Bryan R. Monte
An Interview with Timothy Liu
Timothy Liu is an Asian-American gay poet with an impressive publication record. He is the author of 13 books of poetry and the editor of the ground-breaking Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (Talisman House, 2000). Liu is the winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America for Vox Angelica (Alice James Books, 1992), the PEN/Beyond Margins Award for Say Goodnight (Copper Canyon Press, 1998), and the Poetry Book-of-the-Year Award from Publishers Weekly for Of Thee I Sing (University of Georgia Press, 2004). Amsterdam Quarterly conducted this literary interview with Liu in December 2023 to discuss his past work and themes and also his most recent book, Down Low and Lowdown: Timothy Liu’s Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues (Barrow Street Books, 2023).
Bryan R. Monte: You are one of the few poets I have interviewed whose reputation preceded you—by decades. Leslie Norris mentioned your name at a session of a literary conference or a reading out West in the early 2000s. He caught my attention because of his strange English accent. (I later realized he was Welsh).
After the session or reading was over, I went up to Norris to talk to him, with my partner beside me. Norris asked about my literary connection or interest. I told him I attended the Y in academic year 1977-78 and I edited a gay magazine for three years in the 1980s. He asked me if I knew you and I said I’d heard of you and read your anthology, Word of Mouth, but that we had not met. Then he told me you were a remarkable student and he was not surprised by your success as a poet. He said he always knew you would go far.
I’m curious. How did you get to know Norris?
Timothy Liu: I had yet to take a class from him, but hearing that he was the Poet-in-Residence at BYU, I managed to slip three poems under his office door and stopped by during his hours the following week. He invited me in, told me he had read my poems and said, ‘these aren’t any good.’ He went on to say, ‘But it doesn’t matter. You’re a poet! You write poetry! You’re one in ten thousand. It doesn’t matter if you write good poems or bad poems, you’re still a poet’. Who says such things? He didn’t know me from Adam (or Steve), and at the time, I only felt driven to show him something better. I got on my bike and rode back to my off-campus apartment in tears. I had failed. I felt like a nothing. A fool.
BRM: Yet, obviously, you didn’t give up at that point.
TL: The following week, I stopped by his office with three new poems in hand and said, ‘What about these?’ He read them over and said, ‘These are much better. Something has happened here!’ What I didn’t know at the time was that my whole life was about to change. Had already changed. Somehow, with a little encouragement and a lot of my own (naive!) determination, I had admitted myself (and had been welcomed previously without fully knowing it!) into the Hallowed Halls of Poesy.
BRM: That must have been a great feeling. What did you do next?
TL: The following semester, I took his English Romanticism course where we read Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Byron among others. ‘Creative writing’ was not really ‘taught’ across the Pond. If you were serious about poetry, you read the greats. It didn’t matter if the tradition was full of dead white straight dudes. Later I would come to learn that Leslie Norris was from Wales, that my newfound mentor personally knew the likes of Vernon Watkins and Dylan Thomas. He told me about the two notebooks, a blue one and a red one, that Thomas had kept ever since he was in his teens, notebooks whose jottings and scribblings Thomas would mine for the rest of his life!
BRM: Was it plain sailing from there?
TL: No. One time during another course, I remember Professor Norris kicking me out of his class for mouthing off. I don’t remember what I had said that had set him off, but it was some little quip or retort that had crossed the line. Leslie Norris was the most gentle and equanimous of fellows, a veritable Leprechaun with ice-blue eyes and fiery red hair, and to get under his skin like that, well! That’s the second time I remember having been brought to tears at BYU, this time finding my way to Leslie Norris’ office after being thrown out. I remember him still miffed but handing me a tissue and gently (firmly!) forgiving my folly. My shame.
BRM: Did Norris do anything especially memorable to encourage your poetry writing?
TL: A few semesters passed, and one day, Leslie called me up into his office on the second floor of the JKHB (Jesse Knight Humanities Building) and said to me, ‘I have taught you everything I know. I have now booked you a seat in Richard Shelton’s poetry workshop at the Rattle Snake Mountain Writers Workshop. William Stafford and Naomi Shihab Nye will also be teaching there. It will take you ten hours to drive from here to Eastern Washington and it starts tomorrow morning, so you best get going!’
So, I hopped in my green ’73 Mercury Comet with a straight-six engine and drove all night. That was back in 1988. I was a senior at BYU, and this was like an impromptu study-abroad scholarship, all of it now a blur. Maybe my only memory of that weekend is sitting at the feet of William Stafford in a packed room and hearing him read ‘Saint Matthew and All’ from his new book just out called An Oregon Message.
