Michael Tod Edgerton: California Poets Part 8, Five Poems
January 8th, 2025
California Poets: Part VIII
Michael Tod Edgerton
Five Poems
World Slammed Shut (Two Thousand Twenty)
I.
End-day northbound CalTrain (March nine)
just before or after
the sun: the alert:
Shelter Shutter Stay.
Take a walk: Wash your hands.
Sun Corona Moon
Poetry to link across the distances, the dissonance.
Wipe down the groceries, rinse off the produce, soap up the wine.
Email poetry chains I pass on: a favorite poet a favorite artist (Taggart’s “Slow Song
for Mark Rothko”):
To breathe and stretch one’s arm again
to breathe through the mouth to breathe
Wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands.
Poetry readings and dinner parties, dance-a-thons and happy hours
all live-streamed online. (Why weren’t we doing this all along?!)
Corona Hair Corona Beard Corona Gut
Conferences, vacations, weddings, funerals.
(Five thousand)
Dying alone in a bed a hospital
buckling.
Corona Homeless Corona Pregnant Corona Alone
Funerals. Funerals. Funerals.
Tent city makeshift hospitals overflowing.
“No-no—Fake news!” the Il-Leader foams. “It’ll just disappear!”
(Seven thousand dead)
The world chants, the Italians sing, our neighbor pots-and-pans
for healthcare workers nightly.
You’re the fake You’re the fake You’re the fake You’re the fake You’re the fake…
Bookstores, art orgs, restaurants, bars.
Dime stores, sex stores, thrift stores…stores.
Crawling-Into-Bed Corona
Crawling-Under-the-Bed Corona
Crawling-Out-of-My-Skin Corona
Read the news: Wash your hands, wash your face.
Pluck your eyes
to plug your ears.
To breathe and stretch one’s arms again
breathe to sing to breathe to sing to breathe
to sing the most quiet way
“We did everything so right, so good. Perfect.”
(Ten thousand)
Wash-wash
Wash-wash
Wash-wash-wash
No tests to be taken
no tests to be found.
No test THIS IS NOT A TEST
this is a testament.
(Twenty as of today, reports the Times)
Look out the window: Wash your hands.
Look out the door: The city’s still there (wipe the knob).
Look out over the city:
Look to the dimming horizon:
Wonder if you’ll ever again see them alive.
II.
Quarantined wondering if you’ll hold—
your sister children lover again.
No-Masks Corona No-Gloves Corona
Nurses doctors
daily nightly daily
fall
as they work
ill
as they die
unprotected.
Wash your hands, Corona.
Twenty-second-long song snippets, Corona.
Laid-Off-Not-Laid Corona
Corona Thirsty-Ass Corona
Starving Corona Starving
•
(I’m starting to wonder if all I’ve ever really wanted
was to cocoon myself away.)
•
To sing to light the most quiet light in darkness
radiantia (Corona) radiantia
(haloshine)
(The worldwide toll: Two hundred and fifty Three hundred
thousand Five…)
The whole world tips, pitches—
•
To sing to light the most quiet light in darkness
radiant light of seeds in the earth
Wash your hands, Corona
Wash your hands, Corona
Wash your hands
♪ M-m-m-m-myyyyy Corona! ♫
Twenty Seconds
O, my-my Corona, I’m losing my Corona—let me
sound the ways:
It’s-the-End-of-the-World-As-I-Know-It Corona
You-Bet-Your-Life-It-Is Corona (you bet your life)
Get-into-the-Groove Corona
God-Sometimes-You-Just-Fall-Through Corona
It’s time I had some time alone, Corona…
You can never tear us apart, Corona.
Your Hands, Corona, Your Hands
Every Twenty Seconds
Boy-You-Better-Move Corona
Keep-Your-Ass-Six-Feet-Away Corona
I was streaming when I wrote this, Corona…
I was drunk when I wrote this, Corona…
I was walking after midnight when I wrote this…
Corona, forgive me if I go astray.
I’m-So-Lonesome-I-Could-Cry Corona
Don’t forget I-Touch-Myself Corona
Chronicle Corona
The Times Corona
Your hands, Corona, don’t touch
your eyes
Hit-Me-with-Your-Best-Cock-Shot Corona
Gays-Just-Wanna-Have-Fun Corona
I’m-So-Horny-I-Could-Die Corona
(I could die)
Who’s Zoomin’ whom, Corona?
You should know, Corona, “Relax”
won’t do it. When ya gonna go, Corona?
You take my breath away.
