The Gay Gospel of Aaron Smith

When I was a 17-year-old suffering in the suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut, Aaron Smith’s poems helped me imagine my future, both as a gay person and as a poet. The few gay male poets I’d read at that point were either dead (Frank O’Hara, for instance, whom I loved) or stuffy, which made them feel even further away. The famous one who was frequently recommended to me seemed concerned, in the poems I’d read, with dignifying the subject of gay life so that it might be palatable to a typical poetry-reading audience—something I was not interested in reading or writing. Since coming out five years earlier, at the end of sixth grade, I had given up trying to appease straight people.

But when I found my way to Smith—by chance, via an essay he’d written on Sharon Olds and narrative poetry—I felt, in the unrivaled narcissism of adolescence, as though he were writing for me. At the magnet school for the arts where I studied creative writing, Olds was our poetry god: we loved that she wrote about sex and told on her parents; we admired her elaborately crafted conceits. I was thrilled by what Smith, through his reading of Olds’s “I Go Back to May 1937,” observed in her work: “the very act of telling” could empower a poet to “predict a future” in which it was possible to live. By authoring poems, Smith suggested, one could begin to author a life. If I could write poems about waking up with a lover in bed, I thought, maybe my sexual experiences wouldn’t be forever relegated to hurried trysts in basements, back seats, and the occasional bathroom. If the difficulty of being gay and effeminate wasn’t a constant presence in my poetry, perhaps one day it wouldn’t be in my life.

From Smith’s essay, I clicked through to his two poems then available on Poets.org. “Boston” was my favorite. It begins:

I’ve been meaning to tell
you how the sky is pink
here sometimes like the roof
of a mouth that’s about to chomp
down on the crooked steel teeth
of the city

I loved that sky-mouth and that the poem wasn’t afraid of sentiment: Smith didn’t need to dress up or intellectualize his emotions to admit “Without you here I'm viciously lonely.” I knew that feeling. After my first boyfriend left for college right before I started high school, I spent the better part of my freshman year feeling “viciously lonely”—drafting unsent text messages and listening on repeat to the mix CD I’d made for him.

The scene in the poem’s second section was less relatable. I’d never “watched two men / press hard into / each other, their bodies / caught in the club’s / bass drum swell,” except on Queer as Folk, but I imagined I would soon. When he continued, “and I couldn’t remember / when I knew I’d never / be beautiful,” I felt a pang of worried recognition. I’d also already been left—twice—for boys taller and stronger and more masculine than I was. Perhaps, as the poem suggested, desire was more trouble than it was worth, doomed to end in disappointment. Still, I wanted to go to a gay club and find out for myself. Even the prospect of that pain seemed glamorous to me then.

The other poem, “Brad Pitt,” was stranger and darker. It juxtaposes an arch second-person address to People’s 2000 Sexiest Man Alive—the eponymous Pitt—with a description of binging and purging. I enjoyed the reflection I saw there much less. I, too, had “Barfed ... because [I] ate it, / Ate all the take-out,” plenty of times. The glimpse of gay adulthood presented here was more troubling, but there was nevertheless something affirming about the poem’s existence. “Boston” and “Brad Pitt” were the only proof I had that someone like me, with my particular hungers and hang-ups, could publish poems about his life written in the language of his life. In “Brad Pitt,” the speaker refers to cigarettes as “ciggys,” which is what my best girlfriend and I called them too. I’d never seen that word in a poem before—or, it occurs to me now, since.

After this fateful encounter, I ordered Smith’s first book, Blue on Blue Ground. It was the first collection by a living gay poet that I ever read. I still have my copy, now well-worn, the laminate of the cover curling up around the edges.

