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(This episode is marked as explicit because of extensive discussion of death and suicide.)
Here is a little extra to the episode because Charles Adrian really can’t get this poem out of his head:
Episode image is a detail from the cover of The Dream Police by Dennis Cooper, published by Grove Press in 1995; cover design by John Gall, cover art by Nayland Blake.
Screenshot of a tweet by Griffyn Gilligan, posted on 12th October, 2020.
Content note: there is a lot of talk of death and suicide in this episode. If you are in the UK and would like to talk to someone in confidence, you can reach Switchboard LGBT at https://switchboard.lgbt/ or by phone on 0300 330 0630, and you can reach the Samaritans at https://www.samaritans.org/ or by phone on 116 123.
Taking a very personal look at a poem that has been stuck in his head since the previous episode of this podcast, Charles Adrian talks about the poem Swimmer by Dennis Cooper and some of the things that it brings up for him.
Clarification: In the coda to this episode, Charles Adrian talks about queer sexualities having been criminalised only a generation or two ago. He is talking, of course, very parochially, about the situation in the UK, where he lives. In many parts of the world, queer expression in all its forms remains criminalised. You can find a map of countries that criminalise LGBT people here although this does not include countries in which attacks against LGBT people are either tolerated or actively encouraged by the state. You can read about the situation in Chechnya, for example, in the Guardian here.
You can find Charles Adrian’s conversation with Uwern Jong here and you can follow Griffyn Gilligan on Twitter here.
The Dream Police by Dennis Cooper was previously discussed in Page One 111 and Page One 185. Another book by Dennis Cooper is discussed in Page One 72.
A transcript of this episode, as well as a transcript of the ‘extra’, is below.
Episode recorded: 13th and 14th October, 2020.
Episode released: 10th November, 2020.
Book listing:
Swimmer from The Dream Police by Dennis Cooper
Links:
Welcome to Chechnya in the Guardian
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 186th Page One. Today is the 13th of October, 2020. It's a Tuesday. And, yeah, before we get started, I should say that this episode will contain mention of death and possibly of suicide. And it's death of, yeah, quite a young person.
This is a... This is another special - this is not a Page One In Review episode - and I'm making it just because I can't get Dennis Cooper's poem Swimmer out of my head. I... yeah, so I talked about this poem in the previous episode - the 185th Page One - and in that episode I also talked about how sometimes - well, often - I am afflicted by a kind of esprit d'escalier when I'm editing these episodes - you know, because I realise that there are so many more things that I want to say about the books that I've been talking about. And this is the case here. And rather than tack it on to the next episode, I thought: “Well, I'll just... I'll just take a little bit of time to talk about this poem again here.” I also just want to acknowledge that I... yeah, I have talked many times on this podcast about how I don't get on with poetry and many times I have come across poems - I've been introduced to poems or I have talked about poems - that I love. And so, yeah, I think it's time to stop saying that I don't get on with poetry. And perhaps I should go all out the other way. I'll just... I'll flip this completely. It'll become a poetry appreciation podcast. We'll do the whole thing again - same guests, but they have to bring poems and they only get to read the first line. We'll call it Line One. [laughs] That will be, yeah, very clever.
But, yeah, so until I get round to doing that I should probably explain for anybody who's new to the podcast and this is the first... you know, if this is the first episode that you're listening to: Hello! Welcome. This is a book podcast and recently I've been making episodes in which I'm going through all of the books that I've been given over the last eight years of doing this podcast. And in the previous episode - in the 185th Page One - I talked about this book, The Dream Police by Dennis Cooper, which is a collection... well, it's Selected Poems, 1969 - 1993 and... So I read from a poem called First Sex and then I read the whole of a poem called Swimmer. And I think I said that I... I like this poem, this poem speaks to me, but, yeah, the more I... the more I think about it, the more I read over it, the more I listen to it, the more I... I'm impressed by its apparent simplicity. It's... It says a lot of things to me and I... yeah, I wanted to share some of those.
Let me read it again for you. In case you haven't listened to the previous episode and missed my [laughing] previous reading of it, here it is for you:
Swimmer
When a small girl
explores the lake with a mask
she rubs against Eric, months there
gliding the depths,
arms straight out like a plane.
His trunks nine times too small.
Now when he drifts ashore
girls will put out their eyes
rather than toss him
a look like dreaming.
Monday Dave calls me
at a party,
kissing my stupid mouth
with the news.
As I wake Tuesday
I lie for hours
thinking of death,
then push myself to my cold feet.
When men pull Eric
out of the lake
the water follows him up
like a long gown.
