tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post6525908732329901686..comments2023-12-16T02:44:20.427-06:00Comments on Reginald Shepherd's Blog: Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics, Part FiveReginald Shepherdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11965170916626482963noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-56692873114328510802008-02-28T13:03:00.000-06:002008-02-28T13:03:00.000-06:00Hi Alfred,I think what you're getting at ultimtely...Hi Alfred,<BR/><BR/>I think what you're getting at ultimtely is the limitations of narrative poetry: what does a writer do when the stories have been used up? You're prooviding one way for writers who privildge narrative content over form: more graphicness, senstationalism which rightly you find disconcerting.<BR/><BR/>While I agree it may not be art this stort of solution, I do think it is important writing in its own way: with all the hatred and desire to make queers invisible, so what is people who aren't artists are creating mediocre or even less than that story poetry. Visiblity is better than no visibility, and how much stuff in the journals or Established presses are that good anyway. That's the fun of art and criticism: finding something that actually matters both politically andaesthetically in all the dross. Not that dross is bad or not useful.<BR/><BR/>That's one of my problems with Mark Doty or at least the later stuff that I've read: he has no new stories to tell (self parody was in one of his books he directly addressed Whitman, wondering what he would think of the Calvin Klein models billboards, it was unintentially funny in its benign banality) and has no desire to push his stuff formally either (he's stated himself he's uninterested in the line; the sentence is much more important so is it any surprise that he writes of all things memoir.)<BR/><BR/>Not that sentences can't be made formally useful in poetry. To mention AIDS poets I'd mention Tory Deny. Her long lines (a formal choice) works towards its content (meidtions about AIDS and the odd etours her mind goes in). Here is a poet whose sentences (the syntatical unfolding of them) reflected the form and took essential a banal story (a woman dying of AIDS) and pushed it formally. She did it. She created art. Good important art.<BR/><BR/>Problem is a lot fo gay poets are only interested in their content, not form, and that's understandable, we're told our stories don't matter (still), but at the same time it's up to people who want to play Art Criticim game (which I am) to name the limitations of what they're creating.<BR/><BR/>With much respect,<BR/>Steve FellnerSteve Fellnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12181155226508233319noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-16468028631153609362008-02-27T17:10:00.000-06:002008-02-27T17:10:00.000-06:00Thanks, Reginald for posting this and also to Bria...Thanks, Reginald for posting this and also to Brian Teare, whom I've never met. The brain power here is balanced by a passion for poetry and a regard for Gunn.<BR/><BR/>OK if I send up a trial balloon of an idea about the poetry of disclosure in general (sometimes called "Confessional") and gay-themed poetry in particular?<BR/><BR/>When disclosures center on topics usually held to be embarrassing or taboo or outlawed, readers who participate in or suffer from the behaviors find consolation in seeing them aired in public. By the same token, the ante goes up with each new level of disclosure. The first intimations of gay sex in poetry were welcomed ecstatically by gay readers. But more and more disclosure becomes necessary to sustain the high. So gay sex in poetry became more and more graphic. And the range of sexual practice described was extended. I guess the lingering pockets of self-hatred are helped by the public airing of actions never before written about. That can be healing. BUT: Is it a quality of art? This is only a subhead of the question of how much the value of art consists in subject matter. Poems are the most intense test case of the question; because after all the tabooes could be dealt with just as well in prose. Or could they?Alfred Cornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08120701708290725662noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-46836085020212616782008-02-26T16:54:00.000-06:002008-02-26T16:54:00.000-06:00Steve,Good God! I am starting to agree with you. I...Steve,<BR/><BR/>Good God! I am starting to agree with you. I need to go and lie down... I shall go and read some Robert Duncan for massage :)(Actually, I never thought you dishonest. You said you "disagreed with me." I said I did not know what you disagreed with and could not comment consequently). I do understand "tortured ambivalence" elsewhere: mine is Pound. Best wishes, E.A.H.https://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-86728383272301725962008-02-26T15:31:00.000-06:002008-02-26T15:31:00.000-06:00Hi,I think you're smart and if you look back at my...Hi,<BR/><BR/>I think you're smart and if you look back at my initial post to you, I did say to you that I liked your posts (for my own self-serving reasons and for not). But then you intepreted that at insincere. I have many tragic flaws: insincerity is not one of them.