Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions
by Michael D. Snediker
University of Minnesota Press. 273 pages, $25. (paper)
QUEER THEORY has been criticized on a number of grounds, notably for its difficult language and abstruse categories; in Queer Optimism, Michael D. Snediker charges queer theory with a pervasive negativity and pessimism, a mood that causes its practitioners to focus most of their attention and analysis upon negative emotions rather than affirmative ones. The major players in queer theory—Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick—are all thoroughly explored in the book’s provocative and dense introduction. Snediker observes that “[m]elancholy, self-shattering, shame, the death drive: these, within queer theory, are categories to conjure with.” In critiquing this disposition in queer theory, he asks, both simply and complexly, why pessimism has predominated to date and whether a queer optimism can take hold and afford readers and critics a new perspective.
Snediker examines queer theory through the lens of poetry, focusing on a number of major American poets, among them Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Hart Crane. These may be surprising choices for a book on optimism, and this is one of the book’s strengths. Many fans of these poets will find something new in Snediker’s close and sometimes quirky readings. For example, who would have thought that one could traverse the dark and suicidal Crane and end with a Yes to life? Snediker explores the trope of smile and smirk in Crane’s poetry, not as a “façade for suffering” but as something that “accumulates, takes up space,” and like the Cheshire cat’s smile, “outlast the cat itself.”
Emily Dickinson is also seen to have suffered from a “queer pain.” Snediker spins out dizzying explications of her poems to argue that the pain and masochism so often associated with Dickinson are infused with grace and depth. “Dickinson’s grace dreams of a vastness that could in turn make misery seem minute; misery, that is, that fills minutes rather than machinic interminability.”
In some ways, Snediker’s chapter on Jack Spicer may be the most challenging for many readers, and not simply because Spicer’s work is so strange. The chapter discusses Spicer’s serial poem Billy the Kid and how much weight he put on seriality in poetry in his later work. (Of the poets Snediker takes on, Spicer is by far the least studied by scholars, but he has become something of a star since the publication of Kevin Killian and Peter Gizzi’s triumphant collected poems, My Vocabulary Did This To Me, last year.)
At the end of Snediker’s introduction, he writes: “Queer Optimism differently investigates how Crane, Dickinson, Spicer and Bishop introduce epistemologies not of pain, but of pleasure, aestheticize not the abdication of personhood, but its sustenance. These poets, to paraphrase Dante, show the way one might feel eternal, but also the way one might, more generally, differently, feel.” For those who want to see them, whole new lines of inquiry open with these words.
Specialists studying gay poetry and identity in literature may find that Snediker’s ideas have the ability to instigate productive, creative dialogues. Queer Optimism positions its author as an insightful scholar with refreshing, seriously considered ideas that have the potential to revitalize the field—to help queer theory better understand its early years, to question its motives, and to ask itself what new avenues it must open if it’s to evolve as a field. Queer Optimism deserves its chance to argue for a new paradigm.
Christopher Hennessy is the author of Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets
