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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: As Best I Could

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, As Best I Could. I try not to get in my head about it, but what a strange thing, actually, an interview. You sit down with a complete stranger. You both pretend you’re not nervous. And then you ask this stranger questions so intimate you wouldn’t dream of asking family members or most friends. That anyone agrees to it fills me with gratitude, every time, and in return I do everything I can to make the person in front of me feel good. But the poet Aaron Smith was way ahead of me, making sure I was good. He started off by saying he’d try to speak slowly, so that I wouldn’t have too much trouble editing our conversation.

Aaron Smith: My brain works quick, so I don’t want to speak over you. It’s probably part anxiety, part creative mind, so. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Really what I would like you to do is not speak any differently than you would. I want you to sound exactly the way you do, and I hope that, you know, you can just forget that we’re on a podcast.

Aaron Smith: Sure. I feel comfortable.

Helena de Groot: Okay, good.

Aaron Smith: I was more worried about, like, do we have everything you need? You know? Can I give you a drink of water? You know?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: In my poetry, I’m unapologetic. But I feel like everywhere else in my life, I’m like, Oh, my gosh, did that make you mad?” Or, “Oh, my gosh,” yeah, it’s the weirdest thing.

Helena de Groot: Are you one of those people who goes to therapy and is like, “But how are you?”

Aaron Smith: I feel like my therapist disclosed more to me than they probably should. I mean, not inappropriately, but like, I always find out if they have a partner, or get him to reference their child. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Aaron Smith: Yeah, I need the flight attendants to like me. I mean, it really is a weird,

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: like, I pay attention to the videos. I want them to know that I take it seriously. Safety’s serious. Yeah, it’s ridiculous.

(MUSIC CONTINUES)

Helena de Groot: Four years ago, Aaron’s mother died. She was a fundamentalist Christian, and he is gay, which is not the easiest setup if you have tendencies to people-please. In the poems he wrote after his mother died, Aaron asks himself some of the hardest questions any child can ask: Did I give my mother what she needed? Or at least, did I do the best I could? When we sat down to talk about his collection, Stop Lying, Aaron told me he started writing almost immediately after his mother died.

Aaron Smith: What I was afraid would happen if I didn’t write it immediately was that memory would change the experience of what really happened. So, I got to spend probably the last three or four summers with my mom as she was sick and, you know, moving toward dying. And then I got to be with her when she died. And that felt like the most important thing that I’ve ever done, being with someone and taking them to wherever it is we go or don’t go. Like that felt really important. And she died in 2019, and then we went into lockdown in 2020. So, there was like this collective grief that was happening in the world, and I didn’t want this grief to get lost. So I sat in the living room where she died. And it is where her father died. It was where my father proposed to her. And I just sat in that space and I just wrote poems until I felt like I had enough to assemble the book. And that was its own challenge, too, because it’s like, death, death, death, queer childhood, funny.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: Death, death, death, (LAUGHING) you know. And but there was something about taking the material that I’ve been thinking about and working with through my entire poetry life and juxtaposing it in the shadow or just in the parallel to my mom’s death, and also saying like, “Hey, I have always tried to tell the truth to the best of my ability,” but in so many ways I felt like I had still been lying. And I felt shame around being a gay man who had this weird unspoken thing with my family when the primary gay narrative is, “Oh no, we’re all going to sit our families down and we’re going to have this big conversation and it will be awkward, but then they’ll pull you back in and love you and your future partner, you know, Bobby or whoever.” (LAUGHS) And that’s not true. It wasn’t for me and it’s not true for a lot of people that I know. And I told her friends sometimes I think the more transgressive part of my book is, I was happy that I had kept things from my mother until she died. And right after she died, I felt a deep sense of relief like, “I did it. I protected her from so many things that might hurt her, and I don’t feel bad about that.”

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh. And you wrote this incredible poem about the fact that, yeah, in a way, you’re glad that you kept certain things from your mother, that she could die, having been protected from that, even if it meant that you had to lie or that you had to efface yourself in ways.

Aaron Smith: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: “The Only Thing,” I think it’s called.

Aaron Smith: Yes.

Helena de Groot: And I was just wondering if you wanted to start there, just as a way to enter that part of the conversation.

Aaron Smith: Sure.

Helena de Groot: It’s on page seven.

Aaron Smith: Yeah. So this is called “The Only Thing.”

(READS POEM)

On my way home from the mall,

I want to stop at the cemetery to tell Mom

what I bought: blue sneakers with orange

trim, and Hollywood Park, a memoir

by a singer she never heard of. I got

a fast-food hamburger and ate it

in the car. I never told my mother

I wrote books, and as far as I know,

she never saw one. She Googled me,

once, and found an essay I wrote about

being gay. She called my sister and cried,

begged her to ask me to take it down.

I didn’t, and we pretended it never

happened. She loved me without looking

at me, as best she could, and it was enough

in the end, the only thing, after the broken

years, I wanted. Before they took her body

from the house, I told my sister:

she knows all the answers now. Maybe I should

be ashamed, but I’m not. I’m glad we kept lying

so late in our lives, that I was able

to help her die. What we never said

is forever now, and small in comparison

to the honest place we walked—

Helena de Groot: It is remarkable how you keep twisting and turning, like every time that I think, “Oh, okay, I get the point,” then, no, you’re kind of undoing it again, right? Like you start by saying that, you know, you never told your mother you wrote books. Okay. So my initial reaction is like, oh, that’s bad.

Aaron Smith: Mm-hmm. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) I mean, you’re a poet, you know, that’s kind of a big deal.

