What was your process of creating the sections of Bury It?

 

Well, it’s a bunch of different kinds of bridges. Before, there was a bit more formal constraint around the formal construction of each section, so in “Toll,” it’s like a toll bridge—all those poems deal with currency, or trade and commerce, usually pertaining to the body and history.

 

“Rope” is mostly a coming-of-age section, so each has its own logic and organizing principle, but within that there’s a lot of fluidity in how the poem attacks or addresses the subject. Mostly I just wanted to make a book that had a lot of breath in it. When I’m reading I like to have the opportunity to take some space from the book—I think that’s sort of why I wanted to write a book that breaks in a lot of places—to be challenged with an opportunity to step away and then be drawn back into the text.

 

Can you tell us about the epitaph moment in the beginning, and how the concept of the epitaph operates in the manuscript?

 

I think this book is pretty invested in the elegiac and how an elegy is always a failure. There’s a moment in one of these poems where it goes: “I know none of the people I loved who are dead actually became the poem I wrote about them.” So the gesture of elegy is always the failure to resurrect the beloved, but also the attempt to hold on to their bodies as they pass. And I think that’s often what a book object does, it tries to hold on to a fleeting and passing moment or breath, and as soon the poet is gone it becomes a different book object, it becomes a testament to the life they spent on this earth. So I think the book in general is invested in how to memorialize those who have passed and also to recognize it as a faulty and fleeting ethos.

 

There’s that Robert Hayden epigraph in “Kaddish” that goes: “I grieve yet know the vanity of grief,” and that grief is for the grieving, right? There’s also this other poem I wrote in conversation with Danez Smith and Hieu Nguyen called “Politics of Elegy,” and we each have a poem with that title that looks at the political ramifications of elegizing the dead and for what function. That poem ends with the lines: “I’m never more dangerous than inside the arms of a man who will die before me.” This poem in general I think reads as a thesis for the collection—“eulogy” in Greek means “praise.” “Praise” in Latin means “price.” There’s an innate connection between payment and grief; currency and loss.

 

You began to touch on this a little bit, but how do you approach writing about real events? To what extent do you go into detail—specifically in poems like “Surveillance”?

 

I was trying to write about Tyler Clementi. Y’all remember him? He was the young gay kid who jumped off a bridge after his roommate filmed him having sex with a man—he was closeted. He went to Rutgers, this was in 2010. I kept trying to figure out how to enter into a conversation with him or write about his life or the circumstances around his life; everything felt sort of cheap and performative, and I didn’t feel like I had authority to write on it, and so the poem I ended up making was assembled from fragments of news reports—texts that already existed after his death. I think that by assembling those materials I felt like I was able to enter into the conversation in a way that didn’t feel exploitative to me. I think that’s a tactic of documentary poetics in general: figuring out how to speak and layering texts and utilizing polyphony and found objects.

 

Other than that, I think everything I write about is like a real-life event. Whether or not some of the materials or facts are smushed a little bit. I feel like as a writer I’m very grounded in the materials of this world, whether that means documenting the experience of my own body or the ways I process historical or contemporary events—those feel like very much the same thing to me.

 

I felt that there was a strong proximity in Bury It between grief and desire, especially in poems concerning sites of remembrance or community.

 

Yeah, I dunno... you know, homosexuals.

 

I feel like the narrative sensibility growing up as an ‘80s and ‘90s kid is, like, to be a f----t is to die, or to be ill, or to be murdered. So that sort of initial twinning of desire with the end of your life, or with suffering, has always been a part of my understanding of my queernesss. And I think that being able to take ownership of that has been how I found power in writing and how I build community with other queer people in my writing.

I think that’s true also when we think of landscape. In Madness there’s a lot about cruising parks—like Buena Vista Park in San Francisco—being repurposed and turned into other kinds of monuments. So I think there’s something about documenting landscape—the poem is a form of document that can hold both desire and loss, and yet our desire on earth is fleeting because we’re all going to be dead, so…

 

Speaking of cruising: can you say a little bit about the lyrical possibilities or implications of cruising for gay male poetics?

