A Conversation with Christian Gullette
BY ANDREW HAHN
Christian Gullette’s debut poetry collection Coachella Elegy won the Trio House Press Trio Award. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets), and The Yale Review. He has received financial support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. Christian completed his Ph.D. in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. When not serving as the editor-in-chief of The Cortland Review, he works as a lecturer and translator. He lives in San Francisco.
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Andrew Hahn: Thank you so much for taking the time to share about Coachella Elegy. It’s a truly beautiful collection and I’m honored to have the chance to talk about it with you. What I noticed, in a broad sense, is poems about a brother’s death and a husband’s ocular cancer are woven together with poems of eroticism and pleasure, mostly around water in Palm Springs. Can you talk about the importance of writing/expressing queerness in the hardship of a heavy diagnosis?
Christian Gullette: It’s a pleasure to be in conversation with you, Andrew. I’m struck by the way you described a core tension at the heart of the collection—eroticism and pleasure juxtaposed against mortality and ever-present loss and destruction—with the notion of water. Particularly, water in the desert, which is its own literal and metaphorical representation of that tension. Palm Springs, a place of pleasure and pools and cocktails and sweat, somehow exists in a location of drought and precarity and even environmental catastrophe. Those erotics of bodies and liquids and pool parties take on a kind of recklessness that both makes the speakers feel alive in the face of things like cancer and grief, but also become melancholy and even complicit in hardship in terms of water use. I think this tension of aliveness contrasted with the ever-present reminders of impermanence and loss informs many, if not all, of the poems in the collection.
The poems also interrogate a melancholy that resists that aliveness. You’re right that there’s also a way this tension is related to the expression of queerness in the poems. The idea of being in a sea of bodies at a gay pool party, but also feeling disconnected and alone. Likewise, deserts can seem like solitary places of wandering, but they are also vibrantly alive in ways both seen and unseen. There’s always the potential to bloom amidst the reminders of the sea that the desert once was and may become again. The couple at the heart of the collection have been together a long time and fought for survival against cancer and discrimination. But also, they wander together and separately in ways that don’t lead to any easy answers but never abandon hope and regeneration, though somewhat suspicious of that promise. I tend to write poems that revel in complexity over endings that lead somewhere certain.
AH: I think your answer speaks directly to your poems “Clothing Optional” and “Nurse Plant.” In “Clothing Optional,” I underlined the closing couplet: “I don’t go in the rooms, / just dance and watch // not celebrating anything specific, / but a freedom not to care.” And in “Nurse Plant,” you take that reminder of impermanence and loss and bring it to pools ever-briefly––“One summer, / a man drowned / in The Saguaro’s pool party / while everyone danced”––but the speaker is a degree removed from the tragedy since he had his own pool. Your placement of these poems within the collection increased their gravity, but I’m going to make readers wait and see for themselves.
Speaking of pools, the collection’s first section emphasizes sight, given the husband’s ocular cancer, as seen up close in “Gadolinium (GD)” and “Airbnb Art.” There are moments, specifically poolside, where the husband “watches from a strip / of artificial grass” as the speaker flirts with LA boys. Given the context of the husband’s prosthetic eye, given the beautiful restraint of your lines, there’s a tension that what is perceived is not as it seems. Was sight and its implications part of your process in crafting these poems?
CG: Definitely, and I’m glad the different perspectives of these types of vision, types of lenses were apparent as the speaker’s own eye zooms both wide and close-up, focusing or distorting in relation to how intense the feeling or emotion is. It can feel intimate at times or, as you noticed in “Nurse Plant,” somewhat detached. I think that detachment can feel voyeuristically pleasurable when it’s triangulated—when a speaker is watching someone with someone else. The desire really ramps up. And not just from afar; there can be a desire for intimacy. To feel closeness in response to distance. With the couple in the book, that can be erotically charged not just from proximity, as in an outdoor shower—which is only partially hidden by glass—but also as the result of a fight for survival, almost a determination to hold on and keep one another close. But it can also be a tantalizing tempting of fate, to triangulate a perspective. Taunting it. Pushing limits and boundaries. Willfully looking away but wanting to look back but also then not wanting to see. Those different camera angles reflect those ambiguities and confusions and conflicted feelings in the mind. A consciousness at work that is complicated. This was also important to me in terms of the ways the natural world and many of the environmental challenges facing California landscapes find visibility and interrogation in the collection, but also are ignored, risking so much.
You mention the restrained lines of many of the poems, and yes, I think that formal choice generates tension visually as well, hopefully tightly compacting intense emotional experiences into brief but highly lyrical and imagistic spaces so that there is the potential for heightened, almost unpredictable feeling. The unseen interiority is made, somehow, into a kind of matter.
In that way, the unseen plays a role. The speakers in my poems are always also aware of what’s unseen. The possible blindness from eye cancer looms as an unseen presence that can cause further loss of perception. And it’s something inside a body. Intimacy has its limits of what we can know inside another’s mind and body. Like my speakers, I’m fascinated by machines that can give a glimpse of that physical interiority, but often it’s constructed through slices of images, never truly what is. There is the unseen aliveness and possible bloom of the desert. The lives lost to the AIDS epidemic were felt everywhere such as in places like the Castro. The loss of bees and butterflies that navigate in ways unseen to us. But they still manage to reappear in the poems despite it all.
