107. Kiss & Release (with Anthony DiPietro)

Snarky Opener (0:00)

Anthony DiPietro

You can imagine someone critical or a hater saying Anthony DiPietro is a gay sex poet, you know, like it's the dirtiest thing you could possibly be.

And I wasn't saying it in the dirty way. I was saying it as a statement of fact, like, this is, this is who I am.

I'm confident about it. I'm good at it actually, and it's fine for me to be a gay sex poet.

Episode Introduction (0:41)

Rob Loveless

Hello, my LGBTQuties, and welcome back to another episode of A Jaded Gay. I'm Rob Loveless and, today, I am a non-jaded gay because previously, I think I was talking about how I started doing some work on my back patio.

Well, I am almost done with it, and it's looking pretty good, in my opinion. So, I can't really remember what I was talking about with the patio last time, but like, I got it all painted.

I laid down the plastic lock tile. Finally. Cost a lot of money because I had to buy a lot more than I thought, but it's all laid down there. I got my patio furniture set up. It's feeling nice and cozy.

And right now, I'm really excited because I bought a little lattice to kind of cover the one side for some privacy. So, I painted that, put in some fairy lights. I'm like, dangling some, like, Ivy through it.

It's looking really cute. I did have to stop because it started pouring earlier, so I can't finish that now.

But yeah, I'm really liking it. And just in time for summer.

Queer Poetry (1:35)

Rob Loveless

Anyway, from patios to poetry, I am very excited to be continuing our Pride theme in another podcast episode.

And I feel like today's episode really is going to touch in more to our emotions and some of our creative expression, which I think is really important to be aware of normally, but especially during Pride month because it's a time to really express ourselves.

So, we'll be getting into it shortly. But first, let's pull our tarot card.

Tarot (2:05)

Rob Loveless

Ooh, so we drew a Major Arcana card for today's episode. And actually, I think this is the second Major Arcana card we drew for the month of June. So, Pride is a big Major Arcana month.

Anyway, the card we drew for today is Judgment in reverse. As a reminder, Major Arcana cards are indicators of big life changes or events.

Judgment is the number 20 in the Major Arcana, and it's the second to last card in the suit.

Remember, we start with The Fool who has a value of zero, who is beginning a journey and learning new things with each card in the Major Arcana.

And it ends with The World, because at the end of life, you've experienced it all, and that's when a new journey begins. So, we're close to completing a cycle or journey, but we're not quite there yet.

Also with the number 20, we add double digits together, which equals two, which is tied to duality, partnership, and choice. Now in the Major Arcana, the High Priestess is also number two.

So, there are some tie-ins between these two cards. In astrology, Judgment is tied to transformation, death and rebirth, and power.

But when we draw this card in reverse, it signals self-doubt and resentment. So, this card is suggesting that we might be repeating patterns without learning important lessons from them.

I mean, how does the saying go? Insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.

So, when we draw this card, it's telling us to take some time to reflect inward, because if we really allow ourselves to look inside, we'll be able to understand some themes that have appeared through our life.

And in understanding and addressing those themes, we can understand what actions we need to take to achieve the outcomes we've been working toward, and what is best aligned with our goals.

And Judgment in reverse can also be telling us that we've been too critical on ourselves. You know, we may be too hard on ourselves and sending ourselves negative messages.

So again, when we look inward, we should do so with kindness and see if our overly inner critic is one of those themes appearing in our life, causing self-doubt.

And regardless of what those themes may be, because they are going to be all unique for all of us, this card is a call to action to find ways to break those cycles so we can achieve our full potential.

Guest Introduction (4:14)

Rob Loveless

And with that in mind, let's get into the episode. I am very excited to introduce our next guest.

He is a gay sex poet and art administrator, and his newest book, kiss & release, was just published earlier this year. Please welcome Anthony DiPietro.

Hey, Anthony, how are you well?

Anthony DiPietro

Great, Rob. How are you?

Rob Loveless

Doing well, thank you. Thanks for coming on today.

Anthony DiPietro

Absolutely. I'm excited to be here.

Rob Loveless

Awesome. Glad to have you here. Well, kicking off the episode, can you tell us about how you identify, your pronouns, all that fun stuff?

Anthony DiPietro

Sure. I'm a gay cisgender man using him/pronouns. I'm 44.

Today, I'm non-jaded, and I work full time as the deputy director of a modern and contemporary art museum, which is the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University outside Boston, and I live with my partner, Matt, and a bossy, neurotic cat that I hope won't interrupt us.

