Robert Glück is a poet, fiction writer, editor and potter. In the late 1970s, he and Bruce Boone founded New Narrative, a literary movement of self-reflexive storytelling that combines essay, lyric and autobiography in one work. Glück is the author of the story collections, Elements and Denny Smith; the novels, Jack the Modernist, Margery Kempe and About Ed; and a volume of collected essays Communal Nude. His books of poetry include La Fontaine with Bruce Boone, Reader, In Commemoration of the Visit with Kathleen Fraser, and I, Boombox. He lives in San Francisco.
K Patrick is a writer based in Scotland. Their poetry has appeared in Poetry Review, Granta and Five Dials, and was shortlisted for the White Review Poet’s Prize in 2021. Their debut novel, Mrs S, was selected as an Observer Best Debut of the Year, and K was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelists for 2023. Three Births, their debut poetry collection, was published by Granta Poetry in March 2024.
Earlier this year Bob and K discussed pleasure, pilgrimages and erotic obsession.
Bob:
Your book, Mrs S, shimmers with desire and longing. A major part of this is expressed through the intensity of the matron’s descriptions of Mrs S, so desire and writerly accuracy are on the very same track. Is this something you considered? Are writing and sexuality always part of the process?
K:
I try to write from the body. I like allowing desire to make the image. It can be exhausting, but I think of myself as having more than one body, as in, there are different terms that are alive in me: butch, lesbian, trans. And the list will probably grow. So, I’m not always writing from the same place. There’s more than one source I’m draining. The body changes at all sorts of different speeds, which for now means the competing factors of taking hormones and good, old-fashioned time. There’s pleasure to be had in trying to keep up with it. I like sexuality to be part of the process for this reason. It requires a constant minutia of looking: I have to account for the body’s strange time when in a desirous state, all those elongated seconds and minutes. I actually had a line from your book Margery Kempe in my head while I was writing Mrs S: ‘Nobody knows what I put into my waiting.’
How do you stay in tune with the body in your writing? I’m thinking of About Ed, your portrait of Ed Aulerich-Sugai, which was written over a long time, but also Margery Kempe, in which the medieval is in conversation with the contemporary. How do you maintain an understanding of intimacy, bodies and desire across ‘time’? For Margery Kempe, the genesis of some of these details was collaborative, and I’m interested in how you received that information? Did you take notes? Did people write you notes?
Bob:
I am intrigued by your observation that the body changes at different speeds, without understanding exactly what you mean. Unless you mean that, say, my teeth are hurtling toward the void faster than my pancreas? In which case yes, they do seem to be. Sometimes I just track what is happening in my body. It’s an odd thing to do and at the start a little boring. The boredom must be a defense. Language does not want to go there.
Your note on the ‘body changing at different speeds’ is a good example of what I looked for when I was collecting observations from my friends for Margery: irreducible nuggets of physical life, like words in a linguistic isolate. I asked friends to write five observations about their relationship to their body. Twenty people replied: some gave me notes, others elaborated. Thom Gunn’s was so spicy and eloquent, like he’d been waiting to be asked:
‘He had said on the way back that he hoped that it was okay but he had earlier had a very hot meal, with a lot of pepper. I didn’t understand what he meant until I kissed him, licked him, fucked him, found that every orifice on his body was peppery hot, an extraordinary physical turn-on, just enough of a prickly sensation to be wildly stimulating.’
In About Ed I tried to recognize a physical language of Ed’s death, a choreography of gestures. Like, falling backwards means the empty body, or being dead with Ed.
I did other kinds of research for Margery, reading lesbian porn for instance. I wanted to get it right. Pressing concerns – like do labia feel each other as they touch? One friend said, no more than anal membrane does.
You would think that the mystery of the body diminishes as one ages, but it only becomes more mysterious. Perhaps the mystery of others’ bodies decreases, but then you never know when lightning will strike. You describe physical exaltation so well, the wonder of discovery and access – love makes the beloved a new world.
K:
Labia is membrane is labia is membrane! I love the investigation you took on. It’s something I adored about your depiction of Margery, her voice becomes this big bodily chorus where you’d expect silence, churchly or otherwise. Is that what drew you to her as a subject? That opportunity? Did you even experience it as an opportunity? I also wonder why you think it is that queerness is drawn to the Christian, the saintly image or text . . . I feel it too. Jesus’s abs are always showing up in my work.
Bob:
My work too! – and the rest of his body, to put it mildly. Not long ago I wrote the scripture for a bible, Parables, a lavish artist book, with the Cuban artist Toirac, except Jesus was Fidel.