***

In his past three books—Blue on Blue Ground (2005), Appetite (2012), and Primer (2016)—Smith maintained the core set of poetic preoccupations that spoke to me as a teenager: the gay male subject’s desires and shames (as well as the often blurry boundary between them), and the use of pop culture as a mirror in which to figure one’s own experience (“Walking to lunch I am Cher in Moonstruck, freshly fucked,” from Blue on Blue on Ground, is a line that will never leave me). There is also the reverberant trauma of the fundamentalist Christian home in which Smith was raised (the end of “Boston” recasts the “still small voice” in which God spoke to Elijah), the unsolvable problem of masculinity, chronic depression and suicidal ideation, visual art (Blue’s title is a reference to Mark Rothko), and the occasional skewering of PoBiz and Official Poetry Culture, outside of which Smith has often positioned himself. This is not to suggest that each of his books doesn’t have its own prevailing mood or focus, however. Blue on Blue Ground, like many debuts, is a loose coming-of-age narrative; Appetite, an extended meditation on men’s dual capacity for violence and tenderness; and Primer, a reckoning with how the past continues to disrupt the poet’s present.

Smith’s themes have always overlapped, but in his new collection, The Book of Daniel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), he is explicitly interested in mashing up his various subjects and references, often within a single poem. The associative, frequently double-spaced lines of The Book of Daniel feel looser—wilder—than in Smith’s previous work, perhaps a reflection of what many Americans characterize as the increasingly chaotic tenor of our age (the biblical book of Daniel is about the end times, after all, and the current US president does make a few appearances in Smith’s new work). In an interview with Aidan Forster last year, Smith cites his own Instagram collages as an inspiration for this new formal approach. The mosaic that emerges from the juxtapositions of the grid there (as well as on Grindr) is another apt frame through which to understand this stylistic shift.

 

The book’s proem, “I Need My O’Hara Frank,” announces Smith’s intention to collapse the divide between so-called high and low culture, and to invoke as many influences as he pleases. “I need Sharons: // Tate and Olds, / but mostly Olds, // and never, ever / the Rose Of.” He proceeds through a list of such stipulations, noting that he needs his Etheridge “Melissa / in my twenties // and Knight / in my always” before asking “Does anyone have / a poem to Cher?” It’s a triple-entendre: a play on the homophone you might hear in a workshop or at an open mic, a nod to his own “poem to Cher,” and a winking acknowledgment of his insecurity about his stature as a poet. In the book’s second poem, “Celebrity,” an homage to dead celebrities both literary and otherwise, he declares, “I’ve written three books few people read / and wanted to kill myself.”

Among other poems that draw on the logic of the list for structure (“A Critical History of Contemporary American Poetry,” “Eight Suicides,” “The Pulitzer Prize,” “Once I Was Seven Sandra Bullocks”), Smith’s primary mode is ekphrasis. Or, perhaps more accurately, he often begins there, using a work of art as a springboard from which to jump or a melody on which to riff (choose your metaphor; Smith’s new embrace of expansiveness makes me feel I don’t have to). Of the 47 poems in the book, 17 have titles that refer to some kind of artwork or artist; of those, nine have titles that simply are the titles of the works that occasioned them (and of those, two are titles of Smith’s own past works). Though the ekphrastic impulse is not new in Smith’s poetry, his points of inspiration here are, for the first time, primarily literary. The hilarious entrée to “Cosmopolitan Greetings”—which takes some time to get to the 1994 Ginsberg book from which it borrows its title—is but one example of how Smith records the motion of a mind pinballing between references:

When I read Jorie Graham I feel like I feel when I’m with someone
 
who has better teeth than me. When I read Louise Glück I know I talk
 
too much. I’m the person friends invite to parties and then warn everyone
 
before I get there. Anderson Cooper has good teeth.

While Smith has been writing unapologetically gay poems since the start of his career, he has never seemed so unconcerned with accommodating a general audience—that is, one outside the poetry world. “I assume all readers are coming to my poems knowing nothing about my work or my subjects, and I want to make sure they have enough on the page to navigate through the poem,” he told Eduardo C. Corral in a 2006 interview. Smith then went on to cite “Ars Poetica”—the sole instance of PoBiz commentary from Blue on Blue Ground—as “one poem in the book that is geared more toward poets.” I don’t mean to suggest that an infrequent reader of poetry couldn’t understand or enjoy “Cosmopolitan Greetings,” but I do want to celebrate the freedom this disregard has introduced to Smith’s work. It’s thrilling to witness a poet who was once told he shouldn’t write about blowjobs so that his poems could be “relevant to a larger community” (“Ars Poetica”) and who still “hate[s] how helpful [he is] even when not asked” (“Get Thee to a Nunnery”) writing about whatever the fuck he wants. This book is characterized, in part, by Smith’s compelling confidence—even (or perhaps especially) when it’s his self-loathing that he’s confiding.

