The Brooklyn Rail

The most intense recent experience I’ve had writing poetry was composing a piece called “People Without Names,” a long poem recently published in Eileen Myles’s Pathetic Literature anthology (Grove Press, 2023). I wrote it in January 2021, still living in Alphabet City during the endlessness of the global pause. When my second book of poems was published, George Washington, I experienced a thing I think is not unique among poets. The anxiety of reception gave way to the emptiness of anticlimax. One friend describes publishing a book of poems like sailing a paper airplane into the void. I couldn’t agree more. Chip Delany would call on the phone in his joyous falsetto, “So how’s the book!” To measure a thing beyond reviews, sales, awards mean what exactly? I know but I don’t know. Completion may or may not be a form of abandonment, but publication is a burial for most poets. And that’s okay. The dead know things. 

After my mother’s death in 2016, I stopped publishing poems. I see this now as a grief response. I lost faith in being a poet, in the immediate or even ultimate use of public words. I don’t believe it was a matter of feeling cynical about a particular scene or what Charles Bernstein calls Official Verse Culture. The poetry world, official or not, doesn’t exist. Not like I once pretended. What I’m saying is everything about my life in a very short period—not just my parents—seemed to die on the vine. Relationships. Friendships. My gender. Are grief and silence sisters or surrogates? Rachel Levitsky declared on a Maine beach a few years back re: white poetics, especially the experimental crowd: “Our practice has been called into question.” Real questions don’t have simple or singular answers. One response is silence, however. Silence can be and often is reparative. It can also be egotistical, self-regarding, confining. Mock withdrawal, complicit retreat. To Audre Lorde, silence is what we as poets are called to transform, betray even. For John Cage, it’s tantamount to the essence and soul of art. Now what? 

December 2020. I have a Zoom birthday. I’m in love with two people, one of whom shows up. I hope this other would arrive. But like a Rilkean lover they never do. Afterwards, a bunch of us make jokey New Year’s predictions. I say queers will soon drop their names entirely, become “de-appellated.” Funny how Fate laughs. Two years later, I’ve split from my assigned gender and deadname entirely, including legally, becoming whatever gap of self this is. I’ve transitioned not so much into as out of something. Most days I feel like a nonbinary lesbian. In another way, I always have. It’s just now I am so but with language where the “with language” part constitutes more than radical exit. The retroactive completion of the past. I’m a Sapphic poet. I think there are two kinds of poets, BTW: war poets and lesbian poets. Rarely, one can be both. Falling in love brought me back to poetry. Sobriety, Tarot, therapy. To “swim back to the shores of the living / out from the sea of the dead.” Who said that? One day I sat down and wrote out “People Without Names” on a typewriter that belonged to a chosen ghost I knew. I wrote something very personal, jumbled, raw. I could feel the grief/desire energy shift. I could suddenly retrieve the information of my life, the hidden details I’ve tried to point to like a context. Here they moved all at once. Poems have geodesic crystal density. And why not. Love poems are often fantasies about people you can’t quite know, but they don’t lie. My poem starts with a scrambled wink at West and Pynchon, though their moods more than words.

As I wrote the poem I could feel that I was traveling somewhere extravagant. Knotted speech. One thing becoming another thing. Months prior, I had dreamed of being onboard a bus with X. They sat down next to me but refused to notice me. I reported the dream to a real live dream-shaman who coached me for a few hundred dollars. I had to write a letter to a dead person from my college days. I never did. But the dream episode insinuated itself as the skeleton for this new poem that rambles round. It asks the question of why/how we ghost one another. Why queer love is so filled with premature exits. And silence. Poems speak to those who can’t hear them. The poem believes in magic. It experiences itself as a telling of a vision where intimacy’s hallucination doesn’t mean illusion. Suffering is an indication of something (reality). It’s okay to be hopelessly in love, etc. To court the unavailable. I’ll find the exact Benjamin quote later. Abjection should be a risk. Poetry or love is a way of speaking to the dead and healing them. Sometimes you write a poem to prove you still exist. Writing “People Without Names” was like my un-suicide note. Proof of a future both mine and anybody’s. I like to think of poetry as the preferred currency of nobodies. But you already know that. 

—The Friend

Brooklyn, New York
February 2024