TQ34 Guest Poet: Ben Kline
Poetry writing is a holistic proposition, and I believe we ought to talk about craft granularly while we discuss the psychological growth and wellbeing (or lack thereof) that drove it. Since high school, we’ve rightly been New-Critically conditioned to separate the speaker from the poet, but I want to restore unity for the sake of this discussion about art making. While we’re feeling retrospective, let’s admit old-school pop cultural influences, personal milestones, relational drama, and makeover montages into the record.
L.J.’s rules of the game:
“The Proustian Questionnaire” is a parlor game lauded by Marcel Proust, the French writer, for its revealing power. To poet-guests, I present all 35 original quiz questions with the Be Kind Rewind version riding parenthetical sidecar—like a madeleine beside the tea. My poet-guests select six from the list to answer: two from The Now, two from The Then, and two from The Way Back When.
Let’s get started:
Ben Kline’s It Was Never Supposed To Be (Variant Lit, December 2024) is a beautifully poignant American bildungsroman—crucial testimony to gay life from the 90s to today—bearing us across hope and hate and humor to a place where nothing (n)ever changes. Led by a wizened yet vulnerable veteran of our culture wars, we take the long, bloody way home from one campaign after another. Antagonists range from likely evangelicals and politicians to less familiar, yet sexy sirens: foot fetishists, truckers, outside participants, and (first) husbands. Even as we navigate a perilous route through society’s most dangerous homophobic repudiations, Kline reveals the joy in lusty rebellion. Marriage equality’s complex gift is met with paradoxical loss and Kline’s tenderest reminiscences sparkle with clever spite. These poems’ journey won’t be waylaid, however ... not by movie house porn or state park assignations ... not by family members’ Reagan-era vitriol or Clinton’s shame-faced “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Delivering delightfully executed formal diversity all with an informal frankness, It Was Never Supposed To Be is nothing less than an essential contemporary epic, mapping how far we’ve come across the Gen-X decades to return to a place we never really called Home.
The above also happens to be the blurb that I wrote—humbly, gratefully, and in admiring friendship—for my friend Ben Kline’s book, with its stunning cover (more on the art in the interview!). But even before Ben asked me to blurb, I had planned to introduce him here in this BKR space because his work is powerfully good. Without further ado...
I interviewed Ben about his book, his writing life, and the truth of how he got Here.
LJS: What is your most marked characteristic? (The BKR version: Of all the available poetic technical concerns beginning with the line and ending never, what are your most central obsessions? Has this shifted over time, across projects, or even during projects? If yes, tell us about the moment you shifted your attention.)
BK: Sound and form are my current obsessions. I think non-stop about how a poem will sound when it leaves my mouth. How it feels across my tongue and lips when I speak. I love alliteration, assonance, anaphora, diminution, interior rhyme—all of it.
This concern rose to the top once I started hosting poetry readings in the mid-2010s, concurrent with online journals starting to post recordings of poets reading their work. Once I hear a poet read one of their poems, I “hear” all of their work in that voice. I want to achieve that same effect for every person who hears me read my work. For people who haven’t heard me read, I sometimes (and half-jokingly) say, “Imagine a late 70s gigolo calling a square dance.”
LJS: [Laughs.] Yes, there’s the trademark twang, tattling on your rural Ohio farm boy origins.
BK: I always say my twang is both revealing and reveling. After an early adult period of shame over my twang, I learned to embrace it. To laugh when I say certain colloquialisms, causing everyone near to tilt their head in dismay. It proved an important step in learning to trust my poetic voice, in developing my sound. A lot of my early poetry—from the 1990s into the millennium bend—was about my uninhibited life as a young gay and various macabre scenes from the farm. But the work lacked authenticity—of voice and self—because I wasn’t there yet. Once I was—largely to the credit of new city friends whose laughter was loving vs. mocking and a speech therapist who told me my twang was kind of sexy and I shouldn’t get rid of it—how I should write clicked into place. From there, I spent a decade in diversions, writing two novels that will NEVER see page or screen and 400-plus pages of LiveJournal poetry, a few of which, including “Get Your Own Fries” and “We Will Continue to Fuck as Much as We Want,” were revised for their life to end up in It Was Never Supposed to Be.
