Curriculum Vitae

By Conor Hogan

/ Fiction /  

Dearest Callie,

First, allow me to say that I understand: I am not the same man you once fell in love with. I no longer deserve your loyalty, much less the expiation of your guilt-stricken illness—yet despite my unworthiness, having once known your love, I refuse to endure a life without it. 

I do feel I owe you an explanation—although it is not clear to me what exactly happened, or when, or why. Perhaps the place to begin is with the joke I used to crack in brighter times: my constant assurances that, despite the patinated tropes, you had nothing to fear—the only other woman in my life was my CV. Perhaps you remember—I first made the joke after telling you how Lukasz finally got expelled for fucking one of his WRIT-101 students. By then, you’d already walked in on me drafting my personal statement for the Stegner in Mel’s bathroom during Pamee’s first birthday. I’d recently confessed that I’d forged the anonymous letters nominating me both for the Presidential Teaching Prize and the department’s award for Outstanding Instruction in Creative Studies. But rather than grow angry, you seemed instead bemused by the effort I was expending in pursuit of trivial accolades, and annoyed that I remained incapable of directing this neurotic industriousness toward more concretely helpful tasks, like fixing the kitchen sink or finally replacing the muffler on the Oldsmobile. So, I thought, this soon-to-be-well-worn bon mot about an erotic relationship with my CV served as a reminder that things could be worse, because despite my rank careerism, at least I’d never been caught getting sucked off by a 20-year-old sorority girl in the grad lounge. 

What I think you found genuinely disturbing (and in retrospect, increasingly unattractive) was my constant ruminating over Ultrasounds. Because no matter how I tried to hide it, each email rejecting my manuscript chiseled another brick from the cathedral of my self-conception. Even as my name continued to appear in the Contributors Section of obscure literary journals, even as I was accepted for two-week residencies at Yaddo and Bread Loaf, even as the occasional poem of mine was included in limited-run anthologies, the fact that I’d yet to publish a book began to, at some point, exert a dark gravity over my life. It became a central absence that bent all light toward its bottomless throat.

You think I am being (was being) dramatic. But for all its apparent flippancy, my CV joke represented a sincere attempt to scale an existential dread down into a quip. For, as we’ve endlessly discussed, when I first began writing poetry, I was profoundly, constitutively depressed. During my childhood in Great Falls, land of center-pivots and nuclear silos, the world manifested itself as irredeemably ugly. Yet none of the other Air Force brats appeared concerned with the blend of strip-mall Americana and forever war industry that sustained our town. My classmates were perfectly content to race dirt bikes and snort the occasional line of methy coke until it was time to enlist and follow our fathers’ footsteps up the Escherian command structure of the U.S. military. I, on the other hand, hated everything about central Montana and so sought refuge between the covers of books: first Harry Potter, then Tolkien and Asimov, then Márquez and Rushdie and Morrison. It wasn’t until White Noise, however, that I began to understand literature as something more than mere escapism. It wasn’t until DeLillo and Pynchon and Vollmann that I saw the vast, networked structures of coercive advertising and manufactured paranoia brought into explicit relief.

But while the great prose stylists of fin de millénaire America successfully charted the pathologies of a generation raised on laugh tracks and counterinsurgent atrocities, to my eye, the whole belletristic project collapsed soon after the advent of the Web 2.0. Relying on a novel for orientation amidst the hyperlinked cacophony blaring from the world’s endlessly proliferating media was like trying to use a sextant to navigate a sky swarmed by UFOs. No epics emerged to map the civilizational shifts wrought by PornHub, no bildungsroman limned how the self-facing camera forever altered childhood. As a teenager, I began to think the novel as a form, with its epiphanic momentum, with its roots in empire and progress, was fundamentally incapable of reconstituting cybernetic decadence into redemptive insight, however fleeting.

