Jay Besemer : part one

Jay Besemer is the author of the poetry collections Theories of Performance (The Lettered Streets Press, forthcoming May 2020), The Ways of the Monster (KIN(D) Texts and Projects/The Operating System, 2018), Crybaby City (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), Chelate (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016) and Telephone (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013). He was a finalist for the 2017 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Find him online at www.jaybesemer.net and on Twitter @divinetailor.

photo credit: Rupert Glimm

How did you first engage with poetry?

When I was a toddler, I had a book of kids' poems by John Ciardi (with Edward Gorey illustrations!) called You Read to Me, I'll Read to You. (I still have it!) Though I read at a very early age, I learned many of them by heart before I could read because I loved the book so much. I wrote some poetry in bits & pieces when I was in elementary & middle school, but didn't "fall into it" as my life until I was 14 or so. In school there was a definite line between the stuff we were assigned & the stuff that was considered "enrichment" but felt more vital--I grew up in Buffalo, NY, so there were good poetry orgs like Just Buffalo doing youth programs & there were poets-in-the-schools in my high school years. I was fortunate in high school to have access to a university library where I read the Dadas & Surrealists in translation. We had a few close family friends who were poets. Another family friend was an English professor, who used to give me big boxes full of literature & philosophy from his office discards.