And I'm a poet and writer whose first book, kiss & release, just came out in February.

Rob Loveless

Very cool. You know, you beat me to the punch. I'm glad to hear that you're a non-jaded gay today. Can you tell us why?

Anthony DiPietro

Well, I'm excited. It's about to be Pride Month, and I love talking about the book and getting getting in that Pride spirit, so I feel good about things today.

Rob Loveless

Always glad to hear. Well, as you mentioned at the top of the episode, your most recent book, kiss & release, came out.

So, before we get too into that, though, can you just tell us a little bit about your career as a writer?

Anthony DiPietro

Yeah, absolutely. Like many people, I was writing from the time I was a teenager, but I didn't really know what the career path was.

I did study it in college, but then I felt like I needed to follow, you know, a some, you know, something that was a more of a straightforward career.

So, I developed a career managing community nonprofits after college, and I did like summer workshops on my writing, but I wasn't really getting better at it, and I always dreamed of going back to get my MFA in creative writing.

So, I finally did that in 2016 so that was kind of my turning point year. I went full-time to Stony Brook University in New York. I did full-time because I really wanted to find a writing community.

I hadn't had that in my undergraduate years, and I definitely got that when I when I went to Stony Brook. And I was 36 years old at that point, so I came in with something to prove, and I kind of like learned what I could right away about the publishing industry, and started kind of hustling to get my poems published.

So, I got about 100 poems published over the next six years in literary magazines and journals.

And by then it was 2021 and I put out a small chat book with Seven Kitchens Press, which is just a book that's like small enough to be staple bound or stitched together.

So, this was 15 poems that were all about kind of my life in the pandemic. In that same year, 2021 is when kiss & release went under contract.

So, I've been working on getting that ready for publication and just got it out this year with Unsolicited Press.

What is Poetry? (7:12)

Rob Loveless

That's awesome. Congratulations. And you were mentioning about writing all those poems. So, in your own opinion, how would you define poetry and what it is?

Anthony DiPietro

Yeah. I could define poetry in a lot of ways. I've in the past, I've conceived of a class where we would spend one day talking about how poetry is visual and define, or, sorry, relies on image and puts pictures in your head.

And there's also the visual of how it is looking on the page. And a whole other day could be spent talking about its musical qualities, and I would spend another day talking about just like, what is the line in poetry, and what are lines and line breaks for, and why is that so essential to poetry?

But when I thought about it in the context of today's conversation, poetry is a queer form. It's kind of the outsider. When you think about different forms of writing, it looks different on the page.

It insists on those line breaks, and it usually kind of speaks very differently than prose.

So, you know, no one thinks twice about picking up a novel or a memoir or maybe even a book of essays or articles, but poetry feels to a lot of people like you have to learn another language to access it, which I think is too bad.

And you know, in my own book, I tried to be more accessible. I kind of value accessibility in poetry.

And for most people, you know, most poets that you would ask would say that heightened emotion is part of the definition.

And I go back and forth on that because there's also poems that are kind of more interested in an intellectual side of things, or making an argument.

But for me, when I when I'm writing, I'm thinking about what's the effect that I want the reader to have, which usually is some emotional effect or some effect that I want to create through not just storytelling, but the image, the music, the pacing and how I lay it out on the page.

So, with poetry, I have all those tools available.

Rob Loveless

I think you kind of touched upon that answer a little bit, but why do you like that genre?

Anthony DiPietro

Well, it's funny, because when I was in undergrad, I used to write in all genres, and then when I was in undergrad, going into my senior year, you had to apply for your thesis credit, and I applied.

You could apply in different genres. I applied in poetry and fiction, and I was only accepted in poetry. So, I felt like that was the faculty of my colleagues telling me, like you're a poet. Lean in this direction.

I really can't I'm still bad at writing a story. I'm bad at plot. I tend to confuse backstory with story.

So, like, I find it more interesting to know you know what your deepest, darkest secret was when you were a child, versus, like, what's going to happen to you tomorrow because of what happened today?

So, with plot, you have to think about that cause and effect and what happened for a second, third. And it sort of just doesn't interest me.

So, so anyway, all that is to say, you know, I don't mean to like denigrate fiction, but I just seem to be a more natural poet. And poetry, to me, is much more versatile. I feel like it can do just about anything.

And it's also a form that's kind of mysterious, like I can keep going back to a poem if I if I feel like I understand it, or I don't understand it, I can keep going back to it and keep learning more about it, especially if you start discussing it with another person, usually they've noticed something different than what you noticed when you were reading it on your own.

