Arts & Entertainment
‘D.C. queer poets doing some of the most innovative writing’
Kim Roberts on Washington as home to thriving poetry scene
Cheer up! There’s hope! April isn’t just for filing your taxes. It’s National Poetry Month!
Few people are more important — more vital — to poetry in Washington, D.C. than queer poet, editor, and literary historian Kim Roberts.
It’s hard to imagine any bard in the D.C. region who hasn’t been enriched by Roberts’s editing, poetry, or understanding of history.
“Kim Roberts brings the past and present together with elegance and intelligence,” said Maryland Poet Laureate Grace Cavalieri in an email to the Blade.
“Poetry’s past has gone nowhere at all, thankfully, because of Kim’s work,” Cavalieri, producer and host of the public radio show and Apple podcast “The Poet and the Poem,” said.
D.C. has been home to numerous poets from its founding to the Civil War to World War I to World War II to our COVID era, Roberts, 60, told the Blade in an interview.
“D.C. is a company town like Las Vegas,” Roberts, who moved to Washington, D.C. 35 years ago, said. “Because the federal government is here, people don’t think there’s poetry in D.C.”
“We get overlooked,” she added.
You might think poetry is a snooze or only for residents of Mount Olympus who are untethered to earthly hopes, fears, loves and losses. But you’d be wrong.
All sorts of people – from politicos to journalists to teachers to lovers to mourners — seek out and write poetry.
“You turn to poetry in times of great emotion like funerals and weddings,” said Roberts, who is the author of six books of poems.
Recently, this hit close to home for Roberts. “COVID’s been so hard for so many people,” she said, “I feel a bit guilty. Because at my age, I fell in love during the pandemic!”
Roberts was gobsmacked (in a good way) by love — she didn’t expect to find it so late in life.
At this transformative juncture, Roberts turned to poetry. “My style changed,” she said, “I became confessional.”
Much of her previous poetry has been about other people. The poems in her 2015 collection “Fortune’s Favor: Scott in the Antarctic,” for example, are in the “voice” of explorer Robert Falcon Scott.
“The Scientific Method,” her 2017 book, combines poems about Thomas Alva Edison and Carl Sagan, “the strange mating habits of invertebrates and fish, and rondeaux about the United States presidents,” Roberts writes on her website (kimroberts.org).
Roberts’s poems about her love for her girlfriend Tracey are personal. They are filled with passion and desire.
Five of her love poems are just out from The Last Press. Roberts is the third poet to be featured in an ongoing series of accordion-fold, hand letter press poems called “Quire.” If you don’t feel the passion pulsating through Roberts love poems, check your pulse.
“My desire for you this evening/is not done, where I bridge/inopportune distance,” Roberts writes in her poem “On Roosevelt Bridge,” one of the poems in the “Quire” series, “where I cross/the river into my city, fluid/ around my heart.”
“There’s an ocean inside my belly,” Roberts writes in “Another Lapping Refrain,” one of her “Quire” poems, “and you’re making my tide rise/I want to apologize to the shore/for my past indifference to its beauty.”
The pandemic gave her permission to try different types of projects, Roberts said. One of the things she and her friend Robert Revere, a photographer, missed during the shutdowns was going to museums. Roberts and Revere co-created “Corona/Crown,” a 14-part prose poem with photographs.
“We created a “museum of our own,” Roberts said. “We combined how we imagined people would interact with visual culture with photos of real places.”
“Corona/Crown” will be published as a chapbook by WordTech Editions in the winter of 2023.
Since childhood, Roberts has felt a strong connection to the English language. “I loved the musicality of words. I made up rhymes and stories,” Roberts said, “it’s inevitable that I would write.”
Roberts earned a B.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Arizona. In 2000, Roberts became the founding editor of “Beltway Poetry Quarterly,” an acclaimed journal that publishes D.C.-area poets. She retired from editing “Beltway” in 2019.
“Beltway” has published many queer poets (including a special LGBTQ issue). Richard Blanco, Regie Cabico, Jona Colson, Cheryl Clarke and Angelina Weld are among the queer poets whose work has appeared in “Beltway.”
“Publishing queer writers helps us see ourselves as part of a special literature,” Roberts said.
Roberts began to explore the history of Washington, D.C. decades ago when she arrived in D.C. “It helped me to feel connected to the city,” she said.
