Lib at Large: Larkspur poet finds belated success with provocative ‘Transient Sex’
Sex sells. Just not always right away.
A case in point: In 1989, Brent Reiten, a Marin County house painter with poetic ambitions, wrote and self-published “Transient Sex,” a collection of poems about his libidinous fantasy trysts with famous people, women and men — “Sex with Stevie Nicks,” “Sex with Meryl Streep,” “Sex with George Bush,” “Sex with Sylvester Stallone.” You get the idea.
He had every reason to believe that this clever conceit was so provocative, so tapped into the Zeitgeist of the late ’80s with its equal doses of celebrity, sensuality and humor, that the 2,000 paperback copies he had printed would practically sell themselves, making him a hot new star in the literary galaxy.
“I want to be in People magazine, Playboy, and on the ‘Barbara Walters Special,’” the then 36-year-old poet announced in the book’s preface.
The fact that none of that happened has been a major disappointment of his life. “Transient Sex” made a brief splash (The San Francisco Review of Books called it “evocative ... rich ... illuminating”) before sinking from sight. In 1993, it was included in an anthology, “A New Geography of Poets.” But that’s about it.
Twenty-five years later, most of the copies are still in cardboard boxes stashed in the storeroom of the writer’s Larkspur apartment. With his dreams shattered, Reiten was so emotionally devastated that he retreated inside himself, partly blaming his own fear of success for his book’s failure. In any case, he’s hardly written a word since.
“I was totally humiliated, perplexed, and, finally, I just gave up,” the ruddy 62-year-old poet said one recent afternoon, sipping a Stella Artois at the kitchen table of his Spartan upstairs flat. “I was let down big time. It made me become almost like a recluse. It was very sad.”
But then, all these years later, something completely random and slightly miraculous has happened to shake him out of his hermit-like existence. A hip young writer named Jason Tesauro discovered a copy of “Transient Sex” among the tattered paperbacks and pulp novels on a sagging shelf in a thrift store in Charlottesville, Va.
Pleasantly surprised to find the 40 poems “clever and consistently rewarding,” Tesauro wrote an essay that was recently published in Poetry magazine, one of the world’s leading monthly poetry journals. It’s headlined “Sex with Brent Reiten: How an obscure 1980s collection might be poetry’s best one-night stand.” In the piece, Tesauro calls Reiten “the best poet you’ve never heard of.”
Since then, orders for “Transient Sex” have poured in from Australia, India, Europe, all over the U.S. A Dutch publisher is planning a translation in the Netherlands. And McSweeney’s, the San Francisco-based nonprofit publisher founded by Dave Eggers, has shown an interest in the collection, as have publishers on the East Coast and in London.
“To be witness to this resurrection of a wonderful writer fills our hearts with joy,” says Richard Lang, an old friend of Reiten’s who’s selling copies of “Transient Sex” at Electric Works, his San Francisco gallery, fine art press and bookstore.
“None of the poems are really about sex,” Lang says. “More than anything they’re about the relationship we have with celebrity. Brent is a working man’s poet, bringing the esoteric down to earth. He was writing in the vernacular long before Billy Collins stepped onto the stage.”
For example, his poem, “Sex with Genevieve Bujold,” ends by combining his post-coital fantasy life with his real one. “I was the producer of my own tragic scene/She was off to be a star again/I was off to paint the Wagner’s house — Monterey Gray with dark blue trim.”
FINDING HIS VOICE
A college dropout, Reiten became what he calls “a serious apprentice in poetry” when he was living in Los Angeles in his 20s, inspired by Jack Kerouac and the Beats.
“Being a lost soul, it was a common thing for people my age back then to be enamored with that gang,” he says.
After moving to Marin in 1981, he found his own voice through the example set by contemporary poets such as Edward Field, Paul Zimmer and Ron Koertge.
“They had humor in their poems,” he says. “Oftentimes in a dark, self-deprecating way.”
Reiten was living in Fairfax when the poems in “Transient Sex” came to him in two bursts of creativity fueled by Ecstasy, or MDMA, a drug that’s both a stimulant and a hallucinogen, sort of a cross between methamphetamine and mescaline.
The book’s black and white cover photo, taken by Jay Daniel in downtown San Francisco, shows Reiten looking over his shoulder at his then girlfriend, Toni Bernbaum. Wearing a little black dress, high heels and sexy sheer stockings, she’s sitting on a low wall, lighting a cigarette, her legs crossed seductively. He dedicated the book to her, thanking her for helping him fine-tune the poems after they came to him in that initial ecstatic rush.
“It was just me and Toni then,” he remembers. “We were playing with poems for months. We didn’t have a real baby, but the poems were what we called our baby.”
‘A VERY BAD SCENE’
Two years after the book came out, Reiten was trying to recapture the lightning in the bottle that produced “Transient Sex,” turning once again to MDMA for inspiration. But, unlike the first time, the drug failed him.
“It got me into big trouble,” he recalls. “I was trying to get another poetry roll going, which meant ingesting Ecstasy. It got to the point where I was taking lethal amounts, dangerous amounts. But, in my mind, I thought this is what I had to do to get to the next place in poetry. It was a very bad scene.”
Reiten had been making a living as an independent painting contractor. When it became obvious that he could no longer function on his own, he was hired by his friend, Andy Giddings, to work for Giddings’ San Geronimo-based color and design company.
“He knew I was in big trouble and had to get out of it,” Reiten says, crediting Giddings and his wife, fine art painter Judy North, for becoming his surrogate family and helping him get his head straight, a return to normalcy that took five years.
Over the past couple of decades, he’s lived quietly by himself, working during the day and listening to CDs by Texas singer-songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark at night. He hasn’t gone out to restaurants, or movies, or parties, limiting his social life to occasional dinners with relatives on holidays.
He’d worn out his old electric typewriter, and didn’t have a computer, so he had no email.
The only writing he’d done was to constantly tinker and tighten the poems in “Transient Sex.” Reiten was so far out of the mainstream that part of Tesauro’s article in Poetry magazine is about the detective work it took to track him down.
Spurred by this sudden revival of interest in him and his work, he bought his first laptop computer a month ago and is learning how to use it.
“I’ve got to convert to that world,” he says. “It’s up to me.”
On a personal level, he hadn’t spoken to his former lover, Toni Bernbaum, for a dozen years. She’d moved away since they’d broken up. As fate would have it, on the day of this interview, she’d called him, saying she wanted to see him again during a weekend visit to Marin.
“I’m so excited about what’s happening with ‘Transient Sex,’” she says in a phone message, a delighted lilt in her voice. “You’re becoming famous.”
