Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics, Part Five

I am now posting the last of the presentations from my AWP panel on gay male poetry post politics. Like Aaron Smith, Brian Teare questions the idea and the desirability of being "post" identity politics, though he frames his critique in terms of the possibilities gay liberation held out of a new kind of community. He also writes of the problematic, if not vexed, relationship of the words "gay" and "poetry," largely through an exploration of the friendship between Robert Duncan and Thom Gunn, two poets often seen as opposites on the poetic spectrum, and of Thom Gunn's struggle to reconcile being a poet and being a gay poet, or at least being a poet who is gay. For Gunn, being gay and being a poet had the same source, and yet vexed each other in proximity, but finally he found a way to reconcile them. I think readers will find Brian's thoughts very stimulating and even moving.

And now, here's Brian Teare.


“I can disown no link of this chain from my conscience”: Thom Gunn, Robert Duncan & the Inheritance of Gay Poetry

Can the epithet “gay male poet” signify in a “post-identity” discourse? If we were to accept the suggestion that ours is an art born during an era post-identity politics, should we also no longer be “gay poets,” but rather poets, unqualified by any marker of our participation in a specific sociopolitical realm? If we were to accept it, would we count that as achievement? Or would it be a loss? Would it signal the assimilation our Gay Liberation forbears deeply did not want? I mean: would accepting “post-identity” status imply an end to gay politics as it has lived in and informed contemporary poetry and poetics?

All in all, the title of our panel suggests a chain of contradictions; given the useful conversation they generate, I’d like to suggest we embrace these contradictions fully. After all, the Gay Lib and activist models from which identity politics emerged could almost be said to be contradicted by the institutional structure of the academy: roughly speaking, the former aims to unite a community by active participation in a common discourse aimed at widespread change, while the latter aims to individuate a community by initiation into a common discourse aimed at changing each student. As a product of both activist and academic pedagogies, I’m as loath to abandon one for the other as I am to privilege one over the other.

Indeed, to embrace this contradiction means: I don’t think identity politics is or should be a theoretical project we have finished with. At the same time, of course it should be critiqued. Of course we could and should do better. Of course our vision of justice is inadequate to the growing economic and legal inequities of our increasingly globalized times. Of course we need to rethink the shape and contours of our relationships with each other, both in and outside our communities, in and outside of our nations. And thus it goes without saying that I think the gay community at large has given up far too early on the wide-reaching implications of a community-minded politics.

I’m particularly fired up about this topic because I’ve spent the past eight months researching and writing an essay about Thom Gunn and his development as a gay poet, and a large part of the essay is taken up by his relationship to Robert Duncan, who was a crucial mentor in his development as a gay man and as a poet. About this relationship— which might seem unlikely to some whose notions of literary lineage and aesthetic camps is conservative—I have a little story.

In later life Gunn relished recounting what happened when Elizabeth Bishop lived in San Francisco for a year—1969—and during that time met Robert Duncan: “They got on terrifically well,” he tells Christopher Hennessy, “They would talk and gossip together and laugh” (Outside the Lines 18). Obviously delighted each time he relates the story of what is supposed to seem like an unlikely friendship—“the poetics behind their two projects were fundamentally opposed in a way that their personalities were not”—Gunn spins it wittily, subsequent accounts differing only in the ratio of summary to scene and specificity of detail (Shelf Life 129). In one version Bishop baked Duncan a wicked batch of pot cookies “because he didn’t know how to inhale” and “both afterwards described with glee” how, as a consequence of her recipe, he’d been “reduced…to a mass of giggles on the carpet” (ibid.). In others, Gunn “asked each of them separately what they thought of the other’s poetry, and each of them said the same thing: ‘Oh I can’t read it. It means nothing to me at all’” (Hennessy 18). However, each version is in fact pretense, a disguise for a pointedly didactic parable concerning “literary reputation” and tradition, and the moral Gunn draws from it never varies: “You do not have to choose between Bishop and Duncan any more than you have to choose between William Blake and Samuel Johnson” (Shelf Life 130).

It follows from Gunn’s example that we do not have to choose between gay identity and poetry any more than we have to choose between Mark Doty and John Ashbery, Essex Hemphill and Carl Phillips. However, doing this research taught me a surprising fact about myself: though I had, for all intensive purposes, figured out gay identity in relationship to my own life and writing, when it came time to write about gay poetry, a strange thing happened: I wrote one third of the essay, and then found myself blocked. The words “gay” and “poetry,” when put next to one another, simply canceled each other out. This is the paragraph that blocked me:

“How and why does conflict arise when ‘gay’ and ‘poetry’ are made to stand together in twentieth and twenty-first century literary critical discourse? Even now, the presence of ‘gay’ and ‘poetry’ together suggests a paradox: for at its most descriptive, ‘gay’ is neither apolitical, ahistorical nor morally neutral, even as, at its most politicized, ‘poetry’ can never not refer to specific traditions whose tropes and values are paradoxically alleged to transcend historical time. Even if they are bound as much to upholding cultural norms and values as they are to underwriting large historical shifts and flux, even if these terms often come to represent ideological stress points within literary critical discourse, their presence together still has the power to unsettle what assumptions we hold both about what it means to write and read poetry and what constitutes gay identity. In fact, what’s most interesting about the proximity of ‘gay’ to ‘poetry’ is how each must shift definition to accommodate the other.”

