Tulsa
Step into the Ring: Poet Quinn Carver Johnson, a Pink Cowboy Hat, and an Epic Tale of Queer Pro Wrestling
by | Oct 5, 2023 3:42 pm
Post a Comment | E-mail the Author
Carver with Karl Jones at Magic City event.
Quinn Carver Johnson in Conversation with Karl Jones
Magic City Books’ Algonquin Room
Sept. 28, 2023
Slipping into Magic City Books on a quiet night for the launch of Quinn Carver Johnson’s The Perfect Bastard, I joined a small but enthused audience already talking with Johnson and Tulsa Artist Fellow Karl Jones, the event’s interviewer. Jones suggested we all grab one of the Algonquin Room’s comfy chairs and cozy up closer to the night’s talent. Between Jones and Johnson sat a sequined pink cowboy hat. The bejeweled spectacle is an emblem of Johnson’s explorations in their new poetry collection, which follows the “Perfect Bastard,” a nonbinary, queer pro wrestler, across four states in the mid-South.
The Perfect Bastard is fictional but inspired by Johnson’s growing up queer in small-town Kansas, play-fighting with friends and watching lots of pro wrestling. Studying gender in college (Hendrix College, the alma mater of both Johnson and Jones) opened their eyes to how queer all that pro wrestling had really been. It was drag: bright colors, spandex, big shiny belts.
But there’d been no openly gay wrestlers then — just some queer-presenting wrestlers who fed on hetero fears of gay men being predatory, an unsettling situation that inspired one of the poems Johnson read during this evening, called “Adrian Street Explains the Joke.”
Johnson (who serves as front of house coordinator at the American Song Archives) was resistant to writing poetry about pro wrestling because that’s what everyone suggested they write about. They didn’t want a queer pro wrestling poetry collection that was “just John Cena’s biceps.”
Then they wrote one wrestling poem and “couldn’t write about anything else.”
This excerpt from “Ode to the Pink Cowboy Hat,” which Johnson read during the event, shows their knack for language both tender and powerful, for blurring the lines of lyricism and narrative — it’s a hug, a whisper saying “we can be who we are”:
but what I need to tell you is
I can make a town or a home
big enough for two men
All it takes is a small garden
in the windowsill — here,
take this spade, gather me
a handful of soil from the park
& I could plant seeds in the ground,
beg rain from the clouds, turn
Piper’s Pit into the Flower Shop
I would tug at lavender leaves &
draw you a bath, roll the herb tight,
& add mint to your tea
if you’re going to be a cowboy
then I wanna be a cowboy too
& I want to wear the pink hat
With a great interviewer’s way of truly listening — riffing, keeping in touch with what the conversation brings up organically — Jones talked with Johnson about being queer in small-town Arkansas, the juxtapositions between the college and the town, the worlds of campus and Walmart. The campus was a safe haven for artists and queer folks. Still, Johnson laughed: “You can’t get away from tribalism and heterosexuality.” Over the course of their conversation, I got insight into Johnson’s life and work, but also a welcome education on pro wrestling: heels vs. babyfaces (“good guys” vs. “bad guys”), for instance, and the names of some of today’s openly gay and queer wrestlers (Effy, Sonny Kiss, Pollo del Mar).
Johnson’s mini-book tour has taken them to small spaces across the region, culminating in a poetry reading/pro wrestling show/drag show/concert Oct. 8 at Queen Rose Art House. Tulsa shows up loudest to literary events when the big names come to town (Tim Blake Nelson, Rachel Maddow, Tom Hanks). But smaller events like these are where the literary magic that is our city unveils itself, and I’ve set a goal to show up not just loud but proud for them, too. More and more, venues like Magic City, Whitty Books, The Studio, TAF, and the Woody Guthrie Center (where Johnson books and hosts the People’s Poetry reading series) are embracing local poets who have worlds of experience and language to share. These venues, like these poets, are building the American songs of the future — now we just have to show up. To quote Johnson quoting Woody Guthrie (on The Perfect Bastard’s dedication page), “let’s show these fascists what a couple of hillbillies can do.”
Next for Cassidy: Tulsey Town Two-Step, VFW #577