<BR/><BR/>And let me say this about tortured ambivalence, I find myself most tortured about poets that I do respect, if I don't respect them, I don't read them and don't care. (As for gay poets, I think Bidart and Powell are deities and I have no ambivalence toward them.)<BR/><BR/>All I'm asking is for this, and I'm using Brian Teare's wondeful post as a vehicle for this: I think that gay poets are marginalized, and that marginalization causes us to be afraid of being critical of one another, that if you interrogate or put pressure on someone who is considered untouchable, beyond criticism: like Doty or Gunn, you are seen as being disloyal, stupid, or worse of all, I suppose having bad taste. And I think one can charge Gunn with not creating an honorable ethics of talking to the dead. And while Doty was a touchstone for me (I love his music and ear), I think that lately, his work is becoming self-parodic and he's repeating himself in ways that reek of class privildge (who cares about his middle-class perks) in a way that he is failing to put pressure on in terms of content and/or form. He can write about his house and dog and allt hat stuff but make it interesting. He needs to do something new. I'm much more interested in young poets that he supports (like James Allen Hall who's new book has so many good poems including one that deals with race that I originally read in Triquartely.)<BR/><BR/>One of the wonderful things that blogs like Reginald's does is give insignificant, fatass writers like myself a chance to give his opinion in a forum where it is read by other gay male poets.<BR/><BR/>I don't have many gay male friends. Most of my friends are heterosexual and married and with kids. Reginald's blog gives me a chance to talk to people who I never met and will never meet, and hopefully I can learn from, as I did in Brian Teare's and Aaron Smith's posts in particular.<BR/><BR/>Fortunately, for me I am an insignificant poet so I can say stuff publicly knowing no one can do damage to me because fame and awards and money is a non-issue. Other gay American poets have a lot more to risk because they are talented and have significant careers.<BR/><BR/><BR/>SteveSteve Fellnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12181155226508233319noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-57041412076381666052008-02-26T14:40:00.000-06:002008-02-26T14:40:00.000-06:00Dear Steve,I am not trying to bait you about your ...Dear Steve,<BR/>I am not trying to bait you about your work. If you had read the internet debates on gay poetry recently, you would have noticed that I actually defended your work against a personal attack, from someone who described your critical attitude as a gay poet (whatever that is...) as "full of self-hatred". As Pound might have said, "Hang it all, Steve Fellner, your Thom Gunn and my Thom Gunn." My reference to your poems was simple: all poets have limitations. Is there any sense in going in this direction? I think about Colm Toibin's attack on Doty for a lack of imagination. In truth, the attack only showed Toibin's lack of imagination as a reader of poetry. Clearly, you do have a "tormented" relationship towards Gunn. I do not. That is all there is to it. Yes, Gunn did say some unkind things in his lifetime. Don't we all? But generally, Gunn was one of the most generous of critics, even towards those who despised him for his homosexuality (such as Donald Davie). I understand what you object to as regards elegy and pathos, but I do not sense this necromantic strain in Gunn. Perhaps, I am wrong. Personally, I do not think so. We have to agree to disagree. My final response would be that I never set out to uphold Gunn as a hero of gay poetry...that is something you have introduced to shoot down. And done so very well. I suspect also that we read Gunn from different sides of the pond. As an Anglo-American poet, Gunn was aware of the Scylla and Charybdis nature of his existence. From