Homophobia, in a way, represents a fear of romance, of the joys and follies of love, of sex, of outrageous passion before it’s a terror against identity. For the reactionary mind, the gay or queer identity is eerie, a presence of difference made real in the flesh. But where does that leave the object of scorn? The reaction to queer life and queer living is part of a death drive, a spiral to see all difference and reality compressed and flattened. Surely, there must be a way out of this bind that isn’t despair. Most assuredly that answer must be queer living.
In that injunction towards queer love and life enters the poetry of Alex Dimitrov. Author of three books of poetry, the most recent Love and Other Poems takes up the months of the year as a guiding structure and what emerges, what bursts forth into our world is a gay carnival of love and joy.
The structural limit that comes from the twelve months of the year leads to wonderful contemplative poetry as Dimitrov moves through the calendar in threes. He begins with June, the beginning of summer, the month of Pride. The poem begins “there will never be more of summer/than there is now.” The speaker relishes the height of the season, a time when “death feels so far, it’s impossible/to go underground,” a line that recalls Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, a novel of a bitter misanthrope who isolates himself. But the speaker here can’t do that, it’s impossible in this city, in this time of the year to be alone. Though, the poem says “it’s possible to be happy alone,” it is undercut by the images of a woman adjusting her hair in the middle of a crowded sidewalk. It concludes with the only difficulty being the speaker’s hands “full, not at all peaceful” but “entirely possible and real.”
July is unlucky: “no luck with the guy I’m seeing/no luck with money.” But in September, we have “welcome obligations,” which suggests the speaker of this poem rather than finding themselves tied down by the structure of linear twelve-month time, emerges from it. The “welcome obligations” set out in this collection represents an opportunity to burst forth, not as an anarchic banshee, but a surfacing with direction, a calm arrival into the world.
A turn towards society and the world occurs in October, when we should introduce ourselves like “guest[s].” Reading into November, we shake off the beginnings of winter with “enough of despair!” a rallying cry throughout the collection, which though sometimes melancholic, remains deeply attuned to the joys of the world. That contemplative delight, at times ironic (“that’s performance art, you fucks” in “For the Critics,” or “Repeating easy lines/performing our great politics” in “Sunset on 14th Street.”), falls within a larger contemporary world of both gay poetry, from DA Powell and Jake Skeets, as well as contemplative poets such as Mary Oliver or Thomas Merton.
While a form often associated with stable and affective moods, contemplative lyric poetry offers the opportunity to expand and project out of the singular mind of the poetic speaker. Dimitrov, by situating his collection around the temporal nodes of months, then creates space for two motifs to fill the contemplative mind. The first, the stable event of rain, and the second the speculative, lost future.
In the poem “Time,” the speaker wonders “how long [they’ll] wait/before becoming the rain.” In “August,” rain touches “everyone on their way home.” The rain is a great equalizer, a social flattener and universal experience. Dimitrov’s use of rain recalls the lyric essay by Merton “Rain and the Rhinoceros” where he writes,
“Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By "they" I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.”
Merton and then Dimitrov collide on the issue of rain. It is a festival for both, but for Dimitrov, rain drips with meaning whereas Merton relishes in its de-marketized meaninglessness. In “Weather of Our Lives,” this natural motif glides back to the human being. The poem, after thinking about the vague feelings evoked by the ocean and the desert, holidays, birthdays and summers, concludes with the lines “someone’s tongue/and rough hands that remind you/you’re here. You’re a person again.”
A festival then, the kind Merton suggests rain is, and Dimitrov finds when it contacts human beings, happens in the structure of a calendar used to imagine a future world. The poems are not political prognostication; the future for Dimitrov’s poems is uncertain, distant, maybe not worth it, but will happen. The oncoming passage of time will, in the rules of a society, move forward and we must go together. A calendar, like communing with other people, necessarily limits possibilities and desires (“why is it Monday? I want it to be Friday!”), but the double bind of wanting something new and better for the world while acknowledging the limits of our tools for arriving there creates poetic and cultural space for a better politics.
The other running motif materializes from this thinking about human beings’ future. If human beings require communion, require sociality, then we also need the future. In “Waiting at Stonewall,” the speaker laments failed promises of the movement for same-sex marriage writing “equality was a rumor/elusive as freedom or sex.” They found neither “promised liberation in marriage” nor salvation in “laws.” The poem concludes with the hope that the future is free of “god and memory.”
We find the future in the riff on an O’Hara poem in “Having a Diet Coke with You,” which is “even better than a regular Coke.” The poem ruminates on anxieties personal and social: “I’m always worried about my hair,” and then in apostrophe, “People of the world! Don’t stop./Don’t give up style, irony, or Manhattans.” The allusion to O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You” recalls the work of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, who suggested the poem signifies a “vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, and a utopian potential.” This potentiality comes from wonderment at the world, from astonishment most assuredly manifest in the quotidian and in contemplation, Dimitrov’s poetic mode.
In “December,” the speaker has awe for the winter, the kind not found in “churches and cheap hotels” or purchased in “malls or airport bars.” They suggest it would take lives “yet to [be] imagined” to solve the varied personal and social problems found in winter’s cold clarity. The rejection of the two most common forms of utopic worlds, religion and the dollar, leaves open space for something new. Those other worlds come clear in the contemplation of them, though contemplation is no substitute for actual existing utopia, the preference for a utopia attuned to the wonder and awe-inspiring feelings of being alive and not to the horrors of our fallen world and its varied man-made social problems.
That desire and those feelings of astonishment become more apparent in “Rehearsals for Utopia,” where the speaker experiences “Lazarus Syndrome,” the medical name for returning to life after the heart stops. This event is something doctors and priests “cannot explain” but the speaker finds it an opportunity to ask “why do we think there is more?” in the world than life and death. They answer their own question that once we emerge into something like fame we find that “being known is almost enough.” Being perceived can only occur in society, amongst others, in vulnerability.
The limits of our political world are reflected in the culture we have. The proliferation of reboots, sequels, self-conscious literature, and a reliance on allusions signals a political impasse. We live in a time of art and artists where the question of Mark Fisher, “how long can a culture survive without the new?” rings each day like punching clock, in and out, new sequel, new reboot. Dimitrov’s collection, alludes, even hinges on an allusion to a mid-century poem, and only slims it down with the word Diet. That problem haunts the work. Is this truly struggling to reckon with a new form of queer festival or is it rehashing the same tired tropes of Pride Parades of yore? Or is the work playing with allusion, arguing that this tired device and its deployment demonstrates the limits of our current literary world?
In the collection taken as a whole, his desire for new and better, for communion under the headings of months, his desire for time eternal, to move through the linearity of our time, comes from his wonderment and awe at the world in front of him. The speakers in these poems exist without the new and they want it, yearn for it. The haunting comes from the failure, our inability to emerge from our personal and political shortcomings into better people, better worlds. And the specter won’t last forever, it can’t, it must not. In the final poem, Dimitrov writes “possibility is real and invented.” We can only find new possibilities together, in the rain, wet and nude, in awe at the world around us. Then, just maybe, we could find social relations that turn our everyday into a poetic festival.