Abuses in Poetry

Naming Names

I’ve been thinking a great deal about a comment left on Facebook in response to my last post that merits deep consideration and a detailed response. This is my first attempt at such a response. The comment was about one of the essays I shared in which several poets and writers respond to an essay about assault and harassment in the literary world. It’s about naming names, specifically this comment by Roxane Gay:

I’d name names, but these aren’t my stories. It’s not my place. That’s what I tell myself while also knowing that when we keep these men’s secrets, we allow their predatory behavior to thrive. They won’t stop until they are held accountable.

I think it’s important to note that abuses of institutional power are ultimately an institutional issue. Institutions bear responsibility for doing more than negating complaints and concerns when they’re raised or making decisions that inadequately address these situations—and often behind closed doors.

I’ve never written about this before, but many years ago, I approached the institution the poet who sexually assaulted me worked for. I was told that because I wasn’t one of his students and because the assault didn’t happen on his campus, I couldn’t even make a complaint. But it did happen en route to a college campus, one where he was representing his school and one where he’d written a letter of recommendation for me for the MFA program he was dropping me off at. And I may not have been his student, but he was working with me as a mentor. He also, I realized in retrospect, engaged in grooming behavior several months earlier at the first and last AWP I ever attended.

Most of these abuses in the literary community occur in conjunction with a school, a school-supported event, a literary organization, or some other entity in which the poets in question are serving in formal and informal roles. Those institutions need to do better. Universities and colleges need to do better. Associations need to do better. Conferences need to do better. Publishers need to do better. Journals need to do better. And so forth.

Until complaints are taken seriously and appropriate action is taken, nothing will change and those who have these experiences will continue to feel invalidation, fear, shame, and guilt on top of the trauma from the experience itself. Some may stop writing entirely, as I did for seven years. Some may experience such fundamental shifts in their bodies and minds that they never feel like themselves again, not even years later.

Gay says she doesn’t name names because the stories aren’t hers to tell. I understand that and believe every survivor of these kinds of experiences has the right to discuss, or not discuss, what happened to them in whatever detail and whatever way makes sense for them. If we all rely on those affected to be the only ones naming names, though, we’re shifting responsibility not only for what happened—and the trauma of what happened—to those who often have little to no power and are often survivors of other abuses, but also for the naming and the responsibility and added vulnerability (and possibly targeting) that comes with that.

Speaking at all is terrifying. Carrying the twin burdens of having been abused and also having to publicly name the person who abused is heaping a whole lot on survivors of a system they didn’t create, one that has harmed them and that will most likely not change in any significant way—no matter what they say (other than to expunge those who speak).

And the fact is, many of us have named names. We’ve told the institutions that abusers are affiliated with exactly what happened. And they’ve looked the other way, protected their own, and allowed such abuses to continue.

Experts in the Field

It’s not that bad, they say. It happened a long time ago, they say. He was drunk, they say. One of these men is the publisher of a well-regarded imprint. Another is a poet. Another is a magazine editor. Another is a small press writer. And another. And another. It’s time to start naming these men. I’d name names, but these aren’t my stories. It’s not my place. That’s what I tell myself while also knowing that when we keep these men’s secrets, we allow their predatory behavior to thrive. They won’t stop until they are held accountable. — Roxane Gay

This is just one response that’s part of “Roxane Gay, Aimee Bender, and More on Assault and Harassment in the Literary World,” a collective essay published by Literary Hub in response to Bonnie Nadzam’s essay “Experts in the Field,” which ran in Tin House on February 6, 2017. Other responses are from Ramona Ausubel, Sally Ball, Aimee Bender, Kristi Coulter, Porochista Khakpour, Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Anna March, Aspen Matis, Elissa Schapell, and Sarah Vap.

I don’t know how I just came across both of these essays today, more than a decade after they were written. It’s probably because I left poetry two years before each piece was published as a result of my own experiences with being harassed, assaulted, and otherwise harmed from 1995, when I first started writing poetry, forward. My departure in 2015 was meant to be permanent. I had no intention of writing again. That changed seven years later, in 2022, after a cascade of serious health issues left me close to death. Suddenly, poetry was the only thing that could help me make sense of my past, my present, and whatever my future held. I vowed never to leave it again.

I’m at a different but not-so-different juncture now, after dealing with the poetry community again over the past four years. What I’m experiencing and witnessing isn’t as bad as the assault that caused me to leave poetry in 2015, but I realize the potential for assault is still there, even if I know how to identify grooming tactics and other red flags earlier. That doesn’t mean the space is safer, only that I know how to stay safer in the space. Many of the infractions I’ve detailed recently have occurred since I returned to poetry.