Parallel to the personal journey, being Appalachian has always been a source of pride for me because I understand and embrace it: the cliches and fortitudes, the traditions and misconceptions, the odd mannerisms and quilt-patch culture. It provides an excellent well of perspective and counterpoint as well as a narrative universe from which to source. I don’t know too many other poets who’ve worked in a sawmill tucked in the back of a holler or dehorned cattle with saw wire.
But, back to the main question: before I unlocked the full power of my banjo tongue, clever turns of phrase were my poetry candy. I wanted to craft phrases people would remember and repeat, wordplay that provoked and scandalized, but the sheer volume of poetry created, curated, and shared since the internet became itself makes that nearly impossible. Plus, that obsession slows down the revision process!
And form, oh form, my guilty pleasure. I shouldn’t enjoy it as much as I do. I enjoy the control, switching between the poem’s rules and my willingness to rebel. I enjoy being challenged to do more in the box of a line limit or narrative arc. My favorites are villanelles, sonnets, and pantoums, along with odes, aubades, abecedarians, ghazals, and the occasional ekphrastic exercise. I’m also fond of found or hermit crab forms. In the past few years I’ve written and published poems that took on the skin of debt letters, autopsies, horoscopes, and more. Employing a form to kick-start a generative writing session never fails me. Even if all I achieve is the first tercet of a villanelle, I’ve a map for how the rest of the poem might proceed.
LJS: It Was Never Supposed To Be includes a variety of improvisational forms—Tumblr posts (“(R)ejaculation”) divorce agreements (“What Was Supposed To Be Ours”), redacted outlines (“You Tried To Rape Me, and I Could Only Make This Stupid Outline”) ... I mean, there’s A LOT of the fabulous and strange mixed with the formal and rebellious—, but as I was reading, the thought occurred to me that the forms are not there to point to themselves self-consciously. They’re more like lookout points along the road of this helixing hellscape known as gay life in America...
BK: In a lot of those poems, which attempt to wrangle big political ideas and cultural movements into a personal experience, the form is a control element facilitating the poem going wild on the idea without losing me or its readers.
I’ll use the poem “Abecedarian in which we were supposed to,” which is one of several poems that plays on the book’s title, as an example. Abecedarians, being acrostic poems that begin each line with a letter of our alphabet, are usually 26 lines. But this poem goes on for three pages because I had so many ideas that I wanted to articulate—the sort of contrarian nature of questioning and reckoning with change and progress. The abecedarian was a very powerful control element—I forced myself to do the 26 lines, but then I came up with the indentations to turn each letter into a stanza … so I supposed it’s 26 stanzas instead of lines, but still the basic idea, the limit, holds the poem together as it takes readers on the roller coaster of its narrative.
LJS: That poem is a veritable dick-tionary. Can you say more about the chosen imagery and music of this poem—its rollicking, maximal, overt sexual indexing?
BK: I built this poem for the microphone. As if it were freestyle. It’s meant to stoke the listener/reader.
I started with the form, tussling with an assortment of scenes/images that harkened backward and forward within the book because, at this point in the process, I was indeed “writing for the book,” and I knew this one would come after “Fire Island,” a poem I originally wrote as an ekphrastic for an online fashion magazine editorial. “Fire Island” is woe, romance, Gluck-ish. The abecedarian is anger, spit, and an accounting of self and society, an almost sermon about the mount and the dismount of homosexual congress in the 21st century.
Full disclosure, I didn’t think this poem was successful in its first few drafts. Then, one of the poets in my beta gang said, “Stop revising,” and two journals accepted it for publication on the same day, which I took as a sign to let the poem be and thrive as it wishes.
LJS: When and where were you happiest? (BKR version: When you think about poems as compared to the discrete units produced in other art forms—songs, paintings, dances, novels, etc.—, what is it that makes you happiest about a poem?)
