Never Not a Poet

David Wojnarowicz is remembered as many things—a painter, a photographer, a performance artist, a filmmaker, an activist, an essayist—but rarely as a poet. Perhaps this is because he published only a handful of mediocre poems during his life and one pretty good one. He was mostly self-taught, although in the fall of 1975, when he was 21 years old, he enrolled in a free workshop at the influential Poetry Project in New York City, taught by Bill Zavatsky. When I reached out to Zavatsky about that class (which also included a young and already prodigiously talented Eileen Myles), he wrote back, “What is your basis for studying [Wojnarowicz] or presenting him as a poet? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making a case against David-as-poet. …”

But he was, if only implicitly.

And he hasn’t been alone. In Fire in the Belly (2012), a biography of Wojnarowicz, Cynthia Carr writes that Wojnarowicz’s published poetry uses “imagery to conceal more than reveal.” This is a damningly accurate assessment for an artist whose later stock-in-trade was the revelation of dark truths and disturbing beauty. When I asked the poet, professor, and Wojnarowicz aficionado Jameson Fitzpatrick whether he regards Wojnarowicz as a poet, he eloquently dodged my question: “Anyone who calls the work they make ‘poetry’ is a poet.” As for Wojnarowicz’s classmate Eileen Myles? She thought he used poetry only as a launch pad. What does that say about his poems? Well, no one gives a shit about the launcher once the rocket hits the stratosphere.

Certainly, poetry is just a tiny subset of Wojnarowicz’s sprawling legacy. Today he is best remembered for his visual art, including paintings and photographs in the permanent collections of many major museums, and for his prose books and a series of films made with artists from the gory Cinema of Transgression, an underground film movement that emerged in New York in the mid-1980s. He was also a central figure in AIDS activism, renowned for ingenious political protests, such as his proposal to throw the bodies of AIDS casualties on the steps of the White House—an idea that partially inspired ACT UP’s 1992 “Ashes Action,” in which cremains were scattered on the White House lawn. Wojnarowicz’s interest in poetry is evident from a cursory glance at his oeuvre, with his heroes Arthur Rimbaud and Jean Genet appearing in some of his earliest visual work. But his own poems are harder to find.

Wojnarowicz himself did much to contribute to the low profile of his published poetry, treating it strictly as unimportant juvenilia. His archive at NYU—which contains a staggering array of handwritten diaries, used graffiti stencils, paper houses decoupaged with fake dollar bills, and other ephemera—is so all-encompassing that the conservationists there joke it’s hard to tell unfinished work from accidentally archived junk.

In his one notable published poem, “The Peach,” Wojnarowicz describes his hoarding tendencies:

I stood in the doorway noticing you did the same
as I’ve done while packing to vacate a room
that strange unexplained action where we’ll even pack
personal bits of refuse like scraps of paper
even the covering for some long ago candy bar
munched slowly in the quietness of an afternoon room

Unlike his other published poems, “The Peach” seems drawn from Wojnarowicz's real-life experiences and doesn’t use trite imagery (such as comparing his abusive alcoholic father to a lark, as in Wojnarowicz’s 1977 poem “My Father as the Red Lark Moving in a Photograph of Gypsies by the Sea”) to disguise his true emotions. “The Peach” feels like a poem, whereas his other work feels like what he’s been told poetry should be.

As Carr points out, the anthology in which “The Peach” appeared, Life Without Parole (a group chapbook published in 1976 by Zavatsky’s class), isn’t among Wojnarowicz’s papers. In fact, he kept none of the small journals that published his poetry, except one issue of RedM, which he cofounded with a friend. Years later, when asked to write a timeline of his life as an artist, he left out poetry entirely.

Is that the answer then, a duck under even the low bar Fitzpatrick set? No poetry, no poet?

Perhaps.

But the Wojnarowicz archive tells another story: hundreds and hundreds of pages of poetry, in scraps and verses and chunks so dense they might be mistaken for flash fiction. Some are dated and annotated, titled, and revised. Others are raw, typed out seemingly straight from sleep: poems about dreams about poetry, about Zavatsky naked, about a “bag of primo weed.” Many of the copies are from the mid-1970s, meaning Wojnarowicz held on to them through years of travel, apartment moves, drugs, sex, poverty, sickness, partying, making art, and breaking friendships. That has to mean something, right?

