Sex with Brent Reiten

I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and aimed my rental car up Highway 1 past Sausalito to the town of Larkspur in California’s Marin County. Mystery and transient sex were driving me toward the best poet you’ve never heard of. By the time I reached his address, I’d traveled 2,940 miles and still couldn’t decide if this was an obsession gone too far or a discovery that hadn’t gone far enough.

Brent Reiten waved from the balcony. He looked older than I expected, whey-faced and ruggedly worn. He greeted me warmly. We were both oddly at ease.

It’s my friend Jeff’s fault that I was there in the first place. Jeff is a journalist and a poetry lover. Each day he types out a poem—anything that’s caught his eye—and emails it to an undisclosed list. Those of us on the list sometimes receive several per day. The subject line consists of the author’s initials, the first line of the email is the poem’s title, and five carriage returns later, the poem begins. The other day, “PV” popped in at 11:14 a.m. announcing “17” from Patrizia Valduga’s “One Hundred Quatrains.” Hours later came “Butter,” by Elizabeth Alexander. For years now, I’ve received these messages. I love the way they pop up in my inbox: wisdom, beauty, loss, and sex delivered on the tarmac, in the elevator, at a red light. I never know what to expect or when. It was through Jeff’s transmissions that I found the likes of Ciarán Carson, Cornelius Eady, and Frederick Seidel.

Three years ago, while on the road in November 2011, I stopped into a rummage store in Charlottesville, Virginia. Against the back wall, shoved behind wicker bric-a-brac and vintage Libbey gold leaf glassware, shelves sagged with tattered paperbacks and serial Westerns. Interspersed here and there were volumes of poetry. I was determined to find something good for Jeff when I spied a thin, black, glossy spine with a provocative name: Transient Sex, by Brent Reiten. The back cover was like a schoolboy’s “I’ll never …” chalkboard punishment—all of Reiten’s titles repeated the phrase “Sex With.”

Sex With Margaret Thatcher
Sex With Jeb Magruder
Sex With Olivia Newton-John
Sex With God

Was it a joke? Was it porn? I flipped to “Sex With My Twin Sister.” Instead of crude cracks about incest, I found moving observations about the fraternal sibling bond: “It was innocent as afterlife. / It was libidinous as bugdeath…. But outside, within the jurisdictions / of what is right and what is wrong, / we can only laugh and tease / and hear each other’s stories.” I purchased the book (price: $2). I knew Jeff would love it.

For months after finding Transient Sex, I carried it around in case I happened to run into Jeff, but I ended up dog-earing the book, reading it myself. I returned to Reiten’s urban fantasies again and again—with Zsa Zsa Gabor and her sister in front of a Woolworth’s on 27th Avenue, with Dian Fossey in Room 365 or Twyla Tharp on 23rd Street—casually, but repeatedly. I’d never before consumed poetry in this manner. It was clever and consistently rewarding with its neologisms (“we tremored and quaked with entitidinal zest,” “We were Evolution and God amixed”) and surprising turns (“She was off to be a star again. / I was off to paint the Wagner’s house – // Monterey gray with dark blue trim.”). Some poems were breezy (“I just had a colonic irrigation. / She said, I don’t need that shit.”), some were solemn (“I felt sorry for him, like a victim / of a disease that has no name.”), and several were raw. None were filthy. I especially revisited Reiten’s 13 “Sex With” men poems (Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush, Jim Nabors), the most poignant and compassionate of the lot.

In April 2013, I finally met up with Jeff and handed over Transient Sex. Hours later, my phone pinged with an email: “BR.” Reiten’s “Sex With Stevie Nicks” made the rounds, a satisfying coda to the Transient Sex affair.

Except that it wasn’t. The next morning, Jeff forwarded me a note from someone else on his distribution list, asking who the poet was. I knew nothing about him. Neither did Jeff. Did Reiten actually have sex with any of these people? Was there really a twin? We dredged search engines for clues. Nothing. What had happened to the man who’d written of Joan Collins: “She wanted a Norwegian, stoic as dirt”? I had to know. I began to dig.

