In the lovely art and performance gallery Bill Arning Exhibitions in Houston on Sunday, May 23, at 5 PM, I'll be reading "Catfish," a lengthy poem about about being in love with an ideal but perfectly fake man on Grindr, from my imagistic poetry collection Catfish and After, published by Brighten Press. Books will be available for sale and signature.
Also during that evening's event, poet David LeJeune will read from his Hardcore Epic Queer Erotic Saga.
New video up on YouTube: reading my poem "Merge" from the poetry book Catfish and After, surrounded by video collage of nostalgic childhood moments from the 1980s, family wishes from the 1960s, parading elephants, a clown, American traditions, military iconography, and hot men exercising. The lines of poetry are included in the video.
I was invited by the lovely Bill Arning to give a
poetry reading at the Flatland gallery tonight, but of course that has been
postponed as we all virally die and the world ends. But I thought I might as
well record the long poem I was intending to read anyway, as we’ve all gone
virtual as it is.
I’ll be reading the poem Catfish, from my poetry
book Catfish and After, Brighten Press. 2019. I began it when I was in the throes of falling in love
with a gorgeous, smart, funny, deaf architect on the chat app Grindr. We had
been chatting for a month non-stop daily, diving deep into one another, telling
stories of our lives and sharing our hopes and terrors and depressions,
connecting on a level I hadn’t experienced in nearly a decade. His pictures
were sexy and stunning, with his deafness explaining his introversion and
unwillingness to meet right away. It also seemed to explain his reluctance to
tell me his last name or phone number.
But as I invested more in him emotionally over the
coming weeks, it set off all kinds of alarms that I couldn’t find any trace of
his existence online. The red flags flapped, but he was so consistent in his
stories and personality that I couldn’t imagine he wasn’t who he said he was.
I’m an insightful storyteller, with a powerful bullshit detector. I couldn’t
possibly be deceived to such an extent. As I panicked and churned with emotion,
I began to write about it, and the raw material for this poem spilled out over
the coming weeks.
After I learned the truth, after I recovered,
after I wrote the poetry cycle After, I cut and honed this cyberfraud material
to pare it down to the poem I’m going to read right now.
This is Catfish, from Catfish and After, by Gene
Hult.
I received my first batch of paperback copies of my new poetry book Catfish and After today, and I'm pleased with the way they look. It's available at brightenpress.com.
Some cyber-psychos deliberately
deceive. Catfish is a long poem about being in love with an
ideal but fraudulent man on the chat app Grindr. After is an Imagist
cycle of poetry about psychic, creative, and romantic reconstruction in the
aftermath.
I'll be posting Catfish and After poetry memes here as I make them.
In the throes of an exciting but bewildering love affair conducted entirely in intense, constant text with a sexy and smart deaf architect on the chat app Grindr, I started writing poetry about it when he repeatedly refused to meet. Following months of increasingly fraught but non-stop conversation, he ghosted me entirely, and I couldn't find him anywhere. I couldn't confirm a single thing he'd told me. When he finally returned, it was with a story stranger and more disappointing, more heartbreaking, than anything I'd feared. I had been catfished by a fraud.
Those months of poems were whittled down to form the 30-page long poem Catfish.
In the aftermath, I kept writing, detailing the psychic, emotional, creative, and romantic reconstruction in the wake of that shock of dashed hopes. Those separate poems are collected in the cycle After.