Or maybe I’m just looking at a box of candy bar wrappers.

***

On July 22, 1992, David Michael Wojnarowicz died as he had lived: a poor faggot in New York City’s rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side. Cause of death? Government inaction. Cause of death? Homophobia. Cause of death? AIDS.

He was 37 years old, and for the last few years of his life, his truth telling engendered endless controversy. The National Endowment for the Arts revoked funding for a 1989 exhibition curated by his friend, the photographer Nan Goldin, because of an essay Wojnarowicz wrote for the catalogue titled “Post Cards from America: X-Rays from Hell.” The weight and balance of the title, its formal symmetry and substantive dissonance, is a bit of poetry itself. But the NEA had little use for Wojnarowicz’s lapidary rage; his metaphors came in for particular sanction. Perhaps calling Cardinal John O’Connor, the archbishop of New York, a “fat cannibal from that house of walking swastikas up on Fifth Avenue” was impolitic, but that line stays with you.

A year later, the American Family Association—a straight supremacy group—used extreme close-ups of sexual acts in Wojnarowicz’s visual work to whip up conservative rage at the NEA. Wojnarowicz took the AFA to court for publishing his work out of context and won—a measly dollar. The judge argued that Wojnarowicz couldn’t prove that the organized national campaign to smear his reputation actually hurt sales of his art. Less than two years later, he was dead, and outside of academic and art world circles, he slipped quickly into semi-obscurity.

Then, in 2010, his work was displayed at the Smithsonian as part of the landmark Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture exhibition, which surveyed queer desire in American portraiture. Months after the show opened, right-wing protesters demanded the removal of a recut version of Wojnarowicz’s never-finished 1986–1987 film, A Fire in My Belly, because of an 11-second scene of fire ants crawling over a crucifix. Archived documentation suggests this image was intended to comment on how the Catholic Church had run roughshod over its own teachings in its efforts to Christianize (and colonize) Mexico. Wojnarowicz often used ants to symbolize humanity at its worst, and, as a born Catholic, he identified with Jesus as a social outcast. The film was a broadside against religious hypocrisy, not an attack on Catholicism.

Cunningly, however, protesters’ initial jeremiad mischaracterized Hide/Seek as a Christmas show (the exhibition ran over the holiday season), and instead of unpacking Wojnarowicz’s metaphors, they simply labeled A Fire in My Belly blasphemous.

Within 24 hours, and reportedly without ever speaking to the show’s curators, the museum capitulated and pulled the film. The resulting guerilla exhibitions of Wojnarowicz’s work—coupled, as writer Theodore Kerr points out, with a country now willing to discuss AIDS (at least in a white historical context)—returned Wojnarowicz to the public eye. A Fire in My Belly has since been viewed online more than a million times and was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2012, Carr published her acclaimed biography, and a flood of books, performances, museum shows, and tributes has followed.

Last year, at the apex of his reclaimed fame, Wojnarowicz was the subject of a blockbuster retrospective at the Whitney Museum. “Like an irate guardian angel, the American artist David Wojnarowicz was there when we needed him politically 30-plus years ago. Now we need him again,” the critic Holland Cotter declared in the New York Times.

Wojnarowicz’s poetry wasn’t in the Whitney retrospective, which otherwise touched on every part of his oeuvre, from sculpture to graffiti to film to painting. Again, the message seems clear: no poetry, no poet.

And yet there’s this, also from Cotter’s Times review: “For several years, [Wojnarowicz] identified as a poet—in my view, he was never not one.”

I wonder: is never not being a poet the same as being a poet?

***

Of course, Wojnarowicz’s poetry was in the retrospective. Sort of. It spindled shyly through the show, all stalk, no flower.

The exhibition’s title—History Keeps Me Awake at Night—was taken from Wojnarowicz’s 1986 painting History Keeps Me Awake at Night (for Rilo Chmielorz). Chmielorz, a multimedia artist, said the title was, in part, literal: Wojnarowicz had trouble sleeping during the weeks he was in Cologne, staying in the Anna Friebe Gallery while he worked on this and a series of other canvases. Collectively, they were the first of his history paintings, in the classical sense of a painting meant to convey a narrative (not a still life, landscape, or portrait). These dense and layered images are, for many, the apotheosis of Wojnarowicz’s creative work.

