On Being a "Serious" Poet

Good humor is hot, and funny people are often incredibly hot. I think this is something the poet Justin Chin understood. Consider his poem “Lick My Butt,” one of the hottest and funniest poems I know, with unforgettable lines like “Read Noam Chomsky in bed to me & lick my butt” and “Lick my butt & call your mother, she misses you.” Chin’s poem, full of sizzling anaphora and political heat, is a major influence on my own work; his work in general has deeply informed mine, though it’s taken me a long time to realize that—or to accept and celebrate his influence. 

Any attentive reader can spot the similarities between my work and Chin’s: ecstatic lists and repetition, sexual frankness and pop culture obsessiveness, wacky juxtapositions in imagery, constant remixing of tones, family as site of both warmth and strife, funny yet ferocious social critique. I wish I could say that I’ve always written like this, always loved Chin as a fellow queer Asian poet, and always felt at home in my own queer Asian self, but the truth is that for years I didn’t want to be anything like him. I didn’t want to be funny in the complicated ways Chin was, as that would’ve meant truly confronting the complexities of race and sexuality in my own life. It would have meant becoming the person that heteronormativity and white supremacy said I shouldn’t even dare to imagine. 

During junior year of college, I read Chin’s tour de force of a first book, Bite Hard, and marveled over how alive his images were, how frenetic yet carefully crafted his rhythms. Most of all, I was astonished by how sexy and funny his work was. Given how essential humor is to my writing and to my entire sense of self today, it’s hard to believe there was ever a time I didn’t recognize its significance. 

In college, I was trying very hard to be a “serious writer,” or rather my image of one—an ideal shaped by straight white literary influences. Though I was writing autobiographical poems, I left out crucial biographical details, the ones concerning fraught queer desire and my tense upbringing in a Chinese immigrant household. While undergrad workshops led by brilliant poets empowered me to write directly about my parents’ homophobia and white people’s racism, I kept evading the subject of my own internalized homophobia and racism. In comparison to Chin’s openness, the conflict and passion in my own work seemed muffled, buried under fear. 

What did I fear? I couldn’t say it, then: I feared getting too “loud” with my queerness, too “foreign” with my Asianness. Instead, I polished and polished my work until it shone in the prettiest fashion, but much of the real light—the messy and what I thought was “ugly” self—had been snuffed out. 

My approach to dating mirrored this stifling aesthetic in poetry. In college, I tried extremely hard to date men who I didn’t find remotely funny. Or fun. When a relationship ended, I’d wonder why a handsome face or athletic build or eloquent remark on Kant’s moral philosophy was not enough. The relationships weren’t fun, as I only let myself have fun with those I was already comfortable around—though, looking back, how comfortable was I? It was okay for a friend to, say, do drag or blast Kylie Minogue from their dorm room, but me? I was too busy maintaining a “respectful” queer appearance. I was seeking out what society told me were respectable gay men—that is, white men who “acted straight,” which sometimes meant very much closeted. I was out, but I wasn’t proud. I was ashamed. And it’s become clear to me that I felt shame around Chin’s biography, the fact that he was HIV positive and that his death at age 46, of a stroke, was tied to AIDS complications. I couldn’t fully embrace Chin’s work, or his person. I couldn’t embrace all of myself. So, I worked behind a solid wall of elegant lines and I kissed behind others’ firmly locked doors. 

Before Chin, my cultural references for queer Asian men consisted of a few caricature-ridden episodes from white TV shows, both straight and queer. I knew Chin’s witty portrayal of his own queer Asian life was wonderfully different from what was being portrayed on TV, but I didn’t consider him a model. Overwhelmingly, queer Asian men were depicted as childish comic relief, so I thought humor and play were things to outgrow—much the same way my parents thought being queer was something I’d outgrow. “Once you’re older,” they’d say, “you’ll get serious about your life.” But at 20, I was already so serious. From the classroom to the dorms to a boyfriend’s apartment, I fretted about being treated as just a goofy, awkward kid. There was humor, of course, in my daily life, but I wasn’t prioritizing humor or making it my own. I wasn’t using it to pursue new experiences or to take risks—in poetry, in romance. 