I’m happiest about a poem that does all artful things. That takes me in its line, loves me, maybe even leaves me, lingering like a fantasy and a regret. It dances and moves from its well-enjambed hip, hoisting the reader by their gut, flinging them end-over-end until the last punctuation releases them back (or not) unto themselves. It renders the entire canvas in color and texture, tells an entire tale, rendering heart and mind through metaphor, transforming or transgressing the reader, reminding them of feelings or experiences they may or may not have ever had. All while remaining beyond the sum of those parts—few mere phrases, lines, a handful of stanzas, words and pause—a transubstantiation into all art. ‘To poem’ parallels the god idea, beyond omniscient iteration though, like a creative singularity beginning and ending continuously, doing and undoing itself. The two roads ever without end.
That answer sounds quite extra, so TL;DR, I’m happiest when a poem synthesizes all other artistic units into itself as a gestalt the reader cannot help but be changed by.
I’m also happiest when I’m home alone, dancing badly to my favorite pop songs.
LJS: Which historical figure do you most identify with? (BKR version: If time travel were possible, to where / to whom (poet) would you most wish to transport? Secondarily, which version of yourself would you like to send—current you, childhood you, struggling you...?)
BK: My stock Gen-X Queer answer to this question is Madonna, summer of 1990 on the Blond Ambition Tour. 16-year-old me wasn’t allowed anywhere near that tour, so I’d send wild, late-30-something me. He would’ve soooo fit in with that tour’s vibe, especially given the social, sexual, scientific, and political realities of that time. I would’ve pushed onto and probably over the edge of taboo, too.
My poet’s answer is often Walt Whitman. I enjoyed Whitman’s work in college (my first thorough exposure to his work) and knew the standard details about his life. His status as an ancestral Queer poet waned from my point of view as I turned to other ancestors like Ashbery, Bidart, Lorde, Oliver, and Gunn.
Then, I read Mark Doty’s amazing book What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life (Norton, 2020). I was so taken by one writer talking about another (and himself) in such a manner. I’ve mostly thought about musical or visual artists in a similar way. Now, if we could travel time with our physical bodies, I’d travel back to 1858 New York and attempt a fling with Walt.
LJS: Ha! You know the book does feel like a Whitmanic walk through and across decades. Right? Whereas Uncle Walt was sort of cruising downtown Manhattan, you begin in the Ohio woods...
BK: Like a Shakespeare play, the book has five acts. We traverse the 90s, 00s, 10s, etc., but the sectioning is not obvious that way because there’s all this déjà vu. It is a time loop conversation, and the major ideas are: what has changed? And how does visibility play into that, right? Much of the book is about being invisible and becoming visible and how that changed so rapidly ... and then adapting to that change.
I think the poems’ periodic return to nature is a natural human instinct because it’s the one thing that won’t lie to you, be it a beautiful seashore or a forest fire. It’s funny that you said that about the book starting in the forest because that doesn’t actually happen until the third poem, “New Queer Cinema.” The first two poems are great openers and context setters, but the thread of nature really kicks off with “New Queer Cinema,” the experience its speaker has in the park, and framing that with the vibes of 90s films like Todd Haynes’ Poison and Velvet Goldmine, Derek Jarman’s Edward II, or Gregg Araki’s The Living End. In that movement, you could have these moments of Reality/Not Reality. I was inspired by that, running parallel to this ridiculously fantastical storyline.
Funnily enough, I recently re-watched Party Girl (dir. Daisy von Scherler Mayer, 1995) and didn’t realize, having seen it in the theaters in 1995, how much it had reinforced my previous ideas about the Big City, Queer culture, yada, yada, yada. You know, even beyond what I knew from being a Madonna fan and just being a person who read magazines–isn’t that quaint, like, you learned culture through reading magazines?!–you didn’t really have to transgress if you lived in the city since there was an openness and a freedom and you were dealing with other kinds of oppression, but it was more fundamental in rural areas. And it was both political and religious. It was people who would kill you just as quickly as they’d put their hands down your pants.
