The 30 days of April are simply not long enough for National Poetry Month. That’s why it’s essential to read poetry throughout the year, and the work of queer poet Ed Madden is a great place to start.
An educator and activist, in addition to being a writer, Madden has numerous full-length collections to his name, as well as multiple chapbooks, most recently two published as part of Squares & Rebels’ Chaps Poetry Series: “Arkansas Luggage” (2025) and “I Asked Him What He Needed” (2026). With the current semester at an end, Ed was kind enough to make time for an interview.
Ed, from 2015-2022, you were the inaugural poet laureate for the City of Columbia, South Carolina. Please say a few words about your experience in that role.
I served two four-year terms as the inaugural poet laureate for the City of Columbia. It was the first city poet laureate position in the state. The original resolution creating the position was simple: promote poetry and literary arts to young people, read for an official city event, and be available to speak at schools and libraries. I expanded the role a bit to imagine poetry as a public art and to think about the possibilities for poetry as a public voice. Early on, a council member asked me to write a poem in response to the horrific Charleston church shooting, and I realized that the position came with both an implicit expectation of a public voice and an explicit opportunity for speaking publicly to issues and events in a way that would be different from journalism or political voices. How could poetry — and the arts more generally — help a community to define itself, who we were, who we are, and who we could be. In addition, because Columbia has been a city interested in public art, I wanted to think of ways poetry could also be a public art. So, we put poems on city buses, on coffee sleeves, on movie theatre screens, on sidewalks, on fake parking tickets. I always used local voices. For over a decade, I worked with a summer arts program for middle school students, and it was really fun to include their poems in these projects.
When I had the honor of reading with you in March 2026 at Queer Haven Books in Columbia, we discovered that we each had a poem in “White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology.” Was your poem, “Tusk,” written specifically for the anthology or did it already exist when you received the call for submissions?
Kind of both. I had already been writing a series of poems I called “Playlist” poems. First songs, dance tracks, songs central to my coming out (like the songs played in the first gay bars I went to). The poems are little micro-memoir sequences, songs tethering me to a historical moment, sometimes prompts for remembering, sometimes a structure for holding that memory. Songs seem like useful ways to think about history and memory. So, I hadn’t written the poem yet, but this was a song I’d been thinking about.
What can you tell the readers about the poem?
It’s about growing up as a queer kid in a fundamentalist church in rural America. It’s about high school band. It’s about being all urge and noise and not yet able to really articulate who you are. And it’s about leaving home. Ask me if I’m going to stay. Ask me if I’m going away. That was the crux, wasn’t it? Could I stay there, or did I have to leave to be who I am. I had to leave.
Where does Stevie Nicks land on your favorite list of singer/songwriters, and who are some of your other favorites?
Honestly, back then I was more into disco. Donna Summer, Evelyn “Champagne” King, Anita Ward, Lipps Inc. Urge and noise of a different kind! Then as I left for college I leaned more and more into B52s and Gary Numan and Bronski Beat.
As you said, your poem “Tusk,” mentions being in the marching band, a subject that recurs in the piece “Playlist: dance tracks” from your 2025 chapbook “Arkansas Luggage.” Please say a few words about being in a marching band, also about the songs mentioned in “Playlist.”
I moved from playing clarinet…yes, I know, so gay [laughs]…to playing saxophone. In my last two years of high school, I was the drum major. I briefly tried to stick with marching and jazz band in college but eventually gave that up for other interests. The songs are all songs that take me back to particular ways of thinking and particular memories. Looking back, I’d say now that popular music allowed me to begin to explore who I was in a way that felt evasive, indirect. Evelyn “Champagne” King isn’t gay, but that song hit me deep, consciously or unconsciously, maybe a little of both. It’s all about how “Mama just don’t understand” what you feel. And you know somehow that what you feel makes you feel shame to your core, but you know it also has the potential to change the rules. I couldn’t have said that, then, but I could sing that song. That playlist poem ends with Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” 1981. The year I graduated, also the year that the New York Times first reported on AIDS—a new gay cancer. A reminder to me that I came out at the very moment homosexuality would not only be grounded, for me, in social and sexual and religious shame, but also in the early caution and terror of the AIDS epidemic.
