During unsettled, unsettling times, we often look to poetry to make sense of chaos, to ground us, and to feel less alone. David Groff’s third book of poems, Live in Suspense (Trio House Press), is a wonderful place to turn. Groff shares his own sense of existing in suspension in the face of uncertainty and speaks powerfully to the connections we hold with the people we love, both living and deceased, and to how we might find our own individual worth over time. He grapples with what it means for him, as a gay man and as a human being, to be generative if not procreative. What it means to, someday, no longer be here but to persist as part of the larger system of matter. As we follow Groff in his exploration, we are taken by his signature fearlessness, wisdom, and, of course, gorgeous language. This search leaves Groff and his readers in a calm place of acceptance, ready for whatever may come next.
Groff’s previous book, Clay, was chosen by Michael Waters for the Louise Bogan Award. His book Theory of Devolution was selected by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series. With Philip Clark, he edited Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS; with Jim Elledge, he edited Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners, winner of a Lambda Literary Award. An independent book editor, he teaches poetry and publishing in the MFA creative writing program at the City College of New York.
It was my great pleasure to speak with David Groff over Zoom about living and loving, ghosts and faith, desire, mortality, bridges, and the gifts inherent in suspension.
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The Rumpus: Congratulations on this gorgeous collection of poems. I’m going to quote two lines from the titular poem: “Our bridges still hold us/though their cables quiver.” Your poems feel like bridges. Can you talk about existing between beginnings and endings, the mystery and tension of what comes next, and how it all informs this collection?
David Groff: Poets write individual poems. If you’re not a poet who is intent on doing a project book, as you write poem after poem you start to pull the camera back and see what’s connecting them. There were many things in the poems that were speaking to me in motifs and in subject matter. There’s a point at which you write into those motifs and subjects as you put a volume together. The more I looked, the more I realized I was obsessed and scared by bridges, by the in-between-ness of things.
I was also aware of the time I’m at in my life. This is the third book in over twenty years. I’m not a young, emerging writer. I’m somebody who’s been around, particularly in the context of writing about AIDS and HIV, which I’ve done in all three of my books, but also around writing about my parents and their deaths. I am aware of mortality in a new way. When your parents die, you know you’re next, even as you’re trying to live in the perilous present. With the loss of my parents, with living with a husband who has HIV, and just with being older, I was looking toward the next mortal thing that would surprise me. Ever since I was a kid bullied on the playground, I’ve anticipated ambush. I’m trying just to be planted in place, even if that place sways.
Rumpus: There are ghosts in this collection and many hauntings. Can you tell us a little bit about your father and his presence on the page?
Groff: My father has always loomed over my work. He was an Episcopal priest. If you grow up as a preacher’s kid, you live in a fishbowl of faith, whether you want to or not. I love to use a Flannery O’Connor term—Christ-haunted—to describe that feeling of the ubiquity of belief, even if I had a relatively benign upbringing. I think my father was Christ-haunted as well. For somebody who was a believer, he was aware of mortality to the point of not wanting to talk about it, of crossing himself and beating his breast whenever an ambulance drove by.
After my mother died twenty years ago, my father and I got closer. He lived almost two months short of ninety-nine years old. I feel that part of my job as a son has been to keep him alive and to keep him immediate, no matter what God has been up to. No child can do that, of course, and so there was this odd dynamic between us that persisted after his death: had I done him justice? He hadn’t felt that he could keep his sister or mother or father alive, or his wife. How can you do justice to someone when you can’t keep them from mortality?
Rumpus: There’s a softness and sadness in your poems about the little boy you were. You tried to connect with your dad, but sometimes it seems you felt you were getting in his way: “You’re in My Light / said my father to his boy / when I leaned under his lamp . . . / I never got that he meant / I darkened his text . . . / I thought I cast no shade / that my body was just myself.”
Groff: We had a really intimate bond, but I feel incriminated by the limits of what I could do for him, and I get mad about it, as in the poem, “What Else” when I ask “What else can you demand of me?” and feel I ought to be “Mary Magdalene crow-barring the tomb.” The night he died at Cedars Sinai, I wanted to be away from him. I wanted to go down to the Ray Charles cafeteria and eat, but also breathe.
I’ve always tried to imagine heaven for him. In Clay, my previous book, I had a poem about invoking a heaven for my mother, which was kind of a solarium, where she’d be with her plants, waiting for me. Now, in “His Craft,” I put my father in his little dingy that he loved, with his boat in a harbor, and so put him in his place.
