“Today is not so easy as falling into it.”
Steve Abbott, “Burning to Speak”
Poet, journalist, essayist, novelist, activist, single gay father: San Francisco–based writer Steve Abbott was many things, and this collection captures the range of his interests, passions, and talents. During his lifetime, Abbott was perhaps best known for his prolific capacities as a reviewer and as editor of the magazine Soup, in whose pages he popularized the term “New Narrative” to designate a loose-knit, broadly Bay Area–based group of writers merging theory and gossip, “high” and “low” culture, radical politics, and queer sex. Passing away from AIDS-related complications in 1992, Abbott’s own collections of poetry, essays, and novels have since remained stubbornly out of print. In 2013, however, his daughter Alysia published Fairyland, a memoir of her life with her father (since optioned by Sofia Coppola), which has played a key role in the revival of interest in New Narrative. Alysia Abbott provides a moving afterword to the present volume, movingly reflecting on her father’s legacy at “the age of 48, as old as he will ever be.” Steve Abbott’s literary executor and friend, Kevin Killian, has likewise played an important role in preserving Abbott’s legacy. Killian himself passed away shortly before the volume’s release: much missed, he was the subject of a moving tribute by Peter Gizzi in Chicago Review last year.
Steve Abbott was born midway through the Second World War in Nebraska and raised as Catholic. During his undergraduate studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he was involved in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), won a civil trial after being charged for Vietnam-era draft dodging as a conscientious objector, wrote for the university’s literary magazine, and organized a reading for Allen Ginsberg. (As editor Jamie Townsend’s invaluable and pithy introduction informs us, it was on his journey to Lincoln for the reading that Ginsberg wrote “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” which he read on campus). After graduating, Abbott briefly embarked on a career as a Benedictine monk, studying as a novice before quitting the order in disgust at spiritual corruption (this experience forms the basis for parts of his novel Holy Terror). He then returned to academic study, embarking on doctoral work in psychology, this time at Emory University. Here he met Barbara Binder, soon to become his wife. Theirs was far from a conventional marriage: Abbott came out as bisexual soon after their wedding and became “Gay Lib Editor” for the underground newspaper The Great Speckled Bird and, though Barbara gave birth to Alysia in 1970, the couple maintained an open relationship.
Tormented by a breakup with a boyfriend, Abbott’s life at this period was chaotic—he was using drugs heavily and Barbara was about to have him committed when she died in a car crash in 1973. In Abbott’s words, “Barb’s death shocked me out of my insanity […] I knew if I wanted to keep Alysia I’d have to stop being crazy. I didn’t know if I could but I had to try. Alysia was all I had left in the world and I was all she had too.” The following year, Abbott moved with Alysia to San Francisco. It was here that he developed as editor, writer, and poetry cartoonist, beginning the little magazine Soup in 1980. Abbott would produce four issues, all key New Narrative documents, as well as working as managing editor for the Poetry Flash periodical and writing for numerous other journals. It’s perhaps for his journalism and essays that Abbott was best known. Tirelessly promoting the work of friends and contemporaries, Abbott covered everyone from Dennis Cooper to Armistead Maupin, Diamanda Galás to Odilon Redon: many were collected in the book View Askew: Postmodern Investigations, published in 1989. Diagnosed with HIV around late 1988 or early 1989, Abbott continued to write until his death in 1992.
