An Interview with Christian Gullette

Author of Coachella Elegy

Christian Gullette navigates the tension between grief and joy in his debut book of poetry Coachella Elegy. Winner of the 2023 Trio Award, Coachella Elegy was named a most-anticipated poetry collection by LitHub, has been reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly, The Adroit Journal, The Gay and Lesbian Review and other publications, and appeared on recommended reading lists by The Washington Post Book Newsletter, Electric Lit, CLMP, Debutiful, Alta, and other outlets.

I spoke with Christian in August about the poetics of pleasure, desire, and catastrophe alongside his thoughts on the mythology of California, bees, crowded pool parties, and Lana Del Rey, among other topics. 

Samantha Hernandez : Hello. I’m so glad I was able to listen to you read your work at Book Culture last month. So much of your poetry is about California. So to start, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that. How long have you been there? Did you grow up there?

Christian Gullette : Sure, yeah. I'm happy to talk about California. I didn't grow up here. I grew up on the East Coast outside of Baltimore, but I've been in California since 2008, so quite a long time. My partner is from California. He's from Santa Cruz, so he grew up close to the Bay Area. So the move was sort of a return to his roots in a way, but a new cross country journey for me.

SH: You reference Joan Didion in your book. I remember reading her for the first time and feeling like I was being introduced to California, in a way, even though I’m from there. I wanted to ask you about how you explore the idea of California as it exists in the poetic imagination. You reference earthquakes, wildfires, drought, the Santa Ana winds, freeways, the Getty. I wanted to ask you to talk a little about how you play with these classic images, these personified parts of California.

CG: Yeah, I think there's a mythology about going west that has many different valences. I think especially as queer people moving to San Francisco, it has its own certain mythologies attached to it. That Tom Gunn quote, [“But of all the embodiments ever built, I’d return to one,/ For the sexual New Jerusalem was by far the greatest fun”]. He was not from California, but associated very much with the Bay Area. David Hockney wasn’t from California either, I think part of what the book explores is some of the idea of both going to a place to try to find out what it means to live there, but also the notion of it also being a myth or built upon many myths. Some of the myths are very destructive, and what does that mean? Also the constant wandering and searching that sort of results from that wandering. Also, because my partner and I moved west right on the heels of his cancer. So, in a way, it was also a sort of an escape from where we were, searching for a place to start over. I think California, in that way, is both a place, but it is also a mirage. When I think about southern California it makes me think of those things metaphorically, like movie sets and things like that symbolize the appeal of a place that could offer the mirage of all kinds. And yet, is it sort of built on plywood? The desert is right there, the winds and the sands are always there ready to take it back.

So for me, I think California becomes a place that you're in, but it never really means what you thought it was going to mean. And it's built on all kinds of myths and it's constantly kind of deconstructing and rebuilding all at the same time.

SH: Totally. Yeah, that's definitely a recurring image in your poems and very much in the spirit of California– its absence versus its excess and how they play with each other. In the situational sense you moved to California because of your husband's illness, and historically many queer people have moved to San Francisco as this place that was available to them to be themselves. I feel like something that came up for me in reading your work and thinking about the California landscape is this idea of that queer tension between utopia and apocalypse. It's this constant juxtaposition of hope for the future, but also panic about inevitable destruction. It feels like California holds those things so close together. It presents a very a queer concept of what's possible in the future.

CG: I think that's very, very much right on point because I think, and in a lot of ways pools and gay clubs and those kinds of things can sometimes represent both that proximity of pleasure and the possibility of utopianism and all these kinds of things for queer people. And yet right on the edge of the pool there is all of this precarity and drought and these beautiful bodies can disintegrate and go at any moment. Or the beautiful art in the museum can be consumed by fire at any moment. I think that that tension is really important to the book because the speakers in my poems crave a kind of control. They've endured some suffering and now they want to feel like everything's going to be okay. I think that’s reflected in some of the very lyrical images and the pared down lyricism.

And yet, what I hope is that underneath, that's held in extreme tension with powerful, explosive emotions– both ecstasy and terror at the same time. When you fly into Palm Springs, one of the most striking things about it, and maybe you've seen this if you've been to Palm Springs, is how there can be a row of homes with all these little turquoise pools, and literally on the other side, it's just desert. It just stops. And you realize this is all right on the edge, this fantasy, and this joy is right on the edge. But at the same time, the desert is not just a place of precarity, it's a place of bloom. When it rains, it's a place teeming with life. It's a place of possibility. It's a place where people live. I think California really holds all these things. Even in Northern California where things are growing in the Central Valley that's always held in tension with the land sort of around it and the land was taken from other people. So I think California is all of those paradoxes, and I think the “In Transit” sections keep a wandering feel. I think the speakers, little by little, discover what they thought they might feel in a place is not necessarily what happened.

