Poets of My Age and the Erotics of Influence

Living in San Francisco during the AIDS crisis in 1990, I delayed getting an HIV test until any symptom—a bruise, a cough—fractured my sense of well-being. Back then, the blood draw led to weeks of anxious waiting, and the testing center refused to relay the results by phone in case the patient needed counseling for what was a terminal illness. By the time I arrived at the Mission District center, my dread was monstrous and implacable. When the nurse spoke, I was so certain I was seropositive that I mistook his “negative” for bad news. I must have gazed blankly, unresponsive. He said he would be back in a minute and returned with another nurse, who repeated my good news in Cantonese. Both of them were startled when I began to laugh helplessly. A year or so later, I opened a copy of The New Yorker and found Henri Cole’s poem “Forty Days and Forty Nights.” It begins, “Opening a vein he called my radial/the phlebotomist introduced himself as Angel ...” As I reached the ending, which didn’t disclose the speaker’s test result 
(“I watched the verdict-lips move”), a tear raised a rounded welt on the page of the magazine.

____

To fall in love with poets is part of my practice of poetry. I don’t mean it’s commonplace, although it’s more common than falling in love in real life. I can love many more aspects of poets than I can of lovers, qualities I may not welcome in a person, like unrelenting strangeness, austerity, or audacity. At the same time, my love of poets is faithless and transactional. I love them until another poet comes along. I love them to aid the inspiration of a poem I’m writing. I love them while reading them, but not when I think about them later. Unlike a partner whom I eventually grow to resemble, I do not wish to become them. I’m enraptured by their beauty in order to learn what I should avoid, since they’ve done it so beautifully already. The act of avoidance may be the subtlest form of praise, a tender form of negative influence. Every line I write holds the contours of their absence.

The dominant models of how poetic influence operates—the strenuously competitive psychological agon of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” T. S. Eliot’s impassioned argument in favor of a dryly impersonal “relation to the dead poets”—neglect some supple poetic effects, like what the queer scholar Stephen Guy-Bray calls “the erotics of influence,” in which poetry is the burden that weighs upon us like “the erotic pressure of a beloved body.” To feel a pressure so lustily material that it induces a physical response—tears, breathlessness—is a weight I bear with pleasure.

Of course, “falling in love” with a poet doesn’t mean that I desire to declare my love to the actual poet. The erotic may be overtly sexual in poetry, but it’s more likely to be elliptical, as when the ancient Roman poet Horace wonders why the young man preparing for a wrestling match avoids slathering himself with olive oil as if it were viper’s blood. In an interview with Nick Flynn, Carl Phillips spoke of these metaphorical uses when he mentioned that poetic syntax itself contains great potential for the erotic: “stall-and-deliver, release-and-restraint.” 

I fell in love with Phillips’s work, in part, because of his distinctive syntax, 
with its switchback deployments of meaning, like what his poem “Fall Colors,” from his superb recent collection Scattered Snows, to the North (2024), calls “a ramble, where each corner we turn feels like a turning, as well,/of imagination.” The erotics of a Phillips poem might begin with a kind of seduction, its subject capturing the reader’s attention not with the blandishments of a lover but with the astonishment of something real. In the case of “Fall Colors,” the subject is the brutally honest recognition that all of the speaker’s friendships lacked “warmth and compassion.” As the poem proceeds, it becomes an uncovering of why this was so, recalling the frank judgment of “the only man I think I’ve ever loved absolutely,” before shifting to self-recrimination: 

                                                                                            how
much of my time I spend pretending I’m not afraid, negotiating
this life 
with all the seeming casualness with which a man whose business involves
the handling of fires daily
                                          daily handles a fire.

Phillips’s syntactical form—here chiasmic mirroring with a mid-line break—feels intimate and erotic. The speaker labors to capture the crux of his subject, going back and forth in a kind of copulating rhythm as he veers and emends and shifts toward his fearful conclusion: his essentially friendless self may be a mere “imitation of a self I want others to believe in enough for me eventually/to believe it, too.” What remains, he implies, is the shell of a person, alone except for his dog on their late November “ramble.” 

All the turns and extensions of syntax model the struggle to convey a moral journey with unsparing verisimilitude. As the poem progresses, I identify with the poet as with a lover, while wondering about my own friendships and selfhood. By the end, my sense of the poem’s eroticism lies in the force of its penetration into my mind. The ramble becomes not only a vision of the speaker’s late-autumnal age but of my own, the lengthening shadows of man and dog, an intimation of our common mortality.