And the other thing I like about poetry is that it's kind of this tradition that I get to step into, like I feel like I have a lineage as a poet, you know, not like New York School or something with a name, but what I do as a poet is informed by what I love reading and the poets that make me feel something.

I try to learn their techniques and learn how I can put that in my own voice, and how I can try to push that forward in my way.

The Intersection of Poetry and Identity (10:58)

Rob Loveless

And how has your identity as a gay man played a role in shaping your poetry?

Anthony DiPietro

What I learned when I got to grad school was that I was lucky because I had, I kind of already had subject matter, and some of that was, was about being gay, but some of it was, you know, I grew up with mental illness in my household, and I had a partner who died young, and that had happened already when I got to grad school.

So, I had, you know, more than a decade of kind of adult after-college life experience. And, you know, I'm not saying it's good or bad to kind of, kind of write with much more experience or not, but in my case, it just meant that when I would sit down to write and kind of confront what, what I was going to learn today about my craft, I didn't.

I was never at a loss for words. And, you know, at the same time, I think, I don't think I really knew who I was until I got to grad school, so parts of my identity were still in sort of in formation, even though I was out from the time I was 20, I was like 33 before I went to a job, and was fully out from day one.

So, you know, that's a lot of years in between of like navigating and figuring out where you fit.

And I always wrote about, I always wrote about love and relationships and the search for love from, from just a very young age, that's what interested me, and was writing about it from, from my point of view as a gay man.

I had, I had written a complete manuscript before kiss & release that was my grad school thesis, and those poems were really all about love and longing and kind of the search for a stable sense of my identity.

But the and those were good poems, a lot of them, but the manuscript didn't really let in the outside world. It was really just kind of me talking about me, and with kiss & release, I think I figured out how to kind of let the world in and how I speak about the world, how I contend with the world.

Now that the book is out in the public, I kind of have to remind myself that the book isn't me. It's not my actual self, but at the same time, it feels so vulnerable that and there is a lot of overlap with you know, who I am and what's in the book.

But I've learned from wiser poets than me that you can only be the writer you can be. You can't, you can't, kind of get there by imitation or trying to be someone else.

So, in that sense, the book is completely gay. The book is completely related to my identity.

Rob Loveless

Are there any specific queer poets or writers who have influenced your style or approach?

Anthony DiPietro

Definitely, quite a few of them. So, I wrote recently a Substack blog for my publisher on books that I books that I read that I cherish, and I couldn't have written kiss & release without them.

So, most of the poets I named there are queer poets like Federico Garcia Lorca and Paul Monette, who are both gone now. James Baldwin also gone, but I actually intervene with words from his novel Giovanni's Room in one of my poems.

And there's also living poets that I that I follow and who've helped me with my career. Jericho Brown is one who's a big influence, also Sam Sacks, and one of the other books that I name in the Substack article is Crush by Richard Siken.

I don't know if you know it, but it's a 2005 book that I think really influenced a whole generation of queer poets. It was just very sort of ecstatic, and it was all about voice and self-expression.

And a couple others who interested, I'm sorry, a couple other poets who influenced me are Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall, who have a hilarious podcast called Breaking Form, which is all about poetry and what it is to be a creator in our culture.

Their tagline is we're not for everyone, which I love. It's certainly very queer content and is definitely for poetry nerds like me.

kiss & release (15:08)

Rob Loveless

You had mentioned it a little bit before, kiss & release, it's your poetry book that came out earlier this year. So, what inspired you to write it?

Anthony DiPietro

Yeah, it's interesting, because, like I said, I had, I had done this manuscript that was supposed to be my it became my thesis for graduate school, and it was pretty much done when I got into my last semester of grad school.

So, I had put together, you know, the best 50-something poems I had written in that kind of short time period, and a lot of them had already been published, which was like an extra validation that these were indeed, you know, good poems.

And then in that final semester, so I was feeling more free, and I took a course on short forms with Amy Hempel, who's a well-known short story writer, and she is inspired by people who wrote flash, flash fiction pieces, extremely short pieces.

So, we studied these short forms, whether they were classified as prose poems or flash fiction or micro-essays or something else, or some hybrid form.

And so, I was writing a lot of prose poems and finding that that was a form that let me be really free. And part of that was that I'm usually writing from memories, so there's a lot of past tense going on, but now I started writing about what I was actually feeling and going through at that time, and when I was in grad school, remember I said that I started in 2016 so two things happened right away when I got there.