To unblock myself, I went to the Bancroft Library at UC-Berkeley in order to read Gunn’s notebooks. I was hoping for a little posthumous mentoring, and strangely, I received exactly what I’d hoped for: I found that Gunn had once asked himself the very same questions I was asking, and though his conclusions naturally differed from my own, I learned from his example. Here’s the draft of an essay he wrote on May 4th in 1980:

"Very few poets have ever set out to be Gay Poets. The dedication of poets is a large one, perhaps one of the most enormous—as our subject matter we aim at nothing less than everything and the idea of our initial dedication settling for anything less…

"Why settle for part of the world when you can lay claim to the whole of it? When I started writing poetry I wanted to be Shakespeare, and from my reading of the lives of poets I don’t think the ambition is an uncommon one./Of course, I rationally knew it was unlikely I could be Shakespeare, but I wanted the best, and to have accepted a smaller ambition would have been to want less than the best. By now I know that I will never be Shakespeare, but I also know that I can be more than one kind of poet. A career, if it is to be a happy one, can be a series of breakthroughs into fresh territories, and to limit oneself permanently to one style or subject matter for more than one duration of an individual project would be stupid. I am fully aware of the usefulness of literary classification.

"To miss the gay elements in say Marlowe’s or Whitman’s work has resulted in not only unbalanced views of them but in [illegible word] misreadings. but to treat them exclusively as Gay Poets is also unbalanced…"

Remember that this is just a draft—and though he took the essay through several drafts, he never finished it. And though I can’t in all honesty disagree with his basic premise, I do disagree with him when, in another draft he claims, “To be a poet is more important than to be a gay poet.” Given the fact that I don’t want to choose between these identities, I can’t help but bristle at his willingness to judge. However, he does continue to think about this subject, and in another, undated journal entry from his Sept 28, 1981-Oct, 1983 notebook, points to an essential contradiction within his own experience, one that in fact mirrored the one that had brought my own essay to a halt:

"Why is my impulse to write poetry so closely connected—
so much a part of—my sexual impulse? When I feel one, I
feel something very similar to the other. I don’t like this too
much—I mean I like it somewhat, but I feel it necessary
sometimes to steer my energy into nonsexual subjects almost
by an act of will, since I don’t believe all the important parts
of life are sexual. And when I succeed in doing so, I’m quite
often successful. Yet it does, even then, derive from an energy
that is sexual energy—it’s quite the same kind of concentrated
excitement that lights up everything in a limited area (as a flash-
light lights up everything in the circle it makes).

I wonder where this comes from…I wonder how many
other poets this happens to…It’s my limitation."

I am moved by the juxtaposition of these two journal entries, carrying within them as they do one of the same contradictions we’re addressing in this panel. Gunn, at this point in his life, was still very much wrestling with yoking gay and poetry together, though he’d already published Jack Straw’s Castle and given an interview to The Advocate and marched in Gay Pride Parades and taken a whole lot of acid. And again, I’d say that his academic training at Stanford with Yvor Winters and at Cambridge with F.R. Leavis left him completely unprepared to integrate into his poetry what he learned from Gay Liberation.

*

Enter Robert Duncan, who became most important for Gunn in the late ‘60s. He credited Duncan with helping him expand his sense of what could be accomplished in poetry; he credited Duncan with practically inventing a way of writing about modern homosexuality, publishing as he did the ground-breaking essay “The Homosexual in Society” in 1944 in the journal Politics and risking a great deal in the process. His mentoring, both as a poet and a gay man, helped Gunn to open up his neoclassical forms so that they could include direct street experience, sexual aspects of the movement itself—Gunn himself later said so. Though it should be noted that this passage from “Homosexuality in Robert Duncan’s Poetry”—an essay written in the late ‘70s—does still include a kind of assimilationist thinking that Gunn would after the AIDS epidemic drop from his rhetoric, it gives us a good idea of how useful Duncan’s example was for Gunn:

"Duncan started with little modern American precedent for
speaking openly about homosexuality. There is now a way
of speaking about it, and we may thank Duncan’s continued
example more than any other that it is not a specialized speech,
it is not separated from the heterosexual’s tradition. It is due
more to Duncan than to any other single poet that modern
American poetry, in all its inclusiveness, can deal with overtly
homosexual material so much as a matter of course—not as
something perverse or eccentric or morbid, but as evidence
of the many available ways in which people love or fail to love."

