It isn’t the stuff that “lauded poetry” brings to mind, necessarily – the dusty bristle of Caucasian blues set to rhyming schemes and meters – but Florida native Derrick Austin is breaking barriers and furrowing brows with his visceral and poetic take on otherness. And the praise has been plentiful. He certainly isn’t shy.
“Slowly eat out my asshole, slowly while bees
lave daffodils on our balcony and remember
each bloom with dance. You growl. I lick
your armpits. Come, come for me, you say,
our moans made fluid on our canvas of a bed.”
– 6., Trouble the Water, BOA Editions 2016
That erotic bit of verbal scandal came from the fruitful mind of Austin, a self-identified black, queer poet who grew up on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
Austin is making his first professional visit to Orlando (read:one that doesn’t involve him sitting in a teacup and spinning) on April 23 for a live reading from his first poetry collection Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016) with local book pushers Functionally Literate. Austin is a Cave Canem (pronounced kah-vay caw-nem), Pushcart Prize and four-time Best New Poets nominee. He earned his MFA at the University of Michigan, a veritable sea of cis-whiteness. He stands out.
Austin writes about what he knows: sexuality, religion, blackness. And as such, his work is rooted in the body. The result is a collection of works that are familiar and intimate.
“I try, in my poetry, to stay as rooted in the physical world as I possibly can,” Austin says.“Because, honestly, when I write my poems, I want them to be like little worlds that my readers can enter into. So I try to make it as specific as I can. I feel like the specificity, the experience of being black and gay in the South, I feel like the more explicit I am about those particular experiences, the easier it is for people to enter into them. And for them to see what they can of themselves in the poems. People may not have necessarily gone through the same types of things or seen the same types of things that I have, but I want my poems to be as welcoming as possible. I want them to be understood, and communicate to other people.”
The result is a marathon of blush-inducing, yet meditative essays on contemporary queerness. The first piece of his that I read was called “Cruising,” which on the surface could simply be seen as porn-etry, but succeeds in transporting the reader to a questionable tryst of yesteryear, like in this tasty passage.
“… It’s a question of bones: his muscle-car-wide-receiver hands
knead your spine, your narrow back, exposed
bone no amount of flesh can cover.
It’s a question of overindulgence.
He doesn’t let you kiss him. It is law.”
The seeming lewdness is really just frankness. Austin has nothing to lose by letting it all just hang out there. There’s universality in his pieces that appeals, one that can shake you into dropping pretense in favor of listening, and letting you chew on what he’s serving up.
One of his most infamous poems “Blaxploitation,” which is included in the new book, serves a little shade with the meat:
“Another night of ‘I’m not usually into black
guys but…’ and I’m alone with Johnny Walker black
and too many movies. I’m not offended. No black
moods at all. I’ll watch The Seventh Seal. Black
chess pieces slaying white, live or die, Bergman’s black-
est phase. See I’m not mad. But if I were Black
Death right now, I’d slaughter love. Fade to black.
Brides-to-be would roll around in ash, black-
en their dresses and veils in rivers black
as ink: Gather your roses, dye them red to black.
Then they’d hear the gallop. Metal no black-
smith could forge, flaming, sparking, on the black
hooves of four horses—red, green, black,
and white. Who’s that? Hallelu! A miracle! Black
skies part and resurrected Love blacks
my eyes and rubs me out beneath his black
sole. No more pain. I’m better. Fade to black.
Bergman’s done. I need magic. Call a trick. It’s black
and white—he’s red all over. I love my black
boys sore. He can’t grab my hair, black
brillo pad, curlicues snatched by my black
hand all over the bed and his back like black
script. Give me that nigger dick. His bootblack,
I gave all of him a shining.”
The piece wasn’t 100 percent autobiographical.
“It’s not rooted in something specific that’s happened to me. But it’s kind of the norm for black guys to get that kind of shit,” Austin says.“The fetishizing of black bodies is such an old thing. It goes back hundreds of years – people fetishizing black men, black women – so I just decided to tackle that subject in a way that’s just closest to me.”
Although reducing skin color to a fetish may not be new, tackling the contemporary issue of online dating and skin-color-preference in poetry is. Austin is part of a cohort of young poets making poetry relevant again. His work is something you wouldn’t mind reading aloud to your friends or a lover.
To hear these poems in their entirety, Austin will be reading his work alongside local poet Vidhu Aggarwal at the 1300 Brookhaven warehouse, just behind Santiago’s Bodega in Ivanhoe Village on April 23 for Orlando reading series Functionally Literate. The show starts at 7 p.m., and tickets are free, but be classy and leave a donation. Austin’s favorite drink is a gin and tonic with fruit (lime) if you want to make his first reading in Orlando a memorable one.