an English point-of-view, I have no problem with Gunn's diction. And to return to my original comments which were to a debate, not to Steve Fellner, I do not think that Gunn renounced "gay" in favour of "poetry" or placed one above the other. I feel that he simply saw both as part of a continuum, like landscape, through which his mind might feel.A.H.https://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-30533404506140153572008-02-26T09:35:00.000-06:002008-02-26T09:35:00.000-06:00Dear Eshuneutics and Steve,I'm glad that this post...Dear Eshuneutics and Steve,<BR/><BR/>I'm glad that this post is stirring such lively debate. But I ask you please to remain civil and to keep the argument on the level of ideas. There is no place on this blog for personal attacks, including mean-spirited insinuations.<BR/><BR/>There are enough forces out there in the world trying to tear us down without our tearing down each other.<BR/><BR/>Thanks again for reading and commenting.<BR/><BR/>peace and poetry,<BR/><BR/>ReginaldReginald Shepherdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11965170916626482963noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-37664653709740701422008-02-26T08:28:00.000-06:002008-02-26T08:28:00.000-06:00Hi,How can I resist a challenge from one of my eld...Hi,<BR/><BR/>How can I resist a challenge from one of my elders? Although I myself am ancient, I have some energy so I'll do my best to address a few particular issues just so you know I'm not abandoning me and to reward your energetic replies. :)<BR/><BR/>First, I did address other issues other than the stats. For example, your ostensible praise of his objectivity which I see as false. I see how his rigid formal choices and flat diction (which I mean descriptive, not necessaily critically) could cause one ot think that. But I think it's an incorrect analysis. There are a number of odes in that final section of the book, and I do argue that when writes to the dead, one has a responsibility to truly address them and not hurt them (as one would expect one to treat the living.) To make them relive their physical demise is redundant and mean , and some of those poems (at least 2 do just that.) I personally think gay people have a SPIRITTUAL AND POLITICAL repsonsibility to talk to the dead with care and directness.<BR/><BR/>His choice to make the dead relive their experience seems to me disingenuous and inauthentic and harmful (to the living and the dead.) It seems to me to be creating pathos ina n undeserved way.<BR/><BR/>I would also prefer not to talk about my own insignficant, irrelevant work in this blog. Thom Gunn and his poems and my reactions to the poems are the issue not my stuff. Stop trying to bait me cheaply.<BR/><BR/>Steve Fellner<BR/><BR/>P.S. You keep bringing up these interview with hims. I've read interviews and in fact one of them Gunn makes fun of poetry slams quite unkindly and ignorantly. That it affirms autobiographical poetry. At the same time, Boss Cupid (which I think is a very weak book) has a poem (can't remember the name) which unself reflectively creates an incesst narrative which is dull in terms of cotnent and form. He needs some self-reflection.<BR/><BR/>P.P.S. I happen to like Thom Gunn. I just think he has some limitations and instead of valoring the same old gay poets (ie Mark Doty for instance) we need to look at some other ones that are much more interesting and relevant, like D.A. Powell, Dennis Cooper, Rigoberto Gonzalez etc. etc. etc.Steve Fellnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12181155226508233319noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-68788484379964220622008-02-26T01:12:00.000-06:002008-02-26T01:12:00.000-06:00Dear Steve, what an odd comparison to start with, ...Dear Steve, what an odd comparison to start with, it sounds like something from your Cavafy book. I don't want to talk? You threw a whole mass of questions in my direction. I answered them. There is no "misdirected anger" in my reply. My replies are direct and I have no interest in getting angry with anyone in the margins of someone's else's respected blog. I am too old to brawl drunkenly in the gutter whilst inebriated with poetry criticism. You are right that I don't paraphrase you correctly: I prefer to answer exactly what you say. I am aware that not all of The Man with Night Sweats deals with AIDs...the AIDS poems constitute a third of the volume. My point was, and still is, that the poems are not some sort of emotional memoir, that the 17 AIDS poems are little different from the tone of the whole volume (not personal outpourings, Romantic, confessional