Corona Corona
Wash Corona Wish Corona Want
radiantia radiantia
Post Corona End Corona Dream
Corona only loves you when it’s playing Corona
Don’t you know, Corona?
(Comes and goes, comes and goes…)
Walk-This-Lonely-Street Corona
Now-There-You-Go-Again Corona
Corona-Visions-Drive-Me-Mad Corona
Hanging-on-Promises Corona
Songs-of-Yesteryear Corona
Thunder Corona Thunder
(Maybe once, maybe twice…)
May this shower wash me clean, Corona.
Such dreams, Corona, when I shut my eyes.
You Know Corona You Know
Alpha Beta Omega
We live another life.
[Note: This poem, from Tod’s newly-completed manuscript, “Shelter Shutter Swerve,” includes lines from John Taggart’s “Slow Song for Mark Rothko,” from his collection Peace on Earth. The second section includes quoted or referenced titles and short, generic phrases, often modified, from songs recorded by Tori Amos, Pat Benatar, Berlin, Patsy Cline, The Divinyls, Fleetwood Mac, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Aretha Franklin, Heart, The Knack, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Prince, REM, Whitesnake, and Hank Williams; and quoted and paraphrased words out of the mouth of the somehow-45th president of these ever Untidy States.]
Rythmós (First Principles)
The first fact of the world is that it repeats (Robert Hass)
ascending
the escalator
carries us
a current
of strangers
across a line
(Take Your Time
at MoMA)
that separates
white light like
day indoors
from the corridor
flooded gold
(Room for one
colour) length
of yellow
the only one
visible
eliminates
all others
intensifies
perception
dimension
every surface
velvet-thick
as we cross
into the
circus of
the retinal spell
we are
all of us
the yellowed
edges of
a yellow
field sharpened
marveling
at each other
yellow hues
repeating
yellow brown
yellow red
yellow blue
figure after figure
stupefied
people group
and regroup
for photos
(no mirror)
light forms
space forms
light
connects us
says the artist
(Eliasson)
Icelandic
winters like
centuries
of darkness
to draw the figure
the other
out of darkness
unending
is our task, our test
•
the body extends
to close in
on itself
the body contracts
to escape
itself the forces
seize hold to order it
return it to its surroundings
all these movements
this movement event:
rythmós:
sensation as
essentially rhythm:
The Figure:
the sensible form:
sensation
has one side
turned to the sensate face
one side to the sensed thing: both
give and receive
sensation the same
at one and the same
time I become and
something happens
I become
something that happens
•
color appears pinprick in the corner of the eye it lacerates
a disappearance
an apparition
color like a closing in a closing lid a fainting spell
form attains plenitude
when color attains richness
every place aware of all other places
how a color unfurls
in response
to another
it asserts itself or collects itself
as in the mouth
of a dog
secretions gather
in anticipation of the approach
various intensifications
and dilutions
take place
in the core of every color in order
to survive
contact with others
sensation social and antisocial
at the same time
two measures
beating about
one another
to hold to, to
fold in
[Note: This poem from his manuscript-in-progress, “Yet Sensate Light.”]
Land’s End
For the wondrous Kate Schapira
It’s because of their mortality that things exist. (Etel Adnan, Night)
Walking unintentional miles
along the Pacific: Land’s End to China
Beach and back, Greg and I
in view of Marshall’s
(but not close enough
to make out
any nude men lingering along one another on the wet sand…),
wondering if we are anywhere near
where you had been a week ago when
— a whale’s back
came pouring out—
its dorsal fin
cresting over the tremulous sun
reflective surface foaming over rocks and gliding in and
out as quickly
lost to you as you
turned to leave (do I have it
right), stopped mid-turn
it jerked back it
glanced your gaze (do you recall
yourself) in the very instance of its disappearance
(hence memory,
so sight): so this
absenting presence,
this existence: Oceanic.