Aaron Smith: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And then, you know, one time she found that essay, she cried, you know, asked you to take it down. You didn’t. And we pretended that it never happened. Again, I’m like, okay, that’s not great. But then you go on, you know. “She loved me without looking // at me, as best she could, and it was enough / in the end.”

Aaron Smith: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: “I’m glad we kept lying / so late in our lives.” Like, it’s so counterintuitive. I’m glad we lied.

Aaron Smith: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: You know, I don’t think that people say that a lot, “that I was able / to help her die.” And then the end, “What we never said / is forever now.” I feel like, again, that sadness creeps in there, you know?

Aaron Smith: Yeah. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: “And small in comparison / to the honest place we walked.” Can you tell me you can keep lying, and yet, walk an honest place with her?

Aaron Smith: Yeah. I mean, as I said, I’d never helped someone die or been around death like that. And it was so profoundly important. Like, my vision of it was I was going to be a wreck, I was going to be inconsolable. And what happened is I was very calm, and it felt like I had to do that for her. And I think had I forced her, like, “You must see me, you must know that I’m writing all of these truths,” I think it would have put a distance between us that never would have allowed us to have that intimate experience. So for all of the—and I believe that she knew things that she didn’t say as well, I think it was lies on both sides. And I would also say that lying in our family is not exclusively a queer issue. My sister lies to my parents, too. We are a family of secrets, which is something that made me want to write. Was fundamentalist Christianity, I mean, one of the tenets is to bring every thought under subjection to God. So they not only want your belief, they want your very being. So, for me to have any kind of self left with so much shame and so much, so many people in the culture I was in telling me no, I had to find one like core kernel, one place, and poetry was that place for me where I can have that voice.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith: So I knew that she’d found the essay, and she called my sister instead of me. And my sister quickly poured a vodka, I think. (LAUGHS) I was here, she’s like, you know, she knows.

And I had that moment where it was like she asked me to take it down. And that was sort of the, the preparation in my mind was, when or if they encounter my work, I would stand by it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Aaron Smith: That was sort of the moment where I’m like, okay, I’m not giving that up. And then I think we both were sort of like, there’s stuff we don’t want to know. I know she felt that. And I was like, what do I need her to know? The art was mine. I had that. Early in my writing life, I had a chance to spend time with Mark Doty. And I and I know Mark now, but before I really knew Mark, we were in Boston, and he looked at me and said, “You don’t owe your parents your work.” And that was one of the most generous things that a writer has ever said to me. Mark probably doesn’t even remember it. And I think it’s the things that writers just say casually that stay with people. And it helped alleviate that sort of burden, like, oh, again, it’s another narrative, you write this book and everyone’s, like, so proud of you and you have to tell everyone. And I was like, well, people don’t go to work, their job as a chemical engineer and come home and discuss every aspect of it. And some people might say that’s a cop out. They’re like, “Yeah, but they’re not engineering things about their family,” you know, if I can use a bad sort of, I guess metaphor, is that a metaphor? (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: I see what you mean, I should know these words as a (LAUGHING)

Aaron Smith: (LAUGHING) Good.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: As long as we’re both in it, good. But I needed that to, to get through. And I had a therapist and I was like, you know, again, it was more like what I felt like I should feel versus what I did feel.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Aaron Smith: So it was like I feel like people, they’re saying to me, “Oh, you should go tell her all these unfinished things.” And my therapist was like, “Well, why would you do that to someone who’s dying, who has a faith that works for them that they need the most now, why would you say, I need you to know all of these things just to add more complication?” And I think it’s strange probably to the generations behind me who, I think, I’m not saying everyone’s been able to come out more easily, but I feel like there’s more acceptance overall. Like, I do feel like there’s more acceptance of gay people. I love where we are with they/them pronouns. I love that people are troubling the binary and being themselves. But I do feel like I didn’t want to lose my family and I would have. I just know that. But I didn’t want to lose my poetry either. And I had good and bad things happen on the same day. The day I found out that my poem, “What It Feels Like to be Aaron Smith” was going to be in Best American Poetry. My father and I got in a huge, terrible fight. It was just a nasty fight and we both were terrible. And then I had to give a reading the next day. So a student asked me, they’re like, “How do you deal”—I always get this question—“How do you deal with writing your family?” And I’ve never had, I never had a good answer. It was one of those things where I would wing it depending on the day. (LAUGHS) You know, like, I don’t know. And that day I gave the answer that solved it for me: my father would have been an asshole whether I wrote my poems or not.

Helena de Groot: Huh, wow.

Aaron Smith: The only person who would have suffered for me not writing my poems would have been me. And that solved it for me. After that, I was like, he’s going to be who he is. My mom was going to be who she is, and I had to be who I am as best I could.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith: And also be generous to myself. You know, it’s, it is a big deal to be raised in what I think is essentially a cult. And to make your way out of it. And yeah, spend many days as a kid, “Don’t go crazy. Don’t go crazy. Don’t go crazy.” Like, you know, my mind, I thought it was going to crack so many times and just sort of slowly, it’s like closet within closet within closet, you know, it felt like it was so many levels of uncovering that days when I’m feeling generous, I’m like, “You did okay.” You know, “You did okay and you made art out of it.” And some days I’m not generous to myself, but on good days, I’m like, “Okay, you made it and you made art.” And some young writers come up to me and they’re like, “Your work to helped me so much,” or, “Thank you for writing about shame.” And those are the spaces that I’m most interested in. The narratives we tell ourself, the spaces where we survive, the role of poetry in being truthful and what’s truth mean?

Helena de Groot: This is another thing that kind of was almost like a slap in the face in your poems in general, but especially in this book, is how—I’m trying to avoid the word “straight”—how to the point you are with your truth telling. Like there’s very little padding in these poems, you know? And there’s this one poem. It’s called “After Life.”

