Out of the Clouds

Halfway through my first phone call with the poet and scholar Bruce Boone, he almost convinces me my rampant enthusiasm for his new book is misguided, that this 400-page volume of selected works, many years in the making, is no big deal, why should anyone care? Bruce Boone Dismembered: Poems, Stories, and Essays (Nightboat Books, 2020), edited by the poet Rob Halpern, brings together four decades of Boone’s wonderfully sociable, socially engaged writing, including early poems and talks, essays, reviews, and ephemera. (A 1984 letter to Stephen King is a special treat; King didn’t reply.) The book is, if not exhaustive, certainly major. What’s it like, I ask him, to see so much of his work revived and collected in this way?

“If I was forty years younger, it might mean something,” he tells me. But at age 80, it doesn’t mean much. His limited mobility keeps him close to his home in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, where he has lived for 35 years. “What means much is when Bob comes for movies, or we go down to the corner for coffee. Or when Spencer comes over and we go out for a walk.”

Spencer is Boone’s dom, a sex worker he met online and has continued seeing for more than five years. Bob is Robert Glück, Boone’s close friend of many decades and the title character of My Walk with Bob (1979), Boone’s compendium of dialogues and reminiscences. Together, Boone and Glück cofounded the New Narrative school of queer experimental writing that emerged from Glück’s workshops in San Francisco in the late ’70s and ’80s.

Boone’s early work is quintessential New Narrative in that it lays down the code for a tradition that combines queer life writing and experimental form. Bridging then-separate lineages of identity-based movement writing and the avant-garde, New Narrative blends diaristic writing about friends, sex, and gossip with theory and pop culture. “We had the formula,” Boone told me. “Just do our lives, autobiographical—and throw in a lot of theory that shows we’re smart, so all the straight guys that command this respect”—he means Bay Area intellectuals at the time—“will say, ‘Whoa. That’s kind of interesting.’”

Much of Boone’s early work centers on the political potential of queer friendship, a core value that extends to his performance on the page. My Walk with Bob, for example, wanders through an afternoon with Glück as they walk the city, picking up questions of spirituality and love as they go. All the while, Boone is engaged in a parallel conversation with the reader: “When you tell something to someone, doesn’t it change their life forever?” he wonders. “And what does narrative open up into, if not human love, called into existence for the first time.” Throughout his work, Boone highlights the social functions of language, taking seriously the relationship between writer and reader, storyteller and audience—itself a kind of friendship.

Though we’re in our homes on opposite coasts, my conversations with Boone have the animated, exploratory quality of a long walk. For someone who describes himself as “terminally shy,” Boone is endearingly candid, and pretty soon we’re on a tear, swerving easily from queer sex writing to Catholic and Marxist guilt, from power exchange in sex to the canonization of New Narrative, from friends to writing to friendship again. Somehow it always comes back to that.

“He’s an absolute dream of a human,” says Halpern, whose exchanges with Boone have made their way into his own work. “The model that Bruce offers for the intimate relation between one’s writing and one’s friendships is really beyond compare. He offers an exquisite permission to live a life of writing that is inseparable from the life one shares with one’s friends.”

In an email to me, Glück simply writes: “My friendship with Bruce has been the most generative in my life.”

***

Boone was born in 1940 in Portland, Oregon—“before Oregon was a chic place,” he tells me. “It was just a backwater. We were this little hick town.” In the late 1950s, he moved to the Bay Area to attend Saint Mary’s College. After graduating in 1962 with degrees in philosophy and English, he followed a spiritual path, entering the Christian Brothers as a novice for a year and a half. “I was a postulant and took temporary vows,” he told Eric Sneathen in a recent interview (reprinted in the new book). “But when it came time to submit my name to the Council so I could take my permanent vows, [I] was rejected.” This rejection, in his view, was based not on his sexuality—“most of the novices were sleeping together,” he explained, a story that unfolds in his most well-known work, Century of Clouds (1980)—but because his intellectual curiosity was read as skepticism. “I asked too many questions,” he says. With an aim to teach, he moved back to the Bay Area to pursue graduate school at Berkeley.

