What inspires Ronald Palmer?

First thought: My boyfriend, Kevin Rolston, who is my true partner in life; we live in San Francisco together and some mornings we walk to the park and do pull-ups, sit-ups and arm walk the parallel bars on the "fitness path". We are trying to be generally healthy little bears together, strategizing how we're going to beat our addictions and achieve our life goals. We're each other's life coach if you will and he kicks my ass if I sleep too late, eat too much, bitch and whine too much and implores me to keep my writing deadlines for myself in between my corporate job and my online teaching for The New School.  Otherwise I'd be fatter and lazier than I really am.

Second thought: Ru Paul, The Lady Bunny, La Homa Van Zant (even though she's just a red headed boy now who works in publishing), my ex boy friends: George Wittman and Billy O'Brien, my best friends: Peter Nickowitz and Delilah (aka C. Dale Young), my parents who still call and want to know every detail of my life and keep saying their proud of me even after my scathing Sharon Olds-esque poems written in my 20s, my two older sisters, Street Fighting Kick Boxers and Lil' Kim.

Do you remember the first piece of writing you wrote, and was it a poem?

Very early writing like around 7 was playful and rhymey. Mostly journal writing about teenage acne, when would it go away, now I know the answer continues to be never. I remember writing a few things in grade school about playing football in Pop Warner in Bethel, Connecticut....then for High School English class and a short piece that I submitted to NYU for the MA program called "First Day" which went something like this: every time September came with dew in the grass and a fire burning through the stem of every leaf, my father carried the Polaroid out to the front yard to snap our new clothes, the sweet oil smell of the picture sliding out, me jumping to pull off the black plastic to see: my sisters dressed in matching pink pant suits, my head cocked to the right, belt pulled too tight, and the shadow of my father's head resting on my chest.

Where did you grow up, and what was it like growing up where you grew up?

I grew up in Bethel, Connecticut, about 60 miles north of New York City. The first time I took the train by myself at 16 years old to see a Broadway show in 1982 called A Chorus Line; it was transfixing, especially the storyline of the Gay man who I remember waiting outside to watch him leave through the stage door thinking: "a real Gay man". My small town was very secretive and that's why I'm haunted and obsessed with secrets. Now I know that this is really a microcosm for the U.S. My family in many ways is no different from the rest. I remember moving to a dead end dirt road in 1969 at 3 years old and the American flag waving in the wind on a flagpole in the yard of the house across the street. Our house and back yard was attached to a local farm that had Black Angus cows and Dairy Cows and I would feed them bruised apples from my little palm, so I remember cows and those wonderfully furry lips on my fingers and the HUGE Pink TONGUES!

It was very safe in Bethel; My earliest trauma was trying to walk on my own to a local candy shop called TOMMY's on route 6 and I got half way there and burst into tears on the side of a hill where cars sped by me; a local girl on her paper route rode me home on her bike and I remember screaming and crying in my mother's bedroom which woke her up horrified so she started crying too. My mother was always crying.

This is another recurrent theme for me so I won't get started. My mother worked nights as a nurse and was forever exhausted. I'm from a very working class background and my sister and I were two of the very few in my extended family to finish any sort of college degree. Bethel was also very homogenous and somewhat Tim Burton-esque in the sense that there was an idyllic 80s period where feathered hair and embroidered jeans were everywhere. Prior to that in my childhood and early teens: the 60s and 70s were mostly television for me or the local Catholic Church or making out with local boys in bull dozers parked next to new homes being built: dark, snowing, steaming up the windows. Now all my early boys are hyper Christian and either it really was a phase or denial is a powerful thing (you decide) let's face it the pressure to conform sexually in this culture called American is so infused with fear and hatred that it's amazing any of us survive...and now looking back my high school years were much like depicted in the movie Dazed and Confused, so perhaps that was a national experience.

Why is fiction more socially acceptable than any other genre of writing?