It took me about two years after college to understand that what was missing—from my work, from the men I dated, from myself—was humor. Following an awful breakup and a debilitating period of not writing, I realized that by devaluing humor, by striving to be a “serious writer,” a deadly serious person, I wasn’t taking myself seriously. Slowly, I began to write and date in ways that were fun, funny, and freeing. It would take me another decade to understand my kind of humor, and how connected it is to Chin’s. 

“My butt didn’t always liked to be licked; / on the contrary, it hated anything wet / and sloppy, poking blindly at its puckered dour grimace.” So writes Chin about halfway through “Lick My Butt,” after having repeated the titular phrase a dozen times. Chin’s speaker reveals that it’s been a journey, this butt-licking—that while it may seem as if his enthusiasm for the activity has always been high, it’s actually taken time for him to even want to get rimmed. As for me, I’d long wanted my butt licked, but the “straight-acting” men I dated found it gross. These days, sex seems completely incomplete without someone’s (but ideally everyone’s) butt getting thoroughly bathed. 

Rereading Chin’s poem now, it’s clear that he was not altogether at ease with his sexuality. And rereading other poems of his, such as “Chinese New Year,” it’s evident that he was not entirely comfortable with his Asianness, either. He, too, had sexual anxieties and racial dilemmas, some remarkably similar to mine. Chin wrestled with being fetishized by men, particularly older white men, who would treat him as an adorable Asian object—and at times he’d play into their fantasy out of loneliness and self-loathing. As he writes in one poem, with characteristic alliteration and wryness: “desperation and dependency can make me fake it good,” and “being a bespectacled chink helps” when fulfilling another man’s “craving.” It’s obvious now that such fetishization was what I had frequently experienced as well, and it explained why humor was absent. I didn’t find my fetishizing white boyfriends funny and I couldn’t be funny with them because my humanity was being denied. Still, I clung to their affections, as a part of me just wanted to be adored. 

Chin’s work does not shy away from unflattering vulnerability as he interrogates his own choice, as a queer Asian man, to perform an objectified version of himself. What was missing in my own early work was true questioning and interiority. But perhaps I’m being too hard on my younger self, since articulating a nuanced subjectivity is something that becomes more possible with maturity. I was immature in my 20s. Frankly, I’m immature in my 30s. Perhaps what I still see in Chin’s poetry as a more liberated perspective is really a willingness to be candid about the ways he was not yet free. He had plenty to learn and to unlearn. Informed by Chin’s writing, my own liberatory learning and unlearning continue. 

The larger claim I want to make here is that the best, the hottest sense of humor comes with recognizing oneself as an ever-evolving adult with adult aches, some of which are desires and some of which are wounds. As Chin puts it in these lines that I borrowed for an epigraph to my second book: 

Lick my butt
cos I’m an angry ethnic fag
& I’m in so much pain
so lick my butt

No one does bawdy, bodily humor in poetry quite like Justin Chin. No one does political humor and satire in such stylish, lyric fashion as Chin. Raunch and outrage: Chin’s combining of these modes instructs and, at the same time, delights me. This kind of humor isn’t childish (though some moments may sound silly) and it isn’t about comfort; it’s an honest reckoning with his needs and dreams, with his language and relationships. 

Several years after his death, I finally wrote to Chin to tell him how much his work has meant to me. This took the form of a poem, one I wish I (as the speaker of the poem wishes he) could send to Chin. The poem imagines a meeting in a fancy Pizza Hut in my birthplace of Xiamen, China. My speaker (really me, haha) shares that his mustache is an homage to Chin’s facial hair, which he has long found hot. Throughout the poem, the speaker’s telling Chin, You were—and you still are, through your poems—very funny, extremely hot. Expressing this enables the speaker (me) to see himself (myself) like that, too. 

Funny people are hotter than non-funny people and funny poets are the hottest people, period. Maybe that’s a self-serving statement, as I think I’m a funny poet, so that must mean I think I’m not only hot, but one of the hottest people, period. Well, maybe I am. Why not believe it, say it, act like it? I’ve spent plenty of time doing the opposite. I’ve spent enough time believing I could never be attractive because I’m not white, worrying I won’t find love because I’m not straight, and acting like I’m not hilarious in every part of my life, including on the page, because straight white poets told me that’s not what a “real poet” does.

I’m done with all that. I’ll keep bringing my humor and my whole queer, Asian, mustachioed being into my poems, so I can look at life more closely, so the work is the freest play, so Chin and I can keep meeting, at least in words.