I knew that Transient Sex was published in 1989 by Scalding Press of Fairfax, California. As far as I could tell, that collection was the only thing Reiten published and the only title ever released by Scalding Press. It seemed likely that the company was Reiten’s creation too, but searching for Scalding Press led only to a defunct P.O. box. The author page said Reiten “lives in Fairfax, California, where he makes his living painting houses.” His profession crept into at least three poems (“Sex With Genevieve Bujold” begins: “It was a dimestore revelation: / Tell her you’re a poet, / not a housepainter.”), but yielded nothing on the web and only silence when I contacted Marin County librarians.

I found a review from the Winter 1989 San Francisco Review of Books that called Transient Sex “evocative … rich … illuminating.” And then I came across the 1993 anthology A New Geography of Poets, co-edited by Edward Field, which included Reiten’s “Sex With Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor.” I tracked down the 90-year-old Field in New York City. “That was a marvelous book,” he wrote me in an email. But he hadn’t been in touch with Reiten since. “There might be something in my letters,” he said, and pointed me to his papers at the University of Delaware library.

Pay dirt. There I found several revealing letters. From Reiten to Field in 1990:

Bringing my book to bookstores is a very humiliating experience for the most part. They either reject it—because it’s poetry—or offer to take it on consignment … The only way I feel I can remedy that is becoming famous first. But that’s not happining [sic] … Guess what I didn’t know was that I had it quite deeply in me that the world owes me. Well, not no more … I think I’m on a mission … More people need to find an art outlet, rather than pursue the American dream.

And from Field to Reiten:

I know just what you feel—desperate. But the trouble with the literary life is that it all depends on oneself, sitting at the typewriter … Year after year … I was always miserable. And could never earn a living … The paradox is that like you I longed for success, but felt myself with the underdogs, a loser … If any success came my way, it was a fluke, because when does the world simply reward talent? … It is especially hard going on writing when you’ve done something good, as you have done …

What exactly was Reiten’s “mission”? Maybe the answers were in the book itself. From “Sex With Jim Bakker”: “He was thankful for nothing. / Life had pushed him in a corner, / had done him a cruel twist. / He couldn’t get himself out. / He was the dust that hadn’t settled.” The letters that I had found contained two more poems: “Nine Women and a Health Club” and “She Must Have Been Thinking Robert Redford,” both in keeping with the voice and sprit of Transient Sex. “It’s like when you forget you’re / breathing, by the time you remember / you’ve already told yourself: / What’s the fuss. It’s just breathing.”

Reiten’s soulful letters were typed on Scalding Press letterhead with that same defunct P.O. box. They opened a channel to Reiten’s voice—not merely the poet’s, but the person’s. He sounded desperately unhappy. What had happened to him? Was he still alive? Perhaps this was meant to be the unsolved end of it. But I wasn’t ready to let go; I had one more card to play.

Just as Edward Snowden was raising the specter of NSA surveillance in June 2013, I was hoping I could find my own leaker of secrets. It was time to tap my Jersey roots. As a kid, my Italian family had dealings with some colorful types—hustlers, bookies. They left an impression. There was George Pepe, the manicured restaurateur who was mentioned on an episode of A Current Affair for jury tampering. And Ray Kordja, the detective-turned-racketeer with whom my aunt Georgia eloped to Vegas, forever recasting her in improbable but sublime trochaic dimeter as Georgia Kordja. Thus, when the public Reiten records dried up, I went professional. As we say up north, I know a guy.