***

The Book of Daniel’s other unifying thread is the terminal illness of Smith’s mother, diagnosed with “the rarest / form of a rare cancer” (“My Parents’ 50th Wedding Anniversary”). In Smith’s previous books, she was a remarkably unsympathetic figure, as she sometimes is these pages; the last line of “The Dancing Lesbian” reads, “Mom cried when she found out I was gay. Mom told me to get AIDS and die.” But without minimizing the cruelty to which he was subjected as a child, or downplaying its continued impact on his life, Smith also attests to his love for his mother. In some of the book’s most legibly narrative poems, he forges a forgiveness in which that love coexists with the pain of the past. “The Crystal Lithium,” named after James Schuyler’s 1972 poetry collection, describes a trip the speaker and his mother take to “Eastern Point Lighthouse // in Gloucester, past the Residents Only sign to the shore”:

Across the water, Boston floated on the horizon like we’re taught
heaven floats: foggy and distant and glowing.
 
In that far-off city we were younger, walking the South End,
actually smiling for the camera when my sister said smile, a mother
 
and son not understanding they wouldn’t always be—and hadn’t
always been—happy. Then we stood like that, our past
 
in front of us …

“‘Things I Could Never Tell My Mother’” enacts another re-visitation in which Smith considers his poem of the same title from Blue on Blue Ground “about stuff [he’d] done / that would upset her,” which later “helped [him] say / some of those things / to her face.” The confessions that constitute the original range from the comic (“I wiped the booger on the wall”) to the gravely serious (“I’ve driven drunk and even hit a car without / getting the license number”). From them emerges a portrait of a filial relationship twice divided: by the mother’s rejection of her son’s sexuality and by the son’s rejection of his mother’s faith. The new version concludes with a much shorter, updated list of admissions Smith has yet to make: “Get better. / I don’t know who / I’ll be after you die.”

The book’s dedication suggests, if not redemption, acceptance:

for my mom—
 
we did the best we could with what we had

***

It now strikes me as ironic that I once found hope for the future in Smith’s poems, as he can hardly be described as an optimist (the wonderfully wicked “Poetry Can Save the World!” reads in full: “and I knew / this bitch // didn’t live / in the same // world as me.”) Though The Book of Daniel is a less bleak collection than his previous one—and I don’t use bleak pejoratively here—it doesn’t shy away from his most difficult subjects: the trauma of homophobia, both past and present; his fraught relationship to sex; the specter of suicide. “All My Life” is composed entirely of variations on being called a faggot: “Die faggot / Die” are the final lines. In “The Year Annie Lennox Released Why,” Smith issues a rebuke against the refrain, popularized by the 2010 LGBTQ campaign of the same name: “It Gets Better”:

My friend
on the phone: it doesn’t get better, it just gets
bad in other ways.

In my experience, life gets better and gets bad in different ways, but I admire Smith’s refusal to serve up the tidy narrative his audience might crave. The cultural imperative to be a well-adjusted role model for the next generation is yet another way queer people can be denied the full range of their humanity. Smith reminds us that our worth is not predicated on our happiness—a harder truth, to be sure, but one that might help young people more than the promise of an easy platitude.

Smith is a poet interested in failure: failed relationships and failed sex are subjects he has returned to throughout his career. Every lover mentioned in The Book of Daniel is in the past tense. Smith remembers “a guy on a blind date // who thought I was too plain to have dinner with” (“Blind Date”); an ex who “covered my mouth like Serrano’s / A History of Sex” (“A History of Sex”); another “so good in bed I was embarrassed / how loud I was and how lazy” (“Blooper Reel”); “[a] man who liked to bite my back while fucking me” and who, when he left, "left bruises on my arms” (“Backbiter”). Smith’s relationship to sex itself might be the prevailing one in his oeuvre. “Dark Awful Man,” one of the most accomplished poems from Blue on Blue Ground, moves between sex scenes and a therapy session to delineate the pain, both physical and psychological, of bottoming:

that sometimes I still worry
there’s a hell I’ll go to, that for days after sex
my insides hurt, that sitting here in this chair
I can honestly say I never want to touch
a man again.