What I’m having a hard time with is the fact that Nadzam’s essay and the responses to it could have been written today, not more than a decade ago. Expand them so they don’t conform to the gender binary but instead focus on abuses of institutional power committed against those who have less or no power, and you would be describing the poetry community as it is structured now, from those who engage in abuses to those who are somehow complicit in those abuses to those who are abused and don’t even have the closure of giving voice to what happened to them. (I’m not saying these expanded definitions are new. I’m saying the male-female framework in the original essays carries certain biases and isn’t inclusive of everyone who’s abused. In my case, for example, I’m nonbinary, so not female and not a woman. Still, the way I am seen has made me vulnerable, perhaps more so because I don’t fit the gender-binary framework.)

I’ve been surprised recently when male poets have reached out to me to express their shock over some of the experiences I’ve shared. I say male because men are the only ones who reach out to me in this way, with both an absence of similar experiences and without any knowledge that such issues exist. One praised me for not writing about a recent incident and seemed to think my writing about it would be an attempt to embarrass the poet involved rather than to tell the truth about what happened and hold someone accountable who may have been engaging in this same behavior with other poets for years, or even decades, with impunity.

Given all the ways in which poets have made abuses in poetry known for many years now, it’s hard to believe there are poets out there who have no idea any of this is going on, who haven’t even heard whispers about this or that over the years. And given the call from poets like Roxane Gay to hold poets and writers accountable for their actions, I have a hard time with anyone suggesting I remain silent on any matter, especially one like this, that already cost me a good chunk of my life and has forever changed me as a person.

Demons

Was I creating demons when I was at a poetry dinner party in Kansas City with Carolyn Kizer, and the entire group attempted to elide over her comments when she talked about another well-known poet attempting to rape her?

Was I creating demons when a member of my poetry class in Kansas City started stalking me, leaving flowers, torn-up copies of my poems, and letters about how bad and offensive my writing was on my windshield?

Was I creating demons when a poet and publisher in Kansas City screamed in front of a large group of poets, including my best friend, that I wanted to fuck him behind a dumpster?

Was I creating demons when a poet in Seattle who had agreed to work with me on my poetry googled (from his IP address) the words married and naked in combination with my name before we met? When he then canceled the appointment, told me I was childish for writing cut-up poems, and said I was wasting his time. When he also created a fake blog username and trolled me on my site (again, from his IP address) for months, trashing everything I wrote, including my poems.

Was I creating demons when two other Southern Utah poets said my work was pornographic and I should find another state that would accept it, while refusing to let me join their two state poetry society chapters and telling me they’d stopped meeting when they hadn’t?

Was I creating demons when a poet who’d been following my work for months and said he wanted to publish some of my poems left a hostile, sanist comment on one of my microessays in which I was lamenting the fact that people are jumping from a bridge down the street? When he screamed that my writing was the last thing he needed in his life, as if he hadn’t followed me and chosen to read, and laud, my work up to that point. As if he didn’t have the power to stop reading what I wrote or unfriend me or mute me or any of a suite of well-adjusted options that were available to him. That poet later disappeared during a mental-health crisis. When I was asked to help, I skip-traced him to his brother’s house, and he was eventually found safe. Because that’s who I am. Not someone who creates demons or treats people like demons. I’m a person who helps people when they need help, no matter how they’ve treated me.

Was I creating demons when a poet asked to read one of my manuscripts, then replied that he was sorry he’d even asked to read it? When he then rewrote part of it the way he’d like to see it, infantilized me and my work, assumed the speaker was me, treated the work not as work but as the opportunity to intervene in my personal life and my past, and talked about me in extremely sexist ways. When I responded and he continued the attack and infantilization, using my own work against me by calling me a little fist of a girl, a line from one of my poems. When he continued to move between unwanted intimacy, flirtation, and attacks in successive emails, even after I asked him to stop communicating with me. Or when my life partner had to intervene to make him observe my boundary.

Was I creating demons when a poet I’d known for more than twenty years threatened me here on Facebook, publicly in front of the entire poetry community, saying I was committing both a transgression and a manipulation when I told him I loved him, platonically, as a friend, something my context made clear? Was I creating a demon when he did similar things to other women and female-bodied poets.

Was I creating demons when a poet messaged me about a gay Arab who had gotten ahold of a photo of him in bed without his shirt on and how upsetting that was for him and who then sent me that photo through DM so I could see what he was so upset about? Or when that same poet viciously attacked a woman who was experiencing psychosis and got a group of poets to gang up on and attack her, which could have put her life in danger. Or when he refused to take his public post about her down so she could get some help without being pushed further into a dangerous or life-threatening situation. Or when he later told me I was borrowing the term CPTSD and wielding the label sanism, implying I don’t live with the former like he does as a war veteran and therefore have no right to identify and address the latter. By the way, I helped that woman, too. I reached out to her directly and got her a welfare check. If I’d been in the same part of the county as her, I would have been there for her in person. That’s a lot better than telling her she’s a terrible person and getting at least a dozen other poets to do the same.