“I couldn’t stand it,” he told Sneathen. “I felt like puking.” Deferring his studies, he traveled to Germany to study under Karl Rahner, a Jesuit theologian whose views heavily influenced the Second Vatican Council. After a year spent trying to reconcile his spiritual beliefs with his sexual desires, Boone threw up his hands and returned to San Francisco, where he sought out gay community and eventually, after many semesters off and on, completed his doctorate at Berkeley. His dissertation, Frank O’Hara’s Poems, was the first on O’Hara and a landmark of early O’Hara criticism. In his introduction to Bruce Boone Dismembered, Halpern connects Boone’s analysis of O’Hara’s poems as life writing to New Narrative’s insistence on the personal. The dissertation abstains from any overt political standpoint as per academic conventions of the time. But “like a return of the repressed,” Halpern observes, that standpoint “surges forth” in “Gay Language as Political Praxis” (1979), the most academic work included in Dismembered, and a pointed critique of the scholarly community’s initial refusal to contend with O’Hara’s queerness. In it, Boone identifies a coded gay language in O’Hara’s poems that he reads as socially formed and politically oppositional. “Gay language,” he determines, “is a trivialization that speaks and hides its catastrophe in relation to a future.”

That Boone’s groundbreaking and assured queer reading of O’Hara anticipated the emergence of queer literary studies a decade later may come as no surprise: Boone had been reading French theorists like Michel Foucault, whose History of Sexuality became core to the discipline upon the first three volumes’ translation into English in 1978, 1985, and 1986, respectively. (Boone read the volumes in French.) As a translator himself, Boone was among the first to bring Georges Bataille, transgressive philosopher of eroticism and spirituality, to an English audience.

By this point, Boone had already met Glück, who had responded to a housing ad Boone posted at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1970s. For various reasons, their imagined gay household never came to fruition, but Boone and Glück stayed friends, sharing work, walks, and ideas. In the late ’70s, Glück kicked off his weekly workshops at Small Press Traffic, a literary storefront in the Mission District, which Boone attended as something like an unofficial co-teacher. The workshops attracted writers such as Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Camille Roy, Michael Amnasan, and others, and grew into what is now known as the New Narrative school. “Bob was the extrovert,” Bellamy and Killian write in their introduction to the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977–1997 (2017), “while Bruce had the effective role of a ghost, spied in the shadows here and there.” Boone’s introversion, and his reputation as the more intellectual, or at least the more credentialed, of the two, made his attentions “harder to get,” Bellamy and Killian write, adding, “To interest him, one had to really display the right stuff.” Boone’s mentorship was particularly important to Bellamy’s development as a writer; her work shaped his in turn.

***

“In the years of friendship I see those I love in mosaic-like patterns, and me along with them,” Boone writes in Century of Clouds. “Who will ever know our names in a hundred years!” If it were up to Boone, few in the future would likely know his, as he’s kept much of his writing out of print. “For many years,” Glück tells me, “it seemed [Boone] had given up writing, but that turned out not to be the case. In fact, he was writing barrels of poetry and prose—it was the writing world he had given up on, and the labor of self-advancement.” Then younger poets like Halpern discovered Boone’s work, Glück says. “They drew him out, and voila!”

Halpern met Boone through Glück’s workshop in the ’90s. When Halpern realized how difficult it was to track down copies of Century of Clouds, an inaugural, essential New Narrative work that had long since gone out of print, he undertook to get it republished. (Nightboat put out a new edition in 2009; it is once again out of print.) The book loosely ambles through the three social circles—religious, gay, and Marxist—that have most shaped Boone. Put simply, it’s about friendships and desire, and the ways in which story circulates through them. “Friendship becomes the fundamental unit of political engagement,” Halpern writes in his introduction to the second edition, “just as politics reveals its erotics, and storytelling communicates the relationship between them.” 

It was while working on this second edition of Century at Boone’s home that the idea for a collection of selected works was hatched. When Halpern asked if Boone would help compile a bibliography of his published works, Boone first demurred, asking who would care (“How about me for starters,” Halpern responded), then dragged a bundle of papers out from under his sofa. On top was a typed draft of a piece on Bataille that Halpern had never heard of and that was published in 1984 in, of all places, the LGBTQ news magazine The Advocate. Astounded, he asked to see more.

