Unlearning Toxic Masculinity Through Poetry

KARAN

Aidan, I really dig your poems. And we are super delighted to have you as our Poet of the Year! Your poems are hilarious, haunted, unafraid. They’re full of fractured masculinity, suburban mysticism, and near-religious absurdity. There’s a tight emotional range here — from rage to vulnerability to genuine tenderness — and I love that you don’t resolve those tensions but sharpen them. Let’s start with “Toy Soldier” — probably my favorite of all. You write: “They say every man is born / with a kingdom of bunny rabbits / inside of him. Every day he must / resist the impulse to kill one.” (Fucking hell!) That line floored me. Masculinity and the examination of all its myriad forms seems to be your subject, in the way solitude was Garcia-Marquez’s. Let’s start there. Can you speak to how you approach masculinity in your work — especially the softening or warping of it?

AIDAN

Thank you so much, I’m honored. I love that you mentioned the warping of masculinity. I discovered the ‘masculinity’ that I grew up believing in didn’t work for me. Religion, sports culture, 80s and 90s society in general advertised masculinity that was one-dimensional. When I left my small town, and discovered literature, I realized there are many ways to be a man that are more fulfilling than the violent and reductive templates I had been brought up with. My work examines how bizarre conventional tropes of masculinity are. I can better understand them now that they no longer hold as much power over me. I try to challenge the inherent lexicon of violence I grew up surrounded by. As a kid playing hockey, why was most of the language reminiscent of what you’d expect to hear in a battlefield? As for the softening, it mostly comes from pain.

KARAN

What’s your writing routine like, Aidan? And what does your process look like — structurally, emotionally, spatially? How do you usually begin, write, and finish a poem? And most importantly, why poetry?

AIDAN

My writing routine depends on the season. I work as a high school teacher, so I’m most productive in the summer months. However, I do try to write almost every day. Even if it’s simply a line or two. I walk an hour in the evenings, and I often come up with my best ideas when I go for my daily stroll.

For my process, I start with a line or concept and build from there. I get excited by ideas and connections, so I am constantly inspired. As for the product, poems can take months or minutes. I believe serendipity arrives with practice.

Why poetry? I began writing poems after falling in love with the form at university. Poetry allowed me to communicate thoughts that I could not otherwise articulate. I was struggling with a depression that left me voiceless, sometimes even unable to speak. A page always listens. I wrote poetry for survival. It bloomed into a passion and an outlet for questioning a world that doesn’t always make sense to me.

KARAN

There is a lot of humor in these poems — humor that is biting and always hinting at some kind of absurd dysfunction. Consider “before you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, / make sure they fit.” or the deadpan “every child matters / is made of matter.” I realized a while ago that most of my favorite poets are really funny — Bob Hicok, Mary Ruefle, Luke Kennard, Leigh Chadwick — and if you were to scratch beneath the surface of their humor, you’ll find great sorrow, serious philosophical thought, and a deep love for language. I see all of that in your poems. Let’s speak about humor as it pertains to poetry, because I see that in the last decade or two, the poetry that has been at the forefront has been rather dismal and I’ve found humor to be largely lacking.

AIDAN

We shrug off humour as if it has nothing serious to say, but I find depth in it. Poets like Jeffrey McDaniel and Tony Hoagland have me laughing and questioning the status quo all at the same time. Just because some poems make us laugh doesn’t mean they’re not addressing something serious or painful. On the page it can all coexist.

I like that phrase “absurd dysfunction.” I’ve latched onto it. For me, the world appears more absurd the more I try and make sense of it, but sometimes I let go and somehow pushing words around on a page results in a hilarious moment of clarity.

KARAN

There’s also a recurring motif of violence in your work — we encounter “a man in uniform” setting fire to a house, a child who “decapitate[s] a toy soldier,” “the double-barrel lens of waking,” and a speaker who recalls being “peed on… in the locker room showers / like dogs marking territory.” These moments accumulate not just physical brutality but psychic weather — humiliation, distortion, grief. Do you think of violence in your poems as thematic material, personal memory, cultural critique — or as something else entirely? What role does harm (and its echo) play in the emotional architecture of your work?

AIDAN

The getting peed on in the shower actually happened to me as a teenager, and initially I didn’t recognize it as anything other than what boys do. Toxic masculinity is so normalized that I attributed my humiliation to my own shortcomings, or lack of masculinity. This violence was woven into my life, and I didn’t even realize it was there. A lot of the violence in my poetry comes from growing up in a culture that encourages these behaviours as a part of becoming a man. My poetry is an exorcism of sorts. And my holy water is tenderness. The term ‘fragile masculinity’ is so true, because the slightest softening can disarm all the bravado i.e. “‘Two Fighters / Enter an Octagon / and Open Up / About their Feelings.’”

KARAN

In “Trephination,” you write: “Doctors used to drill / holes in our skulls to save us from storms.” So many of your poems gesture toward systems of unwellness — not only depression which is named (as if there’s anything just about depression), but also cycles of disordered eating, loneliness, emotional damage, masculinity-as-containment, and the rituals we invent to manage the mind. In “Emptiness,” disgust becomes performance; in “Toy Soldier,” rage folds into memory and tenderness; in “Well of Unfulfilled Wishes,” serotonin and spectacle blur. How do you think about emotional exposure in your work? Does writing offer relief, or does it risk becoming another form of spectacle?

