The Mask Came Off: On Writing the Book I Spent a Lifetime Avoiding
I have written eight books about poetry. I have written three novels, a memoir, and a libretto. I have spent much of my adult life working with language, trying to persuade words to say what I mean. Yet the poems in Twist, the poems I needed most to write, took me the longest to find. Not because I lacked the craft. Because I lacked courage.
The title comes, in part, from a dance. Anyone who grew up in the early 1960s remembers the Twist, that brief cultural moment when the body seemed to move with freedom the rest of the culture did not allow. But a twist is also a turning, a change in direction. That is what this book is about. The turn I made when I finally came out at forty-eight, and the long road that led there.
I grew up in Indiana in the 1950s, in a household where a father’s authority was absolute and a boy’s job was to become what his father imagined he should be. My father was not cruel in the ordinary sense. He was devoted in his way. But he once handed his son a monster mask and said, without irony, “That’s my boy.” I wore that mask, in one form or another, for decades. Not because I wanted to. Because I did not know there was a face underneath worth showing.
What the poems in Twist required of me was the opposite of what my upbringing demanded. Instead of performing an acceptable self, I had to uncover the actual one. That meant returning to memories I had worked very hard to leave alone. The first kiss with another boy at a picnic table, both of us pretending it was some kind of lesson. The afternoons in a basement with Pat Boone playing on the record player and a painting of a naked woman on the wall, the two of us quietly sharing a loneliness we could not yet name. The childhood friend who came out at a class reunion, was mocked for it, and died not long afterward. These are the poems that cost me the most to write. They are also the ones that mattered the most.
There is another part of my life that shaped these poems. I am an ordained minister and hold two degrees from Vanderbilt Divinity School. Because of that background, I have always understood poetry as part of a spiritual search. Not a conventional one and not dictated by fixed doctrine. The word religion comes from the idea of holding things together. That has always been my understanding of it. The poems in Twist are an attempt to discover what holds a life together across its many turns, contradictions, and reinventions.
A poet friend once told me that the poems you most resist writing are the ones you most need to write. I resisted these for many years. I told myself the coming out story had already been told too many times. I told myself readers did not need another midlife reckoning. Eventually I had to admit that I was not protecting readers from repetition. I was protecting myself from exposure. There is a difference between writing about difficult things and writing from inside them. Twist required the latter.
The Wallace Stevens epigraph that opens the collection arrived as a moment of recognition rather than a decision. When I came across the lines from “The Rock,” I realized they captured something central to what I was trying to do. Stevens writes, “It is an illusion that we were ever alive.” For someone who has spent decades living as a version of himself designed to satisfy other people, that idea carries a particular weight. What does it mean to have been alive if the life you were living was largely performance? In some ways the book is my attempt to answer that question.
I should also say that Twist is not only a book about suffering. The later poems, the ones about my husband Myles, about a first date at forty-eight, about the simple pleasure of sharing a tangelo in bed on a quiet morning, exist because the earlier poems were written. You cannot arrive anywhere honestly without acknowledging the road that brought you there.
I should also say that these poems can move between humor and angst, between delight and wisdom, sometimes within the space of a single stanza. At my readings, I have watched an audience laugh out loud one moment and fall silent the next. That range is not accidental. The poems are serious about what they confront, but they are also playful in how they reconcile the difficulty of living a dual life. Grief and laughter are not opposites. They are, often, the same reaching motion toward what is true.
What surprised me most while writing the manuscript was the tenderness I began to feel toward the boy who wore the mask. Not pity. Tenderness. He was doing what he knew how to do in a world that offered him very few tools and no map. I wanted the book to hold him gently.
The paintings that appear throughout Twist, created by the artist Liz Kalloch, helped shape the final form of the collection. Her work has a quality I can only describe as earned beauty. These are images that seem to have passed through difficulty and come out luminous on the other side. It felt right that her paintings should accompany these poems. In our different ways we were both trying to make something whole.
If I have any hope for this book, it is the hope I have always carried about poetry itself. That somewhere a reader will encounter a line and recognize something they have been carrying alone. That they will read a poem like “Remember, Michael” and think someone else understood. And that by the time they reach the final section they might feel what I felt writing it, which is that love, the real kind, the kind that fits the life you have, is not too late. It was not too late for me. I believe it is not too late for anyone.
About the Author
Bruce Parkinson Spang is the author of eight poetry collections, three novels, and a memoir. His work often explores the tensions between humor and introspection, bringing together emotional depth, wit, and a reflective perspective on contemporary life. His latest book, Twist, is published by Warren Publishing.
Spang lives with his husband, Myles Rightmire.
For more information, visit www.brucepspang.com or contact the author at bspang4@gmail.com.
