67 Mixed Messages

Ed Allen

An author's statement

 

One reason I have ended up as a writer is that my parents read stories and poems to me, usually at bedtime. I think I came to associate that sense of security with the things they read to me, so that gradually the stories and verses themselves began to seem like a kind of protection against childhood fears. This gut-level sense of the solace to be had in poetry and stories is perhaps part of what Frost was talking about when he described a poem as “a momentary stay against confusion.”

Growing up, I spent a fair amount of my time daydreaming, amusing myself with my own thoughts. In school I was surrounded by a children’s culture that prized rhymed insults, disgusting songs, parodies, rituals. I was particularly lucky to grow up amid the rich tradition of children’s metrical formulae for determining who in a game will be “it.”

For me, these childhood experiences, in their directness and simplicity, are the original source of literature. Believing in the importance of that source sometimes makes me impatient with poetry and prose that tries to be too rarified, too intellectual, and too adult. (Fortunately, that impatience doesn’t keep me from liking Wallace Stevens or Hart Crane.)

I’m glad that I’ve been able to keep one foot in poetry and one foot in prose. I don’t think that the distinctions between one and the other are ultimately all that important. I’ve written plenty of free verse, but I have tended to gravitate to poetry in rhyme and meter, perhaps just because I find it more fun. The sonnet form in particular seems to be a happy and versatile invention.

One of the things that has been particularly fun and particularly challenging about putting together 67 Mixed Messages has been the project of balancing the speaker’s sexual desire for Suzi with his own sense of sexual ambiguity. The heart of these messages is that they are mixed, that they are spoken in the voice of someone who is pulled so strongly in multiple directions that he is unable to narrow his desires down to the point where he can do anything about any of them—a sort of Miniver Cheevy character, pathetic and comic at the same time, and having some sense of his own absurdity.

Even though most of the sonnets focus on heterosexual fascination, it is clear to me that this sequence could not work without its bisexual undertone. If it were just about a middle-aged man yearning for a woman half his age, the story would sound too much like the ruminations of a borderline pedophile. I think the bisexual nature of the work has allowed me as a writer to take a step backwards and to look at this hopeless relationship from an ambiguous viewpoint that I hope will make the salaciousness of the speaker’s fantasies seem less creepy.

On the other hand, I didn’t want the voice of the poems to be perceived as distinctly gay, either. In fact, I asked the Library of Congress to change its Cataloging-in-Publication classification for the book from gay to bisexual, in the hope of emphasizing the mixed nature of these messages, so that the book, ideally, could become a celebration of sexual diversity, not just among different groups of people, but within one person.

67 Mixed Messages was originally 77 Mixed Messages, because I wanted to play with the title of John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs. (77 is an interesting number in itself, being exactly half of 154, the number of Shakespeare’s sonnets.) The acrostic form and the repeated refrain were things I started playing with, at first just as a stunt—but somehow I was able to stay with the form without getting bored, and was able to expand on it, include a subplot or two, and keep something of a narrative form going. The hardest thing was finding enough words that begin with the letter Z. (The letters V, C, and, surprisingly, E, also turn out not to be as common at the beginning of words as I would have expected.) I’m sure I’ll be faulted, with some justification, for some of my repeated Z words.