In History Keeps Me Awake at Night (for Rilo Chmielorz), a sleeping figure grimaces below a palimpsest of nightmares: a gunman aiming at the viewer, a broken sculpture and a toppled pillar, a faceless scientist, an angry alien. Repeated around the top edge of the canvas are patterns of dollar bills and national flags and crosshair targets, implicating the scene with capitalism, nationalism, and violence. The barrel of the gun is like a finger accusing the audience; this may be Wojnarowicz’s own fever dream, but everyone is endangered by the weight of this shared history.

David Kiehl, the curator of the Whitney retrospective, told me he believes many of Wojnarowicz’s titles were generated on the spot, at the demand of gallerists or collectors interested in purchasing work. But History Keeps Me Awake at Night has a surprisingly long backstory.

A few years before he made the painting, Wojnarowicz was in a band called 3 Teens Kill 4 (he played found sounds on a handheld tape recorder). He also wrote many of the band’s lyrics, including those for an unrecorded song titled “History Keeps Me Awake Some Nights.” The refrain begins

In nineteenfortytwo we had a blue blue sky
but it collapsed and hit the ground
it made such a nasty sound

The lyrics bear little resemblance to the painting, but the suggestion of an inherited disaster threads through both. Is it poetry? Well, it rhymes.

Deeper in the archive, however, there’s a sheaf of papers with versions of a poem also titled “History Keeps Me Awake Some Nights.” There’s a short version with handwritten edits and a longer version that seems to have been typed up multiple times, with a few small errors corrected on each copy in pen—perhaps extras to hand out at his class with Zavatsky.

It’s a sad and beautiful poem, with lines such as “though we have such fears of not existing / we fuck constantly so as not to forget ourselves.” But I’m drawn to one couplet in particular: “we have come out of our mothers bellies / to find ourselves at the end of ropes.”

Being born into an unfair and dangerous life was one of Wojnarowicz’s recurring themes. “The one-tribe nation,” he called it, or “the pre-invented world”: the crap that surrounds and defines us before we ever have a say in it, such as language and laws.

Although rarely the dominant theme, this idea wends through many of the poems in Wojnarowicz’s archive. In an unpublished piece titled “Childhood,” he describes himself as feeling “strapped to the masthead of / time and geography.” In a disjointed and untitled series of stanzas and lines on another page, he calls the “demolitionist dust” of war “our bloodlines and histories.” And in a poem titled “Letter Home,” which evokes many of his later essays, he describes the past infecting the present:

How slow the water shifts and turns
how slow these stones become houses
how fast they invented the car and the collision
[…]
I don’t want to become a windmill of slaughter
but those grey faced t.v. politicians and evangelists
are nothing more than nothing more
 
yap-yapping cartoon video death language
into my room into my ears into my collective head
my pillow is filled with their religiously stupid icons

Wojnarowicz’s entire oeuvre was an attempt to destabilize this inherited false narrative of America and let his authentic, angry, hurt, scared, sexual, and powerful queer self shine through the resulting cracks. “To speak about the once unspeakable can make the INVISIBLE familiar if repeated often enough in clear and loud tones,” he once wrote.

Long before he examined these themes in a monologue titled “Do Not Doubt the Dangerousness of the 12-Inch-Tall Politician” or in a painting for Chmielorz, he excavated this idea in poetry. Maybe it wasn’t loud enough. Maybe it wasn’t clear enough. But he repeated it, and eventually, people listened.

***

Wojnarowicz has fascinated me since I read his collection of essays Close to the Knives (1991) in college, probably sometime in 1997, not long after he died. It felt raw, as if he had opened his mouth and the entire book was born in a single howl. Drawn from Wojnarowicz’s own experiences (and, at times, borrowing those of friends and acquaintances), the book deals with child abuse, sexual molestation, homophobic violence, AIDS, poverty, and, most damningly, the willful blindness of those entrusted to protect the powerless, such as governments, parents, teachers, and religious officials.

Perhaps because I was a fellow fey child of the AIDS generation and the New York City suburbs, Wojnarowicz’s rage, desire, and fear spoke to me. But it wasn’t until I first encountered the Magic Box while curating an exhibition on queer history in 2011 that I began to seriously study him.