From our finite shores,
some notion of something more: magical
feeling, this poetic thinking of something like hope, something like survival, like making
a life from the given—call it “The Key to the Gate,” call it
“Any Idea in Disorder”—what else do we have? What else
could we do, even knowing it was futile,
but back-track all our day’s steps to try to find
my lost wallet, inadvertently tossed in the weeds (grabbing my phone
for a quick pic) or slyly lifted from my little black bag as we hung
suspended in the head-swirling susurrations, the glittered-belly-rolling undulations of
the rhythms of the waves below, taken
by sleight-of-hand and transacted into designer shoes from Rodeo Drive,
a trip to Rio for Carnival, a silver-blue Mercedes convertible, maybe
even a chateau on the coast of every sun-drenched droplet of a newly-acquired summer-home
archipelago, crumbs in an electric trail of posted FuckBook fuck-you pics
montaging The Glamorous Life I’ll never know
but maybe might have halfway wanted myself—someone else’s bucket list pocketed
by the fistful from my stolen fiscal ipseity (it ain’t much, it ain’t much,
sings Sheila E)—eyes in the bushes behind rocks my wallet
playing games with my thoughts roaming now
like children
pattering unpaved adventures hunting the hidden when
all-of-a-start they’re sprung upon—
I imagine a plump and graying woman, long-shawled and holding out
one cracked hand full
of endless slices
of cake, another pointing to a box
overflowing the spectrum of inks
with reams of blank pages to capture
their attention. To keep them
occupied. Mouths frosting-glopped, gleefully
they paper her kitchen, oven and all.
And when they put a sheet over her face,
giggling, to trace its contours
in cornflower, their pupils no longer meet
its lines. They must rely
on the three-legged two-step
of memory and perception
(the beat won’t stop
even when your feet go missing)
to map the channels
fissuring out
from the corners of her
night-sky eyes
like a daydream
out of which
we’ll never snap but know
will end (as this record heat submits)—
and so when the moment comes
we look out over the Pacific
with its ever-redder set-piece sun—going going
around and down—look look
out and out for any glimmer of twilight
blue leather along the crepuscular ground,
futile even by cell-flash at dusk-end
retracing a path already taken
again and again, and then giving up, nothing left
but to hop on call after call to call in,
bank rep after crank rep, my current status:
disabused of symbolic currency (it ain’t much).
Only one last place to check against chance:
the Dollhouse on 19th, wherein the men protest all clothing and sexual censorship,
where I had stopped to snatch
a quick shot of the wee plastic
toy-boy Billies gleaming nakedly in their disco window-splayed resistance
on the way out. On the way there, on Geary, the cops
ring up my phone
to inform me my wallet was returned,
to the station on Fillmore, just off Geary—my ID,
my come-what-may condom, every single card, a to-do list on the back of a Blackbird
bar receipt—everything, even an easily swiped bill—
present and accounted for—
turned in by a worker at the VA near the Coastal Trail
who didn’t leave a name,
so all we can do
is go home
as thankful as surprised, as
anxious-buzzed as exhausted,
with hope of waking
renewed in the morning,
of keeping something
of the sound
of the waves
inside us,
that this might fortify us
to press through the night,
that this might make it easier
(though the sea thrashes,
it sings)
to drift off.
[Note: This poem, from Tod’s newly-completed manuscript, “Shelter Shutter Swerve,” was originally published in Posit #20.]
Orphic. Narcissus from beneath
The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering
and the animals already know by instinct
we’re not comfortably at home
hand on the empty surface the surface pools
your hand
between the seemingly full
and the invertebrate
silvered
back
between your abrasion of sky
and the cavern from which I release my call
into glassfuls of diminishing return
you leap
to reclaim or relieve me of everything
everything depends on
that curve of light from the line
of your jaw to the clench of
this shadow
you enclose
my disclosure of flesh
to release our expansion of salt and sea
release this shadow from the soil
the sun-stricken ground
against which you split your head or
leave left blind
you leave left blind
our shadows to tease one another out from touch
from the pulse of
your hand unsinging down
what was will be
my back
a passage from semblance
to sense
the other
unbodying within us
between us
this unspoken echoic around a lustrous lack that
point in the distance
which alters the light
that traverses our course
light straggling over the tall trunks
the tall trunks hold it firm
seething over
this root-dust
this shadow
your shadow spills over
to soothe this stirring in the dirt
you obscure to prove
[Note: This poem was first published in New American Writing #25 and is included in Tod’s first book, Vitreous Hide, from Lavender Ink press. The epigraphs are from Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, and the A. Poulin, Jr. translation of Rilke’s “The First Duino Elegy”. The phrase “to tease one another out from touch” echoes a line from Muriel Rukeyser’s poem, “Despisals.”]
