has to do with the Apocrypha. DA: The other part of Cocktails or the other writing that's going into it at this time…I am writing the spiritual self through sexuality. There's a long tradition of that going back to the Song of Solomon, and the odes that are attributed to Simon of Cyrene. Oh, and the poems of Saint John of the Cross. There's the history of a sensual writing about the experience of spirituality. But I'm doing it from a very queer approach. It's not just flip. It's not as if I'm just writing in a kind of blasphemous, provocative way. I'm really using the historical relationship of man to the male aspect of Christianity in a sensuous way. There is that history. So one of the dominant consciousnesses of the poems is John the Apostle. He's the author of Revelations. That puts him in a strange camp. The first meaning of camp. He is also the youngest of the apostles, one of the first four. There was Andrew and Peter---they were brothers---and there was John and James; they were brothers. And they were all fisherman. John was the youngest of the apostles. He wrote the gospel according to John, which stylistically we know stands apart from the other three gospels. The other three are called the poetic gospels. John is a much more sensuous writer; everything is corporeal. Everything is told through the skin, through his touch and sensations. "In the beginning was the word and the word became flesh." Right from the beginning. Boom, there's gonna be bodies in this. I like the way in which he transfers the notion of spirituality immediately into what happens with the skin and with touch and with the flesh. He's also very intimate with his Christ. There is an intimate relationship which he alludes to; he places himself at the Last Supper with his head resting against Jesus' bare breast. He is the first to enter the tomb, looking for the body; he's the first to see the risen Christ. He constantly refers to himself as the apostle whom Jesus loved. He wants to make sure that we're aware of that intimate relationship. In an apocryphal tale of John, he is the recipient of Christ's foreskin. Which is the only bit of Christ that's left on earth. DA: Right. Christ is Jewish, and Jewish male children are circumcised on the eighth day. So he's circumcised and in the Apocrypha, Mary keeps that prepuce, that foreskin, and she passes it along to John. When Christ is resurrected, he's resurrected in the flesh. So he is whole as he was in death. All of his body goes to heaven. And the only thing that remains on earth is that foreskin. The foreskin is like a wedding ring. It's got that shape to it, and that symbology; it's given to John who is Christ's love. Why was John imprisoned on the island when he wrote Revelations? Was he imprisoned? DA: I'm not sure whether he was imprisoned; he was in exile. And I'm not sure why. That was toward the end of his life. And he didn't write Revelations himself. He dictated it to I believe Nathan; I'd have to check that. It was a younger scribe who wrote Revelations for him. One of the other interesting things to me about John is that he is the survivor of the apostles. Many of the apostles died on the cross, or were boiled in oil, or stabbed to death. They were victims of very brutal deaths, and early deaths. John outlived all of his contemporaries. He was the elder statesman. And in the early days of the church, this lone surviving apostle was often called upon to say a few words. And he would get up…he was very frail, an old man of seventy, which is old by even our standards, but by the standards of his day, he was amazingly old. He would address the congregation and say, simply, "Children, love one another." So, he's someone who's a personal favorite of mine among the apostles. When I was in New York two years ago, right after Tea came out, I was staying with a friend who lived on 112th street. It just so happened that she lived right down the street from the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. It's interesting how certain things, people, events follow you. It's like when I walk into a restaurant and hear "Girl from Ipanema." But that's another story. I was staying at Rachel's and there was the Church of Saint John the Divine. I'd never heard of it or experienced it, and so I went over there. It was just an amazing, beautiful Cathedral. The Keith Haring screen in there. There's a wonderful Last Supper. It's got lots of art. And it's got a very queer feel to it. There are peacocks in the courtyard. One last question about Cocktails. Do you have any idea when it's going to be completed? DA: I'm not working at it feverishly, the way that I did with Tea, and the way that I did with Lunch. As I said I envision the poems longer, so they're taking more time. They're gonna take a while. And I'm in no hurry. I feel like I've got my whole life to finish it. Hopefully I'll finish it sooner than that, whenever that is. Anything else? DA: What else should I say, except, "Children, love one another." Sean Durkin has a background in broadcast journalism; Sam Witt writes poetry. Two Many Stars is the name of their collaboration. They can be contacted at: toomanystars@dotcomnow.com. Return to  Top of Page • Archive Index