My First Book Outed Me

my first sexual encounter with a man was violent. He was a professor at Harvard, I was an undergraduate. I’d met him at my summer job, driving a shuttle bus for scientists doing research at a lab. When he learned that I was at Harvard, he suggested I visit him sometime. I could feel the tension, the eros, as he spoke to me. I spent months back at school toying with the idea of calling him for directions to his condo before eventually following through, as I knew I would. A lot of alcohol and marijuana later, I woke to being raped (though it took me years to understand it as rape and call it that). I did say no, and then I must have passed out again. The next morning, I hurried back to campus to shower and meet up with my best friend, whom I’d planned to have lunch with before we studied together that afternoon. I remember telling her what had happened. I remember nothing, now, of what she said in response, except that it was the right response; she was my best friend, after all. Three years later, we got married.

I’ve left out that I returned, at least twice, to the professor’s place. We had sex each time. It’s not lost on me that the epigraph that opened my first book, from Romans 7:15, is “for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.” Clearly, I didn’t entirely hate what occurred between the professor and me. Maybe it was being myself that I hated. Or maybe, if I’d thought harder, I would have realized I hated that I’d been conditioned to hate my natural urges. Or that violence and disorientation had to be the context for those urges. Or maybe just the messy morality of it all.

i’d written poems as a hobby throughout high school, and as an undergraduate I joined the staff of the school literary journal, the whole time writing what I now see were bad imitations of Plath, whose work I idolized but whose craft I didn’t know enough about to fully appreciate. Then I suddenly stopped writing, had no desire to write. Only now, writing this essay, does it occur to me that my silence more or less coincides with the rape.

Six years after that—three years into being married and into what I’d assumed would be a lifelong career as a high school Latin teacher—I began writing for no immediately apparent reason, at least not internally; an immediate external catalyst was my finding a used copy of Selected Poems by William Carlos Williams. I’d never heard of him. I’d never known that poems could be about such ordinary things as eating plums, and in the kind of language that didn’t sound like poetry to me at all, but like regular talking. This was something I could easily do, I thought, and I began writing about ordinary things from my own life, descriptions, really. I wasn’t ready for the introspection that would later characterize my own poems, but I was teaching myself something about description, precision, how to translate the visual into written language.

Soon, though, I found myself writing poems that pushed through concrete description into something deeper. What enabled me to become more introspective, and more able to implicate or question my own behavior, is that I’d finally started to wrestle with the reality of my conundrum: my honest love for my wife and for our life together coming up against my increasing inability to dismiss as fleeting my sexual attraction to men. I was also developing the literary tools necessary to enact and explore this conundrum in poetry. In “X,” the first poem in my first book, the description moves beyond the surface of newlyweds and domestic life to the fact that betrayal is always possible, even attractive:

That attraction to betrayal is one translation of the X in the poem’s title. After a series of couplets, the poem ends on a single half-sentence line: “X is all I keep // meaning to cross out.” By then, I’d learned enough about stanza breaks to see how this particular one captures the tug-of-war of wanting to keep a thing even as one intends to get rid of it; to keep meaning to do a thing amounts to never actually doing it. I kept meaning to change; I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.

reading the introduction to the Williams book, which mentions the poet’s break from certain formal traditions, led me to look for a book on forms in the local library. Other than sonnets, I didn’t know about form, not in English, anyway; I’d studied classics in college, so I was aware of Sappho and Homer, and I taught Virgil to my advanced high school students—but these were ancient forms, from other languages. I found a copy of John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason, which introduces each form via the form itself—the description of a villanelle, for example, is itself a villanelle. The book was inviting, and I spent a winter trying to write at least two of each form covered within. These were all just exercises, not poems; most never saw the light of day.

