Syd Staiti
Excerpts from Seldom Approaches Two transcripts of past readings — selected excerpts from 2016, and the full reading from 2009 called Go, Poet. Go! (source) As I sit here trying to write about anything other than grief, I remember another time when I was scrambling to write before a reading. It was about eight years ago. I ended up writing something that sort of makes me cringe now, feels outdated and strange to me, as this surely will later on. The reading was about an orgy but it wasn’t really about an orgy. It was more about poets and how they were relating to each other. It was about my perception of the local scene of poets in 2008. The reading I gave was on January 17, 2009. After looking up the date of the reading I realize it took place just two weeks after Oscar Grant was killed by a cop in the Fruitvale BART Station. Things felt explosive then. The Israeli military campaign “Operation Cast Lead” was going on in Gaza. Israel ceased fire on January 18, after 1,440 Palestinian casualties, just thirteen on the Israeli side. Whatever little dramas I felt at this time inside me and in relation to my little scene of poet friends, there were large scale crises erupting in the city where I lived and also around the world. I look back at the reading from 2009. It’s strange, the ways I thought about poets and myself in a time that feels so different, the other side of a wall. That night I read with Dodie Bellamy and Suzanne Stein at the Canessa Gallery in North Beach. We were invited by erica lewis, who was the guest curator for Colleen Lookingbill, a San Francisco poet who passed away in 2014 from cancer at the age of sixty-three. As a young earnest poet, it felt daunting to be reading with Dodie and Suzanne, two writers I highly respect, whose work has influenced and continues to inspire me. The reading was taking place in a period of heightened sociality in my scene of poets. I was relatively new to it all. Everything felt exciting and totally filled with stakes. At the time, I was obsessed with micro-aspects of poets, everything I saw that I thought was wrong with them. It was like a politics for me. It was one of my loops. It seemed to me there was rarely ever any discord between the poets in my scene, not outwardly, not publicly. Everyone was friends because everyone was poets, and everything was all good. I wasn’t so sure. I felt a lot of unspoken aggression bubbling up in different ways, shit rising up, everyone pushing it back down. I wanted ideological differences to come to the surface—aesthetics, politics—I wanted to argue about these things and to form friendships and allegiances around them. I wanted people to want this too. I admit, I don’t think I made much of an effort to create or foster this myself, it was just something I wanted them to do, and something I could criticize them about not doing. Maybe what I wanted ended up happening, in a messy sort of way. Some version of it. I’m not sure. Go, Poet. Go! For months I was trying to top the orgy but I couldn’t. There was no way I could top the orgy. It was too big and powerful. Too many people owned the story of the orgy. I had to let the orgy top me. My hope was to try to speak my version of the orgy, my story, but as hard as I tried I couldn’t speak it because my mouth was stuffed full of shit and the orgy was shoving more shit into my mouth and the shit was dripping down my throat and collecting in my belly. The orgy tied me up and humiliated me and threw me on the ground and fucked me hard. That was the story I wrote. I was going to read that story tonight but I decided not to. I know where I stand with the orgy. I know how the orgy feels about me. The orgy is a powerful thing. It’s still here almost a year later. The orgy did things to the people in it, changed them. Some of the people decided to retreat and be more careful where they put their hands and tongues. Some people yawned and carried on their lives but were less interested in coming to events where the others would be. Some people became more excited and eager and aggressive with their sexuality. And others continued to be the way they have always been except that they decided it was time to stop feeling guilt and shame, because no matter how many orgies, or how many people out there know about the orgies and talk about the orgies, orgies were going to continue to be a part of this person’s life and there was nothing this person could do to prevent their involvement in them, unless this person repressed parts of their being which they were not willing to do, and in dealing with months and months of feeling shame and guilt and cringing inside from their actions they finally decided it was enough. The shame and guilt had to stop. That one is me. I am hard. I am so fucking hard and tough. I only want you to want me. Don’t love me. OK? It would be a disaster. It’s not that I want to be hard, I just don’t have any other way. I hope you understand. I am hard, but I’m also very sensitive. I have many feelings. As much as I don’t want anyone to love me I also very desperately want everyone to love me. I can’t stand the thought of people not loving me. Love me, but don’t get too close. I wrote about other things in the story I was going to read tonight. I wrote about other things besides the orgy fucking me. I wrote about poets, about Bay Area poets. I mean about the Bay Area poets that I see all the time at readings. I am critical of the poets. It is because I love the poets that I am critical of them. In the story I’m not going to read tonight, I wrote about how all the poets walk around with their mouths stuffed full of shit. And when the shit gets too heavy they spit the