One was that Donald Trump got elected president, so that sort of impacted the mood of things immediately, like the shock, and then the shock wore off into something else and but, you know, sense of uncertainty.

And also, I started grad school. I had a boyfriend at the time that I thought I was going to marry, but we did the long-distance thing, and with before one semester was up, he he decided that he wasn't comfortable with the distance, and we broke up.

And it was very much kind of like a La La Land breakup, like at the end, you know, he was kind of telling me, you have to follow your dream and see where that takes you.

And kind of, maybe I'll be here, maybe I won't, maybe I have to follow my dream too. So, we were just sort of living, you know, separate lives. I was living in New York, single suddenly.

And after grad school, I lived in Cambridge, where I was finishing a lot of the book. So, but the prose poems that I wrote in that class, there's probably a dozen prose poems that ended up in kiss & release that I wrote in that class.

And the title is kind of a cute story, because it comes from a conversation I was having with a friend at the time who asked me, you know what's dating like and for you right now?

And I said something like, I don't find many keepers. And he said, catch and release, right? And I said, probably more like kiss and release. And immediately I knew that that was going to be the book title.

So, I had written much of it already, but the title came to me kind of all once.

Rob Loveless

And it's broken up into five sections, yes, and when?; came and made; parade and ceremony; body and literary; and sound and gesture.

So, can you tell us about how you grouped your poems together and what those sections represent?

Anthony DiPietro

Yeah, I don't think of each section as being about one or a couple of things. I kind of felt that I had a collection of poems that was about, you know, a handful of themes, and I wanted those themes to be present in all five sections, kind of in an arc across the whole book.

So, but there are some things that I knew, you know, should come later in the book, and some things that should come earlier. So, I felt that, for example, I have a lot of poems that are concerned with the idea of letting go, and I wanted to put those more in the second half of the book.

And there's even some poems in there that I think are concerned with, like, how our language is changing. Like, is the language of romance the same as it's always been?

Or is it, is it decaying with, like, the use of technology, for example? So, I have a few poems that I co-wrote with my iPhone with the predictive text.

And all those poems came later in the book as well, because the idea was, if this is decay, it's going to read like a decaying language. But that was sort of a question I didn't answer for myself.

And I also knew, for example, the poem that has the right note to end the book on, and the poem that was the right introduction for the book.

So, I kind of laid out these anchor points between what would start the book and what would end it.

And then need to have other poems where you think, okay, this could be this could open a section, or this could close a section, so you you fill in kind of more of those anchors, and then one by one, you end up with a sequence. It took a lot of time to fully flesh that out.

Rob Loveless

As you mentioned earlier, the book is very gay. I was able to get a copy. You actually sent me one, so I have my signed copy here on my bookshelf, and I really enjoyed reading through it.

But in your own words, what are some of the queer themes in this body of work?

Anthony DiPietro

Yeah, I think, I think the book is queer, and first in the way that it treats sex, it's, it's a, I think a sex-positive attitude throughout.

It doesn't take sex as this taboo thing, which it still kind of is in our society. It just sort of treats sex as a part of life and of relationships and the search for love.

I think sometimes the kind of the speaker of the poems dislikes that sex is is how being gay or being queer is defined, that sex has something to do with the definition of our identities, because personally, I find so much more richness and a lot of other things about gay culture and community.

And I think the speaker also encounters a tiny bit of guilt, like there's an interesting poem in there about this idea of ruin.

But I think he's not really encountering shame, and he's not really apologizing for himself. He's sort of aware that, like if, if there's an apology here, or if there's a violation, it was me with myself or my own ideas, and that's all I have to contend with. It wasn't like, yeah, it doesn't seem shameful.

I think the book is interested in kind of, where is the line between love and sex, or between intimacy and romance, if those are all different things.

And one of one of the early reviewers pointed out, I thought astutely, that the book is interested in the line between the self and everything else.

Given that everything outside of us is limited by the self by our own perceptions, isn't everything also kind of part of us?

Maybe that's not a queer theme, but it's sort of one of the bigger themes of the book. I think.

Rob Loveless

Do you find yourself drawn to certain poetic forms or techniques when exploring queer themes?

Anthony DiPietro

You know, I like trying lots of forms, and I think that any any form, can be sort of made queer. So, there's, there's some traditional forms in the book, like a Villanelle or sonnet.

And I always try to put my own spin. And there are some forms that I've kind of invented myself, like like the idea of writing a poem with auto-correct or with iPhone predictive text, I should say. In terms of techniques, I pay a lot of attention to voice, so I want to read poems where there seems to be a real person talking there.

