My newest poetry collection is called True Believer and it’s a series of pieces that spin around and through Marvel Comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I can’t say I set out to write a collection of Marvel poems, but I will say I was determined to work on a book less bleak than my last one, Teacher/Pizza Guy, which illumined the year I spent delivering pizzas 3-4 nights a week while continuing to work as a full-time teacher. That was a rough year—filled with late nights navigating icy roads and washing mounds of sauce-spattered pots in an unheated back room until 5:00 a.m., before catching a couple hours of sleep and then snapping awake to teach English 10. My mother hates that book. She doesn’t like to think about me teaching all day and then devoting an 11-hour shift to delivering pizzas to the university dorms of drunk former students for whom I’d once written letters of recommendation. Look, the book was basically a public admission of failure. I’d chosen a noble, if frustrating, career path that failed to fully support my family. It was an important story to tell, but there wasn’t much joy in it.
Reading Ross Gay, specifically his Book of Delights, compelled me to find inspiration in places other than disillusionment. After Stan Lee’s death in 2018, I wrote an elegy in his honor. A few weeks later, teaching a poetry workshop at a center for addiction, I wrote a piece about how much I loved Marvel’s use of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song in the movie Thor: Ragnarok. Workshop participants seemed to enjoy the poem and I started thinking, hmmn, maybe there’s something to this Marvel stuff. I read comic books in the seventies and eighties with the kind of hunger most kids display for a bowl of ice cream, so it occurred to me that if I wanted to create a poetry collection that could spark some joy, maybe I should plumb that world in which I was once so happily absorbed. Of course, the success, even ubiquity, of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, both enhanced the pleasure of my nostalgia and created a new series of stories I could explore.
One of the keys that helped unlock the manuscript revealed itself when, in the course of researching the Marvel canon, I decided to research the month I was born, August 1966, and see what was happening in the Marvel world in that moment. As it turns out, in that month’s issue of Captain America, Cap’s nemesis, The Red Skull, discovers what he calls the Cosmic Cube, a fist-sized box that allows him to realize any wish he can imagine, sort of an Aladdin’s Lamp he intends to utilize for various schemes of evil. The plot of this particular story is forgettable, but the Cosmic Cube eventually turns out to house one of the Infinity Stones that, a half-century later, becomes the foundation for the epic, global-records smashing Avengers movies. In fact, the story helps explain why, seemingly randomly, The Red Skull ends up guarding the Infinity Stone known as The Soul Stone—the one both Black Widow and Star-Lord’s girlfriend Gamora end up dying in pursuit of—and makes an allusion to his having some experience with its power.
It might sound egotistical, or just plain ridiculous, but the way I see things, the fact the Cosmic-Cube-which-becomes-an-Infinity Stone debuts in a comic featuring one of my favorite characters in the month I was born, meant I was 100% destined to write a book that excavates the Marvel Universe essentially from the month of my birth all the way up through the saga that is Avengers: Endgame (though I do venture slightly beyond that moment in poems exploring both Spider-man: No Way Home and Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness). What I’m trying to say is the story that ends with Avengers: Endgame is a story that’s thrummed beneath my feet every day I’ve been walking this planet. It’s as much a part of me as the rhythms of Dr. Seuss or Bob Dylan or Springsteen or Run-DMC, as much a part of me as the voices of Yankees play-by-play announcers over the radio, as bagels and a newspaper on Sunday mornings. One thing I always tell my students is, your story matters, because I want them to believe their observations about themselves and the world around them are worth writing about. Well, if the same maxim holds true for me, if my story matters, then the Marvel story matters too.
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
I consider this book the ultimate novel that explores the origins of superhero culture. It’s the first book that made me think about the people who created the heroes, as opposed to just the heroes themselves. Years ago, reading it felt religious, and not just because the Judaism of central characters plays an important role. It felt religious because it was the first time I reckoned on a philosophical level with the notion that rooting for the triumph of superheroes meant believing in hope, meant believing that faith itself was maybe more important than the heroes and whatever specific powers they wielded. This book also inspired me to think about creating art out of other art, and, more pointedly, that comic books could actually be considered art.
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
I picked up this novel because of its title, an allusion to Superman’s fortress of solitude, a refuge where he goes when he feels down about the death of his home plant Krypton, or just depressed about the state of the world and the many villains wreaking havoc. What I loved most about it was its vivid description of childhood in New York City, especially what seemed to me like pages describing the efficacy of small pink rubber balls called Spaldeens, which at one point universally provided enjoyment to inner city (and other) kids playing stickball, stoopball, handball and all other manner of ball-based games. More than the allusion to Superman’s hideout, this book influenced my thinking in regard to the symbolic importance of childhood past times and the kind of impact those activities could wield on one’s worldview as one grows into adulthood.