shit out onto the walls. I wrote about how every wall of every reading is covered in shit. And when readings are over, all of the poets, with globs of shit stuffed in their mouths, dripping down their throats and collecting in their bellies, they say the reading was good. The reading was good huh? Yeah the reading was good. How good was that reading? Dude that reading was good. Hey that was a good reading. Yeah good reading. Yeah that reading was good. The reader says thanks. Then the poets say who’s going to the bar. Are you going to the bar? Is anyone going to the bar tonight? Let’s go to the bar. I’ll buy you a drink if you come to the bar. Are you coming? Cool, see you at the bar. I wanted to talk about the poets and how they aren’t very friendly to anyone who is not them, including other poets. I wanted to talk about how the poets don’t allow anyone else to see them. When anyone brings a non-poet to a reading it is torture, for everyone. I will never meet anyone new if I keep hanging out with the poets. Nobody new ever comes around. I wish at every reading, every poet brought one friend who was not a poet. If that happened, I wish the poets would be nice to the non-poets. I wish the poets would realize that they could learn from the non-poets, that it’s nice to be friends with non-poets. That maybe non-poets are good for poets, in the long run. It is not that the poets are mean, it is just that they’re scared. They are scared and they must protect themselves. I understand this because it is how I am with love. I am scared. I must protect myself. Nobody get too close. It’s not that the poets don’t like people, they just need people to insist their way into the group. To do this, all you’ve gotta do is go to every reading and allow yourself to be ignored at every reading for like a year or more, and then eventually something gives, and the poets decide you’re okay. In allowing yourself to be ignored for over a year, and continuing to go to the readings, you proved to the poets that you are “committed” to poetry, that you are worth talking to, and being taken seriously. I am talking about my experience here, or my perception of my experience. Now the poets have absorbed me and I have allowed myself to be absorbed by them. Now I absorb others. I love the poets, I really do. But I also worry about the poets. I also worry about myself. My biggest problem with falling in love is that I lose myself. I let the love absorb me. I give myself up to the love and the love controls me. This is why I have not allowed myself to love or be loved in the past few years. But in the past few years, I have given myself up to the poets. Have I replaced love with the poets? Maybe this is why I so badly want to make out with so many of the poets. I’m asking them to fill a space they shouldn’t fill, a space that, even if they wanted to take it, they are not cut out for. Making out with the poets is a problem. It has to stop. I mean there are a few poets I would like to make out with sweet and tender and behind closed doors—even though that would be impossible because I would want it to be a secret, because secrets are sexy, but the poets don’t know from secrets, and the poets often don’t know from sexy either. Well, I’ve had enough of the drunk sloppy cluster-fucks. They are so un-sexy, so messy. It’s already messy enough in here. If the poets keep making out with each other, the community will implode. Maybe we could use a good implosion. Let it all shake out, settle down, start from scratch, pick up on a new track. Hello? Bay Area? Is something very wrong in here? Or we can close our eyes and keep kissing, or we can close our eyes and keep talking about the kissing, whichever it is that you do. It will all shake itself out, with or without you, anyway. As soon as I proved that I was committed to poetry, I never had to talk about poetry again. I could talk about poets. I could talk about making out. I could say things like, the reading was good, yeah the reading was good, who’s going to the bar? I used to be able to talk about poetry. Now I am lazy and incapable of it. I hate how many times I’ve used the word poetry and poets and community in this. Everything I’m saying is wrong. I hope you disagree with me and prove me wrong. I hope this talk is more messy than the community. If the community is more messy than this talk, the community is fucked. It’s about practice. It’s about integrity. It’s about insecurity. It’s about Gaza. Why haven’t I said anything about Gaza. But how could I possibly say anything about Gaza. Where is my place to say something about Gaza? What is my duty as a poet? To say, to leave unsaid? Or is my place to say: I can’t help but speak even if I know that my speech is futile. I believe my duty is to say, how dare I. Either way. Everything is despicable. Everybody walks around with shit stuffed in their mouths. The shit clogs their throat and collects in their bellies. Everybody spits the shit out when it gets too heavy. There’s something else, many other things. More than the making out. Something about the making out is wrong, but it happens. It happens and it keeps happening and who the fuck cares. Something about it feels right even though it feels wrong. There is something still about implosion. And something about the people who do not partake in the making out but who are invested in the fact that it happens. Something about that vicariousness, something about the distraction. Something about the fact that things are being left unsaid. Hello. Hello. Do you like my hat? I do not. Goodbye. Goodbye.
Syd Staiti is author of Seldom Approaches (The Elephants, 2023) and The Undying Present (Krupskaya, 2015).