BRM: That workshop must have been fantastic. I had the chance to study with Nye at Berkeley in ’82. It was a great class and I wrote one of my best erotic poems there: ‘Intimations of Frank O’Hara’ (on the AQ website at: https://www.amsterdamquarterly.org/aq_issues/aq4-food-sex-and-happiness/bryan-r-monte-intimations-of-frank-ohara/.
TL: What Norris gave me during those most formative years, I can never repay. Indebted would be le mot juste. There are so many other stories! In the thirty-five years since, I have tried to give something back to the hundreds (if not thousands) of student poets I have taught and continue to teach. Leslie was so spontaneous, in the moment, inspired, never the same advice twice.
I don’t know when or where I first encountered this quote by Camus, but Leslie surely must have known it! It captures some of the magic and import I have felt to have been so blessed by my first mentor: ‘A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.’
BRM: Thank you for sharing your life-changing memory of Leslie Norris and you at BYU. I’d like to shift gears a bit now and talk about matters closer to the present. I have a few questions about your frequent use of the Horatian, ars poetica mode (at least in your last three books), which you use twice in Luminous Debris and Let It Ride, and once in Down Low and Lowdown. Is there a reason or reasons you prefer this poetic mode?
TL: I’m interested in the question of what brings me to the page and/or what bids me to speak, or to put it another way, what pressures a poem into being. Most of my poems are untitled when they are being written and rewritten. If in the process of their creation, I feel they also have something to say about the act of making itself, then I might title the poem ‘Ars Poetica’.
BRM: Do you use it to lift the veil and show the artist at work or to provide an interpretive key for your poems in that collection or section?
TL: I think the veil is lifted in every line and every line break of a poem no matter what it’s called. I think it has more to do with the question of what does it feel like to be in a certain body at a certain moment at a certain age writing a poem, and why the poem is an attempt to capture a fleeting thought or emotion in this form and not another.
BRM: Is it to set the tone for the book or sections themselves?
TL: If the ‘Ars Poetica’ kicks off a book, then yes, it serves as a kind of proem or frame for what is to follow. If it appears elsewhere, I don’t think of it as setting the tone so much as taking a time out to address the act of making itself, and in this sense, perhaps to show the Wizard behind the curtain.
BRM: Thank you for answering those questions about ars poetica. Now I have some questions about your depiction of sex in your poems. Approximately half of the poems in Down Low and Lowdown are about sex, masturbation, or erotic materials. One online bookseller describes Down Low and Lowdown as ‘unruly, naughty, looking for trouble… a raunchy feast that left everyone feeling stuffed.’ Why do you think the percentage of erotic poems in this collection is so high? Did you consciously choose to put so many erotic poems together?
TL: I’m interested in the relationship between the Carnal and the Incarnate. I’ve been rewatching the six films from the Alien film franchise, and in Alien IV: Resurrection, when someone asks Ripley which direction the aliens are going in, she says, ‘Towards us, wherever the meat is.’ To think of ourselves as meat, as food, as trapped (and blessed!) inside our aging bodies, full of hunger and lust, is at the heart of my poetics.
BRM: How did Covid-19 affect your life? Could you talk about any frustrations you might have about intimacy during lockdown sex as embodied in such poems as ‘Covid Ode’, ‘Make America China Again’, ‘Ode to Distance Learning’, ‘Ode to Sexual Distancing’, and ‘Self-Portrait with Surgical Mask in the Rearview Mirror’?
TL: When the pandemic first hit in March 2020, just before Spring Break, I not only had to shift my teaching modality from in-person to online, but my husband and I were freed to move from our apartment in NYC, (where COVID hit much harder), to our home upstate in the Hudson Valley. We basically ended up seeing each other 24/7 for seven months straight, (which was a novelty in our 28th year together as a couple!). Surprisingly, we got along fine. As always, the erotic for me resides elsewhere, not in the homestead but at the edges of the forest where the wilderness begins.
The poems you cite above all have to do with masks and distancing and online technologies that helped serve as protective barriers. How this has affected societies across the Globe remains to be seen, but this kind of Isolation certainly held my attention as a Poet. On the one hand, I crave my Man Cave and all things Hermetic, but on the other hand, I enjoy the communal, whether in the form of a Companion, a Lover, and/or a cadre of Makers, not only connecting ourselves over Zoom but in the Flesh.
BRM: Do you see sexual encounters as adhesive as Walt Whitman did, bringing men together and keeping them together or as liberating as the ’60s generation did?