The Magic Box is a Florida orange crate (helpfully labeled “Magic Box”) found among Wojnarowicz’s things when he died. Its contents are an esoteric jumble: crystals, coins, action figures, crucifixes, photos of gurus, a saint, a skull, a cock ring, a stuffed toy snake, etc. It looks like a beginner’s eschatology set for the homosexual teen. In the entire Wojnarowicz archive at NYU—all 175 boxes—it’s mentioned exactly once: in an undated list in a journal from 1988, which simply says “Put Magic Box in installation.” But according to Carr, the Box never appeared in any of Wojnarowicz’s installations, and in 1988, he made no installations at all. But he kept the Box—and kept it a secret—until he died, four years later (and who knows how long he had it before that).

Handling this strange collection in the cool quiet of the archive, I could for the first time understand that reverent impulse that drives pilgrims thousands of miles to touch finger bones and grave cloths. The ritual of requesting and receiving each piece transformed ordinary research into an act of supplication; the granting of a unique privilege from the initiated to an acolyte. The holy cowboy, the hallowed cock ring—I balanced each carefully in my palm, hoping to imbibe a mystical vibration as much as the visceral knowledge of its weight and heft, its smoothest and roughest places.

The longer I looked at the Box, the more familiar its contents seemed. The gray mask with wire spiraling through its lips? A junior version of Wojnarowicz’s famous self-portrait with his lips sewn shut. The giant plastic fly? It holds down one corner of The Newspaper as National Voodoo: A Brief History of the USA, another of those early history paintings. The metal toy train? It rolled through a half dozen of his artworks, representing life hurtling forward as well as humanity’s thoughtless destruction. Poring through the box felt like looking at Wojnarowicz’s ideas in physical form—a symbolic dictionary, a Rosetta Stone for a private language.

A few years after the Hide/Seek controversy, I reached out to the show’s co-curator, Jonathan David Katz, to talk about the piece at the heart of the backlash, Wojnarowicz’s unfinished film A Fire in My Belly. Katz said he showed that film because it was unfinished. The Smithsonian wanted only video work that was under five minutes, which prevented Katz from including any of Wojnarowicz’s finished films. To Katz, reassembling the footage that comprised AFIMB seemed less an imposition on Wojnarowicz’s vision than abridging a finished film or leaving films out of the show entirely.

Like the Magic Box, AFIMB contains images that are familiar from the rest of Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre: the sad circus monkey, the spinning globe, the hands reaching out in supplication, the speeding train, and the image that got the film pulled from Hide/Seek, ants on a crucifix. Like the toys in the Magic Box, the meanings of these images are debatable, but that they had meaning, and a specific space in Wojnarowicz’s expanding cosmology, is inarguable.

“He would lard these images through his work,” Katz said as we watched the flickering black-and-white footage of AFIMB on my laptop. “If he found them particularly resonant, he would come back to them again and again.”

But here is where Wojnarowicz stumbled and perhaps why he is primarily remembered as a painter, prose writer, and photographer, not as a poet or filmmaker: the rhythm of his images. “He had a remarkably fast eye for catching metaphor,” Katz said. “But weaving metaphor into a full-on piece was difficult.” Wojnarowicz tried at least twice with AFIMB to capture the exploitative legacy of the colonization of Mexico before giving up. He used the images in other films (much as he did with lines from the poem “History Keeps Me Awake Some Nights”). Over and over again, this kind of artistic economy—return, recycle, reuse—crops up in Wojnarowicz’s art.

This works in a visual practice. Think Andy Warhol with his soup cans or Georgia O’Keefe with her flowers and skulls. But it can be frowned upon in poetry, as Fitzpatrick told me. “Of course, poets have motif,” he said. “But in mainstream schools of poetry, there’s that sort of anxiety about repetition, right? If you come up with a brilliant image, you can’t put it in every poem.”

Wojnarowicz was a master at collaging symbols into a synchronous statement in a painting. And in his prose, he pulled readers forward with wild torrents of words, firing off metaphors but never using them as the dominant explication of his ideas. But the finesse of building narrative from a highly structured series of images—of writing a poem or making a lyric film—still proved elusive by the time AIDS cut his life short. Perhaps knowing that he had so little time made time itself difficult for him to handle. He needed to say everything all at once.

Wendy Olsoff, the cofounder of P.P.O.W., the gallery that represents Wojnarowicz’s artistic estate, told me that she believed film was his next frontier. With just a little more time, he would have found his rhythm. Looking through the archive of his poetry, I wonder if that breakthrough would have allowed him to reach forward and backward simultaneously, to make films and poems he considered worth sharing.

