Tim Dyke
Poetry and Prose
1.
I like to go to the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver whenever I can. I live in Honolulu, so I only get there every other year or so. Recently, during one such pilgrimage, as I walked through the galleries, a man asked me if I ever looked at myself. I was admiring huge paintings with my friend from Fort Collins, my museum companion for the day. My friend casually mentioned to me that on her heterosexual dating app profile, she describes herself as an untamable woman.
2.
I don’t write poetry as well as I write prose, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.
3.
Nearly a decade-and-a-half ago, when I was a 47-year-old creative writing student in a graduate program full of brilliant folks in their early twenties, I pushed my way into poetry classes even though I was there in Arizona to study fiction. Why would I put myself in a situation where I’d stand out as the prose writer when I could stay in the fiction room and stand out as the old man? Why would I rather be separated by genre-choice than by age? Why would I prefer alienation based on something I chose over alienation based on a difference I could not alter or control? The questions answer themselves.
4.
I’ve always been an outsider. I was a closeted gay boy in the 1970s and ‘80s. In a forty-year career as a high school English teacher, I have been the lone out-of-the-closet, queer faculty member much longer than I’ve been one color in the spectrum of a rainbow-hued teaching squad. Even amongst gay men, I am an outsider. I define myself as asexual, aromantic and agender. I don’t want to have sex or romance with anyone other than myself. I’m not trying to be manly or to get in touch with my fem side.
5.
Perhaps I write poems in order to learn more about prose. To use an analogy of physical fitness, perhaps my forays into poetry are a kind of cross-training. When Herschel Walker was a Dallas Cowboy, in the 1980s, he studied ballet so he could learn secrets about the body that none of his opponents on the football field would have discovered.
6.
When I read and write poetry, I wonder if language can move through space without moving through time.
7.
Maybe it’s weird that I’m writing about Herschel Walker now that he’s revealed himself to be a terrible senatorial candidate.
8.
I feel like I might be losing the plot here a little bit. I’m beginning to veer across the line separating productive self-reflection from anxiety-ridden over-thinking. Patterns of thoughts around anxiety lead to self-sabotage.
9.
To consider another creaky sports analogy, think of basketball players who are expert at shooting right-handed. If one of those athletes began practicing more with the left hand, day in and day out, month after month, you might say they were dedicating themself to self-improvement. You might also say they were neglecting, perhaps even rejecting, their own strengths.
10.
There’s a difference between humility and insecurity. I am a person who cannot take a compliment. Tell me I am good at something, and I will tell you all the reasons you are wrong. If this sounds like humility, it’s not. I have rejected my own strengths before. I cheated on tests and quizzes in high school. This could have been because I wasn’t confident in my abilities. This could also, however, have been a form of intentional self-ruin. I’ve always been a good student, more or less. Why did I willingly put my reputation at risk? Was punishment more alluring than success? Am I a masochist? Am I writing poems and showing them to people because I’m a masochist?
11.
Paul McCartney wrote an unsuccessful symphony once. Imagine one of the greatest pop songwriters of the 20th Century feeling like he would be taken more seriously as a composer if he could write classical music. Imagine a fiction writer who thinks they will be taken more seriously as crafters of language if they write poetry. Maybe I’ve fallen for that siren song.
12.
I love poetry, but I don’t love poetry more than I love prose. I enjoy prose poems. I enjoy lyric essays and poetic storytelling. I like the spaces between genres. Genres seem flimsy and porous because there is so much action in liminal space. Gender also seems flimsy and porous because there is so much happening in liminal space. To think about between-spaces is to think about what a person can gain from being an outsider. What epiphanies dwell between the parameters of genres and gender?
13.
Now, of course, I’m talking about queerness.
14.
The Untamable Woman and I had accidentally entered this weird competition with these other visitors to the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. A man and a woman seemed to be competing with The Untamable Woman and me over a bench in front of a garage-door-sized canvas of black splotches and splashes of red. A glimpse of yellow. The Untamable Woman was the youngest of the four of us. I’d judged the other man and woman to be in their sixties, as am I. None of us mind standing in front of paintings, but I think we’d all agree it’s nice to rest upon a good gallery-bench once in a while.
15.
I perceived that The Untamable Woman perceived that I perceived that the other man and woman in the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver perceived us as enemies. The Clyfford Still Museum is not large. The Untamable Woman and I were on our third lap through the exhibit rooms. Yes, at some point we noticed this other man and woman on this particular bench. We also noticed other times when they weren’t sitting there. They seemed to think they owned that bench. I could feel telepathic messages from The Untamable Woman suggesting it was time to deescalate the situation.