People like sentences. We're an animal made of story and people are fed the logic of beginning middle and end from children's books and fairy tales. Fiction is a fish hook that pulls the reader through. I have to admit that my next project is a porn thriller. I'm going to reinvent the genre a la Delany's The Mad Man meets a Gay Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, but of course there are several twists. I love Denny Smith by Robert Gluck, who's so totally genius and would sell as much as David Sedaris if the reading culture was smarter. Cuz he's just as funny but there's a lingering residue of linguistic karate that sizzles in the brain. On another note: It's the same reason football is so popular in our culture as opposed to Rugby. The rules are confusing and there are apparently no rules. What the hell is the criteria for poetry? That's the general feeling for most people, I think, and judging from my years of teaching at various colleges where I constantly heard statements like "why don't they just like say what they mean?" Commonplace by now is the statement "Poetry is closer to Jazz than fiction" and it's a true analogy for me. Plus the obvious monetary connection to fiction is a major reason. The best plays and fiction is poetry in sentences masterly disguised.

What are the things you love about the poetic word?

Word or World? I'm a word clanger in a Hopkins-esque sort of way, I'm the dork on the airplane who's writing a hundred words that rhyme with Snout. I love the way words can make music and meaning simultaneously. Word have saved my life. Words at times especially the poetic have made me convulse with sobbing, been my best friends, carried through The Netherlands on a train, the poetic word in general is more aggressive in its potential to transform the human spirit, or to tug and rip and shake the soul, the poetic word can wound, can instill desire and horror, make the most poignant political statements all within ten lines change nigger change change nigger change, No! Gwendolyn Brooks, I will not forget you. Some day this kid will grow up.

David Wojnarowicz's text on his child hood photo is to this day chilling. The most emphatic poetic words tell the reader about herself/himself in a startling way and becomes something that drives you on to save yourself.

For you, why poetry?

Gerard Manley Hopkins was an influential force in my undergraduate years, especially in 1987 at University of California at Santa Cruz, I had a great teacher who made me memorize Hopkins. It could have been the acid then the redwoods and the stars, Hopkins mimicked the way my consciousness felt and I was in love with his voice pulsing in tandem with my yearning. I am an addict. I can't stop writing. I have several prose projects now that I'm balancing and literally will be awakened with lines at 3AM that I have to slither to the bright kitchen squinting to record. Why, because the voices tell me to. Embarrassing but true: the voices become you.

Is there a writer or writers who make you sit up and take notice?

Living writers? I mentioned Robert Gluck already; Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian are so dauntingly curious as a couple and both superb writers: the new Mina Harker, her new faux-bio-novel is fantastically inventive and hilarious. Joe Wenderoth and Henri Cole are two of my super favorites. Cole because you can feel his loneliness and he's like a magician who can whirl together a world that just keeps haunting. For example from his recent book Middle Earth the lines "a bee scribbles its essence between us" and "the iridescent ducks swim away like phrases" (I'm not sure where the line breaks fall because I don't have the book in front of me). Wenderoth because he's just so damn hysterical and boils down all that Foucault/Blanchot/Lacan/Butler madness of theory into chunks of visceral giddiness. I also think my new Soft Skull family kicks ass with basically everyone on their roster and I'm so proud to be included on their list of poets. I'm in a writing group right now with several poets from the Bay Area who come and go, and I do also like their poetry very much: especially Taylor Brady, Stephanie Young and Del Ray Cross, my Shampoo.com editor buddy.

Dale Young gave me a copy of TORN a recent poem of his and I have it under glass next to my front door. He's a talented writer and goes for the sublime with beautifully constructed lyric lines, but of course I want him to be funnier and looser and sillier and raunchier and more diva in his writing as he is in his real personality.

Kathy Acker (who died of Breast Cancer) continues to rock my world and she was writing this stuff in the 70s and 80s! She was so prophetic and beyond brilliant. Read everything by her if you haven't already. I'm recently obsessed with Paul Celan who's of course dead and gone too, but wow what a genius. Some of the folks from the NYU program back in the early 90s are already well known such as Dana Levin, Richard Tayson and Nick Flynn all of whom I highly respect and admire and read everything by them that I can get my hands on...the other one who's on her way and will eventually tear shit up is Duriel Harris, a Cave Canem fellow and one amazing writer. I've read Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red so many times I had to buy a new one because I tore the cover off my first copy. I want to fuck that little red monster I'm in love with him!!!!  There are so many stellar living poets and writers, that I get dizzy in magazine/journal sections of bookstores.