But AIDS robbed Wojnarowicz twice: during his most fecund years, it preoccupied his world, as it did for every queer person—and then it killed him.

***

In the last two years of his life, Wojnarowicz’s painting practice shifted. The dense and apocalyptic history paintings melted away, replaced by deceptively simple canvases dominated by giant, beautiful flowers. He Kept Following Me is perhaps my favorite: two blood red anthuriums stretch across the canvas, their priapic yellow stamens aching upward. One seems to follow the other, a still life with cruising.

“Don’t ever give up on beauty,” he once told the photographer Zoe Leonard when she confessed to being conflicted about making photos of clouds during the first wave of the AIDS epidemic. “We’re fighting so we can have things like this, so we can have beauty again.”

Stitched into the canvases of Wojnarowicz’s flower paintings are small black-and-white inset images: the moon, a man jerking off, an ambulance, a collection of cells as seen through a microscope, a gas mask, a clock. From a distance, however, these register as tiny blips—bugs in the garden, if you will. Instead, beauty has stepped forward. Complications are still present, but they are the backdrop, not the focus. It feels, to me, like a declaration. Wojnarowicz is no longer fighting for a world of beauty on the mythical “other side” of the AIDS crisis; he’s claiming that world for himself, here and now. Flowers and viruses, fear and fucking—all of this is beautiful. His life is beautiful.

The flower paintings also contain texts written in tiny red letters that require a viewer to get as close to a canvas as a museum will allow. Watching each supplicant at the Whitney bend into the paintings, it was clear that Wojnarowicz was making viewers do what he didn’t have time for. “Smell the flowers while you can” are, in fact, the last words of Close to the Knives.

The text on He Kept Following Me is a riff on another Wojnarowicz essay, part of which repeats the phrase “in loving him, I saw ...” followed by various images that echo those in Wojnarowicz’s visual work: a prisoner’s hand, laborers digging fruitlessly, great buildings falling into decrepitude, men loving each other. Some feel like descriptions of scenes from A Fire in My Belly; another resembles the central image in his poem “The Peach,” a room empty of everything except the detritus of smoking (in “The Peach,” it’s an ashtray; in He Kept Following Me, it’s cigarette smoke). Even as his work evolves, Wojnarowicz is always reaching back into his past.

In this case, far back. In the unpublished poems in Wojnarowicz’s archive, one takes more forms than any other. Variously titled “Desire,” “Desire 23,” “Love Song 23,” and “I’ve Walked This Hallway Twentyseven Times,” it shares lines and images with another written and rewritten poem, “Dark Green.” Drafts of it vary from 40 lines to just 29. In one version, it seems to be notes for a film script; in another, lyrics to a song. In every version, it is sweet and aching, a poem of want and fulfillment, imprisonment and escape.

In the seven copies that all seem like variations on a single poem, it begins in scenes of suburban captivity until a “mysterious stranger” appears,

takes off his dusty clothes for a moment in time
lies down so easily like night among the streets
 
things are gentle; things move sideways
men encourage each other to lay their arms down

“In loving him,” Wojnarowicz finally tells us, he is freed “from the silence of interior life.” The very thing the “one-tribe nation” condemned Wojnarowicz for was also his way out. A freak alone is a monster, but a band of freaks is another tribe with another way of living, another way of loving. He carried this desire for fellow outcasts all of his life, from his earliest experiments in writing to his final finished paintings.

To those who argue that Wojnarowicz wasn’t a poet, I say this: his work is saturated with poetry, and poetry seeps upward through his life, like a water table importunate with spring. He may have “written poetry” for only a brief period in the 1970s, but forever after, he kept ideas, phrases, and images in his pocket, like rough pebbles waiting to be polished. Fitzpatrick told me he considered the label “poetry” something of a warning sign, a way to tell readers that language is broken here, with purpose. Poetry is a way to say “pay attention” and “don’t make assumptions.” Wojnarowicz’s work is about digging deeper and contravening expectations. That’s why critics can so easily misread his images; the images’ surfaces are not their interiors. It’s the magic in the Magic Box, the transubstantiation of the everyday into the holy. Wojnarowicz’s concern with language—his poetry—is the hidden strength under his so-called raw monologues. This is what “never not be” a poet means: to think in poetry, no matter what form those thoughts might eventually take.