____

The AIDS epidemic killed friends and a multitude of strangers during my formative twenties and thirties. That it also obstructed my personal life for decades was the particular fate of my own character. The unfolding gift of gay poetry offered me respite from my own estrangements—and not just respite, a form of erotic imagining that helped me come to terms with the real association of sex and death. Many of the poets that I followed in that era, like Reginald Shepherd, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, and Essex Hemphill, are gone, but many have survived and flourished, with valuable new additions to their oeuvres.

Going back at least to Horace, born 65 BCE, who may have called Virgil, born 70 BCE, “half of my soul,” poets near in age often assume a distinctive place in a poet’s consciousness. Just as the first classmates who married or had children couldn’t help but signify something about where I stood in the trajectory of my life, the poets in my age cohort who first published poems that I admired or who received acclaim became markers of my progress as a young poet. 

Three poets with recently published books, Carl Phillips, Henri Cole, and Cyrus Cassells, are all gay men who were born within three years of me in the late fifties and who have been pieces of my poetic soul for much of my adult life. When I read them today, the years have stripped away the need to compare poetic “progress.” Nowadays I summon a more bountiful context—our shared decades of poetry and living—and appreciate their poetry more for what it achieves on its own than for what it can tell me about how to approach the formal elements in my own work. I feel a personal, almost intimate engagement with the ways in which their latest poems—and now their social media—are navigating an utterly changed cultural landscape. 

____

When I first read Cassells’s third collection, Beautiful Signor (1997), its unabashed, homoerotic romance seemed a lifeline to love’s possibility. In a section of “The Magician-Made Tree,” he wrote:

your body, siphoned for a while
of sorrow—
will I ever love you more 
than in this place
where voices of reproach
can’t reach us.

If to be “siphoned of sorrow” through a vision of a “beautiful signor” offered consolation, Phillips’s From the Devotions, published a year later, in 1998, captivated me with its conflations, more provocative than consoling, of the sacred and the erotic, like this image from “The Gods”:

                    recall Christ, then (all over)

the boy you found lying restive,
(among the sand, the salt grass),

naked—save for the words breakfast included
lipsticked onto his chest in thick, plum letters.

By the time Cole’s Middle Earth appeared in 2003, I found the disarray of my own coming of age reflected in the gorgeous lyricism of poems like “Self-portrait in a Gold Kimono”: 

The essence of self emerges
                                  shuttling between parents.
Noel, the wet nimbus of Noel’s tongue
                                                      draws me out of the pit.
I drop acid with Rita.
                       Chez Woo eros is released.
I eat sugar like a canary from a grown man’s tongue.

I admit that I contemplated “Chez Woo eros is released” as if it were a sibylline, erotic summons from a leading poetic voice of my time. That the line was referring not to me but to the verb “to woo” or its revolting offshoot “woo-woo,” which may derive from the theremin in old sci-fi movies, was something an admirer surnamed Woo might conveniently ignore.

____

In Eros the Bittersweet (1986), Anne Carson states that “all utterance is erotic in some sense,” that just as “writer and reader bring together two halves of one meaning, so lover and beloved are matched together like two sides of one knucklebone.” The eros of other poets’ oeuvres, their Platonic life force, opens what Carson calls a common “erotic space,” where imagination plays in the gap between the reader and the poet, “linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference.” As a young poet, I learned a viable range of voice and form from Phillips, Cole, Cassells, and others. At the same time, while composing a poem, I stepped away from that erotic space to avoid any divergence from my own inspiration. 

My first book, The Eclipses (2005), was, in part, a fantasia on the family poem. It focuses on the death of my mother, not only because the subject was foremost in my mind but because I was searching for lyrical extensions of the autobiographical and found it in versions of what Freud called the “family romance.” Cole, in particular, was a model for this material.

In my second book, Divine Fire (2021), I sought to broaden my themes to include the sacred, the sublime, the literary, the erotic. As if to declare my independence from my previous book, I included a piece called “The Death of the Family Poem.” I broadened, too, my range of tonalities and forms. Wit, subtlety, and a kind of disabused irony were the ideals. Here, Phillips was a touchstone. A high-style, apex-queer mode appealed to me (as it does to this day), and I was fully aware of the ways in which contemporary culture mediated against entire ranges of expression. However much the complex sentences of Proust and late Henry James reflected my own ideals of syntax and style, they were no longer the sound of our times. 

All three poets’ newest collections—Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North, Cole’s The Other Love, and Cassells’s Everything in Life Is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982–2022—bestow a bristling sense of how the culture has changed, even if the poets themselves complicate facile conclusions. For example, the notion that our language has been dumbed down to what Tony Judt in The New York Review of Books once termed “inarticulacy,” with “self-expression” favored over “form,” is belied by the increasing complexity of Phillips’s syntax and the variability in Cassells’s emotional directness, and is only superficially true of Cole’s chastened diction.

