Christopher Hennessy: For the non-elect, what is this awesome group you've gathered?
Alex Dimotrov: Wilde Boys is a queer poetry salon for beautiful boys who write and appreciate beautiful poems. We meet monthly at each others’ apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Some of the boys are pursuing their MFAs in poetry at NYU, Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, New School, and Rutgers; while others teach, or work in publishing. It’s a mix of established and emerging queer poets, and what fuels our discussions is our obsession with poetry, which is queer enough as it is.
CH: What prompted you to start the group?
AD: This past February I was in Chicago for AWP and I ended up hanging out with a group of incredibly engaged and talented queer poets all weekend.
CH: How did I miss this!? I was there....oh, yeah, hiding in my room.... Go on.
AD: When I left, I remember thinking, “There’s no reason why we can’t get together like this more often…” I talked to David Groff about it over coffee one day, and also to Scott Hightower, and they both told me about the Pink Poets, who used to meet in New York in the 90s. I was inspired, I had a lot of energy and hope for a similar group, and three months after AWP, in May, the first Wilde Boys salon was held in the West Village, at the poet Tom Healy’s apartment. I was happy that poets I really admire, like Mark Bibbins and Jason Schneiderman, ended up coming, and have continued to attend regularly.
AD: So far we’ve discussed poems, interviews (from your book!), and essays by Hart Crane, Thom Gunn, D.A. Powell, Reginald Shepherd, Henri Cole, and James Merrill, among others. In the next few months we'll be reading Mark Doty, Richard Howard, John Ashbery, and Carl Phillips, to name a few. Everyone in the salon is encouraged to suggest readings.
CH: What's the atmosphere like? In my head I picture everything from giggling to poetry recitation to spirited arguments.
AD: The atmosphere is playful and witty—and we’re very prone to gossip, naturally. We go on many tangents, most of which I probably shouldn’t go into detail about. And of course, we get into serious disagreements at times, which is also when we take a break to refill our drinks.
CH: Can you describe a particularly engaging salon you've had so far?
AD: In July, we read Reginald Shepherd’s polemical essay, “The Other’s Other: Against Identity Poetry.” In that essay Reginald challenges the idea of "black" and "gay" poetics, or that any such schools could possibly define him and his work. This raised a lot of issues for our salon....
CH: Which leads me to our next quesiton.... If there's an arc you'd like the salon to have -- e.g., the exploration of a particular unified concept, if that makes sense -- how would you articulate that?
AD: Partly it’s that age-old negotiation between identity and art making. In some ways it’s interesting to ask the simple question -- what is it really that brings us together? Poetry? Queerness? Queer poetry, if there is such a thing? And then, what keeps us coming back? Queerness frames itself against the status quo, but it too can get boring and incredibly didactic. It’s limited, like how theory is limited. The imagination is more powerful than queerness, or any idea of queerness—and I say that without the intention to erase a queer history or negate the importance and reality of social struggle. I do think that being queer may be, like many other things, a gateway to the imagination. And there’s a lot of invention and artifice to queerness, but at the end of the day it doesn’t allow us to transcend or achieve the kind of freedom that the imagination allows for. And one of the reasons may be because the imagination is based on the logic of illogic, Lorca's duende. I think that’s what Reginald was getting at in his essay, and like him, I would hate to be understood by the culture simply as a queer poet (assuming the culture cares at all). That's not very powerful, or interesting. This issue of personal identity and its relation to artistic production seems both endlessly frustrating and engaging at the same time. That’s one way to understand why we continue to meet, or why we began meeting in the first place.
CH: What am I forgetting to ask?
AD: Boxers or briefs? And I wouldn’t know the answer to that. We do keep our clothes on—at least during the salon.
CH: Well, that's a good tease of a note to end on! Maybe next time we can talk about why gays poets are such teases?
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1 comment:
Fascinating. That's about the only kind of salon I might try to attend these days. Something that really was engaging and interesting, where heated disagreement led to more discussion rather than flaming. Well done, and best wishes to them.
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