I was drawn to Margery from the beginning – I learned about her at school in 1967. I knew there was something there for me. In the first place she seemed like a comic figure because of her vast miscalculation; that her self-description would convince readers she was a saint when the very opposite was true. She was wrong so energetically that she was also saying something about our two eras: in the throes of changing paradigms, we can’t really understand or assign meaning to our experience. I tried to write a musical about her that ended in the crucifixion. What I was missing was her heedless, overwhelming desire. That was supplied later, in my forties, by an obsessive romance with L that was also a kind of breakdown. Access to L’s body became access to life itself. Desire charges the landscape with physical upheaval. We become water, weather. And why not? Why describe a character by the hat she is wearing instead of her experience of orgasm?
Let’s talk about the role of the butch. The narrator in Mrs S is trying on this identity. We might prefer to be amorphous blobs, not confined to the prison of an identity, but like an orchid (rare or not so rare) we must be identifiable to our pollinator. To get sex we have to be recognizable. There are different versions of this butch institution in your book. The headmistress is the ‘salt of the earth’, but our heroine is more Byronic, with a wounded nobility. Like the hero in a novel by one of the Brontës, say.
K:
It’s interesting to think of the butch as a Byronic hero. I’ve got the echo of a line you wrote in your essay ‘Long Note on New Narrative’: maybe nobody saw that Byron might just want ‘to take revenge on the world for not existing’. In a way this is butchness: there’s a pilgrimage happening. What if the used language doesn’t generate the meaning that you want? You go out in search of the new. It isn’t necessarily wholesome either, in what I think is a good way, thus ‘revenge’.
I like that word, pilgrimage, for its ongoingness, a devotion that continues off the page. The life of a pilgrim could even be read as the embodiment of taking revenge on the world for not existing. If I can take it that far? This too feels deeply butch. The idea of a pilgrimage might make meaning from all the cliches, and why not make meaning from cliches? There’s the requisite solitude, the quiet faith, the act of the pledge.
Bob:
I’d like to pursue the butch as chivalric hero. The matron is on a quest, she is the one whose life changes, and she is the one who is not in place. This posh private school feels exotic because of class and queerness. Of course, as a reader I want love to continue, but she makes a gallant sacrifice exactly to keep everyone else in place and to launch herself into the next chapter. Put another way, she accomplishes what she did not know she wanted, which was to attain knighthood. Tell me if I am wrong to think this way. Am I foolish, too romantic? Yet this describes many butches in my life: Eileen Myles, Judy Grahn, Angie Romagnoli, the mother of my son Reese. And the character of Mrs S may not be as chaste as the lady in a courtly romance, yet there is a part of her that is untouched, untouchable. Maybe that’s why she is always Mrs S, and never a given name, even in the throes of sizzling intimacy. That makes it irresistible to erotically dismantle her. I suppose the young matron realizes this?
K:
I think you are right to think this way. The butch is noble. The butch is nobility. The butch is knighted and knighting. I hadn’t considered Mrs S in such terms before, but it’s true, the core of the book is a journey into the self, through surroundings. I never much liked the term ‘coming of age’, especially as it relates to queer novels because it makes an ending, or concluded self, seem too attainable. Chivalric heroes, though, go on and on. There’s always another quest.
Yes, the matron has an acute way of looking: Mrs S is remade through her desire. In many ways she is a Guinevere. There’s a feminine, or even femme, legacy that is at play there, a kind of paranoid, projected ideal version of ‘woman’, happening in contrast to the newness of language that the matron is evolving for themselves. I found that naming interfered with the pace of the matron’s gaze. It made things too slow. Names seemed dull, less interesting than a limb or a smell.
I wonder how the knight thinks about the body? With a certain distance but then, maybe paradoxically, a heightened knowledge, too. Imagine moving inside a suit of armour. You’d get to know it all very well, every muscle, every sneeze, every chafe. It would be a good writing exercise. A few years ago I made a film called Silence with my friend and artist Adrien Howard. We took Le Roman de Silence, a medieval romance, and cut out a little slice for ourselves. We did close-ups of talking armpits, crawling slugs. We even had a prop sword.
Tell me more about this scripture? I was referencing the Bible a lot for a recent project. The language is so thrilling to me. Everything is an aphorism. This entire experience laid out like an irrefutable fact. It’s fun and silly and grave. Also, I’m still wondering why it is that queers are drawn to Christianity, be it image or text. What is it about Jesus’s abs?
