Three young poets who have published their first books of poetry in the last year participated in a “virtual panel,” moderated via e-mail, in early summer. In it, they tackled such slippery questions as whether there’s a “gay æsthetic” and the limits of sexual explicitness in contemporary poetry. The panelists included the following:
Jason Schneiderman is the author of Sublimation Point (Four Way Books). His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2005, American Poetry Review, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, among other places, and he’s received fellowships from Yaddo and Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center. He is a chancellor’s fellow at CUNY, where he’s pursuing a Ph.D. He teaches creative writing at Hofstra.
Richard Siken is the author of Crush (Yale University Press), which was selected by Louise Glück as winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. Siken is also the editor of spork magazine. He is the recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts grant, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. He lives in Tucson.
Aaron Smith is the author of Blue on Blue Ground (University of Pittsburgh Press), winner of the 2004 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize selected by Denise Duhamel. He has also published What’s Required, which won the 2003 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Contest. He lives in New York City, where he works for an academic nonprofit.
— Christopher Hennessy
The Gay & Lesbian Review: Through the 20th century, gay poets have been among the most prominent and groundbreaking masters of craft, covering a multitude of subjects and styles. As poets who have just published your first books, where do you think gay poetry is headed? Are poets who happen to be gay in the vanguard?
Jason Schneiderman: I’m tempted to say that the big trend we can see among gay male poets is towards the explicit; that gay poets have the increasing ability to be honest and completely forthright about sexual concerns and the ripple effects of those sexual concerns on the rest of their lives. I can remember having to explain the queer text of poems like Thom Gunn’s “First Meeting with a Possible Mother-in-Law” or Craig Arnold’s “Hot” when I was in school—people just didn’t see it. But you get to Timothy Liu with lines like “I knelt behind a toilet stall, waiting / for eight-and-a-half inches or more / to fill my mouth,” and it’s hard to miss the gay content.
I love Aaron’s poem “Dark, Awful Man,” which is very explicit about anal sex and how it is woven into a larger life—it doesn’t stop (or start) in the bedroom. In Wayne Koestenbaum’s brilliant new book of poems [Model Homes], he talks about cruising on-line: “Today, who’ll pop up on Rentboy-dot-com?/ Rick M., Italian-Irish, masculine?/ Or washboard-stomach eight-and-a-half-inch Tom?” I guess I’m trying to say that we’re a long way from cryptic lines like Emily Dickinson’s “Might I but moor tonight in thee” or W. H. Auden’s “Let us honour if we can/ The vertical man/ Though we value none/ But the horizontal one.”
But I don’t want to make a cult of celebrating the explicit. Mark Bibbins is a fine poet, and his work eschews these kinds of confessional, narrative sexual modes. Also, there’s not a neat timeline from less explicit to more: the Timothy Liu poem I quoted is from a 1995 book [Burnt Offerings], and the Craig Arnold poem was in a 1999 book [Shells]. Whenever I hear people invoking the less explicit to more explicit timeline in order to explain John Ashbery or Hart Crane’s obscurity as a kind of poetic closet, it feels incredibly dismissive of their work. We all work in our own time, and it’s not as though the two of them were just waiting around for a time when they could write “hotsexymanlove” poems, or that’s what Ashbery would be writing now (it’s not).
Then again, I don’t want to ignore the repression that gay poets of earlier generations had to bear—and are still bearing. I think a lot about the distinction that Henry Abelove makes in Deep Gossip between “gay” (slogan: “We are everywhere”) and “queer” (slogan: “We’re here”). I take a certain amount of pride in so many young and not-so-young gay poets being published and winning prizes. On the other hand, it’s hard to think of contemporary gay poetry as an œuvre. Almost all of my mentors have been straight, and I feel the pull of Natasha Saje and John Donne as strongly as that of Frank Bidart and Mark Doty. I’ve always felt welcomed by “mainstream” poetry communities, and I’ve never felt the need for a specifically queer writing group along the lines of what Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte have built for black poets with Cave Canem.
That being said, if somebody did start “Cave Queerem,” I’d be first in line to go. I think that what Charles Flowers and Joan Larkin have done with Bloom (which I’m incredibly proud to have been published in) is indicative of the state of queer writing—it’s loosely defined, not based on the kind of identity politics that excludes or homogenizes, but built around the recognition that we do have a different experience in the world, and that we do have something in common. So, to get back to Abelove, we gay poets are everywhere, but we’re each queer and here in our own way.
Aaron Smith: I’m interested in what Jason is saying because I’ve felt as if being overt or explicit in subject matter in “mainstream” poetry has been an uphill battle. It seems that since the late 80’s and early 90’s there’s been such a backlash against confessional poetry that anything narrative, seemingly personal, and/or sexual gets lumped under writing that’s 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. Is gay writing becoming more explicit or is the publishing world becoming more open to publishing explicit material about gay men’s lives? I think there has been explicit writing for a long time floating around. We can’t forget Allen Ginsberg, Edward Field, Peter Orlovsky, and Joe Brainard, to name a few.