 

Well, I’m really interested in the phone as an object that can shift how we think about the lyric landscape of a poem and the architecture of a poem. I think each new technology that is introduced into one’s writing life wildly impacts poetics. You can think about Frank O’Hara and the typewriter, or the pen, as a machine that informs how the line operates. I know very few homosexual contemporary poets who don’t have a poem that interrogates cruising apps or uses the shape of this kind of communication to inform how they think about writing about desire and writing about sex.

The poems “Meat” and “Applications” both think about how the self is presented on these cruising and hookup platforms in a way that mimics how the self is presented in the poem. To present yourself or write about yourself is to shift and augment, and both the poem and the cruising app are sites for the transmission of pleasure. I’m also thinking of Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, to think about the textual object as a way of sharing intimacy with a reader, so both those things are at work in a bunch of these poems.

 

There’s such a careful attention given to the body in your work. For me it recalled CA Conrad’s While Standing in Line for Death: queer body poetics and reclamations of the medicalized and othered body. Can you speak about how body and embodiment poetics are at play in your work?

 

Yeah, I write about the anus a lot. When I was here in the Bay I started writing these poems, a suite about buttholes which is both a fun project and a politicized one. I think anality and anal pleasure in particular was something that made me wanna not... made me want to kill myself as a young person. To see the body as a site of pleasure when it was supposed to be stone or something else—it made me want to die. And so, being able to write these poems that center queerness, and queer desire, and the body in particular and how we’re meant to see the body as a graveyard—being able to transform what’s most “disgusting” about the most fecund parts of our bodies into sites of celebration is a politicized and spiritual project at the same time.

 

I think also reconfiguring how we think about what’s most “disgusting” about ourselves and how that intersects with technology is a particular area of interest for me. There’s one poem about an object called The Anuscpope which is like a camera for the butthole. I’m sad I didn't put that in this book—it’s a future project.

 

Can you say a little bit more about technological and queer connectivity; the interpersonal and psychological impact of tech?

 

I think the internet is a site where most queer people living today have gotten affirmations that they’re not alone or monstrous—or are alone and are monsters but there are other lonely monsters who wanna be in conversation with them. It’s a necessary site for queer community.

 

And this is also how books function—as a young queer person, reading Ginsberg really changed how I thought, which is a form of building community across time and life. Being in community with the dead is also a necessary part of being a queer person.

 

Can you talk to us about the opening poem “Will,” and the kind of role water plays throughout the manuscript?

 

It’s sort of a ghost of the former title (Gay Boys and the Bridges Who Love Them). I started making Bury It in 2010, at least in my head, when there was a lot of publicity around young queer suicide—or when the news decided it was a worthy form of public discursive mourning instead of the private grief practices that were going on beforehand. So, my initial interest in making this book was that shift in 2010—like what happened culturally and at the level of the line and of language that made this type of loss worthy of public outcry. That year I had a friend who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, and so the bridge became this central object both as what ties us together, what keeps us apart, what should be burned, what should be leaped from--it just seemed to be this multi-realizable object. Water kept coming back as a central metaphor primarily because of my friend and folks who’d been jumping off these bridges. Also, water is what makes up our bodies, and allows us to live on the planet, and ties us together, similar to the bridge. It rears its head IRL as it does in the text. There’s this one poem that ends: “this ends how all stories ends, an infant climbing back into its mother, animals throwing themselves back in the ocean.” Water is both the thing we all came from and where we’re all going, whether in our lifetime or into the future.

 

Final question: are there any aspects of queer experience that you’ve felt unable to articulate, or any aspects of queer experience you would like to see foregrounded either in your future work or in the work of others?
I’ve always been interested in villainous queers through history. I’m always trying to figure out how to write about them. I’m fascinated by Roy Cohn, and other sorts of powerful monsters. I’m unsure of how to write about them without re-inscribing heterosexism—power operates in really complicated, intersecting, and difficult ways. The next book addresses that a little more. My next book is about pigs, called The Pig Book, and it looks at the pig as a multiply recognizable symbol in literature and in the body.