And so, when I was teaching poetry, I would always tell my students, you know, there's some some kind of tricks and techniques you need to learn that signal to the reader that they're also in the poem with you.

So, for example, asking a question in a poem, because a question, you know, that question mark there sort of demands that there's another person there to hear it and answer it.

The reader will hear it as if they're the one being asked the question, even if you're asking yourself a question. Another kind of way of doing this is using the pronoun you, which is really simple, but it's kind of a magical word in our language, and it's kind of everyone's default name.

So other than your own name, you is kind of the word that you're socialized to respond to, so whether you hear it or read it, so you see that in the book.

And there's also just ways of, kind of making a little aside where you make the reader feel like you're co-conspirator, like you're talking to them, like you're expecting the reader to be following through a certain line of logic or getting this punch line of a joke.

So, I kind of keep the reader in mind as being inside the poem.

Rob Loveless

And how do you balance personal narrative with broader themes of queerness in your poetry?

Anthony DiPietro

I think that's an interesting question, because, like I said, I had this sort of failed manuscript, or, you know, that never got published, that was really maybe too personal, or too concerned with the personal, and not with anything else.

But I'm finding that I seem to be a storyteller like that seems to be my way into most poems. Because even if you want to write a poem about an emotion, it's it's usually the drama of the situation that kind of creates the emotion.

So, there's lots of beautiful, lyrical poems there that are out there, say about grief or about love or whatever.

And there they can be full of metaphors and and mood, but if the reader doesn't know what it's about, you know, maybe they don't know it's about grief, or maybe they know it's about grief, but they don't know what that relationship was.

Those are things, you know, those narrative details and relationships are things that will make it more powerful and nuanced, I think.

Is this about your father or your husband or your childhood friend, or what age were you when this happened?

So that's all narrative information that I to me is like important to to find ways to include in the into my poems. So, I kind of start with telling my story, and then the rest just comes.

And I just trust my point of view to take me there, and that my my queer point of view will always come through.

Rob Loveless

One poem that really resonated with me was, love is finished again: first movement and one of the lines is, "Your ears can't tell exactly when its sound has ended and another has taken over."

And for me, I interpreted that as when you're with someone, you don't necessarily kiss them knowing that it's going to be your last kiss, and after a relationship is over, you don't necessarily know when you're going to be over that person, but eventually you meet someone new, who you're excited about, and you can think back to the past relationship, but it doesn't hurt anymore thinking about it, and there's no longing for that person anymore.

So, I was just curious what inspired that poem?

Anthony DiPietro

Yeah, this is interesting because it wasn't sort of inspired by a personal narrative. It's actually from another poem. So, the title love is finished again, which is almost a poem in itself, because there's, there's layers within that phrase is actually from Yehuda Amichai's poem.

Yehuda Amichai was like the national poet of Israel, like the way say Pablo Neruda is your quintessential Chilean poet. Anakai wrote really successful poems, both in the personal vein and a political vein.

And I got interested in him and read a volume, a book, a book that was spanning his entire career, and I found this really humble poem, love is finished again. It's 15 lines. It's three stanzas with maybe one or two central images in each stanza.

So, the first line is, love is finished again like a profitable citrus season. So, this idea that you had something good, but it was temporary, but you might have it again next year.

And the poem ends with this image that I found very complicated. It's the sound of a fork clattering against a porcelain plate beating an egg yolk with sugar for a child, clattering and clattering.

And the repetition of clattering at the end almost takes makes that sound kind of go on forever. And I was interested in, why is there a child in the poem? Is that the poet himself, remembering his own childhood, is the child the product of a love that's now finished?

And if so, then is the poem really about lovemaking, not just love? So, I had had all these questions, and I just started writing my way into it to sort of solve the puzzle for myself of what this poem meant.

It was, it was just really huge to me, and I couldn't put my finger on why. So, the idea of finished, finished is a temporary state, but the word again indicates that it has come before and it will come again.

So, it's temporary, but also cyclical. So, I was trying to write my own images that conveyed that same kind of understanding.

So, you'll find in the book that my images, many of my images, start with sound, but I also travel to lots of places. I look at nature and weather. I go into politics. I think about the idea of home.

And so, this poem ended up my version of love is finished again ended up with 11 sections that each have a central image or a few related images similar to the original.

But I gave each section a different form or shape, and I wanted the poem to have lots of space, so I separated each section onto a new page, and that 11-page poem got published right away by Breakwater Review.

