I have always had a taste for excess. By excess, I mean work that deals with violence and sexuality in often confronting ways. I keep expecting to get into trouble for it, but I never have.
My poem-sequence inside the castle opens with these lines:
I watch you fry a lamb and
I want you to slam your hand on the element,
to slam your
hand on the element so
hard that when you jerk off you
feel intense third degree burns I want you
Lust is expressed as violence, violence is expressed as lust.
A theater director saw me perform this poem at the same time as they were directing me in a romance scene. As a result, they attempted to cast my character in a dangerously sexualised light. While directing that scene, he exclaimed, “He likes the pain!” As if the statement itself were self-evidently true and as if that would somehow influence the playing of the scene. This is a poem often trotted out at parties by friends, read aloud to guffaws. My friend Federico puts it like this: “You think Josiah is a really nice, lovely, innocent person, and then you read his poetry and realise there’s a lot going on.”
This happens to me a lot. Across the first two years of university, somebody I was close with at the time assumed that inside the castle recorded mostly true events. But this person saw me as a hypersexual being in a way that they rejected, actively belittled me for, and bullied me. I couldn’t help but feel that this had a dimension of homophobia to it as hypersexuality is certainly a stereotype of homosexuality.
I finished the first draft of inside the castle whenI was 17. It had not yet been accepted for publication when my girlfriend at the time invited me to attend an open mic night. I read a very teenage poem to the Catalyst crowd:
He struggles to keep it up all the time. That
mask worn like a fake smile. He cellophanes
his struggle to make it solid. The other night
he hardly got home a sculpture made out
of mouldy popsicle sticks…
There was a thudding, unimpressed silence when I read the final lines of the poem to the room, which I had drastically misread.
His dad especially
doesn’t understand what’s going on in
his body. His dad has no fucking idea.
The Christchurch poet and comedian Ray Shipley was sitting in the front row of the crowd, staring at me, aghast, just like everyone else in the room. As I sat down, my girlfriend whispered: “Good job.” A consolation prize. Years later, in 2023, I was invited to read at Ray Shipley’s Late Night Poetry Hour for the first time. This hour is a kind of Christchurch poetry institution, a genuine smash-hit open mic followed by a line-up of invited poets. When I read, I shared my slot as a featured poet alongside Ben Brown and Tusiata Avia.
If anybody was aghast, I couldn’t tell.
On another night, I went out for dinner with my parents and one of Mum’s close friends, Sarah. Sarah is the kind of person I might have expected to be struck aghast by my work, even now. She is a person so focused, intelligent, and engaged that you’d be scared to say something untrue around her. She works as an economist, and I’ve known for as long as I can remember, perhaps even earlier than I knew the names of her Sphynx cats. On the dinner table in front of my family and Sarah were a few portions of warmed saké and a range of sharing plates.
The conversation was general: the state of the nation, the last election, my university studies, the university studies of Sarah’s daughter, how the rest of the Morgan family were, how the rest of Sarah’s family were, how good the food was. Things like that. My first book Inside the Castle had just come out, and somehow we got onto the topic.
“The writing Jos does is…pretty full on,” Dad said.
“Like what?” Sarah asked, looking at me with an amused glint.
“Oh, you know, sexual and stuff,” I replied, shying away from the topic.
“Is it full on just because it’s gay though? Like, it would be fine if it was a book about straight people?”
Dad and I looked at each other. “Uh… not really. It’s just full on regardless.”
Sarah laughed. We laughed. The conversation moved on.
Then, earlier this year, at the book launch for my new book i’m still growing, Sarah showed up, eyes glinting with that same intelligent humour she always had. She grinned throughout my entire reading, most especially when I got to the gay stuff. It had been my assumption that Sarah’s world had little overlap with mine, at least in the sense of our day-to-day lives. But her reaction was genuine and engaged in a way that I only rarely experience from ‘arts-focused’ audiences.
Later, she posted a lovely congratulatory message on Facebook, also tagging my mother. “I so love seeing our young people in their element….if he is still growing, watch out!”
And I am still growing. When I was 10, the majority of my reading was the work of Stephen King; I scoured local secondhand bookstores for cheap well-thumbed copies of his works. On Saturday mornings I attended a two-hour writing class led by a stoic and very scary playwright. She would often reprimand us, wanting the best from our work. One morning I took an erotic vampire short story in to class. I was a pre-teen in the era of the Twilight franchise booming big. Because I was 10, the story was not very erotic and not very good. The writing teacher encouraged me to throw it out.
“It’s been done before!” she said. “Besides, the connection between vampires and sex, boring…”
My taste for excess was visible, even then.
i’m still growing by Josiah Morgan (Dead Bird Books, $30) is available in selected bookstores nationwide, or direct from the publisher. “This book heralds the arrival of a unique voice in Aotearoa poetry,” says poet laureate Chris Tse, while Emma Barnes, author of I Am In Bed With You, writes: “Josiah Morgan has written a beautiful, sticky, queer cacophony. It speaks to the difficult work of staying alive when those around you don’t always choose to…No safe critical distance, just every page all up in the gooey, painful, and funny grime of growing up.”
