RECENTLY, a first-of-its-kind book, Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets was published by the University of Michigan Press, a collection of interviews with some of the most prominent poets alive who also happen to be gay. On the occasion of the book’s release last June, The Gay & Lesbian Review asked interviewer Christopher Hennessy to invite all of the poets who appear in the book to write a paragraph about how their artistic sensibilities have been shaped by their identity as gay men. Their thought-provoking answers appear below, and offer a taste of the kinds of insights and wisdom that they provided in abundance in their longer interviews.
Are there elements of your gay identity that you especially value as a writer, elements that might contribute to your ability to have a distinctive voice?
Frank Bidart
The answer is yes—but that begs the question of what one means by a “gay identity.” I don’t mean the “wittier-than-thou” cool dresser identity the media are so in love with (perhaps the only gay identity the media can bear). I’m not particularly witty and am an indifferent dresser. The gay identity that’s crucial to me as a writer is the sense that I don’t quite fit into the boxes the social world is most comfortable with. Something mercurial that instinctively understands a range of feeling traditionally assigned to the feminine. Something that can enter the skin of everyone in a room. Of course this is an ideal, not something I think I actually manage. Someone who immediately feels past the usual sexual alignments in a group, to the panic underlying the roles so many people adopt (I don’t exclude myself from this panic). 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.
Frank Bidart’s most recent books of poetry are Star Dust and the Pulitzer-nominated Music Like Dirt.
Rafael Campo
For me, the notion of a gay æsthetic is a complex one. What elements of myself as a gay man do I draw on in my own work? Of course, the primary subject matter for any gay writer is the same as for any other writer: love and death. And yet in this moment where queerness is so greatly imperiled, certain inescapable pressures give a necessary and particular shape to our literary production. We must write about love while we are refused the right to marry and despite the withheld affection of many of our churches and our families of origin; we must write about death through the lens of the insatiable epidemics of AIDS, crystal meth addiction, and sexual compulsivity. So the gay æsthetic comes to mean, yes, the mocking archness of camp and the searing irony of self-awareness, but even more than these, a kind of urgency and heat that says we refuse to be destroyed. It is at once polemical and yet intensely empathetic, because in our community’s aspirations and in our suffering we see reflected the greater human struggle to be better than we are now. Hearing the stories of my patients, listening to their bodies through my stethoscope—and hearing my own story and body’s music through my love relationship with another man—I realize that the gay literary æsthetic 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.
Rafael Campo is the author, most recently, of Landscape with Human Figure and Diva, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Henri Cole
I think my love of simile is connected to homosexuality. Nothing is ever exactly itself, like me. Unexpectedly, I see this now as a gift to the poet.
Henri Cole is the author, most recently, of the Pulitzer-nominated Middle Earth.
Alfred Corn
I’ve thought about this for years and have consistently postponed writing an essay on the subject. Nietzsche said that sexuality extends up into the very pinnacles of the soul. That sounds right to me. And, 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. And then at the social level, current historical forces have placed us on the margin, along with other “minorities,” in 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.
Alfred Corn, a former Guggenheim fellow and Academy of American Poets fellow, is the author of nine books of poems, including Stake: Selected Poems, 1972-1992, and Contradictions (2002).
Mark Doty
Every time I sit down to write I am—consciously or not!—grateful that I’m not in a position to take my life for granted. I think that’s the great gift of queerness, to stand at that “slight angle to the universe” E. M. Forster attributed to Constantine Cavafy. I’ve just come back from a month in Provincetown, and I have to admit that I’m alarmed by the visible conformity of the gay community: SUVs, condos, marriage rights, adoption. None of those things (save SUVs) are evil on their own, but taken all of a piece one can’t help but feel that the mainstreaming of gay life is a tragedy and a bore. 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.
Mark Doty is the author of seven books of poetry, including, most recently, School of the Arts and Source. His My Alexandria won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1993.