Cole’s first book, The Marble Queen (1986), was indebted to certain paragons—Hart Crane’s lush romanticism, Elizabeth Bishop’s observant perfectionism, James Merrill’s formal elaborations. The young poet who wrote “the azure room where mercury youth dissolved,/sun-spurged beneath the brown-beamed, blossom-/blown ceiling,” would not have written, as the older Cole does in The Other Love, “Are you going to shoot 
me,/motherfucker...?” or “I felt like I might puke.” These latter phrases employ a contemporary register, not for woolly self-expression but because what we consider effective language has changed. While Cole’s sophistication hasn’t waned, he has divested himself of what Louise Glück called “the arsenal of devices that had come to seem static or imprisoning.” The Other Love is frank, funny, unsettling, and tonally virtuosic in its artful critique of the present moment, offering the imperfect individuality of the poet as a moral counterweight to the violence that the powers that be are inflicting upon the world. The speaker is a version of Cole himself, a queer poet with a congenital need for solitude and a sexual vanity affronted by the diminutions of age. He’s serious yet ironic about his calling, adamantly refusing to confuse his identity as a poet with what he’s not, someone who has the charisma to change the world. In “Komorebi,” the speaker watches on television how “helicopters and armored vehicles confront young people,” but he leads “a cautious, quiet life” far from such commotion. “Inside the walls of my abode,” he writes,

I am a novitiate to the Art of Poetry.
Though I dig home cooking more than threesomes,
I would never say, “You are so fine, Henri.”

Cole has stated that he believes a poem is “organized violence.” In his work, this violence is not that of gunships and tanks but of a more subtle encroachment on the reader’s mind. The earnest yet off-kilter train of thought here—his somewhat unhip diction (“the walls of my abode,” “dig”), his monastic, zero-sum game involving sex (“threesomes”) and staying at home as a “novitiate” to the Art of Poetry (note the self-consciously pretentious capital letters), his weirdly narcissistic disclaimer about personal superiority (what sort of person would find the phrase “You are so fine, Henri” a plausible form of self-talk?)—is a tart little injection of charm and idiosyncrasy directly to the brain.

With Cassells, the belief that poetry was ineffective as an instrument for political change has given way to more direct engagement. As he noted in an interview, he has moved from “a very mystical sort of book” to subjects that have “a lot of gritty, political dimension to them.” In Everything in Life Is Resurrection (2025), the desire to memorialize acts of great political violence is evident from the start in poems like “The Memory of Hiroshima” and continues with poems about the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, and migrant detention camps. 

The strength of the Hiroshima poem, which is remarkable for having been written when we were still undergraduates at Stanford, lies in the understated plainness of its witness: “The impact came/at the moment of soft laughter./There was a shock of light./The house shredded.” By contrast, more recent poems, like one about an Arizona border activist and another about a Latino victim of gun violence, use a more clotted, tendentious style to draw attention to such alarming phenomena as “The rash, all-too-daily report,/The out-of-the-blue bullet” and “our bigotry-is-commonplace republic’s/Chaos.” What might have been unpersuasive and stilted to a seventies English professor may now be the most direct way to cultivate political outrage in the 2020s. But, in what’s become known as “the attention economy,” how can poetry garner any? 

____

Long before the online era, as an idealistic young poet, I chose to focus on reading and writing poetry and not seek attention for my work otherwise.
I decided not to go into academia and publishing, which I considered tangential to what I, like Cole’s speaker, revered as the Art of Poetry. Networking, I naïvely thought, was a game played by venture capitalists and divorce lawyers. 

My post-hippie anti-careerism corresponded to the views of many college acquaintances, who changed, in varying degrees, over time and by necessity. Even though I, too, have made pragmatic compromises, my default mode regarding poetry remains to find anything that wanders too far from the work itself—the reading and writing of poems—to be irrelevant or a waste of time. I’ve been fascinated by how poets of my age have adapted to a culture overrun by commercial interests and online technology. If what draws me to these poets is the eros of their work, their adaptations to our times—through social media, promotional tours, and the compulsory extroversion of their networking—can feel like a draining away of the interiority and allurement of the art itself. 

One day, I opened up my Instagram feed, and Cyrus Cassells’s profile displayed a puppet in a museum in Buenos Aires, a little matador with bilious skin and eerily blue eyelids. Another day, Henri Cole shared a photo of a robin in a backyard birdbath and said, in his mischievous way, “They drink, and splash, and poop all at the same time. I wish I could do this.” Yet another day, Carl Phillips’s page showed a photo of a homemade plate of spinach timbale and Moroccan stuffed pepper. “The verdict: culinary eleganza, darling,” he wrote.