Was I creating a demon when my poetry mentor breached my trust seventeen years ago with his words and his body and his insistence and his intrusion? When he made me talk about the ways in which my father abused me and became aroused when I did so. While he had me pinned down with his body. While he talked real nice, real childlike. While he continued despite no and stop and no and no and no. That was not a demon. That was a man. And a poet. A beloved one at that. I didn’t create that man any more than I create demons.

More recently, was I creating demons when a poet told me my comment about mentors not taking advantage of their students, which stems from my own experience, didn’t need to be said because it was already implied in the statement that students shouldn’t sleep with their mentors? That, in other words, we should all just be following the programming we’ve been given, which is to place responsibility on victims for not being or becoming victims. Look at my paragraph above. What part of that looks like a mentor trying to sleep with me? What part of that could I have avoided under the circumstances? Was I creating demons when that poet interrupted me in front of a group of poets to make his assertion? How about when he turned my gender into a joke and literally wanted to tell it as a joke on his joke podcast. How about when he asked how my life partner felt about my having sex with whoever I wanted and continuing to ask me that inappropriate bullshit question even as I kept repeating the word asexual, emphasizing the first syllable in the hope he’d understand not only his error but the violation intrinsic in his question. Is that evidence of my demon-making. (Note to everyone: Just because someone uses language for their gender and sexuality doesn’t make it your right to ask personal questions about either, especially not when first meeting them.)

Was I creating a demon when a friend of the poet in the paragraph above, one who’d been supportive of me, my work, and everything I’ve discussed about poets and poetry—up until it involved someone he personally knows—sent me a message in response to my asking not to be invalidated in which he says I am marshaling evidence, finding demons, distracting from real communication, seeing a glitch as a serious issue—thereby invalidating my concern about that issue—calling me a wrecking ball, making it clear none of the poets in the group, my former friends, like me, not even the one who appears to like me, saying this very personal issue around my story of sexual assault should have been mediated in the group and as a group—as if my experience and my trauma should be on trial and the most painful parts of my life should be made freely available to the group? Then, when in order to drive the point home about what a terrible person he thinks I am, he says, I think you’re a great writer. That opinion is somehow impersonal and won’t change. Or when he ends by saying he knows his own mind and I am welcome in it anytime I welcome that.

And that was from a friend, a dear one, who in one paragraph tried to invalidate everything I’ve ever seen or experienced and to get me to see myself as nothing, as worthless, as a monster. He reminds me of my father. He reminds me of my father’s best friend. He reminds me of Ruthie’s father and her brothers. He reminds me of Shawn Green and Greg Kullich and Jack Ladd and Matt Rawlinson and my trigonometry teacher, Steven Knight. He reminds me of my nephew. And of my old friend Jared.

The life partner says I tend to be drawn to creative people, and they tend to be drawn to me. I need more boundaries around that, clearly: who gets access to me and when and where and how. In this case, I’m at a bit of a loss. I’d been close friends with this person for years, the one who reduced me to creating demons. It feels like another example of someone being with me all the way until I talk about someone they know personally. That happened around the assault seventeen years ago as well.

Ironically, the group I created where this rift occurred was supposed to be a safe space, a place for creativity to flourish, and a place for peer support around mental-health issues. That’s something I need in my life and know others need as well. Instead, my biomarkers have been negatively affected, I feel like I was attacked when being vulnerable, I feel like my story was submerged under the weight of those who don’t want to hear it, and I feel like this last email was designed to destabilize my mood and be health- and even life-threatening. One in five is the statistic for those living with bipolar, not even bipolar coupled with trauma. Knowing my past and what I’ve survived, I can’t reconcile how this poet, this friend, would choose to do the maximum amount of harm possible, including attacking my sanity, my motives, my perceptions, and my worth as a human being.

I’m at a loss. With regard to my relationships. With regard to poetry. With regard to this country. All I can do is honor my commitment to speak out and keep speaking out about issues and injustices at all levels. I am not on this Earth to remain silent. The moment I let someone silence me is the moment I stop living.

Gaslit

I was just on the receiving end of the most surprising gaslighting I’ve experienced in my life. In part because of what I wrote yesterday, I was accused of turning everyone into demons, and the concerns I’ve articulated about various experiences I’ve had in poetry were described as my finding new demons every month.

That’s a particularly painful accusation because it not only discounts my experiences in poetry, up to and including sexual assault, it’s also sanist in that the implication is that I don’t have clear seeing or clear perceiving. That I am not sane.

When I was delusional in 2023, I literally thought I was evil or even the devil, something I’ve written about here and in numerous poems. The poet making his accusation today knows about that delusion and how terrifying it was. To call up the word demon the way he did, to resort to making me afraid I can’t trust my own perceptions—well, it doesn’t surprise me. I thought someone would have that reaction to my writing. I just didn’t think it would be this person, this poet, who I considered a dear friend.