Then that fateful afternoon I’ve recounted to you at least a dozen times: 16 years old, snooping around my parents’ bedroom and discovered the false bottom in my mother’s lamp, where she’d hidden a resin-blacked one-hitter, a small vibrator, and a dog-eared copy of Sappho’s Fragments. Even as I reeled before the tangible evidence that my mother consumed illegal drugs and harbored a sexual appetite, more than anything, it was the idea of this woman, a catatonically anxious housewife, reading poetry that I found most shocking. I remember flipping open to “Fragment 31,” above which my mother had sketched a weeping eye, then reading those four jealous stanzas again and again, my mind spinning between the poem and ghostly marginalia like a top.

Despite the cultural blight afflicting my hometown, the Great Falls Library did boast an impressive collection, and for the next two years, I followed the Melics out across the epic sprawl of Medieval and Renaissance verse, before eventually stumbling upon the strange, prismatic constructions of High Modernism. While nothing I read captured the specific surreality of an adolescence inflected by shock sites and Ritalin abuse, something about the textural pleasure of phrases unencumbered by plot or prognosis gestured toward a boundless field of potential floating just outside my perceptive scope. Even my most derivative juvenilia reflects a profound excitement at the possibilities that bloom in syntactical gaps, at how punctuation might allow tension to gestate in peculiar ways, how chiasmic rhyme could suggest some dialectic between, for example, “collated mindless deutero” and “utero heedlessly freighted.” Often, after I set down my pen, I had no memory of writing, and the poem before me would remain as seamless and inscrutable as my own stomach. This premonition, of an alien internality, operated on me like a drug. Plus, of course, the poems I left littered around the house deeply upset Colonel Deckerman (my mother never acknowledged them, but I imagine she took some secret pleasure in our shared affinity). For a while, the dissociative trance that took hold during composition, coupled with the occasional outburst from my bastard father, was enough to sustain my practice. 

I hear you upstairs, vomiting again—awful, isn’t it, how these bodies refuse our mandates? As you might imagine, I’ve now read dozens of screeds authored by other cuckolds, and the most common tell they cite is the physical manifestation of culpability in their partner. Guilt expressing itself as nausea, no doubt against your every wish. Hemoglobin binding with ambient monoxide, despite all autothanotic implications. Even now, even after everything, I’m struggling against the instinct to sprint upstairs and hold your hair, rub your back, prostrate myself before you—excruciating, how little self-control a lifetime spent controlling words begets. 

Perhaps in part because my writing soon subordinated itself to a rapidly autonomizing concupiscence. Senior year, I realized that my newfound pastime was attracting the interest of several female classmates, an interest that bloomed when I began composing lineated meditations about the radiance of their eyes or whatever. Even at 17, I was aware that I was corrupting something pure, introducing a kind of teleological slime mold into a previously pristine practice. And, after I lost my virginity to Rachel SingsInTheTimber—following a protracted wooing that involved two sonnet crowns and a sequence of villanelles—the act of composition was forever tainted. While writing, I’d find myself anticipating how Rachel might interpret a certain imagistic shift, instead of losing myself in the chain of associative leaps that had, until then, informed my process. Increasingly, the flow of words began to snag and bind, as the supreme confidence of childlike privacy evaporated. It’s something I’ve always envied about your woodworking, how much joy the act of creation itself still brings you. Perhaps, in part, that’s why I’m writing this letter here at your workbench, where you’ll no doubt find me in several hours: if I cannot destroy your love for him (and I know I can’t, knew it as soon as I laid eyes on him), perhaps I can at least destroy your love for this. How petty we remain until the end.

Regardless. I do think these young, horny considerations of a potential reader improved my poetry, lent it a transpersonal architecture within which another mind could move and take some pleasure. But it wasn’t until I noticed you sitting on the other side of Professor Wydra’s class that I felt the poetic and the erotic impulse merge completely: from the moment I saw your quicksilver grin, heard your quiet laughter, my every thought began to orbit the project of how to make you mine. 