LJS: With the pop cultural elements, the 90s Gen-X zeitgeist–from the Reagan era (“Spite Shit”) to the AIDS quilt (“It was supposed to be”) to Ellen DeGeneres (“Ellen came out on the cover of TIME”) to the Iraq War(s) (“Iraq Is for Lovers (2003 Remix”))–this feels like an ethnography...
BK: Yes, about the historic element and the ethnographic, for me the thing that was missing was a very grounded rural perspective. Not specifically Appalachian or Midwest, just … not urban. My exposure—and I use that term because literature is cosmically vast and it’s too easy to miss entire subgenres of writing!— found much of the literature and the art and the film and even the official record of those times very focused on the metropolitan areas. Which makes sense—the big cities were the center of most of the trauma, the political action, and culture of the time. I remember reading And the Band Played On, or Kramer and Schulman’s writing from those periods, and later seeing documentaries like We Were Here ... and thinking … my experience is nothing like any of this. Even as I bore witness to people both dying and thriving in the worst social and economic conditions.
LJS: Which talent would you most like to have? (BKR version: If we look at Gregory Orr’s Four Temperaments—the Myers-Briggs of poetry personality—, order is key. I’m an I-S-M-S (Imagination-Story-Music-Structure though the double ‘s’ of Story and Structure throws an alphabetical wrench into this conceit, so let’s change Story to Narrative; now, that’s better: I-N-M-S). What’s your order? And explain how you’ve seen this pattern enacted in your work over time.
BK: On the original Proust question, I would’ve loved to have been a singer. What good singers can do with a song is unmatched. Ella Fitzgerald and “How High the Moon”? Who else could?
As for the Four Temperaments, which I’ve not thought about since undergrad, when, if my memory is correct, our “Intro to Creative Writing” professor spent a class session on them, I’d say I’m Music, Story, Imagination, Structure.
LJS: So, if we switch the ‘s’ in Story to an ‘n’ for Narrative, you’re M-N-I-S.
BK: This circles back to my emphasis on sound and ties it directly to my love of telling a good story in my very Appalachian way of seeing/saying things, followed by the forbidden forest of my brain and the form/shape of the thing I’m about to iterate.
But, so very Gemini as I am, I will frequently remix that to Structure, Narrative, Imagination, and Music (S-N-I-M). This happens when I’m working with forms. I will literally say to myself, “Let’s write a villanelle about another poet who tried to perv on me,” and whoop, there it is.
LJS: [Laughs] “Whoop, there it is” is such a tidy way of reducing a complicated psychological and creative process down to its absurd essence. And the thing about this book is that it, too, tells a winding and iterative tale of progress and backlash, progressive and regressive tides, and for those of us actively questioning whether the ‘moral arc’ we’ve been assured bends in the right direction isn’t actually boomeranging instead...well, ‘Whoop, there it is.’ Your book feels like its treatment of the subject is right on time.
BK: I wanted very much to mimic and reinterpret that throughout the book. At the same time keeping it darkly realistic like the poem about the day Massachusetts passed marriage equality, “Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage ten days before my 30th birthday”.
The speaker and their friends get gay-bashed right at the exact same time and so there’s fantastical change, but yet here we are, you know? Still living in the (practical) everyday. Or, openly gay artists like Melissa Etheridge performing at the Clinton inauguration, but at the same time, I was trying not to get targeted and fired at work in Ohio. This tension fills the book: rapid change mixed with its antithesis. But some of that I had to leave out because I wanted the book to focus on interpersonal relationships. I could probably write another concurrent book on what it was like to live unapologetically Queer alongside people who were unapologetically bigoted. And then here we are again 30 years later...
I wanted the book to capture the nature of change and how you can like parts of it/not like other parts of it. And how do you navigate that as a thinking person?
LJS: In concluding the journey of this book, we find ourselves unboxing an animatronic owl and falling from a ladder only to land in the ER for stitches, all in the name of chasing starlings away from the house. “We’ve come so far to go” is an apropos intersection of nature–both wild and domesticated–, character–both rebellious and traditional–, and time–multi-directional and plastic.