I am as unsettled as I’ve been in a long time. I am so tired of folks doing the greatest amount of harm possible when they disagree with someone else. It happens all the time on social media, but this is different because it’s not an interaction with a stranger on a comment thread. The call came from inside the house. And it wasn’t a calling in or a clarifying. It was needless, pinpointed weaponization of communication to do the most harm possible.

This is a story I’ve known since childhood. Long before I had lived experience with mental health, I was called crazy anytime I talked about what I saw and what I experienced. Abuse. Assault. Bullying. CSA. Trafficking. The R word.

I don’t see demons. I don’t have to. I see humans under their gloss, their resumes, their titles, their connections, their reputations. I’m going to keep talking about what matters because it matters and because I learned decades ago that silence never helps me or anyone else. Not ever.

Not Being One

A few months ago, I attended a writing conference in Arizona. I experienced instantaneous healing after a speech by the keynote speaker. During her speech, she told students not to sleep with their mentors. As someone who was assaulted by a poet acting in the role of mentor, I immediately saw the imbalance in that comment. It’s akin to telling people not to get raped rather than teaching people not to rape or saying boys will be boys (and by extension men will be men) rather than teaching all children (and adults) how to be respectful, kind, and compassionate. In each case, the responsibility is shifted to the person who has little to no power, who has been targeted, and who doesn’t hold the keys to or actually wield institutional, professional, or social power.

When the conversation was opened up for questions, I stood and spoke. I asked if anyone in the room was a mentor. Then I said, Mentors, please don’t take advantage of your students. It was well-received. People clapped. The speaker expanded on my comment. Some of the attendees came up to me afterward and thanked me for what I added to the conversation.

There was no awkward silence, no feeling alone, no sense of isolation. None of what I’d lived with for seventeen years, which is how long ago the assault happened. I wrote this shortly after the conference:

Those of you who know me and my history will recognize why that was such a meaningful moment. I was able to leave part of my past and part of my pain behind as I spoke those words. I said them because they needed to be said, but I want them to mean something. I hope they make a difference for others. I want things to change, and to continue changing, for the better in poetry and for all poets.

When I say instantaneous healing, I both do and do not mean that. I’ve been healing for years from what happened, first outside of poetry and more recently as a poet and within poetry circles that I feel are safe and inclusive. But there was also a culmination of that work that I never thought I’d experience. It happened the moment those words left my mouth, in that room with those poets, where I was suddenly aware of how understanding the world can be and how I can be understood within it. I mean the larger world and also the world of poetry, which felt cordoned off from me after what happened seventeen years ago.

When I got back from the conference, I met with a few poets online. One of them asked me to talk about my experience in Arizona. I began to recount the story above. Partway through, before I could describe how healing the experience was and why it was transformative, another poet interrupted me to say that I didn’t need to make the comment I made. It was unnecessary. His reasoning was that men (his word, not mine) already know they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing with their students. It doesn’t help to make a comment like that.

This poet knows about my assault. He’s one of the few people I’ve entrusted with that story. He knew why that moment at the conference was meaningful for me, but he chose to cut me off and derail the conversation in favor of his imposed read on my experience and my decision to speak when and how I did. There’s no better illustration of gender-laden explaining, negation, and erasure than that one, at least not in my book.

I tried to point out how we do this in our culture: assign responsibility in innumerable situations to those who don’t have the power and control, as opposed to those who do. It was as if he’d never heard such arguments before, as if nobody on the call had heard of such a thing. I was baffled, confounded, and hurt. I want to say my healing at the conference was undone in that moment, but I won’t let that be taken away from me, not by anyone, and certainly not by a poet whose aim was to discount what I was saying and smother my voice with his own.

I’d had other experiences with this poet that were suboptimal before this interaction, but I was still trying to give him the benefit of the doubt and get to know him better. I should have seen the red flags for what they were. Issues included stereotyping people with mental-health issues, minimizing the harms being done in this country to folks who are queer and trans, and allowing people to make infantilizing and sexist statements to guests in a series he runs. He also tried to turn a story about my being nonbinary into a joke. And, when I had an emotional conversation with him about being assaulted by the poet who was acting as my mentor, he wasn’t listening, at least not fully. I thought he was asking questions because he was engaged in the conversation, but he was trying to get keywords from me so he could find the name of the poet who assaulted me online. That felt like a violation, much like his comment about my experience at the conference felt like a violation.

After that call, the poet reached out to me. I told him how I felt about his transgressions in a private message. He replied that he didn’t feel safe because my perception of him might affect his writing career. He then went to the other poets who were on the call and tried to send my private communication to them, which felt like another violation. He purportedly told at least one of them that it was a difficult time to be a white male poet. I’m sharing my message below, since he’s already shared it or threatened to share it with others:

It feels like you miss the mark in terms of connecting meaningfully and emotionally at important moments, then you interrupt and turn to playing devil’s advocate or, worse, imposing your own framework on someone else’s life and experience. You’ve done this several times in [our] meetings and when you and I have interacted one on one.