The anthology “By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of Our Nation’s Capital,” which Roberts edited, came out in 2020. The collection covers poets, born between 1800 to 1900 through the Civil War, Reconstruction and World War I.
Their work “spans the gamut form traditional Victorian-era sentimentality through the beginnings of literary modernism,” Roberts writes in the preface.
Everyone knows about Whitman being queer, Roberts said. The anthology’s title comes from Whitman’s poem with the same title. But there have been many other queer poets throughout D.C.’s history, Roberts said.
Take Natalie Clifford Barney, a feminist poet, who lived from 1876 to 1972. Barney spent her early years in D.C. She hosted salons in Paris for artists for more than 60 years. “She was the first woman to write openly about lesbian love since Sappho,” Roberts said.
“The full-sailed rising of your body’s sweep/ – Adrift and safe on joy’s last tidal wave —,” Barney wrote in her poem “How Write the Beat of Love,” “Will toss you on the silver sands of sleep/Forgetful of the ecstasy you gave.”
Other queer poets in the “By Broad Potomac’s Shore” anthology range from Charles Warren Stoddard, whose homoerotic writing about the natives of the South Seas was inspired by Whitman’s “Calamus” poems to Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, first lady for two years for her bachelor brother President Grover Cleveland.
Roberts is as committed to LGBTQ poetry in our time in D.C. as she is to queer poetry in the city’s past.
Roberts and filmmaker Jon Gann are co-coordinating the DC Queer Pride Poem-a-Day project. In June, the Project will feature 30 poets reading a poem in short videos online. One poem will be released daily. The website will stay up after Pride. (This reporter is one of the poets who will be featured in the Project.)
“D.C. queer poets now are doing some of the most imaginative, innovative writing,” Roberts said. “It’s important to document the writing of our time.”
Movies
A ‘Battle’ we can’t avoid
Critical darling is part action thriller, part political allegory, part satire
When Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” debuted on American movie screens last September, it had a lot of things going for it: an acclaimed Hollywood auteur working with a cast that included three Oscar-winning actors, on an ambitious blockbuster with his biggest budget to date, and a $70 million advertising campaign to draw in the crowds. It was even released in IMAX.
It was still a box office disappointment, failing to achieve its “break-even” threshold before making the jump from big screen to small via VOD rentals and streaming on HBO Max. Whatever the reason – an ambivalence toward its stars, a lack of clarity around what it was about, divisive pushback from both progressive and conservative camps over perceived messaging, or a general sense of fatigue over real-world events that had pushed potential moviegoers to their saturation point for politically charged material – audiences failed to show up for it.
The story did not end there, of course; most critics, unconcerned with box office receipts, embraced Anderson’s grand-scale opus, and it’s now a top contender in this year’s awards race, already securing top prizes at the Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice Awards, nominated for a record number of SAG’s Actor Awards, and almost certain to be a front runner in multiple categories at the Academy Awards on March 15.
For cinema buffs who care about such things, that means the time has come: get over all those misgivings and hesitations, whatever reasons might be behind them, and see for yourself why it’s at the top of so many “Best Of” lists.
Adapted by Anderson from the 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel “Vineland,” “One Battle” is part action thriller, part political allegory, part jet-black satire, and – as the first feature film shot primarily in the “VistaVision” format since the early 1960s – all gloriously cinematic. It unspools a near-mythic saga of oppression, resistance, and family bonds, set in an authoritarian America of unspecified date, in which a former revolutionary (Leonardo DiCaprio) is attempting to raise his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti) under the radar after her mother (Teyana Taylor) betrayed the movement and fled the country. Now living under a fake identity and consumed by paranoia and a weed habit, he has grown soft and unprepared when a corrupt military officer (Sean Penn) – who may be his daughter’s real biological father – tracks them down and apprehends her. Determined to rescue her, he reconnects with his old revolutionary network and enlists the aid of her karate teacher (Benicio Del Toro), embarking on a desperate rescue mission while her captor plots to erase all traces of his former “indiscretion” with her mother.
It’s a plot straight out of a mainstream action melodrama, top-heavy with opportunities for old-school action, sensationalistic violence, and epic car chases (all of which it delivers), but in the hands of Anderson – whose sensibilities always strike a provocative balance between introspection, nostalgia, and a sense of apt-but-irreverent destiny – it becomes much more intriguing than the generic tropes with which he invokes to cover his own absurdist leanings.