(The Occasions of Poetry 134)

For Gunn and Duncan—born in 1929 and 1919 respectively—did find Gay Lib a shock. As Duncan reports in an interview:

At the beginning of the gay liberation readings, Thom Gunn
and I were sitting there, and the new writers were reading
poems that were hair-raising; and Thom said, “I feel so old-
fashioned and embarrassed, I don’t mention anything but
love.” (Bernstein 108-9)

Indeed, throughout the ‘70s they both clung to a more universal notion of poetry; and though Gunn would later revise his thinking, this definition of poetry came for Duncan at the expense of a more expansive sense of community. Nonetheless, this fact is useful; it illuminates the very contradiction of our panel, and helps us answer the questions with which I opened this talk. As Bruce Boone writes in an essay called “Robert Duncan & Gay Community: A Reflection”:

"Is it possible, one wonders, without rolling back advances for gays in the form of rights, social cohesiveness and a greater, earned sense of self-esteem—to push out the boundaries of our identification so they can apply less narrowly, more generally? ...the corollary for gays: how to go beyond separatism without negating its advances?" (81)

I’d suggest that this is the inheritance left the twenty-first century gay poet by the gay poets of the twentieth. It suggests not the impasse I came to in my thinking, but rather a wider range of possible relationships to history. It implies that though poets like Gunn and Duncan were bound up in the historical categories that defined the times and communities in which they lived, they were not necessarily bound by them. Interested in literary and sexual communities and ways to construct and sustain them, yet often tangential to prevailing political and/or literary ideologies, they chose to move differently through history.

But I’d like to end this talk at another point in Gunn’s journey. It is 1989. He has just finished writing The Man with Night Sweats. He has survived the opening decade of AIDS, though most of his friends did not. Duncan has died of kidney failure. In short: his community has disappeared around him. And yet what rises out of this experience for Gunn is an altered sense of the value of community and a no-longer ambivalent commitment to gay poetics. Here’s a notebook entry from the summer of that year:

"july 2

The next book to be about my idea of aliveness—not of getting on with life, mostly, but of the intensity of lives in past and in present. The gay revolution—its essential subversiveness & emphasis on the individual—to be clarified, if I can, by instance and anecdote, all the more in that so many of those who have been a part of it are dead and will die soon. If we are a dwindling minority, all the more reason to state its values, to emphasize the libertarian aspects, the euphoria, and the way we have tried to “make it up as we go along”…

"The tragedy of loss—which has been inevitable anyway, though who would have dreamed so dramatically—is so great because of the essential optimism of the enterprise…The possibility—what is sketched out at the end of the sixties and embodied in the seventies is still alive, and it is up to me to record it, as well as I can. I would like to be able to address such subjects as: the Parades, the same-sex union as a (unsolemnized) marriage, bathhouses, the Castro, gay political power, etc. I am not good at dealing with such straightforward didacticism, and will probably have to do what I can indirectly as heretofore, but I’d like to…"

What hits me hardest about this entry is that, while it clearly articulates the aesthetic values that Duncan stood for—subversion, improvisation—there is room both for what Gunn’s relationship to Duncan evoked—subversion as a furthering of tradition—and his own extension of the form of that relationship toward others, the sense of gay community and sexuality being “Our Dionysian experiment,” as he calls it elsewhere. This is the mature thinking that prepares Gunn to write the deep gossip of Boss Cupid, and it serves as a grand summation of his evolution. It’s also the thinking that so beautifully and simply resolves many of the conflicts in suspension for Gunn since 1980, when he attempted to write his essay addressing the contradiction of being a gay poet: “To be a poet is more important than to be a gay poet.” It’s not that in 1989 he might not still in some small sense agree with that statement, but that the paradox, the tension between “gay” and “poet” simply disappears by virtue of his lived experience. After his fruitful, reciprocal decades-long relationship with Duncan and the communal devastation of AIDS, his experience renders the question academic, suggesting that perhaps some conflicts in value might only get resolved off the page, and that Gunn in the end accepted that, when struck full force by the passage of time, when mired in its radically relational context, the thing to do is give—and give way to others.


Works Cited

Bernstein, Michael André and Burton Hatlen. “Interview with Robert Duncan.” Sagetrieb. 4.2 & 3 (Fall/Winter 1985): 87-135.

Boone, Bruce. “Robert Duncan and Gay Community: A Reflection.” Ironwood. 11.2 (Fall 1983): 66-82.

Gunn, Thom. The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography. London: Faber and Faber, 1982.

__________. Poetry notebooks. BANC MSS 87/1. The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

__________. Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs and an Interview. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.

Hennessy, Christopher. Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics, Part Four

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics, Part Three

As promised, I am continuing to post presentations from my AWP panel of the same title, in neutrally alphabetical order. Christopher Hennessy's piece presented a dialogue if not a polyphony of gay male poetic voices all addressing the question of what gay poety is and what it can or should do. Brad Richard's presentation questions the question itself, wondering whether there is such a thing as gay poetry and whether and why being gay and writing poems (including writing poems about guys) constitutes being a "gay poet," writing "gay poetry." As he wrote me before the panel, "I think the main thing I've learned from this is how little identity politics, from a gay perspective, has really meant to me, even when I've written 'gay' poems. I'm interested in painting, war, and guys--but I couldn't just say that." So I will say it for him, via ventriloquism.