And then when I went to put together the book, that was the first time, I decided to break it up differently to kind of give it even more space.

So, you don't get 11 sections at once, you know, like somewhere in the middle of kiss & release. You get seven, what I call movements broken up throughout the book, which I think gives the reader a place to pause and kind of breathe.

I've been getting a lot of good feedback about the way that the poem unfolds in the book, that they like it. They kind of, when they finish a section, they look forward to the next one. And I think it's been some people's favorite part of the book.

Rob Loveless

And then in your other poem, yours, there's a line that I thought was really interesting, and it's "Sometimes a guy rubs against me and my mind just attaches to sadness at that moment."

Can you tell us about that?

Anthony DiPietro

Yes. So, as you know, that moment kind of interrupts, and what's happening in that poem is an inner dialog about how the speaker wants to get with his friend who he thinks is hot, and it's a married guy and a straight guy.

And he's thinking how strange it is that he wants a straight guy. And then, after that passage that you read, he says, a mud a mud-splattered truck screeches up to the stop sign, and I hear twang, twang of country guitars.

So that image could be read as something that actually happens that kind of interrupts his train of thought while he's sitting there reading his emails and deciding whether he's going to go for this tryst with this guy.

But the way I read it, I can't help but read it as the truck is in the speaker's mind. It's sort of like the arrival of a memory, and memory brings sadness to his mind because of all the failed loves, all the loves that are finished again.

At least when this happens to me in my life, it's a feeling of personal failure. It's definitely enough to ruin a date, a date, or a day that's otherwise been good. So, I think that's what I was trying to say there.

Rob Loveless

Do you have a favorite poem in kiss & release?

Anthony DiPietro

I definitely have poems that are my babies. I have a few. One that's really easy to love, I think, is draft divorce decree. I just looked this up last night, and the original title was poem that is really just a list of places.

So, I sort of carve up the globe in an effort to so completely forget one ex that I'm saying, you know, you stay in these regions, and I stay in these others, and let's just never cross paths.

And I think it was a genuinely original way of getting a feeling that I think everyone can relate to. But I also don't get tired of admiring the first poem in the book when I was an Uber driver, because I think it's a really good introduction to my work and to the book.

Another gay poet that I know, someone who's extremely hard to impress, read that poem and said it made me gay gasp, and that's that's when I decided it was going to be the opening of the book.

That poem begins by putting you in tension right from the first line because it announces that this is going to be a horror story.

And then it takes you on a roller coaster with some laughs and some twists and unexpected takes you to unexpected places and unexpected emotions.

And then at the end, I feel like is the best twist, because it's this reversal of power dynamics. So, the character who called for an Uber is a rich lawyer in the poem, and he becomes, you know, the cocksucker in the end.

And the Uber driver, who's supposed to be the hired hand in this scenario, is now a top in the situation. And not only that, he's disappointed in the service. So, I can't, I can't help it, but I love that moment.

It's kind of like, you know, the original movie Willy Wonka, how Gene Wilder comes out of the factory, and he's an old man with a cane, and then he stumbles, but it turns out he was pulling a joke, and he's he's young and can walk, and he's fine?

So, Gene Wilder came up with that kind of improv moment, and the idea is that after that, you'll never know if what's coming out of his mouth is a truth or a lie.

And this was my, this was my version of that. You know, it was kind of me saying. You may think you want to pigeonhole me but don't because I'm going to surprise you.

And I can, I can make reversals and contradictions. I can convince you of something you weren't expecting.

Rob Loveless

Did you learn anything about yourself through writing kiss & release?

Anthony DiPietro

I think I learned a ton about myself, particularly as a writer, and about how to put a book together.

As a person, I feel like well and it's related to me as a writer, but I feel like the most important thing I learned might be from just last year, when we were making final edits to the book, including, you know, I had to update my bio, and I wrote, Anthony DiPietro is a gay sex poet.

And that, right there is another kind of reversal because you can imagine someone critical or a hater saying Anthony DiPietro is a gay sex poet, you know, like it's the dirtiest thing you could possibly be.

And I wasn't saying it in the dirty way. I was saying it as a statement of fact, like, this is, this is who I am. I'm confident about it. I'm good at it, actually.

And it is, it's fine for me to be a gay sex poet. So that is almost, has almost become like another coming out for me, that this is, this is what I write about, and I'm comfortable that I write about this.

And yeah, if you're interested, you can look at me and watch me do this. And if not, keep keep walking.

