Coastal Solitaire

CHRISTIAN GULLETTE is the coolest literary citizen. I’ve known him for years in San Francisco; he has been a constant, generous friend to me and our motley poetry community in the Bay, and the editor of one of my favorite publications, The Cortland Review. He’s the one you can count on to say something nice about your lines on Instagram—and maybe the one you worry is spending too much time on Instagram—and he’s a blast to hang out with, wry and sartorial and ageless—like, ageless, in an enviable Dorian Gray sort of way. And then, of course, there are his elegant poems, which focus the mind like a splash of pool water—one is left, as one leaves, with a stinging chemical yet welcome, like chlorine. “Everything feels excruciatingly close” in his bloodless, circumspect poems, but really, like a body underwater, it’s all a “nude blur.” Put another way, his poems have the pretense of confession, but they confess almost nothing. (I like to imagine that my poems do the same.) We talk about the publication of his first book, Coachella Elegy (2024), as well as my own recent retrospective, Deal: New and Selected Poems (2023); we discuss, among other things, voyeurism, architecture, the intimacy and isolation of the couplet, and the myth of California, which by now, for us both, has become the myth of the self.

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RANDALL MANN: First, congratulations on Coachella Elegy. The poems have a kind of ease, a seething ruthlessness, that I find remarkable in a first collection. Can you speak to this, and your publishing journey?

CHRISTIAN GULLETTE: It wasn’t the publishing journey I expected when I graduated some years ago from my MFA, and I definitely wouldn’t have imagined a PhD detour for a degree in Swedish language and literature—a very niche detour. But I got to really live some life, travel, translate, and write poems. An earlier version of my manuscript called “Beehive State” transformed into Coachella Elegy, one desert to another. After a year or two of sending out the older version, this radical revision happened quickly, but it also required ruthlessness. In one sitting, I deleted the Utah poems so it could be an all-California book. During the editing process, six of my Utah poems returned to the collection reframed as elegies, which brought the collection together. Maybe that’s where ruthlessness and ease in my poems find their expression, in abandonment. I think that got into the DNA of the poems. Letting the book become what it needed to allowed tensions to vibrate like a bee. But to also seethe with resentment and apprehension. To have that sting.

I like that, resentment and apprehension; I suppose poems also have longing—I’ll reluctantly admit that mine do—though much of the time, like some monstrous Alain Delon in La Piscine, I want to shove desire underwater till it drowns. In the “big afternoons” of your poems, the speaker, like Delon, suns in a slightly stunned haze of unknowing, which adds a layer of sexiness and menace to the goings-on. Can you tell me more about the mysterious speaker of these poems?

It is a stunned haze, that unknowing, you’re right. But also an air of mystery. I like it when a poem teases and triangulates, and my speakers also enjoy that evasion. A jaunty menace. A brief line can be playfully evasive. But also a deliberate choice to throw caution to the wind, especially after surviving cancer or navigating a long-term relationship. It’s recklessness, an erotic rush. The voyeurism of watching and enjoying each other’s recklessness. You feel alive. Daytime amplifies that. Visibility but with the potential to get burned. My poem “Clothing Optional” doesn’t mention how hot the pavement was! I actually got a burn on my foot the one time I didn’t put on flip-flops. A cruising battle scar. There’s no hiding in an outdoor glass shower. Those hedge walls around that Airbnb better be very high—at least if I’m going to rent it.

I really admire your poems, Randy, for the way they also embrace ambiguities and ambivalences, the way they resist a drive towards explication or deliverance or redemption. At the same time, that resistance makes an extraordinary, vibrating tension with the formal structures and even menaces the form. But that’s also what makes the poems so acutely felt. Can you say more about how form generates that tension in your work?

Wallace Stevens famously said that the poem is the cry of its occasion, so I try to prick up my ears, even if it’s just the echo of a thought of a possible poem. And in that attention, I hope to discern architecture. I often tell people, when I’m asked for advice about making a poem, to listen to the poem—and what I mean is, when I start to inhabit the poem, the ideal architecture reveals itself. And this sort of thinking is not just about how to build, but also how to undermine the reader’s expectations of what’s being built. For instance, I write elegy in trimeter because the jauntiness of that sort of waltz creates a welcome sonic confusion to, and derangement of, what’s being said. Or, I’ll write in short lines to call attention to the words being said—dare the self and reader to slow down even as shorter lines are perhaps asking the eye and ear to speed up—all the while edging the reader, withholding line by line. Or, if I want to draw blood, I might choose a pantoum, the repetition itself the relentlessness—and then add a layer of pain by, say, having end-stopped line after end-stopped line. People sometimes call me a formalist because I use received forms, or reclaim them, or upend them, or whatever. But every poem, no matter the make, is an artifice, is a contained thing, and therefore has a form—and is formal.

In your own sonically rich, fashioned free verse—which subtly isn’t free, which is to say it’s in control of its casual music—you often, though not always, choose the couplet, that stanza of connection and alienation. Can you tell me why so many couplets—and in general, since nothing in this book feels arbitrary, how you made your structural choices?