Brad's presentation ends with a beautiful poem on a painting by Thomas Eakins, which he discusses in his piece. However, the poem is a full-page composition, and I have no idea how to reproduce its formatting in Blogger. It is integral to his piece and so I must reproduce it, but please note that the original is written in stepped-down triplets loosely corresponding to William Carlos Williams' triadic foot as used in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," among many other later poems.

And now, my good friend Brad Richard.


“The Burden of Connectedness”: A Few Remarks on Identity, Poetry and Possibility

In an interview, the artist Paul Chan has talked about what he calls our shared “burden of connectedness,” a phrase I find interesting, although, as I think you’ll see, I want to pursue some connotations he may not necessarily have had in mind, connotations relating to identity and poetry. Chan has in mind our cultural and political connectedness in a world in which much of our experience occurs through mass media. For him, this entails a responsibility to all things, past and present, to which the media connect us. He calls this a terrible burden, because we have to find ways to yield to this connectedness without becoming desensitized by it; furthermore, he believes that we inevitably end up trying to protect ourselves from the burden, in our attempts to escape from it, whether through analysis or fantasy. But if I understand him correctly, art is one way of dealing with the burden, of being sensitive to it in a way that creates “a space for the kind of not-knowingness that holds the promise of something to come.”

For our purposes, I’m interested in considering identity as both difference and connection, or as connection through difference. Part of the burden of identity, then, is that it allows me to experience connections and similarities while also making me aware of difference. And if I choose to take identity into consideration when making or experiencing art, then it would seem to be both part of the burden and a way of being sensitive to the burden, of sharing and bearing it. But what of the differences to which I also know I am connected? Aren’t they also part of the burden I’m taking up in writing or reading a poem? In that case, identity may have to yield to that vital not-knowingness Chan speaks of, to the extent of not taking itself for granted, of questioning itself and allowing itself to be questioned in the context of connections, of something to come, of possibility. And in that case, identity may always be post, always after, always subsequent to—and also, because of our connectedness, always antecedent to that which it has not yet become. To make a rather obvious connection, “Je est un autre,” and that other, to me at least, is possibility.

At this point, I should confess that I have never felt bound to or, if you’ll pardon me, felt I identified with identity politics or poetics. I’m very aware of the ways in which being gay has shaped my perceptions, interests, and politics, but, particularly as a poet, I’ve always been more interested in what is possible than in what is—even if what is possible is that which is also past. This brings me back to the word post, which, of all the words in the title of this panel, is the one with which I most strongly identify, as it denotes both an historical acknowledgment and a sense of possibility, factors that I find playing ever larger roles in my own work. For example: a few years ago, I became obsessed with a painting from 1885 by Thomas Eakins, called Swimming. At first, I was obsessed with it because I couldn’t decide what it meant, or if I even liked it. In it, six nude men and a dog are swimming or sunning themselves near a rock ledge, somewhere in an idyllic America. Surely I felt connected to the subject—but what exactly was the subject? And what connections was I bringing to it? The more I looked, the more I felt a burden of connectedness that was also alienating me, making me different from what I saw. As I spent more time with it, and researched it and began writing about it, I realized, in part, that I had been trying to make the painting mean something in terms of myself, of my own experience and identity. Eventually, as I learned and imagined more about the painting and the men in it, I yielded to the burdens I discovered—burdens of war, democracy, desire, art, poetry, and history. Here, then, is the middle section, “Is it democratic?” from “Three Essays on Swimming.”


2. Is it democratic?


Listen: you won’t hear hammers slung on steel,
or calls of stevedores at the docks;
no bickering in market stalls,

the ragman’s plaint, the newsboy’s cry,
trolley’s bell, cop’s whistle, screams
of a child crushed by carriage wheels.

And no gunsmoke, no drumtaps:
it’s twenty years since the war.
Here, the air is fresh, and no noise

distracts these men, these citizens,
from bathing in freedom
imagined at an abandoned mill.

Even the diver—George Reynolds,
9th New York Cavalry Regiment,
Congressional Medal of Honor

for taking Virginia’s flag at Opequon—
dives unheard, silence the anthem
uniting these isolatos.


• • •


June 18, 1885: two hundred fourteen crates
arrive at Bedloe Island in New York,
Liberty as yet unassembled.

Erect, she will be robed and crowned,
bearing her torch and message;
millions will crawl inside her

as she stares across the Atlantic.
Now watch as Jesse Godley turns
his bright body away, face in shadow

as he calls our gaze to the picture plane
and no farther, staring where the diver’s
body shatters shade and reflection.

Or will, soon enough: composed,
so long as we look, their bodies’
arc holds them in place, in a place

not paradise, not even home,
barely natural, their freedom
imagined in a place abandoned.


• • •


Man-made, the foundation of layered rocks,
the stream widened by a dam,
the pigments ground and blended,

the idea that they were naked
for us to look at them now,
if we like, if we let ourselves

believe we really see them
as they meant to be seen.
Or as we mean to see them,

wanting to watch Laurie’s hand
touch Jesse’s thigh, feel Ben
reach up to Laurie, as if touch

would connect us, would signify
noble kratos and loving demos,
akin to daiomai, “I divide.”

