Dave Awl's eagerly anticipated book, What the Sea Means: Poems, Stories & Monologues 1987-2002 ( Hope and Nonthings, Chicago, 2002, $12.95 ) , has finally arrived and the good news is that it was well worth the wait. Anyone who has ever had the privilege of hearing Awl perform as a Pansy King, a Neo-Futurist, at the annual Pride reading at Women & Children First, or any other venue, knows that he is an exemplary artist, who is able to communicate a vast range of emotions through his writing. Collected in book form, his writing has the same impact, washing over the reader and sending them on an unforgettable voyage.
Gregg Shapiro: You are a familiar name and face to theatergoers from your membership in The Neo-Futurists and as a performer in Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. How did you come to be involved with the theater company?
Dave Awl: You could blame it on my pal Lisa Buscani. In early 1989 Lisa got cast in Too Much Light and ordered me to come see her. I was immediately hooked. A little voice in my head said, "This is what you're going to do next." I launched an Eve-Herrington-style campaign to finagle my way into the cast and by summer of 1990 I was in.
GS: What was involved in the transition of your work from the stage to the page?
DA: Usually for me it's been the other way around. I was always very literary in my aspirations and envisioned every word I wrote, up to and including shopping lists, being published someday. So for me the struggle in the early days of Too Much Light and other shows was learning how to take words I'd written for the reader's eye and translate them into performance. Some of that is a matter of delivery, some of it is a matter of staging and judicious editing, and some of it is a matter of learning how to add little words here and there, to make the text less dense. And ultimately, I've always believed in the bardic concept of poetry as something meant to be spoken aloud, before an audience...so I refuse to believe that there's ANY good poetry that doesn't belong on stage, or shouldn't be read aloud. Which has sometimes put me at odds with certain of my collaborators, bless their little hearts.
GS: What The Sea Means contains some recurring themes and images. For example, moths fly in and out of the poems. What is the significance of the moths?
DA: Well, "significance" is a tricky word, but I think I can tell you how the moths got into the poems, and what they're after. In college I read about an analysis Jung had done, of the fantasies of a young American woman known by the interesting pseudonym "Miss Frank Miller." She had written a poem called "The Moth to the Sun," about a moth yearning to approach the glory of the sun, longing for "one raptured glance." I thought that perfectly captured the sense of lonely adoration the unrequited lover feels for the object of desire, not that I'd know anything about that. I'd found that sun gods, solar heroes and other heliocentric images were already popping up in my work at that time, quite a lot, and so the moth symbol seemed to make a lot of sense. I think gay men in particular are prone to unrequited yearning, because of the peculiar circumstances in which we often find ourselves in our youth and because so many of us are masochists. But it wasn't until I was compiling this book that I realized how numerous the moths, and other light-worshipping insects, are in these poems...they infest the book, as if it were a closet full of wool jackets.
GS: The city also figures prominently. Does this mean you won't be fleeing to suburbia any time soon?
DA: That's a pretty good guess. One side of me misses the open spaces, trees, fields and big sky of living in central Illinois, but the other side can't survive without gay newspapers, fringe theater, Thai restaurants, 24-hour buses and New Wave dance clubs. That side has the upper hand. When I lived downstate I wrote a lot of nature poems; in the city I started trying to figure out how those pagan, pantheistic impulses could express themselves in the landscape of the city.
GS: Your identity as a gay man permeates the writing. One of the most romantic and erotic of these poems is "Letter To Mark In Dublin." Did it actually begin as a letter or as a poem?
DA: "Letter to Mark in Dublin" definitely began as a poem...it was written specifically for the annual Pride month reading at Women & Children First. ... I don't know how to contact Mark now, and I'm not sure if I ought to because his situation was, um, complicated. He did give me an e-mail address, but said it would only be active for a week and I missed the window. But I know where he hangs out in Dublin so if I ever go back, I'll look him up.
GS: There are a couple of poems that I refer to as the "post-coital snubbing poems" ...
DA: Let's just say I've had a lot of experience with unrequited attraction, like Prometheus had experience with vultures. But I should note that "The Buddha Receiving..." is about moving on from an unrequited attraction so there was no actual coitus involved, and if anyone's doing the snubbing in that poem, it's me. It's like my version of "I Will Survive."
GS: You also have a found poem in the book..."Notes from first trip to San Francisco." What was there, in the journal entry that you found 15 years after writing it, that made you want to transform it?
DA: I think all of us find our younger selves poignant. We know things they don't; we've also forgotten things they knew. When you flip through the pages of a notebook at 35 and suddenly encounter all the naiveté and yearning of yourself at 22, it can be very arresting. The poem is almost exactly verbatim from my travel notes in 1986, just edited slightly, and the last stanza is a postscript from the present. A couple of people have told me it's their favorite in the book. We were all once wide-eyed kids; partly we miss it and partly we're relieved to have gotten past all that.
GS: One night a week, you can be found dancing to the new wave hits and obscurities of the 1970s and '80s at the Chicago nightclub Neo on Planet Earth night. In fact, Planet Earth has become such an important part of your life that you have included some poems in the book to pay tribute?
DA: I think any poet has an impetus, and maybe even a duty, to write about the milieu in which he or she moves. I'm an old New Waver, and always will be, but the gay clubs these days are full of that repet-a-thud music that sounds like you're trapped in a washing machine with an unbalanced load, so by the mid-'90s I'd given up on hearing music I actually liked in the clubs. Then one night in late 1998 my old high school buddy Cliff, who was a bartender at Big Chicks then, took me to Planet Earth, which was at the old Club 950 on Wrightwood and has since moved to Neo. They were playing Roxy Music, The B-52's, Devo, The English Beat, ABC, The Clash, Bronski Beat, The Psychedelic Furs, Patti Smith, and lots of Bowie. ... Best of all it, it was that truly diverse New Wave culture I remembered from the old days...gay boys and tolerant straight boys, straight women and dykes and transpeople all dancing together in perfect camaraderie. I felt like I had found my church. I've since gotten to be good friends with the DJs, Dave Roberts and Kristine, and we all agree that New Wave should be considered a musical style, like Swing or Rockabilly or Folk or anything else people are into.