Aaron Smith: Mm hmm.

Helena de Groot: And in its entirety, it goes like this: “Sometimes / the hardest part // is wondering / if my mother died // believing / I would go / to hell.” It’s such a tiny poem. And it is such a terribly painful question.

Aaron Smith: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: So simply phrased that it just knocked the wind out of me. “Sometimes the hardest part is wondering if my mother died believing I would go to hell.” What happened, that you could actually land there and not try to be smart or try to be this, or, you know, that you’re just like, “No, I’m just going to say it as clear as I can.”

Aaron Smith: Yeah, I would probably get the quote wrong, but Bruce Weigl has a poem called “The Impossible” and he says, “Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.” And it’s following a really difficult scene where he was abused and he talks about it in detail. And for me, craft and emotion have always ran side by side. And when I was in graduate school in the ’90s, there was a lot of back and forth between poems or language experiences. And we would hear a lot, “Nobody wants to hear all of these personal details. You’re relying on, quote-unquote shock value.” And I look back now, and I can see it was just sort of that heterosexist, heterosexual, yeah, heterosexist system.

Helena de Groot: That’s a good word.

Aaron Smith: Yeah. Really trying to keep us behaving in a certain way. And I couldn’t quite, obviously I couldn’t quite see it then. I would even hear this exact quote: “Will straight audiences want to hear that?”

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, uh-huh.

Aaron Smith: Like we were put in that is exactly, you know, who we should be thinking about. So that kind of clarity for me has always been political in a certain way. Like, I’m going to make you sit with this idea, and if I decorate it too much, in a certain way, I’m softening the impact for you. So for me, that thought, arranging in a line break to even slow you down and to pace you in it, I want you to have to sit with it for a short minute. I joked with the reading I gave two nights ago and I said, “I’m going to read this poem.” And it was students. They were great. I said, “It’s really intense. Sometimes when I read it, I can’t believe the things that are that are coming out of my mouth,” I said, “but you only have to sit with it for about a minute and 30 seconds. I have to live with it in my brain all the time.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: (LAUGHS) And I feel like that, it’s like if a little bit of truth can bring an intensity and make you stop and have the experience of that truth, that in some ways, I have to say that is a poem, too, you know. And it is, it is better than being, quote-unquote smart, because I think in its own way, it is smart. And for me, it feels distinctly queer. I’m sure other people who write, who aren’t queer, relate to maybe that straightforward type of poem in their own way. And I believe poetry is a queer form. I mean, it transgresses prose, the line break, all of these things just go against what we, you know, how we think about using language. So I’ve always loved it, and I’m obsessed with line break. So all of that, for me, is really essential in making. And sometimes I do like to stop and say, “Okay, we’ve had all of this, we’ve had these stories, we’ve had these juxtapositions, but sometimes it just comes down to this: I worry that my mother died thinking I would go to hell.” And that’s just a really big moment. And it gets into those things that are unresolved that you can never resolve when someone dies. I mean, my mom can’t know large things about my life, and she can’t know that we voted that horrible woman off the condo board. You know, all of these things and they sort of exist on a similar plane when someone’s gone, the little things and the big things. But the big questions you can’t know. But I still don’t regret—I might regret the circumstances of our lives, like Marie Howe says, but I don’t regret how we navigated what we were given.

Helena de Groot: Huh. Wow. That’s actually the best you can hope for, in a way, right?

Aaron Smith: Yeah, and you know, there’s a way when you read poetry and you study it, you learn that, I might write an entire book of intense poems. And the poet Lynn Melnick talked about this when we had her on our podcast, and she said, “My life’s actually not as intense as my book.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: Like, you know, “I walk to CVS, I do things for my kids, and like, yeah, I watch a lot of TV, you know, I hang out with my dog.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Aaron Smith: So, you know, you assemble a book, and I think about my first book, you know, I have a poem called, “Things I Could Never Tell My Mother.” And it’s a list of all of these things that I did that that would disappoint her. I wrote it after an argument in graduate school in 15 minutes. And now it stands as a piece of art that has been there for years. And I’m like, God, how crushing that would be to my mom to think all of our time together was reduced to all these intense moments. So it didn’t feel even honest in a way to say, “You don’t understand this, but now I want you to sit with everything that we sort of messed up,” because that’s what I was drawn to making art about. But we had wonderful Christmases. She and I went shopping all the time. You know, we went on vacation. So I felt like it was unfair to say, “I need you to see this, and, and react to it the way I want you to react to it. And if you don’t, then somehow you’re at fault still.” And sure, I can blame my parents for the religion and the shame. But like, my mom got her own dose of that stuff, too. She was raised in it. She was a person who was trying to survive. And I think maybe that’s age. You know, getting older, you look back and think, “Wow, they really did do the best.” They, they had it, they had it tough at times. And who told them they were going to have like a five-year-old who was coming to them saying, “I think I’m gay, I just learned that word.” You know. And I’m sure that blew their minds.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. As a five-year-old, oh, my God, that’s so cute, little Aaron, I’m just, if you don’t, if you don’t object, I’m just loving on him retroactively.

Aaron Smith: (LAUGHS) Well, do you want to hear, do you want to hear the story, it’s kind of heartbreaking, about me telling my mom that I thought I was gay?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Aaron Smith: So that was the beginning of the AIDS pandemic, before we knew really what was going on. And I had, like, crushes on men the way kids do, like an affinity, this little thrill. But of course, I was a kid. And I remember seeing a news story that said gay men were getting gay cancer. And then I realized that being gay meant having feelings for men. So I had to go tell my mom I thought I was gay at like five or six because I was afraid I was going to get cancer.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Aaron Smith: So that, I didn’t know anything, obviously. But that was sort of the shadow. And then that’s the shadow my generation of gay men grew up in.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah. Like from the start, like at its conception, like literally the concept has, like, death kind of built into it.

