On Beauty and Distance
The essay that destroyed my poems
A few links to start:
While I was in London last month, I got to do an episode of BBC3’s Private Passions, a show that’s like Desert Island Discs for classical music. It’s hosted by the composer Michael Berkeley, son of the composer Lennox Berkeley, and it was a little disconcerting to realize that he had a personal connection to almost all of my musical selections. He’s pals with Alfred Brendel, for instance, and when we listened to Kathleen Ferrier singing Mahler, he said, “Oh yes, I remember when she premiered one of my father’s pieces.” Lord. And Benjamin Britten? That would be Michael’s godfather. Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and I loved the conversation. I was especially excited to talk about Julius Eastman, who was new to everybody on the show—and also about David T. Little’s adaptation of What Belongs to You, which features in a world premiere broadcast. The excerpt they use is from the last scene of the opera, and it’s absolutely astonishing; it reduces me to a little pile of dust. (Karim Sulayman sings it unbelievably beautifully.) You can listen to a version of the show with just a minute or so of each musical selection on any podcast app. For the next couple of weeks, you can also listen to the whole thing here.
I’m really happy to see Small Rain on Publishers Weekly’s list of the Best Books of 2024.
Also very happy to see this review of the novel at Psychology Today by Christopher Lane, who reads it as about illness in both an individual and the national body.
A very personal, very beautiful review at Review31 by Francis Blagburn.
Finally, I’m a little embarrassed by how happy I am to see this brief review (“Breathtaking … an unforgettable performance”) of the audiobook, which I read, at AudioFile.
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Last Thursday, I got to have a public conversation with my dear friend Mark Armijo McKnight at the Whitney Museum here in New York. An edited version of the conversation will appear, eventually, in Aperture. We talked about Mark’s show, Decreation, which is up at the Whitney through the end of the year—go see it if you haven’t—and about Small Rain, but mainly we talked about our friendship, which began back in 2019, when an editor at Aperture approached me about writing on Mark’s work. In the intervening years, Mark has become one of my closest friends, and talking about art with him—and thinking about his work, which I did most recently back in August in this very newsletter—has been both a joy and a deep influence. As I said onstage at the Whitney, there’s a scene in Small Rain that I’m not sure I could have written without my encounters with Mark’s work.
That event was the last event of tour, pretty much exactly two months after the first event at Prairie Lights. Thanks so much to all of you who came out to say hello: it made me so happy every time someone said they were a reader of this Substack as I signed their books. It was a very lucky tour, full of terrific conversations. (You can read one of the ones I enjoyed most, with Colm Tóibín, in my last dispatch.) I made a point of inviting as many poet interlocutors as possible, and got to speak with a starry bunch: D.A. Powell, Dana Levin, Richie Hofmann, Andrew McMillan. Those conversations were as exciting as I had hoped. Poets ask different questions than fiction writers do, it turns out, and Small Rain is very much a poet’s novel.
Even now, eight years into publishing novels, maybe the question I’m asked most often at events is what made me stop writing poems. I wish I had a good answer, but I’ve never come up with one. It certainly wasn’t a choice. I finished a manuscript of poems in 2009, shortly after moving to Bulgaria, and put it in a drawer to let it sit for a while; my plan was not to write anything for several months. But then I started feeling sentences that I knew were not broken into lines. I’ve said that often over the years; I can’t seem to find a better way of putting it. I tried to write down those sentences as I wrote my poems—that is, on the computer, but I found I couldn’t feel them that way, and so started writing by hand in a very cheap notebook. I started to feel out one sentence after sentence, and at a certain point realized that what I was doing in prose wasn’t just better than my poems. It destroyed my poems.
I’ve always said that Mitko, which would become the first section of What Belongs to You, was the first fiction I had ever written, and that’s true. But it wasn’t the first piece of aesthetic prose I wrote, and it wasn’t what made me feel that my poems were destroyed. By aesthetic prose I mean prose that wasn’t, as all my prose had been to that point, academic or critical, prose that attempted to do what I did in poems. How can I characterize that more clearly? Prose invested in form; prose saturated in emotion; prose that felt expressive of my whole person.