—Or: it’s an act, every work of art
an act that excludes, but holds us
watching, with them all summer.


• • •


“very democratic, but all decent behaving” :
Whitman, watching “squads of boys”
bathing by the Harlem River,

“glittering drops sparkling,” “the dark
green shadow of the hills,” boys laughing
and diving, their “movements, postures,

ahead of any sculpture.” Whitman watching,
Whitman listening, democratizing,
sits alone “under an old cedar

half way up the hill,” believes his boys,
“[a] peculiar and pretty carnival,”
rehearse for him an art unknown,

figured in their live, loud bodies.
Chaste motifs of an August day,
echoes of the poet’s artifice

assembled, whose bodies hold
their silence together.
Listen:

Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics, Part Two

As I wrote in my earlier post, I will be posting the presentations that my panelists gave at the recent AWP conferenc. The presentations and the discussion after the panel made me question some of my positions about identity politics and poetry, so besides the general opportunity to hear some very smart and talented gay male poets discuss their reviews on the issue, it really stimulated and challenged my own thought, which I found invigorating.

Obeying the law of the alphabet, I will begin with Christopher Hennessy's untitled piece, which started off the conversation on a high note. Once again, I encourage people to check out his blog, ]Outside the Lines[ , which approaches the question of the relationship of identity and creativity from many directions, and never with a sense that the answers are already known.

And now, here are Christopher's remarks:


Gay poet D.A. Powell has pointed out that queer poets are “doubly displaced,” both gay and poet identifiers fixed outside the mainstream. It’s a location poets like Powell fully inhabit and one I’d like to consider today. Powell said, “In the America of the 21st century, the poet is a displaced person. The queer poet, doubly displaced. (Thanks America, for nothing.) If there can be a useful consequence of living as a second-class citizen within this growing empire, it is that the range of possible subjects and forms expands also.”

Let’s think about what the word “dis-placed” means:

1. To move or shift from the usual place or position, especially to force to leave a homeland: millions of refugees who were displaced by the war.
2. To take the place of; supplant.
3. To discharge from an office or position.

Each of these definitions speaks to a loss of power of some kind, but, on the contrary, for gay poets to be ‘displaced’ gives us a perspective and experiences that can, if we hone our craft, strengthen our work. But how ‘displaced’ are we?

When I started to think about what I would say today, I found I kept coming back to the idea of normal as a location, what it means to be ‘normal…what it means to belong to the club, what it means to want to belong--and more importantly for gay artists, what it means to resist that, to proclaim difference rather than to mumble or even pretend normalcy. What do we create outside the borders of normal that we could not create, or would not create, if we were ‘like everyone else’? The key to these questions lie in what aspects of our identity specifically keep us displaced, keep us from being normal. even at a time when homosexuality is losing its stigma. (A hint – it’s the sex, of course. More on this later.) I think these questions are crucial to understanding where we go from here, as it were.

In order to have such a conversation, I’ve ‘brought together’ several of today prominent and promising gay poets to join me in a sort of conversation.

David Trinidad: I guess it's always felt like the things I shouldn't or couldn't say are the things that I must say. For instance, putting one's sexual identity on the line felt like a risky thing to do in the 1970's; it also felt like a necessary thing to do. I think it's still risky, especially since gay poetry has become (since the late 80's) more coded, more conservative, as if it's trying to pass (I think of gay men getting married, raising babies) as straight. I always feel (whether it's true or not) that there's something unacceptable about my poems — they're too gay, too campy, too middle class. And that unacceptability is a big part of what makes my work (I hope) distinct.

CH: I think it’s important David has noted the possibilities gay people now have, the relative safety we enjoy. Are gay poets trying to pass as straight? I’m not sure. We may no longer face persecution, but what about assimilation? I worry that being safe means the risk-taking, the boundary pushing, the edge-exploring will fade. Looking back, I’m thankful for the crucible of growing up gay because I think it’s really affected me, in positive ways, as a writer.

Frank Bidart: To grow up gay in America is to know early that one's existence is fundamentally antithetical to the fictions desperately asserted by institutions that imagine their authority proceeds from God or nature. To know early that one's existence is fundamentally antithetical, period. That's a good start for a writer.

Joan Larkin, co-editor of the anthology Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time: We are not just-like-straights-except-for one-thing. We are different because--often from an early age--many of us experience and see the world differently. Not separately, but distinctly--both the inside story and the outside story. It's often the gay writer who's taking risks for the entire culture. We're really good at that. From early childhood, many of use are faced with situations...we are forced to deal with....One of the daring things we do is write poems. Finding some way to tell the truth is part of staying sane. that's why our poems are often risky. And disturbing.

CH: In the past, we’ve had to create new metaphors, coded our language, disguised our desire, turned to myth and history and art as subjects in our poems when we wanted to talk about our differences--all strategies that refreshed the tradition, I think. And it’s about more than that--it’s about putting us in a position to see the world differently.