Bob:
For Parables I was not supposed to know anything about Christianity or about Fidel, but to discover a sheaf of photos and feel compelled by them to make a religion. No irony, no winks. Toirac identified thirty-three images purveyed by the Communist press in Cuba that apply Christian iconography to Fidel, as the Communist Party did for Lenin in another era. What is it about Christianity? I wonder if Judaism or Buddhism inspire queers in the way Christianity does. If you poke around in Judaism you can find wild things, like adulterers boiling in sperm in the afterlife in the Talmud. The Israelites circumcised themselves at the Hill of Foreskins before entering the promised land. In the Midrash, God relishes the rotting fragrance of that foreskin hill like fine incense. I have been exploring the history of lingams – phallic shapes that are worshipped – for one of my ceramic projects.
If you go back far enough, all cultures seem to have phallic sculptures. But Christianity focuses on the body, whether in ecstasy, in mortification, in horror, or in spectacular death. Even after death, it invests power in a fragment of a saint’s corpse. After seeing the amazing Apocalypse Tapestry in Angers, I read Revelations. It’s wild! There are bowls of God’s wrath, for example – tempting to a potter. And there is a key to death. I am making that now, a big key with death on it. Does this key unlock death? Is death the key? I think obsession, and especially erotic obsession, is a conversation with death. Or it is something to put between death and oneself. That may be where religion comes in, because where do we find the uncanny but in religion and in horror movies. Where else do people return from the dead? And yet both religion and horror have their rituals, genre constraints, and failed effects. In About Ed I describe watching a horror film whose very artificiality lends it authority as an exploration of the afterlife, like a church service.
I believe you say it in a poem about snails fucking on TV,
‘One hundred per cent anticipation
of want, that’s living almost dying,
so on the edge of newness . . .’
You published a new book of poems this year – Three Births. People always ask how writing poetry is different from writing fiction, but I don’t much care about genre distinctions, and I am more curious about how they are the same – what do you bring to both?
K:
I think all my work belongs to a place of pleasure. I mean that in all its complexity. Pleasure has freaky tenets that I’m still deciphering. At the moment the subheadings are Ego, Recent Memory, Chest, Future in Terms of Months, Animal. It’s about where pleasure begins and ends in those realms. I rely on what pleasure does to time, too; it gives the present tense such an eerie glow. I used to have this beautiful clear glass sphere that was left on a wooden windowsill. I didn’t notice that I’d left it right at the winter sun’s favourite afternoon angle until I saw the deep and precise hole it had burned into the wood. Maybe pleasure is like that for me? Sorry to swing for metaphor. That glass sphere was a total fire hazard . . .
There are differences too, but they’re differences I want to overcome. My fiction can be shy, maybe, and I want it to have the bossiness of my poetry, to find the authority of freedom. When it comes to the novel or the short story I get intimidated by detail, by the pressure of realism, as if I might let the actual down. Which is dumb! In my poetry I want to challenge the invention of ‘the actual’. I like to be grandiose, I like to be awkward, I like to get it all wrong, and then to make new facts anyway. I also like to think of my writing as showing the work, as if it’s a maths equation at school. You can follow the thinking, that’s poetry. It’s generous. When it comes to fiction, especially the novel, it can get snobby. You get afraid to show the labour of even getting from A to B.
In what ways are poetry and fiction the same for you? You maintain poetry everywhere. About Ed is full of gorgeous and impossible questions and right in front of us you try to answer them. I’ve gone back to this line so many times: ‘The lovers on my tomb are a bodily promise to keep the argument of life open’. The book is so huge. How did it feel to bring together? I mean that in a sensory way. All this loving, all these selves, all those decades of thoughts?
Bob:
Part of your answer was an object, a glass sphere, the feeling of that, which I love. If I were to choose an object it would be my white glass cup, also on a windowsill. It’s a thick-walled Pyrex cup from 1953, when they still used borosilicate. The cup appears here and there in my writing. Its form is so simple that it’s almost abstract, flitting in and out of existence, going from two dimensions to three, or four since it will obviously outlive me. At the same time, it’s a modest domestic object.
Last year, I was asked to explain how my writing and pottery are similar. I resisted to the point of indignation. What relation could they possibly have? The answer is: everything. My first love was Keats and I want to duplicate what first captivated me about his poetry, that is, a lacquered surface with chaotic emotion below. There is obsession in my content but also in the way I make things. There is a relationship to the history of the medium. When I spend hours making intricate patterns on a vase, I’m relating to potters 8,000 years ago. There is an exploration of emptiness, whether an emptiness that travels along with the story, or the emptiness in a closed form. The faces and bodies of friends often appear on my pots and in my writing. Finally, in the last few decades, I have been beguiled by a parable from the Gnostic Gospels. In the Gospel of Thomas, he tells his disciples that heaven is image replacing image. That describes my last book of poetry and the feeling I have these days about writing and art.
