A New Sun Rising

More later.

Some Further Thoughts On Cock Sucking

Yesterday, I offered a disquisition on the problem of what makes a gay writer gay. Today, I should like to amplify on those remarks and arrive at few general guidelines for students of literature.

I prefer to apply the word cocksucker instead of gay to myself, since cocksuckers are so universal a phenomenon and so well understood. One may be a cocksucker regardless of his or her sexual orientation. Indeed, like your local library, the telephone directory is packed with cocksuckers, male and female: page after page of them. The cellphone has merely expanded the reach of their mouths. Cocksuckers are often found sucking cock very loudly on crowded trains, particularly the 7-train.

Intellectually, artistically and emotionally, I feel that the majority of my readers can relate better to the term cocksucker than they can to gay or queer. I am sometimes unhappy. So are they. How can we be unhappy and gay? It is semantically impossible. Besides, let's be honest. After a few beers, even the most saintly, patient, inclusive and understanding people will freely acknowledge that 90% of their neighbors are, to one degree or another, cocksuckers, regardless of race, religion or ethic background. The other 10%--the nice ones they never mention--are probably aliens, most probably from Andromeda. Their customs are certainly queer. They may even be gay.

As for myself, in addition (obviously) to being a cocksucker, I also happen to be a writer who sucks cock. This probably lends a slightly fruity flavor to my work, depending on the soap you used this morning. (I favor the savory ginger bath bar from Origins.) It is a taste which may not be to everyone's liking, I admit. But I appreciate your efforts to meet me half-way on the subject. Especially the soap. Thank God for that. Even so attentive a lover of Man as myself cannot suck off the entire human race. I have dishes to do and poems to write.

Regarding the original cock sucking question, What is a gay writer?, my rule of thumb is this:

A gay writer may be less than great and still write well. But a great writer is always more than gay. He is very likely a cocksucker, just like everyone else.

Here endeth our foray into Fairyland—the philology of fellatio. Go forth, you sexy beast, and sin no more.

What It Means To Be A Gay Poet

Speaking strictly as a man who enjoys sucking cock, I have always seen myself as a member of Poets Anonymous: one more individual trying to make sense of a universe largely hostile to my desires. I am not sure if this (the cock sucking, I mean, not the universe) qualifies me to be a gay poet. It is so hard to know what anything signifies in the world these days. My desires or cock sucking.

I do use the word gay sometimes in my work, but hardly (now that I think about it) in reference to myself. This is not a political statement. Aristotle may believe that man is a political animal, but somebody should tell Aristotle that I am not an animal. I am not a man either. I am a cocksucker, a different beast altogether. You see, I show up everywhere I go as a mysterious mathematical variable—usually an “I”—doing whatever the authorities have forbidden: swinging from chandeliers, peeing in potted palms, smoking cigarettes, making love, that sort of thing. One wonders why?

I think I must have trouble seeing myself as a member of a collective, community mind. I have discussed these feelings of isolation with other members of my support group—Catullus, Andrew Marvell, John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, A.E. Housman, Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, and that cute cashier, Chad, at my favorite coffee shop in Queens. The consensus among us seems to be—at one time or another—we have all been loved or hated as individuals.

In other words, cocksuckers. Whether we were sucking cock or not.

The Lady Next Door

Thin flakes of the sweetest chocolate paint

curled invitingly from the door trim

belonging to a neighbor who would faint

when I pretended to be eating them.

She planted flowers with strange leaves—like hearts—

on either side of the gas meter. She

had me collect their seeds in olive jars

because I said they looked like bombs to me.

Her yard was where I saw my first eclipse.

We gathered to observe it on the lawn.

Before one word of wonder reached my lips,

the birds stopped singing and the sun was gone.

Although I knew that the darkness would pass,

I was glad grandmother gripped my hand.

Why teacher said, “Don’t be afraid,” in class,

she said she would never understand.

The Poet as Prophet

Since today commemorates nothing in particular, I thought I would memorialize the occasion with a retrospective essay on the role of the poet as voyant, or visionary, in contemporary society.

I should probably add, as a legal disclaimer, that the opinions expressed here are not my own. Apart from these prefatory remarks and a remote gastric gurgle occurring at the very end of this piece, each of the following paragraphs was dictated to me through an Ouija Board by a gentle soul grown disenchanted with life in the astral plane of existence. Picture, if you can, a poor little poltergeist pining away for a human heart he can call his own. I am sure you would have shut your eyes and invited him into your home just as I did, if he had contacted you.

Like many people of a spiritually sensitive nature, I feel that the dead deserve to have their say in this world as much as the living. Rarely do poets permit the past so much unfettered access to the present. Whatever the risks to our own—often fragile—artistic identities, I think we should. So, I was happy when the fellow rapped on my door this morning as I was measuring out a spoonful of coffee. I filled the kettle with water as he filled me. Soon we were all whistling with glee.

I plan to allow him the use of my entire body.

Hopefully, just for today.


Madame Blavatsky, Poetry, and Me:
An Appreciation


[Being the antepenultimate lecture in a series I recently delivered at the University of Iowa School of Cooking, Creative Writing, and Paranormal Research.]

We take for our text today a cryptic quote from T.S. Eliot:


I shall not want Society in Heaven,
Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;
Her anecdotes will be more amusing
Than Pipit’s experience could provide.

