Wilde Boys: a queer poetry salon returns

So much controversy has swirled around my career in poetry from the very beginning that sometimes I feel like hardly any attention gets paid to the poems.

When I first realized this would be the case was in 2010 when a photo of me reclining on Proust’s grave in Paris went viral and I didn’t hear the end of it from the peanut gallery in poetry (imagine!).

At the time, I hardly had any poems published and people were strangely invested in (homophobically) dismissing me by talking about my looks or talking about how there’s more photos of me than poems on the internet. And yeah, you sort of get the picture (though do look at it below). It’s truly an old story, but I definitely knew I was in for bullshit.

And I was right. Because the same thing happened when my first chapbook American Boys came out. Some poorly written article on “beauty” published in Lambda Literary circulated online, and while I was talking about beauty in the Rilkean sense (“for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror”) everyone thought I was talking about physical beauty. Groundbreaking misconception! Alas. It’s poetry. Everything is like two decades behind and though people should get references, they mostly don’t.

In any case, cut to more bullshit about why it was “Diet Coke” and not “regular Coke” in my “Having a Diet Coke With You” poem—and was I against body positivity (I have to laugh here). Cut to me writing about “love” (how could he!) when so many other horrible and “political” things were going on in the world (as if that hasn’t been the case since the beginning of time).

Cut to “Someone in Paris, France Is Thinking of You” in the New Yorker and how it supposedly and single handedly became linked with a hate crime that happened in Paris the week the poem ran last summer (mind you it was written a year before and taken 7 months prior). I could go on, but I can assure you the bullshit is endless and this isn’t really the point of why I’m writing this anyway.

My favorite (this is irony by the way), was the backlash I got for Wilde Boys, the queer poetry salon I hosted in New York from 2009 to 2013. Specifically when the New York Times article in the Style section (why isn’t he in Books!?) covering it came out. You can imagine the feedback. Or if you can’t (ha ha encore), much of it had to do with “why was it an invite only salon and who gets to decide who’s invited?” Well, me. Because I ran it. And it was invite only because it took place in the homes of patrons. Not at a public venue. That’s that. That’s what I wanted and that’s what I was going to do.

Wilde Boys is one of my proudest achievements in poetry. I hosted and interviewed John Ashbery, Louise Gluck, Frank Bidart, Jorie Graham—I could go on but again, that’s not the point of why I’m writing this (I was 26 by the way—and shaking!—asking John what it was like hanging out with Frank O’Hara while downing champagne in front of a bunch of fags with a giant Jay Davis painting above us).

So what’s the point, finally? Well, I’m bringing the Wilde Boys salons back. This fall. In New York. At Kapp Kapp gallery downtown. Putting visual art and poetry together again as the New York School did.

Except I’m the New York School now. It’s my time baby.

Stay tuned x Alex