SH: Yes, absolutely. I really enjoyed those “In Transit” segments, and it reminded me of how when you’re in California, the way that you view things is primarily from inside a car. Looking from the inside, it's just a particular way of seeing something that it's different in other places in the world.

Going back to what you were just talking about regarding the tension between needing to escape something and also wanting to seek joy. About how these things border right up against each other. I was really struck by it. It made me think of your poem“The Fish.” I loved the line “it's the flinging that makes it tender.” There is definitely a recurring theme that there is this kind of tenderness or joy or possibility in the idea of fleeing. Someone (at the reading) asked a question about the difference between writing about pleasure versus desire. Do you remember that?

CG: Oh yeah, I think so. Yeah.

SH: It was interesting hearing that conversation and trying to figure out what the difference is. I wanted to know more about how you hold the tension between desire and pleasure in your poetry.

CG: That's a great question and I'm glad you reminded me of it. I think that one of the first things that pops to mind that swings the pendulum towards either pleasure or desire is the role of intimacy, in the longing or in the feeling between the figures. You know what I mean? I think desire may, in some ways, derive more from intimacy or thrive on intimacy, but at the same time, I think some of my poems blur that line, like the poem “Outdoor Shower,” that's clearly, this is a very intimate couple, but at the same time, the experience is very much focused on pleasure. The space is very intimate, and the hummingbird reminds us that they're very, very close, but at the same time very exposed. It's very much about physical pleasure. So I think even though I could maybe pinpoint some things that separate them, I think some of the poems blur the line.

I also think another way I explore and play with that duality or that binary between pleasure and desire is how, oftentimes, crowded pool parties are very melancholy for my speaker. Yeah, [laughs] how can you be in a crowded pool party with all this going on and feel so sad? There can be a sense of loneliness in a crowd, while at the same time the poem never shows the other parts of that scene. There could be equally ecstatic, intimate moments. It's just whatever that camera is showing at that moment is maybe a different side of that coin. And I think that I'm really interested in tensions because I think that that really amplifies how complex feelings are. Desire is very complex. Pleasure is complex. Grief and elegy are very complex, and they're not easy to essentialize into one thing. I lean into the ambiguities and ambivalences in it because I think that's in a way sort of what makes it hotter– more exciting.

SH: Yeah, I think place and location relates to that idea. Especially that strange feeling of melancholy in a place that is sunny and bright and beautiful. What do you do with those feelings in a place like Palm Springs where you're supposed to be oriented towards pleasure, and that's not always possible?

CG: Well, and I think the title of the book and the title poem juxtapose that in a way like Coachella, which people associate with a celebration of music and style and excess and enjoyment and those kinds of things, and with the idea of an elegy. But I also think in some ways elegy can be love poems too. And in that sense, again, that can be in a poem ostensibly that is sad, like the poem about not remembering it was the anniversary of my brother's death, also be kind of a love poem to him and to Coachella. But yeah, I think that the contradiction of it is part of what makes it beautiful. What makes any place both beautiful and terrifying is its contradictions.

SH: Yeah, all the precarious images you use lend themselves to elegy. These images of California, love and loss beneath them. 

CG: And grief. I think that's why the bees are so important, because of the connection to my brother and the Beehive State and Utah and the loss of the bees and what bees symbolize. But at the end of the book I wanted to end with a poem that embraced the bees in a kind of ecstasy. It might be artificial, and it might be new, and not even really what we think of as bees. They may still be dying yet I felt like there's still joy and hope in the fact that they found a way to reinvent themselves. I definitely think the book’s closing gestures are reflecting my own sadness and my own grief, but I think still finding beauty is part of the only way I was able to be with it. And in fact not knowing what to do with my grief sort of opened the door in a way for the poems in the book. 

SH: Yeah, that ending poem is so lovely, but also filled with anxiety. You've got the chemicals of the Maraschino cherries that shouldn't be there, and the bees just continuing with their work. 

