The Reader
In the summer of 2012 (after I finished my first book of poems) I began a project called Your Life: 26 Questions for 13 Portraits of People I Don’t Know from the Internet.
I wrote 26 questions. One for each letter of the alphabet. Posted them on the internet. And asked strangers to send me their answers.
The goal was to write poems that were portraits of people I didn’t know.
Here were the questions:
1. What was the happiest time in your life?
2. Do you think you’ll ever be happier?
3. What do you want most while you’re here?
4. What do you want that this poem can’t give you?
5. When was the last time you cried in front of someone?
6. Is that person important to you?
7. Who do you miss most?
8. Are they living or dead?
9. How do you continue to talk to them?
10. What is the first thing you imagine when you think about death?
11. What wouldn’t you do for love?
12. How often do you hate sex?
13. Who is the first person you thought of this morning?
14. Who is the last person you thought of before bed last night?
15. What is your favorite time of day?
16. What is the most private secret you’re willing to share?
17. Do you think a poem of all questions is meaningless?
18. If you weren’t here right now where would you be?
19. Have you given up on your biggest dream?
20. What is the book that changed you for the first time?
21. Who would you like to go on a walk with tomorrow?
22. How much longer do you think you’ll live?
23. What is the dish you always order at your favorite restaurant?
24. Do you have a sweater that hugs you just right?
25. Who is the last person you want to talk to before you die?
26. How many times have you lied answering these questions?
I threw these into the abyss of the internet on July 8, 2012.
Four days later I had over 200 responses.
I wanted to write 13 poems about 13 strangers.
Instead, I didn’t write any and started making collages.
Instead, I also read more than I wrote. I just couldn’t stop.
Opening email after email as they came in. Each one increasingly more personal than the last.
In some ways, I must have been thinking about identity.
Can you write about someone without know them? Can you write about yourself who you (presumably) know so well?
I don’t think these questions are that interesting. Like identity itself. Which is a total bore (no matter what anyone tells you).
Regardless, that project, unfinished as it was, began my long relationship with the reader—who I do think about—all the time—and with great interest.
I wanted to finish the portraits by Valentine’s Day of the next year and include them in a little book called Every Stranger Is a Lover, Every Lover Is a Stranger.
That little book became Night Call. A performance piece where I read strangers poems in the most intimate spaces of their home. Be it bedroom, kitchen, living room—once atop a roof—and a few times in a bathroom and inside a tub.
I’m going to bring Night Call back next year, after 10 years.
This is what it looked like on the evening of February 14, 2014 when I announced it. This was the trailer. And this is the poem that accompanied it, too.
After Night Call my interest in the reader continued.
I don’t write to the air. The human voice and the human spirit aren’t abstract things to me.
And so perhaps out of intrigue, or guilt (I am, after all, a Christian)—the disappointment of not finishing the portraits of 2012 gave me the impulse to write “Poem for the Reader”, which is in my last book.
It was an opportunity for the reader to write back to me. And in a note in the back of the book I told them they could send me their answers, in the shape of a poem, like the questions below.
In the same book, in a poem called “Poem Written In a Cab,” I gave the reader my number.
Almost every other week I get an email or text responding to one of the poems or projects above.
A few months ago I opened my Night Call account (makeanightcall@gmail.com) and found emails people sent well after the project was over.
2015. 2018. 2019. And (surprisingly—or not) many during the pandemic years, where all of us were incurably lonely. Not that much has changed.
Without the you, the I seems irrelevant. And without the I, the you is alone.
“Missing me one place search another,” wrote Whitman in 1855.
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Being alone, willingly cut off from other human beings, seems so desirable. In a forest with mountains that look like parts of the moon. Because the moon fell down some day. It has a sweet smell. Stonesugar. Maybe I was too young, my skin too healthy, for loneliness, _aloneness_, to crawl up and get inside. I lived in my dreams and thought I had found my own kind of happiness. But you'd guess; all the dreams were about people. About love. About sex. Why didn't you ask how often I hate love? Because, oh, it is many times. Since it's real. My parents died from sickness being barely 50. One after the other. Boom. I could keep up dreaming for a while. Then I couldn't. My skin was old and wide open. I found love outside of my rainy brain at the same time that I found heavy Xanax addiction. I like when you mention Xanax. Even though the moon should be back in its place, it's not. Stonesugar. We were magic and then we became a collage of aloneness. My addiction to the soft white is my solitude and it's eating everything. We have to be with people, especially with the ones closest to us as well as strangers. But we rarely are people. I think rain is closer to death than endless snow, even though Selby would disagree. Maybe. I am afraid. Not of death, not in a normal way. I'm just scared of dying all the time. And now I have nothing left but the way to the rehab facility, which is more like a moldy Walmart for people without insurance. You get Covid everytime for free. I don't want to go. My imaginary cabin in the woods has brought me here. Again. I don't want to go. Would I return? Yes. Always. To someone. Not a place.