AIDAN

Thank you for noticing this. We tend to highlight the bad in the world in mental illness, but I find so much brokenness everywhere. The risk is in believing the world is okay, and it’s just those with mental illness who aren’t.

A poet can write a poem that provides relief, but deciding to share it is another thing entirely. As soon as we send our writing out into the world, we risk it becoming spectacle; regardless of earnestness. Writing, and then being read, is a transmitter-receiver relationship. We cannot control how readers will interpret our work.

KARAN

Some of your most striking poems — “Well of Unfulfilled Wishes,” “Swiss Army Saviour,” “Broken” — walk the line between comic irreverence and spiritual ache. God shows up, gets repurposed, gets abandoned. So does language. Do you think your work believes in anything? What’s your relationship to belief?

AIDAN

Yes! My work believes in love and in questioning what I’ve been told. My work believes in the reader and their knowledge and intelligence. My work believes in transcendence. In finding another path. My relationship to belief is in finding truth and not settling for comfortable illusions.

KARAN

One of the most moving things in these poems is how often care sneaks in sideways — a croissant, a strawberry plant, a man offering a hug. But it’s complicated by hunger, addiction, even self-sabotage. In “Emptiness,” you write: “I want / to remember / how to be / made whole.” Do you think of poetry as a substitute for faith, or a kind of spiritual practice in itself?

AIDAN

No, I think faith is too personal and nuanced to be compared, or substituted for, anything else.

KARAN

I love how your work handles gendered cliché. “Waves of Mermaid” turns locker room surveillance and hockey coaching into dream logic: “there is a rugged / gentleness to my game, I play as though / I am the softest cloud in the sky.” I love that ending so much! Really, it lands like a punch from a cloud. What’s your relationship to sports as metaphor, or sports as failed blueprint for masculinity? Or maybe just actual sports. Yeah, let’s be real men and talk about sports.

AIDAN

Yeah, sports as failed blueprint for masculinity is spot on! Sports have been hijacked by ‘masculinity’ for way too long, and it’s a shame. I’d love to see a world where sports are primarily for exercise, teamwork, skill-building, fun and not appropriated for policing manliness and gender. My poems mean to question the aggression and hyper-competitiveness I’ve encountered in playing sports. Or we can just be real men and rub some dirt in it, lol.

KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: There’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes — poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all? And do you suspect it will move to another direction anytime soon?

AIDAN

Poetry of the mind is how I would describe my work these days. My first two collections were filled with poems of the body and the heart. I think once you’ve mined your past, and come to a place of contentment, as a human being, as a writer, as I have, you invent ways to access creativity and to explore your craft. For me, that’s why I’ve moved toward writing poetry of the mind. Humour has shaped my recent work, so has an exploration of dialogue. I’ve also been obsessed with surrealism, so my poems are becoming metaphysical.

KARAN

You’ve published a well-acclaimed collection, and you also just won one of the coolest poetry awards around :) — you’ve clearly built something sustained and striking. What advice would you give to younger poets who are beginning to get serious about their craft? Alternatively (or additionally), what is some of the best writing/writing-adjacent advice you’ve received so far?

AIDAN

Read a lot of poetry. Find out what you like and learn from it. Study the tricks that poets employ in their verse. Tinker a lot. Get comfortable with rejection letters; they are not a sign of your worth. Know what journals align with your work. Not every journal will be interested in the kinds of poems you write.

KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt — something strange, simple, or rigorous — to help them begin a new poem?

AIDAN

Sure. This one is inspired by my poem “Emptiness.” It’s an easy one to do. Take a feeling or emotion (anger, sadness, loneliness etc.). Use that as your title. Now write the poem, with that word as your anchor, as an extended metaphor.

Example:

Sadness

is a cellphone on the sidewalk blinking in the night.

Takes itself too seriously. Wants to be taken.

Seriously.

…

*I recommend doing this for like 10 different feelings/emotions. Just play with it. I bet at least one of those iterations will spring into a great poem.

KARAN

Please also recommend a piece of art (or a few) — a film, an album, a visual art piece (anything other than a poem) — that you wish you could impose on everyone.

AIDAN

I’ll go with the last three books I’ve read (Two novels and one non-fiction): The Trees by Percival Everett, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones, and Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez.

KARAN

And finally, Aidan, since we believe in studying masters’ masters, which poets have shaped your sense of what’s possible — who do you turn to for guidance or nerve?

AIDAN

For humor, intellect and metaphor, I read Jeffrey McDaniel, Caroline Bird, Tony Hoagland and Bob Hicok. For imagination and creativity—Michael Bazzett, Rochelle Hurt and Joanna Fuhrman. For diction—Kiki Petrosino, Stacy Gnall and Kyle Dargan. For longer forms—James Tate and John Murillo. For the overall “It” factor—Jericho Brown, Ocean Vuong, Natalie Diaz and Richard Siken.

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