Capable Monsters by Marlin M. Jenkins
This chapbook of poems focused on the world of Pokemon offered me a blueprint on how to create a whole poetry collection where the focus was on a specific set of characters created by other writers. I know nothing about the Pokemon universe, but the way Jenkins was able to connect certain characters, plots, and themes from the Pokemon stories to his own experiences gave me permission to conduct similar explorations in the Marvel universe and relate them to my life experiences. Perhaps the most cogent example in my collection that was influenced by Jenkins is the Dear, Bullseye poem where I write in epistolary form to the Marvel villain Bullseye as if he might actually read what I have to say. This notion of engaging in direct dialogue with a Marvel character found its birth in Jenkins’ Pokemon poems.
Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith
In terms of general influence on my poetry, there’s no question Patricia Smith has been a huge inspiration. All of her books have meant a lot to me, but specifically Blood Dazzler, Smith’s collection about poems exploring the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, had a tremendously powerful impact. Her poem “34,” which speaks in the plaintive voices of the 34 people who perished when abandoned at a nursing home, hits me hard, always. When I think of voices crying into a void to be recognized as existing, that theme finds its way into both my poems “Outside School Today” and “The Hour of Thanos.” In both poems, Thanos and his ilk represent sociopathic genocide, and while we think of the heroes who confront the menace to do battle, rarely do we think about all the individual people/souls destroyed over the course of the Armageddon. Patricia gives people like that a voice in Blood Dazzler, and in my own way, I try to do the same.
Another poet whose work wormed its way into my brain while I was crafting True Believer is my former student Carlina Duan. Duan commands both sound and image masterfully in all her writing, but her collection Alien Miss creates a series of documentary poems based on the writing of people who experienced our shameful Japanese internment camps during World War II, and others who went through the dehumanizing immigration process in San Francisco. Duan’s influence creeps into my work in the poem The Thing about The Thing where I quote both a story from The New York Times circa 1885, and text from an antisemitic propaganda pamphlet that was distributed throughout Ann Arbor during a recent Jewish New Year. In other poems I also directly quote text from various Marvel stories and I don’t think I would have had the confidence to do that without having experienced Duan’s work.
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
Of course, Ross Gay, like I said before with his Book of Delights, inspired me to write more joyfully. But I also want to shout out his poetry collection Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude for a couple additional reasons. First, the title track from that collection gave me permission to attempt longer poems and feel free to veer and circumnavigate and spin around and eventually jam in on a particular moment. In fact, his book Be Holding, which is one long poem that takes place while Julius Erving is in the air with a basketball in a game against the Los Angeles Lakers, also gives me that permission to expound and expand without fear. The other thing that happens in Gay’s poem “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude” which weaves through me is the way he refuses to look at the world in any kind of Pollyanna-ish way and stares down the darkest elements of humanity, but, nonetheless, knowing how fleeting it can be, treasures any beauty and wonder he can find. My own worldview rocks with those notions pretty seriously and I try to excavate them further in True Believer.
Danez Smith is another important poetic influence. When I think of Danez’s work, I think of energy unbound, of a voice that’s uncompromising and wants to believe in love so much, they’re willing to fight/shout to the heavens for it. Their books Bluff, Homie, and Don’t Call us Dead all resonate not only with power, but with that loving, fighting spirit that constantly wants to keep itself alive despite any and all horrors it confronts. When I think about standing up to Thanos, or any other representation of greed and hate, I think about Danez, their singular, dynamic voice.
All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told by Douglas Wolk
This exploration of Marvel Comics helped me visualize the Marvel universe as one, single epic narrative. While I don’t necessarily focus on the same moments in Marvel that Wolk does, his passion to understand the shape and scope of the Marvel story inspired me to look beyond the stories of individual heroes and think about the themes that connect their journeys. I don’t claim to have the breadth and depth of Marvel knowledge (I guess it’s called lore these days) that Wolk does, but because he did all that work/research, I was inspired to excavate Marvel in my own quirky fashion.
MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Dave Gonzales, Gavin Edwards, and Joanna Robinson
I encountered this book late in the process of writing True Believer. It didn’t inspire me as much confirm I was managing to hit some important notes in what I was already composing. It was actually pretty exciting to think about how some small moment I was wrestling with trying to understand, or highlight, ended up—as related by Gonzales, Edwards, and Robinson—as being important to the to the big wigs who created the Marvel Cinematic Universe. My poem Star-Lord’s Dance, which I was imagining was a celebration of a pretty obscure slice of the Marvel saga—when Peter Quill first dances onto the MCU scene on a grimy-looking planet in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie—in fact, turns out to be something of a seminal moment at Marvel Studios, a moment that originally had a totally different soundtrack. To learn that the scene actually helped unlock Marvel’s musical creativity was a fun and enlightening revelation and made me feel a kinship with others attempting to excavate the Marvel story.
Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay
I’ll shout out to one other poet here, Aracelis Girmay, whose poem “On Kindness” in her book Kingdom Animalia, is something of a foundational poem for me. In it she talks about the two-plus billion years of human existence and how, despite how awful we can be to each other, we’ve also been kind and charitable enough to enable us to survive and even thrive throughout all this time. That idea also gives me hope, the kind of hope it takes Captain America, and me, to stand up to the horrific power of Thanos.