Timothy Liu
I was recently sitting on a porch in the Upper Peninsula with a close straight-white-male-poet friend of mine who casually remarked that maybe the only erotic poems of any substance written these days are being written by gay writers. I’m not sure if I exactly agree with him, but I get his point. As gay citizens living in a heterocentric world, we all pay a big price, not just once, but again and again. If Wallace Stevens is right to say that the poet must meet “reality” with an equal force from one’s own “imagination,” then I think the gay imagination might indeed need to cultivate particular and peculiar strengths in order to secure its own survival. And how does this lyrical pressure ultimately manifest itself? Through the voice of our writings.
Timothy Liu is the author of five books of poetry, of which the most recent is Of Thee I Sing. He is also the editor of Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry.
J. D. McClatchy
I should say that being gay is not my identity, it’s a part of my identity. But, that said, of course it has played a crucial role in my life as a writer—which is another term, by the way, I don’t use to define my “identity.” As Auden said, you’re a “writer” only when you’re writing. First, it’s drawn me to other gay writers. From early in my serious reading life, the likes of Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill helped shape my literary ambitions. Then, too, it’s made me continually skeptical of many of our burly, smug straight writers with their empty assumptions and sentimental claims. So there has been a tradition, a starting place. As for writing itself, my being gay has given me a queer perspective on the world—the sense of being something of an outsider, an instinct to look for the paradox at the heart of any set of circumstances—and that has decisively stamped the way I make images and argue ideas. I have taken pleasure in dealing with subjects that in other times, and to a certain extent in our own, are considered taboo. That brings its own energy to a poem. But more obvious “gay” material exists as a means to something more. When writing about sex, say, I am writing finally about desire, a common human affliction.
J. D. McClatchy is the author, most recently, of the Pulitzer-nominated Hazmat.
Carl Phillips
What has most contributed to my having any kind of distinctive voice has been a sense of ostracism, of being excluded by others because of difference. I first came to understand this in terms of race, and only later in terms of sexuality. My being gay only compounded the difficulties I had encountered as an African American. But it was while grappling with coming out that I think I found my subject matter, or part of it—the conundrum of the body and of desire. And I think that the feeling of being excluded by much of society equaled, for me, a kind of exclusion from societal conventions, including those of language. It’s as if I had to generate a language of my own, one that would both contain and enact my own concerns with identity. I’m also aware that my voice has a certain covert aspect to it—i.e., meaning isn’t delivered at the immediate surface—and this seems related to sexuality, and to how often sexuality has to be coded, in a society of prejudice. Another thing that can come out of having been excluded is subversiveness, a desire to overthrow convention—and I’d definitely say there’s a subversive quality, at the level of language, in all of my work.
Carl Phillips is the author, most recently, of The Rest of Love, a finalist for the National Book Award. His other books include Rock Harbor and The Tether, which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
Reginald Shepherd
For me, being a black gay man means being an outsider to both groups, an outsiderhood sharpened by the sense that I should feel a sense of belonging in these groups, as opposed to the racist, homophobic larger society. (I don’t claim that this is the experience of all black gay men, or even all black gay writers, but it is mine.) That sense of being an outsider even among the outsiders, of being unable to take my existence for granted, is one reason (though not the only one) that I see the world rather askew from convention, that I do not take even my own existence for granted, and that skewed vision is central to my writing. It has fueled both an urge to produce a place for myself through my writing and a knowledge that there may be no such settled place for me or, indeed, for anyone. On the smaller or at least more specific scale, one thing that being gay has given me as a writer is a large part of my subject matter, the labyrinth of gay desire, with its confusions and convolutions of being and having, wanting and wanting to be.
Reginald Shepherd is the author of four books of poetry, of which the most recent is Otherhood. He is the editor of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries.
David Trinidad
I think the sense of being different, of feeling outside mainstream poetry (i.e., fashionable or “straight” modes of writing), gave me the freedom to develop my own style in my own way (my heroes were always mavericks, or seemed maverick-like to me). It also gave me the freedom to explore the kind of subject matter I wanted or needed to explore. 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.
David Trinidad is the author of eleven books, most recently of the Lambda Literary Award finalist Plasticville, and Phoebe 2002, with Jeffery Conway and Lynn Crosbie.
Christopher Hennessy is the author / interviewer of Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets.