Aaron Smith: Sure, had disease built into it. And there was so much misinformation when we were coming up, too, we didn’t know, you know, certain things. I have a moment in the book in the poem, “My 1990s,” and I say, “Do you need a condom for oral?” And people hear that and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, that’s absurd.” But those were the questions that were floating around. And, you know, depending on where you live, there was terrible information about—and there were homophobic doctors and, you know, you’d go in for like, you hurt your ankle and they would start asking you if you slept with men or women. So then you don’t want to tell your doctor the truth, you know?

Helena de Groot: Of course.

Aaron Smith: And it was just, so, when I came to gay poetry, it was a lot of AIDS poetry. So even my introduction to the art was, you know, these beautiful elegies that shaped it, but just so much pain, you know, so much difficulty. And so yeah, so it was a, it was a very difficult way to grow up. But I’m really glad that I was able to find art, because I do think—and I know sometimes we say this and it sounds melodramatic, but it really kept me alive. It helped organize the mess, and it helped me realize that like, wait, I can have a quote-unquote weird brain, and I can say these things. And when I found Sharon Olds’s Satan Says, that book just changed everything. And it was before Amazon and I had a special order it at a bookstore in the mall. And we drove 45 minutes, and I snuck and got it, because I didn’t know what my mom would think if she saw Satan Says.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: (LAUGHING) You know?

Helena de Groot: Yep.

Aaron Smith: And that book changed everything. And it’s funny, I’ve only met Sharon Olds a couple times, and I hear she’s lovely, but I kind of don’t want to know her because if I had any type of bad interaction, I would be devastated. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yes. Yeah, exactly, exactly. That’s so interesting. To go back to the story, how did your mother react when you were like five or six and you came to her with that news?

Aaron Smith: She was like, “Oh, no, you know, you’re not gay. God would never let someone be gay who doesn’t want to be.” And it was very much like—and then we started, you know, I didn’t get sent away to a conversion therapy camp, but she started telling me, “Any time you have these thoughts, you should say, ‘I rebuke them in the name of Jesus.’” It was like she wanted me to self-brainwash. And I was a little kid, you know? And when people hear that, they’re like, “What’s that even mean?”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Aaron Smith: You know, that’s such a strange thing. Like, what do you mean? But it was like, you change the thought. She was very much like, you change the thought. And in the book, it’s, I realize this may sound strange, like a couple of times, I mention my mom’s hysterectomy. And I know people are probably like, “Why do you do that?” Well, right after she had that when I was a little kid, she started having kind of what she would call nerve problems. And I believe now it was undiagnosed mental health, like, obsessive compulsive, she needed medication. So that was a moment in our life when her mental state changed. So when I bring it up, it’s because that’s when I think that she even started having more intrusive thoughts or like, religious OCD. So that’s a turning point for me. And I, and I feel like maybe I don’t always get that across and I don’t want people to think that I’m a man commenting on, you know, a woman’s hysterectomy. But for us, and again, I don’t think that she got the care she needed. I think that she probably had terrible men doctors who didn’t take care of her. But in her head, medication was not something I think she could even have conceived of. So she thought, I’m just going—there’s something in the Bible, like if you speak, speak something, it’ll become, and I literally can’t remember it. I don’t expect you to look it up. But she would try to like, “I’m healed in the name of Jesus, I’m healed in the name of Jesus,” to try to fix her difficulties. And she tried to have me do that. And obviously it doesn’t work. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: At all. And I didn’t need it to work. You know, I, I have queer joy, too. I always want to say, like, I write about intensity, but I’ve had, you know, so far, and hopefully there’s more, I’ve had a really great, you know, queer life, too.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: To go back to the untidiness of the stories that you tell, one story that I think in the culture at large gets told in a very tidy way is like, “I was raised fundamentalist Christian, and then I got out.”

Aaron Smith: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: Right? Like, that’s always like, how the narrative goes. Well, especially because I didn’t grow up here, like, I don’t know anyone personally who grew up fundamentalist Christian. So can you tell me, like, the ways in which, like, growing up, that showed up and that also didn’t show up?

Aaron Smith: Mm-hmm. People often don’t know this. There’s so many sects, sects, not sex (LAUGHING)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: (LAUGHING) There’s no sex. There’s so many sects, yeah, that, in fundamentalist Christianity.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Aaron Smith: You know, so it’s like, and then what was funny is, like, they would debate those. Some people believe that God would come back and set up a kingdom on earth. Other people believe you die, you go straight to heaven or hell. My grandfather committed suicide, and they were like, “Oh, he’s burning in hell now.” You know? So you’re a kid thinking, “Oh, my God. Like, this is like, you know, his new reality.” So, we went to church three times a week. Sometimes it’d be two hours at a time. And then I also, my sister and our neighbor, we started singing in a trio, and we would travel to other churches and sing. And I still love the music. I mean, the music was such a gift to me, and my grandfather was the preacher. So I think my mom, thankfully, one of her beliefs was you’re in the world, not of the world. So, in some ways, we were lucky because she would let us participate in the world. But we were supposed to be, I guess, a light. So we were able to go to a normal school. It was like, but if everyone else is swearing, we didn’t swear. I mean, it’s that kind of thing, so, that was actually, we were very lucky, because I think some people have very much you have to dress a certain way and you have to do these things. So, ours was just a lot more of like, you have to get saved and then that salvation can be taken away. And it was almost like, even if you swore and then Jesus decided to come back on the clouds, you could go to hell for one swear, you know, in relation to an entire life. And it sounds absurd now, but when your brain is younger and you are, you know, being told that, it sticks and it’s a worry. My sister told me that she still has moments when there is a terrible thunderstorm where she has that initial dread of like, Jesus could be returning. And she doesn’t believe that. But it’s like this initial panic and it’s just so ingrained in the body. And that may be why I write about the body a lot, too. I think queerness manifests in the body, you know, but then also the muscle memory of the religion and then being told that your body’s sinful, you know, all of those things. So did that answer the fundamentalist part or not?