Say what you will of Snowden, but within minutes of turning over the Reiten files to black ops, I was texted his last known and current address, phone number, and names of relatives, including a twin sister—Brenda Kinsel. While Reiten had gone silent, I soon learned that his sister was a successful author of self-help books on fashion for women over 40. Imagine that—you can’t find Brent in the phone book, but you can find Brenda on NPR and reruns of Oprah. On her website, I found a picture of the three-year-old twins in matching Davy Crockett outfits, and this telling blog entry:

What you hear about twins is true—we’re very close in ways that are sometimes hard to explain. There was a period of time when we were estranged for 6 very strange years. One time I was talking to my best friend since high school … “Call your brother Brent,” she said.

I emailed Brenda. Five days later, she responded. The subject line: “Guess who's coming to dinner?”

This is Brenda here, Brent Reiten's twin sister. Yes, Brent is coming to dinner tonight. He is alive, well, and … This is just so deliciously random and exactly the kind of thing my brother delights in … Hopefully he'll still be alive by morning. I have no idea what Brent will say. He's quite an unusual person so I can't predict. Brent doesn't do email.

The following day:

Brent's message to you is that this is exciting and shocking at the same time. And two days later: Good news! Brent is moving away from shock and toward random ‘grinning’ outbursts … He really does have a phone, a landline with an answering machine.

I dusted off my manual typewriter and sent Reiten a long letter. Soon after, I received a package from him. It included a fresh volume of Transient Sex, wrapped in the San Francisco Chronicle sports section; a copy of Edward Field’s Stand Up, Friend, with Me, the book that earned Field the Lamont Poetry Award; and, intriguingly, a sheaf of 18 poems, two of which were torn straight from the drafting desk with Reiten’s scribbled edits. (From “A Breakup”: “I was on the bottom stair, weeping. / She was on the top stair, scolding. // ‘So this is the way we depart?’ I ask. / ‘This is the way we depart,’ she said.”) Best of all, the package included a long letter, seven pages—handwritten on that same damn Scalding Press letterhead—explaining the genesis of Transient Sex, including the pivotal role Toni, his lover at the time, played. The book is dedicated to Toni and she’s the one on the cover, lighting a cigarette just a couple of blocks from the Transamerica Pyramid.

4½ weeks into a successful binge of new poems, “Sex With Ayn Rand” showed up. It was totally random with no thought whatsoever of anything past the poem … Out shoots in a week 19 more sex poems … The next twenty in a ten-day period. The order is the same as in the book. By the time all 42 were here, Toni and I became madcap editors, constantly reapproaching them with changes here and there. “Honey, who are we going to have sex with tonight?” June 16, 1989 the books show up … We were king shit … But 24 years later, you’re the first to search me out. The last bookstore to order TS books was an order of three from a Chicago Barnes & Noble about 18 years ago.

“Eighteen years ago.” Reiten hadn’t sold a book since 1995. He also used that phrase back on page one of his letter. “My last machine was an electric typewriter, but it lost its brio around 18 years ago, so I’ve been without.” Not only did sales run out in 1995, so did Reiten’s ink, and maybe—as I came to learn—his mind, too. “Except for the book-signing party, 30 copies were sold,” he wrote. “The next biggest sale, 22 copies at my 20-year high school anniversary at West Fargo High School, North Dakota.” Then there were the dozens of times he’s stuck books on people’s shelves during a paint job. “Sex sells,” he said, “right? But I forgot one thing, it’s poetry.” A San Francisco music producer wanted to put the poems to jazz, “but,” said Reiten, “I never called him back."

•

I called him when I hit terra firma in California, using the number he’d written in a hasty postscript: “I’ll pick up the phone and say, Hello. This is him.” I’d heard that line somewhere else. Then I remembered that it was in “Nine Women and a Health Club,” one of the poems among Field’s papers: “The phone will be / ringing constantly. / Hello, I’ll say, / this is him.”

