Interview of Edmund Miller by Mary Ryan Garcia, 12 November 2004

1. Please share with readers how this book came about, including how long
you worked on it and what this book involved in terms of both field/literary
research and literary style/rhythm?

I started writing The Go-Go Boy Sonnets by accident, probably around 1993. I
had been writing sonnets quite a bit at the time, and when I got inspired to
write about some of the men of the bar and club scene, at first I just used
the sonnet because I was working in that form. After a few poems, I realized
that this was a book idea. Each of these sonnets has a special job of
describing the guy and describing his act-that is something about him that
makes him memorable or special beyond his looks. Front the beginning I
wanted these poem to take the guys seriously and yet be funny by suggesting
something of how they see themselves. There is something inherently absurd
about being a icon, about being admired for your looks even for a man on the
gay scene.

I worked on the English sonnets for about six years. At first I just wrote
when I was moved to do so ("Nick's Workout Routine" was the first poem
written). Then when I had identified the specific genre or format for these
sonnets, I started taking extensive notes during my research field work in
bars and dance clubs. I started conducting interviews, and once I got going,
guys would ask to be interviewed and included. "Rubber Ducky" and "Renorming
the Curve" came about this way. Most of the poems comes from the second and
third year, when I was doing a every week or two. Then I stopped seeing new
ideas, so I slowed down. Eventually, I had so much material that I forced
myself to stop, except when something came up that I had been looking for.
Toward the end, for example, I did a poem ("Look for the Union Label") about
a guy who works in the building trade because I hadn't been able to find
many craftsmen, and did another poem ("Sloe Dancer") when I found a Japanese
go-go boy. But I was still putting a lot of other time in on the book during
this period, creating translations, getting photographs taken, and (very
time-consuming this) looking for a publisher. The last few years were taken
up completely with finding the missing translators, polishing the
translations in the languages I did know something about, and copy-editing
this very complicated project.

I didn't have to do any new research on the poetic form. Field research I
did need to do. But I also needed to know what was happening all over the
bar and club scene-I have a huge collection of the free bar magazines I've
been trying to figure out what to do with. They ought to be in a library
collection. When I started adding the translations, I had to do a lot of
research-both in books and through personal interaction. I began the
translations because I realized that some of the guys I was writing about
didn't understand English well enough to make sense of the poems about them.
And eventually I taught myself first Portuguese and then Spanish to be more
on top of things in two of the translation languages that came up most
frequently, and I brushed up my French, Italian, German, Greek, Old English,
and Latin. But finding translators for some of the exotic languages was a
real challenge. In addition to basic language issues and special poetic
problems in the translation process (one of my translators explained, for
example, that you can't use technical terms in Spanish poetry the way I do
all the time in the English poems), there was the issue of finding
dictionaries of gay slang in all the languages. There were also technical
problems. One poem, "Twofer," is full of theatrical terminology that does
not have French equivalents. Sometimes even common words were hard to find:
Italian dictionaries are very reluctant to includes any words for underwear.

2. How is this book different from your other books? Please share.

Well, I have scholarly books and a collection of erotic stories, so this
book isn't like them. Even though it is about sexual icons, this book is
playful, not erotic like the stories. My poetry book Fucking Animals is also
playful and also includes a lot of personal poems similarly recreating guys
in brief portraits. That early book is poetically more experimental and
includes all kinds of poetic forms and also shows the influence of various
authors-Hopkins, Donne, Herbert, Eliot. William Carlos Williams was also an
influence on the early book, but he is the major influence on The Happiness
Cure, although that book is also brief portraits of guys caught in
characteristic moments. I have written completely different sorts of poetry
too. Leavings is surreal. A Rider of Currents is nature poetry. That last is
my lost book. The book was printed, but the publisher went bankrupt or
something, and all the copies are in some printer's closet somewhere in
Ohio. If this new book makes me famous they ought to be worth a pretty
penny.