Helena de Groot: Oh yeah!

Aaron Smith: If I didn’t quite get everything that you wanted. Okay.

Helena de Groot: In part, I’m just like eager to know a little bit more. Like, for instance, did you believe when you were a kid?

Aaron Smith: I was definitely a believer.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Aaron Smith: I believed very much. And I thought God would take away my gayness. I believed I wanted to go to heaven. I really, really tried. And I think the bigger disappointment is when you really do believe and then you find out none of it is true. Whereas I have friends who’re like, “I never believed that. I was seven and I knew they were full of shit.” I really wanted it to be true.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith: So when people ask me what I am now, I say, “I think I’m a disappointed atheist.” You know, like, I’m like, that’s too bad, it sounded so cool when it worked, you know? But then when I realized I was a damned outsider, it was like, because gay people are turned over to a reprobate mind, meaning they think they’re okay, but they’re not. So then that’s another mind game. Like, wait a minute, do I still believe in Jesus? Or has Jesus turned his back on me? And in Appetite, my second book, I talk about being a little kid and I was masturbating to a magazine and I felt like that was the moment when God turned his back on me. So a very early sexual experience. I was like, that’s the moment that I was damned. And the artist David Wojnarowicz has this really powerful story where he talks about he stole some money from his father. I believe it was his father. And he knew that if his father found out, he would kill him. So he asked God, he’s like, “I’m going to go around to the side of the house and I want you to meet me there and, you know, help me.” And he said God didn’t show up. And he said, and that’s when he knew there was no God. So, I think, yeah, about you can only be disappointed so many times. You know? (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: Jesus is the ultimate abusive relationship. And I really mean that. I don’t, I don’t you know, I would never take an abusive relationship lightly, but it’s true. It’s very abusive. You can never do enough, and it’s always your fault. That’s the trick. You didn’t believe enough. You needed to try harder. And you just, you know, and obviously gayness is gayness. I mean, I’m gay and that is the thing you can’t, you know.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Aaron Smith: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And so, in that moment, right, where you realized, “Oh, I’m damned, I might as well not believe anymore because this is not, I’m not welcome here,” right?

Aaron Smith: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: Like, how did you then find your way to that private space within yourself, where you could be a poet, where your thoughts were yours, where your thoughts were not subject to like, the scrutiny and the judgment of, you know, whether it’s God or it’s your parents, you know? Like, how did that happen?

Aaron Smith: In some ways, that’s all you have. In order to survive, you’ve got to find somewhere to go. And I’d always been interior. And it was a scary place, too. It was very fraught, especially when you’re, like, battling like, you know, they believe in Satan as much as they believe in God. Like these two people are always pulling at you. And they, they’re kind of people-ish. They say they’re not, but like, you know, God’s the little man and Satan’s the little man. And they’re always trying to, you know, get your soul. And then I think I read William Cullen Bryant’s poem “Thanatopsis.” And it was something beautiful. I don’t think there is anything in the poem—it’s a poem about death, but there wasn’t anything in the poem, per se, that gave me any sort of comfort, but I was just sort of astonished by this kind of making. Like, “Wow, this is so beautiful. And it’s saying big, important things.” And then I started writing really bad poetry. And then as I started finding better poems, I was like, “Oh my gosh, these people are weirdos, too.” (LAUGHS) In such a wonderful way, you know? I love and I use weirdo with just affection.

Helena de Groot: Sure.

Aaron Smith: And I have a first cousin once removed. Her mom is my—her mom is my grandfather’s sister. Her name is Darnell Arnoult. She has two books of poems with Louisiana State University and a novel with Simon and Schuster.

Helena de Groot: Not bad.

Aaron Smith: Yeah, and she’s terrific. An amazing writer and teacher. She came to visit, and she said something about poems. And I showed her my poems, and they were terrible. I was in high school. She was so lovely and generous. And then she gave me Best American Poetry 1993, the Louise Glück issue, still my favorite. Tim Dlugos’s “Healing the World from Battery Park” is in there. Denise Duhamel’s “Feminism”, I mean, there’s just so many amazing poems. And then she would look at my poems. She was one of the first people to ask me if I was gay. I lied then, but she, she knew. And then I went to West Virginia Wesleyan College, and I got to study with the poet laureate of the state, Irene McKinney. And she was fearless. She wrote what she wanted. She encouraged us to write our truth. And it was such a, just an amazing space to be in. And once I found the poets and the voice in them writing these difficult things, I knew that I wasn’t alone. And I think that’s why I think of poetry as a queer form, because it felt queer in that sense. It wasn’t about sexuality, but it was about being outsiders and having transgression and queerness in all those sort of interesting ways.

Helena de Groot: There’s something in an interview that you once said about, you know, you’re only teaching at Lesley University because you’re a poet, and that that kind of ruins it sometimes, right, like “Well, I guess I have to write a poem.”

Aaron Smith: Yes.

Helena de Groot: But you do sound genuinely grateful to the form, you know.