16.
The Untamable Woman is one of two close friends of mine who like art museums and live in the Denver Area. The day after spending an afternoon with The Untamable Woman at the Clyfford Still Museum, I met up with my Honolulu friend who now lives in Denver. She had been a student in my writing class in 2012. She’s an untamable woman herself. For some reason, she and I really wanted to see this exhibit at the Denver Art Museum on Mexican chairs.
17.
I shouldn’t say, “for some reason.” I know the reason we wanted to see the exhibit: they let you sit in the chairs. I like art exhibits where you can touch the stuff. I mean, I’m not going to touch a Van Gogh painting, but chairs invite you to sit. Obviously.
18.
My Honolulu friend who is also an untamable woman is a dancer. She noticed that no one at the Mexican chair exhibit acted as people usually do in museum galleries. No one was standing in front of paintings quietly. Visitors to this exhibit were leaping up from chairs, squatting on stools, rolling over bean bags, hanging from swings. The Mexican chairs mandated improvised choreography.
19.
Neither my Honolulu friend who is also an untamable woman nor I was high in the sitting room. There was something psychedelic, though, about all those chairs. Weren’t we speaking of masochism? I tried to squat onto this chair that was about half as tall as a wooden warehouse pallet.
20.
Poetry is word-art you kind of have to sit in.
21.
Stories move characters through time. Essays propel readers through the chronology of memory or through the logic of association and argument. I don’t want to get too esoteric, but in poetry the relationship to time comes from the letters and typographical marks themselves. It takes time to say a word. Certain combinations of words create specific rhythms. The rhythms contribute to how the words are understood. The spaces between words and lines create silence.
22.
As one who grew up a closeted boy, I have been wounded by the percussion of silence and empty space.
23.
I’m writing this in June in 2024 during this historical period when governments are attempting to legislate the silence of the closet back into education and literacy.
24.
I feel a lot of queer pride when I read and write poetry. Not every poem is about LGBTQIA+ identity. I know there’s homophobia and transphobia in the poetry world. I know all this. I also know many queer folks who have had to struggle with words. We struggle with the words we are called. We struggle with the words we call ourselves. We have developed codes for talking about what we’ve been told not to name. We say gay when they say we can’t say gay. We insist on our pronouns. Reading and writing poetry helps me negotiate my way through worlds made by language. I’m not implying that queer life is easy. I’m asserting that queer life is poetic.
25.
The cliché is that art is in the eye of the beholder. It’s also in the skin. Art seeps. The other man in the gallery at the Clyfford Still Museum asked me if I ever looked at myself. I could feel thought rays coming to me from The Untamable Woman. She telepathically was suggesting I find a bridge across this awkward gallery-bench situation. I asked the other man, “Did you just ask me if I touch myself?”
26.
The other man was probably a couple of years older than I am. He was dapper. He insisted that he said watch, not touch. He gestured toward my arm tattoos. He pointed at the colorful logo on my t-shirt. He said I looked like a work of art myself. I could feel The Untamable Woman scanning for sarcasm or creepiness.
27.
It seemed like a pretty sincere situation.
28.
The other man in the gallery pointed to the other woman and introduced her as an artist and as his wife. In front of the Clifford Still painting, we were now having a conversation about beauty and the definition of art.
29.
Earlier in the morning on that Clyfford Still Museum visiting day, I had left my hotel room at around 7 AM and went for a walk down Broadway in search of this biscuit restaurant. I was struggling with jet lag and sleep adjustment. Two men approached carrying whiskey bottles. As one of the men passed me in a crosswalk, he said, “Hey Big Man, I like your arm art.”
30.
I am a 61-year-old white man who is 6’3” and 235 pounds. I chose to accept this exhortation in the middle of the street as a compliment. I also decided to take the gallery man’s look-at-myself question as a compliment. I responded with earnestness. I asked him if he’d seen the Barbie movie. He said he hadn’t, but his wife had.
31.
She was sitting on the bench again. For the first time, I noticed she had a cast on her foot. Shit. Maybe I had been obnoxious about the bench after all. I felt vibes from The Untamable Woman. She wanted me to redirect my anxiety, to focus in on my Barbie reference.
32.