The Go-Go Boy Sonnets has a unity beyond the thematic and stylistic unity of
my previous poetry books. Not only is it a revival of the sonnet sequence
(which was big in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries, but
is less common today), but this book actually reinvents the sonnet sequence
because it surveys the gay bar and dance club scene through portraits of the
idols of the scene while traditional sonnet sequences use narrative to
connect the poems into a fuller story. This book also explodes out of even
this variant form by including prose biographical statements, translations,
and all the indexes.

3. Describe the style of the sonnets in the book.

The working definition of the sonnet that I give my classes is that it is
poem in lines of equal length having some relation to fourteen lines and
divided into unequal sections by a shifting pattern of end rhyme. I knew I
wanted to use traditional iambic pentameter (not sprung rhythm or
alexandrines) and exactly fourteen lines (not double sonnets, sonnets with
codas, curtal sonnets). Most of the poems in The Go-Go Boy Sonnets use
Italian rhyme schemes (with an intricate interlace tying all six lines of
the sestet at the end into a single pattern), but some use English rhyme
schemes (with a final couplet). Many of the poems double up the rhymes so
that there are fewer different rhyme sounds than in the traditional patterns
(for example abbaabba in the octave instead of abbacddc). And there are a
lot of pattern variants and internal rhymes. "Dark Cloud" is interesting
because the octave is in couplets, almost contradicting the sonnet tradition
of interlacing ideas, but then the whole sestet of that poem has only one
rhyme sound for all six lines, also untraditional but at the same time a
striking contrast to the pattern of the octave. I have laid out all the
sonnets on the page with a space between the octave and sestet, but the
volta can come anywhere and there are many cases with enjambment at the end
of the octave. I also laid out the translations (even the Chinese and
Japanese) to look like sonnets, in most cases with little poetic
justification.

4. Also, how many languages are used in this book?

There are seventy-five translations into twenty-four languages. Of course,
this does include Pig Latin-used quite effectively (since the last word in
the poem "Pigging Out" has five syllables) for a dancer whose act is to be
rather crude and boorish on stage. Translation languages used for one or two
poems include Hebrew, Russian, Maltese, Farsi, Albanian, Norwegian, Turkish,
Tagalug, and (for "After the Pool Shark" about Greg Louganis) Samoan. Most
of the translations are ethnic-heritage translations, but (as I have said),
I began the translations in order to help some of the guys understand what I
had written about them. The many Spanish and Portuguese translations are
mostly of this sort. But as I was working it occurred to me that the
translations would give another dimension to the book, allowing me to take
the scene seriously in a completely different way. Then I started looking
for occasions for poems that would lead to translations. A bartender working
at a place called Rome happened to have a PhD in History with a dissertation
on a medieval Latin manuscript, so he became the occasion of the Latin
translation. After I had exhausted most of my own translation resources and
even learned a few new languages, I started looking about for a dancer who
was a graduate student in English in the hope that I could make use of my
Old English. I did find him ("Jon Interview"). Although his specialization
turned out to be post-modernism and not medieval, I did the translation into
Old English anyway since one of the principles of post-modernism is
rewriting the past. The most interesting translation case is the macaronic
one. The bartender celebrated in "By the Book" is the cover model on a
seven-language gay slang dictionary that I had been using. Discovering this
gave me the theme for the poem and also meant that the translation had to
have two lines in each of these languages. Since I know no Czech, I created
an English poem in which two lines could be made up entirely of phrases of
gay small talk for which the dictionary provided Czech equivalents.

5. What sorts of literary references in the book are your favorites?

I like the idea that, through seven citations, I was able to weave a short
history of English literature into the poem "Job Interview" (the poem about
the graduate student in English that has the accompanying translation into
Old English). I make a reference to Byron to conclude the sonnet about the
guy named Byron. And I think I used the allusion to the film Dinner at Eight
effectively in "Accounts Receivable."

6. And similarly, which sonnets are your favorites?

"Accounts Receivable" is also nice because it uses accounting imagery to
describe a dancer trained as an accountant. I think those poems where the
images are related to guy's other life are particular favorites of mine. I
did an especially nice job of using legal imagery to describe the law
student in "Briefless"-unfortunately one of the few cases where the subject
did not want me to use even his first name, even a performance name. I also
like poems with multisyllabic rhymes and phrases of several words rhymed
with one, always funny and a way for an author to show off. "Ars Poetica,"
for example, ends with the rhyme of "athletic supporter" and "poetic
reporter."