“It’s truly astonishing how much he writes, and how little of it trickles out,” Halpern says. He describes Boone’s attitude toward publishing as a mix of “deep humility” and a loathing for any publishing that is divested of commitment to community. Boone rarely publishes unless asked; and certainly this volume would not have come into being without the persistence of Halpern, who spent the better part of a decade digging through boxes and bundles of papers in Boone’s home and in his archives at SUNY Buffalo. Many of the texts included in the book existed in analog versions only, discovered in zines or pamphlets, or as typed pages, and had to be transcribed into digital form. A late-stage addition to the book was the aforementioned “Letter to Stephen King, The Horror Writer,” a 1985 manifesto on popular writing and the reader/writer relationship. “There’s a specifically erotic side of this relationship that develops that’s the key to your art,” he tells King. He concludes: “Your writing gets me hot.” (It’s also, he says in a 1985 Ottotole interview with Charles Bernstein reprinted here, “as American as vomiting out pizza from your mouth.”)

Also included is Boone’s withering takedown of Language poetry, first published in Soup in 1981 (“It’s as if the genuine intelligence you feel there ends up eluding life, not participating in it or embracing it”), alongside enlightening early criticism on New Narrative–adjacent writers Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, and appreciations of Bay Area favorites Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and Beverly Dahlen. (“Being inflammatory pays off in a big way,” Boone writes of Cooper, in a review of the latter’s 1982 collection The Tenderness of the Wolves.) There’s also a touching eulogy for the writer Steve Abbott, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1992:

He was so easy to make fun of, for instance. It was—and isn’t this unusual in the life of a writer?—as if Steve hadn’t any natural defenses of any sort. Life kept hurting him, over and over, and he kept accepting that hurt. Was he a masochist then? Oh probably not. I just think of it as genetic, you know, a DNA type thing: The pores of his cells would open wide naturally, welcome whatever foreign or alien thing decided it wanted to pass across the threshold of him! This is my prayer now for him: oh naughty world, at least now can you not keep yourself at bay from this little lamb of yours, now that he’s gone anyway? Or can the long hand of the world even reach where Steve now is? Who knows.

Among Boone’s own favorites in Dismembered are “Dark Queer Suite” (1984–1987), a series of poems that, like much of his writing, mix politics, spirituality, and pop culture. The first, “Stephen King Poem,” offers a grim 2020 forecast:

            … If there’s visitors to the
planet or rubble of it in 2020 and there’s anything
left they’ll wonder why these poems, ours, rhymed
language with “nothing.”

The book’s title, Halpern explains, derives from the idea of disjecta membra, Latin for “scattered fragments,” or, in this case, a collection of surviving texts and manuscripts. When I ask Boone about it, he tells me, “There’s no unitary being called Bruce, there’s just parts.” This book isn’t the whole, cohesive body of his work, in other words: many other texts didn’t make it in. Case in point: the 2007 talk in which Boone elucidated this idea, which, having been mostly extemporized, did not survive as a text re-creatable for the book.

“We began with a constraint that we would only include materials that saw the light of day in one form or another,” Halpern says. This became difficult to honor once he discovered the wealth of material Boone has kept hidden in various stages of composition. Together they attempted to reconstruct a number of talks Boone had extemporized based on notes. “I almost desperately wanted to salvage them,” Halpern says, “but we [had] to give it up because we were writing something entirely new and it seemed out of sync with the book.”

The exception is “The Queen Beats,” a talk presented at the 1997 Queer Beats conference at the San Francisco Art Institute, and printed here for the first time (in a revised form). Investigating “the increasing boredom with the likes of ALLEN GINSBERG or WILLIAM BURROUGHS” and the accompanying celebration of less widely known Bay Area poets Spicer and John Wieners, Boone asks: “Is the return of the queen beat writers an indication of a change of fashion?” Heralding the work of these “queen beat losers,” Boone argues for failure and masochism in the service of achieving new, “still-to-be-discovered loser-FORMS.” Another “loser” exalted here is Valerie Solanas, Andy Warhol’s would-be assassin, who had died a decade earlier in a hotel in the Tenderloin district, and whose hyperbolic energies Boone seems to channel.

The volume also includes excerpts from an abandoned novel titled Carmen, published here for the first time. (“The final text literally exists in one long accordion file from a dot-matrix printer,” Halpern tells me. “It’s never even been perforated.”) These excerpts are vivacious, hilarious, and wild: writerly gossip meets campy cultural criticism in the form of letters written by Boone’s fictional drag-queen persona. Wait … sounds a lot like another novel I know and love. The project seems indebted to, or at least in league with, Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker, which was conceived around the same time, in the mid ’80s, although it wasn’t published until 1998.