In place (of place). Two male dancers and revolving screen
4:30 PM. Caution Caution Caution
from all directions. Lights
on the blink. Horns Blasting. In the passenger’s seat
next to his hissing lack. Dead still. No
vember. Inch up. Dead still. No next to
his lover. Distill
ation of his brea
th hiss. Dissatis
faction. Peers unobstructed through
the driver’s side window through to thread
bare climb of late lum
bering light
Skyrise distortion of spatial relations
The question of next
to the question of volume and
duration of con
tent of solids of forum
of form
ulas of satis
fact
ion. The what of
The condition of the question of pose
possibility of the tru
th the position (prop) of (from) the (I) object
(II) to the question the (III) lies lies lies
(IV) (of) love (the question) of para
llel perpendicular
triangulated question of the tangential and
the genital the interstice inter
secting of the circular of as
sociation near of far
of here in out
*
*
*
your chest wet against
my back your cock
between us this
body a means our bodies
a way this bodying forth
unending unlit two
silvered hides
in the dark this
body inside
me inside you
this knot be
tween us
our hands
our fore
arms shoulders
stammering
legs
mur
muri
ng
searching a way
pressing the non until the known
gives way
with your mouth my mouth there
is something of One
echoing all about
something I know not what all static down the line
sharp turn steep hill
you part this road I part
to follow
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Dead Still. Zeno’s arrow. Bolt
ed down the s
ide of their car. In
ches fractioning again
st inches into ne
gative abstraction. The unobstructed
view pixelating into
empty space. Of
foreign origin. Of for
gotten sources. Place and
body. Time and
action. All directions the plu
mmeting (all directions) out
of place into place. A fallen
light.
A falling
leaf. The rain
falls. No const
ellating lace
ration no consub
stantiation but
the br
ight bl
ack
Aut
um
nal
plu
nge
*
*
*
*
we two to
gether framing this bodying between
this articulated mass our
something more than the sum we
imparting
the air with the
charge of
expansion
a distance
breaking over
our faces
breaking over
the light
holding our faces distance
this distancing mirage what is it
this pulse in the razed air
between us what is it this
glaring
pitched up beneath
a plummeting
plummeting
a something
no
not
I
know
what thirst
an answer or
is it another question
begging
questioning its foreign tongue
its only tongue
all gesture our limbs
locked open our eyes shut there
is there a key look in
am locked struck
blind the way presses you
press
am
plucked
s
igh
t
*
*
*
Curtain Curtain Curtain
From what direction what other time fails
falls
over him wraps tight a light a place
bright as
muscle
memory
as self-pity from every
wind
ow openly
bleats
A light despondent and sheer. Re
animating
the excessive
war
mth of untouched
skin
Enveloping the sheath he
lies
enveloped in. Lies de
nude
d on the bed until the
light
from every
dire
ction from even the neckbreath-close
absconds.
In bed
denuded enveloped in h
is body his
lover whose extension and move
ment constitute
a rigor
ous researching. Re
surging. How to place (his
or her) place
arms
torso
legs
exten
ding over and around to
harbor to give
place each of us re
turns to
find
his or her
place to find his or her
cause again and then
returns to
ward the other
place (the place of) the other
(impossible)
foundation condition
of possibility for motion
something res
plendent in the di
stance (between
us) (mutual suspens
ion of disbelief)
where the direct
ions circul
ate
(de)
sire
*
*
*
*
*
*
sky lit up sky opening over
two bodies our bodies as
One no
two no
self the same this
bodying our (gaze)
difference expanding
contracting
(gaze upon each other in that hour)
that exponential expanse
your response to touch my
response to fingertips
wet or dry
warm
this Othering sameness this
difference in the Same again
our darkening field our blind-white flash
this chest our backs these arms our eyes
our only reach
this movement between
(that hour)
(when newly created)
this movement unwavering its sky unraveling
(each in the other)
the One we try the One
to body to bury
the One
(in the other we hang)
unbodied
(music)
all
shoulder
all shutter
all edge
licking over
my shoulder blade
my neck
I hear you
some
echo ing
where in
(we hang smoke)
there where
gleams
(smoky music)
where
(in the air)
a knot
un
s
i
n
g
s
[Note: Note: First published in EOAGH magazine (a much earlier version) and is included in Tod’s first book, Vitreous Hide, from Lavender Ink press. Short passages and phrases included in the text are reproduced or adapted from Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, Baruch Spinoza, and Robert Duncan (the italicized lines in parentheses in the final section, from his poem “I Am a Most Fleshly Man”).]
Interview
March 8th, 2025
California Poets Interview Series:
Michael Tod Edgerton, Poet, Professor
interviewed by David Garyan
DG: Your work pushes the boundaries of form. What are some of the aesthetic and theoretical aspects behind the choices you make?
MTE: First—thanks for inviting me to do this interview, David, and for all of these personalized, very thoughtful and thought-provoking questions!
