CP: I realized I'm not even introducing myself. I don't know what to say. I write poems. I live in Massachusetts now. I did live in Missouri, where I taught for a long time. I just retired. I don't know. I have a dog. There's not much to say. So should I just start saying something? 


I just want to say it's interesting, because I have been talking to my partner recently about my impatience with straight work—straight fiction in particular. I was saying that there's a way in which when I read straight male fiction; I just returned a book to the library because I just find the sentences so tame and boring. There’s no risk taking. I don't know why I attach this to straightness, because obviously there are exciting straight people and risk takers. I keep a log of all the books I read every month; I’ve done that for years. When I look, it's really interesting how the ones that I actually finish are, if not queer, then they're by women or writers of color or in some way, you know, marginalized—whatever the term is. I noticed this when I used to teach—that the straight male graduate students were the ones who wrote the worst poetry. I used to think it was that they were afraid to open up or something. Maybe it is partly that they're so locked down by certain kinds of expectations of masculinity. But I also feel like there's this way when you grow up thinking that no one's listening, that you may as well say whatever you want, however you want, because no one's listening anyway, so no one's going to criticize you for it. Meanwhile, I think most queer people that I know, we all know how to speak that other language. It’s like your job as a queer person to be alert and—for safety reasons—to know how to read a room quickly and know how to understand the language of the so-called majority. 


There is definitely a difference, for sure, in poetry and in fiction. I feel like I can tell almost instantly that someone is queer or that they're at least not the usual kind of straight person. There's something else that is making them not stay in line with expectations.


RLU: You’ve said that when you were writing your first book, you were writing to save your life. You were living and writing within a moment of crisis. I want to connect a question I have about this to a poet’s analysis of Sara Ahmed, the scholar and theorist, who wrote that if the sexual involves “contingencies of bodies coming into contact with other bodies, then sexual disorientation slides quickly into social disorientation” (as a disorientation and how things are arranged.) What is familiar, what is passed over, and the veil of its familiarity becomes rather strange. I feel like this sort of crisis, this decision point when you realize that you're queer, or you realize that you have a choice of if you want to enact that queerness in your life, if you want to live queerly. I think that moment of crisis, that decision point, is when you realize that you are actually disoriented towards the world, and the decision point is if you want to be normatively oriented, or if you actually want to re-orient. I think this idea of looking into the center from the outside, from the margin, along with what I've heard you and many other poets talk about, is that there’s a really joyful moment when you're writing: when you finish a poem and the work surprises you, or you learn something new about yourself or about language or writing. I'm curious about you in your poetry journey and in your journey as a queer man because it seemed that poetry helped to make sense of this disorientation and to make peace with being disoriented. I'm wondering if you could reflect on that, or if that brings anything up for you.


CP: I don't know if it's a way of making peace. I remember, looking back at the first book, realizing that it's not so much that you're in strange territory. It's that you haven't found the language for that territory. That's how it felt to me starting to write the poems that would be my first book: I don't see things in the world that describe, for me, how I feel, or how I think my body is. So I'm going to have to make that for myself, which I feel is also something probably lots of writers think. There's no container so you create your own container to live in. So that's what it is. It seems to me like it's architecting a space to live in. It’s sort of saying, Well, yes, this is a landscape, but within the landscape that we all have to live in, you can shape your own. It’s akin to how people can redefine what family means. They don't have to subscribe to what the general majority think of as family. So, I agree. I guess I somehow feel like I avoided an answer, but maybe I answered it.


RLU: Maybe you'll come back to getting at the center of the answer with another question that I have. As we discussed earlier, when you're queer, you're negotiating safety. I think a part of what you were talking about is that if you're attuned to something—and in this case, queerness—you'll see this on the page. In a previous interview you talked about how your wife, at the time, read your first collection, and it seemed like she didn't really see the queerness on the page that the person who selected your work for the prize did. I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit more about that, about negotiating safety and risk in a way that translates into poetry. Giovanna Lomanto used the word ‘veiling’ and I really liked that word. She talked about how when she's writing a poem, she’ll go through many drafts. It's during that drafting process that she'll get to choose what she wants to demonstrate or make explicit to the reader, and what she wants to hold for herself. I think there's a really beautiful negotiation of being defiant and looking straight at the page and also holding something for yourself. I think that's also very similar to what I was noticing in the queer photography, how there's this defiant gaze with a lot of queer subjects, but also vulnerability in those subjects too. I think queerness toes that line really well.