TL: I will always love Whitman for saying: ‘Divine I am inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch and am touched from; The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer.’ Talk about a consequential affirmation! What an antidote to a culture founded on the Puritanical. So, there’s something here that both encompasses and goes beyond the Sexual Liberation of the Sixties, a kind of balm that extends to the advent of AIDS and all the way down to our current pandemic.
BRM: Why do you think the Dionysian influence is more prevalent in your erotic poems, emphasizing the wild, unpredictable, emotional, and less intellectual nature of sexual encounters, rather than Apollonian (concerned with form, structure, and predictability)?
TL: It’s both useful and limiting to think in binaries like Dionysian/Apollonian when it comes to making poems (and living our lives). Useful in the sense that we need the energies from both divine sources. As a lad raised on LDS tenets where ‘Obedience is the First Law of Heaven,’ you can imagine my strong attraction to Milton’s magnificent opening, ‘Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste / Brought Death into the World, and all our woe . . .’ If we are more than merely fruit or meat whose destiny is to rot, then what are we? Are poems not fermented like grapes trodden under stained bare feet? It’s that mash, that mix, in these little (but monumental!) creative/erotic acts that I pray and desire most my poems to embody.
I live in an open marriage. My husband and I will make room for other Great Loves if they happen along. This is no easy arrangement! Things are even more challenging to negotiate when we are locked down together. As Kabir says somewhere, lovers are always plotting how to get together again. The forbidden, the illicit, and the transgressive are of course driving forces that fuel the erotic and help keep the energy in the wine (and poems!) from growing flat.
BRM: How does your poem, ‘Foraging for Mushrooms in the Pandemic’, reflect your life at this time?
TL: In this poem, I am in search of mycelial fruiting bodies on the mountain that my husband and I live on, State Lands that are parcel to the New York Watershed and hence off-limits to hunters and the public without DEP permits. A pristine world unto itself, an Eden, and like Eden, full of Life and Knowledge that can lead to creation or destruction. Medicine and Poison share a continuum—too much of one can turn into the other.
BRM: In comparison to your many poems about men in Down Low and Lowdown, there are three poems about women that really stand out: ‘Apology and Gratitude Are Two Sides of the Same Coin’ about your mother’s alcoholism, and two elegies, ‘Elegy’ and ‘Last Christmas’, about women with whom you were close. They seem to stick out due to your intense focus on details. Did you write all three during the Covid-19 lockdown? If so, do you remember the order in which you wrote them?
TL: I worked on all three poems during the pandemic even though the events within each poem happened before COVID. The lag time between poem and real life varies. Some events need more time to fully digest before they can enter a poem. I work on many poems simultaneously over many years, so the order I wrote them in gets lost, but in terms of chronology, the poem about my mother is the oldest memory of the three.
BRM: I find ‘Apology and Gratitude’ an attention getter because of the image of the broken wine glass that ‘managed to land // on the base of its stem upright!’. Did this actually happen or is it a poetic invention? In addition, I like your metaphor for this maternal abuse: ‘…kneeling on shards / of heirloom glass … when I had to clean up after her / time and again’. ‘It’s also startling because the poem ends in mid-sentence ‘but I never knew how to say —’. How did you come up with this ending? In addition, why do you think it took you so long after your mother’s death to write this poem?
TL: Most of the images in my poems are from my lived life, often cobbled together from composite memories to support the narrative at hand. My mom was mentally ill, not an alcoholic, but she certainly knew how to destroy a kitchen! My first book, Vox Angelica, has a short poem in it called ‘She Smashes Dishes’. That was written over 30 years ago. So ‘Apology and Gratitude’ was a way to revisit an old battleground. ‘The kneeling on shards’ pays homage to my Christian-Fundamentalist father who, in an act of rage, tore many of my LDS framed certificates (for having completed reading The Book of Mormon and The Doctrine and Covenants) off my bedroom wall and smashed them on the backyard porch. The ending of the poem muses on the notion that if only my parents had written their own poems, if they had some way to discharge what was pent up within them, then the ensuing violence might have been avoided (or at least tempered), and I would’ve been spared of having to write the poems myself (decades later!) as a consequence of their actions. Call it karma. Aesthetic payback.
BRM: ‘Elegy’ is about an unnamed, fellow poet, who returned out West to take over her father’s winery, which suddenly burned down, the emotional strain it caused her, and her early death from cancer. Here you portray the sudden loss of her estate overnight as she slept: ‘Go to bed one person // and wake up another…’ and the sound of the horses ‘burned / alive in her barn … unable to stampede out of weathered boards / consumed in an instant—’ … Hearing horses / scream like that, …’ against your jealousy of how easily you initially thought her life was: she got and left her teaching post for an inheritance and had a new book which was well-reviewed.