BK: That poem begins the end of the book. Like, we’ve had all this change, but we’re in another plague and we haven’t learned any lessons. It’s a reckoning. And weird to have all those figures from the first go-around like Larry Kramer (a gay rights activist) and Lou Sheldon (an anti-gay evangelist). Dying. Period. And then the whole idea that younger people have no clue who those people are. It’s also a quiet reckoning with aging and domesticity as well, right? Being a cranky middle-aged person fighting a losing battle against birds in the eaves. Getting a fake owl to solve the problem. For me, it’s all about the forty years of trying.
“This is something, my lover says,
unboxing an animatronic owl
I hope terrorizes the chattering
whose roost smells of wet grass stuffed in the vent
above our bed. It’s an option
I wanted to try. Forty years of trying
compressed into glowing eyes
a pitchy hoo hoo.”
LJS: The lover unboxing the Not Owl and saying, “Well, this is something.” What a pantomime! It’s an ars poetica, too! The humor throughout the book is noteworthy and delightful—even in the midst of all that’s wrong. And we proceed to the resolution of the book with humor, poignancy, and intelligence—wedding rings and cock rings abounding.
BK: I like humor for humor’s sake, but I also understand its power as both weapon and shield. I learned that power early, from time spent as a little kid around my uncle and his Queer friends. (See my book Twang (ELJ Editions, forthcoming April 2025) for more on that!) Thanks to them, I had instincts for shade and satire before I was ten, before the AIDS crisis took all of them, before I ever encountered a wannabe bully in junior high or a married man creeping on me at my first library job.
Further, humor mixes well with my poems that have a ‘sexy sad’ vibe. (A descriptor coined by an editor; I can’t take credit for it!)
I think the funniest poem in the book—for me!—is “Then He Will Be Reborn (Baptized in Cum).” It borrows a line from a Rufus Wainwright song for its title and proceeds to mix West Virginia with Provincetown, Reba McEntire, and Dolly Parton with hanky code cruising in a park, Greek myth, and Applebee’s while giving me a chance to use the word ‘buisine,’ which are the horns used by the heavenly hosts in Catholic mythology. The version in the book is, I think, the second draft. It’s a rare poem that just came into being—immaculate poemception! Every time I read it, I giggle. I can’t read it out loud without breaking!
LJS: This cover art feels like an absolutely incisive depiction of the book’s themes and concerns while happening, also, to be fabulously beautiful!
BK: Yes, the cover of this book is perfect. Exactly as I imagined it—from the figures, color story (something borrowed, something blue), and motifs—during the first conversation I had with the artist George Gozum, an award-winning creative director/designer/fashion illustrator.
George and I have known each other since the late 1990s. As is one of the modern gay ways, our friendship began on an old-school internet message board about X-Men comics and moved to real life when I’d be in NYC. We’ve had amazing late nights on the town, drunken nights in, talked art and culture; I’ve even been “one of his French girls” (Is that the Titanic quote? I have no idea; I’ve never watched that movie). We’ve discussed a more formal collaboration for years, and as It Was Never Supposed to Be took its final shape, I realized George was the only artist I wanted to create the cover, combining his fashion stylings and comic book sensibilities to portray the Future Past made real. We had one 20-minute conversation, and a few hours later, he sent me a sketch that became the cover. As if he’d plucked it directly from my dreams.
I love the pinky grip highlighting the rings, linking the cover to the first and final poems in the book. It’s just…*chef’s kiss*. I would encourage readers to see if they can find all the easter eggs in the cover art after they finish the book! Definitely after they read the book.
L.J. Sysko is the author of THE DAUGHTER OF MAN, which was selected for the Miller Williams Poetry Series by Patricia Smith and published by University of Arkansas Press in 2023, and BATTLEDORE, a poetry chapbook about early motherhood published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. Sysko’s work has been anthologized in BEST NEW POETS and LET ME SAY THIS, appearing also in publications such as Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review’s “Poem of the Week,“ and Mississippi Review. A former high school English teacher, Sysko is now Director of Executive Communications at Delaware State University and a Contributing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly. She lives in Wilmington, Delaware with her family. You can find her at ljsysko.com.