CP: I've been thinking about the veiling idea. The thing is, I work very intuitively, so I don't have a sense when I'm writing about what I'm doing. I’m not thinking I'm going to withhold something here, I'm going to reveal something there. But, when writing the poems of the first book, I felt, and I guess I still feel this way, that when I'm writing, it feels like I'm utterly alone, and so I can do whatever I want. I never have a sense of an audience. I think that might be what it is. Is, for me, whatever would be sort of veiled in public it seemed like, here's a place where you can talk about what you're really thinking. I remember thinking that when writing those first poems, because I didn't have a person to talk to about this and I didn't want to talk to my wife about it. Although it's strange because I did actually, a few years into our marriage, I did say I think that maybe I'm gay. Her reaction was, well, maybe you should talk to someone—but not as in, so you can decide about that, or come to into it, but so that you can maybe not be gay. I actually went to a therapist and we were attracted to each other and immediately had sex instead. We decided not to work together because he said you can't be my client. And so I said, Okay, fine, never mind. We can just have sex. So that was not a solution. Part of that was actually useful information because my reaction was, I can't even go to therapy and find a way to work this out. It's just making this situation more problematic. So poems for me are a place where I can be utterly vulnerable. People ask, what's your strategy for vulnerability? Or aren't you brave for being vulnerable? It's not even that. It's more like, I feel like my guard is totally down. I don't realize until I'm reading in front of people, and I'll think, what did I think it was going to feel like to stand in front of a bunch of people and say these words? So for me, it's kind of like maybe how home is for a lot of people, where there's the world we have to interact with all day, and then we can be ourselves at home—it still feels that way to me, writing. It's not as desperate a thing as like I have to write to survive but it does feel like there's a kind of staving off of something I don't know; things that I think I'm still conditioned to think of as bad things, when really I don't think that anymore. Recently, a young person at a Q&A said they wondered if I thought it was old fashioned—they said, shame no longer exists when it comes to being queer, and so what do you think that means for your poetry? This was a kid who said he came out when he was five, and his parents were great about it. But I thought, that's not how every parent still feels and reacts. And I think a lot of people who are closeted are for good reason. I feel like you might be thinking, Carl's not ever going to answer these questions directly.


RLU: What I’m actually thinking is oh my God, I am loving this conversation. I had a friend recently say to me that they think shame is fundamental to being queer. 


CP: That's interesting. I wonder if it's true or if it is more generational. I grew up in a military family and there was no media or resources suggesting that there are other people like you. Of course, you think there's something wrong with you and it's something to be hidden, which is why you end up creating a hidden world of your writing or your diary or music or whatever. I know Ru Paul's Drag Race is not the gauge of everything queer, but it is interesting how many people seem to struggle with a lot of self loathing. Even though here we are in 2024 and drag race is on TV, they're still struggling with being ashamed or having to live with the fact that they've been ostracized by their family. Shame is still there, but it seems harsh to say it's fundamental to being queer. I'd like to think someone could be queer and always be joyful and free, but on the other hand, I don't know if you can be an interesting artist without some kind of wrestling with shame in some ways.


RLU: Agreed. I think what makes for interesting art is being a little dissatisfied. Shame is one avenue for reaching that. That being said, I don't feel shame about my queerness. I was raised in a really supportive family. My dad had two brothers who were gay. My read of that person’s initial question is that it points to how we're all living in different temporalities—I can grow where queerness is accepted, while a good friend of mine who's 26 can grow up in a very homophobic and transphobic family. We’re all living in 2024 but our families, those worlds, are of different times. 


CP: I don't feel shame about being queer at all, but I think what I feel is a kind of restlessness. A sexual restlessness that I guess there's a part of me that still buys into. I'm in a long term relationship and we're monogamous and there's a part of me that thinks that it's like a queer version of a marriage without actually being married. In my growing up, being married meant you don't feel desire for other people and all of that. But to me, it's quite human to do so. And so I feel like there's always a wrestling; it's a strange thing to feel like at 65 that's still with you. It's not exactly a shame, but more like, shouldn’t you have grown up by now, Carl? 

