Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

An Interview with Cyrus Cassells

169 An Interview with Cyrus­Cas­sells© Rachel Eliza Griffiths 170 Cyrus Cassells My impulse is to move to beauty as a healing approach for things that are really horrific or challenging,” says poet, translator, and actor Cyrus Cassells. “I don’t know if it’s a balancing act, or a need to ameliorate,” Cassells says, but he is clear that one of the goals is “beauty that is in some way not ornamental.” He goes on to emphasize how his “experience of eroticism” is to see and illuminate its inherent beauty, its power to heal. Beauty, trauma, and desire—how they’re linked in our lives and in our history, and most importantly how they can heal—these are the materials in which Cassells’s acclaimed poetry is steeped. These facets of his verse are no doubt what prompted scholar Malin Pereira to describe Cassells’s poetry as full of “sensual beauty, exquisite skill, global range of allusion, and spiritual themes.” She adds that Cassells “turns to art as witness to horror and ultimately a path toward spiritual grace and healing.” In the following interview, Cassells eloquently explores the role of healing in his poetry, charting the course his life has taken and how he has shaped and been shaped by poetry. The conversation is marked by a strong sense of the history of our shared human traumas, as Cassells discusses the horrors of the twentieth century and how his poetry is both a confrontation with and mediation of those events. (“I have a powerful sense of history as very human and individual, as a lived, individual experience , not as a master narrative overlaid on people’s lives.”) Mary Frances Jiménez notes, “[Cassells’s] empathetic approach to events as gripping as the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, the AIDS crisis, American slavery, the oppression of women in Afghanistan, the integration of public schools in Little Rock, and his father’s death invites readers to enter the spaces of torture and grief.” For Jiménez, Cassells’s “witnessing voice becomes a means toward reclaiming the wounds of the past and returning agency to those who have suffered, revealing hope in its least-expected dwellings.” 171 Cyrus Cassells Cassells’s career as a poet began in 1981 when Al Young selected his manuscript The Mud Actor to win the National Poetry Series competition. (Up to that point Cassells didn’t really consider himself a poet, he says; he was pursuing an acting career.) The book introduced a poetry inhabited by voices from the past, voices Cassells believed represented a kind of past life experience, something he discusses in relation to his latest work, as well. Carl Phillips has said of this aspect of Cassells’s writing, “By not focusing on a single identity but including instead as many as possible . . . Cassells conveys something of the universal, human fact of suffering and alienation.” While The Mud Actor skyrocketed Cassells to national notice, it would be twelve years before his second book appeared. Cassells talks frankly about what he was seeking in those years, what helped him find his voice, and the one poem that enabled, and became, his “emergence.” Cassells has gone on to write a total of five books of poetry, including the most recent The Crossed­Out Swastika. Below he discusses the challenges the book presented and talks about the urgency behind the stories of the Holocaust (including the story of a gay French survivor named Pierre Seel) that prompted him to write it. In the interview Cassells also talks about how he adapted traditional Western romance tropes to explore gay desire in the Lambda Literary Award–winning Beautiful Signor. This topic also occasions a discussion of Cassells’s poem on gay marriage (written in 1997, several years before the issue was a cultural lightning rod) and how gay poets need to reclaim and rewrite history to reflect the gay experience. Cassells also addresses a number of craft issues. He shares what he’s learned from his poet-hero Lorca and discusses how to write about sex and the body, and how a poet negotiates questions of tone and voice when his poetry is fueled by outrage and empathy. 172 Cyrus Cassells Whether the topic is the writing of elegies to his friends who died of AIDS or shining a light on the integrity of the young people who were killed in World War II, Cassells talks...