You know the rest: in the throes of this obsession, I started to compose the intergeneric hybridities for which I would become known (“known” here meaning, of course, the occasional flash of recognition on another academic’s face at some conference; known meaning a Google search that returned, along with the lawyer in Gloucester and personal trainer in San Bernardino, photos of my face above the word “poet”). I still recall so vividly, coming upon you that February morning as you stood on the footbridge and contemplated the frozen floes slip westward along the Clark Fork. Ears naked, no device in hand; just a girl staring at a river. I watched you watch the current for a time, and then, in a rare fit of inspiration, wrote that strange prosimetrum “Freshmelt.” In an even rarer moment of recklessness, I walked up and handed it to you and asked if you might read it, asked for your “thoughts” as though it were the most casual thing in the world. Rather terrifying, isn’t it, to consider how the random interaction of chance and chemicals can forever change a life: would I have had the nerve to approach you that morning, if I’d eaten a different breakfast or forgotten to take my Lexapro? 

The weeks and months that followed, as I found every excuse to invite you out and you, to my shock, kept agreeing, are now agonizing to regard. I’ve never loved this world more than sitting at Charlie B’s, listening to you expound on fetal biopolitics and third-wave feminism, trying not to shatter whatever delusion you held about me. For it could not have been more clear, how disparate a pair we made: you, Callie O’Phee, effervescent campus darling, confidante of every girl and crush of every boy; and me, Adam Deckerman, awkward specter of the library. How was it possible that you seemed to be betraying a, if not commensurate, at least discernible, interest in me? 

Whatever attraction you felt, of course, depended on my poetry. For while I regularly overheard other men comment on what a rarity your blend of beauty and sardonic wit represented, for me it was the impossible fact of your literary discernment that made you such a paradox. I’m sure I’ve told you how, in one of our earliest conversations, you so eloquently argued for Dickinson’s canonical importance (whom I’d considered until then grossly overrated) that my entire conception of American poetry forever shifted. You held strong beliefs about sprung rhythm and projective verse, you could talk for hours about the history of Black Mountain, you’d read not only Zukofsky and Olson but Guillén and Du Fu and Akhmatova, and yet you did not write. Before we met I assumed America’s population of poetry readers was exactly coextensive with its population of poetry writers; you were the first (and remain perhaps the only) pure fan of the art I’ve ever known. 

So I wrote for you. Manically, unceasingly. Night after night, countless hours spent typing and deleting, typing and deleting, so I might have a few lines to show. Despite the insomnia, the constant anxiety, I remember those early days of our courtship as an idyllic state of prolificacy: I have experienced no compositional mode more thrilling than writing for one reader, with whom I was so desperately in love. Though it feels like a lifetime ago, I still remember when the horizon of my poetic ambition ended where your requitement began. 

But then you finally agreed to go on a date with me, and continue dating me, and move in with me, and follow me to Camden, and…well, everything that was to come. And…I don’t know. I should have been overwhelmed with gratitude. I should have been shocked at the sheer improbability of three sponsored years to study craft and discuss method and share work with a cohort of other writers, all while falling ever deeper in love with you, this phosphorescent woman who had against all odds chosen me as her partner, who appeared to be seriously considering me as candidate for marriage and procreation. It’s cliché, of course, to claim some privileged vantage from my current position, but I do indeed recognize how much of you, how much of everything, I took for granted. How much I regret not dedicating myself only to the ongoing pursuit of your affection, how much I wish that every poem I wrote was for your eyes only…how desperately I’ll miss you…

In retrospect, I think the seeds of real corruption first unfurled their roots when that deranged buffoon Gordon Radcliffe won the Sidney Prize for his chapbook. I still remember receiving the department email announcing Gordon’s victory while reading one of his workshop packets, and as I toggled between the PDF declaring him recipient of the most prestigious award available to an unpublished poet and his latest crop of discordant trauma porn, I felt a fury on behalf of Poetry herself. By my second semester at Rutgers, I’d come to resent the contempt my classmates displayed for the classics. Already I couldn’t stand their asinine gripes about the problematics of any pre-millennial publication, already I’d begun to understand myself as the only one of us who cared to experiment with metrical arrangements and fixed forms and apostrophic address. I was, I believed, the only student working as a steward of Tradition, rather than patricidal avenger. Already, I considered myself the only serious writer in the program.