So there you go. That's the poem. And I s... Yeah, I imagine that, listening to this, you won't know that the last verse is both the bit about the narrator - “As I wake Tuesday I lie for hours thinking of death, then push myself to my cold feet” - and also: “When men pull Eric out of the lake the water follows him up like a long gown”. That's all together inside one verse and it seems to me... That's... Yeah, that's the first and the main bit that I wanted to return to. I was really struck by the neatness of what I see as the narrator's identification with Eric. I mean, first of all, because he - and I'm choosing to assume that the narrator is he - that he is lying for hours thinking of death and then pushes himself to his cold feet - his cold, possibly corpse-like feet. And then just alongside that he has the image of Eric being pulled out of the lake - also from horizontal. Perhaps to... You know, he was... Eric was floating - we know that - in the... “gliding in the depths”, his “arms straight out like a plane”. So we have the image of Eric horizontal and then pulled out and “the water follows him up like a long gown”. Also cold, one assumes, Eric is.
So. Anyway. These two images sit side by side in my head now. And what I was... Yeah, one... well, one of the things that I was thinking about was how common it is in the LGBTQ experience - and particularly, I think, in the young LGBTQ experience - to spend time with death and to spend time thinking about death. I mean, yeah, first of all because the rate of suicide among LGBTQ people is disproportionately high. And then, I suppose as a... perhaps as a knock-on effect, one hears about death among LGBTQ people, both because it's in the news and because it's in the stories that we read and watch and listen to... the fiction. There is... Yeah, death at the hands of other people and death at one's own hands among LGBTQ people is very present in the culture. And... And then, also, it can be intolerable - it can feel intolerable - to live as an LGBTQ person, you know, in a society that is hostile to us.
And... So that... I guess that's why that's been swirling around my brain. It feels like an acknowledgment of that - a really nice acknowledgement of that. I mean, he spends hours, he lies for hours thinking of death. And I guess, yeah, I would assume he's thinking about Eric - or the thoughts are provoked by the fact of Eric's death - but it's not... he doesn't say: “I lie for hours thinking of Eric”. “I lie for hours...” - or “thinking of Eric being dead” - “I lie for hours thinking of death”. So that... Then there's that little door that opens towards, again, the question that I think a lot of LGBTQ people ask themselves: “Would I be better off dead?” You know, people have said that about LGBTQ people and there... I think there can come a point where you feel like: “Oh, this pain is... is so great - this... this... the pain of rejection, or the pain of not being normal, the pain of not seeing oneself in culture, the pain of not being s... not being seen, the pain of not being celebrated and supported, the pain of seeing the... the wish in people's eyes that... that you were different, that you were not as you actually are...” All of those things, I think, can lead to the... the question of: “Well maybe... Yeah, maybe it would be a happier existence not to be.” And I d... I... At the age of forty, I don't... I don't think that's true but it's certainly something that I spent a lot of time thinking about when I was a teenager.
And... And so that... yeah, that's... that's all here for me in this... in this poem. And there are all these other little clues. The idea that... so: “girls will put out their eyes rather than toss him a look like dreaming” in an earlier verse, when Eric drifts ashore. And in there, there's this little... this little knowledge that the world - and of course it's changing but... I don't know when this particular poem was written but, you know, thirty years ago or more - the world is organised according to a template, according to which cisgender and heterosexuality are assumed and the desire of teenage girls confers status on teenage boys because this is... it's supposed to be what you want. The desire of teenage boys does not confer status on teenage boys. And that... I... Yeah, I feel like that's just in there - the... the... the awareness that Eric is no longer desirable to these girls and perhaps he was and even that, even the desire of these girls was not enough somehow. It didn't save him that they found him attractive in the past. And it is meaningless - it means nothing - that this... that the narrator perhaps found Eric attractive or that there was something between them - there was a love or a... a friendship, an identification, whatever it is that there is between the narrator and Eric.
I have questions about Eric and whether Eric is perhaps trans. I don't think that's the point. The point is that, it seems to me... and this... again, we don't know how Eric died but the... I feel like pervading this poem is the idea of suicide and that Eric - if not, perhaps, the narrator projecting - but that Eric is... is trapped by cis-heterosexual masculinity and the water dissolves the contours of his body. His trunks are now nine times too small. And originally I was like: “Oh, have his trunks shrunk?” And of course: No. His body has bloated, his body has expanded.
I also think it's really significant that it's men who pull Eric out of the lake. That line: “When men pull Eric out of the lake”. It could be: “When Eric is pulled” or “When they pull Eric out of the lake” - there are... there are other options there. But it's... it's men who pull Eric out of the lake and the men... [considering noise] yeah, and it's not just the men but, you know, you are policed... in terms of your... as a... as a queer person, you are policed by men, sometimes violently. I'm lucky enough not to have experienced that in my life but that, again, is an extremely common experience for LGBTQ people of all genders. And it's... yeah, it's men who pull Eric out of the lake. And I think there are two very distinct possibilities for that: There's an image of Eric surging out of the lake almost triumphantly - you know, like something from a Busby Berkeley musical on... you know, almost on the shoulders of these men with his gown of water. And then there's the men who pull him out who are also the men who put him in the lake. And who perhaps don't understand that that's what they've done. They may not know that.