But then, who says it's not growing up because you still feel sexual and alive? Promiscuity doesn't disappear because you fall in love with somebody. So I don't know, yes—I guess maybe there has to be something you're wrestling against.


RLU: But also all of the trappings of heteronormative progress really deaden desire too. Sharing bank accountsand logistics can lead to complacency or predictability, not to mention that they’re just not sexy.


CP: It's not sexy. Children are another thing that make it less possible to live a risk-taking life on a daily basis. That’s not against anyone who wants to raise children, but that's just another thing that can deaden a certain kind of freedom and energy.


RLU: Totally. Sexual freedom is something that I've been thinking about a lot recently. I'm going through a breakup after the ending of a four and a half year long relationship. We were monogamous. I turn 29 next month and while I'm still in my 20s, for most of it, I've been spending it with one person. It's very freeing to get to see myself and experience myself as a slutty 20-something queer person. I'm realizing how having sex with different people can teach you so much that you wouldn’t be able to learn with just one person. When I think about being in  a long term relationship now, I'm like, that sounds horrible.


CP: It's weird. I was in one for 17 years, and then I ended that relationship, and I lived for four years alone. I never lived by myself as an adult. At this point I was in my 50s, and it became exactly what you're talking about—except I was in my 50s and having a total slutty adventure. On one hand, I thought, I guess this is what I've been missing out on, and that was exciting. And at the same time, I was thinking, That's exhausting. Because after a while it was. I hit it at the wrong time in life. I think it's exhausting to be in your 50s and do that. Now's a good time, though, for you. And you’re right, there's so much that you can't learn with just one person, which I suppose is why a lot of queer people—men, anyway—seem to have a lot of open relationships, but that brings in other stuff. 


RLU: I did want to ask about queerness and sex. How sex relates to a queer aesthetic. Within  the heteronormative patriarchal world, queerness is feared because queer sex is feared. Or, it's thought of as illogical for people to have sex if they're not able to make a child. Queer sex is thought of as disgusting or emasculating. It's a challenge to masculinity. With male sex, it's illegal with sodomy. It's fetishized with wlw sex, or convsersely and simultaneously, it’s misogynized—to think that sex that happens without men is not sex or without an essentialized penis and a vagina is not sex. Queer sex is both over read and over investigated, while not really being investigated at all. I think that's a consequence of being seen as one dimensional or labeled in a specific way.


Your work contains many religious references. Christian thought says that sex belongs in marriage, and if it doesn't, it's apostasy. It's lacking in biblical grounding. And you've also, in previous interviews, spoken about the importance of locating sacredness in vilified bodies, bodies that exist on the margins, or bodies that engage in activities that are marginal. I'm curious if a queer aesthetic has to investigate sex and sensuality. I wonder, does a queer aesthetic change how we see connection and entering other people or the possibility of sex as a way of connecting with other people?


CP: It's interesting because one of the things I used to think a lot about when I was teaching graduate workshop—I probably shouldn't reveal this, but I'm just going to—the students would be reading their poems loud, and I would sometimes think, this person either hasn't had sex yet or has not ever had interesting sex. I could just tell and that's why this poem was problematic. But I couldn't say that, because that's not a workshop critique. I don't think you're allowed to talk about those things, but I really thought I was right in most cases. It's not that with a queer aesthetic the subject matter always has to be sexual, but I feel as if there's a way in which people speak about other bodies and about their own bodies that gives me a sense of whether they're at ease doing that and experienced in doing it. It's why you get all these straight male novelists who write badly about women. It's not like they haven't had sex with them, but they probably have had bad sex with them. Even then, there are some gay novelists who I feel are regarded by many as the masters of sexual writing. But actually the sex seems very tame in their books. I don't think I'm so far ahead of the curve, I just think, wow, people don't seem very imaginative. Having sex as a queer person doesn't necessarily make you a good writer, but at the very least, there seems to be the presence of the erotic and an ease with being in that presence. 


American society is still so puritanical. No matter what's out there, there's a sense of the forbidden and the fear of it, as you said. Even in heteronormative relationships where if two people who just decide not to have children but are still sexually active with each other—there's something abnormal about the fact they're actually experiencing sex for pleasure. 