The speaker in The Book of Daniel remains ambivalent about sex but perhaps less distressed by that ambivalence: “It’s true, / I want sex. But I never leave the house for it,” “Blooper Reel” concludes. The book’s final poem, “Elegy,” seems to yield some clarity: “I told my therapist that gayness // has always been more aesthetic for me / than sexual. I’d rather have the magazine // than the man in the magazine.”

Smith might make an exception for the actor Daniel Craig, yet another of his enduring obsessions. The Book of Daniel refers not just to the apocalyptic text but also, Smith tells us in the title poem, to “a Daniel Craig scrapbook” he made (“For years I bought / every magazine with him on the cover”).

 

Later, in “‘The Only One’ by Hilton Als,” when he says “Als writes André Leon Talley / like a fictional character” and confesses he “wanted / to do that with Daniel Craig / and tried over and over in / a blue notebook,” I think there might be a third (or fourth?) Book of Daniel too. Importantly, it’s the repeated attempts that bear mentioning, not a perfected result.

***

What I needed from Smith’s early poems when I was a teenager—and what I was so grateful to find—was not the guarantee that I would be happy but the possibility that I could be at all. And I am: gay, a poet, and a depressive. And I still look to Smith’s poems for permission to tell the truth of my life in my own words—not the sanitized, prettified version but the hard truth, complete with my insecurities, failings, and continued attempts at being a person in the world. When I had the impulse that I shouldn’t begin this essay with personal experience, because it was too easy, or not serious enough, I returned to Smith’s essay on Sharon Olds. There, he cautions

I’m concerned about the voice that says: Take the “I” out. Whose voice is this, really? Perhaps I resist it because it feels dangerously similar to the voice I recognize from childhood: the fundamentalist voice of fear and doubt, the voice that eradicates the body and the self, the voice of conformity that renders the individual speechless, invisible.

There have been some surprising deviations from the expectations I had when I first stumbled upon that essay at 17: I’ve spent less time in gay clubs than I imagined I would, for one (but it turns out I still enjoy hurried trysts in basements, back seats, and the occasional bathroom). And though, like Smith, I still err toward autobiography and plain language in my poetry, my taste as a reader has expanded exponentially in the years since. I’ve come around to the poetry I once dismissed as “intellectualized,” and to poems that force me to consider language not just as a medium but also as a subject. Perhaps what I now value most in poetry is the opportunity poems provide to experience the world—thought, language, whatever is—the way someone else does. I agree with Smith that poetry can’t save the world, but it does offer innumerable invitations to reconceive of that world—in as many ways as there are poems.

When I started reading The Book of Daniel, already with an idea of what I wanted to say about Smith’s work and what it means to me, I didn’t know it would include his own testament to a book of poetry that changed his life: Alice Walker’s Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965–1990 (1991). Smith writes of discovering Walker’s collected in a “Waldenbooks in the mall” as a teenager: “Imagine me then, in West Virginia / needing someone to talk to.” The way Walker “talked back to Christ, talked / sex,” Smith recalls, “showed the body, unapologetically, / to a queer boy on the page”—and, along with it, an alternative model of faith and sexuality. Smith’s poem, also titled “Her Blue Body Everything We Know,” ends “People have told me her poems / aren’t good. But they looked / this queer kid in the face. / Said: Refuse to be erased.”

It’s not my favorite poem in the book: I’m not entirely convinced by its concluding slant rhyme, and, more significantly, I don’t know how to reconcile Walker’s substantial literary legacy with her anti-Semitic boosterism in recent years. But perhaps I am already forgetting the lesson of Smith’s work. The point is not that what happens in our lives is always pleasant or uncomplicated. The point is that it’s true.