I asked the woman on the bench if she remembered the scene where Barbie sits next to the old woman at the bus stop. She nodded. I told them I saw the movie with my 90-year-old mother.
33.
My mother was actually 87 at the time. What’s the harm of a little exaggeration?
34.
I told the other man and woman that my mother cried during the scene. I told them that this made me realize that everyone is a work of art. I wasn’t sure the man and his artist wife were buying what I was selling. I suppose there was something trite about my profundities.
35.
There was nothing trite about the situation at the Mexican chair exhibit. Sitting isn’t really a trite activity. Squatting and grunting and laughing and engaging with the part of one’s body that perceives softness and hardness. Anchoring such perception in the butt. Negotiating the social codes embedded in acts of sitting. None of that is trite.
36.
Poetry might be trite, but with the good poems, you can avoid trite experiences by sitting on the words and reading the rhythms of the silences and between-spaces.
37.
To understand what I mean when I say there are social codes embedded in the act of sitting, consider some questions. Who sits and who stands? Who do we stand and sit up and down for? Who rides shotgun? Who sits behind the desk? Who sits at the restaurant table near the bathroom? Why is it perceived as unmanly if a dude sits down to pee? Why do some popstars write requirements for brand new toilet seats into their touring contracts?
38.
Poems do have a relationship to time, but the passage of time in poetry might reveal itself through shape and the negotiation of space.
39.
Touch my assonance and grind up against my penetrating analysis. Don’t expect me to know what’s happening. The moth is a hurdle but not a hindrance. The moth is a myth but not a mother. I want to accelerate like celery. I want to aspirate into lettuce cups. Cupid is cubed. Sasquatch is squashed into an abandoned Volkswagen. Rabbit has the runs. Sing in low frequencies. Sing solos. Sentience plus loss equals fingertips.
40.
That last section came from a poem I wrote recently.
41.
I’m not saying that’s good poetry, really. It probably could be once the balances between the said and the unsaid, between the intentional and the accidental, between the funny and the not funny are worked out. Mostly, though I just enjoyed writing it. I feel like queer language balances between all those things too: said & unsaid, intentional & accidental, funny & serious.
42.
Maybe all I really have been saying this whole time is that queerness and poetry are best understood when you can sit in them for a while. To say one is queer is to commit an act of language. To say one is queer is to commit to life beyond language. Poetry is life in language. Great poetry is the language of life beyond language.
43.
Clyfford Still was described by some critics as an action painter. He wasn’t painting representation. He wasn’t painting emotion. (Or so the theory goes.) His paintings documented the action of their creation.
44.
My body documents the action of its desecration when I stall out mid-squat in an attempt to sit on the chair that is half as tall as a wooden warehouse pallet.
45.
The chair no taller than half a warehouse pallet had been positioned at the end of a line of four wooden stools. I sat in the tallest, and my feet met the floor. The second one required minor squatting. The third chair challenged the integrity of my knees. The fourth chair was floor sculpture, like Carl Andre without the murder allegations.
46.
My Honolulu friend who is also an untamable woman said she felt like Goldilocks as she chose which chair to sit in. I laughed.
47.
I chose. I bent from the legs and aimed my butt at the surface of this mocking chair. I got stuck in my descent, unable to go up or down.
48.
I’m kind of stuck now as I move to the conclusion of this piece of writing. Sometimes you have to brace for a fall and roll over. Sometimes you have to risk triteness and refer to the moment in the Barbie movie. Cupid is cubed. Sasquatch is squashed into an abandoned Volkswagen. Rabbit has the runs. Sing in low frequencies. Sing solos. Sentience plus loss equals fingertips.
49.
Touching, as an action, proceeds through time. Touch, as an act, occurs as one moment in time. If I say queer language touches me, that would be trite, but if I say poetry helps me turn trite language into queer language, that would almost make sense to me. I mean, I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if that does make sense to me. The prose I write learns to sit in the chair. The prose I write learns to share the gallery-bench. I think that makes sense to me.
50.
Let’s sit with these memories for a while. Let’s sit on these metaphors for a while.
Author’s Bio
Tim Dyke is a teacher and writer who lives with parrots in Makiki. He has published a chapbook titled Awkward Hugger, a book-length poem titled MAGA, and a collection of prose poems called Atoms of Muses with Tinfish Press. His memoir, Backbends, will be published by High Frequency Press in 2025. Tim has taught high school English at Punahou School since 1992.
Photo by staff