Rumpus: Is it hard to separate your father from religion? There are three poems titled “A Boy’s Own Bible Story,” and “A Boy’s Own Jesus.”
Groff: Jesus, I think, is an intensely physical and even erotic figure. When I was a kid, it was very easy to confuse God the Father with Dad the Father, and imagining Jesus as the older brother in “A Boy’s Own Jesus” was part of this pull. The poem’s end, when Jesus is either “devil or deliverer,” is the predicament for me.
In the “Boy’s Own Bible Story” poems, I wanted to play on that boy’s ideas and revise some of those stories, just as I was revising my ideas about Jesus. The poems have a bit more attitude. One of them is about Abraham and Isaac, which is deliberately offhand, different from Bob Dylan’s version or Marie Howe’s poem, “Isaac,” which is from Isaac’s point of view. In the Noah poem, Noah’s a real tyrant and so is God, the indignant, disrespected weatherman. As Jack Miles has said in his God, A Biography, God’s a sociopath in the Old Testament. It’s a little different in the final “Boy’s Own” poem, when Jesus heals the leper. I’ve been fascinated, ever since I was a little boy, with what it means to be healed by Jesus. What do you do after that? I’ve tried for years to write a poem from the point of view of Lazarus. How do you have dinner after you’ve been in the tomb for three days and you’re the local celebrity, or your leprosy disappears like magic? How do you go on living when you’re the subject of a miracle?
Then there’s “A Boy’s Own Heaven,” which is where I try to imagine immortality apart from these other boy’s own figures of power and danger. The poem ends with an entangled embrace. It’s more open-hearted.
Rumpus: Are you a believer?
Groff: In my head I’m not, but I’m still companioned by notions and images of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. When I was a little boy, my mother and I would say my prayers every night. She taught me there were five prayers to be prayed in a specific order: You praised, you confessed, you thanked, you intercessed for others, and then finally you got to ask for your own thing. I don’t pray like that now, but I still feel the summons of that rubric. There are times, especially at night, when I imagine the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost sitting outside a small cavern on the side of a mountain where they can see everything. They can’t do anything, but they have their eye on the sparrow, on the fall of every twig and leaf, and they watch you and me from this place of absolute attention and sympathy. I find some solace in that.
Rumpus: That sounds like a poem.
Groff: It may be. I’ve got a fourth book to write.
Rumpus: When you write about your mom, as in “Malcah,” you wonder how you could have been a better son.
Groff: Yes. There are a couple poems where I play around received forms, as in this ghazal, where I hope the force of feeling breaks it open at the end.
To be almost sociological about it, so many women born before World War II, like my mother, had a sense that they hadn’t quite lived up to their potential. My mother was a production editor at Oxford University Press. She gave that up to have kids and be a rector’s wife, though she went back to editing later to help pay for her sons’ college.
I wanted more for her. I felt I had somehow not followed through for her, not paid enough attention. In “Malcah,” I was looking for the word in Hebrew that meant matriarch. There really isn’t one. I actually asked on Facebook, “What’s the word I want for this?” People said malcah, which means queen. My mother could be queenly, but she was not empowered enough in that queenly role.
Rumpus: There are other hauntings. Clay, your husband who is very much alive, has HIV, so that’s a haunting. The idea of suspension seems to be ever-present in your writings about him.
Groff: My first book, Theory of Devolution, came out when my relationship with Clay was new. Issues around HIV were urgent then, but they largely manifested in poems about my gay fraternity. By the time Clay came around, HIV had hit home. Clay’s HIV was drug-resistant, and there were real touch-and-go moments where we would live in suspense around what his viral load would be, whether opportunistic infections would break through. The concerns persist. HIV, even when it’s undetectable, as it is now in Clay, in flames and threatens you.
So, I am still asking, What will the next month or year bring? Will the bridge hold? I think that’s true for a whole generation of long-term survivors and those who love them.
Rumpus: There are also the hauntings of all the men you knew and lost to AIDS. In “Days of 1986,” you describe bringing your blood, along with hundreds of other people bringing theirs, to the Board of Health to be tested. “The vial—I wanted to pluck it / from my backpack and / prop it on top of a pay phone / or stash it in the trash can / with the dead Daily News / wanting no news, not even / good news, all news cleaving me / from my brothers.” Grief travels through many stages but never fully resolves. Do you feel your poems around AIDS or the grief around it are different now?