I was rapidly acquiring the technical tools that are, I believe, half of what poetry is: patterning devices, ways of delivering information, meaningful variation from pattern to allow for surprise. The other half is vulnerability, an ability to dwell in and speak from a state of openness, which gives authority to a poem, makes it a thing to believe in and trust, by reminding the reader that behind the poem is an actual human being who speaks not with detachment but from felt experience. This is harder to learn, except perhaps by routinely exposing oneself to examples. In 1989, I read three debut books that had been published a year earlier, and they became lodestars for me: Lucie Brock-Broido’s A Hunger, Marie Howe’s The Good Thief, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s To the Place of Trumpets. These were the first contemporary poets I’d ever read, or at least the first that showed me—each differently—a way to convey subjective experience with both urgency and candor, and to do so without seeming merely to have reported “what happened.” I was learning, without knowing it, about resonance, that thing that makes readers recognize themselves in a sensibility that isn’t theirs at all. Something about these books opened up in me a bit of the wall I’d built around the question of my sexuality. Maybe it was the intimacy of the poems. (Even Lucie’s poems, whose baroque, often obscure diction can seem to shield their speakers from intimacy, often explore the very fear of self-exposure that gives rise to such exaggerated baroqueness in the first place.) A poem seemed a space to store a secret, and I had plenty of secrets. I began then to write the poems that would become my first book—though if I’d known that, I wouldn’t have written them. I thought of my poems (as I do now) as entirely private; they are, despite how unfashionable it is to say so, a form of therapy, of psychoanalysis, where I get to give useful narratives to experiences I can’t otherwise make peace with. The point was never to share the poems; it was more about writing myself free, if only temporarily, from what I felt must destroy me. I know how dramatic that sounds. That doesn’t change the truth of it.

That same year, the poet Martín Espada was scheduled to visit the high school where I was teaching—Falmouth High School, in Massachusetts—as part of the Poets in the Schools program. He was to give a reading for the entire school, and he’d also offered to give an hour-long workshop, after school, for any faculty who might want to sign up in advance. I had no idea what a workshop was, but I signed up. The workshop involved a twenty-minute freewrite, as I recall, and because it was close to Mardi Gras, I wrote a poem (now lost) about Fat Tuesday, or at least that was the title. We shared our poems, Martín commented a bit, and that was it. But as I was leaving, he asked me to stay a moment. He said I seemed to write actual poems, which I immediately denied, assuring him it was just a hobby. Martín asked if I’d ever applied for an artist’s grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council—I’d never heard of that. He gave me the information (this was long before the internet), so I acquired an application, put together a ten-poem sample, and mailed it. About six months later, I learned that I’d won $10,000 to use any way I wanted. I’d never seen so much money in my life! My first decision was to replace my typewriter with my very first computer, and I must have bought a printer of some kind. My second decision was to take some workshops I had heard about but hadn’t been able to afford: for something like forty-five dollars a session, I could join an ongoing summer-long workshop being taught by Alan Dugan at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, about sixty miles from me. Unlike Martín’s, which had been a generative workshop, not so much about critique, Dugan’s was one where we brought a new poem to each session and waited for him and the other participants to weigh in on the poem’s merits or lack thereof (a standard workshop format but entirely new to me—and frightening—at the time).

At the first session, I watched Dugan fairly quickly dismiss two poems before we got to mine. The silence that followed my reading seemed endless before Dugan said something like “All right, then, we have an actual poem. Change nothing.” Not every poem of mine would pass muster with Dugan, but this beginning changed everything, as did his belief in me. When he noted (to my embarrassment and confusion, since I wasn’t out to myself yet, let alone to anyone else) the homoerotic aspects of the poems, he said, “I assume you’ve read Cavafy.” I hadn’t; I asked him to spell the name so I could find a book of his and read it. Discovering Cavafy, who has remained a huge influence on my work, was crucial at the time—he was the first gay male poet I’d ever read. I envied the spareness and honesty of his poems, and I became more comfortable, under their influence, writing from and about my own erotic life, some of it real, most of it still imagined. Suddenly, I couldn’t stop writing poems.

At the end of that summer, Dugan suggested some literary journals I might send work to. I’d been sending poems to journals I’d seen listed in the acknowledgments of Lucie’s, Marie’s, and Brigit’s books, and had received mostly rejections. But slowly, here and there, my poems got accepted for publication. For some reason, sending my poems to journals didn’t feel like showing them to actual people—something I couldn’t really imagine doing, except with the few but supportive members of Dugan’s workshop, people who knew nothing about my real life. But thanks to Martín and Dugan, I now had reason to think my poems might be taken seriously by readers. The poems still felt intensely private to me, but the approval of the editors who published my work was irresistibly gratifying—not, I realize now, because I needed anyone to “approve” of my poems but because the poems were so attached to private struggle and inquiry that approval of them amounted to approval of who I was. Others liked the very thing that I had thought made me unfit for the world. I’d say Martín and Dugan quite literally rescued me from a fear of myself, an inner loathing that had made me dangerously self-destructive. They saved my life.

by the following summer, I had a lot of poems. I returned to Dugan’s workshop, and at the end of one session, he asked me if I’d ever considered putting the poems together into a manuscript. Of course I hadn’t. I did know that Brigit and Marie had each won a first-book prize, but somehow I hadn’t thought to enter a contest. After Dugan’s encouragement, though, I learned of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize for a first book, administered by the Northeastern University Press. I was so naïve that I thought I’d have more of a chance of winning that contest because it was in Massachusetts and so was I. Totally illogical.