Richard Siken: I think the culture at large is becoming more explicit; it isn’t limited to gay culture. And why not talk about what we do and where we’ve been? But there’s a trap hidden inside it all. First, you don’t have to see that far into the future to belong to the future. Simply being in the present puts you head-and-shoulders above most people. It’s interesting to watch the kids in beginning poetry classes. Their first efforts are full of nature images and end rhyme. Their poems are full of oak trees and lakes, while their actual landscape is the Sonoran desert. Their concept of poetry is centuries old. Tell them they can look around and write about mac & cheese, thrift stores, their thoughts and feelings, and suddenly their eyes dilate. Vanguards simply find that what has come before doesn’t or won’t work as a strategy for self-expression. So they invent new strategies. I think the arts are a comfortable place for inventors and re-inventors, and being gay demands creativity and invention. Since the dominant heterosexual template doesn’t fit well, gay men and women have to invent a new template for their lives. If you can reinvent your life, you can reinvent anything.
G&LR: Let’s talk about what qualities might constitute an artist’s “gay sensibility”—and is that even a useful term? This question has been percolating for a while in queer discourse, but perhaps we can bring fresh insight to it.
Siken: I want proof that two men can love each other. I don’t see evidence of it in my daily life—men holding hands, or kissing in public, for instance—so I search deeper for it. I’d rather have proof and not have to be in the vanguard, but that’s not my experience of the world.
Smith: Even when I see men holding hands and kissing in public, the perpetual skeptic in me thinks it could have as much to do with manipulation, lust, convenience, comfort, etc., as it could with love. I think interrogating these surfaces and others (like the body) is interesting and perhaps part of an æsthetic that gay men share. However, these concerns can be found in heterosexual writers, too. When I first came to poetry, I found more in common with women writers than with male writers, gay or straight. I do think the subjects we have in common and write about tend to define our æsthetic because people feel more comfortable categorizing things. So, it’s easy to look for things we have in common and then place us under an umbrella and say: Gay writers do this. I think trying to fit us all under one æsthetic reduces us, though. Our writing can be so much richer, I think, beyond what we have in common.
Schneiderman: I feel that whenever I try to talk about specifically gay poetry, I’m always falling back into talking about poetry in general. My husband [poet Michael Broder]and I always joke that our primary minority identification is “poet.” Also, I think that queer sensibilities have inhabited and formed American poetry to such an extent that almost everyone has access to them. I was at a reading where Matt Longabucco (a straight, married poet) read a poem ending “O Morrissey we love you don’t age,” which feels like a perfect inhabiting of O’Hara’s camp sensibility—which I would have called specifically gay, except that here’s a straight guy occupying it.
Siken: On a social level, because I don’t fit into the heterosexual template, I can get away with a lot. Since I’m not a real boy and not quite a girl, I get better access to people and their stories. Growing up, gay meant pervert. Now it means something closer to rabbi. People of both genders tell me everything, even when I don’t want to know. I’d say I’m far more drenched in the human experience (its needs, desires, dramas) than my straight friends. That certainly informs my poetry. And often, I’m invisible. I can stare at a straight man forever, stare the way a painter stares, and he won’t notice because he’s looking at some long-legged girl. And I can stare at the long-legged girl and she won’t care because I’ve got nothing she wants.
On the level of language, there’s grammar and contamination. The obvious pronoun problem—he and he instead of he and she—can get confusing. And AIDS is unavoidable. Even if I don’t mention it as such, I have to acknowledge a certain emotional charge to what used to be (mostly) neutral words: positive, negative, blood, pathogen, ill, to mention a few.
On a theoretical level, I feel no compulsion to bow down to the history of poetry. This comes directly from my learned disregard for the history of heterosexuality. I like the history of poetry, but I don’t feel obligated to it in any way. I’m obligated to other things. Romeo and Juliet doesn’t work for me. First, they should ignore their families and live. Second, they should both be boys. Gay culture wasn’t available to me when I was growing up, which wasn’t that long ago, but the world is different now. Better. I feel an obligation to honor, investigate, and portray gay love.
Schneiderman: Richard, you write, “I wanted to be wanted” (in “Little Beast”), which resonates with a line from my own work: “He hungered for me, and I hungered for his hunger.” Is a preoccupation with being desired (the desire for desirability and its attendant dangers) specific or characteristic of our gay moment?
