The end of May is approaching, which means Pride month is up next! So, what better way to start the celebrations early than by giving you a guest post from a poet whose collection releases right at the beginning of June! You won’t want to miss out on Willie Carver’s poetry and he oh-so-kindly wrote a guest post for us which illustrates exactly why!
Of course, that means there’s still time to preorder Gay Poems for Red States, but first, give Willie’s post a read!
In another life, I taught high school English for almost two decades.
Despite being a poet and a linguist, the only English class I taught outside of basic classes was a dual credit course on composition dedicated to argument. Oddly, despite my love of words and all things creative, it was my favorite class to teach.
My joy in teaching composition came from breaking down ideas into base components so fine that they lacked context and would soon lay bare the constructs we were using to build reality around us. In a shaky world where structures tended to fall apart, my students loved the idea that they might find truth and meaning in tearing up those structures on their own and examining the building materials.
Our first assignment was always to define argument. We’d pare it down, strip it away, melt its cover, and eventually come down to a sentence like this: “Two entities or more attempting to establish what is or should be with potentially differing parameters.”
This was our basic consensus until one year, when a 17-year-old student blew the definition apart. She asked, “Does it need to be more than one?”
Mic dropped.
Paradigm shifted.
Structure destroyed.
Her question was simple: Can a person argue with themselves?
The answer is obvious for anyone who has ever tried to decide what to eat or whether to do or postpone work: of course we can argue with ourselves.
Her question actually demonstrates that there is no cohesive, consistent I at all – the word itself is illusory, a surface-level pretense that lets us sleep at night.
Last year, I learned all too well how correct she was.
My I broke down entirely in the time when I was being harassed and attacked by homophobic people in my community for being a gay teacher. I soon discovered that there may be an unlimited number of perspectives, competing for surfacing, inside our brains.
And during that time period, it was a small boy who emerged in mine.
That small boy grew up always queer, often poor, and sometimes happy. His happiest moments were at school.
School was safe.
School had food.
School had warm water.
And best of all, school had books and ideas that made promises–promises that there lies in this world beauty waiting to be uncovered, truth waiting to be seized, goodness waiting to be done.
So he, that is to say, I chased those feelings.
I taught my sister and my teddy bears after school. I taught everyone I ever met anything I knew. I learned things just to teach them. I felt like school had the power to convert potential–which I saw and see in everyone I see–into pure possibility.
I had found my calling–a life purpose twined deeply around the atoms I was built from–by the age of six. I was a teacher.
For almost two decades I taught–in France, in Vermont, in Georgia, in Kentucky. In colleges and K-12. I settled in a rural high school in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, close to my Appalachian roots. It was sometimes hard work–I was a gay teacher in the rural South–but it was worth it because I saw the transformations in my students.
And not only did the potential I sensed in these kids become realized–they soon manifested potential, power, and characteristics I didn’t even have the ability to foresee. The more they shined, the harder I worked, the more they shined, the harder I worked.
And soon they shined so brightly that I was named the Kentucky Teacher of the Year–a big gay Appalachian, a courageous choice on their part in this day and age–but such was the light of my students’ work.
That light was soon thrust into darkness.
The award made me visible, so hatred reared its head. Community members soon began to go to board meetings and make baseless accusations–that I was a groomer, that my LGBTQ-affirming student club was a “grooming ground”–that my mere presence or existence as a gay man was problematic, offensive, dangerous.
They even began to attack my now former students–sharing pictures of them online, showing their faces, their names, and even posting pictures of them at their after-school jobs.
One former queer student was approached by authorities to say there was a viable threat against her.
Students at the school became afraid. Their parents became afraid. They wrote to the school administrators. I wrote to the school administrators. I installed security cameras. I called the police. I contacted lawyers.
We had hoped someone would defend the kids.
But no one did. The school chose silence–which sent a clear signal that these LGBTQ youth weren’t worth protecting and that the people making accusations were worth so much that they couldn’t be corrected.
In this space and time, school was no longer safe.
I sat down at my computer to write to my superintendent, wanting to express my anger.
And instead, I wrote a poem.
Or I should say a little boy did.
Words poured out of me while memories overwhelmed my senses. Smells, textures, temperatures, tastes, and feelings that I thought long lost to the waves of time flooded across my body and suddenly my childhood self–albeit with the memories of a grown man–began to write.
Day after day, I sat with my laptop and I let him speak–or I should say I let myself speak? I am not sure anymore.
I even argued with him.
I would see a line of text emerge and say, Well this is too sentimental or What if we pared this down and he … he wouldn’t let me.
Or he wouldn’t let some other person inside of us who had silenced him for the sake of a job. For the sake of others’ comfort. For the sake of others’ thinking.
I would try to erase a word and he would stand in front of it and say, I dare you to erase me. I dare you to do what others wanted.
He won. Or I won? We won?
Winning happened.
The argument that this boy raised in the head he shares with the adult who had silenced him rang such noble truth that there was no counter, no rebuttal, no other perspective worth considering.
He agreed to keep his stories–the emotions of them, the music of body, senses, chemicals, and lighting that told him what the world was–deep inside so that we might go on.
So that we might make it through middle school sane.
So that we might make it through high school alive.
So that we might be the first in our family to go to college.
So that we might become a teacher and create a new world safe for other children.
So that they could make it out sane, alive, and pursue whatever dreams their hearts might imagine, totally intact.
He held in his story for the adult who was writing it–and now that school, the only safe place they ever shared, was gone–that child would create a new safe place for them to share. That space would be healing, would be reconnection, would be a unification of voices ripped apart by a universe that defied either of them to exist.
That little boy and I wrote an entire collection of poetry together, Gay Poems for Red States, which remembers what was important to a little boy and lets him speak, finally. A collection that remembers. A collection that bears witness. I am proud of it because I am proud of him, proud that he was smart enough, courageous enough, and selfless enough to get me–to get us–here, alive, and strong.
I am no longer in the classroom.
I no longer teach composition to students.
I no longer challenge them to define anything, let alone to define an argument.
But I have found that I am more a teacher than I have ever been because my classroom has been expanded to the entire world, the walls destroyed, the desks erased, the concept of teacher rubbed down to its finest base components so that we can see its truth laid bare.
And what I find is that there are worlds inside of all of us that are vast, open, unseen, and filled with arguments excited to be known. I want to know them. I want to share them. I want to teach.
About Willie Carver
Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. is an advocate, Kentucky Teacher of the Year, and the author of the forthcoming collection of narrative poetry about his childhood growing up queer in Appalachia, Gay Poems for Red States (June, University Press of Kentucky). His work exists at the intersection of queer identity, Appalachian identity, and the politics of innocence.
Willie is a candidate for the MFA in poetry at the University of Kentucky. He publishes and presents on the subjects of education, marginalization, and identity, and his story has been featured on ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, and in The Washington Post and Le Monde. His advocacy has led him to engage President Biden and to testify before the United States Congressional Committee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. His creative work has been published in 100 Days in Appalachia, 2RulesofWriting, Another Chicago Magazine, Largehearted Boy Blog, Smoky Blue Literary Magazine, and Good River Review.