Aaron Smith: Oh, I love it. I absolutely love it. And I think there’s a very long, ongoing conversation about people hating po biz vs. poetry. But I was really fortunate to come up, I think fortunate, before social media, before we all knew each other so well, or we knew personas before we knew poems. So we used to have to—I remember Spring Church Book Company was this little mail order book company ran by Ed Ochester, who later became my editor, and his wife Brit. And they would send out this big Xeroxed several sheets of paper and they’d fold it over. And it’s every book that they had. And we’d go through, my friend, we would highlight all these books. And then you would order them and they would show up, and it was amazing. And it was like these secret texts being passed around, these secret things, like, “Oh, when am I going to get from this?” So, we just had the literature first. We didn’t know anything—I knew nothing about like, awards or somebody’s getting this, and I didn’t get that or somebody gets this fellowship and, you know, and I didn’t. So it was just the work. And I don’t begrudge anyone their success or getting to make a living from readings or anything. But for me it was just always more about the art. And I don’t want to say that it’s not about art for those people either. I want to be clear. I don’t want anyone to be mad at me, because I’m not trying to be shady. If I were being shady, I would tell you.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: And then I would do it. But I do think sometimes you go to the conferences and you see people like, talking to you, but looking over your shoulder for someone maybe more important, or, I think all of that—and then also, you know, if you study with the right people, I do think when you start putting it in academia, I think there is a certain kind of pedigree. And I think like, if you have a chance to study with someone who won a Nobel Prize, you know, and maybe you went to Columbia, I think it might make you more marketable when you start getting into jobs. And again, amazing for the people who’ve had those experiences. But I do think there’s an outsider status that a lot of poets feel. And a lot of awards in poetry, like, you can get them only for your first or second book and then that’s it. And if you survive for 50 years, you might get like a big one on the other side.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Aaron Smith: And so I do think, I think it’s human nature to want more recognition. You know, it feels good. But I think somebody—there’s a joke like, they imagined Seamus Heaney, when he was still living, woke up every morning and said, “I wish more people were paying attention to my poems.” I mean, I don’t think that anyone ever probably quite feels that, you know, they’re being heard. Maybe that’s why we’re obsessively making. So for me, it’s like reminding myself to get back to the essential. Going back to the books that just made me want to do it, and finding that intensity. Because I don’t think, I don’t think you can create that real intensity in the work if you’re not in an authentic space.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith: So I feel like that’s how I see through the politics or through the, some days teaching’s fantastic, some days it’s absolutely exhausting. Nobody’s read, you know, you’re just like, “Oh my God. And you’re like, This is Marie Howe’s What the Living Do. These are some of the most important elegies about people who died of AIDS. You know, her brother died and you’re just, you skimmed it, you know.” And I will, I will stop class sometimes and say, “I know you’re rushing, and I know that you have so many things to read, but stop and look at this book for a minute and think, you know, not just Marie Howe’s book, but this person may not be speaking to their family anymore because of this. In some cases, people have been exiled or imprisoned for saying this. So just stop for a second and think about the artist who did that.” And I think when you find that intensity in a book, regardless of someone’s awards or where they went to school, I think that is where poetry lives. And that’s what excites me still.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Well, let’s get to another poem. I was thinking the poem “Stupid Beauty” on page 46.

Aaron Smith: Okay.

Helena de Groot: Also, if ever I pick a poem where you’re like, “No, I’m disappointed by that one,” or like, “Let’s not,” do tell me, okay.

Aaron Smith: I haven’t read from this book hardly at all.

Helena de Groot: Oh, wow.

Aaron Smith: And after I turned it in, I didn’t look at it. And I used to walk around obsessively just looking at after I submitted them. It was just really painful. It was like after I wrote it, it caught up with me in certain ways, and it just made me really sad. And I think I was able to keep it through the lens of art while I was making it. But after I made it, it’s like, wow, these are—my mom’s dead, and these are the poems about it. So I think that’s probably why I haven’t looked at it as closely. So that’s a long way of saying I’m happy to read (LAUGHS) whatever you would like to hear.

Helena de Groot: Does it feel in a way like a second kind of finality? Like she’s dead and the poems are finished?

Aaron Smith: Yes. It feels like now that the project is complete, she’s gone.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Aaron Smith: It’s, yeah, it’s a second closing. And then what I also found was in certain ways, I was like, “Oh, I’m grieving, I’m putting this in the work and I’m going to do this and I’m facing the grief head on.” When I realized that the poetry protected me from the grief more than I knew, and I felt like she will have been dead four years this coming October, and I feel like I started feeling it more last fall and this winter. Because I think the project was finished. And now I had no in-between, no buffer, no way, no lens to put it through. And now I’m just a person in the world who’s mom’s dead. The other thing that happened last month is one of my best friends completed suicide. And so it’s been—and then my dog died in November, which some people don’t think is huge, but it was devastating. And then my friend who I, we’ve known each other since we lived in New York in 2001, very surprising that it happened. So I think about, I’m like, how many more griefs can I—(LAUGHS) and I don’t want to ask.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Aaron Smith: You know, I don’t know what I believe, but I don’t want to put it out there just in case there’s something, you know.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Aaron Smith: So I think it’s probably going to be my subject on and off for a very long time. And yeah, I don’t know, I think, I hope that it becomes something that lives in a pocket, you know, inside of me. I think of “Michiko Dead” by Jack Gilbert, and it’s all told through the metaphor of this man trying to carry this box and just, you know, arranging it and putting on the shoulder and moving it around. And I just hope the box gets smaller.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah. Or your shoulders get stronger, I guess, is usually how it goes, right?

Aaron Smith: Well, as a gay man, that would be great

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: if I had broad shoulders. (LAUGHS) I’ll take that. If grief can make me be in very great shape, I’ll take that.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Do you want to read “Stupid Beauty”?