CG: But they are glowing, they're artificial in a way. I think that kind of circles back to what you were saying at the beginning. There's an artificiality to some of the constructed notions of, and yet at the same time there's a beauty in it too.

SH: And there's a feeling of knowing we can’t go back to some imagined time before. We have to keep going.

CG: Totally. There’s some of that not-going-back at the end juxtaposed against the things about California that have been about the fantasy of going back, and erasure and all of that. Even the fantasy that it's possible to move on from cancer and just be all better. All of those kinds of inabilities to pretend are there in these bees. They're finding a way, as frightening as it is. I think the notion of what disappears and what persists is also symbolized through a lot of those different bees and butterflies and different things and bodies, the old funeral home– there’s now condos in the Castro, I think that is very much part of the notion of struggling with grief and what it means to survive. In that Castro poem “City Bees” despite all of the loss and grief, the speaker's life is still better than he could have imagined when he was a kid. There's still possibility in a place like that despite the reminders of what happened.

SH: Yeah. I also wanted to ask you about putting in the idea of mentioning current events within poetry. Because it feels so important and at the same time, it's difficult, especially because it feels like news is so fleeting.

CG: I think they're there as important anchors to the present because the poems do exist in a context. But at the same time, I think the poems also are really reaching for timeless, lyrical emotions that are the overarching kind of forces behind the book, grief, loss, joy, pleasure. My hope would be that those kinds of lyrical emotions make a reader feel something that they can bring to the poems that is not specific to necessarily any time or place. And that being able to find a way into those bigger emotions is what also balances some of the more specific contemporary mentions.

SH: Yeah. Yeah. It feels important. Things need to be a part of what people are making and because they're a part of our culture.

CG: Yes, I definitely feel there are very specific kinds of things like Seven Elevens, or even a Sizzler somewhere, or the CyberKnife machine that delivered the radiation. These are very grounding images of a moment, but at the same time, they are only really going to reach a kind of emotional resonance if they're also working with a kind of larger emotion that's not time bound. And I think that that's ultimately what I hope the book can do is just sort of make someone feel something that doesn't require being able to specifically relate to my partner's cancer struggle or my brother's life story, but it's more of a loss, grief, joy. These are the things that kind of universalize some of those details and they work together hopefully.

SH: It definitely feels like the right time to read this book of poetry, especially because there's so many summer images. I really love in “Desert Ride” the line– “everyone’s song of summer/ is about addiction and love.”

CG: That's one of my favorite poems in the book, and it does feel very summer-y and reminds me of a kind of moment, like driving a convertible and watching my husband healthy and thriving. The sexiness of that moment and feeling like there was so much possibility and fun and heading back to the pool with booze to have a fun day is all part of it. While at the same time, that kind of endless summer feeling that's very, very associated with California, I think has a slight melancholy to it because nothing's endless.

SH: Yeah. Anything can become oppressive when it's unchanging.

CG: Like Lana del Rey's music. It is so melancholy because that feeling of driving fast, enjoying the moment with your lover at your side, and that feeling can only burn so bright and so fast. I think the desire for endless summer is the desire to let this feeling of joy or beauty go on forever, because we know it can't. And that's what makes it feel so powerful. 

SH: Yeah. Yeah. I definitely understand that the endless summer feeling, even if you're having the best time, the best time that you're not allowed to stop having is eventually kind of like a punishment. You can't continuously experience pleasure. And that's why I also really liked the beginning of that poem about “my body asks for unorthodox things” because that's like that desire for something kind of perverse or that you've just been in the sun for too long and your body's almost craving something unhealthy.

CG: Yeah. It's like you want what's bad for you. And speaking of Lana Del Rey’s music, a lot of those songs are about that, and I think that in this case, what does it mean for the body to be so precarious? Especially my partner's body, and yet you want cigarettes and booze and to drive fast and you want to just kind of live on the edge to feel alive. Yeah, I think that's it. It's about feeling alive and especially when you've, in my partner's case, stared down death in that way or experienced the death of someone in a way that was very traumatic. You’re looking for that alive-ness feeling that, ironically, sometimes can only come by the proximity of risk. Like in the poem “Mariology,” it’s one of my poems that I think captures the sense of how much risk is involved. And I think that and the
“City Bees” poem brings up what it was like to have that shadow of queerness that’s associated with risk, but at the same time, you want to feel alive and you want to feel joy and pleasure.