7. What was most challenging for you in terms of putting this book together?

Finding time to work on things like proofreading, translating, and indexing
was a big problem. When I was actively pursuing the idea of having
photographs of the guys accompany the poems, I also spent a lot of time (and
money). I am hoping for follow-up editions. I've been working with the
photographers Daniel Perry and Charles Hovland and still do hope to bring
out shorter photobooks with the with poem/picture combinations for the guys
that have been shot by these photographers.

8. In terms of literary influence, do you feel that you've been influenced
by any other poets, such as Hopkins and others? Please elaborate.

Well, a broad range of experimental imitation is apparent in my earlier
poetry books. Hopkins, as you have noticed is a continuing influence for the
internal rhymes and some of the density of the language. Byron, who was not
an influence on the early poetry, is certainly an influence here in the
creation of the humorous and surprising rhymes. Donne probably taught me to
combine images and ideas from the whole universe of my knowledge and throw
rules of decorum to the winds. Milton and Herbert were influential is
freeing up the position of the volta and in generally loosening the
connection between the development of the ideas in a sonnet and the rhyme
scheme.

9. Feel free to share with readers anything else you think might help them
to appreciate and enjoy the book in terms of background information.

As I tell my students, let the punctuation be your guide. This is highly
enjambed poetry. The meaning will be revealed more easily if you pay no
attention to line breaks (even the space between the two parts of the poem)
and just follow the punctuation. You can get some funny effects out of
reading it aloud too. All the end rhymes are true rhymes, not eye rhymes or
slant rhymes. I don't believe in letting "again" rhyme with "rain" on paper
just because it really did rhyme in the Middle Ages. On the other hand,
there are trick rhymes. In the poem "Dance Captain," you have to pronounce
"Francisco" in the Spanish way or the rhyme doesn't work. In "Distaff
Duties" I have created a little problem of rhyming "Uh" with something in
French. There's also a nice little multisyllabic rhyme trap in "Most
Improved Camper."

Most of the ideas here are accessible without any special knowledge of the
gay scene, although I have included a glossary of gay slang and also an
index of New York locales.

10. Ink Water Press is an on-demand publisher. Why did you decide in the end
that it would be better to publish this way? Tell me about your publishing
experience.

I went through a round of the same thing at many publishers with a proposal
for a book with photographs all by one photographer. These publishers
include at least three major houses besides photobook publishers, poetry
houses, and gays presses and series. The editors loved the idea and the
material. Then they showed it to the marketing division, where they were
told the book was only going to interest the small niche market for gay
poetry (demonstrably untrue since the editors loved it) but was going to be
very expensive because of the photographs. The editors then rejected the
proposal instead of doing the more sensible thing of firing the marketing
division.

Finally I got a photobook publisher to agree to publish the thing but
without the translations (because they would "confuse" readers); however, I
had to withdraw because the publisher insisted (very prudishly?) that some
of the photographs had to include frontal nudity. I had promised the guys
that there would be no nudity in the pictures, even of other guys and, even
so, had been finding it very difficult to get them photographed even when
they had a history of being photographed erotically-even naked. So I had to
withdraw from this deal.

Then I found a poetry publisher with some of the usual reservations but an
imaginative approach to the problem. Instead of rejecting the book (or
firing the marketing division), this press suggested dropping the
photographs. This struck me as a good way to get the book published and
perhaps even taken more seriously. It would be harder to publicize, but I
figured I could always do a follow-up photo book. I spent a year getting a
few remaining exotic translations and reformatting and polishing the book.
Then the poetry press said that on reconsideration the project was too big
for its resources. Hence Ink Water, an on-demand publisher, with an
editorial process that has been both scrupulous and prompt. I've had a lot
more difficulty with more traditional publishers, especially with the
introduction of typographical errors even though I submitted the text in
electronic format. On-demand publishing cuts out the expense of a press run
and of stockpiling printed copies of a book by producing copies in any
number just in relation to demand.