“I Watch Straight Porn to Find Out What X Likes” and “Vomit Sonnet” by John Muellner appeared in Issue 45 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this pair of poems.
Like most of my work, so much of “Straight Porn” is about distance and intimacy. The more time I spend in poetry the more I try to consider sound. This poem was written years ago, but I remember many of the edits being about the sonic qualities at my enjambments, and getting slant rhymes to the ends rather than burying them. I’ll also add that I find having a frank or sometimes bombastic title allows me to get into a piece easier.
“Vomit Sonnet” came during the gap year between my MA and MFA. I started writing a sonnet a week to keep myself in practice without being in a program. It forced me to get to that 14th line each time, rather than ending a poem too early. “Vomit Sonnet” was the first sonnet to come of this, and now, a couple years later, I have written so many sonnets that I often find myself thinking in ten syllable lines!
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Poetry: Vantage by Taneum Bambrick. Fiction: The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li. CNF: Leg by Greg Marshall
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Anne Carson. Enough said.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
Much to my professors’ dismay, more sonnets. I’m currently deciding if I’ve just written one collection of poems or two and am starting to look less at the poems as individual pieces and more at their function in a larger work.
Our thanks to Cedric for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “I Watch Straight Porn to Find Out What X Likes” and “Vomit Sonnet” here.
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John Muellner (he/him) is an LGBT writer from St. Paul, MN. His work can be read in Denver Quarterly, New Delta Review, Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Court Green, and elsewhere. He’s currently a Departmental Poetry Fellow in NYU’s MFA program.