Abbott’s friend Robert Glück calls him “a tireless community-builder.” Perhaps most notably, he helped to co-organize the 1981 Left/Write conference with Glück and Bruce Boone, bringing together a large number of left-leaning writing and activist communities from the Bay Area. This was a foundational event for New Narrative. As is often the case with selfless organizers, Abbott’s generosity toward others often led to the neglect of his own work: in the introduction to Writers Who Love Too Much, Killian calls him “the sparkplug that every scene depends on without, perhaps, realizing just how much it needs him”. Abbott’s work as editor and organizer and the often dramatic and unusual circumstances of his life, as documented in Fairyland and in his own autobiographical writing, should not blind us to his own writing. The Abbott oeuvre has three main strands. His poetry adopts a variety of styles, from sestinas to rhymed sonnets, to something approaching Kerouacian “spontaneous bop prosody.” His drawings are influenced by the political cartoons of his friends S. Clay Wilson and Robert Crumb found in Zap Comix, their styles adapted into a form of his own invention, the poem-cartoon. (Notable samples included here are the adventures of an ampersand and a piece for Walt Whitman from which the cover image is borrowed.) Abbott’s crowning achievement, however, remains his prose—whether novels, short stories, or essays. Beautiful Aliens (Nightboat, 2019) marks the first publication of Abbott’s work in nearly two decades, and it covers all these bases of his career. Aware that this is a “Reader,” rather than a “Collected,” editor Jamie Townsend offers generous but judicious selections from longer works, giving them space to breathe without pretending completeness, and, as was Abbott’s own practice, allowing neither the essays nor the fiction nor the poetry to take priority.
Fittingly, the work begins with what is probably Abbott’s best-known work— Lives of the Poets, originally published by Boone and Glück’s Black Star Series in 1987. Its cover—Johnson’s Lives of the Poets with the face removed—suggests something of what appears within: the text collages that appear to be mainly found text or paraphrased selections from biographies and autobiographies, from Lady Murasaki to Elvis, Rimbaud to Jane Goodall. With an immense wit and charm that belies the seriousness of the work’s endeavor, Abbott asks what it means to write a life, and, in turn, what it means to write and what it means to live. As he puts it: “I read biographies. The woes of geniuses and stars cheer me up. Destiny in a dewdrop, more harmonious than a song. A few pages and X moves from agony to greatness; then death, how neatly it ties things up. But tiny, unexpected details appeal most.” In Abbott’s work, such concerns were by no means abstract. Abbott’s own, often painful experiences led him to an in-depth exploration of what it means to be an individual and of how we narrate our lives and those of others around us. The death of his wife Barbara prompts the moving “Elegy” from his first collection, Stretching the Agapé Bra (1978).
What seems most outlandish in our autobiography is what really happened.
It is only circumstances that makes death a terrible event.
She dreamt of our fishtank breaking & all the fish…
You should not have to burn your hand everyday to feel the mystery of fire.
On the book’s front cover, Steve and Alysia appear in impossibly stylish Southern Gothic mourning clothes: mourning turned to performance, the poet as a movie star, gay pinup, and grieving husband all at once. “All the books we read lie,” writes Abbott in the uncollected “Poem for Joe Mauser”, and he was concerned to excavate such lies: not only the lies of American heteropatriarchy, imperialism, and white supremacy but the self-deceptions and self-inventions with which we negotiate our place in the day-to-day world that goes by the name of “real life.” Like many New Narrative writers, Abbott increasingly turned to prose to conduct such investigations. As he jokingly tells Glück in “Writing my First Novel,” “[I’m writing this novel] for myself, to understand why I’m so fucked up. Isn’t that why anyone writes?” Other highlights from Beautiful Aliens include the two chapters selected from Holy Terror (a clandestine gay affair in a seminary, followed by some deliriously over-the-top European sexcapades that end in a Satanic ritual); “My Kid,” a previously unpublished self-interview about his life with Alysia; a series of moving letters to his parents; and the closing selections from Skinny Trip to a Far Place—his documentation, in prose and haiku, of a trip to Japan with Alysia in 1987.
But for me, the essays are the real gem here. Abbott was a prolific reviewer: a master, not so much of the quip, as of the one-sentence characterization of a poet’s or a theorist’s work that hits home—gut-ache, gut-punch, seed of rage, or tear in the eye. In the previously unpublished “Passing Strangers,” Abbott writes: “Most of my writing is published in obscure magazines. I like to write on unusual topics: the history of rubber stamp art, avant-garde poetry, tv commercials, horror movies. I want to make connections.” As this quotation indicates, Abbott took pleasure in writing on anything that took his fancy. But this approach is not superficially eclectic, because the “connections” Abbott makes are based on a set of underlying ethical, political, and sexual concerns that underscore all his writing, drawn from lived experience, and rendered with fidelity to that experience. Abbott taught a series of fifteen theory classes at Small Press Traffic and his work is peppered with references to the contemporaneous classics of Left theory. Yet these never feel like namedropping; learning is always worn lightly and any example used is always apposite, contributing to the momentum of the writing.