First, though, I’d need a manuscript, and the contest deadline was a week or two away. All I knew about manuscripts was from the books I’d read—they seemed to have sections, and the sections were usually held together by theme, and there seemed to be a loose narrative (story, emotional trajectory) that surfaced between the opening and closing poems. I decided on five sections, to mimic the five acts of a conventional play, thinking, I suppose, that this might give structure to what seemed to me a random assortment of unconnected poems. One section tracked a hopeless (imagined) affair with another man; the next had to do with devotion, faith, spiritual vision; the next contained poems of vision gone dangerously awry: murder, arson, rape. (The poem I wrote about and for the professor who had raped me landed in this section.) I was left with a bunch of outliers that touched on various things: art, desire, the Annunciation, soldiers on a night patrol, a fraught relationship to Blackness. These became, for no particular reason, the book’s first section. I see now, though, how the result is a first movement that introduces the range of angles of approach to a sensibility that hadn’t yet consolidated itself into a recognizable whole. That journey toward holism would happen across the book, as it turned out.

This left me with one long, unaccounted-for poem in numbered segments. Why not end with that poem as its own section? When I looked at the first poem—“X”—next to this one, I saw how it has a speaker telling someone else about his own confusion and untrustworthiness and fears about himself. The final poem—“In the Blood, Winnowing”—has a speaker addressing himself with the truth of himself: he still refuses to believe in a “world / where things don’t wash off” (i.e., can’t be erased), which is precisely what the first poem’s speaker believes is still possible, that what is unbearable can be crossed out. But this later speaker has bodily evidence of changes that can’t be denied, and more specifically, this poem opens with the speaker fully aware of his own mortality, while it ends with the speaker already succumbing to the kinds of desires that may have brought him to the situation he’s in. Which is to say, there’s an implied narrative arc, from intending to change oneself to reckoning with the fact that one is who one is, for better and worse. And just like that, I had a manuscript.

I mailed it in, using part of the long poem’s title as the book’s title, In the Blood, by which I meant only that my queerness was innate, an unshakable part of me. Three months later—after having met a man on the street, had sex with him, and immediately fallen in love with him, after having told my wife the truth of it, that I was gay, that I couldn’t help it—I came home to an empty apartment and a message on my answering machine: I’d won the contest; was my manuscript still available for publication?

timing really can be everything. I’ve always felt that my book wouldn’t have been chosen had Rachel Hadas—whom I’d never met—not been the judge that year. A classicist herself, and a daughter of a famous classical scholar, Moses Hadas, she surely responded to my use of myth in certain poems and to a syntax that I myself took for granted until reviewers traced it to my having studied Greek and Latin (correctly enough, though I trace it further back to my having studied German—also an inflected language—as a child, when my family lived on an air force base in Germany for four years). But perhaps more important, just a couple of years earlier, Hadas had organized a poetry workshop for gay men with AIDS living in New York City—her work would result in the anthology Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop, published in 1991, the year I sent my manuscript to the contest. I didn’t know of the anthology—I barely knew anything about AIDS; many still denied its existence, and coverage of it was often absent from mainstream media, which was all I had access to in my small town in the pre-internet era. But I’d seen Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, and I knew he’d died of AIDS, and I reference him passingly in one poem. And in my title poem, I mention dying, in the context of the body, of the blood in the title, and of the book’s queer sensibility. So, while the book is not about AIDS (or the loss of a partner to AIDS, as some reviewers suggested), I see how it can seem otherwise, and I can imagine that this potential reading resonated with Hadas in that particular moment especially. “In the Blood, Winnowing”—one thing AIDS does is winnow people from life itself; at the height of the AIDS crisis, the winnowing seemed, once I became aware of it, relentless and sweeping. I think I also had in mind, though, how queerness separates some of us from others; how a poem can have its winnowing effects; how my being biracial seemed to winnow me from quite belonging to either whiteness or Blackness.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what I meant or what I think I meant as I try to remember it now. I’ve learned not to trust memory. Instead, as when I first started writing them, I trust the poems, and the various shifting chemistries they might have with each given reader. It is still difficult to revisit the poems in my first book, because it means revisiting the confusion and fear that defined so much of my life back then. I believe the writing itself saved me, though. That remains why I write—to save myself, in the hope that the poems, if only as proof that we’re together in this, might incidentally rescue a few others.

This is an edited version of the afterword to Carl Phillips’s In the Blood, reissued by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.