While there were several years when Ted Rees and Eric Sneathen lived in the Bay Area at the same time, it was only after Ted moved away (first to far northern California, then to Philadelphia) that their friendship and correspondence began to blossom. As two poets ever eager to share work, encourage each other, and gossip, theirs is a transcontinental bonhomie that is evident in the interview below, conducted over email upon the occasion of the release of Eric’s new book, Don’t Leave Me This Way, now available from Nightboat Books. 


TR: Eric, I’m so glad that we’re able to have a conversation about your brilliant new book, which I have been lucky enough to see through several iterations over the years. To spend time with it again is an immense gift, as the poems continue to surprise and reveal themselves anew to me— it is as if upon each reading, a new texture of signification and history becomes apparent. But for those who haven’t read the book, I'm interested in asking you how the project of Don't Leave Me This Way came to be. What was your original vision for the work, and how did it change as it moved beyond the germination stage and into the composition and editorial stages?

  
ES: Ted! It’s  such a pleasure to be in conversation with you about this book. Through your Overflowing workshops, you’ve been helping to shepherd this manuscript for years now. One of my aspirations for this book is to produce the circumstances (in the form of a book) that stimulate conversation and community. Our conversations over the years about this project have been a template for that kind of social poetics, so I’m thrilled to be talking with you. 

My original inspiration for this book was a woman named Mary Banda. I don’t know much about her, only what was presented in William Easterly’s polemic on international development The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Mary Banda, as she was described by Easterly, was a tragic figure: a woman taking care of her grandchildren following the death of her own children from AIDS-related illnesses. My heart went out to this woman and the hopelessness that Easterly describes.

I was reading The White Man’s Burden on my little stuffed mattress in Outat El Haj, Morocco, where I was completing my two years of service as a US Peace Corps volunteer. My work was not anything like what Easterly was describing—not much money supporting the programming I did with teenagers, hoping to keep them occupied after school; the stakes rarely felt urgent, the tasks were hardly critical.

That is until one day I was asked to submit a five-figure funding proposal for a PEPFAR project I called “Youth Against AIDS.”  (This dopey title was easy enough to say in English, French, and Moroccan Arabic: a big part of its appeal.) PEPFAR (The President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief) was started in 2003 by President George W. Bush as part of his “compassionate conservatism” agenda, and through PEPFAR I was able to bring together dozens of youth leaders to talk about safer sex. Yes: there was a banana demonstration. 

In his chapter on AIDS funding in the context of international development, Easterly makes a case that, dollar for dollar, resources are better spent on education and prevention rather than treatment and support. Easterly’s argument is rational and clear-eyed; his is a vision of international development that is radical in its dispassion. It’s a vision that clearly aligned with the kind of work I was asked to do with the help of PEPFAR: compassionate in its intentions, conservative in its outcomes and methods. 

When I began writing about my experiences in the Peace Corps—much of which became my first book, Snail Poems—I returned to Mary Banda. My first cut-ups combined AIDS activism in the US (eg, descriptions of ACT UP demos) with the few scraps of text that related the story of Mary Banda. My hope was something like this: I wanted a picture (made of words) of those activists rushing in to help this woman, to allay her suffering through their brand of in-your-face antics, intersectional political analysis, and transformational social demands. The cut-up created a pathway for these disparate times and places to suddenly unite in anger. 

Here’s are a few lines from that project:
 
  
 This project hopes ground, for “All of the United

  things. all of Hertz’s automobiles, project will

  disrobe and already belong, to a large working

  of the world.” And how children is in what we

  rather not see, It might be worth examples, how

  knowledge and skills in children became sick to

  Unleash Power), which fought tried traditional

  healers, material historicization of art, sometimes

  found hospital…

This writing on Mary Banda did not make it into this book. I also wrote, but did not complete, poetry composed of texts related to Mary Mallon and Robert Rayford. At one point, I thought I might write many books—then, after years had passed, I worried I might not be able to collect anything at all.

I began writing DLMTW while I was a graduate student at UC Davis and finished it during the final stretch of my PhD at UC Santa Cruz. Still, the final shape of this book didn’t come into focus until the last few months before I submitted it to Nightboat. I started reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, and I saw something of my struggle to render the story of Gaétan Dugas in Telemachus’s quest to find his father, following a path of gossip and hearsay across the Aegean. Ultimately, a book dedicated to Gaétan Dugas felt right.

