The Brooklyn Rail

“The self keeps atomizing,” charles theonia writes in “The Color of Joy Is Pink,” a poem from their debut collection, Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can’t Relax (the title comes from a tweet by Diana Ross). The line reminds me of a story I read when I was about ten years old, about a little boy who wakes from a nightmare, bolts out of bed, and charges toward his parents’ room; he pauses when he realizes he’s walked straight through a wall. That moment is enough to slow down his frantic molecules, and he is reconstituted as a solid—but more significantly, he’s stuck, bricked up in between the walls of his home. Reading charles theonia’s poetry makes me feel a bit like that boy, but I don’t get stuck until I finish reading, and then I can simply start over and I’ll vibrate again.

Gay Heaven, with its myriad forms of liquefaction and (pun intended) sublimation, makes phase changes from the beginning, from “the moment I open the morning / door and liquid cats spill in,” as theonia writes in “Earthly Reasons,” the first poem in the collection. Phase would be an obvious metaphor for the mutability of identity, and sometimes it does function that way, as in “Her crisis stalls at the evaporating edge of : before it can burn off, she licks the essentialism / from her lips” from “I Feel Ugly Eyes Creating Me.”

But something else is happening in Gay Heaven, too, even in the poem this quote is taken from, from the book’s second movement, where theonia uses a (mis)translation technique to run the abstract of a “scientific” sexology paper through the text blender. theonia is gathering source texts and references—from Diana Ross to Gerard Manley Hopkins—and setting the blender to puree. They are making texts rub together, catch fire, and explode. They’re making molecules accelerate. “Language experiences orgasm upon touching itself,” writes Roland Barthes, and it’s tempting to also talk about theonia’s acceleration as somehow sexual—but this might reduce their broader project to less than it is. Still, the body is a blender, too, and sometimes it’s difficult to tell where the corporeal ends and the textual begins: “the body turns out to be a metabolism, a place where questions are fleshy, digested” (from “We Couldn’t Encrust Life With Love”).

One of the good things about liquids is that they’re easy to permeate, and the same is true of liquid text; liquids give us a hint about the stakes of theonia’s work. In the Joe Brainard-inspired “Truth Game,” about halfway through the book, one of theonia’s mini-essays goes:

AFFINITY POLITICS

My enduring affinity for art by gay men who don’t care about me

The gay identity that many of theonia’s art angels knew—figures like Martin Wong, Frank O’Hara, and even Arthur Russell—is actually not a very permeable category, and theonia’s smart enough not to assume that any of them would have felt bound in queer communion with the poet. theonia dreams of separating the art from these artists, and phase changes are the way they’re going to do it. If texts become liquid, they become flexible, permeable, and difficult to contain. If we can make them slosh around in a big bucket, maybe we can catch some drops on our tongue:

without porosity, an opening onto what it’s read
folding in to meet an earlier
text, other arrangements of the self
paper folds back and rubs one name on another
I turn to Dear Angel of Death, to help me read
backwards, to write with others, in the slippery
contact of citation (you might get your sources wet)
every time we read someone, we touch
the papers touching them
the page is where we keep
looking, where we come from

There is no better site for the melting and annealing of bodies and texts than the dance floor, and no better genre than disco. Built on samples, disco “provides impetus for new modes of being and nonbeing involved in the writing and in particular the nonwriting of poetry and art, where lyricism, subjectivity, and personal expressiveness might be reduced to blips.” This is Tan Lin, whom theonia must have had in mind in composing the book’s last movement, a beautiful, long-form poem about Arthur Russell, the genre-hopping musician who died of AIDS-related illness in 1992. (The “about” feels inadequate—the poem is sometimes an ode, and sometimes a self-portrait as Russell, and sometimes a landscape, New York in the eighties.)

theonia samples other artists like a disc jockey. And they are specific about disco as a kind of musical liquidity, a wet environment where bodies and texts alternately melt and fuse:

gay life: you want to dance

then you look around and see who you could be dancing with

I thought at the disco

if i were alive then, i’d be in the library looking back

your smile across the open dance floor

my hands up your sweater, from the beginning

it was always better not to think

as anyone who has gone

to find you there can tell you

disco understands itself

maybe you spilled onto me

i leave half-connected

i feel the ongoingness

The dance floor is supposed to be fun, but it’s not easy. We can’t relax because our molecules might slow, leaving us stuck in time. But in the storms of touch, sweat, body odor, samples, and beats, there is also a utopian, liquid possibility.

Here’s Tan Lin, again, in harmony with theonia:

Poetry—and here one means all forms of cultural production—should aspire not to the condition of the book but to the condition of variable moods, like relaxation and yoga and disco. The poems (of our era) (are designed to disappear, (and disappear) continually into the stylistic devices that have been sampled and diluted from the merely temporal language) (i.e., duration, historical or otherwise) of the day. As such they might resemble a pattern uninteresting and enervating in its depths but relaxing on its surface.

theonia’s poems aren’t uninteresting on their surface (quite the opposite!), but they’re trying to relax.