I wanted to do a fun / campy post where some of my queer poet friends could celebrate the people who have helped them develop as writers and humans. (Where we could celebrate the people who let us imagine a world outside of corporate slumber and heteronormative family models). Quickly, I’d like to thank some of my mentors- Griselda Suarez, Eduardo C Corral, William Johnson. Love you so much! For letting me know that I could be brown, queer, a poet, and FIERCE and surrounded / affirmed by community. For guiding me and holding me and feeding me and laughing with/at me and creating opportunities for me. HOLY SHIT, Ive been a messy-gurl in this life. And y'all have supported me through all of it. Yayayyy!!! ... And now, the rest of the LOVE PARADE---
STEPHEN BOYER
Dodie Bellamy came into my life at a critical time, I was straddling the worlds of university and night life, a day job and porn, yet still broke, barely surviving, depressed, and full of dreams. My advisor at USF, the poet D.A. Powell, knew I was miserable and after reading my work suggested I meet Dodie and apply to the weekly, private workshop she offered as a way of getting out of the trappings of the institution and enter the queer San Francisco I ran away, seeking. At the time, I wanted to be making art and writing but it seemed impossible to go from notes to actualized work, everyone seemed so cool and connected and then I met Dodie who showed me the shit covering all the “cool people’s” faces as she refocused my energies on craft, form, politics, experimentation, and most importantly–continually demonstrated the strength necessary to remain yourself in this apocalyptic world.
DARREL ALEJANDRO HOLNES
I cherish my semesters spent slipping poems under Mark Doty's door, picking up his comments on my poems in his mailbox, and meeting occasionally throughout the semesters when he was my undergraduate thesis advisor at the University of Houston. My getting feedback from the poet who wrote "Charlie Howard's Descent", the first poem to ever make me cry, a poem Jericho Brown introduced to me while we sat in the Gulf Coast Magazine office and talked about poetry and our crushes, made me fearless when confessing and questioning my queerness through poetry, an exercise that in many ways saved my life. I am eternally grateful. Mark Doty, I celebrate you.
KEVIN KILLIAN
Hello Loma thanks for asking me about this! At my age the mentors I could name are mostly passed on now. Allen Ginsberg, Thom Gunn, Robin Blaser, Harold Norse, James Schuyler, from each I learned something about how to proceed in the world. A trio of friends made me the writer I am today, the New Narrative group of Steve Abbott, Bob Gluck and Bruce Boone. The poets of my generation were shot down by AIDS, so we lost Essex Hemphill, Sam D'Allesandro, Reinaldo Arenas, Tim Dlugos, David Wojnarowicz; from each I took resolve to keep alive and to get out a message. And in recent years my queer mentors have become young, so bright and smart and able to see things more clearly than I ever could, my models in many senses: Andrew Durbin, Lucas de Lima, Evan Kennedy, Brian Teare, Stephen Boyer, dozens more. You, Loma, I've looked up to you, bizarre as that might seem to you :-) xxx Kevin K.
OCEAN VUONG
When I think of mentors and community-building, I think of Eduardo C. Corral. Eduardo makes it possible for so many of us. I think it’s important, even necessary, to see poem-making as something akin to person-making, an act where life and art not only informs each other, but are strengthened and enriched through a fluid and seamless dialogue. This is what Eduardo exemplifies for younger writers like myself: a way to move forward on the page—but also with our bodies, bodies that are so often under threat from a world bent on extinguishing its most vital voices. Eduardo teaches me that to be scared is never to be weak. That to love and care for something—and to express it freely and openly is the most radical act of self-preservation. For that, I am grateful.
CA CONRAD
Peppy thought of me as her protégé when I was 19. We called her Queen of the New Age Drag Queens and she taught me to read tarot through the zodiac, a template I still find to be one of the most reliable and vivid forms to harness. Other boys were in mechanic school but I was in tarot class spread naked on the bed where Peppy and I spent most of our time studying one card at a time. When I would visibly merge with a card, when I would finally GET IT, Peppy would lean over and start to kiss me. She would say, “Time to reward you for learning and time to reward myself for teaching.”