You also did it during [ ]’s first meeting with us. It feels like a dilute, deflect, and dismiss approach. In my case, it involved dismissing my concerns about those who often have no choice or power or control being yoked with the burden of preventing what those with power and control are doing. There are myriad analyses of this kind of shifting of responsibility to the exploited. Women, including presenters at the conference, didn’t approach me after the session to thank me because what I said was already known and didn’t need to be said. [The speaker] didn’t thank me in front of everyone and expand on what I said because it was implied, and that was enough.

You are daft about this issue and come across as extremely insensitive and entitled. You did the same thing when [ ] and I were discussing the specific ways those who are queer are under attack. You tried to claim everyone is behaving like that now. You diluted what we were saying, and it took an inordinate amount of emotional energy to talk you through why and how you were doing that. I don’t have that energy. You embody a lot of what I’m working against in poetry. I don’t see you as emotionally safe.

You also revealed private health information about your [co-worker’s] mental-health issues in one of our meetings. [In your professional line of work], you should know better than to do that. Why would you not do the same to me or any of the [group] members? You aren’t modeling best practices around mental-health support.

Why am I writing about this now, months after it happened? Because it happened. It’s still affecting me and my relationships with poets I once trusted and considered dear friends, one of whom is calling into question the validity of my concerns. Things like this happen far more often than they should, and not just to me: both these types of experiences and the ways in which they’re minimized, denied, and justified with language like, We don’t always have clear seeing or There’s often more to a person than we realize. As if people in these situations don’t understand the first thing about perception and memory. As if we level other human beings the way kids smash LEGO figures, reducing them to one aspect of who they are or to a single moment.

Neither of those things is true. What is true for me personally is that I know harm when I see it, when I feel it, when I hear it, when I taste it in the air. I know harm, and I know when someone is doing harm. Humans don’t need to be omniscient to know that, to call it what it is, and to stop giving it yet another pass.

Oh, and for anyone who thinks it’s hard being a white male poet these days? Try not being one.

A Pound of Honey

There are black vultures in parts of Oklahoma. Tell me that’s not a reason to move back there.

Your near rain is my far rain. You, there. Me, here. Native sparrows gather in the wildlands behind my house as winter surrounds yours. They say what you won’t, what you can only feel. Cold, they say. Seed. Wind, they say. Wind.

Something happened a couple of days ago that has me so shaken I woke in tears this morning. It’s related to poetry, to poets. Of course it is. For my health, for my life, for my future, I need to limit who I’m intacting with, where I’m publishing my work, and where I’m spending my time in poetry and as a poet. I support kind, generous, compassionate poets and the journals and presses they run. I will continue to support those poets, journals, and presses. But all the rest? It doesn’t have a place in my life. I’ve seen enough. I choose a different approach to writing, a different community, a different way of being in the world.

Watching a baby goat take a shower is how I am.

For only $69.99, you can send a bag of mystery bones to someone you love. So there’s that.

I’m spending Thanksgiving with my loved ones: the life partner, our dog, and Bo Burnham.

Despite everything, I’m thankful for everything.

My poems are like webs I weave under every bridge, every cliff, here in canyon country. They’re not just for me. They’re for everyone who lives here and needs something to catch the light when they look down, when they find themselves leaning forward.

Ironically, I really need a paperweight right now.

In a stunning turn of events, I don’t like handblown glass paperweights as much as I thought I did.

I dreamed I was made of cotton and kept pulling parts of myself from myself until there was no me left.

Marbles are so emotional. One member of the marble-identification group shared a note a woman wrote about the marbles she played with when she was a child in the early 1900s. Her name was Lulu. She kept her marbles and note in a face-powder box. Another person found a coin purse at an estate sale with three wheat pennies and a single marble inside. The poster writes: This was somebody’s treasure.

I dreamed I married my husband’s brothers, even the dead one, and was also an evil clown is how I am.

I just joined a marble-identification group on Facebook is how I am.

The life partner woke me up eating a pickle on the other side of the house is how I am.

I don’t have a lot of words right now. It took me twelve hours to get out of bed and onto the sofa today and another two to make it to my desk. Now, I’m headed back to the sofa and then back to bed. It is very hard to be outside of language. It means I’m outside of hope. It’s going to take some time to come to terms with that feeling, if that’s even possible.

I don’t know who Facebook thinks I am, but it’s trying to send me a vacuum-packed cow brain in the mail. Also, a pig heart in its pericardium. A sheep-organ set. A turkey gizzard. Petrfied snapping turtle feet. A cat in a box, a skinned cat, an economy cat, a pregnant cat, a small cat, and a cat skull. A cut-open dogfish shark. A sea squirt. Half a sheep’s head.

