Erick Verran

Twilight of an Idol: A Review of Alex Dimitrov’s Ecstasy

Alex Dimitrov has written another book. It’s called Ecstasy. Though the promotional copy informs us that Dimitrov “embraces a life on the edge in New York,” as the Times reported he typically spends his Sundays, accompanied by sidekick Dorothea Lasky, lunching on macrobiotics and browsing witchy boutique stores. Stranded between enfant terrible and poète maudit, because the internet won’t shut up about him (“I kept reading Alex Dimitrov / over and over in tweets / from people I’d never met”) Dimitrov has to be photographed leaning against a brick wall or holding a rose. Break my heart, he seems to be saying, if you dare. With an obsession with A Streetcar Named Desire you could psychoanalyze from a mile away, it’s only right that the Bulgarian-born poet chose a glass of white wine and an opened pack of Marlboros for his new headshot’s props. Then, from the cigarette hanging churlishly from Dimitrov’s mouth, your eye moves—how can it not?—to the fluorescent yellow CAUTION BEAR IN AREA road sign hung behind him, the inclusion of which is so breathtakingly comic as to be an accident, surely.

Equally sleeve-worn has been Dimitrov’s attraction to American despair. It’s why his first two collections used Francesca Woodman and Diane Arbus’s photographs for their covers. But while Dimitrov’s sorrows feel like Calvin Klein material, there is an obvious fraudulence to journaled bursts of joie de vivre even, or especially, when the content is sex and drugs:

I stood on Rue de Saintonge

and a man on Grindr offered

500 euros to fuck me.

I was surprised. 2000, I said.

I bought cherries from Monoprix

and ate them on the street.

They were bad. And I knew

that they would be.

Dimitrov would be the butt end of T. S. Eliot's suggestion that “a man may be a great artist, and yet have a bad influence”: as with the cultural endurance of Milton, the trade-off with Frank O’Hara was that he bred a generation of pale imitators. (Eliot’s observation, about the author of Paradise Lost, that “it is more important, in some vital respects, to be a good poet than to be a great poet” is no less worth considering.) Indeed, Dimitrov’s homages to O’Hara—see “Having a Diet Coke With You” in Love and Other Poems, that or the constant references to oranges—spell out his runner-up aspirations too clearly. Dimitrov also co-writes horoscopes with Lasky for 90,000 subscribers, a writer’s hustle if ever there was one. Poking around the free version of their Substack, you’re rewarded with such unambitious wisdom as “Keep seeing the open door in front of you” and “What can be will be. The low bat flies.”

Following his expulsion from the Creative Writing Program at NYU amid allegations of you-know-what, the milky Twilight vibe began to curdle. (Perhaps no single line of Dimitrov’s has aged worse than “At the office I think about James Franco,” speaking of which.) While online Dimitrov’s response to those critical of him has been to insist on his status as a literary darling—“Judas was obsessed / with Jesus,” after all—the echo chamber of the poem is where a self-inflicted wound pays dividends. Having eaten a banana, with Billie Holiday on in the background, “when I cut myself shaving above the lip / I lick up the blood.” Like Bram Stoker’s monster, the one residing in a castle in Eastern Europe, there is something fundamentally unreflective about Dimitrov. Or don’t call it immortality if, despite turning forty, he appears to be incapable of maturing (“I was supposed to be older / but I’ve been six years old / since I got here”); that is, unless his oeuvre is more Portrait of Dorian Gray, with each collection’s steady degradation tied to an increasingly effete lifestyle.

Dimitrov hosts a social club named for Oscar Wilde, and it doesn’t take much sleuthing to learn that his motto is the borderline corny “aesthetics over everything.” But as a nineteenth-century postcard once admonished, beneath the illustration of a made-up dandy clasping lilies, “YOUR ATTEMPT AT THE AESTHETIC MAKES YOU TOO TOO RIDICULOUS.” Over at his blog, the splash page consists of a black-and-white photograph of Dimitrov in a bathtub and pulled-up Rimbaud shirt. With a role model like that—Rimbaud, as everybody knows, being the French symbolist who quit poetry to run guns for a colonial outpost in the Congo—Dimitrov’s gloated-about cocaine habit makes a certain kind of sense. Decadence in a time of global austerity isn’t daringly over-the-top but gauche, its want of shock as desperately transgressive as a Call of Duty lobby. (Ecstasy’s aggressively retro jacket features a still from Andy Warhol’s silent film Blow Job, in case you weren’t paying attention.) Lies, as opposed to lonesome boasts, don’t warrant fact-checking:

I’m so tough I could live this life twice

smoking and drinking through it,

wearing pearls with flannel,

yawing at the opera,

standing by a jukebox

never asking any man

to take me home. Yeah,

that’s right it’s six o’clock

and I see the Empire State Building

rising in the distance. Lighting up.