But soon after Gordon won the Sidney, Olivia Doerr got two of her “poems” published in Harper’s, a pair of fragmented litanies revolving around the one time she shot heroin. Then Veronique was honorably mentioned in TBAP for an erasure poem that sourced what we all suspected was a fabricated doctor’s note diagnosing her with Stendhal syndrome. Then Lukasz got accepted into the Künstlerdorf Schöppingen summer program on the merit of an essay about the three months he’d spent living in an abandoned Manhattan subway tunnel (an essay which carefully elided his access to a trust fund, presenting his time among the mole people as an economic necessity rather than voyeuristic choice). 

Now, at the time, aside from getting me accepted into Rutgers, my work had received no institutional recognition. This never bothered me, for my poems had curried your favor, and prior to grad school, I could imagine no higher recompense than that (although I did take a certain pride in my fantasies of posthumous acclaim, of becoming the Hopkins of the 22^nd century). But after we all had to go listen to Gordon read from his war crime of a manuscript, I succumbed to the first of my feverish, all-night submission marathons. I told you I was writing, of course; really, I stayed awake until four in the morning, sending poems to every literary magazine that accepts unsolicited work. And as often happens, I caught a wave of first-timer’s luck: within a few months I received acceptance notices from The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and BOMB. 

Hindsight is such a merciless bitch: how clearly I recall the grandiose slant of my self-regard after first seeing my name in print; how sincerely I believed that my involuted apophata represented hitherto unexplored poetic terrain; how delusional my fantasies about saving contemporary literature from elitist navel-gazing and victimhood idolatry. By then I’d started to work in earnest on Ultrasounds, and with each new publication my megalomania metastasized: I was pushing the culture forward, I was assembling an aphoristic atlas for the coming age, I was stop-gapping my own mortality. The lineage that ran from Leaves of Grass through The Cantos and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror would swerve through me. What patience you displayed, as I peacocked around our apartment, reciting lines from my own work and the most laudatory comments on each journal’s Instagram. How supportive you remained, as I…Oh God… 

Well. The internet said, given my age and weight, this would take at least an hour, although I suppose…well…all sorts of factors at play. But I do feel somewhat muddled, so please excuse any forthcoming prolixities, my darling. I do want to say what I came here to say but find myself increasingly distracted by the matching dolls you carved for Mel and Pamee. Your creations really are so lovely, I don’t say that enough…so much I no longer say …

What I want to communicate before my departure is that I understand, for even this brief period of hubris proved preferable to what came next. It’s remarkable how rapidly a dream can dim: in a period of 18 months, my fantasies for Ultrasounds deliquesced from canonical immortality to smash bestseller to critical darling to Kirkus-reviewed to published at all. By the end of my MFA, simply securing a tenure-track position at a minor state school seemed about as remote a possibility as winning the National Book Award. All of a sudden, I began to apprehend what would be required, what I would have to sacrifice, to maintain my half of the roof over our heads. 

But rather than share my mounting fears, I tried to hide this sublunary devolution from you. I was afraid you’d leave me. For you fell in love with an artist and I was quickly becoming something else: an opportunist, a mercenary academic, a tireless curator of adamdeckerman.com. Yes, I learned to mask my increasingly terrestrial ambitions with irony and self-deprecation; yes, I learned to mold the announcement of each new achievement into a joke at my own expense; yes, I managed to reassure you that I still understood my role as beleaguered but enthusiastic practitioner of a noble, neglected art, even as I convinced you to move here, so I could pursue that most absurd and oxymoronic of titles: Doctor of Poetry.