I think the couplet feels like a tense unit of verse. Like two bodies, it can feel incredibly intimate, but also isolated and melancholy. A brief encounter, but explosive. Entwined, but set apart by a lot of blank space. It’s fascinating how bodies in a pool can also feel so alone. Couplets feel that way to me. Almost caught off-guard by the feeling, but also controlled. My speakers like to feel in charge until they want someone to be “daddy.” Like those caps that say Grrr. So much of life is beyond these speakers’ control, but they also crave abandonment. The water’s surface can be life or death. A search for ecstasy or dissolution. At the hands of Alain Delon.

Speaking of searching, we both share a westward movement to California. To San Francisco. How did that happen for you?

In classic fashion, I followed a guy. He got lost after a couple years, but I gained a city, which is my real long-term relationship, fraught and messy, constant in its inconstant way. The first poem I wrote in San Francisco, in late 1998, was a palindrome about, or “about,” the Pacific, called “Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery”; I suppose I saw myself in this place, in the sea, and that mirroring was reflected in the work. A city has no right to be this beautiful, and that sort of grief keeps me here. What about you? What is your relationship—personal, aesthetic—to the myth of California?

I followed a guy too—my husband. We were living in DC, and he had just finished radiation treatment for eye cancer. Before his diagnosis, we spent a summer in San Francisco, planning to move here. Everything on the West Coast felt full of promise. That mythic and corrupt sense of the new. When we moved west a year later, a lot of that promise—not unlike the myths of American promised lands—had been revealed as the illusion it is. I think that tension between the seen and unseen, illusion and reality, aesthetically influences my work. When we arrived in SF, we were living according to three-month check-up MRI scans, always aware of the impermanence of the body. San Francisco itself is full of reminders of both breathtaking beauty and the memory of loss and suffering.

A few months after we moved to SF, both Prop 8 passed and the economic depression began. We kept searching for an escape from those realities. Palm Springs offered that mythic escapism, but soon it was obvious what a mirage that was, and echoes of past pains and present environmental realities were insistent. Accepting these contradictions allowed me to fall back in love with San Francisco for what it is, despite the myriad challenges the city faces. I accept that the giant orange radio tower known as Sutro Tower up near Twin Peaks will be shrouded in a dry ice of fog nearly year-round. But in that same spot, there will also be a gleaming pink triangle in a few weeks for Pride. For a brief time, San Francisco celebrates a mythic and hopeful notion of queer utopia. I think that’s part of this place’s lore. What’s your relationship to that particular myth in your life and/or work? Despite what I just said about loving San Francisco, I know that we’re both fascinated by another mythic California place, Los Angeles, and we’re both always threatening to move to WeHo.

Oh, my threat is pretty empty, even though I’m literally writing this response from the La Peer Hotel in West Hollywood (ha). When I moved to San Francisco, I thought it was the answer to everything: queer connection, beauty, community, poetry. And it was; it is. But I don’t really look for answers anymore, I’m just trying to get through the day, to find a space for writing and friendship and fucking and art—and this city seems like my kind of setting, small, manageable, vaguely affordable (I have a rent-controlled apartment they will probably drag me out of), and odd. The vibe seems pretty good in SF right now, though of course this city, any city, has challenges and addiction and heartbreak. The city still often provides a setting for the poems, but not in the same way as it did, say, in my second book, Breakfast with Thom Gunn (2009), which is my high San Francisco book, written in the first seven years after I arrived. The place grounds me in my poems, even if I never mention it. I wonder if it’s the same with you.

I’m thinking about how Coachella Elegy, with its very SoCal inspiration, is also my San Francisco book in a lot of ways. I’m also drawn to the fact that it’s a small-feeling big city. And an odd city. Those lamp posts in the Castro covered in sex-party posters and drag-show advertisements make me feel like this neighborhood is still the vortex of something unique and a continuum. I’ve been here a while, but I also feel like I’m just discovering it. Whole parts of this city I’ve still never spent time in. I feel like there are aspects of place and my life in California I haven’t explored. California still feels like an evolving and problematic and endlessly captivating source of poems. How about the direction of your new poems after Deal?

I have been writing about my family of late, my great-grandparents on my mother’s side, who came from Puerto Rico and the Philippines to work the cane fields of Maui. It’s been fascinating. I have also been turning inside-out the codes, triumphs, and confusions of queer midlife, the freedoms that come with the shifts of aging—also my particular Generation X post–Reagan era fatigue. I have been writing in repetitive forms more than ever of late; “I’m shifting like a paradigm,” I say in one Grindr villanelle. How about your new work?

I feel drawn towards a more overtly sonic line now. Changing up the formal rhythm from so many couplets. Coachella Elegy helped me process a grief that got in the poems on a cellular level, and now I’m learning how I sound, not necessarily without grief, but moving through it. I’m feeling both still attached and letting go. I felt drawn to write about my time in New York City long ago, but I also can’t access something about those feelings. I have to wait for some new emotions to move through. I feel creatively spent but oversaturated. Like the Monday after a big Pride weekend. Elation and the sadz. You think you’ll never recover. Lots of promises. Then a week later I’m stopping to look at those party advertisements in the Castro and life feels both the same and endlessly bizarre and captivating.

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Christian Gullette’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets), and The Yale Review. He has received financial support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. Christian completed his PhD in Scandinavian languages and literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, and when not serving as the editor in chief of The Cortland Review, he works as a lecturer and translator. He lives in San Francisco.