TR: Perhaps relatedly, while I've been familiar with the work for a few years now— it really has been a pleasure watching it progress and morph— my most recent re-reading made me wonder about the compositional strategies that you utilize in the book. Your first book and more recent long poem, Patience, are deeply indebted to what one could call the experimental lyric, but in DLMTW, there is the hint of conceptualism in the way you have assembled various archives into a centuries-old formal conceit like the sonnet. What felt different to you about composing this book, as opposed to a more recent project like Patience?

ES: The first attempts to write these poems were prompted by assigned readings on uncreative writing and the long shadow cast by the Language poets. I was discovering New Narrative at the same time, and books like Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups, Rob Halpern’s Music For Porn, Kevin Killian’s Argento Series, and Matias Viegener’s 20,000 Random Things About Me Too provided a distinctly queer route into and through conceptual writing. 

It’s no surprise that Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups was especially important to this project. In my early readings about the AIDS epidemic, I was struck by the way this history is often sanitized of sexuality, how often it is forced to make sense retrospectively. But, well, part of the terror of AIDS seemed to me that it didn’t make sense. Answers were elusive, contradictions were the norm, no one was the good guy for long. Everything was all mixed up. In general, the cut-up procedure allowed me to suggest the many, many other stories intersecting and bordering Dugas’s. Specifically, Cunt-Ups provided a model of sexual excess propelled by irregular textures and pornographic hyperbole. 

One of the most exciting effects of the cut-up procedure, at least as I had enacted it, was a voice that was not mine. Not really. The poems I was writing were full of these pronouns that made the poems seem personal; the poems had that lyric intensity of addresser and addressee. And yet, the vast majority of the texts that I provided for the cut-up procedure were not written by me. The lyricism was borrowed and constructed through an alchemy. Unlike in my other other poetic compositions (Patience included), I encouraged this impersonal tendency. I found it liberating to produce a text that I, too, could study, argue with, feel shocked and/or creeped out by.

After I read an earlier version of this work at the house of Rob Halpern, I told him about my ethical concerns regarding this work. Who am I to speak for ———? As I remember it, Rob suggested that I reframe my concern. Rather than construct an unimpeachable ethics of correctness, I might consider an imperative to risk the unethical. I’m still wrestling with this suggestion, though I think it was at least a good start to help me turn the writing away from giving a voice to Gaétan Dugas, and rather open my poetics to one of listening to the voice(s) that were already present, whomever they might belong to. 

TR: When you first sent me a version of the book, I believe I mused to you about who the book was for, exactly— it appeared to me to be ghettoizing itself in the semiotics of faggotry and pre-AIDS sexual energy. For example, who knows what The Saint was but some nerdy homosexuals, music history hounds, and very occasionally those who were regulars at the infamous gay nightclub? But since then, as queer people, our very representations have once again come under fire from the fascist revanchists and Evangelicals, and my tune has changed quite dramatically— I think the book is essential in sharing part of a former world with those who may only be privy to blinkered narratives of liberal progress that came with AZT and newer drugs, as well as the wider acceptance of gay people and gay sex in society generally.

I wonder whether you feel that the urgency of the book's contents has changed as it has made its way into the world, and what you would like the book to do now.

ES: One could make a list of art works made during or responding to the AIDS epidemic that include or suggest some kind of heroic and/or hopeful ending. Angels In America might be on that list: “More life.”

This book ends without hope or heroism; it ends somewhat where it begins, on the sea. In the opening quartet, “Telemachy,” there’s a reiterated version of Telemachus looking for his father, Odysseus, inspired by Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey and Derek Jarman’s Blue among other texts. The ending of the book, “The Bronze Age,” concludes with a spectral orgy fading into the Russian River, which flows into the Pacific. This book is dedicated to haunting—to the ghosts who still roam this earth, knowing what has happened here—without a presupposition of what use this haunting might have. The use changes, has changed, will continue to change. 

