When Maureen Seaton, Columbia College's Lambda Literary Award-winning poet-in-residence, left Chicago after the Spring 2002 semester to take a new position as poet-in-residence at a university in Florida, it was hard to imagine who could take her place.
The answer was close at hand, as David Trinidad, who had been the visiting writer during the school year, accepted the position. Trinidad is the author of numerous poetry collections and chapbooks, inluding Plasticville, Answer Song and Hand Over Heart, to name just a few. He is a frequent contributor to various prestigious periodical and literary journals and has been published in many anthologies, including Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. I spoke to David Trinidad shortly before classes resumed for the fall semester.
Gregg Shapiro: Last year, you were a visiting poet at Columbia College. Was that something that you did on a regular basis at other colleges and universities?
David Trinidad: No. I've given poetry readings at various schools, but this was the first time that I was asked to visit for an entire semester. So it was wonderful.
GS: What was involved in being the visiting writer?
DT: Teaching two poetry workshops and giving a poetry reading and one lecture.
GS: You have published several poetry collections and have been published in numerous anthologies. If you had to pick your favorite collection, which one would it be?
DT: I think I would have to say the last one ( Plasticville ) . I guess I would say that about the one before that if you would've asked me at that time.
GS: What is it about that book?
DT: Plasticville I wouldn't say represents everything I do, but I guess it just captures concerns in recent years. I guess that's why I feel the most attached to it.
GS: You've also published in a lot of anthologies. Do you have a favorite anthology?
DT: I've been in many anthologies and it felt very significant when I was in this particular anthology which is Paul Hoover's Postmodern American Poetry. I think that's a very important anthology and it brought together a lot of poets for the first time, who really needed to be represented and canonized. I was very happy to be included.
GS: Have you begun work on your next book of poems?
DT: Yes. In fact, it's due out in the fall of '03. Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse. It's actually a collaboration with two other poets, Jeffery Conway and Lynn Crosby. It's a mock epic based on the movie All About Eve. It's going to be more than 500 pages long. It's a huge, sprawling epic.
GS: Who's bringing that out?
DT: Turtle Point Press, who did Plasticville.
GS: Do you continue to publish your work in magazines and literary journals?
DT: Yeah, I've always done that, since I began writing. It's just something that is always going on. Sometimes more than at other times, it just depends. Sometimes I'm asked to contribute work and at other times there are magazines I'd like to be in so I submit work to those magazines.
GS: Have you published any of these ( Phoebe 2002 ) collaborations in literary journals?
DT: Yes, excerpts from it. Both online and in journals.
GS: After living in New York City for almost 15 years, you have now relocated to Chicago. What does this move represent to you?
DT: Sanity ( laughs ) . It's a wonderful move for me, at this time in my life. I had reached the point living in New York where I sort of developed that prisoner of New York syndrome, where I was sort of ready to leave. The city can get to you after a while because it's so intense. I wanted a quieter, less career-driven life.
GS: Had you considered moving back to California, where you're from?
DT: I did and then I decided no. I'm from L.A. and I just knew I couldn't go back. The main reason being that I didn't want to go back to a car culture. I'd gotten used to living without a car, so I wanted to be in a city where you didn't necessarily need a car to get around. That's what was so wonderful about being asked to be a visitor here is that while I was here as the visiting poet, this new position in poetry opened up and I applied and interviewed for it and got it. So I sort of walked into the answer.
GS: Had you been to Chicago before?
DT: In the mid-'80s I did a couple of readings here, but that was only for a few days and I think it was snowing.
GS: As the artist-in-residence at Columbia College, what are your duties?
DT: It's a full-time, tenure-track position. I'll be teaching workshops and literature classes and I'll just be involved in the program there. At the moment it's all undergraduate, but Columbia prides themselves on being the only college that offers an undergraduate degree in poetry. I think that's how they'd say it. But next fall they're starting an M.F.A. program in poetry, so I'll be teaching classes in that as well.
GS: What do you like best about teaching poetry?
DT: Good question. I like to be involved. I like to help students with their poetry. I get to turn them on to poetry that can effect them, both as people and as writers. I like teaching poetry because it's something that I love and I get to be involved with it on a daily basis.
GS: I read a great quote online that said, "It's not every day grownups get to mine their childhood with the artifacts of those times. For David Trinidad, it's the stuff of his writing." Do you feel like your past is your best resource for material?
DT: Primarily. Although I'm aware that that could change. The book before last, Answer Song, although it has a lot of poems about the past, it has a lot of present-centered poems. Poems that I wrote when I was new in New York. It was very exciting for me to be there and to write poems inspired by the New York school poets, slice-of-life poems, of the moment, you're sort of celebrating the mundane or the ordinary.
GS: You also write a lot about pop culture themes.
DT: I didn't always, but in the mid-'80s I started writing about popular culture. I wrote poems about girl groups from the '60s, Barbie, certain movies. This current project, about All About Eve, where it's based on this movie, is full of popular culture. So, it's something I've done for a while now. In fact, Plasticville, I sort of thought, while I was writing it, let me just get this out of my system. Let me write all this pop stuff and then I'll be done with it. But of course I'm not.
GS: How does being a gay man find its way into your work?
DT: It's always been there, from the beginning. When I said that I write primarily about pop culture, I also write very personal, autobiographical pieces and I have written a lot about my sexuality. In fact, my first real "poem" was about being gay. It's been there for me from the beginning. It's part of my identity as a writer.
GS: In terms of contemporary gay literature and the gay literary movement, I always think of Andrew Holleran's Dancer From The Dance and Larry Kramer's Faggots as beginning something totally new, and it was also a movement that included lots of poets as well. The prose got the most attention, but the poetic side also got some attention. Where do you see your place in that group?
DT: I came of age in the early '70s when the gay movement was just beginning. So I feel like I was very lucky that I became a writer at that time, because it created a sense of safety almost. I could express myself in my work and not have to worry too much.
GS: Sure, because 10 years earlier ...
DT: You couldn't have.
GS: It opened all those doors. The post-Stonewall generation of writers had the chance to write openly about things that probably had been shrouded in the past.
DT: Yes. I was aware of that at the time. I was friends with a number of other poets at that time, in the late '70s and early '80s, like Dennis Cooper and Tim Dlugos, and their work had an affect on me too. So, I sort of see myself as being a part of a group that came of age at that time. Cooper and I were on the West Coast. We were in L.A. But then Dennis became friends with Tim and that's how I met Tim and that inspired me to move to New York.
GS: As a writer and someone who lived in New York for many years, have you addressed the subject of the Sept. 11 attacks, the aftermath or the anniversary?
DT: Yeah. Because I lived in Soho, I witnessed it that morning from my front steps. Because I was working on this ongoing collaboration, it couldn't help but come into the piece. I've dealt with it, I've written about it in that piece and have published excerpts in a couple of Sept. 11 anthologies. I don't know that if I hadn't been working on that, I don't know what I would done, if anything, in my work with it. To sit down and write a Sept. 11 poem, I don't know if I would do that and maybe someday I will. How could it not affect this big a project. In a way, it was sort of a perfect way to address it. It actually comes into to play in a rather significant way into this book and into this piece and it affects the piece.
