How does a poem begin?
My Poetry, Not Mine
My first two collections of poetry, Anvil’s Mouthfuls of Space and Gordon Hill Press’s A Cemetery for Holes, engage with my lived experiences on the street and growing up in an abusive household. I embraced the narrative that through self-expression, an author could disambiguate their painful and oftentimes confusing memories while simultaneously finding inner cognizance. Poetry was a path forward out of the obtuseness of masculine silence and its self-destructive repression. I imagined that I could speak freely about my life and through this find unity within the divide between my unconscious and conscious mind that had been so splintered. This was art-therapy and was something that I hoped would help me heal.
In a naïve way, I also believed that my work could educate my readers so that they would learn empathy and come to a more thorough understanding of how homelessness happens. It is possible that for some, my poetry was insightful. Generally speaking, though, I was deluded by this simplistic worldview.
It turns out that many of my readers just wanted to be insulated from the problems of the world, especially those that plague their street corners. It’s easy to claim to care about people in some far-off country when you get a nice tax write-off for charitable donations, but having to observe a homeless person outside the 7-11 oftentimes leads to immature and opaque conclusions that conveniently dismiss the life of the individual as somehow lesser or of a lower order than a taxpaying citizen who maintains their financial security with rigor.
Class was something I just couldn’t see, until my writing had been published. I had been writing from such an innocent perspective because I was writing for myself. The response to my early writing, oftentimes ingratiating, was laden with the kind of class-based cliches you’d find on a sitcom. I was the regenerate homeless man. I was no longer part of the distasteful lower class but was now a member of the lower middle class. I had lived in squalor, been a bottom feeder, but had redeemed myself by becoming an academic. Ideas so laden with bullshit that the only way to make sense of them is through the Darwinian image of an ape transforming into a troglodyte. It is no surprise that the most ennobled literary institutions in CanLit are funded by the arbiters of genocide. Birding and bombs. Politically convenient claims of decolonization megaphoned out from the gilded lanes of gated communities. No real concern for the tent cities aside from the upsetting aesthetics, definitely no concern for those inner-city folks. Annoyed by them.
I was special because I had pleased the middle class. Instead of stimulating an empathetic response, my poetry had further fortified their opinions. The homeless really were trash, and I proved it by finding a way to sell my story. (Not that poetry generally sells well; poetry has become moral capital, a thing used to “purify” like Clorox or hydrogen peroxide.) I was valued because I gave these readers sentimental reassurance. If a homeless person can rejoin society and become a good capitalist, they prove themselves worthy of respect. But I won’t forget what it felt like to be sneered at by people like them, who say all the right things at all the right times, back when I was so thin that you could see the bones protrude from my back. Back when I slept under a bridge.
Invisible hierarchy (racial, gendered, and financial), “taste” (a truly obscene word), and individual worth (one that amounts to dollars and cents): this triune dignifies the middle class. If one is able to naturally integrate these three belief systems into their life, in an unassuming and inoffensive, yet implicitly colonial manner, one is divinely privileged.
The homeless can freeze to death on the street. Once you are their kind of middle class, you are superior because you are polite and thus free of moral defilement. Never mind that some of the smartest people I’ve ever known have lived on or still live on the street. Never mind that stupidity seems to permeate every facet of middle class life, especially because that lifestyle is so wrapped up in waste.
Some approached me about my early books, and they seemed to fetishize my experiences, even eroticize them. I had one man who’d read all the poems about my having been sexually assaulted with great interest. A leering glare and a bit of drool at the corners of his lips, longing in his smile, an expensive watch engirding his wrist. Maybe, he hoped, I’d suck his dick. A cruel grin, not unlike the ones produced by those who’d abused me. Instead of healing, my hell was something for someone to get off on.
This is why I wrote Male Pregnancy in Reverse. J.G. Ballard once said that he wrote Crash because he “wanted to rub the human race’s face in it its own shit.” I likewise wrote my collection with a similar satirical ethos. I am repulsed by some of the responses to my first books and thus created something so utterly cold, alien, violent, and filthy to offer back to those same readers who’d expressed such pearl-clutching piety and/or carnal desire. Met with disgust by some fans, met with adoration and glee by a new readership: an audience I much prefer. This is an experimental book that violates all the expectations that anchored my earliest published writings to the degrading basin of CanLit’s immaculately dull and disingenuous pond.
Both of my solo books did well: Mouthful of Space was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial prize and Male Pregnancy in Reverse was chosen as one of the Top 4 Genre-Defying Books to be released in B.C. in 2023 by Read Local B.C. Poems from Male Pregnancy in Reverse appear in multiple issues of UCLA’s world-renowned experimental poetry journal Lana Turner: poems much of CanLit’s journals were too horrified by to acknowledge. If I upset my previous readership for stomping on a floor littered with middle class eggshells, having been included alongside some of the greatest living poets suggests to me that I made the correct decision.
Sometimes ugliness is the most genuine expression, sometimes giving people what they don’t want is the duty of the artist.
Tom Prime [photo credit: Dani Duesbury] was the only Canadian to be invited to University of Chicago’s 2025 Graduate Student Conference in Premodern Studies at the Newberry Library. He is a PhD Candidate in English at Western University and will be presenting his paper, “Lady Eleanor Davies in Drag: Using Symbolic Female-to-Male Crossdressing to Claim Authority as a Biblical Antitype.” He has a recently released collection of poetry (Male Pregnancy in Reverse on New Star). His debut solo collection Mouthfuls of Space was published on Anvil. Has been published in many journals, including Fjord’s Review and Lana Turner. And has three books of collaboratively written literature with Gary Barwin (A Cemetery for Holes on Gordon Hill Press, Bird Arsonist on New Star, and Dead Code on Anti-Oedipus).