Mark Doty: Queerness invites us, every minute of our lives, to question our assumptions about what a man or a woman is, a mother or a father, a citizen; what is desire and what are the institutions we build around it, what does it mean to be desired, or the one doing the desiring? The position of questioning can keep an artist alive. I hope to never lose a liberating degree of distance from conventionality.

Alfred Corn: A contestatory stance: this is a good vantage point for an artist. We can see what the mainstream takes for granted, and we may call those axioms into question. Where there is no conflict or contestation, art is banal. Conflict comes to gay people ready-made, and we have to make use of it, in order not to be overwhelmed by it.

CH: I agree. Of course, it’s not always easy, but I feel like if we have something unique to offer poetry, something that informs our individual voice, whether we want it to or not, we have a responsibility to the poems to utilize it, to understand it. (Understanding that ‘it’ is why I do my interviews!) But as society accepts us more and more, do we risk becoming ‘normal’? I would argue not yet and perhaps never. Because let’s be honest, a big part of what makes us different lies in sex, desire and our relationship to the body, since this is what most explicitly and most fundamentally makes us different. Sure, our love is no better or worse than heterosexual love, our sex and relationships no more or less messy, our right to love and lust no more valid. But because of a history of repression, oppression, and sublimation; because of seeing the body as a site of death and disease for decades after celebrating it as a place of transcendence; because physically we do things that are, shall we say, a creative use of our bodies, because of all of this, gay writers start in what turns out to be a frustrated place--a burning desire to speak about our love and eroticism but not knowing how to do so, and not being sure it’s even safe to do so.

Alfred Corn again: When I contemplate the nature of sex between men, I find a counterpart in the art that gay men produce--a special searing intensity, the DMZ between pleasure and pain, synonyms for which might be "ravishment" or "rapture." Also, the ability to play both sides of the tandem, to understand both entering and being entered. Art has its analogues to these physical / psychological states.

CH: I think part of our work can be to analyze those ‘analogues,’ to understand how our desires get translated in our texts. I like what Alfred says but of course that is only one way our lives, unique and varied as they are and always have been, offer the work. How else might our experience affect our writing?

Carl Morse, co-editor of the Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, talking about the anthology’s poems: Some of these experiences require recasting of the language--since no one has ever talked about them before--and these poets have done a lot of that. Gay and lesbian poetry refreshes the language. So much of this writing gets away from "polarity vocabularies."

CH: I’d like to think that our perspective on sex and desire gives us permission to expand the boundaries of poetry, to push what the lyric, for example, can accomplish. In the Michael Lassell and Elena Georgiou anthology The World in Us, the editors argue that our most important contribution is “the liberation of the libido.”

J.D. McClatchy: Over the centuries, the homosexual temperament has seemed especially suited to engaging the themes of bafflement, secret joys, private perspectives, forbidden paradises, hypocritical conventions, and ecstatic occasions.”

CH: I think it’s important to note that McClatchy says “suited to engaging the themes,’ not just ‘suited to themes.’ So for me, that means our talents lie not only in what we write but how we ‘engage those themes’, that is, how we convey our experiences onto the page. Well-known British poet and author of seminal texts on the history of gay poetry Gregory Woods argues that modern gay poets “have reflected the peculiarity of their social status by adapting correspondingly peculiar linguistic strategies.” For example, in his A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition he explores how gay poets employ paradox. “Once one finds oneself to be para doxa, freed from the ‘logic’ of linguistic common sense and the ‘natural’ urges of the syntax we have been taught, all kinds of poetic dialects struggle to unfurl the tongue."

Our own Brian Teare: Though we often speak of experimentation exclusively in terms of what a poem does with syntax, the line, or the page, there are as many conventions about subject matte--and how we feel about certain subjects--to be tested. For instance, writing a good lyric poem about enjoying anal sex: that too is a resistance, a test of what poetry can do.

CH: I always think of Ginsberg in this respect. I read a review of his books once in which the critic said: “No other writer of his generation defended homosexual desire as a fit subject for poetry as effectively as Ginsberg” and doing so within “a vision of the world in which the asshole could be, rather than a source of shame, something deeply holy.” I think that’s an important function for a poet--turning a subject inside-out, upside down, from shameful to holy. But I wonder if today’s poets are interested in that function, taking advantage of our ability to speak about those experiences that make us different?

Rick Barot: We're now in an amazing moment where artists can describe gay desire without having to camouflage it as something else. That desire can finally be an open subject matter, and this freedom has given us some recent writing that is scary, truthful, beautiful, and profoundly new.

CH: True as that may be, I think with it comes yet another problem, created, perhaps, in part, ironically, because of the levels to which Ginsberg pushed poetry. It’s that a deference to difference often times means that those gay writers who embrace sexuality in their work, depict those elements of our lives explicitly, are forced to worry if we’ll be seen as abandoning the poem’s needs over a “personal” (of god forbid political!) desire to ‘make a statement’. Or maybe that’s just me. Of course, that doesn’t stop us from writing the poems we must!