Indeed, one of the lessons of this book is how Abbott’s work insistently refused both generic boundaries and fetishization of the individual author. His formal experimentation occurs not simply within the transgressive media of avant-garde novels and poems but in his often self-referential journalism. “Visiting Stonestown”, originally written for the San Francisco Sentinel, starts off as a piece of “gonzo” journalism and ends by critiquing gonzo’s “hype of caricature and ego-inflation,” in which “as image piles on image, joke on joke, we swirl into an endless vortex.” Abbott concludes: “I don’t want that anymore. Like [his friend] Felix, I want to be real.” Abbott is not so naïve as to imagine that he might be granted unmediated access to the real through writing, drawing on elements of available modes while remaining skeptical of their sometimes reified understandings of writing’s relation to self and community. Thus, though his autobiographical revelations are sometimes startling direct, he realizes that, as fellow New Narrative writer Dodie Bellamy notes, the “Confessional” is nothing if not in itself a mode of performance. Though Abbott is capable of adopting the wide-eyed optimism of Ginsberg at his most Whitmanesque, he rejects the excesses of Ginsberg’s bardic pose. Though his writing contains illicit drugs and sex aplenty, he avoids the Beat valorization of the poète maudit and the junkie lifestyle. And though he’s a passionate Socialist, he distrusts the homogenized vision of community present in certain visions of politics. Abbott’s writing across all forms can be understood as a search for what the Real is in all its complexity: an honest record of a life which, as he puts it in a piece on Bob Kaufman, should be understood in the context of “alternative communities” rather than “personal legend”—a record for the milieu in which his writing emerged and which it encouraged and the communal aspirations toward both writing and life fostered there.
Community was central to Abbott’s work and to that of New Narrative in general. The vulnerability of those ties—often established precisely out of shared persecution at the hands of an often vengefully homophobic society—is apparent even as they are celebrated. Likewise, what comes through in much of this work is not only a sense of generosity but of the loneliness that can come out of the other side of individual selflessness. In “Passing Strangers,” Abbott writes: “People move out of my life like that. Before I can reach out, they’re gone. I told Dodie [Bellamy] over brunch two days ago that I wished I could think of my skin as connecting me to the world instead of separating me from it.” Such separation occurs not only in the context of breakups or broken friendships but in the deaths to which Abbott’s communities were increasingly subjected. Abbott knew intense and wrenching loss early on through the loss that changed the course of his life—that of Barbara—and now AIDS increasingly came to haunt as a real specter. Given this, the future was something Abbott sometimes desperately believed in, particularly as mortality cast its pall in the Reaganite 1980s: friends and lovers died of AIDS as he himself was diagnosed as HIV-positive.
Abbott addresses AIDS with admirable clarity in his essay “Will We Survive The 80s?” first published in the San Francisco Sentinel. “We” here refers both to the queer community of San Francisco within the Sentinel’s immediate readership and to those facing the national and worldwide decimation wrought by AIDS. Toward the essay’s conclusion, Abbott asks himself a broad series of questions, which are then turned outward to his readers.
In work and play, how can I free myself from the hype of competitive stress? Can I learn to accept and find joy in the present moment, even when it’s not what I might prefer? Can I continue to take risks, to redefine myself? Can I wake up from sexism, racism, ageism and careerism without becoming obsessed about being ‘politically correct’? [….] These are some of my questions. What are yours? What do you hope for?