However, you stop your jealous rant suddenly within two lines ‘she had it / so easy—barely making it/ past her sixtieth birthday. Did you plan this important, emotional, redeeming, hairpin turn, or did it just come about naturally as you were telling her story?
TL: I love this question! Emotional hairpin turns do happen in the initial or early drafts of a poem. But they can also happen late in the revision process. As in, ‘hmmmm, this poem is so one-sided, needs something else to up the ante.’ I think of Robert Frost’s ‘No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.’ Or maybe I’m misremembering. I think what he actually said was ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.’ In either case, Frost seems to be inviting poets to take some serious emotional risks when they sit down to write. Beyond mere therapy, or that emotional ‘striptease’ that Sylvia Plath reminds us the ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ are shoving in to see, is the challenge to capture depth, contradiction, complexity. Elegies are not meant to be saccharine eulogies. I was exploring my own mix of compassion, rage, resentment, petty envy, and resignation when thinking about the poet Jane Mead to whom my ‘Elegy’ pays tribute. She died before we had a chance to meet up again.
BRM: The third poem, ‘Last Christmas’ takes place during the holidays on a visit to another woman friend, who also died of cancer. The poem begins with two men seeing Xmas-light decorated suburban houses, then moves on to the visit of the ill friend, but unexpectedly ends because of an argument between the speaker and the other man, the driver. The poem ends suddenly with an argument and leaving the speaker literally in the cold ‘…trail of exhaust / glowing red on the darkest night / of the year. I stood there, stranded…’ Is this what actually happened or is it an embellished or invented event? In addition, by the word ‘stranded’ do you mean more than just being left behind by the driver?
TL: Most of the crucial events in my poem ‘actually happened’. For the sake of the poem, they might be embellished. The explosive exchange at the end of the poem actually happened a mile from the nursing home in the centre of town where my lover was dropping me off at my car. I was still hoping we’d go back to his place to frolic, make love, but he was too exhausted by our visit with his dying friend. So, the poem abbreviates/collapses what ‘actually happened’ in service of dramatic timing and what the narrative requires. We never tell the same story twice from our own lives anyway, so this is no surprise. When writing and rewriting a poem, I often ask myself, ‘Am I telling the hardest truths?’; ‘What does my audience need to know or not know?’; ‘Which of these descriptions have metaphorical weight and emotional consequence?; and ‘Which details can I simply leave out?’
BRM: The last poem in your last three collections always seem to be some of the longest. They include many of the themes and images previously mentioned, but also take the discussion/depiction to a higher level with political awareness. For example, in Luminous Debris it’s ‘Leda and the Swan’. The poem begins with a suicide bomber, then mentions Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners, Kuwaiti oil fields, and trickle-down economics. In Let it Ride, it’s ‘Love Letter: Dublin’. A Cedar Rapids tourist at the Guinness Gravity Bar, a walk down wet, cobblestone streets, scanning Grindr for a hook up, and hugging a “tree on St. Stephen’s Green…// to see if Ireland had anything // to say to me, Henry Moore’s // memorial to Yeats / looking haggard, beleaguered.’ In Down Low and Lowdown it’s ‘The War’. You climb up on your roof in response to pot and pan banging bear warnings, a bullet-ridden speed limit signs, advice to ‘Hurry up // and graduate … and get out of town’, living on stolen Lenape land, your ‘…ancestors / squatting on another continent.’ and ends with the branches below an eagle’s nest ‘interwoven with collars— more dog and cats IDs // than medals hung on a general.’
Why did you write these newsy, political poems and place them at the ends of your last three collections? Are they a sort of poetic finale? Did you write them while you are creating and compiling a collection’s poems or only after you are finished?
TL: I mostly write poems rather than books. Each of the final poems in the books you mention were poems that pressured themselves into being and were revised over large swaths of time. I’m interested in catastrophe, that Greek notion of an inward and downward movement after all our outward looking. In Gestalt therapy, there’s an interest in moving around what’s in the foreground of one’s consciousness into the background as well as the reverse of that—dusting off and taking a fresh look at what has been consigned to the dungeon of forgotten and unexamined memories/traumas.
For me, each book of poems is like a journey, an Orphic journey if you will. An adventure into the unknown, the unacknowledged, the heretofore unsaid. So, at the end of every Hero’s journey is the return to an outer world where the personal/political and the private/public must encounter one another, collide, and commingle. The writer needs the reader to complete each poem, that’s the contract of language, and this seems like a perfect place to go out on. AQ