In my own writing, I think the most erotic thing is not the subject matter, but the sentences themselves. I wrote somewhere about this as ‘an erotics of syntax,’ because syntax seems to me so much about control or manipulation. You can withhold verbs; like it's literally teasing the reader down the page. But not everyone writes that way or needs to. 


RLU: I’m recalling what you said on a podcast about sex being an exchange of power and power being present in all kinds of relationships. I think what can make sex fun is when you are aware that you're in this game of exchanging power back and forth. The way you describe your poetry sounds very much like that, where you're aware of the power within the syntax. You're aware of the power of holding the reader's attention and are engaging with that power actively.


CP: For some reason, people get very upset when I talk about sex being about exchanges of power. But I feel like, what else would it be? I mean, even if you're not conscious of it being that you have to acknowledge there's a strange power, first of all, in entering somebody's body. There's a very strange, different power in being entered by someone's body and the degree to which you allow or demand it. I mean, there's all just the potential brutality of role play. With a lot of gay men, there's often a lot of acting out the very things that were shameful, or the situations they encountered when they were bullied and sort of called demeaning things. Then it becomes a turn on to want to be called these demeaning things because you've chosen it. It’s just the old thing of reclamation, I suppose. 


I don't think sex is possible without acknowledging that it's about power exchange. Good sex is being able to trust somebody and respect them enough to be yourself, to be vulnerable, but also to listen so they can be vulnerable and to be aware of what power you hold. As I say all those things, I think this is exactly why straight men are problematic, because they're not raised to have to listen, let alone to women. They're raised with the assumption that they—especially straight white men—can speak and that they will be heard immediately. It’s as simple as walking into the front of the line of a restaurant because they literally don't see that other people are waiting. And that's a strange power in of itself, but it also means that they haven't had to learn to listen to put themselves second for a moment, and that that could be a turn on. 


RLU: I feel bad for that person, whoever they are. That existence just seems so flat to me.


CP: I know and I feel the same way. I know many of those men and tt seems too bad, but maybe it's maybe they're happy. It doesn’t matter if they’re happy if think they're happy, right? Maybe that's enough. To think you're happy is enough sometimes.


RLU: One last question, broadly, is what does a queer poetic aesthetic do or achieve? We've explored that queer poetics might bring history forward into the present. It might memorialize or conduct memory work of generations who passed away due to AIDS and government negligence and harm. A queer aesthetic might be about demonstrating or proving humanness in the way that we say trans people have always existed. Queerness is not an invention, but rather a tradition that's always being reinvented. I’ve heard you say that you hope your poems incite some sort of physical experience in readers. I'm wondering if we can layer that on top of this premise of a queer aesthetic and pair the two. 


CP: As you're talking, I wonder if an aspect of a queer aesthetic, at least from my poems, is that they should give a person the experience of living in brokenness and unresolvedness. I say that because I think that's an aspect, for me, of being queer. It’s part of the fluidity and non-binaryness whether or not one identifies as non-binary. But there was a mistake that I made when I first came out. I thought, Oh, I figured out the problem, I'm not straight, I'm gay. Back then there were only those categories and it felt good, as someone who was raised in a binary system, to know your category. But what I learned over the time of writing books is that, of course, being gay is not one thing any more than being Black is. I think the impulse in the heteronormative world and the poetry that's come from it, is to resolve things. That you should come up with a sense of resolution at the end of a poem. For me, I resist that because it doesn't seem true to how my life is or really how human life is. It's sort of fake: the idea that we grow up, we meet somebody, we fall in love and live happily ever after. It's punctuated with all kinds of other stuff that's unexpected. I think that queerness involves being not only prepared for the unexpected, but sort of making a weird pattern of life with the unexpected. Sometimes that means tragedy, but often it means unexpected joy and I like that. I feel like I didn't really become the poet that I became until I accepted that there's not a way to resolve any of this stuff. All you can do is write the next poem that sort of pushes a little further into the space, only to see the space itself start shifting as a result. So then you have to write the next poem. It's all unstable. It's kind of like grabbing the next handhold as you're scaling a mountain. In the straight world, the resolution would be you get to the top. But what I'm learning is, what if you never reach the top? What if the whole point is the climbing and what you discover along the way? I don't know, it's like living in brokenness in some way, which doesn't seem like a nice way to live, but I think it actually can be more exciting and more honest.