The collage poetics of Kevin Killian come to mind. In his poetry—and most famously in his first book, Argento Series—Kevin sutured together phrases and images from his community, many of whom died from AIDS-related illnesses, and combined these with pop culture references, bits from Dario Argento films, and, really, whatever else he wanted. The practice was one of assemblage—specifically an assemblage of ephemera. Glances, quips, whispers, shadows: these patrialities suggest that the primary aim is not the construction of a monument. I would say that the threadbare quality of Argento Series, while passionately dedicated to the experience and language of a gay San Francisco since passed, allows readers the opportunity to move, emotionally, among the ruins and fragments. Some of these fragments are recognizable still. Others can be traced to their sources using Google or the help of a friend who has survived to tell the tale. And there are certain fragments that remain opaque, untraceable, unstoried; it is Kevin’s gift that the moments of greatest opacity can actually yield a heightened sense of emotion. Argento Series is a book that can become more and less meaningful, with respect—not to the poems themselves necessarily—but to the source materials that inform the poems. 

I can (and have!) talked about Kevin’s poetry for so long. But, in response to your question, I would like Don’t Leave Me This Way to do something along the lines of what Kevin’s poetry has done for me. To this, I would add that I want to honor (through my selection of texts) those authors, witnesses, and others who communicated something to me about the early experiences of AIDS. As a gay man of a certain age, AIDS is a complex of narratives that has been told to me since puberty. This book waves back in salutation to the stream of images, texts, PSAs, and artworks that have shaped, at least in part, my sense of myself as an expansively sexual being.

TR: I am interested in how your own understandings of bathhouse and club culture were formed. When I read Love Saves the Day as a senior in college, my world was altered, and the book became a touchstone for my understanding of music and the social world of the homosexuals. For the next half a dozen years, I threw myself into our contemporary version of that world— I met my husband at a Kink shoot, and we eventually first consummated our relationship after he came into the queer industrial goth club where I was working. And that's to say nothing of the evenings spent in clubs, discotheques, and bars around the Bay Area, hungry and willing to jump into bed with just about anyone, engaging in public sex, hustling, etc.. I relate this to you not to be weird or braggadocious, but merely to share how I relate to the world that is portrayed in your book, how Dugas' world was before the Plague Years began in earnest, and so on. Did your personal research for the book make you feel closer to its subject? Did it make you feel closer to yourself?

ES: I love the scene you’ve drawn here of your younger self. Though perhaps that’s making an assumption! Who can say what you’ve been getting up to out there in Philadelphia?

In the essay that concludes the book, I believe that I do mention, briefly, something about my own “notes from the field,” it’s true. That said, I’m not sure how sincerely I mean my engagement with group and/or public sex over the past year as a form of “research.” On the one hand, those experiences have simply been a component of my life; on the other hand, yes, I want to take these experiences up as encounters worthy of study and consideration.

For me, there’s something in these experiences that speaks to my seemingly contradictory fascination with anonymity and intimacy: I seem fascinated by the smudged image—figures exceeding or falling short of recognition. 

At Steamworks, I’m curious: when the lights are down, what features can be made out in the darkness? More broadly, I wonder, what does anonymity actually illuminate about being, poetry-ing, historical emotion, political action? I can think of my time in a group sex scene as similar to my time at a demonstration, as represented by a trendline, as one among many writers leaning into certain formal concerns, as a type of person. 

Through And the Band Played On, Gaétan Dugan became a type (ie Patient Zero). It’s worth underscoring that the particularly monstrous portrait Randy Shilts drew of Dugas was extrapolated from among those parts of the gay male community that attracted, for Shilts at least, shame and guilt—the aesthetics, the appetites, the superficiality of the late 1970s. I think there’s something compelling, also, about the details of Dugas’s life, precisely for how generic they were: he was a conventionally handsome, sexually active gay flight attendant! Shocking? While Shilts’s journalism—allegedly backed by scientific evidence—insisted upon Dugas’s uniqueness as the Patient Zero, Dugas’s real life showed something of the opposite: his life was similar to that of many others. I wonder, given a few tweaks of the journalistic and scientific investigations, how many others might have been otherwise captured by the demand to know, definitively, who was to blame for the catastrophe of AIDS?

Do I feel closer to Gaétan Dugas, after all this time? No, not really. But I don’t think it was knowledge (of a person, of a past) that I was after. The poems of Don’t Leave Me This Way conjure a multiplicity of persons and pasts: singular and anonymous at once. 

Do I feel closer to myself? I guess what I want to say, in response to this question, is something about a profound experience I have had subordinating my personal expression in service of something else. I grew more confident with this work the more room I afforded that something else. I thought writing poetry meant writing poetry, but it became more about listening. Through these poems, I can speak of what I heard. Like myself, these poems are still resounding—some days further, some days closer, yes.