Form!—Yes, yes—organic/open forms, and choreographic field composition, in particular, has long been central to my poetic practice. The page first exploded for me in high school with Diane Wakoski’s Black Mountain-influenced poems, e.e. cummings’s (as for so many), and Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes. Years later, the Black Mountain poets themselves would become important to me in this regard, especially Robert Duncan. I was so drawn to and learned so much from what he had done with the page as field (and, as a gay poet, myself, I was also nourished by his queer sensibility; check out “The Torso, Passages 18,” for instance, and the early “I Am a Most Fleshly man,” a bit of which I collaged into the final poem of my first book, Vitreous Hide). I also learned a tremendous amount from poems by Forrest Gander, Anne Lauterbach, and Jorie Graham, among others.
Those poets’ approach to form as the per-forming of and as the poem, as the embodiment and enactment of its content (“A poem should not mean / But be”), remains the most fundamental principle for my own poetics. I like to synthesize Olson-Creeley’s dictum and Levertov’s inversion of it: Form is an extension of content is an extension of form is….
I early on conceived of this (literally and metaphorically) margin-liberated, embodying-attempting, and choreographic form as linked to a kind of feminist and femme male écriture féminine à la Irigaray and Cixous, though I’m not sure if I would write that exact same essay in precisely those terms today (were I to be so masochistic as to try…). Adjacent to Freud and before Lacan or Kristeva, Badiou or Deleuze, there was Stein; see her essay “Identity A Poem”, her play Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights (probably still my favorite Stein), and her Ida A Novel and you’ll see what I mean (and with all that in mind, I prer to write “identity” as “id-dented-entity,” as I have with a poem sequence I’m plating with). While I would definitely connect it to a theory of the subject and body where the two can’t be opposed (nor absolutely aligned), I wouldn’t necessarily connect it to queerness or femininity, per se, or any essentialized identity category, which can be as reductive as empowering. As I tell my students when they’re questioning or struggling with these issues, I agree with the contemporary truism that identity labels should be used to the extent that they’re enabling and dispensed with whenever and wherever they feel constraining. We’re all, god knows, more than any novel’s-worth of words can ever completely convey. But the second I go down this (forked) road, the whole theoretical project rapidly balloons into an utterly unwieldy and potentially infinite book project that would take twelve lifetimes to never complete—and so I don’t!
DG: You’ve collaborated with artists outside of the poetry genre—sound artists and choreographers, for instance. What do you love most about collaborations like these and are there plans for more such projects in the future?
MTE: The richest collaboration for me was Pulse, a twelve-minute piece for two dancers and two voices, which I co-created with Nathan Andary while I was still at Brown. Nathan and I were both two gayboys from Kentucky and had an instant rapport, followed by an aesthetic schism that was as challenging for me as generative. He wanted something more narrative from me than I was then capable of composing. I reached and reached and failed—better and better! It was a wonderful exchange, a dialogic back-and-forth from start to finish, and I grew a lot from that collaboration. It was incredible performing our work for an audience (my friend Lynn and I were the voices, off to the sides). I’d love to do more like that in the future—that’s one of the things that most excites me about possibly being at all involved in any production of my in-progress play, “Cissy Nicky Unreciprocated: A Femme Mani-Feste & Queerling Fantasia in Scenes Unwed” (more on that at the end, folks)—but opportunities for something that involved have been few. (Hit me up!)
DG: You have an MFA from Brown and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Georgia. How did your writing change as a result of the MFA and what did the PhD then add that wasn’t there before?
MTE: I was veryveryvery lucky not only to be accepted to Brown but to have the most amazing cohort (go MFA Poets ’06!). We’re still fast friends, readers, and supporters of one another. Everyone thinks about the faculty when choosing programs (as did I—Forrest Gander! C.D. Wright! The Waldrops! Thalia Field! CREELEY…and that’s just the writers whose work I knew going in…I also got to work with the wonderful Michael Gizzi and Carole Maso, as well as take fab theory classes in the famous Modern Culture and Media department), but it’s really all about the other poets in your workshops. And my fellow “Brown Grrlz” (as I call us all)—Kate Schapira, Bronwen Tate, Caroline Noble Whitbeck, and Lynn Xu—were and are so very amazing; I lucked the fuck out! The main thing I felt at the end was that the program had done a great job…of preparing me for the program—I’m ready for it now, people! Let me start over!