Aaron Smith: Sure.

Helena de Groot: Did I tell you that it was on page 46?

Aaron Smith: You did, I think.

Helena de Groot: Okay.

Aaron Smith: I found it, but I think you told me.

(READS POEM)

Stupid Beauty

The sun dissolves through

the window. Three weeks

in my condo—only texts

or dog walks, the grocery

store quickly with my head down—

grief still lines the aisles

in uniform boxes. No people, person

to come home to, to bring me food

because he doesn’t want me to be

hungry. Nobody to drive me

to a simple procedure if I need

a simple procedure. For a moment

I feel like something good

might happen, like when I was young

in a humid city trying on tight shirts

with my shoulders back, thinking I,

too, could have a story. I’ll spend

the night cleaning the kitchen, wiping

crumbs to the floor, sweeping,

opening something else I bought

that I’ll only look at once. A body

untouched is still a body

I used to believe. Nothing of anything

will ever be enough. My mother

is dead. I wasted so much time.

Why is this so hard to say?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Again, Aaron, I mean, you say things out loud that I feel like—even the “Why is this so hard to say?”—ring so true, right? Where it’s like, I’ve just said it, and actually I kind of want to take it back immediately, you know, like, I don’t know if I can even bear the truth of that.

Aaron Smith: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: That’s at least how I hear it.

Aaron Smith: And, you know, I worry, too, it’s like, I worry—earlier in the book, I’ll say I don’t regret anything, and then other times I’m like, oh, I’m having a day where maybe I feel like, do I regret it? Ultimately, no. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t have periods where we question our decisions, where we question the way that we decided to navigate the world. One thing that that strikes me even in this conversation, after my book, The Book of Daniel, came out, I was flying home for my mother’s funeral. And she died on the 7th, and the book came out officially on the 1st. And when I landed at Logan Airport, the publicist from Pitt, she’s like, “You just got a really great review. But I do want they give you a heads up, because he quoted the line from the book where they say, ‘Your mother told you to get AIDS and die.’” So I literally left her funeral, landed in Logan Airport, and they—I so appreciated they wanted to give me a heads up. And I remember in Logan, I went and I called my sister and I sat down by the baggage claim and wept. I was like, “Did I do the right thing?” Like, you know, “What is this? I wrote all these things, and, and it wasn’t always bad. It was just, you know, these moments that happened.” And my sister was so great. She’s like, she’s like, “You’re an artist. And the artist looks at everything. And the artist has to think about all the aspects.” And God, she just gave me so much what I needed then. And so it doesn’t mean that it’s easy. And it doesn’t mean that you’re always, like, resolute, like, “I have this,” but like, I believe that I did the best that I could. And that’s, I think, all we can hope for. As people, we do the best that we can.

Helena de Groot: You know, what I find so interesting in what you’re saying now about this poem, “Stupid Beauty,” and then the same thing in the poem that we read at the beginning, “The Only Thing,” it seems like your concern is about, am I doing justice to my mother?

Aaron Smith: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: On the page, but also to her. You know, like, have I protected her sufficiently? Have I helped her die?

Aaron Smith: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Have I, you know, and then on the page, like, have I mischaracterized her in ways that, you know, I wouldn’t want for her?

Aaron Smith: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And that’s a concern we have as kids, right. But we also need something from our parents, right? Like, we need that same concern from them for us. Do you feel like you got that?

Aaron Smith: Somebody said once, like, all we want is our parents’ acceptance. I don’t think that’s all I ever wanted. I feel like I figured out early I wasn’t going to get it. Sure, there were times like, “God, I wish that they understood me, or I wish they accepted me. What would that mean for my life?” But I think very early I came to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to get that. So to long for it was going to be pretty much fruitless. And I think I just wanted to know that they loved me. You know, that’s probably what I wanted. Like, did they love me in spite of the things that they were afraid of or the things that they thought were going to damn me? You know, like the poem we talked about, “Afterlife.” And I do feel like I got that, you know, I definitely got that from my mom. I think that she probably made a lot of concessions in her life in her belief system to the extent that she was able to, to love me. And, and that means something.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. It’s like, you know, that line that you wrote in that poem we read at the beginning, “The Only Thing” you write, “She loved me without looking // at me, as best she could, and it was enough / in the end.”

Aaron Smith: Yeah. The love.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, the love.

Aaron Smith: Yeah. And so I guess, yeah, not acceptance in like, all my decisions, but the love. Yeah. And I did get that. And it’s odd to look at the poem “Stupid Beauty.” That poem feels particularly vulnerable to me, because as a gay man at age 48, again, these expectations that I wrestle against, I should have a partner, I should be settled. We do all this struggling to come out so we can have this certain life. And then I’m like, “Oh, I don’t have it,” you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Aaron Smith: But I’m not, I’m not sure I want it. But then I’m like, well, what do I want? So, so it’s odd, like the poems, I think we get back to that intensity, that might be me on one evening, and then the next night I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m watching The Big Bang Theory with my dogs and it’s great. And I can order an expensive art book because I don’t have any kids,” you know what I mean, it’s fantastic, you know?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Yes, yes, yes. I mean, in the beginning you said that, you know, you wanted to write those poems right away because you didn’t want memory to get lost, you know? Now that your memory is inevitably getting skewed and turned and twisted around, what’s it been like, actually, to kind of revisit the moment when you had that memory really clear? What’s it been like?