And, of course, there’s the elegy itself, words attempting to fill an emptiness left behind. The grief for the no longer seen, who are always present and in some ways brought back to life through words, seen or heard. Now I’m going down the rabbit hole of speech utterances and what can actually be heard and said and felt from the no-longer-seen!
AH: The practice of reading poetry in itself is a sort of voyeurism, and with this collection, like a trained chef, there’s a sharpness into what we’re allowed to see. And regarding the grief that is deeply felt within this novel, there’s a line that struck me in the final section: “Though death followed us / here too”—and calls to attention all that is lost, and though there’s a reappearance of things like bees and butterflies despite it all, a large part of this collection is about keeping a brother alive through memory. This particular loss haunts the collection. I want to leave the question fairly open-ended, so can you speak to the brother’s presence in the poems?
CG: The presence in this book of my brother Jeremy, who died in a car accident many years ago, was both near and distant over time, and in many ways, tracks the evolution of the book to publication. Before Coachella Elegy came to be, it was a different manuscript entitled “Beehive State,” set in Utah, where my brother went to a boarding school for a time. Many, if not most, of the poems were set in Utah and the high desert. It was a book very close to my grief, which I now realize I hadn’t ever fully faced, but it was also a series of poems incessantly calling from the past. The poems were trapped in a way. The speaker was a bit frozen in time. Cooped up during the pandemic, I found escape in writing my first poems about Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley. The poem “Coachella Elegy” began as an homage to the desert but for me, the melancholy always finds its way in, and soon I remembered that last time I was there, I had forgotten it was the anniversary of my brother’s death and was both horrified and relieved it finally happened. In a way, it was a sign of healing. In another, a kind of call or echo from the past intruding on the present. Once I realized that the book needed to explore that present, but with more infrequent echoes of my brother through the six elegies that punctuate the collection, everything came together. The portrayal of the couple, that is me and my husband, and our current experiences really gave the book a sense of feeling in the present that brought intensity and searching and eroticism and joy; life continues with all its precarity but without forgetting the past.
AH: That was really beautifully stated, and thank you for sharing. It’s amazing how death and the spirit of those who are lost weave into the present so seamlessly, which I think is authentic to how grief actually works, and your collection discusses Jeremy’s death matter-of-factly with impact and grace. Interestingly, you say, “it was also a series of poems calling from the past,” and “the poems were trapped in a way,” and I wrote in my notes from the collection’s third section (where grief is mostly at large) that there’s imagery of binding, of inescapable and inevitable moments. All that to say, I really admired those poems.
Switching gears, I want to talk about the final section. It starts with the aforementioned poem “Nurse Plant,” which starts the section off with the passing mention of a death. In context, after the section focusing mostly on grief, the poems in this section have loss sprinkled into this beautiful world you created for us in the poems. I say “loss” because the husband’s ocular cancer comes back to mind in “The Fish”: “I can’t be sure I’ve / ever loved anything this whole, / that I’ll ever be this close again.” The poem is about eating a whole fish, but because the poem mentions its eyes, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was an intentional callback to the cancer poems in the first section. Was world-building part of your process when writing and ordering these poems? The last section really has some powerful lines that are made even more so from the context of the whole.
CG: You’re so right about the eyes in “The Fish,” and I guess they are a kind of call-back to the eye cancer. And I’m glad you sense a different mood in that final section of the book because poems like “The Fish” do switch gears a bit. Many of the poems in this section yearn for ecstasy and pleasure despite all the grief and loss. Even though the poems still resist easy redemption, the human desire to recognize beauty in a harsh and precarious world is what keeps them going, searching. The bees at the end seem to have disappeared. But some have also found themselves delirious with a sugar high—disoriented, and transformed even, but not fully gone.
AH: And trying times, tragedy, and illness push us into a sort of transformation. I think anyone could think of a particular gutting or drawn-out emotional experience and consider how that’s transformed them in some way, and it’s not just people who go through these changes, as you’ve stated—the bees, the climate, communities in the aftermath of a death. I really can’t emphasize enough that you’ve touched on something special in this collection and I’m so excited for others to read it.
As there is movement in this searching, grief, and disorientation, there is also literal movement between the sections marked as “In Transit.” Given your previous answer, I’m reminded of the last line of the final “In Transit”: “my bag is on board somewhere / below us along with mail whose final destination is not my destination.” Can you briefly discuss the ideas behind the “In Transit” poems? Because I think they work so well with the traveling speaker who seems grounded in each location yet never settled, like a plant native to another land.
CG: I’m very interested in the notion of searching, particularly the liminal spaces encountered when moving between places—whether physical locations or emotional states or life and death. As someone who moved to the Bay Area, but who has lived here for almost 15 years, I both feel from somewhere else and at home. But not completely. I also think these in-between and liminal spaces can make room for asking questions about the myths and narratives that inform how we think about place. On a more personal level, there’s a questioning of notions of the myth of the queer utopia, places like San Francisco and Palm Springs, which have been places of refuge and joy and safety, but also death and injustice and displacement. When “In Transit,” I question the notion of destination. Does it exist for me? Did it ever? Is it from that place that I can more acutely feel both loss and joy and yet still not have arrived?