I just misread something as Mr. Bananajeans, and now I need to find an animal I can call Mr. Bananajeans.

The life partner saw the two-person steam sauna I put in our Amazon cart and removed it is how I am.

In my despair, I put a two-person steam sauna in my Amazon cart is how I am.

Lines from my dream: Alive to the moment, / unaffected by the heat, / penetrated by the Midwestern sun / pocked with chicken-laden pastures, / I wait for a rapture that never comes.

I’m a little bit grumpy. The life partner and I are having a funeral tonight for the part of me that can no longer live safely in the world, but he keeps saying mixed weenies over and over because, hours ago, that’s what he thought I was saying when I actually said McSweeney’s.

Grammarly says I wrote 122,765 words last week. Really? Where are they?

I live in poetry. I survive in prose.

Maybe I cast light on poetry’s shadow. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Come to terms with that shadow and with what you are in response to it. That’s the work that must be done before understanding and integration can occur at the individual and collective levels. Don’t blame me for the shadow. I didn’t create it. I am not it. You’ve conflated me with a system, with you.

I dreamed my ex told me he couldn’t choose me because all choice is limitation and restricts freedom. I’ll take you for now, he said. But I don’t choose you and never will. He said this as I cleaned the dirt from his boots off his favorite ottoman.

Ten years is nothing to eternity.

I don’t think I’m ever going to heal. I don’t know if I’m even going to survive.

My love is in my feet today so it can hit the ground as I walk.

My neighbor blows all the dust down the street and back into the wildlands.

As hard as it is at times to live with empathy, I wouldn’t want to live without it.

During the election coverage, I rubbed my boobs on the TV.

While you sleep, bees will honey your lips the way they did when Plato was an infant. Then you will kiss me sweet, love me sweet. I will die sweet on your vine. Oh, sugar. Oh, conjecture turned confection. Do not tell me why you are bad for me. Waggle. Buzz. Make my whole body vibrate. There, there, little love, little bee. Feed me.

              Two million flowers
              make a pound of honey
              a riot of blossoms

If those who are being harmed refuse all collective language to describe those who are being harmed, those who harm will continue to harm. Collective language leads to being seen collectively. Being seen collectively leads to acting collectively. Acting collectively leads to change.

              Sand at the foot
              of the mountain forgets
              it was ever part mountain

Dissolving and Emerging

My severe hypothyroidism is taking a toll. For the past two weeks, gobs of hair have been falling out every day. I’ve been in bed since Friday. I need to have blood work done to see if the new dose of thyroid-replacement medication is improving things at all, but I didn’t have the energy to call the lab to schedule an appointment because the required opening up the cabinet where I put the lab paperwork, pulling it out of a stack of papers, finding the phone number, dialing the phone, and talking to someone. Too much. Also too much: doing my immunoglobulin infusions, the ones that keep me alive; preparing for the support group I’m facilitating that starts this week; hydrating; exercising; bathing; eating.

In this hypothyroid state, which has been creeping up on me since last fall, I’ve also been thinking a great deal about poetry and what I’m doing as a poet. A hypothyroid state isn’t the best one to be in when having these thoughts, but anyone who’s been hypothyroid knows these are the kinds of thoughts one has when hypothyroid.

Here’s my conclusion. Poetry is, at its worst, a discriminatory and harmful system. I’ve experienced discrimination and harm firsthand. But the system being what it is doesn’t make it one I can walk away from. I’m a poet. Being a poet isn’t something I chose or can unchoose. It’s a way of being.

When I was close to death in 2022, writing an imitation poem after Richard Siken is what brought me back to life and what allowed me to continue living. There was no question for me then that I was bound to poetry, to being a poet. It doesn’t matter that it was a Richard Siken poem. It could have been any poem, imitation or otherwise. I time-traveled in that poem. I found my way into and through time itself, not because I’m special or any given poet is special. What’s special is poems: who we are in them, who we aren’t, what we see, what’s beyond seeing. That dissolving when we need to dissolve. That emerging when we need to emerge. That liminal space between dissolving and emerging where we can live more expansively.

I came back to poetry. I can’t leave it again. I think my presence makes poetry better, not worse. I’ve written about what happened to me in poetry and beyond. I see issues at the systemic level and call attention to them. Because I’m older, I have a longer memory than a lot of poets do, which gives me insights others may not have. I make choices about where to send my work and who to associate with accordingly, which is necessary when poems enter the world of poetry, that less-than-optimal system that can and does do damage.

I’m neither a sycophant nor the poetry police. I call things like I see them. I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad about the unexamined biases that exist in poetry or the ways in which they may be contributing to those biases or at least not helping alleviate them. I do think we should all pay more attention to the institutions and organizations we support, the people we defend, and how we talk about those who are exploited and otherwise victimized within the system. But I know I can’t change anyone or the system as a whole. I can only control how I navigate it and who I am within it.