MICHAEL KLEIN
Adrienne Rich always read my poems and once, when I was having a sad life in Cambridge in the '90's and wondering if I should let poetry go, she told me to never give it up--to stay with it because she believed in what I was doing and had always believed in what I was doing--way more than I ever did, and way more than more people around me did. And she always told me the truth. About everything, and especially about my poems. Of course, we loved each other. I'd known her most of my life, but as it is with many great writers, she loved the writing more than she loved me, so she went to the heart of the poetry and saw where it was being too self-referential or--her most common criticism--being made with too many words. My second book, "then, we were still living" was dedicated to Adrienne, who e-mailed me, after reading it: "This is the only book that has ever been dedicated to me, and the only one I need."
CHING-IN CHEN
I made a film-poem called "We Will Not Be Moved: a Story of Oakland Chinatown" in a workshop taught by Madeleine Lim, who runs the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP), a community organization which provides free film workshops to queer women of color. It was an ambitious project to finish our films within the time of the workshop (16 weeks!), especially for most of us who came into the workshop with little to no film experience, but Mad expected it of us and I wanted to do it and prove her right. The last night of our workshop when we were showing our films to the class, my film crashed and would not load! Mad looked at me and said, you could either get back to work and re-create it while it's still fresh in your mind -- or you could wait (but when you get far from it, you might not get back to it) so why not just do it now? I heard her and committed to re-creating it for our showcase in the next week because Mad called me to be true to my best sense of myself and this is still a lesson I keep practicing and learning to this day.
EILEEN MYLES
James Schuyler being the big one because he always made it clear that life was the problem, poetry wasn't. He put things in the right order. Michelle Tea for her knock out generosity & reminding me that poetry was a place. It was still outside of me, like an explosion of queer brilliance meeting. Also Amiri Baraka who taught me how to fight back in public. His resistance to lesbian poetry being "revolutionary" struck me as really queer and provocative in a way that wound up being affirming and in the end friendly. He was a great poet that taught me that contradictions always belong.
DANEZ SMITH
Avery R Young thank you for teaching me to always been my trillest self to every piece of art, to bring in all things black & new and black & old and every bit of sugar or blunt or song necessary to make the work werk. The bravery, urgency, and ingenuity you create with has taught so many of us. I remember handing you my chapbook for some notes and you handed me back myself, better. Your work and your lessons teach us how to create art that is intelligent, of the heart, and transformative for artist and audience alike. And you know we be fixin’ ham sandwiches after we be doin it. Be Lean On Me get these kids to do the right thing blk!
TOMMY PICO
Pamela Sneed taught me how to read. It sounds so simple, but knowing what yr saying and what you have to say can be frustratingly unclear. Especially if you've been raised to believe yr perspective and experience has no value. Through her guidance and by her example, Pamela showed me how to pay attention to myself, to the words that build the lines that build the stanzas that build the poems that guide the voice--and in that way to value not only my work but also myself. I have no freaking clue what I would have done without her, but thankfully I don't have to wonder!
ARISA WHITE
Nikky Finney, Thank you for reflecting back to me that sometimes you feel like a write “with a stiff collar on.” I needed to hear that, to figure out why I yoked my voice, what was holding me back from getting into the natural groove of my own prosody. I was afraid to be too black, to be too woman, to reveal all those marginalized identities in my work, and as a result I gave up my “natural swimming style.” I can say, I’m not just dead-man floating, I’m breaststroking, I’m putting some butterfly in it, too. Getting my hair wet, I’m not afraid to do.
ROBERTO MONTES
If it wasn't for Mark Bibbins I would be something other than myself. It's his fault. His poetry, kindness, and intelligence has shown many of us the way to survival in an unfriendly world. We can't help but be better for knowing him.
FATIMAH ASGHAR
Kazim Ali, You were the first poet I ever read who dared to be both Muslim & Queer. Your book sat like a nightlight by my bed, a wandering I could sink my feet into. I have only met you once, but thank you for teaching me patience in your line breaks. Your words make me feel less lonely, strong enough to begin building my own home. May all us queer muslim poets leave our words as smoke signals to each other, a gentle way to find each other.