Yeah, so those... Yeah, those are thoughts that have been swirling around my brain and I wanted to share them. Obviously it's a very personal reading of that poem. I think, perhaps... I don't know, maybe all readings of everything [self-deprecating laugh] are personal. Its sounds so banal when I say it, doesn't it. But, yeah, I feel the impulse to apologise for sharing such a personal reading of this poem and at the same time there's a voice that says: “How else could you respond to this poem? How else could anybody respond to this poem?” But, yeah, so I offer that in this little special, this 186th episode of my podcast. I don't... [laughing] Yeah, I don't know if that's how I was taught to read poetry. I'm not sure that it was. [pause] Yeah, I don't know that I was encouraged to just spend time with a poem and to allow it to be so personal. [pause]
Right. Thank you for listening to this. Thank you for choosing to listen to my podcast. I send you love and, yeah, if you are somebody who is struggling with suicidal ideation I think one of the most dangerous parts of that can be the feeling that you are alone - the isolation that comes with those thoughts and feelings and the idea that you... it's too dangerous to talk about them with people. I would encourage you to talk to somebody. I think... Yeah, it seems to me that isolation is one of the most dangerous and damaging things. I'm not an expert. I don't have advice but... yeah. Or I guess that's my advice.
Right. Yeah. That's it. I'm done for today. Thank you very much and please look after yourselves and each other.
Wait... Sorry, I'm not done. I thought I was. It's now Wednesday the 14th of October, 2020, and I've just been editing what you've just heard and... So I wanted to add a coda to this episode - which was itself, of course, a kind of coda - because...
So in 2013 when I had Uwern Jong on the podcast for the 29th Page One - Uwern Jong who, for several years at school, slept in the bed next to mine - I asked Uwern whether he thought it made sense for LGB and T to be thrown together in that acronym. And, I mean, my thinking has developed a lot in the years since that and I wouldn't ask that question now but the reason I asked that question then was because I was wondering if the putting together of those quite different things encouraged confusion about what they are. LG and B are sexual orientation markers, T is about gender, then you have Q - which [laughing] I'm not sure I entirely understand but it encompasses a lot of very different things - and then possibly I, standing for ‘intersex’, which is something else again. And, in fact, to be fair to me asking that question, only two years ago I sat through a court case where lawyers and judges alike use the words “sexual orientation” every time they wanted to talk about gender and gender expression and nobody corrected them or picked them up on that. But more and more insistently recently the question “Should LGB and T stay together?” has been asked as a way to begin driving a wedge between different parts of that community as part of a wider transphobic movement that is not, apparently, ashamed to try and recruit people whose sexualities were criminalised only a generation or two ago.
And... So there's the... the background to me... I mean, in a way, this is a, kind of... a thing I've wanted to correct for a little while ever since I... ever since I transcribed the 29th Page One and just cringed inside hearing myself ask that question. But it so happens that just the other day Griffyn Gilligan, who gave me The Dream Police by Dennis Cooper, from which the poem I've been talking about was taken - Swimmer... W...? How did that sent... Yeah, so: Just the other day Griffyn Gilligan tweeted [laughing] a really good... just a really good answer to my question. And so I wanted to read that out here because I can't better it. He wrote:
The reason LGBTQ+ activism sticks together is that desire, sense of self, and bodily autonomy are a package deal. When you pick at the threads of transness to defend gayness, you unravel things for all of us.
Yeah. I have no more to add to that. I think that's just beautiful.
But one more thing to add to the episode which is that, in case you would like to talk to somebody in confidence about how you're feeling or what you're experiencing, I thought I should just add here that in the UK you can reach Switchboard LGBT at... so online at switchboard.lgbt - "switchboard” is [spelling] s w i t c h b o a r d dot l g b t - or by phone on 0300 330 0630 and you can reach the Samaritans at samaritans.org - that's [spelling] s a m a r i t a n s dot o r g - or by phone on 116 123.
Okay, now I'm done. There are still things I want to fix in this episode. I... [frustrated] Argh! So many things I didn't say as well as I would like to have done. But it's done. I am absolutely done now. Yeah, it's... we're... Yeah, I'm going move on. We're going to talk about other books in the next episode. Okay. Thanks. Thanks. Bye.
Jingle
Thank you for listening to Page One. For more information about the podcast, please go to pageonepodcast.com.
