One of my favorite aspects of poetry is how it is so often inextricable from friendship. Everyone knows the examples: Wordsworth and Coleridge writing the Lyrical Ballads together; Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton calling each other and leaving their phones off the hook while writing; Ashbery and Schuyler collaborating on the novel, A Nest of Ninnies. In fact, basically every movement in poetry is a testament to group friendships: The Romantics, the Black Mountain Poets, the Harlem Renaissance, the New York School, the Beats, the Black Arts Movement….I love that these transformative moments in the history of poetry all have the names of groups of friends. And I love how poetry is often written together by friends. I’ve done plenty of that myself, mostly with Joshua Beckman. And since 2020 Matthew Zapruder and I have been collaborating over email, writing hundreds of little poems together. The Soft Skull Press book, Saints of Hysteria, will give you a crash course in just how many friends have been writing poems together in the 20th century alone.
Early in my studies of poetry, I was also fascinated to see how many poets considered dead poets to be their friends. There were call-backs, shout-outs, and put-downs from the current moment to poets of the past. The Glanmore Sonnets by Seamus Heaney, addressed to a friend (Anne Saddlemyer), compares the speaker and his interlocutor to Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy (surely one of the strangest poetic friendships), and calls back to Thomas Wyatt. This was the first example I noticed as a young poet, and it influenced the way I thought about the making of poems: not as things separate, written from the dreaded (and over-referenced) “ivory tower,” but actually engaged with other writers and their work, writers who may or may not be friends, and may or may not be alive.
I also love poems about friendships. O’Hara is such a great source of these. Especially “Poem” dedicated to the painter Franz Kline. It begins “I will always love you/though I never loved you”, clearly establishing the line of demarcation between friend and lover. Basically all of his poems that aren’t addressed to lovers are addressed to his friends. And we all know from reading his Personism essay that communication between friends (and lovers) was paramount to his understanding of poetry. Also, of course, he tells us that Personism was invented with his friend LeRoi Jones. It’s friends all the way down with him.
Whether it’s calling back to a poetic predecessor or addressing a living friend, there’s something so touching to me about a poet publicly asserting these friendships. My book Surrounded by Friends does this very thing—with poems addressed to living and dead friends, as well as living and dead poets whom I consider my friends.
So it shouldn’t surprise you that I wrote a poem about my friend Joshua Beckman, and titled it Poem for Friends. But imagine MY surprise when I texted the poem to him, only to discover (eventually) that this was in fact not my friend Joshua Beckman at all, but someone else who had been assigned his old phone number.
“Joshua” asked what “he” was to me, and my first response was from a dream I once had about an alien in my kitchen—the alien said to me “I am to you what you are to me.” Kind of obvious but memorable. But then “Joshua” persisted, and I told him he was an inspiration also. Because that’s what friends do, tell the truth. When “he” pressed me, I shared this poem called Poem for Friends, thinking that would answer the question. The giveaway? It should have been the emoji: Beckman has only ever used a flip phone. But the real giveaway was being asked if I wanted to “get down tonight.” I found this exchange so funny that I saved it, and now I’m sharing it with you. Let it be a warning: when you share a vulnerable poem about your friendship with someone, make sure you’ve got the right phone number.
Matthew Rohrer:
How is train?
Joshua Beckman:
Good
Matthew Rohrer:
Can I call you real quick? Just to talk rare books
Joshua Beckman:
Sorry, no
Matthew Rohrer:
No worries–sometime soon
Joshua Beckman:
OK
Matthew Rohrer:
Did you get an iPhone?!?!
Joshua Beckman:
No
Matthew Rohrer:
You seem to have sent an emoji
Joshua Beckman:
Yea it’s a app
You copy n pasted
Matthew Rohrer:
nice
Joshua Beckman:
What am I to you answer quick
Matthew Rohrer:
What you are to me
Joshua Beckman:
Yes
Matthew Rohrer:
That’s my answer– it’s from a dream I had
Joshua Beckman:
Give me a
Next answer
Matthew Rohrer:
Inspiration
Joshua Beckman:
What would you consider us as
?
Matthew Rohrer:
POEM FOR FRIENDS
On someone else’s estate
running through it to avoid
the outdoor wedding there is a grave
in a little copse of trees
so panting we hang out there
How beautiful to lie down
not to be the dead ones there
their eye sockets filled with dirt
nothing is theirs anymore
you pass me a crumpled joint
swaying a little like a poem
while black birds wail in the air
and the commuter train wails
all we have to do is make tacos
tonight and be friends
Joshua Beckman:
Aww
Love you
Matthew Rohrer:
You too!
Joshua Beckman:
Wanna get down tonight or..
Matthew Rohrer:
You stole this phone you need to give it back to Joshua
Joshua Beckman:
I’m not playing
I swear
Matthew Rohrer:
Give him his phone back
Joshua Beckman:
I swear girl