I suspect things would be different if poets didn’t have jobs to worry about or tenure or getting published or securing money for their projects or any of the other pressures that keep the system humming along without much change over the past several decades. I’m not fettered by any of that. I just read and write poetry.

I still remember Carolyn Kizer telling a group of poets that another famous poet tried to rape her. It was at a dinner before a reading she was giving. I also remember how the other poets at the table responded, which was to react in a flustered way and quickly change the subject. That was nearly thirty years ago, when I was just starting to write poetry. But what happened to her occurred decades earlier.

Poetry has had systemic issues that affect individual poets for a long time. These issues didn’t start yesterday, and they won’t end tomorrow. That’s why I’m not going to stop writing poetry or talking about what I’ve experienced and seen in the poetry community. Carolyn Kizer was talking to me that day in 1997. She was warning me. I heard her. I try to hear everyone who speaks.

Assertions

I came across a thread today from ten years ago. It’s about the poet who sexually assaulted me. I’d never seen the thread before or the assertions it contains. I want to be very clear about something: I never retracted or changed my story. The essay that was slated to run in VIDA did not run because another poet divulged the name of the poet who sexually assaulted me to one of the publication’s editors, and that compromised me as well as VIDA. The piece did not name or otherwise identify the poet in question, which was a requirement for the essays in that series.

I have since published that essay and made it publicly available. It took me ten years to do so after what happened. I’ll link to it in the comments.

The thread I saw sickens me even now, a decade later. I don’t have words to describe how atrocious it is. It reminds me why I left poetry in the first place. It wasn’t just because of the sexual assault. It was because of how poets, in particular women poets, responded to the situation.

The poetry community terrifies and horrifies me.

The Fog

Writing used to be my way of working through things in order to discover beauty, complexity, and meaning, as well as what escapes meaning, to feel those textures and colors the body and mind together send to the surface like koi in a pond waiting to be fed. All those little mouths mouthing at once. All those fat bodies and watery fins. So much movement but not without pattern, like music.

Writing used to be my music, its notes distributed like lilypads the bodymind somehow reads through touch, for that’s what language is. Something we touch, not something we see. Something we touch and hear.

I worked hard to learn how to write despite my dyslexia. To write, to read, to understand. I wanted into that world because of what poems could do.

              The fog comes
              on little cat feet.

If fog could be a cat, I could be anything in language, not what I was in my home. I didn’t have to be that child or a child at all. I could be something that made sense or was so far beyond sense that sense wouldn’t matter anymore. I wanted to do that with language, to unlock its magic. It took decades, but I did. I think I did.

I’ve come to identify with being a poet and writer, with sitting down at my desk and writing every day. I told people poetry was everywhere, always, like a faucet you can just open up and there it is.

I don’t feel like that anymore. I open the tap and there’s nothing. People are cruel. I’ve encountered more cruelty in the past three years, which is when I started writing again, than in the other twenty years of writing combined, with the exception of some awful things that went down in the poetry community in 2015. I’ve been personally threatened, accused of appropriating the term CPTSD (as if my trauma isn’t real), attacked both for not really being neuroatypical (based on how I appear) and for using the neurotype framework, told nobody should listen to me because I have bipolar, that I’m morally unclean, that my writing is doing harm, and more.

That’s on top of the more general comments people have made in response to my writing: things like everyone who has a mental-health label should be round up and forcibly removed from Utah or queer people are evil and satanic.

               It sits looking
              over harbor and city

These comments are like gargoyles draining the life from my writing and from me as a person. They go well beyond discourse. They’re attacks. They’re erasures. They’re discriminatory. They’re scary.

They’re what passes for engagement these days. We’re all seeing comments like this day in and day out, especially on social media. Some of us are participating in it in our own ways. Most if not all of us are negatively affected by it. Even outlets that are designed to give us a voice can end up sending us to slaughter with every piece of ours they publish. For civil discourse? For freedom of speech? Or for clicks, shares, page views, and increased reach? If an outlet wants to keep you angry at those who also trying to speak to the larger issues in our culture, our country, and our communities rather than catalyzing you to also speak and act in response to those larger issues in your own way, ask yourself what that outlet’s motives are and what effect the infighting it generates has on anyone’s ability to advocate for anything—or even to survive what’s become increasingly difficult to survive.

How is a writer who, for years, wrote for some of the largest medical organizations and research universities in the country, as well as an esteemed consortium comprised of the top medical and research centers, in this position? Who’s routinely had work in competitive literary journals and with well-regarded indy presses? Some of this is coming from social media and website comment threads and is in response to my essays and opinion pieces. Some of it’s happening with friends on Facebook, namely people who read my work and then project things onto me so that, when I am not what they think I am or what they want me to be to them, they can and sometimes do become irate, belittling me and my poetry.