Smith: It would make sense for a preoccupation with desire to suffuse the work of gay writers for many reasons. One in particular is that our desire is still outside the mainstream, and many writers, I think, at least the ones who are interesting, are drawn to the places of tension. I know I resent the ease with which straight male writers can take the idea that “poetry can be about anything” to the most boring extreme. They don’t have to fight for their place on the page, their reason for being there. Their place in our culture gives them a license to ramble on about baseball and trees and ultimately get published. Even so, when I’m writing I feel that I have to “come out” on the page almost every time in order to avoid getting a heterosexual reading. If someone doesn’t know my work, and I am writing to a “you,” it most certainly will be read heterosexually. So maybe there is a certain power in the margins, a certain power in the stories “they” can’t tell. (And telling these stories in an art that itself is mostly on the margins feels about as gay as it can get.)
Schneiderman: I don’t really worry that much about coming out on the page. Some of my stuff is pretty explicitly queer, you really can’t miss it, but for a lot of the poems, I don’t think of myself as the speaker. I recently found out that a guy used my poem “Sublimation Point” to seduce his girlfriend, and I’m proud of that. It makes me feel like I got something right. I certainly don’t expect the guy to recite the poem, then tell the girl that it’s actually about an intergenerational gay romance, and then kiss her. He should get right to the kissing. Love is harder for us to come by, but it’s pretty hard for everyone. In some ways we have “the Barnes & Noble problem” here: any book can only appear once in a given store. You can be in the poetry section or the gay section—you cannot be in both. I suspect we would all pick the poetry section, since we want a readership that includes but goes beyond a gay audience. But it’s a choice that has led to the death of a lot of gay presses and imprints, as well as many gay bookstores.
One more thing about coming out on the page—I remember hearing Mark Doty read when I was an undergrad at the University of Maryland—he was reading “Lilacs in NYC”—and I remember that when he said, “I enter you,” I was desperately hoping that the next part would be “You enter me,” and when it was, I melted away into this viscous college-poet-boy puddle of adoration, identification, admiration, hope, and love. He did make it specifically queer, and I am still grateful for how he made that college-poet-boy feel.
G&LR: What do you each think of art’s role in gay culture? Does it have more or less of an importance, a role to play, in gay culture than in straight life?
Smith: I believe in art, in its power, whether it be to facilitate change, to document history, to witness, to challenge, to represent. I think it’s hugely important to gay culture—its presence, at least. I say its presence, because whether the gay community values art more than the straight community can be argued many ways, I’m sure. However, we live in a heterosexual culture; heterosexuality is everywhere, unapologetically, whether it be in art, day-to-day life, entertainment, political preference. So, simply put: I think anything that keeps gay people’s lives out there is good and necessary and important.
Siken: I think gay culture, for better or worse, has embraced the art of artifice more than any other subculture. The fabulous, the flamboyant, the exaggerated all seem integral to a culture that includes drag queens, leather boys, and dykes on bikes. We do affectation well, though I’m not sure that’s what we usually mean when we say the word art. And, yes, it can appear hollow, but affectation is only concerned with the surface; it makes no claims on depth. Perhaps artifice and affectation started as vanguard strategies for self-expression, but today they seem like icing on the cake. I think many people concentrate so hard on the icing that they miss the cake. Personally, I like the cake more. I chose poetry over film, over dance, over fashion, over a variety of other modes of expression because it deals with the cake. Aaron calls it the power of art, and Jason (I think rightly) connects it to the ideas of desire and access. I’ll just call it the cake. And who doesn’t like cake? Who wouldn’t enjoy a bigger slice? Art always has been, always will be crucial to a life of consideration and investigation.
Smith: The old joke about throwing something shiny across the room and watching the gay men run after it—our culture has a certain interest in the surface. However, there’s a complication: most gay men I know say they hate drag queens. I only see dykes on bikes once a year during New York’s gay pride parade, and in the few leather bars to which I’ve been, most of the men are in sneakers while everyone stares at the few fellows in chaps (maybe I need to pick better leather bars). And after every pride parade, the newspapers have a drag queen in feathers on the front page. So, are the extremes integral or an aspect? Could they be the annoying aunt who shows up at the family reunion, and we love her despite the fact that she annoys us? She’s just always been part of the family. Maybe affectation was part of an earlier strategy for self-expression. But I do think the surface is important across the board. Isn’t poetry dependent on the image?
Schneiderman: I think that Richard’s “icing” is a pretty good definition of camp—everyone else sees icing, but we see cake! And that’s why I love camp! I’m thinking of Kiss Me Kate or Moby Dick. I have an incredible amount of respect for the generations of gay artists who coded their works so that it could enter the mainstream while still appealing to a wider audience, but I’m also grateful for the other artists who broke down the walls so that I wouldn’t have to code. And I do think that there is work to be done in restoring the specifically gay attachments of those works, but it has to be done in a way that isn’t a version of the drag queen on the cover of the newspaper the day after pride. I think it’s very easy to reduce work to the sexuality of its author, in the same way it’s easy to erase it entirely. In terms of the present and going into the future, I want more permeable barriers.
The full text of this panel, moderated by Christopher Hennessy, can be found on-line at www.areyououtsidethelines.blogspot.com.