I had an uneasy, up-and-down time at UGA and in Athens, GA, I have to admit, but I learned a lot from teachers like Isabelle Loring Wallace, Jed Rasula, and Andrew Zawacki, who also sat on my committee, along with Tim Raser (with whom I share an interest in Lacan), and made some wonderful friends I still value to this day. In the end, I’m glad I went, and certainly grew intellectually, but for any readers out there contemplating a PhD and an academic career (especially one in literature or creative writing), I’ll offer that I personally regret going down that road and that tying my institutional success in “po-biz” to my success as an academic only poisoned my creative well, lead to depression and heightened anxiety, and I would not do it the same if I could change it. That’s of course not everyone’s experience, but it was mine. And there simply are no jobs out there, especially in this 2025 moment, when college after college is shuttering its doors while others are consolidating programs and departments (where they’re not cutting them out completely), and it’s the humanities and arts that are of course taking the hardest hits. Don’t do it!
But how did my writing change as a direct effect of either program? I’m not sure. It changed from reading C.D’s post-Deepstep writing, but that could have happened wherever I was. It changed after Katrina hit New Orleans almost a year to the day that I left for Providence, but that had nothing to do with the program itself. I know that being read well by my teachers and cohorts in both programs helped me grow as a writer, but I can’t pinpoint just how and where. Certainly my teachers across the board introduced me to such amazing new writers (and filmmakers—thanks, Carole!) that expanded my small universe. At UGA, my whole understanding of Modernism, the avant-garde, and the aesthetic regime both deepened and widened after working with Jed Rasula, Isabelle Wallace, and Nell Andrew (the latter two in Art History), which also changed my path.
Really, I think the main thing was the permission both sets of faculty gave me to explore and discover as I went, to experiment and fail and try again, rather than positioning themselves as “masters” whose doctrines I must fulfill and demands I must meet. Instead of drawing boundaries of the “properly” poetic/aesthetic, they taught us how to ignore them and recognize instead our own artistic and intellectual impulses. That’s guided me ever since as both a writer and a teacher.
DG: A very interesting aspect of your career is the participatory literary and multimedia art project, what most vividly. What was the inspiration behind the project, the questions themselves, and is it a continuous enterprise or is there a precise end date?
MTE: Thanks for that shout out for What Most Vividly!
The first inspiration was my teacher, the late and very great C.D. Wright’s One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (a collaboration with her old friend, the photographer Deborah Luster). I was astonished by the book’s deftly-balanced investigation (truly the best word for it, and C.D.’s own: she used it as the subtitle for the subsequent poems-only paperback edition) and excavation of the tossed-aside lives and crossed-out humanity of these inmates while neither forgetting nor self-righteously judging their crimes (“No one here for walking on the grass”). I remain particularly struck by how she incorporated quotes from the prisoners in the work to such a moving, ethical effect. I was also learning about social practice art in my Contemporary Art seminar with Isabelle Wallace at UGA, which fed into it, and it truly made me want to do something along similar lines. I got the crowdsourcing idea from my friend Kate Schapira’s first book, Town, and the questionnaire form from Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (newly back in print thanks to Kelsey Street).
See What Most Vividly: A Choral Work for more info and to participate!
DG: Do you see teaching as an inextricably linked to the writing you do or is there some degree of separation?
MTE: Well, as many writers and researchers do, I’ve definitely designed courses around some of my own artistic interests and projects, from docupoetry and social practice writing in my “Lyric Investigations” course (after C.D., per above) to ekphrastic and multi-media writing in my “Ek-static Ek-phrastic: An Inter-Arts Lab” and my “Balancing Acts: Lyric/Narrative” workshops.
DG: Politics plays a major part in your writing, and though creativity is a day-to-day thing, it still follows a given trajectory. Given that, do you think your work will become more political in these next years or will language remain the primary driving force? In other words, do you see the latter as a representation of the times or is there something intrinsic about language that mandates its own considerations?
MTE: To try to answer this question, I’d have to first establish what “politics” and “political poetry” are, and I’m not sure I can do that. Certainly wherever the social emerges, there is “politics” and some kind of economic relation (symbolic currency or not), and life cannot be lived in absolute isolation, however reclusive an adult may become. While I love a message I love, I feel let down by poetry (call what you want “poetry”; that’s up to you) that feels like it should be an op ed and fails to give me the richness, music, and mystery I desire from that thing which takes the top of my own head off (to reference Dickinson’s famous “definition”). At it’s most “messagey,” it can be artless. Mostly I fall on the side of Rancière and Deleuze, who say, on one hand, that art has little to no ability to change politics in its narrowest sense, but only our “percepts, affects, and concepts” more generally (but how much more radically!), and, on the other hand, that we have no way to really predict or precisely control how—or if—our work will change anything at all. That said, if you don’t make it, it definitely won’t do jack!