ROSEBUD BEN-ONI
We owe letters to each other, poet Norma Elia Cantú and I; I'm writing this now while visiting my family in La Frontera, which is not unlike Norma's Frontera in Canícula, and remembering that somewhere back in my apartment in New York is an addressed envelope stuffed with paper awaiting. Norma is a poet you write to when off-season on the Gulf Coast, with the wind ripping at the wet-sand-stained pages, the seagulls chasing the shadows of your pen. This is the letter I should be beginning, one humid night, my head heavy with the blunt sun of overcast skies, but somewhere Norma is wrapped in her shawl, singing that we met, we've already begun, the tide, the tide rolling in, within the tide we speak the distances we both have crossed since.
JUSTIN PHILLIP REED
Gahd loves me so much that she lay down one long micro-braid the size of the Mississippi for me to follow and find the poet Phillip B. Williams, who has, in two short years, shown me the friendship, kinship, and unordinary love over which Homer’s Greeks dragged each other. Where would I be without Phillip? Not here, not with this coconut oil in my hair and these relentless endeavors on the pages at my right and these gender-queer friends in my inbox and all this Black love in my heart. He has guided me toward Ceremonies and “Crispy Business", Nina Simone and Sharaya J, the MetroLink and The Amen Corner, right through the terza rima sonnet, and even called my momma when I was in jail. Phillip—who insists that I read wider, write harder, dig deeper, and love (myself, even) bigger—is a blessing, and I can’t sit down and stop testifying.
ANGELO NIKOLOPOULOS
Glenda Jackson's performance as Gudrun Brangwen in the film Women in Love, based on the D.H. Lawrence novel, taught me everything I know about poetry.
JOEY DE JESUS
I am always hesitant about contributing to a list of writers, especially a list of writers on other writers but I want to contribute to this to celebrate two writers who have been mentors to me in different capacities, not that I matter. And while I love my mentors, it is just as important to celebrate my unlearning their wisdoms in order to construct some sort of semblance of myself. The first is Kazim Ali, under whom I studied for years at Oberlin College. In the classroom Kazim measured my breath, he tempered my tude, he let me off the hook and off the leash. Outside, in the wild, he has seen me hurricane into madness, and was there when I found myself on the other side. I think his craft must have instructed him in some kind of patience--the utilities of silence, this what I've learned from him. The second mentor of mine is Doug Powell, who has taught me to celebrate my fortitude. He, too, has been there for me in doomy hours... Doug once told me about his long-time fear of the full-stop period, why he avoided writing in sentences; he viewed them as analogous with a death. I think of all my tiny deaths.
L. LAMAR WILSON
I am Nikki Giovanni's son. She called me this, first, a few months after she advocated for me to come to Virginia Tech, where I completed my MFA with her help & that of Erika Meitner, Lucinda Roy, Fred D'Aguiar, Ed Falco, Jeff Mann, & Bob Hicok. You see, Nikki is shockingly generous. I mean, after our first conversation, in which I was interviewing her for my employer at the time, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she told me I was a poet, sounded like one, both in cadence & in tenor. At her behest, I sent poems to Tech, where she's been giving of her time & unabashed hope for nearly three decades. My first year there, I wrote poorly. I was hiding behind, not writing through, persona & then, in a meeting, she said to me advice I carry today: "If you don't start writing for yourself first & saying what you have to say, you're not going to be a very good writer, & you have what it takes to be one, Lamar. Just tell your stories." The next day, I wrote "Ars Poetica: Nov. 7, 2008." I shared it with her during our next independent study session on what has been canonized as the Black Arts Movement, which Nikki's work has helped define. Reading it, she beamed as only she can, & I felt like a poet. Finally. Weeks later, I found out she was going to publish this poem, one of my first private successes, in her anthology The 100 Best African American Poems, that she was placing it after "leroy," a powerhouse by my namesake Amiri Baraka. (He was born Everett Leroy Jones., I Leroy Lamar Wilson.) That's what mamas do. That's what mentors do. I am blessed to be one of the many, many Nikki Giovanni has claimed & catapulted. Just look at Kwame Alexander & Nikky Finney to see others doing wildly successful things. But I have to say it: I've been prodigal, too. I've been disobedient, made a mess of things, did it my way. & yet, after a bit of quiet repose, Nikki has always assured that I can come home. & I always, always will.
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