Indeed, it’s that absurdity which infuses “One Battle” with a bemusedly observational tone and emerges to distinguish it from the “action movie” format it uses to relay its narrative. From DiCaprio (whose performance highlights his subtle comedic gifts as much as his “serious” acting chops) as a bathrobe-clad underdog hero with shades of The Dude from the Coen Brothers’ “The Big Liebowski,” to the uncomfortably hilarious creepy secret society of financially elite white supremacists that lurks in the margins of the action, Anderson gives us plenty of satirical fodder to chuckle about, even if we cringe as we do it; like that masterpiece of too-close-to-home political comedy, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 nuclear holocaust farce “Dr. Strangelove,” it offers us ridiculousness and buffoonery which rings so perfectly true in a terrifying reality that we can’t really laugh at it.
That, perhaps, is why Anderson’s film has had a hard time drawing viewers; though it’s based on a book from nearly four decades ago and it was conceived, written, and created well before our current political reality, the world it creates hits a little too close to home. It imagines a roughly contemporary America ruled by a draconian regime, where immigration enforcement, police, and the military all seem wrapped into one oppressive force, and where unapologetic racism dictates an entire ideology that works in the shadows to impose its twisted values on the world. When it was conceived and written, it must have felt like an exaggeration; now, watching the final product in 2026, it feels almost like an inevitability. Let’s face it, none of us wants to accept the reality of fascism imposing itself on our daily lives; a movie that forces us to confront it is, unfortunately, bound to feel like a downer. We get enough “doomscrolling” on social media; we can’t be faulted for not wanting more of it when we sit down to watch a movie.
In truth, however, “One Battle” is anything but a downer. Full of comedic flourish, it maintains a rigorous distance that makes it impossible to make snap judgments about its characters, and that makes all the difference – especially with characters like DiCaprio’s protective dad, whose behavior sometimes feels toxic from a certain point of view. And though it’s a movie which has no qualms about showing us terrifying things we would rather not see, it somehow comes off better in the end than it might have done by making everything feel safe.
“Safe” is something we are never allowed to feel in Anderson’s outlandish action adventure, even at an intellectual level; even if we can laugh at some of its over-the-top flourishes or find emotional (or ideological) satisfaction in the way things ultimately play out, we can’t walk away from it without feeling the dread that comes from recognizing the ugly truths behind its satirical absurdities. In the end, it’s all too real, too familiar, too dire for us not to be unsettled. After all, it’s only a movie, but the things it shows us are not far removed from the world outside our doors. Indeed, they’re getting closer every day.
Visually masterful, superbly performed, and flawlessly delivered by a cinematic master, it’s a movie that, like it or not, confronts us with the discomforting reality we face, and there’s nobody to save it from us but ourselves.
Sports
‘Heated Rivalry’ stars to participate in Olympic torch relay
Games to take place next month in Italy
“Heated Rivalry” stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie will participate in the Olympic torch relay ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics that will take place next month in Italy.
HBO Max, which distributes “Heated Rivalry” in the U.S., made the announcement on Thursday in a press release.
The games will take place in Milan and Cortina from Feb. 6-22. The HBO Max announcement did not specifically say when Williams and Storrie will participate in the torch relay.
Bars & Parties
Here’s where to watch ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ with fellow fans
Entertainers TrevHER and Grey host event with live performance
Spark Social Events will host “Ru Paul’s Drag Race S18 Watch Party Hosted by Local Drag Queens” on Friday, Jan. 23 at 8 p.m.
Drag entertainers TrevHER and Grey will provide commentary and make live predictions on who’s staying and who’s going home. Stick around after the show for a live drag performance. The watch party will take place on a heated outdoor patio and cozy indoor space.
This event is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Queer liberation is your liberation
A ‘Battle’ we can’t avoid
LGBTQ Ugandans targeted ahead of country’s elections
Trump-appointed EEOC leadership rescinds LGBTQ worker guidance
‘Heated Rivalry’ stars to participate in Olympic torch relay
McPike prevails in ‘firehouse’ Dem primary for Va. House of Delegates
Faith programming remains key part of Creating Change Conference
LGBTQ Iranians join anti-government protests
The power of no
