#bruce snider

[kitchen-light]

It was the beginning of two impressions that would only deepen the more I read. The first was that if you were gay, you needed to live in the city. The second was that if you were gay and wanted to be a writer, you needed to write about the city.

Bruce Snider, from his essay “Where Are All the Rural Gay Poets?”, published in Lit Hub, September 22, 2017

[kitchen-light]

an embodiment of Salman Rushdie’s claim, in Imaginary Homelands, that “description is itself a political act,” that “redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing it.”

Bruce Snider, from his essay “Where Are All the Rural Gay Poets?”, published in Lit Hub, September 22, 2017

[kitchen-light]

In the end, my literary coming of age involved a search for works that challenged these assumptions, a kind of shadow canon that hadn’t been included in what I’d been taught. I discovered Don Schueler’s memoir, A Handmade Wilderness, about a gay, interracial couple in 1968 who bought eighty backwoods acres in southern Mississippi. I read Jim Grimsley’s gay-themed rural novels, Winter Birds and Dream Boy, as well as, long before it became an award-winning movie, Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.” Though I’d been taught Whitman as a poet of nineteenth-century New York City, I found passages that celebrate love between men in a natural world: “To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean, / On his right cheek I put the family kiss.” I discovered James Wright’s poem “Sappho,” about a rural woman’s love for a married woman, as well as Adrienne Rich’s “For Julia in Nebraska,” which contains the lines “for Willa Cather, lesbian, / whose letters were burnt in shame.” These works, I learned, existed, but weren’t widely anthologized, weren’t part of how I’d been encouraged to imagine what it meant to be rural or gay.

Bruce Snider, from his essay “Where Are All the Rural Gay Poets?”, published in Lit Hub, September 22, 2017

[largebadpicture]

There ought to be a fire somewhere in Indiana, not this night across the fields in Indiana.

And God said let there be light, and there was light. And God said let there be corn, and there was Indiana.

...

I don’t need a communion wafer. I need the autumn mist of Indiana.

Arcola, Goshen, Nappanee. Remember a place where the river bank passes through you, where the Amish girls spread their skirts in Indiana.

...

And will you ask: where are the lilacs? And I will answer: Under the snows of Indiana.

Soon, spring buds will thrust their sex organs into the mouths of bees. Their story is the story of Indiana.

If there are a hundred ways to recall the dogwood in bloom, this is the one where your parents make love on a battered sofa in Indiana.

Stamen and pistol, pollen in the air, the field of poppies knows lust spell its name: I-N-D-I-A-N-A.

What’s death, after all, if not the Wabash wearing down river stones, if not the muskrat flicking its damp tail in Indiana?

Are those angels’ trumpets? Is that God calling Bruce? Have I reached the end of the world? Or Indiana?

[roysexton]

I was a teenage quiz bowl werewolf

Congratulations to the Columbia City High School (my alma mater) Spell Bowl team which won the state championship for the first time in a few decades. Below is a blast from the past, celebrating the wins – Academic Super and Spell Bowls – from a generation or so ago. 

View On WordPress

[literaryhousepress]

For fifty bucks you sat there never thinking what you’d sold—your mother’s green eyes, your father’s head for math, his heavy drinking. Some part of you hadn’t lived yet might not die, abandoned on a day with so much you’d forget—the time, the shirt you wore— though you recall blushing as you handed the nurse your cup with its small embarrassment of riches. And you can see her face. And you remember driving home, how your body hummed the urge of damp soil: ferment, thorn and hay, how all of April moved through you, ragweed tossing pollen in a pale froth, leaning at the fence break, just giving it away

Bruce Snider, "At The Sperm Bank"

Bruce Snider's "At The Sperm Bank" is just one of his works alongside other writers on display in the inaugural issue of Cherry Tree. 

Purchase subscriptions here. 

[bookspresso]

"Machine Song" | Bruce Snider

I Xerox what I need to keep (a sheaf of papers, taxes, real estate), everything that once was ours. I close the lid. The light flares—

a sheaf of papers: taxes, real estate. This is what we were, divided in a tray. I close the lid. The light flares, then spits the pages neatly stacked.

This is what we are, divided in a tray. (No more walking hand in hand.) It spits the pages. Neatly stacked, everything we loved is here—

no more walking hand in hand. I copy one for you, and one for me. Everything I loved is here as your touch drifts back.

I copy one for you, and one for me. As the gears grind and shift, your touch drifts back— the bed we shared those nights, a part

of us those gears. Grind and shift, my breathing slows. The paper jams: the bed we shared, those nights apart. I clear the path and start again,

my breathing slow. The feeder jams, the paper blank as sleep. What’s left? I clear the path and start again. Lost deep inside the machine,

what’s left: the paper, blank as sleep. Was everything once ours? Lost deep inside the machine, I Xerox what I need to keep.

[ronk]

Afterlife

From  American Life in Poetry at www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.

Column 435, BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE Perhaps there’s a kind of afterlife that is made up of our memories of a departed person, especially as these cling to that person’s belongings. Bruce Snider, who lives and teaches in California, suggests that here.

AFTERLIFE

I wake to leafless vines and muddy fields,

patches of standing water. His pocketknife

waits in my dresser drawer, still able to gut fish.

I pick up his green shirt, put it on for the fourth day

in a row. Outside, the rusty nail he hammered

catches me, leaves its stain on everything.

The temperature drops, the whole shore

filling with him: his dented chew can, waders,

the cattails kinked, bowing their distress.

At the pier, I use his old pliers to ready the line:

fatheads, darters, a blood worm jig. Today, the lake’s

one truth is hardness. When the trout bite,

I pull the serviceable things glistening into air.

American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.