When I meet poet, playwright, journalist and video artist RM Vaughan at a park in Kensington to talk about his new book, Troubled (Coach House, 80 pages, $16.95), he immediately gives me a present: a white pin with “PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT RICHARD FLORIDA” printed in microscopic type on it. “That’s the YA version,” he cracks, digging out another pin with a larger font and handing it to me. “This one’s the seniors’ version.”

Vaughan has also made pins politely requesting that we stop talking about New York and Vancouver; this series, while a footnote in his creative output, nicely illustrates his penchant for playfully challenging cultural consumers to stop chattering about the same damn things and reach for an original thought already. A wry, incisive and sharp-tongued cultural commentator who works prolifically in multiple mediums, Vaughan’s latest book is a remarkably brave and nakedly emotional poetic memoir about a disastrous sexual relationship he had with his psychiatrist.

What made you decide to write this book?
The line I’ve been using — oh, what the hell, I’ll use it on you — is that this started as an act of vengeance. But then I began to wonder [how this happened]. I’m a pretty smart person — I can read and stuff; I get by on my wits, let’s say — so how did I do something so fantastically stupid? Answering that became the quest.

The best responses to the book have been from people who have told me, “I’ve never been in that specific situation, but I’ve done something incredibly stupid and I could really relate.”

Why did you choose to tell this story through poetry rather than narrative nonfiction?
No. 1, I’m stupid and I don’t like money. The deeper answer is that I tried and I couldn’t make it work. There were too many ambiguities — it became a hall of mirrors — and poetry is the language I found that allows for gaps.

You started your literary career as a poet, but you were also writing plays early on — do you identify more with one form than another?
I’ve always done everything simultaneously. It means I have a really fat resumé and that I’m taken seriously by no particular camp. I suppose I’ll eventually pick one thing, but not until I’m at least 60. Why should I? No one tells Vincent Lam he has to stop being a doctor. It’s a problem if I want to write a few poems a year, but it’s OK to be a brain surgeon.

Speaking of camps, do you get drawn into the wars between different genres of poetry?
I used to be interested in all that, but I grew out of it. I’ve experienced some dismissal for being a confessional lyricist and it gives me some satisfaction that this is a 100 per cent confessional text. It’s like being called fat and sticking your stomach out and saying, “Yes, I am fat. Look at it. Touch it.”

What makes something a “gay” book?
Marketing. Gay is like an ethnicity now. Actually, I was thinking how this book would receive a different reaction if a woman had written about the same experience. We don’t have as developed a language for talking about power imbalances between two men as we do for power imbalances between a man and a woman.

How do you feel about gay writers who write for a mainstream audience, like David Sedaris?
I’m hypnotized by those people. I want to follow them home and figure out how they did it.
But this is important — I don’t want it to sound like I think of myself as anything but incredibly lucky. To make a living as a writer — I don’t live like a king, but I feel enormously lucky.