As for me, I almost never set out to write a “political” poem—or any specific kind of poem—but always begin by just following the language, the title or line that’s come to me or that I’m returning to. As an artist, the things I feel strongly about and think about a lot come into my work organically, and some of that is inevitably political in one or more ways. In recent years I’ve definitely “loosened up” on making space for the “non-art” of explicit statement (I’m thinking, for instance, of such poems from “Shelter Shutter Swerve” as the ones in Interim 41.1 and “World Slammed Shut” on LAdige).
As I’ve turned to the character-driven, meant-to-be-staged genre of drama with “Cissy Nicky Unreciprocated,” I have become necessarily concerned with the politics of representation and the economics of theater work in a way that my poetry never has been. There’s no way I’m going to focus on a group of Queers and write them all white, for instance, and so David is a Black man from Uganda (David is the first name both of the founder of the Ugandan gay rights movement and of the man who proposed the “kill gays” law), and Coco and Queer Voice-Over It All (“QVC”) are ethnoracially unspecified and open (as is QVC’s age). I did that not only with the issue of more inclusive representation in narrative art, but also with the real economic concern of which actors are being hired to play these parts; I note, in particular, that every production should cast a trans woman as Coco, being herself a trans woman (so, uh—duh!), whenever possible.
Just over a month into this much-worse second Trump term, where he seems hellbent on blowing up the world (and perhaps literally starting WWIII in the process), I am truly reeling and feel unable even to try to predict how best to counteract any of it. I know poetry won’t do it, though, in the realm of the legislative-political (that would be delusional). What it can do, however, is offer you, as reader or writer or both, its essential “soul-making” magic in a time of a soulless government (all three branches!), and that’s certainly important. (If you really want to help make positive change in the immediate world, go donate or volunteer for the International Rescue Committee or Trans Lifeline or an organization locally.)
(So, I guess my short answer, after that lengthy digression, is that language is always my primary driving force.)
DG: Let’s talk about San Francisco—the city you live and work in. What is the most exciting part of writing right in the midst of a cultural epicenter and what are the challenges?
MTE: I honestly don’t know if it makes a difference for my writing. While “Shelter Shutter Swerve” is very much a book that came from a person living through specific experiences in specific places and times—and so inflected by those specificities—and while my husband’s and my move here is definitely one of the big surprise “swerves” that mark the work, it could have been a generally similar book had we moved almost anywhere else. I love living in SF, but ultimately my writing takes place somewhere between the screen and my brain, the keyboard and my fingers (to paraphrase a long-favorite quip from Wittgenstein, my hand often knows more of what I’m writing than my head).
DG: What are your favorite places in San Francisco and what is another city you love?
MTE: While SF isn’t the Utopia it used to be and never was (c.f. my friend Donna Stonecipher’s The Ruins of Nostalgia), I do love it—particularly my gayborhood, the Castro, one of the last largely queer neighborhoods left on the planet (#KeeptheCastroQueer). I love sitting with my favorite Richter and Rothko at SF MOMA after perusing whatever’s newly passing through; I love sitting in the back garden/patio with a glass of rosé at Swirl or Arlequin, or a G&T at Pilsner Inn on one of the rare days a year it’s hot enough for just a Tee. I love seeing D.A. Powell’s “Grace Notes” readings at the gorgeous Grace Cathedral, or in the Poetry Room at City Lights (it’s own kind of sacred space), the expansive Catherine Clark Gallery, or, hopping over to Berkeley, in my friend Alex Mattraw’s garden for a Lone Glen reading. I am a Karaoke Queen, and you will occasionally find me burning house at The Look Out or Midnight Sun (go-tos include “A Change Is Gonna Come,” “The Man that Got Away,” and “Purple Rain”).
My few years in New Orleans was a lifetime in itself, and I still have friends there I consider family. My time there was transformative both as a person and poet. Years later, it would be my friend and former Lit City Poetry Series colleague Bill Lavender who would publish Vitreous Hide with his newly revived Lavender Ink (thanks again, Bill). It is truly a magical place in its way; nowhere else is quite like it, and it will always be a second home to me.
DG: Who are the California poets you turn to consistently and who are those outside of the state?
MTE: Alex Mattraw and I met through our mutual friend Lily Brown soon after I moved here, and we had an instant poetry connection. After workshopping poems with one another, we decided to continue, and she furthermore knew of another poet who might be interested in forming a group. Six or seven years later, she, Tiff Dressen, Megan Breiseth, and I are good friends and among one another’s best readers. I’ve dubbed us “Queer Your Darlings” for kicks and I always go to them not only for their perceptive eyes on my work but also for how their poetry feeds me.