odes), and of the 17 final poems (which pick up the theme of "The Great Dejection" in a different, less English key)all preserve a certain distance. As for the rest, well I suggest you "let it go" since you don't really have an answer and prefer to locate diffidence in me. Great theories and accusations are two-a-penny in the world of academia.A.H.https://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-88094375660435115252008-02-25T17:40:00.000-06:002008-02-25T17:40:00.000-06:00Hi,When I was younger and thinner (I was never att...Hi,<BR/><BR/>When I was younger and thinner (I was never attractive as I am not now), I would g ony gay.com and send phony pictures of myself (I'd send photos of good looking guys) in an attempt to lure them to my house and fool around.<BR/><BR/>Whenever they came over, most of them left, but some very good looking guys had fun with me because they made the drive and what the heck.<BR/><BR/>Once inawhile someone got so angry, and I didn't understnad why, all I wanted to do is have fun.<BR/><BR/>Your post reminds me of one of those angry guys.<BR/><BR/>I won't respond to it other than you have a lot of misdirected anger, so much so, you don't paraphrase me correctly.<BR/><BR/>And remember, hon, The Man With Night Sweats is not all AIDS elegies, those are tucked in at the end, so at least get your stats right.<BR/><BR/>The rest I'll let go since you don't really want to talk. I'm doing this because I have plenty of time to waste in my life and this seemed as good as any.<BR/><BR/>Love,<BR/>SteveSteve Fellnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12181155226508233319noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-25946112393601893392008-02-25T17:26:00.000-06:002008-02-25T17:26:00.000-06:00Interesting, Steve Fellner. As I don’t know what c...Interesting, Steve Fellner. As I don’t know what comments you’ve read on what blogs, I’m not sure that I can respond to this opening. <BR/><BR/>I remember an interview that Gunn gave in the UK. In this, he spoke about a sense of isolation, an awareness that so much of poetry (written by poets who were gay) came from a direct encounter with AIDs. He expressed a kind of “guilt” that somehow (especially given his worship of the sexual renaissance in the USA) he had escaped. So, he said, he wrote detached from that Plague, in that sense. His poetry in The Man with Night Sweats is not an AIDs memoir, the diary of a relationship… or a record of his own dying…it is more a remembrance of a culture sensed through individual encounters. Compare his collection with other volumes of the time and there is a noticeable departure.<BR/><BR/>Out of 48 poems in The Man with Nights Sweats, 7 are intimately connected to individuals (according to Gunn, himself). Not a lot is it? And it should also be noted that Gunn attributes no poem directly to them; only indirectly in “Acknowledgements and Notes”. In others words, Gunn allows his poems to stand in the abstract, not personally. I believe I said that Gunn wrote with an Augustan sense, meaning: with an eye for an ethos in which individuals played symbolic roles. Interestingly, he did not return to his Renaissance routes and make his 1992 volume a sort of Journal of the Plague Year full of Shakespearean horror.<BR/><BR/>I am slightly puzzled about your formal choices argument. I don’t sense any real departure in The Man with Nights Sweat from the evolvement of Gunn. All poets fall under the spell of others. So, yes Gunn was influenced by Yvor Winters. But I don’t think that there was any appeal to Yvor Winters as regards Man with Night Sweats (which is the only work I referred to). He had after all been dead since 1968. I must say that I think you are fundamentally wrong to imply that Gunn’s structural choices were limited by his publishers: Faber. Gunn’s choices of form were very much Gunn’s, like them or not; I happen to like them and believe he was a great technician. I respect that fact that you do not.<BR/><BR/>In what way was Gunn trying to “elicit pathos from the literary establishment”? What establishment? UK? USA? It is interesting that you call Gunn an “icon”. He is not so in the UK, Indeed, his work has been formally assessed, without panic, as a poet (not gay poet) for a long time. I think of the work of Michael Schmidt. Guess you describe an American phenomenon. I take it, given your reference to Doty and Howard, you have been reading the essay on The Gay Sublime—a rather daft piece in my opinion, that is out-of-date and hardly touches the later work of Doty, who, yes, has “limitations”, but has written some significant poems, technically and emotionally. Does Steve Fellner have “limitations”? Suppose, I ought to look!A.H.https://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-1436793304311927992008-02-25T17:20:00.000-06:002008-02-25T17:20:00.000-06:00This comment has been removed by the author.A.H.https://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-81038741484320965102008-02-25T15:40:00.000-06:002008-02-25T15:40:00.000-06:00Hi eshuneutics,I've read your reactions to things ...Hi eshuneutics,<BR/><BR/>I've read your reactions to things on a variety of blogs, and I find them engaging, even if I disagree with them as I do here.