© Jason Tesauro

Inside his apartment in Larkspur, I saw that the living room was decorated in a utilitarian, DIY motif: sofa, books, television, stereo. I counted three total pieces of artwork. Even his bathroom was austere as a cell: towel, toothbrush, bar soap, razor, and a plunger that still had the price tag on it. But for whatever his pad lacked in outer polish, it made up in enlightened shelves: Dorianne Laux’s The Book of Men, Tony Hoagland’s What Narcissism Means to Me, Frank Polite’s Letters of Transit, B.H. Fairchild’s Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, Matthew Zapruder’s Come On All You Ghosts, and Anna Akhmatova’s Complete Poems. He directed us to a small dinette, where we drank and talked.

I scribbled in a notebook while he leaned back in a kitchen chair with his hands behind his head. Born to liberal parents in North Dakota on the summer solstice in 1952, he is 14 minutes older than Brenda. In the 62 years since, “I’ve been fingerprinted in three states,” he said with a smirk. But his toughness seemed more a pose. If anything, he’s a street-clothes monk devoted to the church of plain-talk poetry, something he says he learned from William Carlos Williams (“he taught me meter and the American idiom”) and Charles Reznikoff (“simple words”). He said, “I’ve conquered being alone, living alone, going to bed alone, and waking up alone for 33 years.”

Reiten unlocked a door on his balcony. In a storage area sat three large boxes filled with stacks and stacks of shrink-wrapped books: 900 copies of Transient Sex, untouched since 1989. He put it in perspective: “The book was given to me, but I did not take it with grace. The more I got rejected, the more arrogantly I pushed. I was a rock-and-roll brat who wasn’t a rock-and-roll star.” He wrote Transient Sex with rock star verve and then fell into a rock star–sized crater. He was angry. He was doing Ecstasy. (“But when I got there he said, I just play / the piano and eat MDMA four times a day. / But I’ve been tapping into Indian spirits / who knew the earth before she hurt.” —“Sex With J.C. Knight”) He wasn’t writing. “It took years … for me to reconnect to any semblance of a human being. To do that, I had to retreat, chop off everything … The last 20 years, I had to discount myself as a poet just to get rid of the inflated ego that I had created. The biggest fear that I had was that I was never going to come back.”

Over another round of Heinekens, he explained that while he still admires poetry, part of becoming healthy meant that he’s no longer writing poetry. Yet he continues to return to Transient Sex. For decades he has mulled over small changes to the poems; he flirts with the notion of a reissue. He walked me through the collection poem by poem (“‘Sex With Myself’ has the purest rhythmic undulation”), line by line (“In ‘Sex With Death,’ ‘I wanted to fuck him’ should read, ‘I wanted to fuck her’”), pausing over a stained and scribbled-upon copy to explain the origin of a phrase or syllable (“My first ‘Sex With Shirley MacLaine’ said, ‘I had to purge real bad.’ Toni said, ‘change it to shit’”). Rubbing a jagged scar awfully near his jugular vein, he talked about a car accident and recited “Sex With Death.” We sipped our beers, and I noticed a minor tremble in his hand that didn’t abate.

I wanted to come—I thought so
anyways—I wanted to give it all over.
But beneath bright lights,
and the white of doctors

and nurses and sheets,
with my neck ripped open
like a vanity press,
with shards of glass twinkling

like halos from heaven,
with my blood running free
as the Kingdom of God.
he broke from me.

The creation of the book is both a part of him and something separate. “The muse who assists me, I think, was repulsed by who I was and said, ‘Fuck you, I’m going somewhere else.’” He claims to not be regretful: “There’s humility in being a housepainter.” Perhaps painting is better for him as a person, but as a reader, I mourn the loss. By tracking him down, I’d hoped to witness Reiten’s resurrection before it’s too late, as he writes in “Sex With Tammy Bakker”:

We came to our senses just in time.
Vultures were pacing behind the door.
But we didn’t die; no, we were Reborn!
We wept and cried, Hallelujah!

If Reiten has indeed written all he’ll ever write, he belongs on the 20th-century roll call of literary one-hit wonders—no matter how late the honor. Better yet, let’s just call Transient Sex poetry’s all-time-best one-night stand.