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Recently I caught up with Joey Gould, a well-admired poet in Massachusetts and beyond. Gould is all about breaking the traditional labels that have been entrenched in our society.

From their website,

“Joey Gould is the author of The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review). Joey is a long-time contributor to Mass Poetry, for which they assist the Poetry Festival Planning Committee, lead workshops for Student Day of Poetry events around Massachusetts, write web articles for MassPoetry.org, and judge slams for Louder Than a Bomb MA. Their work has appeared in Paper Nautilus, Drunk Monkeys, The Compassion Anthology, Memoir Mixtapes, and District Lit, amongst others. They have twice been nominated for Bettering American Poetry and once for a Pushcart Prize. Since their first public reading as a fellow of Salem State University’s Summer Poetry Seminar, they have performed in The Poetry Circus, Elle Villanelle’s Poetry Bordello, and The Poetry Society of New York’s Poetry Brothel. In addition to their Mass Poetry work, they have taught workshops for the Salem Poetry Seminar and Salem Lit Fest. They write 100-word reviews as poetry editor for Drunk Monkeys. Most important, they like Pusheen and painting their nails.”

Joey Gould

Doug Holder: You have been with the Mass. Poetry Festival for a long time now. What do you view as your most important contributions?

Joey Gould: I would like to think that my work at Mass Poetry resulted in poetry reaching people. I think first of a Student Day of Poetry workshop I taught wherein a teenage student wrote a poem that resulted in a stunned silence and then a standing ovation from the class. That’s the power of poetry, in the excitement and the community poetry can create. I also fondly recall sitting at the Mass Poetry check-in table at the entrance to the Peabody Essex Museum, listening to headliner Nikky Finney read to a packed crowd, and then hearing people describe how incredible the reading was. I think, foremost, Mass Poetry’s mission that I strive to embody is the cultivating of passion for poetry in Massachusetts and beyond. The festival has always been carried by a community of committed volunteers who want to hear more poems.

DH: You have led a number of poetry workshops over the years. What is your method? What do you emphasize?

JG: In my workshops, I build a collective understanding by sharing some poems and asking what the group thinks poetry is and can achieve. I try to listen and transcribe more than force my own understanding on the cohort. I’ve run many distinct workshops for second graders up to adults, and perhaps my favorite is Ode, Snap, where we read a few poems (including Ross Gay’s Ode to the Flute and Ada Limón’s How to Triumph Like a Girl) and then start a poem with a palimpsest of Limón’s first line: “I like ____ best”. It works for all ages and it highlights that poetry can be, out of many things, an expression of thankfulness or joy.

DH: You have had a poetry book out from the Lily Press, The Acute Avian Heart. I read you are a birdwatcher. What do our feathered friends teach you?

JG: Birds have many lessons to teach. They’re social. Aesthetically, they’re often lovely and musical. Music calms and focuses me, and bird song itself inspires me. Wood thrushes can harmonize with themselves! Visually, they can be stunning. Have you seen a cardinal on the fence post in the middle of a snowy field? They teach me how to observe. Birdwatching is a way to slow my neurodivergent self down. They also have deep symbolic and metaphorical value, both in collective consciousness and in my own lived experience. Here, I’m thinking of “the bluebird of happiness” and my personal obsession with starlings, who are master mimics but have a reputation as household pests. So, like anything that goes in my poetry, any bird is useful on a few different levels: as sound/phoneme, as an anchor for the poem in an image that reader might know, and as a cultural reference to the catalogue of things a bird symbolizes. Not that I always know the totality of meanings any image, any bird will suggest. Once, after a reading, an audience member told me they think of their mother every time they see a robin. That’s a lesson – that something you see every day can have many diverse meanings to another person.

DH: You describe yourself as a non-binary poet. How is this sensibility reflected in your own work?

JG: My queerness is much of my public identity, partly because it’s inherent to me and partly because it’s how much of the world might either judge me or simply classify me. Calling myself “queer” reclaims the word from people who called me that word as an insult in my youth. My second book, Penitent>Arbiter, is a treatise on the arbitrary way binaries are constructed. Is every person a man or a woman? Is everything right or wrong? Is everyone a penitent (criminal/wrongdoer) or an arbiter (judge/injured party)? In the first poem, I introduce a non-binary character before any gendered characters. Western society’s many binary constructions (right v left, Black v white, religious v secular) fail spectacularly under the least scrutiny. It’s also something we all struggle with in conflict: I’m right, you’re wrong. You hurt me, I punish you. When is real life ever that simple?

DH: Tell us about your connection with the legendary, bohemian poet Joe Gould. Gould was related to Robert Lowell – a confessional poet – do you consider your work confessional?

JG: I love this question. The Joe Gould who graduated from Harvard in 1911 and hung out with Greenwich Village luminaries such as e.e. cummings and Alice Neel has no relation to me, but one of my first awakenings to poetry was my sister bringing home cummings’s no thanks, which contains a hexameter sonnet that starts: “little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn’t know where/ to find them.” What a fascinating first line! Who was this person? It turns out he was a fascinating man who was chronicled in The New Yorker, the process of which became a movie, Joe Gould’s Secret. Some of my friends ask what my secret is or how my Oral History of Our Time is coming along when I see them. His life has become part of my story. In my early poet days, one hundred years after Gould’s graduation from Harvard, I wrote a set of poems about how I’m not the first poet with my name. It’s a strange thing to contend with.

I feel like I am a confessional poet, in the sense of what my friend Bleah Patterson calls “surreal confessional…a blending of the century old surrealist and mid-century confessional forms.” I often set confessional speakers based on my own self in places like the Sinai during exodus or a woodshed during a thunderstorm in the 1800s to explore how I would act as a character in the situation.

DH: Any future projects?

JG: My work in progress, my desert, imagines a modern version of The Binding of Isaac, set in a surreal version of Acadia/Bar Harbor, Maine. I spent five months in Knoxville, writing at Sundress Academy for the Arts’ Firefly Farms. I wrote about the sheep on the farm and the trails through the woods. It’s been magical, and now that I’m back in Massachusetts I have to add what I wrote to the existing manuscript. Firefly Farms is where I met Patterson. I’m lucky to have had the space and time, and hopefully I put together a book that furthers our collective understanding of fatherhood, especially a fatherhood acculturated to monotheistic religion, often problematically.

I’m also working on a set of math poems, which hope to portray how math underpins beauty in music, space, and theory. There are poems that use math as a metaphor, and that’s cool, but I also want the interest focus to be math itself. There are so many interesting ideas in topology, perspective geometry, wheel theory.

I work with the Boston chapter of The Poetry Brothel. Our lovely recurrent performance space in Somerville is upstairs at Bow Market. I’m lucky to collaborate with such incredible poets, artists, musicians, practitioners, and dancers.

Study: Mom on One of the Last Fine Days of Fall

Mom looks small in the yard
with her tall thin rake sweeping
up the trees as they crumple
apart, her hopeless defense
against the fade of fall,
& I help her bag the stricken
giants’ guts. The day is chill–
as crisp as a glass of wine, nearly
bitter like anything savory–
so we’re locking up the world
for winter & then, when she goes in
there are boxes, always
more boxes of his stuff
to give or file or toss,
but at least she can be outside
that mess for a while longer,
trading the extinguished light
for the waning reds & oranges
of fall. Raking as a tribute–
not a chore—collecting
deaths, making them seem
containable & neat.

— Joey Gould