This is how things are now. And they’re going to get worse. But I don’t have to keep saying OK to it. I’ve already started saying none of this is OK. Now, I’m grieving on many levels—what poetry and writing can and can’t be, what kinds of audiences it can and can’t have, what the writing community and our communities in general are and aren’t—and I’m waiting for the faucet to flow again. That may be the only faith I have left in me. I believe I can find my way back to poetry, and poetry can find its way back to me. I have to believe this to survive.

              on silent haunches
              and then moves on.

May the fog that obscures poetry move on. May the fog that keeps us from seeing each other move on. May the fog that blankets our entire country move on. Let it move on. Let it move on.

—

I appreciate my friends on Facebook who feel their way through the world using language and take the time to communicate thoughtfully. You are the antithesis to much of what passes for communication these days.

The poem used in this essay is “The Fog,” by Carl Sandburg. It is in the public domain.

More Abuses in Poetry

I’m reflecting on how I could have stopped writing poetry at any of a number of points over the past year:

Last spring, when a poet I’d known for more than two decades went on his page and threatened me because he thought it was inappropriate for me to tell him that, as a friend, I loved him. He decided that meant we were having an affair. He attacked me privately, then went on his page to tell the entire poetry community he was going to out me as a married woman who was acting disgracefully. I had to watch women poets, including those I know, console him rather than telling him his behavior was inappropriate. That is the one and only time I’ve screenshot a Messenger conversation and shared it. I did so to put an end to the unfounded, untrue, and libelous comments he was making. He immediately blocked me. I never even said his name—though I would if something like that happened again today—and I removed the screenshots the next day rather than leaving them up as I could have. (Update January 26, 2026: They’re back up on my Facebook page.)

Last winter, when a poet who’d been following my work for months and said he wanted to publish some of my poems left an obscenely hostile, sanist comment on one of my microessays lamenting the fact that people are using a bridge down the street to die by suicide. He screamed that I needed to be in therapy rather than writing and that my writing was the last thing he needed in his life, as if he hadn’t followed me and chosen to read, and laud, my work up to that point. As if he didn’t have the power to stop reading what I wrote or unfriend me or mute me or any of a suite of well-adjusted options that were available to him.

Two days ago, when a poet I’ve known for more than a year, perhaps the most successful and talented poet I know, lashed out at me for using the term sanism, indicating that I was “borrowing” the term, implying my experiences with abuse and trauma and my lived experience with bipolar aren’t valid because, unlike him, I haven’t been to war. It was not the first time he’d lashed out at me or the first time he’d engaged in disconcerting comments about and behavior toward women, namely women poets with mental-health diagnostic labels and lived experience.

That’s about one-third of what’s happened over the past year. Poets can be so toxic and vitriolic and othering and fragile and entitled and bullying—and even engage in nasty tactics like gaslighting—that it’s still hard for me to wrap my head around it. I am shocked every time it happens, though I shouldn’t be. Something similar but much worse is why I left poetry for years back in 2015.

Shame on those who engage in behaviors like this. Shame on the effect you’re having on other poets. Shame on the dynamics that underlie what you’re doing. Shame on you for doing everything seemingly in your power to remove folks like me from poetry in particular and the world in general. I mean the human world. I also mean the living world. Like everyone with a dignoastic label and lived experience with bipolar, I have a 1 in 5 chance of unaliving myself. Not trying to. Actually doing it. Anyone who nudges, pushes, or shoves another human being in that direction needs to sit with what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Bigtime.

I had just finished my essay for Mad in America the day before the poet accused me of appropriating the term sanism. What if I’d pulled that essay? What if I’d decided not to submit my manuscript to any more contests? What if I’d decided not to write poems or essays anymore? What if my mental-health recovery had been compromised?

Folks who need my writing would have lost my voice, including my insights, perspective, and stories. And I would have lost part of myself. That could have been what happened because poets like the ones listed above make poetry too much. Too hard. Too unwelcoming. Too dehumanizing. Too rancid. Because of the sexual assault that occurred with my mentor, which took me away from poetry and—in a sense—my life for seven long and lonely years, I am always close to leaving when some new poet rears his head in a similar way, with similar impulses and similar levels of dysfunction.

But I told myself when I came back that I will not leave. I will not budge. I will not back down. I will be a 4 in 5 even if certain men in poetry have absolutely no regard for my health, well-being, or life. That’s the biggest fuck you I can give men like that.

And I will write. I will not stop writing.

—

And those of you who know these types of folks and do nothing? Shame on you as well.

And those of you who think folks like me should shut up about things like this, who confuse us for the problem because we speak about the problem, who tell us to just get over it or at least not talk about it publicly? Shame on you, too.

I do not have the capacity for any of you. The work I’m doing is far more important than publishing poetry, that is if I have to stay silent about abuses in order to have work accepted or dissociatively participate in the system without being able to advocate for change within the system. I will not stay in the good graces of a toxic culture. This is about human rights. All of it. My life, my work, my purpose.