You wrote, in the titular braided essay “Arkansas Luggage,” “I have never before written about being uncircumcised…” Now that you have, do you feel like you’ve said everything you have to say on the subject, personally and professionally, or do you foresee writing about it further?
I think there’s a lot more to say. Like so many sexual and bodily things, it’s something we don’t talk about. That was just a first attempt to think through what it means to be uncircumcised in the American South, and how that is a marker of class and ethnicity and region, despite a common assumption that it’s standard medical practice long associated with hygiene. It’s also a bizarrely American thing. Routine infant circumcision is not standard practice in European countries, and there, non-medical circumcision is mostly tied to religious identity. And, of course, I couldn’t help but think about its place in gay porn, and its central place as a metaphor in the fundamentalist religious culture I grew up in.
Your new chapbook, “I Asked Him What He Needed,” is a series of what you call “postcard poems.” Is this the first time you’ve written ekphrastic poetry, or is this an extension of writing you’ve done previously?
I’ve written ekphrastic poetry before — I think most poets have — but in part because I’ve been involved with writing projects at art museums. This project grew out of my experience as the city poet laureate. I was always trying to think of forms of public outreach, even in the wake of COVID, when we also had to think about social distance and safety. On a whim, really, on January 1, 2022, I wrote a tiny poem on a postcard, posted images on social media, said I intended to do that every day that year, and then dropped the card in the mail. In a way, by posting that so publicly, I blackmailed myself into the task. I had tons of postcards—I had started collecting them as an undergraduate while studying abroad, back when we didn’t have cellphones. It became a daily practice, almost meditative, sorting through the cards, letting one call to me, and then jotting down a tiny poem, posting it, sending it. Though most of the poems responded to the images, that was also the year the war started in Ukraine and the year of Uvalde, so war and gun violence entered the poems. After the year ended, I still occasionally wrote postcard poems, but with less diligence, less intensity. But something about the horror stories coming from ICE and Trump’s deportation regime pushed me back to public poetry—not direct responses to the stories, but indirect ones. We know that over 70 percent of those detained by ICE have no criminal record. So, Trump’s fascist rhetoric about “the worst of the worst” is clearly lies. I felt angry. I felt despondent. Poetry has always been a way for me to process things, but this also felt like witness. We can’t just let the barrage of horrible stories wash over us. We must pause. We must think about what is being done to other human beings, done in our name.
The poems are in response to the ongoing ICE detentions that are occurring under the current administration. Are you seeing much ICE activity on the campus where you teach?
I am not aware of ICE activity on campus here, but I do know students who are afraid — not just about ICE but about the anti-trans rhetoric of this moment.
Would you say that these are your most political poems?
Yes.
Being queer, and being a queer poet, are political acts on a daily basis. In what ways do you think poetry and poets can make a difference at this turbulent time?
I don’t know that poetry can make a difference in policy. But poetry can, I hope, bear witness, document, testify. And poetry can, I hope, slow things down. In the work I did as the city poet laureate, putting poems in places you wouldn’t expect to find poems, we called that work “guerilla poetry.” Impromptu, sometimes unsanctioned, sometimes resistant. We wanted to make space, create moments for reflection, raise awareness in a different way, re-center our attention on the human, on the community around us. In the barrage of cruelty and ignorance we face daily now, maybe poetry is another language of resistance: a language that makes us slow down, makes us refocus on the human, a language of witness. I hope so.
Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who wrote through the Troubles (in Ireland), used the story of Jesus and the woman detained for adultery. We usually focus on that little quip of judgment, let he who is without sin cast the first stone, but Heaney pointed out that Jesus kneels and writes in the sand before he says that. We don’t know what he wrote. All we know is that for that moment, everything stopped. Poetry is that writing in the sand.
Have you started working on or thinking about your next book project?
Yes. Projects. I’ve been working on a series of essays I wrote about my experiences living in Brazil. Being away makes you think differently about who and where you are. And the dead keep showing up in these essays. The project may turn into a memoir. And another book of poetry. During the shutdown, like lots of other people, I was fascinated by the birds when my attention was restricted to the yard and the neighborhood. I grew up on a farm, so I have often written about landscape and nature, but there was something different about this experience. I think it’s going to be a book about birds—but also about how the things that happen to us, good or bad, are what we turn into song. Or maybe more accurately, are what allows us to sing.