Rob Loveless

And what do you hope readers get from kiss & release?

Anthony DiPietro

This is an interesting question, because, you know, I I try not to draw a lesson from it myself. And also, just when I was thinking about this question, you build the book in very small parts, you know, you're looking at the tiny details of every word choice and every punctuation choice the whole time, and then it's harder to look at what is the bigger hole trying to say after all, after you've been doing all that detail work for so long.

But what I hear that kind of from other people reading it, that also resonates with me is that it's a book about resilience and ultimately, hope. And I get that. I feel like you can hear that in the way that we talked about, love is finished again, and I'm happy if that's what people take away.

But I when I was putting it together, I was just thinking about, kind of giving the reader an experience, and this was something else I had to think about when, when we were finalizing the book and I was doing marketing copy, like, what is the effect of of all this on you.

And for me, there's a lot of ups and downs in here, but it's sort of like so there's days when you feel okay and you think you finally let go of the thing that's been bugging you, but suddenly you know your ghosts or your grief just rise up to greet you, and you have to remember that that's also part of you, and kind of deal with that. But the opposite can also be true.

You can be having the worst day, and suddenly you wake up feeling healed, or just feeling okay, or feeling excited about something. One of the one of the poems, which is another one of my babies, ends with the line, at least the strange man in my mirror wasn't as ugly as I remembered.

So, the idea is that whatever that journey has been, you can surprise yourself, you can recover, you can be okay. While I was writing this, I was reading about Buddhism one summer, and you know, one of the central ideas is that everything is a temporary state.

Everything's changing, and in a way that can be really devastating news when you realize how true that is, but it can also be really helpful and freeing because whatever you think is awful and gross that you're feeling is not going to last either.

I think the other thing was that I learned in this process was that to make this book, I really had to be completely, 100% myself, no compromising.

Everything in the book had to be fully my own artistic vision, and I had to stand by it. Even the cover, you know, I didn't design it, but it has a big it has a big Anthony stamp on it.

I kept telling the designer, turn up the volume louder, basically, and that's how we got to this book cover that you can kind of see from across the room.

Rob Loveless

And do you have any future projects planned?

Anthony DiPietro

Yeah, I have, I have a partially written screenplay that I keep meaning to finish, which is a queer romantic comedy. I've also got a memoir that I keep meaning to get back to.

But what's been flowing out of me lately is more poetry. So, I'm working on a second poetry book, which will be very different, but still very me. In kiss & release, I felt like I took a lot of power in the eye.

You know, like I said earlier, that I was very interested in voice and what that can do. So, this time, I wanted to write from a different perspective and and write in the third person, and I kind of discovered this persona, the god of love, that I write about as a character.

And my version of the god of love is necessarily queer, poly, and multiple. So, he speaks from we because he's got multiple selves inside him.

He's also, you know, a human guy my age, who loves music, loves sex, and is on the search for love. So, he's got a ton in common with my own self.

Rob Loveless

And I'm very excited by that screenplay. I mean, hopefully, it'll be in theaters in a few years, and we could have you back on to do another episode on that.

Anthony DiPietro

I would love that.

Pride & Poetry (38:18)

Rob Loveless

Well, can you tell us, you know, it is June and Pride season. So, can you tell us how the work you do, especially within kiss & release as a gay man, how it exemplifies Pride?

Anthony DiPietro

Yeah, you know, while I was writing this book, I got some great advice from another gay poet, Jericho Brown, who I was at a workshop with in 2017 and he was suggesting some edits to one of my poems.

Actually, the poem kiss my lisp, which ended up in the book. And he was like, you could cut this, you could shorten that line, etc. But I have a bigger question.

He said, why are you being defensive here, and why in this line, why are you hiding? In this line, why are you apologizing? So, and this is a poem that's not even about me, you know, it's, it was came out of a prompt, and it's a character that I sort of invented, so the biographical details aren't mine, but I was still sort of having to apologize for him, for his behavior.

And yet, Jericho Brown could pick up on that. And he was saying, you know, why are you putting shame in this poem essentially?

He was saying, not only don't apologize, he was saying to be who you are and turn it up to 100 and that is advice that I truly believe I could never have gotten from a writing workshop filled with mostly straight writers.

I couldn't have gotten it at my MFA program, and it was some of the most valuable advice I ever got. I think about it every time I write, although it's part of me now. I don't have to necessarily consciously call it up, but I love that advice.

