I enjoyed the reflection I saw there much less. It juxtaposes an arch second-person address to People’s 2000 Sexiest Man Alive-the eponymous Pitt-with a description of binging and purging. The other poem, “Brad Pitt,” was stranger and darker. Even the prospect of that pain seemed glamorous to me then. Still, I wanted to go to a gay club and find out for myself. Perhaps, as the poem suggested, desire was more trouble than it was worth, doomed to end in disappointment. I’d also already been left-twice-for boys taller and stronger and more masculine than I was. When he continued, “and I couldn’t remember / when I knew I’d never / be beautiful,” I felt a pang of worried recognition. I’d never “watched two men / press hard into / each other, their bodies / caught in the club’s / bass drum swell,” except on Queer as Folk, but I imagined I would soon.
The scene in the poem’s second section was less relatable. After my first boyfriend left for college right before I started high school, I spent the better part of my freshman year feeling “viciously lonely”-drafting unsent text messages and listening on repeat to the mix CD I’d made for him. I loved that sky-mouth and that the poem wasn’t afraid of sentiment: Smith didn’t need to dress up or intellectualize his emotions to admit “ Without you here I'm viciously lonely.” I knew that feeling. If the difficulty of being gay and effeminate wasn’t a constant presence in my poetry, perhaps one day it wouldn’t be in my life.įrom Smith’s essay, I clicked through to his two poems then available on. If I could write poems about waking up with a lover in bed, I thought, maybe my sexual experiences wouldn’t be forever relegated to hurried trysts in basements, back seats, and the occasional bathroom. By authoring poems, Smith suggested, one could begin to author a life. I was thrilled by what Smith, through his reading of Olds’s “ I Go Back to May 1937,” observed in her work: “the very act of telling” could empower a poet to “predict a future” in which it was possible to live. At the magnet school for the arts where I studied creative writing, Olds was our poetry god: we loved that she wrote about sex and told on her parents we admired her elaborately crafted conceits. Since coming out five years earlier, at the end of sixth grade, I had given up trying to appease straight people.īut when I found my way to Smith-by chance, via an essay he’d written on Sharon Olds and narrative poetry-I felt, in the unrivaled narcissism of adolescence, as though he were writing for me. The famous one who was frequently recommended to me seemed concerned, in the poems I’d read, with dignifying the subject of gay life so that it might be palatable to a typical poetry-reading audience-something I was not interested in reading or writing. The few gay male poets I’d read at that point were either dead ( Frank O’Hara, for instance, whom I loved) or stuffy, which made them feel even further away. When I was a 17-year-old suffering in the suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut, Aaron Smith’s poems helped me imagine my future, both as a gay person and as a poet.