In response to the scapegoating of a particular group as an emblem of disease, Abbott turns both to self-help and political organization, and to the ramifications of figuring sexual orientation as identity both chosen and imposed. For Abbott, AIDS brought to the fore the questions of community—how to sustain it, preserve it, and survive its breaking apart. AIDS served to show the inadequacy of any single-issue, single-identity politics, even as he fiercely insisted on the specificity of particular struggles at particular times and in particular places. Abbott’s writing here on the multiple identities he might be seen to inhabit is still instructive for us today. As he writes in “The Malcontent”: “Coming out in the 70s I thought being gay would change the world. No more patriarchy or war.” Yet, even at this stage, Abbott’s understanding, as indicated by his organizing of Left/Write and his earlier activism with SDS and other groups, was always intersectional, moving beyond idealism and toward practical attempts to encompass the multiple nature of oppression. In “Will We Survive” he writes of the need for “revisioning who we are”:
How do we use power? How do we use language? It is clear that what we are doing now—as bosses and workers, as men and women, as gays and straights, as whites and non-whites—is killing us all […] I would argue that today we can no longer afford to see anything—not even ‘gay liberation’ or our survival—as a separate issue needing a separate cultural, political, or spiritual agenda. This does not mean I intended to renounce my sexual orientation, far from it. Even in times of sadness or loneliness, it remains my greatest source of strength and joy. But if my sexuality is a social construct, I can change how I think about and act on it.
Abbott continued to think and to change and to act on such things until the end. So how best to sum up his legacy, nearly two decades after his untimely death? Reading across Abbott’s work in Beautiful Aliens offers a valuable opportunity to see themes initiated, developed, and returned to. “Who’s really who when anyone says us?” he asks in “Notes on Boundaries”. Like Boone and Glück, Abbott’s writing presents a vision of community which acknowledges the negativity that—via Jacques Derrida and Georges Bataille—he understands to lie at its heart: “What’s cast out as ‘marginal’ has to be first within […] The self has been erased only to return with the sacred vengeance of a cry.” In “Dialling for Sex,” Abbott reflects on the fact that he finds words with “sp” sounds particularly erotic; elsewhere, he writes of John Wieners’s work, “merely to hear is to be irrevocably and sexually implicated: spit, spark, sperm, speak.” It’s that combination of erudition and poetic turn of phrase with the quirky materialities and kinks of one’s own sex life, the perversely personal shared in public, that characterizes Abbott’s oeuvre.
Vitally, New Narrative centers intimacy and shame—the capacity to feel (gay) shame and to move beyond it—by putting it in print. In a recent interview with Jocelyn Saidenberg, Boone asks whether gossip is inherently destructive, or whether even in its destructiveness—of personal relationships and their crisscrossings, pairings, competitions, enmities—it can have a community-building function. This community, with disorder and otherness built into its core, functions to challenge the restrictions of conservative family life and the acts of violence which, as Lee Edelman has noted, it enables under the guise of futurity. Abbott’s understanding of a future is very different: “a florid crying-out theme of suffering or horror,” “a cry [that] becomes our own,” which “propels us into a future, dislodging us from our past by deepening and darkening it.” At the same time, it involves practical efforts to organize alternative futures beyond Edelman’s gesture of nihilism. Abbott’s open approach to parenting, in his polyamorous marriage, as a single father, and in his later organization of a group for Gay Fathers, echo other queer activists’ attempts to build alternative models of community and family structures, from the Boston-based Men’s Child Care Collective to Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) shelters in Manhattan for homeless trans youth.
But this is present in the writing too: Abbott seeks to break down boundaries even as he notes the importance of drawing, redrawing, crossing, and crisscrossing them in the search for a more ethical mode of social organization, both on a local and a planetary level. What this Reader explores most of all is the ethical question of how we might live our lives across the ties and blocks of love, friendship, activism, and family (with the latter understood well beyond the heteropatriarchal nuclear unit). The role of the poet (or writer in general) as an orientation, an identification, a stance of being in the world, was above all Steve Abbott’s most precious chosen call. I’ll end with a passage from the end of “The Malcontent” which seems like something of a creed for Abbott and which might serve as a beacon for us even now:
“Wrong life cannot be lived rightly,” Theodor Adorno concluded in a 1944 essay on the homeless. This applies equally to the question of sexuality and friendship today. But what can be salvaged when life is wrong? Something surely: a smile on the street, an hour by the ocean, having a cup of coffee with a friend, realizing that we are all interconnected. Even as you’ve read this you’ve become someone else for a few minutes….