Our own Aaron Smith: I've felt like being overt/explicit in subject matter in "mainstream" poetry has been an uphill battle. It seems like since the late '80s early '90s there has been such a backlash against confessional poetry that anything narrative, seemingly personal, and/or sexual gets lumped under writing that is just for shock value. The writing is defined by that quality and not assessed for its craft, skill, and overall project. And so many writers are afraid to write personally for fear of being labeled a confessional poet.

CH: I personally hope we continue to embrace our differences as well as our similarities, no matter how post-gay we become. On that note, I’ll give the last words to J.D. McClatchy and Rafael Campo. McClatchy tells us why the difficulties of our history give us urgency and necessity to express our differences.

J.D. McClatchy again: [Speaking about the poets in his anthology of gay love poetry] Because their desires have been deemed dangerous, and their lives made difficult, they place a unique value on true love….Pleasure has been wrung from pain, illumination wrested from bitterness and fear, the moment of transcendence stolen from complacent hours.

CH: And Rafael Campo tells us how the triumph of our tradition gives us the permission and inspiration to write out our lives.

Rafael Campo: I realize that the gay literary aesthetic is one of hope, ultimately, where art is not simply a monument that displaces the truth of our existence, but rather is an insistence that we exist. At once edgily transgressive and universally humane, both painfully fractured and joyously restorative, queer writing is more than its artificial accomplishment in the eyes of critics; it is a document of persistence, an act of beauty, and the very breath and heartbeat of an imaginative and ultimately indomitable people.

Gay Male Poetry: Post Identity Politics?

This will be the first of two posts regarding the panel I chaired at this year's AWP conference (the second that I've attended), which was, like last year's, wonderfully exhilarating and utterly overwhelming. I lead a very isolated life here in Pensacola, so to have the chance to hang out with so many writers was an amazing experience. The trip has practically bankrupted me (I will never stay in a Hilton again), but it was worth it.

As I noted in my previous post, my panel at AWP was called "Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics." The presentations of my panelists made me decide to add a question mark to that title.

This post will present an expanded version of my remarks at the panel. I have asked my panelists to send me copies of their presentations, and a subsequent post will discuss their wonderful contributions to the panel.

1

When I told a friend about this panel, he said, “No one sent me the memo that racism, heterosexism, and class struggle had ended and thus we can now put that silly business [of] the politics of identity behind us.” I told him he should check his mail more regularly, as lots of people have sent out that particular memo.

But in consideration of his quizzical response, I’d like to emphasize that the “post” in “post-identity politics” doesn’t mean “We’re over all that now,” though there are various people who do say such things. It just means that gay identity politics has happened, more than once and in more than one form (gay liberation, gay civil rights, Queer Nation, just plain queer). My friend also asked, "What does post-identity politics mean?" That’s one of the questions this panel is intended to address if not answer: Where are we and what do we do, what (or who) are we doing, now?

2

A large part of gay identity, at least for men of a certain age, and for men who didn’t grow up in major metropolitan areas (or did but were too shy, awkward, repressed, or just too young to strike out on their own in the big city), has been the product of books and magazines. My gay identity was formed by books like C.A. Tripp’s The Homosexual Matrix, Dennis Altman’s Homosexual Oppression and Liberation, an anthology called Out of the Closets (which included photos of men dancing together in a bathhouse! wearing just towels!), and another called Lavender Culture. And by issues of Blueboy and Playguy I bought on the sly during my ninth-grade lunch hours. For me, the gay world was a world of words and pictures in glossy magazines.

Gay male literature may be divided into pre-Stonewall riots and post-Stonewall riots or, to put in another way, closeted (or at least taking the closet as a given) or uncloseted (or at least informed by the realization that the closet door had been opened). Despite the presence of predecessors such as Robert Duncan, James Merrill, Frank O’Hara, and even Walt Whitman, the emergence of openly gay male poetry is concurrent with the emergence of the gay liberation movement in the late Nineteen Sixties and early Nineteen Seventies. Such poetry was dedicated to the affirmation and celebration of a newly articulate gay male identity in the face of a massively homophobic society. Such poetry made possible the emergence and development of a gay male poetry that took such an identity as a starting point, not a conclusion or goal, let alone a given.

My sense that there was or could be such a thing as gay male poetry was largely shaped by groundbreaking anthologies like Winston Leyland’s Angels of the Lyre and Orgasms of Light (whose frontispiece featured a drawing of a huge, erupting penis), and Ian Young’s The Male Muse, which didn’t have any pictures at all. But while I was very turned on by poems like Allen Ginsberg’s “Sweet Boy, Gimme Your Ass” and “Please Master,” even at sixteen I was aware that they weren’t good poetry. Someone I was on a panel with at the old Outwrite gay writers’ conference in Boston over ten years ago talked about not feeling able or allowed in his youth to write poems about the boys on whom he had crushes. I never had that problem. My problem was how to take those feelings and turn them into things I could recognize and respect as poems. I wrote a poem in college called “A People Without a Language Cannot Be Free.” That was my one “gay liberation” poem, the one time I consciously wrote as “a gay person.” I threw that poem away a long time ago, and I don’t even know what the title assertion meant, though I have at various points read things about the possibility or necessity of a gay language. I don't know what that means either.