Episode Closing (39:48)

Rob Loveless

And tying it back to the tarot, Judgment in reverse, it's telling us to look inside, because we may be repeating patterns and not achieving what we want to, and that's because we're trying to do the same thing over and over, hoping that we'll get a different outcome.

So, this card is calling us to look within which can be uncomfortable sometimes, to see if there's been any themes that have appeared in our life.

And if there's any negative cycles, find ways to take action to break those cycles so we can achieve our full potential.

And just like Anthony talked about in the title of the book, kiss & release, you know, we kiss a lot of frogs, and sometimes dating feels like catch and release, where you kind of have to let go of whatever love or whatever feelings you thought you had for someone.

And it is sad, but with each person we date, good or bad, there are experiences there we learn from, and it teaches us things about ourselves.

And maybe sometimes, if we've been unsuccessful in dating, it's because we find ourselves in the same patterns. I'm gonna call out myself because my therapist told me this the other day.

I've had a tendency of being attracted to emotionally unavailable people because I was afraid of getting too close. So, with them being distant from me, felt safe.

But then once I started falling for them, I wanted them to be open with me and closer, which obviously wasn't going to happen, so then I'd freak myself out and get all anxious because they were distant with me.

And maybe that's something that sounds familiar to you, but it's a pattern that I'm working on breaking, because obviously if I do want a fulfilling, healthy relationship, I need to allow myself to be vulnerable and get close to someone, even if that feels uncomfortable, so that way I can really accept that love in for a reciprocal relationship.

So that's something I need to look within for myself and work to break that cycle, and you may have yours as well.

And reading through kiss & release, reading the poems through there, I'm sure you'll see all instances of, you know, all different types of love. And again, sometimes that involves saying goodbye to love, which can be a painful thing to do.

But through all those cycles, through all those journeys, we're learning something new. You know, just because one relationship ends doesn't mean that that's it for us.

It's just like the Major Arcana, we start with The Fool, beginning a journey, which you can kind of think about the phases of starting to date somebody new.

You know, at the beginning, when everything's exciting, and sometimes you reach the end of that relationship. And the timing can be different.

Maybe it's a month, maybe it's a year, maybe it's, you know, 10 years. But eventually, maybe you'll come to the end of that relationship, and you'll reach the end of that Major Arcana, and when that cycle ends, when the relationship ends, it's sad, and you're going to have to let go of some things and maybe address some patterns within.

But that doesn't mean love is over for you. It means that you're just getting ready to start on a new journey, and through addressing those themes in your life and breaking any negative patterns, it's going to be setting you up for a better journey in the future.

Connect with Anthony (42:21)

Rob Loveless

And Anthony, thank you again, so much for coming on today. Can you please tell the listeners where they can learn more about you and your work and connect with you?

Anthony DiPietro

Absolutely. I have a website, which is anthonywriter.com and there I have links to some YouTube and some SoundHound so you can hear me read or see me read.

And I actually have so much going on right now with the book tour that the the website isn't always up to date.

So, the very best way would be to follow me on Instagram, where my handle is @ant.providence.

An Excerpt from kiss & release (42:51)

Rob Loveless

And to close out the episode, can you read us one of your poems?

Anthony DiPietro

Absolutely, I'm gonna read unrequited fuck boy:

"The way I love you is only possible because I know next to nothing about you, boy from the neighborhood. I know your eyes that look as if you wear permanent eyeliner.

I love the lashes that protect them and could swat a fly from across the sunroom. I know your rules, like condoms, no exceptions.

While we make love, I insist you look deep in my eyes, and if you force me to insist one more time, I may playfully slap your cheek while I whisper. What is more intimate than a whisper?

What is the real reason you can't love me back? Is it your white-collar family with their sailboat in the bay and summers on the island?

Is it because I prefer the taste of artificial coconut to your unsweet Earth-safe, organic water? Mumbler, your mouth barely opens whenever you speak. Will you never make clear declarations?

Will all conversations be bedroom conversations after I render you too tired to leave, but you do leave whenever I suggest you stay. Will you never stay from first whiskey until next day?

Will I never write an Abad a poem for lovers who part at dawn? The only poem I know how to write is the Abad's opposite, a fragment of two queers cruising after midnight."

Rob Loveless

Again, that is a poem from kiss & release by Anthony DiPietro. Anthony, thank you so much for coming on today.

Anthony DiPietro

Thank you, Rob.

Rob Loveless

And for all the listeners out there, make sure as soon as you're done listening today, you go out and get a copy of kiss & release.

Connect with A Jaded Gay (44:50)

Rob Loveless

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Mmm-bye.