“I didn’t know where I was going when I started,” Boone tells me. “The epistolary novel form that Dodie borrowed from Dracula—that sounded hot.” He decided to try, as Bellamy had, sending letters to different members of the writing community—“about my nutty head life, space beings, and sex, being abducted by the mothership and they’d probe me for sex changes. You know, ordinary stuff.” The Carmen persona renames herself Orlando, based on Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid time traveler from her eponymous 1928 novel. “It started getting serious and more serious. I realized that my Carmen character was in a great part me, and I saw I would have to change my gender.” Boone abandoned the project.

When I ask how he relates to it now, he confesses he never thinks of it. “I broke it off in fright, and fear, and terror. And put it behind me and stuffed it down in the unconscious and slammed the door.” Then, six years ago, he hired Spencer, with whom he has been exploring feminization as an integral part of their sex life. “Now it’s not scary, because I’ve gone beyond it.”

***

For our second interview, I call Boone on a Sunday, and he tells me he’s been texting with Spencer, who has food poisoning and needs to reschedule for the following day. But the PG&E guy comes at five on Monday, Boone narrates for me, so he can’t be in a negligee and shave his body until afterward. Spencer agrees to manage his expectations: “‘I don’t mind, sweetie,’” Boone says, imitating Spencer, “‘just a little eyeliner is totally okay.’”

I’m reminded of Boone’s performance at the Communal Presence conference, where he read his work in full face, with Spencer at his side. That conference, held at UC Berkeley in 2017, is one example of recent attention to New Narrative from both the scholarly and literary communities. The timing of the conference coincided closely with the publication of Bellamy and Killian’s anthology, as well as the release of From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (2017), edited by Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw. Since then, two of Killian’s early books have been republished in a new volume, Fascination: Memoirs, by Semiotext(e); a new volume on Bellamy’s work, Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind (2020), appeared in February; and Glück’s Margery Kempe, an early classic, was reprinted this spring.

Why this revival of New Narrative now? Next-generation New Narrativists like Halpern, Sneathen, Tremblay-McGaw, and others are doing the work to archive and honor its legacy within the literary canon. At the same time, the recent explosion of contemporary queer autotheory—nonfiction writing (by Maggie Nelson, Trisha Low, T. Fleischmann, McKenzie Wark, to name a few examples) that bridges the personal and the theoretical, often with a good deal of politics and sex—has brought to light how influential New Narrative has been as a direct and perhaps underrecognized antecedent.

Boone has mixed feelings about this new attention: “Of course a part of you, being a human being, is flattered. But I guess my main response is ‘I guess that means we’re dead now.’” Boone isn’t (only) history: he has been writing all this time. In fact, when I first approach him about this profile, he pointedly includes a link to Wallpaper (2019), his newest work, in his reply. Wallpaper is 500-plus pages of fragmented poetry available in print and PDF. It’s written through a lust haze stirred up by Spencer (“Daddy” in the poem) and is designed to be read haphazardly.

pushed
                             out
my lips    of    red   lipstick.                  this    metallic purple
                           fright    wig                       the     coverup              of       
      unintentionality
                                                                                                            spells
       a.r.t.i.f.i.c.e.                                like     that.
see          it?—
                                                            right       on
                                               
                             its                             page            the      emergence
                                                            of     face?
Daddy   your
                       authoritarian       hand                     knows       monitoring
            the      steering   wheel                     left to              right
                              and    back

“It’s entropy of language and of the world,” he says in the book’s introductory interview with Evan Kennedy. “It’s our destiny to move faster and faster toward entropy. Therefore, mess, or sloppiness even, is a desideratum. It’s something you want rather than thinking of a text as a perfectly shaped story with a beginning, middle, and end. No. You can begin anywhere and end anywhere in wallpaper writing, which is my new genre. And it will all be the same.”

Boone has been interested in this genre for some time, first using “wallpaper writing” to describe, perhaps snidely, Ron Silliman’s poetry in the ’80s, and offering King’s commodity writing, less pejoratively, as another example. That he has now adopted this mode himself may be not so much ironic as inevitable. “He has gone from a writing that knows itself as such,” Glück says, “to a writing that takes part in the crumbling of our society through different kinds of fragmentation—a writing that knows it lacks a reason to exist.”

I suppose this explains Boone’s diffident attitude toward his body of work as a (fractured) whole: the uncertainty that writing and publishing may matter much at all. What matters, what has always mattered for Boone, is intimacy, communality, social life. His hope for the release of Dismembered is more of this. “I would like some people to call me up or send me an email, ask if we can have coffee, and have some new friends.”