While enjoying these posts, I wonder what the medium provides established poets and how it affects readers of their work. It’s nothing new to say that Instagram is a late-capitalist, mercenary entity that can nurture a vapid community of interactive solipsisms, with its faux-casual artifice of hypercurated self-presentations, its dopamine rushes of “likes” and “follows,” its algorithmic compulsions and browbeating sales pitches, its vanity-fair influencers, and its emojis of support from “friends” who may be strangers. And yet, in the roughly six months, at this writing, that I’ve engaged with the medium, creating some posts and following a few hundred poets, I’ve come to see its significance to the business of poetry. Instagram offers poets, both emerging and established, easy access to readers at a time when the volume of coverage by critics who commit their professional lives to new poetry books may not be enough to support poetry as a living, viable art. The social aspect of the medium offers many opportunities to nurture connections with poets, former students, and other readers. In pre-Internet days, the only image of Cassells, Cole, or Phillips I would have been able to call up was an actual memory of Cassells, handsome, with a sly look of surmise, at a get-together at Stanford University’s “Gay People’s Union” when I was nineteen and he twenty-one. Now, the proliferation of memory-giving images is staggering.

If I return to the social media feeds of favorite poets, it is because their best posts echo the sensibility of their poetry. With Cassells’s matador puppet in Buenos Aires, the blue eyelids remind me of the line in “The Way of Duende,” “a dark and sobersided blue I’ve found/only in Andalusia,” invoking the eros of cosmopolitan otherness that imbues his best work. 

When, on Mother’s Day, Cole posts a fading color photo of his mother and himself as a toddler on a beach (like the cover of his collection Touch), with the caption “Mothers are the holiest thing,” the tone is as hard to pin down as in his poems, both loving and ironic in his unsettling way, and I recall the decidedly unholy portrait he has created in many memorable poems about her. In The Other Love, he writes the shocking yet comically deadpan lines, “He was glad his mother was dead;/she had Overbearing Mother Disease.”

As for Phillips, a casual post captures some of Instagram’s contradictions and the complex way his mind operates in his poetry. Under an image of his debut, In the Blood (1992), he mentions that he is reading proofs for his publisher’s reissue of the book. (Still in the closet while writing it, Phillips was sympathetically outed by Rachel Hadas’s prescient foreword, which recognized the anonymous submitter of the prize manuscript as “a poet of color who is erotically drawn to other men.”) Of the excellent sestina “Birdland” that he’s now proofing, he says, “What a lot of work I went to, just to describe cruising (sex, not the boat kind) lol ... FWIW I hadn’t ever cruised when I wrote this—the powers of imagination!” With a few choice phrases, Phillips’s post tells us that the sophisticated sexuality of the early poem (“A cool disinterest/is, above all, essential in the particular field/you’ve entered”) wasn’t a product of personal experience but a result of the same creative cunning for which he would become renowned. The surface falsehood wasn’t a lie because poetry is a product of the fictive imagination, and literal-minded interpreters should remember this truth, though he’s surrendered the desire to impose his understanding (“for what it’s worth”). All of this dazzling implication arrives in what is also transparently an advertisement. As with much of Phillips’s work, he creates an eros of moral tension that readers can succumb to, if they so choose. In Scattered Snows, to the North, he speaks of how, in certain situations, “what’s false, being all you can see,/becomes the past that justifies/all the things you are.” 

I’m emphasizing the continuity of these poets’ oeuvres with the sensibilities projected by their social media because I wish to suggest how authors can present themselves in our current cultural landscape without compromising the ethos of their poetry. It matters if, when trying to focus on what I’m reading—a pulsing syntax, an overbearing mother, a loving Signor—I conjure instead images of the Instagram version of the poet incessantly hawking an image of themselves. For all the age-old arts, like poetry, that arise from fundamental human faculties and that manage to endure in our acquisitive culture, both artists and audiences must figure out how much of their limited time to spend on aspects of artistic life extraneous to the work itself and how much on cultivating the erotic space necessary to create and appreciate the art. 

In the end, what fascinates me about the poets of my age—not only Cole, Phillips, and Cassells, but others I could have gone to college with, like Catherine Barnett, Don Mee Choi, Kimiko Hahn, Karl Kirchwey, Li-Young Lee, Campbell McGrath, Diane Seuss, Patricia Smith, Susan Wheeler, Cynthia Zarin, and many more—is how they, unlike poets of other generations and eras, generate a dizzying simultaneity. My engagements with their oeuvres and lives across decades exist all at once in a transfigured present. At its best, the eroticism of their bodies of work presses against me not with accumulating pressure, but the opposite: a rising lightness that I associate with light itself and even the gods—household gods, perhaps, like the ones in Cavafy, who safeguard and influence someone in the prime of youth until they hear the Furies outside and scurry away, permitting the end, as it must, to arrive in a flurry of dust.