SH: Also, related to what you were saying about Lana Del Rey, I think that there is something to the idea that people who move to California, as opposed to people who are from California, sometimes it feels like people who aren’t from California can almost have a more accurate idea of the place. Lana Del Rey sings about California the way that people who aren't from California write about it. It's almost like you need to experience it as an outsider.

CG: It’s interesting that you say that because I think a lot of the artistic touchstones for my book are writers or artists, Joan Didion excepted, who people do tend to associate with California for a lot of reasons, but aren't from here, like David Hockney and his pool paintings or Tom Gunn or Christopher Isherwood, his novel, A Single Man, I think is one of my favorite novels, but he’s another person who moved to California. And in his case it's very interesting that he became famous for work that was very centered in Europe, but then kind of reinvented himself over a few decades as a person who wrote from this very particular sort of southern California viewpoint, but wasn't from California.

And I liked actually juxtaposing some of those references with someone like Joan Didion who is from California, and yet a lot of her work I think is about her own discovery that she's constantly trying, even though it seems like Joan Didion is telling a reader what California is. I think her work builds book to book in a way that kind of demonstrates even she isn't sure and still trying to figure that out, and oftentimes has to travel to find out. She went to New York only to come back to California or goes to Hawaii to write about California and comes back. And so yeah, I think I’m fascinated by that sort of self-consciousness and yet also that sort of almost too real to be real perception, like David Hockney's pool paintings are almost too real and there's always someone in his work looking outside the frame of the painting in a very discomforting way that takes you out of even the eroticism of the experience of what's in the frame. There's always a sign that there's a sort of second, a zoomed out perspective like the viewer. Yeah, there's something about The Splash. There's no figure in The Splash. There's something that’s not there that reminds the viewer that Hockney is sort of reporting in a way as well as experiencing, and I find that really fascinating.

You can swim in a pool that Hockney hand painted, and yet at what does that mean? It strikes me as being really Californian, but also he's not from California, and I go to that pool to feel very California, and yet, I'm not from California originally, but I kind of am now.

SH: Yeah. It's a feeling, it's a concept, and I feel like it's when I found out that palm trees aren't native to California. Where it's just like, oh, that makes sense. Here’s this thing that's everywhere and it isn’t even from this place. 

CG: And that there's all this long history of rewriting and displacing and warping the idea of what California is to suit your own purpose. That's been destructive, I think, too, is I think part of the search for how to even conceptualize the notion of place in this state, and it's geographically so diverse that, and unlike a lot of other states in that there's within just two or three hours, there's deserts, there's sea, there's mountains, there's vineyards, there's that also adds to that kind of complexity. I talk to people who live in other states who don't know, maybe they don't really realize, and I didn't until I had spent years in California, how many hundreds of miles of the Central Valley feeds so many people, and the legacy of that in so many different ways that there's so many things about California also as a place that grows and makes things and sustains as well, and all the complexities that go along with that that are not well known necessarily even outside of California or taken for granted. 

SH: The water usage in California, I think it can kind of just be reduced to waste and excess, which a lot of it is, but there's also that huge agricultural component.

CG: For sure. It blows your mind when you drive through during almond season and you could drive for an hour and it's nothing but almond tree groves and you realize, oh my gosh, the water to make this happen is so intense, but also how many millions and millions of people are depending on the food growing here, or economies based on it and people's livelihoods based on it. It's so complex, and I think that part of the ecopoetics of the book is to also make sure that the speakers are drawn into that complexity of both acknowledging in that. There’s one poem about the Central Valley where they are noticing the water usage and the almond trees, but also one where the speakers are in their Airbnb and they don't listen to the host and let AC run all day. I think that that kind of complex complicity is important to the ecopoetics of the book and acknowledging that desire for pleasure in the desert in Palm Springs has costs.

SH: I think one of the most wonderful parts about poetry is that it can zoom in on the specifics.

CG: Yes, but without ever taking an eye off of beauty. I think that's one of the important things for me, that beauty and pain are held in tension. I keep making sure that the poems are always still yearning for beauty as well as acknowledging all of the pain. I think that is part of the lyricism. 

Samantha Hernandez is a poet and MFA candidate at the City College of New York. She agrees with Alice Notley that “poetry’s so common hardly anyone can find it.” Her work has appeared in Taco Bell Quartley, Endless Editions SPRTS, and The Marbled Sigh. 

Coachella Elegy is available in both print and e-book formats. To order a print copy from Trio House Press (and get 25% off), use the code 2024THP when you check out here.