Read at Basket Books in February 15, 2023
I begin writing this little essay in my bed. I never write in my bed. I begin writing this long hand in my journal but I write one sentence and then move to the Notes app on my phone. Seems more practical. That was yesterday.
Now I am re-writing the piece from yesterday, sitting at my kitchen table and working on my laptop.
Now I am re-reading at a long plastic table.
Now I am here in front of you.
Time shifts so quickly. The now over days that intermingle together in one piece that seems like a unit and actually is not. Its unitariness a figment of the imagination. A sleight of hand. A feigning.
How I am writing this is also how I was reading Anthony’s book Particles of a Stranger Light. Or what I was reading is also now in this essay. I mainly read the book in bed, which seems like an ideal place to read this book.
And as the poet reminds us, “It’s impossible / to finish a conversation / when the beginning is erased.” So I thought I’d include the beginning. Of this essay and of me knowing Anthony.
Twelve years ago when I was trying to figure out how to make small attempts at fomenting spaces to nurture non-normative writing in this city, Anthony was someone who kept showing up, to wander through the space of an installation of books in a museum or to take a class in that installation or to attend a series of performances that were also readings that were also sculptural installations and a workshop. Anthony was someone who would come in and linger and ask questions and engage, someone who seemed moved by the wildness of these forms clashing. He would watch and observe and listen and take notes, and maybe that’s the humble thing that the poet can always do.
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This essay is a part of a conversation, but also a presentation. Like a debutante ball. Like the presentation of the poet in society. We form a society, at least tonight, a small temporary society to celebrate this book coming into being. I wanted to read Anthony’s book and to think with it, to present that book to you and to build a context for it, to set up a little runway and let these poems strut down, each one of them unique, new and beautiful. I wanted to say something about what the poet has made, what it might mean and why it matters.
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The book begins with a desire to finish the conversation, but that desire is interrupted by a temporary loss of self, an infringement on the poet’s personhood. I won’t go into the details. The poet is in a body, but that body is unknown or distant, unreachable, the body becomes an object. The poet is outside of his body, but we don’t get any psychological terms for that outsideness: the poet doesn’t turn to pop psychology terms that we have been encouraged to use to relate to our lives. I want to make a list of all the words that Anthony does NOT use to filter experience, but because I am so happy to be able to rest from those words, I will not use them here either. We’ll try to inhabit the space of the poems instead.
These poems collect, but they’re concise. The poems are slippery, because they are specific, not making large claims. If the poet has an epiphany or some momentary certainty, they’re like flashes in the midst or in the mist.
As one poem says: "certainty is an act of control. Even when feigned. " The world is asking the poet to toughen up, but these poems refuse or maybe they don't refuse maybe they play with the idea of toughening up and then quickly grab a drink or a surfeit of drinks and collapse later in the early hours of the morning on a river bank in dappled light of the rising sun
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The book proffers a creation myth born out of blatant copyright infringement, it is Friday the 13th and Jason is “slashing every one of us,” slashing all the bodies and then the creation of the world coming out of that. The poet writes:
We took his skin and made the earth.
We took his mask and made the moon.
We took his machete and made all of you.
An implement of violence become the creation story. How to create something of the slashing …. For all of you
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Out of all the slashing, the poet is still perceived as something whole by others, something to be measured, defined, categorized. There is a questioning in these poems about how the poet is perceived by the people around them, the endless pull to gender one another and the endless pull to define each other with some word existing before we had even met one another. Fitting each other into boxes and pushing each other in no matter whether we fit or not. These misidentifications a kind of ticket meted about the authority figures we become for each other, and as the poet writes:
"then I stuffed the ticket in my wallet and drove to work."
The poet is often headed to work or work is always looming in the poems.
The poet brings to the poems a long list of men: Auden and Dante and Frank O'Hara and Catullus and Barthes and Derrida and Jason and Keats and Robert Haas and Kazim Ali and Prince and Icarus and number of lovers.
These are poems that linger in the complications of loving men, the complications of letting men in the mind or the body.
The poet writes: "Most days I am more anarchist / than sex object"
And — "I am expected to be / more of a man than a person."
The poems come up with other words as men (or the people formally known as men) look away from each other and into mirrors at one another
The poet lingers on a light fixture in a jail cell. It becomes a kind of sunlight or imitation of sunlight. The poet can't see the sun
Lovers and love are dangerous, potentially violent or striking or failing
Dating apps in the phone are always threatening
There are multiple little deaths
Alcohol and hangovers the next morning
The poet receives phone calls from a mother concerned about the crying of car alarms and the tears of a grandmother in the Philippines, a place the poems reference as both far away and perilously close, a dictatorship hanging still in the humid air of the ghost thickets
The poet gets tired of talking about himself, runs out of things to say or things they want to say and suddenly animals are falling from the sky
One of the epigraphs to the book is a Godard quote about a film that is partial or a film never quite made, but always imagined as a potential life, a life impossible to attain, a yearning for something else
The poems end up producing something that we can read, something that we can see, some thing that the poet has wanted for us to see, even if that thing is the continuing impossibility.
There's something about the poems where the reader is able to hold the pieces together and see how they fit, making sense of all the senseless things, or unmaking sense out of the things so fixedly defined, for the gift is how the poems take everything apart into pieces and then become an invitation to someone else to try and read it all as a whole
Here we are muddling around muddying ourselves another muddy morning
The poet says,
“Yes, I was here / and though / I was not / What I was / when we met / I still was”
And I say back:
yesterday you were not / who you were / when me met / but you still were