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]
186 extra transcript:
Charles Adrian
Hello, Charles Adrian here. Today is Friday the 16th of October, 2020, and I'm still thinking about this poem Swimmer by Dennis Cooper. I'm about to record the 29th Page One In Review but, yeah, I just want to take two more minutes to talk about this poem because... yeah, there's... So. Well.
So, in case you don't know what I'm talking about, you can listen to the 185th or the 186th Page One for some context but this is a poem by Dennis Cooper called Swimmer and it's about a guy called Eric who is drowned and his body is discovered. And the lines that have been preoccupying me, let's say, for the last two days are the... so, it's the third verse, the beginning of the third verse. It says:
Monday Dave calls me
at a party
That's it. That's just [counting] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 words. And I've been thinking... well, first of all who's Dave? Is he a friend of Eric's? Is he a friend of the narrator's? Are they all three friends? Is Dave the narrator's community, or part of the narrator's community, or part of Eric's community? Do they... Do they know about each other? Those questions I find very interesting because, yeah, I'm interested to know what connections do... do these people have. I was talking about isolation in the previous... you know, when I... in that 186th Page One, to which this is the extra little bit - the coda to a coda to a coda. So yeah, there's... there's this other guy, Dave. He's the only other named person in the poem so I... yeah, I've been thinking a lot about Dave.
But more than that, what I realised was that when I first read this I kind of skipped past that “Monday Dave calls me at a party” because I thought: “Yeah, that's... I mean, people do that”. But of course these poems were written between 1969 and 1993. I don't know when this one was written. It's not like the narrator of this poem has a cell phone. You know, they don't have mobile phones in the seventies, eighties or early ninenties. You know, unless you worked in Wall Street you didn't have a mobile phone, did you? So presumably Dave has called the house where the party is happening. I mean, also - side note - it's a Monday night and the guy's at a party. I think that's interesting.
But, yeah, more than that, Dave must have called the house. And I don't know if you've ever called the house where a party is happening but there's a... there's a lot going on just in that, isn't there? You know, you've got to call the house, you've got to hope that somebody picks up because often they don't. It's not their house, it's not their responsibility. But maybe somebody comes past the phone while it's ringing and picks it up and you've got to go: “Hi, it's Dave. Is... Is Dennis there?” Let's call him Dennis. And... So then you've got to hope that the person who's picked up the phone is not too drunk or too high to go and find Dennis - or to... even to know who Dennis is. And then maybe they do know who Dennis is and they go off to find Dennis and they forget and they don't come back. And you're just there waiting. You know, if you've done this I'm sure you'll know this feeling of just waiting, hearing the party going on in the background, not knowing whether the person you want to speak to is coming to the phone at all. You can't be sure that they are at the party - you might have been given [laughing] false information.
And then maybe somebody else comes past and sees the... the handset just sitting - you know, the phone off the hook, basically - and tidies it up... you know, hangs up on you. Because people do that. They don't [laughing] necessarily check. Or maybe they do check and they're too drunk to hear that there's anyone there and they go: “Hi. Hi. Is there anyone there?” And you say: “Yes, it's Dave. Is Dennis there?” And they go: “Hi. Hi. Is there... I don't think anyone's there, I don't think...” and then they hang up. And you've got to call again and say: “Hi, it's Dave. Is Dennis there?” And maybe eventually Dennis is found. I mean, presumably he is because Dennis gets the news, you know, as far as this poem is concerned. So Dennis is found. You know, he's pulled out of whichever room he was in or maybe he was in the garden or he's pulled up from the couch or dragged out of the bathroom. Whatever. And he comes to the phone and he says: “Yeah? Yeah, what?” And Dave says: “Oh, hi. Dennis… Eric's body's been found.” And that's a... Yeah, it's a... that's a big moment, it seems to me. Not least because Eric's been gone for months. He's been in the water for months. We know that.
And so when I first read this... when I was first talking about this in the 185th Page One I talked a little bit about the second half of that verse - “kissing my stupid mouth with the news”, which really struck me - but the... yeah, there's so much going on just in those first seven words from that verse. Dennis Cooper's amazing! [musing] Yeah. I have... I mean, obviously, I've... I read all these poems and I... I liked them but I wonder if maybe every poem would come apart and open up for me like this. I don't know. Or whether this poem is special. Anyway, that's been preoccupying me, let's say, over the last few days [laughing] and I just, yeah couldn't resist talking more about it.
Okay. I'm going to... I'm going to start recording the 29th Page One In Review now. Thanks for your... Oh, what's the word? Forbearance, I think is probably the word. I think that's probably the appropriate word in this case. Thank you very much for your forbearance and your patience with my... as I say, my preoccupation. Okay. Yeah. Bye. Bye.
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]