3

A column rather provocatively called “Gay? Who Cares?” that appeared last November in the Los Angeles Times reported that “‘Society is beginning to say that being gay is not such a big deal,’ [demographer Gary] Gates says. ‘What that means for gays is that homosexuality won’t have the centrality to their identity it once did. Being gay then becomes one of a variety of an individual’s competing identities.’”

This has always been true for all gays, and is true for all identities as such: no one has only one identity, at any one time or over time. It’s something, though, that gay men who don’t fit the mold of the financially comfortable, buff, fashionable white man have always had to be consciously aware of. Certainly for black gay men, gayness has not only been an identity distinct from their other identities but often in conflict with or contradiction to them.

Though I don’t think that writers or their work should be defined in terms of social identities or subject positions, I have much less trouble being considered a gay writer than a black writer. This is because being gay was a chosen identity for me (I may have been born homosexual, but I decided to be gay), whereas being black was an imposed identity, and one that came with a great deal of unpleasant baggage. Perhaps because I was rather out of touch as a youth, I had no such negative associations with being or becoming gay. Quite the contrary—the gay world I read about in books seemed infinitely preferable to the world of the Bronx ghettos in which I grew up. And I’ve definitely had a much easier time as a gay person than as a black person, even as a writer: the expectations placed on a gay writer are much less restrictive and eagerly enforced than those placed on a black writer.

For a writer like James Merrill, a white upper-class man, and thus as central as can be in American society and representation, homosexuality is a displacement, a marginalization, and his poetry enacts the negotiation of that displacement of centrality, that forced march to the margins (though he takes his sense of entitlement with him). But for me, as a poor black man, and thus the incarnation of otherness and marginality, the adoption of a homosexuality imaged, by both black people and white, as “white” was a move of displacing displacement, a move towards centrality and “self-ness”: a difference from difference that did not quite (any more than my education did) make me “the same.”

4

The Los Angeles Times article I quoted above goes on to say that “As the challenges associated with coming out diminish, so does the primacy of the identity that that act of self-discovery and self-assertion once forged. It means that the culture once associated with gay identity becomes less distinctive from the mainstream.

As the recent spate of state referenda banning gay marriage demonstrates, homophobia is alive and well in these united states. But nonetheless, we are living in a very different world than the one in which Robert Duncan, Frank O’Hara, and Jack Spicer, or James Merrill and William Meredith, to take poets from opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum, lived, or that in which pioneering gay liberation poets like Antler, Paul Mariah, and Charley Shively, or less explicitly political though quite explicitly gay poets like Joe Brainard, Ed Cox, Kenward Elmslie, and John Giorno lived. “Gay” is part of the texture of daily life, and there is a disparity between the still-prevalent political rejection of the idea of gayness and a widespread quiet acceptance of gay people themselves, even in Pensacola, Florida, where I’ve lived for almost seven years on what’s sometimes called the Redneck Riviera. I like to call it Redneckistan. Just as one can live an openly gay life (or at least a relatively openly gay life) in a number of ways and places than would have been possible even twenty years ago without making it a statement of identity, similarly one can incorporate one’s gayness into one’s writing (however one would define either gayness or the incorporation of that gayness) without making that the definition of one’s work.

So we come back to the questions in the panel description: What does it mean to be a gay male poet today, after gay liberation, the somewhat domesticated gay rights movement, the revived radicalism of Queer Nation, the AIDS epidemic and ACT UP, and intellectual interrogations of “queerness” and identity itself? Contemporary gay male poets can take their gayness for granted on several levels. They also can explore, question, and even explode that identity. This panel explores just what the words “gay” “male” “poetry,” in themselves and in conjunction, mean to four smart and gifted writers.

AWP and Me

For anyone who will be attending the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference in New York City later this week, I will be chairing a panel on Saturday, February 2 from noon to one fifteen on Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics, featuring “emerging” poets Christopher Hennessy (whose wonderful blog Outside the Lines focuses on the relationship of identity and creativity), Brad Richard, Aaron Smith (whose entertaining blog focuses on anything but poetry), and Brian Teare. Here is the description of the panel from the conference schedule, and the "statement of merit" from the panel proposal, both written by moi:

What does it mean to be a gay male poet today, after gay liberation, the somewhat domesticated gay rights movement, the revived radicalism of Queer Nation, the AIDS epidemic and ACT UP, and intellectual interrogations of “queerness” and identity itself? Contemporary gay male poets can take their gayness for granted on several levels. They also can explore, question, and even explode that identity. On this panel, four emerging gay male poets discuss what the words gay male poetry mean to them.

Despite the much greater social openness in the almost thirty years since gay liberation began, homosexuality is still a contentious topic in America, and gay writing is still a marginal presence in American literature. It’s important for writers to see not only that can one be an openly gay writer, but also that there is no set way in which to be a gay writer. This panel explores some of the things that gay poets have done with their new freedoms and their continuing constrictions.

I hope that all interested parties will attend. Let’s make this panel a party!