Get paid for what you love, and you will never love a day in your life. Gloss: You will pay for what you love. Gloss: Love pay. Whatever a poem is, I have not written one since we arrived here in Cincinnati. Instead, I’ve labored like the speaker of Plath’s “Colossus,” assembling a marketable monument to myself: teaching long-extinct rhyme schemes to overprivileged youth; co-editing volumes on partum poetics; publishing formulaic articles about representations of male repression across the long 19^th century. Even my workshops at River City Correctional, which for most of my PhD has endured as the singular zone of intrinsic enjoyment in my life (only in conversation with the incarcerated did I experience an echo of the excitement I’d felt as a boy, a sense of the fathomless, transformative potential certain semantic arrangements contain) have lately been polluted by commercial logic: now, when I step through those slam-lock doors, rather than feel the autotelic satisfaction of delivering poetry to the detained, I instead imagine referencing my time instructing inmates during interviews with NYU or the Michener Center.

But of course, more than anything, it was the founding of Delivered Labor that led me here. Like most of my so-called accomplishments of late this one too was born in plagiarism: I overheard three students in my senior workshop discussing their plans to coordinate a reading at a trade school in Queensgate. While I could tell from the cloud of vaporized THC floating above their heads that this event would never be realized, I also recognized that establishing such a series, where outsider artists could share their work, would demonstrate a fashionable concern for the aesthetics of the hoi polloi to future hiring committees. Given that both Copper Canyon and Milkweed had sent emails rejecting Ultrasounds that afternoon, and given that it was less than six months before I’d be entering the professorial job market, I began frantically planning the inaugural reading.

The last thing I expected was to actually facilitate the exhibition of some virtuosic unknown. Now I can admit that I encouraged Julio to participate only because I assumed he would humiliate himself onstage. Because, from the moment you introduced us at Doctor Raghubansh’s going-away party, I felt the tenterhooks of suspicion pierce my chest. The energy between you two was palpable: the too-familiar proximity of your bodies as you chatted on the veranda, the way Julio’s eyes followed you across the room when you weren’t looking, how his hands lingered an extra beat on your back when you hugged goodbye. I’d heard Julio’s name countless times, of course, but whenever you referred to your “hospital bestie,” I always imagined a slender, charming twink, not this hulking Adonis leaking heterosexuality from every pore. As I shook his muscled hand, a whole history was recontextualized: all your stories about Julio singlehandedly saving preeclamptic or breech-presenting patients; all the pranks you two played on the hapless OB-GYNs; all your afterwork sessions studying together for the RNC-OBs. For weeks I struggled to hide my ballooning jealousy: how was it possible that the hospital’s supposedly random scheduling algorithm kept placing you with this handsome émigré, instead of with Diana or Vashti or Keelee? What comparisons were you drawing between the wan shadow to which I’d been reduced and this charismatic foreigner?

But when you mentioned that Julio wrote poetry, I relaxed. Surely, after two years of working together, he’d shared enough of whatever he’d blasphemed as “poetry” for you to recognize it as doggerel; surely your shrug when I asked about his writing masked a pitying contempt. So when Julio agreed to participate in the inaugural Delivered Labor reading, I was thrilled. Rather than study for exams, I spent all my time inviting as many people as possible: other students, professors, strangers on the street. I knew the magnitude of Julio’s disgrace would be equal to the audience’s size, and when The Blind Stork’s courtyard filled to standing-room only, it seemed preordained: a hundred witnesses to this would-be homewrecker’s public castration. 

And then he read. For a few moments, I remained blissfully unaware of Julio’s voice, all my attention focused instead on the gathered crowd, straining to spot the first wince, listening for the first muffled chortle. But line by line, Julio pulled me from my anticipatory schadenfreude. I turned toward the stage, where from his mouth a phosphorescent prosody issued directly from the future. I’ve stood dry-eyed before a thousand priceless portraits; I’ve listened to ten thousand poems, a million songs, unmoved—not since my teenage years have I known such reservoirs of feeling. The quantum charge of Julio’s every metaphor, the teem of allusive accumulation that writhing meter like the stochastic jag of capital itself. Julio this anonymous Salvadoran nurse had somehow invented a poetry that contained everything, every child blown apart by drones the bloody root of each supply chain miles of rainforest immolating as polyfluoroalkyl seeps beneath the mind all of it coolly regarded and radically estranged and transubstantiated into breath. 