My early work definitely falls right in the lineage of Duncan and the whole SF/Berkeley Renaissance poets, so it’s oddly right that I somehow ended up here. Duncan acolyte Michael Palmer was also a huge early influence. Doug Powell’s a forever favorite. Tongo Eisen-Martin, who just ended his term as SF Poet Laureate, has very deservedly gained national attention—but he’s a performer and to experience his work properly, you really have to hear him perform it (I don’t think I’ve once seen him read from the page). It’s mesmerizing! There are really just so many amazing poets in the Bay Area; I couldn’t begin to name them all and am reallyreally lucky to be here! Rusty Morrison is an exquisite poet, herself and is also, of course, the main force behind Omnidawn, which has published so many wonderful poets from all over, including such Bay Area poets as Norma Cole and Maw Shein Win. Forrest Gander moved back to California a few years ago; I always return to his gorgeously rich and enriching work.
MTE: Among those writers whose work I feel perennially at home in include Stein and Stevens, Woolf and Genet, O’Hara and Oppen (thanks to Forrest), Rilke (especially the Sonnets and Elegies), Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Larry Eigner (thank you, Linda Russo, whose own work is so smart and beautiful)…. Among my other contemporaries, I’ll risk naming an additional few: Dan Beachy-Quick, Terrance Hayes, Carolyn Hembree, Douglas Kearney, and Andrew Zawacki, among those listed elsewhere in this interview and too many others to list.
DG: Do you follow a strict writing schedule or is inspiration a real thing?
MTE: I’ve always been an intermittent writer. I tend to write in spurts, however long or short, followed by “dry spells” (however partial or complete, however long or short…).
DG: What are you reading or working on these days?
MTE: I’m oscillating between two manuscripts, both of which were started between ten to fifteen years ago (cf. previous question…). One was pulled out of the book manuscript version of What Most Vividly, which in the end I was not pleased with. From those poems came “Yet Sensate Life,” a book that explores questions of aesthetics and creativity, art and anxiety, and our always internally fractured psyches and social bonds, our multiply partial singularities and always tenuous collectivities.
Then the COVID pandemic hit suddenly, soon followed by the global outcry and cultural shift after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police sworn to “protect and serve.” The summer of 2020 saw one of those “spurts,” and the resultant poems pulled some of the other work in “Yet Sensate Life” into its orbit and sent the more ekphrastic cum “politics of aesthetics” poems reeling away to form another galaxy entirely. I titled the manuscript that I’d then finished, inclusive of the Summer 2020 poems, “Shelter Shutter Swerve,” and it’s coming to a bookstore near you soon (just as soon as I get someone to publish it)!
The other book I’m (still…) working on started in 2011 or 2012, born from my relatively new love of opera and live theater. It started out as an opera libretto. Then I saw an interview with the very composer I most dreamed of composing it, Nico Muhly (his album I Drink the Air Before Me, still my favorite, gets a shout-out in “Shelter”) wherein he said he hates “wordy-word” librettos, that all the music comes from the score, not the words—and that was that for the libretto. So then it became a play. But most of the “scenes” came to me as poems first (and could I get a play published or produced? How do you even go about doing that?!)…so then it became a book of poems. Eventually it settled into its current format/cross-genre creatureness as a verse play in poem-scenes, many composed as the field poems I so often gravitate to (see question one…). It’s more often than not more lyrically ludic than discursive (though there are conventional dialogue scenes), the flavor of which the title foretells: “Cissy Nicky Unreciprocated: A Femme Mani-Feste & Queerling Fantasia in Scenes Unwed”: Coming to a playhouse near you (one of these years…)! (For more about “Cissy Nicky,” see also my answer to the “politics” question above.)
Author Bio:
Michael Tod Edgerton (he/they) is a Queerboy poet of lyrically fluid gender and genre alike. Author of Vitreous Hide (Lavender Ink), Tod’s poems have appeared in Boston Review (annual contest winner), Denver Quarterly, EOAGH, Interim, New American Writing, Posit, Sonora Review, VOLT, and other journals. Tod holds an MFA from Brown, a PhD from UGA, and has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and MacDowell. He serves on the poetry-editing teams of Conjunctions and Seneca Review, where he is also Book Reviews Editor. You’ll find him swishing along the streets of San Francisco and online at MTodEdge.com and WhatMostVividly.com.
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