Do you think there is any such thing as gay literature?

Yes and No. Binary Schminary. Reductivity is anti-artist. Gay is obviously similar to Black/African American Lit or Women's Lit, yet Queer Lit or Pornographic Lit, which should be distinguished I think, even in my own tastes I wouldn't put Henri Cole on the same syllabus as Kathy Acker. Proper vs Vulgar is the real divide and class is the lion tamer. My favorite line in Acker's ovure is something like: "Soft as the hair on my grandmother's cunt." That said, at some point all criteria must be reduced to one of aesthetics and used as the only binding factor. e.g. Toni Morrison is closer to Faulkner than Baraka. I could go on for several pages on this question alone and no one would read it so I'll stop here.

Do you consider yourself a "gay poet" or a poet who happens to be gay?

In your opinion, what is the difference? I'm not gay. hee hee. just kidding. I've been a gay poet since kindergarten. That silent anxious awkward one frozen in the corner. I'm just a human anomaly as one corporate cohort once called me. I want to be considered a performer, a performance artist, but we'll see how ridiculous I can become and turn my Logicalogics into a traveling circus freak show. I'm a bitch at heart so many poets hate my guts. I want to be nice, I'm beautiful at pretending. I'm a queer bitch of a poet. I'm not someone who seeks out the approval of my straight counterpart in any setting especially literary or academic. I learned from all my teachers that your subjects choose you, Sharon Olds said that to me, not sure where she got it, but it's so accurate. Don't censor and if it comes out gay/queer/porn/ then write as such. I know that sometimes I write something and then pretty it up to submit to a certain journal. I have to continue to resist that because editors know when you're trying to pass some hacked piece of crap off as art. It's art because it's true and something crystallized in the process, something froze during the making and uttered a goddess. Yes I'm a gay poet AND a poet who happens to be gay...I've resisted inclusion in Gay anthologies (not that anyone's breaking down my apartment door like Please just give us one lousy poem!), because I don't want to be a ghetto girl. But hell I'm almost 40 so whoever will have me in poerty-whoreville, I'm there.

Describe yourself in 10 words.

Child. Perpetually chubby dork. Black girl on the inside. Dancer.

What's the last thing you bought for yourself?

A brown rain coat from Banana Republic for all this San Francisco weather.

What pisses Ronald Palmer off?

My own carelessness.

Do you think poetry can be taught, or are we born with it?

Born with it.

If you could be any superhero or supervillan, what kind of power would you like to have?

I'd be ghostboy: Visiting the dead to get some answers for delivery to the living.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

I have two webbed toes on both feet.

How much revision goes into your writing?

Sometimes none; sometimes I obsess for months that turn into a year or two. "The Dildo" I wrote in ten minutes when I was 28 years old. "The Logic Of Addiction" took me two years between ages 31 and 33. I recently met D.A. (Doug) Powell who told me over tea that a few of the poems in Cocktails took him two years to write, especially that purple poem that is so crushingly gorgeous. Sorry I'm being such a poetry name dropper but I'm so happy to interact with other writers.

If someone wanted to make a movie about your life, what actor would you should to play you?

Pam Grier when I was a yung'n and then Mark Walburg when I was all grown up.

How would you define your style?

Lyrically Spastic, Shockingly Weird, Devistatingly Disturbing? ...once a reader from the Paris Review wrote to tell me that the poetry editor would not publish poetry that straddled experiment and lyric. I love broken words because it forces a "vertiginous" (Bill Haver taught me that word) cerbral experience where two ideas collide in a new central meaning. At least that's what I've been trying to accomplish in newer writing. I want to be a bridge builder and braid several styles all at once.

If you could call anyone right now, who would it be?

Dale, I have to meet him at Mecca. More interestingly: James Baldwin if I could contact the dead. Michael Jackson if the person must be living, come on, Michael is a genius no matter how you slice it. Poor Michael, poor poor Michael Jackson, the severest visionary!

What other occupation would you like to pursue?

I would be an astronaut and tip toe across the rings of Saturn.

Complete this sentence. No one knows Ronald Palmer_______.

No one knows Ronald Palmer has a stuffed bunny and rhino with twin doll costumes that I hug and kiss at bed time. Abused boys never grow up.