Aaron Smith: There was a moment when I read, like I said, a couple of days ago, where I was like, “Am I going to cry?”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Aaron Smith: It’s like I was hearing it. And even early in our interview, I had a moment like, Am I going to start crying?” (LAUGHS) And then I didn’t, you know, I don’t want to sit here and cry on you. So it hits me in ways that surprise me. And then, because it’s permanent now, those poems make it permanent, I’m allowed to interact with them in various ways. Sometimes, you know, I read them and I’m like, “Wow, that’s so hard to remember,” then other times I’m like, “That’s a pretty good poem,” you know? Like, my favorite line break in the book is in “Stupid Beauty.” You know, the line where I say “a body, line break, untouched is still a body, line break, I used to believe.” I’m so happy with that enjambment. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Absolutely. Because you’re saying it and then you’re unsaying, it, in a way.

Aaron Smith: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Like, a body untouched is still a body, I’m strident, I, you know, this is—well, I used to believe. Okay, there you go! (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: Yeah, and that’s my favorite thing about line break.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Aaron Smith: That’s what thrills me. So I’m able to look at them, too, just from craft. But then, yeah, for me, I just wanted a permanent record. And I believe my mom had so many unfulfilled dreams. I think she had undiagnosed mental illness. And I think about what the world could have been for her had she maybe not grown up in, you know, that religion, had she maybe, you know, been able to approach things differently. And I think that she lived an amazing life in so many ways, you know. You know, she started out as a school cook and then she took classes and became a teacher’s aide. And she was so nervous about being able to do that. And then she was so proud. And I was so proud of her. And then, you know, she put us through school. She would get up at 4:00 in the morning and go cook. And she’d come home with burns on her arm. And she just did it because she wanted to put us through college. You know, so, the affection is so much more than any of the difficulty. And then even in the opening, I say, “I dedicate the book for my mom, who wanted more from this world than she got.” And sometimes that is the bigger sadness for me, is I just wish that I could go back and give her everything that she wanted. So, except grandkids, I didn’t want, I didn’t want kids. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

That’s too big. That’s too big of an ask! (LAUGHS) But, you know, all joking aside, I just wish I could go back and give her more of the things that she wanted, because she was a really neat person.

Helena de Groot: Oh, Aaron, thank you so much. And I’m sorry that you lost her.

Aaron Smith: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Can we sit here for another minute, and I’m just going to record the silence.

Aaron Smith: Of course. And I can read another poem if you think you need one or something, so.

Helena de Groot: Maybe “Mom in Casket I Picked Out.”

Aaron Smith: Sure.

Helena de Groot: Would you be comfortable with that?

Aaron Smith: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And this is one, I think, that pushes against the narratives, narrative poems in the book.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Smith: Because I can look down the page and I get really freaked out when you see a poem and it’s all “and” and “but” conjunctions, articles “a” and “the.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: So it’s like, we can’t escape them.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Aaron Smith: And it just freaks me out. I’m like, but I don’t want all these throwaway words.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, this is not The New York Times. We’re not trying to be, like, legible legible, yeah.

Aaron Smith: Exactly. So these, I was like, how many of those words, those excess words can I get rid of? And in many ways, it became, I think, at least one language of grief for me. Like, if I’m really going to get to the essential, then what is the language that needs to be there, but I can still get this across? So this is “Mom in Casket I Picked Out.”

(READS POEM)

Mom in Casket I Picked Out

wearing shirt she bought when we shopped at mall

not time she fainted but time before under-

taker cut shirt up back glued eyes shut ripped neck-

lace from neck dad wanted back goodbye mom

I said did the best I could preacher wouldn’t

take a hand off my back tried not to piss off dad

at lunch his old friends wanted photos a mile

away my mother’s being buried in dirt

said to James Wayne Tommy Joel and these mother-

fuckers want pictures smiled while dirty-beard

loser cousin made rabbit ears behind someone’s

head camera flash one more another flash

the lipstick they put on you mom was pink you’d

never wear everyone almost everyone liked it

Helena de Groot: (EXHALES) I had the hardest time with that last sentence.

Aaron Smith: And my sister still apologizes for that lipstick. I, I saw it and I was like, “That’s a terrible color.” I guess that’s having a gay son.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Aaron Smith: And she’s like, “It was in her drawer. It was with her makeup.” And I was like, “I know,” I said, “and I don’t, I don’t fault you,” but she’ll still say, “I’m so sorry about that lipstick.” It’s still something that haunts her. And I would never do that to make her feel bad. But it just, it just, that’s the part that didn’t look like her.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Aaron Smith: And that was, you know, kind of difficult.

Helena de Groot: I totally get that’s why, I mean, I just I read that line and I could have never, you could have never made that up, right? It has to be true to come to you, I think.

Aaron Smith: Yeah, mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: But the moment you wrote it, I thought, my mom is also really someone who just, she has such a particular style, and it would be almost like a moral offense to put her in the wrong thing, you know?

Aaron Smith: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And so, I really felt that one. And yeah, back to what you said about I really wish that I could have given my mother what she—or that she could have had the life she wanted, you know?

Aaron Smith: Yeah. And I believe that she loved being a mom, you know. And I believe that she had a good life in so many ways. I just think that there was that longing that so many of us have. And I think a lot of us get a chance to investigate it. And I think practical expectations on her maybe kept her from getting a chance, you know, to explore those things. So, yeah, it’s like, she was good enough.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Aaron Smith: You know, even, even the failures, even the strain between us, even, you know, the parts that she couldn’t accept about me. You know, I really think she did the best she could.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Aaron Smith is the author of five poetry collections: Stop Lying, The Book of Daniel, Primer, Appetite (an NPR Great Read and finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize), and Blue On Blue Ground (winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize). He’s a three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Mass Cultural Council. He is associate professor in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

(MUSIC PLAYS AND FADES OUT)