That first piece of aesthetic prose was an essay, but in many ways it feels like a preparatory sketch for What Belongs to You. It’s about cruising, and it begins where the novel begins, in the bathrooms beneath the National Palace of Culture in Sofia. I revisited the essay a couple of weeks ago for the first time in many years, because my friend Mark shared it with the students in a graduate seminar he’s teaching on beauty, and asked me to visit to talk about it with them. Mark had asked me if I had written anything on beauty, and—though beauty is a theme in everything I’ve written, more or less—this old essay, which was published back in 2010 or 2011 but isn’t, so far as I know, available online, is the only thing I’ve written that takes beauty itself, the phenomenon of it, the idea, as an explicit theme.
I enjoyed visiting Mark’s class, and tried to read as much of his syllabus as I could in preparation; I hope to share some thoughts about all that in future newsletters. But this week I’ve decided to share that first essay, the one that destroyed my poems and marks the closest thing I can point to as the moment I became a prose writer. Which is funny, because now, fourteen years or so after writing it, it’s the prose, the texture of the sentences, that feels most alien to me, and more than a little cringe. I’ll say more about that below. But I expected to feel that when I reread the piece; what surprised me was how excited I was by the essay’s material, and by the way it moves.
The essay is called “On Beauty and Distance,” and it covers a lot of ground: it’s a kind of autobiography via cruising, with scenes set not just in Sofia but in Louisville’s Cherokee Park; but it’s also a meditation on art, and on the ways in which I think of cruising as a kind of education in poetry. I like how the pieces fit together: there’s a movement between them that feels riskily disparate to me, but also right. I’m not sure I’ve managed that anywhere else, it’s not a kind of movement I think of as characteristic of my work. Which is why it feels exciting to me; I’d like to try to find my way to it again.
But the sentences. Parul Sehgal, in her review of Small Rain (I offered a reading of her reading in an earlier newsletter) characterized the prose of What Belongs to You as “ceremonious,” and that feels right to me. But that prose was already quite a bit looser than the prose in “On Beauty and Distance.” In fact, if you were to compare the novella version of Mitko with the version that makes up the first section of What Belongs to You, the changes are all in this direction: I was trying to shake out the sentences a little bit, to make the style more fluent, more natural; and Cleanness goes further still. I remember editing “Gospodar,” which had appeared in The Paris Review before What Belongs to You came out, and being surprised by how many changes I needed to make to the sentences. I had already worked hard on that story—working with Lorin Stein was my first experience of really being edited. But “Gospodar” was one of the first chapters of Cleanness I wrote; by the time I was revising it for the book my style had changed a great deal.
Well. The prose in “On Beauty and Distance” isn’t just ceremonious; it’s like every sentence is strapped into a metal suit, a tuxedo made of chainmail. It’s weird to claim something written in your thirties as juvenilia, but I was a baby prose writer, and this feels like baby prose. The sentences in What Belongs to You don’t really fit me anymore, but they still feel like my sentences; the sentences in this essay don’t. They were written under the spell of certain Central European writers I was reading in translation, an influence they do nothing to metabolize. I still love those writers, and I’m grateful to them: they opened a door for me into prose writing. But they needed metabolizing. It makes me laugh to revisit the sentences I wrote in their style; it makes me cringe to share them here. But I don’t disavow the ideas the essay expresses, and they provide context for the notes on beauty I hope to share in future newsletters. One reason Mark wanted to bring me in to his class was that his students were reading the book I describe throwing across the room in the essay. If you’ve read that book you’ll recognize it from the description, though it goes unnamed. I’ll name it in a future post—I’m trying to compile some more coherent thoughts about why it seemed then, and still seems, so wrong to me.
Anyway, this is a long prologue and a lot of excuses. One last note: Sofia is a very fast-changing city. The “gay scene” I describe below is no longer the city’s gay scene; and even in 2009 or 2010, when I visited the kinds of bars I describe, I experienced them very much as a stranger to the city. I hope the essay makes that clear.
In any event, read on below.
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