I have been thinking about the nuanced way you portray something most of us have experienced: being invisible but suspect at the same time. I experienced this especially in my younger days, say, working in the trades, yet I never wrote about it. Instead, I placed my characters in strong queer communities. Sometime in my young life I read that a secret destroys the group. That added to the anguish of the closet – was I toxic, destroying my hippie group? Now I realize what I was looking for in high school, when I searched the public library for books in which homosexuality is taken for granted, like The Satyricon or, later, the poetry of Frank O’Hara. I wonder if that’s at the heart of my focus on domesticity, and generally the goal of the quest, a haven in which we are normal, whatever that might mean.
K:
Normal is such an impossible word, isn’t it? When I was younger, I obsessed over it for so long that I invented desire for it. You make a parallel of yourself. There was one me, operating in the ‘normal’, then there was the other me, operating in the fantasy lands. The fantasy lands were wildly innocent. I didn’t yet know how to move away from the normal, but oh my god I wanted that movement so much. It was physical, I turned everything into potential: I was falling in love with my female teachers, I was wearing two sports bras over my chest, I practiced walking a certain way. It was all instinct and so little language. Then I did, as you say, start to find the language. For me it was late-night TV, the kind of porn-y soaps that came on around midnight. I didn’t get to the texts until much later. In retrospect I often think Mrs S, and a lot of my poetry, comes from there. Not the soaps, but the fantasy lands. I loved keeping the secret of myself. Maybe it’s one of the many shocks of coming out. Queers experience that move from private to public so early on. What has become a deeply personal experience then has to be announced in order to be ‘true’. I’ve just reread John Ashberry’s poem, ‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror’. There are plenty of lines I wanted to put here, but maybe these lines in particular:
‘That is the tune but there are no words.
The words are only speculation
(From the Latin speculum, mirror):
They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music.’
You know, it makes me think of a possibly too-fundamental question: what do you get from writing? For Mrs S it was this, journeying the early fantasy lands, a return to that early instinct. For the poetry, for Three Births, it was figuring out how to place that queer instinct in a kind of future.
Bob:
I once asked Robert Duncan this question: ‘Why do you write?’ Which is different from ‘What does writing do in the world?’ He replied without missing a beat, ‘To exercise my faculties at large.’ When I was very young, say in middle school, I realized that I couldn’t be a saint. I thought being a poet might be second best. Really, I was too naive for this to be as pretentious as it must sound, but I wonder if this lonely child’s dream in the outer darkness of a Los Angeles suburb became part of the hard drive. I inhabit a community that spends its time choosing one word over another, and for some reason I see this as a noble activity. There is something aspirational about writing – aspiring to what? Bringing words closer to the tune? I think for me it’s relation itself. I want to ‘wake up’ to the world, recognize it, or take revenge on it for not existing.
I think we are getting close to the end, K. What should our last exchange be about? Why don’t you describe your home? You live on a beautiful island.
K:
At the moment it’s edging out of winter and there have been some huge gales. There’s a conservatory on the front of the house, which is single-storey, and it looks down on the bay. I had a friend stay in February and we were confined to the house as the winds were up to 85 mph. Unlike me she wasn’t spooked at all, and wanted to sit in all the shifting, creaking glass and watch the island’s rinsing. In summer there’s so much to keep up with. A humpback whale and her calf come through in June. Plenty of porpoises and minkes. My favourite, apart from the humpbacks, are the Risso’s Dolphins. There’s a spotting scope so I can be extra nosy; it can even spy on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Here, everything is easier in summer. It’s a hard place to describe. I always make it sound too utopic. It can be very disarming, too. You need to take a break from it, from yourself. Also, I’m not a very self-sufficient person but I’m learning. I can be very impatient, which doesn’t work here at all.
Can you also describe your home?
Bob:
I’ve lived in San Francisco since 1970, except for a few years in Sweden. It is the theater of most of my life. A lively theater, but also inhabited by memories and ghosts. I’m often a tourist here, pushed into it suddenly as I turn a corner onto a world-famous view. Now it’s ridiculously expensive – hard, impossible for artists and writers. I realized in the eighties that I would not be able to live here unless I bought a place, and I saved like a demon till I amassed a down payment of $20,000 to buy the house I’m living in. Ed and I moved in as tenants in 1976. It was way beyond a fixer-upper – I have spent most of my life rationalizing this building. It’s a modest house from the 1880s. Luckily, it’s on a hill, much better for earthquakes, and I can look out into distance. Today that distance is full of rain clouds. When Ed and I moved in, we built a complex bed out of cedar, with drawers and a hidden cabinet for art and a huge headboard. I am in it now, with my laptop balanced on my chest, writing this with one finger.