I shall not want Pipit in Heaven:
Madame Blavatsky will instruct me
In the Seven Sacred Trances;
Piccarda de Donati will conduct me.

—From ‘A Cooking Egg,’ Poems, 1920


It is not easy to overestimate the influence of 19th Century Theosophist thinker Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky on the evolution of modern poetry; but it is always possible to try.

Helena Petrovna remains, if she remains in our minds at all, a mystery, a medium, a mystic—an enchanting metaphor, perhaps—the raisin in our rice pudding, if you will. Numerous numerologists have noted (with hysterical hand-rubbing) the mathematical symmetry of her name—the very recipe for collective wisdom as it is received around a workshop table.

We assign a number to each word, mix them together in a nonsensical way, add 1 tablespoon of vanilla, 2 cups of sugar, sprinkle with nutmeg and bake in a custard crock for 30 minutes at 350˚. When your crock has sufficiently cooled, refrigerate your poem for 24 hours. Multiply the result by infinity (∞), and cube that figure to the power of 10, and the sum is always the same: 0, whether you enjoy the results or not.

A casual coincidence? I leave that to others to decide.

Most often, we encounter Madame Blavatsky (if we read poetry at all) not in the coolness of our empty custard crocks, but as a dusty sunbeam on a deserted seat cushion, a glowing nullity, the lonely reminder of an absence in our lives: the Guggenheim Fellowship that never was, but still might be. She may be the most malleable public figure to draw the attention of a writer since Homer donned a spiked leather thong and tackled King Proteus.

Personally, I shall always associate Madame B. with the song of Shelley’s skylark: an eternal monument to Possibility, with a capital ‘P’, which rhymes with ‘C’, and stands for ‘Cruel,’ cruelty being the one cosmological constant in a world tortured by turmoil. Her preferred mode of apparition bears much in common with low pressure sodium street-lighting: that broad band of orange ectoplasm—so offensive to astronomers—which floats like the face of a friendly celestial visitor over our most crowded cities on cloudy nights.

Indeed, so large and so illuminating is her influence today, after a recent reading I gave in Waukegan, Illinois an aspiring clairvoyant (an MFA candidate)—Jack—I forget his last name—these earnest American graduate students are all the same—bumped into my elbow, causing me to splash burgundy on my new white canvas high-tops, so moved was he by my remarks on Madame Blavatsky’s book, Behold! The 12 Most Blessed Steps Toward A Poetic Career: Your Guide To Becoming A Gasbag. He had somehow penetrated my security detail in order to pluck at my sleeve and inquire breathlessly, “What was she really like?”

“Her table-talk does not survive,” I admitted, rather bitterly, as Jack was carried away. I watched his thin, white arms disappearing, gesticulating wildly at the crystal chandeliers high above the heads of the assembled autograph hounds in the hotel lobby. Disgusted with what the creature had done to my sneakers, I impaled a piece of poorly peeled Gouda with a pink toothpick. I had to catch a flight.

For that, and for many other offensive slights and oversights in my life, I have to make amends.

Clearly, Madame Blavatsky was a woman of voluptuous appetites. We can only speculate about how she took her tea: à la russe, with a dollop of Dmitry Dmitrovitch’s home-made raspberry conserves, or in the English fashion, with a decorous drop of milk and a sprinkling of refined sugar?

For my own part, as a writer myself, I am content to ask the difficult questions. The nonsensical answers which invariably flow from my fingertips permit me to live quietly off the credulity of others. It’s a living. The pen has its perks. Such as dining on stuffed doves and wilted beet greens with a spectacular constellation of actors, politicians, music producers, rap artists, and those other self-loving, self-luminous, self-absorbed objects one finds orbiting the intellectual firmament of New York’s trendier trattoria of a Friday night.

While I only talk trash at the table, like my friends, when I lecture I try to adopt a more serious, extra-oracular mode of expression in order to lend a shimmer of substance to my inane assertions. I hope you don’t mind the rattling tinfoil.

Really, what can one actually say about life, or death, or even doorknobs for that matter, which hasn’t been said before, and probably better, by somebody else, probably by Robert Benchley, in between highballs back in 1919? Like all successful charlatans, I keep careful accounts. I pay no attention to my own prognostications. But I will happily lift a glass of something good to those morons that do.

Still, the consolations of poetry aren’t really what we are discussing here, are they, Jackie?

No.

I bring up the tedious subject of poetry only as a point of departure—the proverbial pine plank, if you happen to reading this passage while hiding in the hold of a cruise ship recently captured by pirates—a springboard to another, deeper discussion.

I wish to conclude my address this afternoon by pointing out something that looms much larger and lovelier in our lives, yes, larger and lovelier even than poetry. By that I mean, the mysterious force of Chance, as represented by the grandiose—almost gravitational—attraction of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

How she hovers over every event, every incident, every accident, every argument which occurs on this glaucous globe—every gathering of two or three believers—or non-believers for that matter—endlessly, annoyingly—vispering, “Vat eef...?” in thickly accented English, proposing an infinite number of alternative universes: where all you need is love, Art reigns supreme, comets are cabbages hurled at us by Heaven and the terrible laws of common sense do not apply.

*Hiccup*