A classic in the evening.

Accompanying me to dinner

where I will sit alone and order

a vodka martini from the bartender

Note the lack of blurbs for Ecstasy. Interviews, however—yes, please. (Several years ago the comment section under Dimitrov’s Q&A with Brian Broeder was spammed with ads about becoming a vampire. Check for yourself.) Confessing, like Sylvia Plath, to crimes nobody charged him with in the first place, Dimitrov’s melancholy, populated by anonymous cowboys across a slew of hotels, still manages to be more My Chemical Romance than Cormac McCarthy. “No one has known what I am,” he broods. You’re reminded of those emotionally stunted high-schoolers who, with an edgelordish smirk—“a red light of triumph,” to quote Stoker—let slip that they’re nihilists and debate the moon landing. Ecstasy is crammed full of moody stabs, each with the lethality of a penknife. Confessionalism’s metastasis into the worst interpretation of Christianity now means that the purgative function of airing one’s sins is confused for libertinism. Dated since at least the Nineties, when it seemed radical of Madonna to address the body of Christ hormonally, the idea of prayer as masturbatory (“GOD’S COMING / reads the sign / above a parking lot”) is a wafer-thin excuse for a theology and shocking only to closeted conservatives, who order their Freud over easy.

Though Ecstasy’s epigraph quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson—an old-fashioned Yank to suit Dimitrov’s politics—the man behind the title is of course Walter Pater, Wilde’s tutor. Pater had convinced hordes of British narcissists that “[t]o burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” (In the same essay he also saw the Mona Lisa, “older than the rocks among which she sits,” as possessing a set of fangs.) Harry Crews, the blue collar novelist and memoirist, used to flash his tracks to University of Florida students and, on particularly bad days, could be seen dragging himself to the department elevator. With Dimitrov, it’s the opposite. The poetry “cares a lot but wants you / to think that it doesn’t really care,” so much so that, instead of genuine evidence of pain, what you get is the foppish arrogance of Alex DeLarge the morning after a Korova Plus bender:

In another life I’ll have self-control

or actually be happy.

Has anyone ever had both?

[. . .]

Maybe (even though skinny jeans

are over), when they bury me—

and I do hope it’s on a Friday

so people can get their shit together

on the weekend—maybe, just maybe

I’ll be allowed to dress however

I want. And eat whatever I like.

And drink whatever I please.

And my hair will look perfect forever

because that’s what death is, right?

I hadn’t heard of Dimitrov until sometime in 2022 when, at an upstairs bar in the East Village, he was introduced as “kind of an important poet.” His disciples, filling the room that evening, hummed loudly to themselves and would snap their fingers like beatniks, or else screech, at the least attestation to illegal behavior. (“I guess Kevin Young likes blow!” I recall Dimitrov interjecting.) But for the fact that the event was in honor of Yale Younger recipient Robert Wood Lynn, who apologized for being less exciting than Dimitrov, the whole thing was unproblematically libidinous; and when finally it was his turn Lynn counted down his poems on the assumption that everybody at a reading, he said into the microphone, is secretly hoping it ends soon.

In Four Quartets, Eliot proposes that in order “to get from where you are not, / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.” Empty writing, steamed up in a notes app, ought to make your eyes roll—and not in the St. Theresa way. Artists and lust are as complementary as garlic and crosses, or a stake to the heart, luring us with language that, if we’re lucky, will be half as affecting as intended. Yet how much interest can a distant readership honestly be expected to take in vanities with the shelf life of a tomato? James Elroy Flecker said it best, addressing the future students “of our sweet English tongue”:

I care not if you bridge the seas,

Or ride secure the cruel sky,

Or build consummate palaces

Of metal or of masonry.

But do you still snort coke

In Art Deco bathrooms,

Have you jerked off someone’s

Friend wearing Carhartts?

Sending his soul through time and space, Flecker at last begs us,

Read out my words at night, alone:

I ate the steak raw. It was Fleet Week.