Rodney Koeneke: I’m Rodney Koeneke, and this is PoetryNow. I have a good friend in San Francisco, Bruce Boone. He’s an older writer in his 70s, and was kind of a major figure in the New Narrative movement of the late Seventies and early Eighties. And I went to his house in San Francisco. I’m from San Francisco. I lived there for many years. So when I go back in the summers, I try to see as many people as I can. But I had never been to Bruce’s apartment before. He lives in an apartment in The Castro that they’re always trying to evict him from, because the rents have gone so sky high, and he’s been there for 30 years or whatever. And you knock on the door of this old Victorian, and you go up this extremely steep set of steps, and his little dog is at the top barking at you like some kind of spirit guide. Bruce’s apartment is a little old and worn. I mean it’s wonderful, but you know, the kitchen is a little battered. The “gold fixtures hook to cheap lath,” you know, was kind of the impression I took of this faded Victorian glory that Bruce lives in the middle of. So that’s kind of the physical origin of the poem. Bruce came to one of my readings once, and he said he had liked it, but that he wanted to see even more emotion, which is a very New Narrative thing to want to see. I don’t really do that. (LAUGHS) But, I took it as kind of a challenge. Like maybe, Bruce, this is how one might do emotion in a poem.

(READS POEM)

poem for bruce
 
Under the roof is the empty room
papered in requiem blue.
 
Partiers crowd the burned kitchen,
gold fixtures hook to cheap lath.
 
What is it they can tell you about absence
how it abates, takes names
 
Becomes a wall with windows
faced on a formal garden, content
 
To accept the thin rain. The syllable
forgives the words that need it, a sentence
 
Badly written, epigraphs scrawled
thoughtlessly in books. Book where the hero<
 
confronts a dark riddle, book where
the suitors stand at the gate and are stumped.
 
What force brought them forward
stooping at the lintel, up the chipped steps
 
To the blue door in the unbuilt tower,
half-built, the new stone.

* * *

It’s kind of a riposte to Bruce, a little bit, you know. So it’s saying that there are maybe other ways of expressing emotion besides ripping your heart out of your chest.

(QUOTING FROM POEM)

Under the roof is the empty room / papered in requiem blue. // Partiers crowd the burned kitchen, / gold fixtures hook to cheap lath.

It should feel a little restrained and formal. Maybe that’s where the mythic fairytale element comes in. But a little generic, of a genre that could be applied to a lot of different situations. Not this particular space, but maybe the space of fairytale or myth.

(QUOTING FROM POEM)

Book where the hero // confronts a dark riddle, book where / the suitors stand at the gate and are stumped.

You know, Bruce came out of this New Narrative writing movement in the late Seventies. And one thing they were saying was that poetry and literature ought to be open to more emotion. That the Language poetry and other kinds of experimental 20th Century poetry had disallowed emotion, and disallowed the “I” at the center of emotion. And that that had been really difficult for particularly queer writers who had emotions that they felt they weren’t allowed to share. And I totally see the New Narrative point. New Narrative was also about friendship. This poem is about friendship, too, or at least it came out of friendship. So maybe in a small way, it’s me trying to get onto the caboose of New Narrative a little bit. (LAUGHS) You know, in the sense that Bruce and I are friends, and I’m practicing literature in this poem in the way that the New Narrative folks did.

Katie Klocksin: That was Rodney Koeneke and his poem “poem for bruce.” I’m Katie Klocksin and this is PoetryNow, a production of the Poetry Foundation and the WFMT Radio Network. For more about this series, go to poetryfoundation.org/poetrynow.