Groff: There was, in 1986, so much not knowing. Seeing all those vials stacked in a tray was shocking. We are all players in history. If we’re not survivors of HIV, we’re survivors of the AIDS era, which still persists. HIV is not cured, and treatment is not equitably distributed in the US or anywhere.
AIDS was always a metaphor, whatever Susan Sontag said, as well as a reality. Everyone’s immunity is permeable, temporary. How do you live with the notion of a finite lifetime, in a world with such injustice, where you want to do things and have fun and love people?
This comes up in my “Days of” poems, which are responses to Cavafy, who wrote a series of “Days of” poems, rife with fleeting moments of youth, connection, and desire. I love Cavafy, but his yearning is so tinged with sepia. I was trying to bring those poems into memories around AIDS and HIV. How has desire always been infused with grief?
The poem “You Kids Get Off My Lawn” features me being a cranky old guy looking at the young ’uns who have come of age at a time when they could manage their desire differently, without HIV shadowing them in the same way. What do these young people tell me, and what can I tell them? In the last line, “If you look hard into my shade / you’ll see me in you,” there’s a desire to be part of them and to point at the overall continuum around HIV and mortality and desire and grief.
Rumpus: “Disbelieving These Deaths, I Go to Sit by Lake Hebron” was an award winner.
Groff: It won the Editor’s Choice Award from Spoon River Poetry Review. Austin Smith, who’s a terrific poet, selected it.
Rumpus: You write about your dad, but you also name people who died of AIDS. There’s so much power in remembering, in honoring.
Groff: They’ve been named in all three books. They’re a growing chorus. One of the surprises in that poem, and a surprise for me writing it, is that it was takes place on a 9/11 anniversary, so the people lost are part of this larger sense of the impossibility, injustice, and shock of death, even as the poet is trying to be all Wordsworthian alongside an idyllic lake.
Rumpus: We can’t discuss this collection without mentioning bugs. What possessed you to write about bugs?
Groff: Bugs swoop into a lot of my poems. In Clay, there were birds everywhere. I had seagulls, who I love, and turkey vultures. There are a few birds in this book too.
I didn’t invite the bugs. They just started insinuating themselves. Some people had issues with the desert stink beetle, who is kind of icky but is my darkling, my nightingale. There’s a companion poem to “A Boy’s Own Heaven” called “A Friend Asks Me to Pray for the Soul of His Dead Brother” in which a flying cricket buzzing around creates a halo. Bugs are my messengers and talismans. They’re scurrying, flying, escaping, delivering, between states and places, in suspension.
“Turn,” a poem about fornicating box elder bugs, makes a contrast between me and the insects. One of the discoveries of the book for me was that certain later poems had a greater sense of desireless-ness, which I think is a way to rest in suspension—not to be a fornicating box elder bug right now but just to be me. That felt to me almost inadvertently Buddhist.
There’s a poem toward the end called “I Want to Be Alone.” There I am acting all Greta Garbo by a Wyoming creek, not having opinions and conclusions, just being a set of cells. I’m interested in those moments of what my therapist-friend and writer Jan Crawford calls dis-identification—when we step back from our egos and just inhabit our integuments. There’s a reason this book ends with a poem called “The World Without Me,” imagining that moment of post-suspension.
Rumpus: Tell us about “I with No Rights in This Matter.”
Groff: It’s a poem about walking the streets of Chelsea beholding other people’s children, wanting to be their parent, and letting go of that wish. I’ve been lucky to be part of a generation for whom chosen fatherhood as a gay man was a possibility. I had one or two chances to pursue parenthood, and it didn’t work out. This led me to think about how we value those who are procreative and those who are not. Some of us may not be procreative, but we can be generative. What would it mean to embrace being generative? To have a different way of taking on a responsibility for creating more life on the planet?
Rumpus: That leads me to my last question: what’s next?
Groff: I’ve been grappling with that. There’s been a big gap in years between my books, and I would like that gap to be shorter. I’m interested in possibly doing a project book, where poems are all united around a subject. I’m noodling with prose and memoir. But I think I’m going to have to see what comes next through indirect means, such as playing with form. I need to jam the radar on form and subject matter, so there’ll be a sense of discovery.
I suspect my new poems will edge me closer to the end of the bridge I’m on. Each new poem I write usually leaps upon me without premeditation, pointing out the path just up to its last line. Only later, as the poems accrue, can I see further down the road. To quote Roethke, I learn by going where I have to go. For a while I’ll have to live in suspense.
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Author photo by Henry Lee