As Julio finished his tour de force it all made sense: your recent distance your bouts of nausea the sentence teetering forever on your tonguetip some revelation permanently lodged between us…I knew and could not blame you for how had I won your favor all those years ago? How could you resist this man this absolute savant? This oracle penning his oeuvre between pelvic exams and blood tests with my minor awards my handful of publications without a single collection to my name I was no match. 

What did not make sense was the tepid applause the slow swell of humdrum conversation the lack of ovational eruption when Julio spoke that final line why was this crowd not on its stamping feet? until I considered how the audience was composed entirely of my coevals: other writers similarly reared amidst neoliberal scarcity no doubt also terrified of what they’d witnessed the distance they suddenly apprehended between their own scratchings and what Julio had just unveiled and so were concealing jealous awe with boredom. You too managed your emotions admirably hiding the depths of your enthrallment with a little yawn. But as the sublimity of what I’d heard raised not only hairs but my skin cells my muscle fibers every part of my being straining toward the unassuming revolutionary stepping off the stage I could scarcely imagine what you a heterosexual woman and poetry aficionado must be feeling. The previous months snapped sharply into focus: you staying late at the hospital for “appointments” the precipitous ebb in our physical intimacies the new evaluative expression on your face as you watched me wander our apartment. Perhaps you thought I wouldn’t notice but even beyond the nausea your body has begun to betray you: you think I haven’t seen the new bras inside your dresser? a quick Google search will tell any fool that during early infatuation women release estrogen dopamine and noradrenaline all contributors to the thickening of breast tissue. 

Still I held onto hope that I could win you back even after you left your computer open last week and I managed to read your latest exchange with Julio before you reemerged from the bathroom for the fifteenth time that day (perhaps he’s given you a UTI…I assume this new latex allergy means you take him raw as well?): you haven’t told adam yet???? Julio asked to which you replied and here I transcribe from photo evidence: i will i just want to wait until he finishes his exams he’s so stressed right now and this will make it 10x worse which even as it confirmed your infidelity somehow made me love you all the more for only you could cheat and still put another’s feelings first. It gave me hope that some measure of your previous love for me remained that I might coax this flickering ember back into its former flame. Perhaps you might forget him yet. 

But then yesterday while you were dropping Pamee back at Mel’s house you accidentally called me and left a message. And here I copy the transcription—you: it seems impossible but I already love him more than anyone I’ve ever known. That’s insane right? I already love him more than anything else in the world and your sister’s reply it’s not insane it was the same with me and this one here and a pause and then Mel again: Adam still doesn’t know? and you: no I want to wait until summer he’ll be more supportive then and then silence and then you: will he believe it was an accident you think? and Mel: was it? and you: unintelligible. 

But accident or not it does not matter I know I’ve lost you and that I cannot go on without you and so refuse. Forgive the fact that you found me at your workbench I now regret my pettiness but here in the garage sucking fumes was the cleanest option and of course a final metaphor to exegete you get it? No arterial tub no body hanging from the fan just another industrial death for this awful world to absorb. I am so sorry Callie for everything I wasn’t and I absolve you of any guilt you feel you fell in love with a poet and that poet ceased to be if he ever was at all I’ve left Ultrasounds in its final form arranged to do with what you will. It’s the late stages now I feel my vitals starved of breath and they said confusion would it would only be confusion but instead I feel so clear up here you wouldn’t believe it Callie oh Callie I hear you moving upstairs perhaps curious about this unmufflered growl but it’s too late it’s true what they say you see things so clearly at the end you understand so many things and I do I see clearly I see what we had and what we made and my God and my God no I hear you moving closer my god the two of you moving towards me

hurry

tell him I was

please