<BR/><BR/>What do you mean that Gunn wrote anti-AIDS memoir poetry, and that his writing was very balanced, detached???<BR/><BR/>Detached? A good number of them odes, and a lot of those odes were written to specific people. He;s aware of his audience in those poems and is anything but detached. Yes, the rhyme, formalness of the poems may PRETEND to be so, but I would argue those formal choices are partly (And I do mean partly, so don't panic) the result of a gay poet trying to appeal to certain teachers (Yvor Winters), institutions (look at who published his books at the time and what other verse they were publishing).<BR/><BR/>I have a tortured ambivalence toward Thom Gunn. I think sometimes he is unkind to the dead. In one of his poems, an ode to someone who has died, he recounts the graphic nature of his death. Why do that? The dead know how they died; they don't need it retold to them. It seemed gratutious and disingeuous: who did he really want to share those details with since the dead already knows those details, after all they lived them?<BR/><BR/>I would claim he was trying to elicit pathos from the literary establishment that is questionaly unethical to say the least.<BR/><BR/>This isn't to say that I don't liek Thom Gunn or his poetry but I think gay poets need to stop unequivally praising everything he does. He needs to be reasssesed formally and politically. Just like other icons who you can't seem to interrogate without people panicking. Like Mark Doty or Richard Howard. I respect these poets, but they have their fair share of limitations.<BR/><BR/>Steve FellnerSteve Fellnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12181155226508233319noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-15524882224114475952008-02-24T15:02:00.000-06:002008-02-24T15:02:00.000-06:00As a further thought, it is perhaps relevant that ...As a further thought, it is perhaps relevant that Gunn viewed himself as outside gay poetry. So much of gay poetry was AIDs memoir at the time that his return to the poetical fold--"The Man with Night Sweats"--was a kind of anti-AIDs memoir. He was, in that volume, writing a different kind of gay poetry: one that responded in a very balanced, detached, Augustan manner. He wasn't placing gay above poet or poet above gay, but allowing the two to co-exist, to see what happened.A.H.https://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-68392047770004485572008-02-24T14:54:00.000-06:002008-02-24T14:54:00.000-06:00“To be a poet is more important than to be a gay p...“To be a poet is more important than to be a gay poet.”<BR/><BR/>This whole essay is intigruing. I feel that something is happening here that is transformative. Gunn's statement is an odd one. He knew well that if he had stayed in the UK, he would not have been a truthful poet. If being a poet was all that mattered, then he could have stayed this side of the pond, alluding to his gay train/strain of thought. His move to the USA was precisely so that he could be a gay poet and he defended Duncan fiercely for just this. Probably, Gunn never re-iterated this view because he knew his life did not bear it out.A.H.https://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-20682106779017276352008-02-22T14:15:00.000-06:002008-02-22T14:15:00.000-06:00Hi Brian,I enjoyed your post. I was in graduate s...Hi Brian,<BR/><BR/>I enjoyed your post. I was in graduate school in Alabama when you were still an undergraduate and you were already then writing poems better than all of us.<BR/><BR/>Do publicize when you publish your article about Thom Gunn. A couple of years ago I published an essay on Thom Gunn in a lit mag which focused on my tortured ambivalence of his work (I find The Man with Night Sweats to be surprisingly politically conservative and sexphobic in some ways). I'd be curious to read what you have to say.<BR/><BR/>With much respect,<BR/>Steve FellnerSteve Fellnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00747531204940737604noreply@blogger.com