Christopher Matthew Hennessy's Blog, page 12
June 6, 2011
The excitement of invisibility
From an interview with lesbian poetry Elizabeth J. Colen over at Boxcar Poetry Review:
EC: ….Gay people were marginalized to the point of complete invisibility. In high school I only knew one other queer and I was fucking her. And she didn't even admit she was gay until a few years after we broke up. Maybe I was stupid, but I saw the invisibility as excitement, like we were super heroes or something. I mean, I knew we could be killed, that much was clear from the language used around everything queer.
Click the above link to read the rest!
June 1, 2011
Just discovered another review of Outside the Lines
I don't know how I missed this, but Outside the Lines got a review over at Library Thing. I'm really honored by this!
Anyone interested in the life of the creative mind, or writing in general and poetry in particular, will find valuable insights and ideas on every page of these interviews. Outside the Lines has a resonance for the general gay reader as well. As Timothy Liu says in the final lines of this rich and rewarding collection, "I believe we're not just interested in making beautiful poems, but we're trying to make a beautiful life. I think the courage we bring to poems is not only for our art, but as if our lives themselves depended on it." (
)
Thanks, Reginald!
This, my friends, is how you give a poetry reading
I give you, the one and only, Dennis Cooper reading his poem "Dear Todd,"— and believe it or not I think this is word for word of the actual text of the poem.
May 27, 2011
A poem to blow your mind, from John Wieners
Anniversary
He too must with me wash his body, though
at far distant time, over endless space
take the cloth unto his loins, upon his face
engage in the self same toilette as I do now.
Cigarette between his lips, would they were mine
by this present moon swear allegiance
if he ever look, see clouds and breaches
in the sky, by stars lend his eyes shine.
What care I for miles, rows of friends lined
up in groups, blue songs, day's bright glare.
Once he was there, now gone searched empty air
this candle feeds on, find eyes, my heart's blind
to love and all he was capable of, sweet patience
when he put his lips to places I cannot name
because changed, now not the same
sun shines sad larks break forth
from winter branches.
Dennis Cooper on Tim Dlugos
Dennis Cooper (I don't need to tell you who he is!) reminisces about Tim Dlugos in the post, encouraging you to read the just-out Collected Dlugos poems. I have it and am reading it. It's big and fat, beautifully done and I'm enjoying every minute of it. Some great links at his post's end, too. And pictures.
Says Cooper,
"His poetry influenced mine vastly, and, thanks to his companionship and kindness and extraordinary social skills, I was introduced to many of my lifelong dearest friends and writer comrades and a serious boyfriend or two. It would take ages to begin to describe what a star and shining light Tim was in late 70s and early 80s, as a poet and as a person. He seemed to be friends with every interesting person in the world, and to move within his circle of friends was a non-stop heady and enlightening experience."
May 26, 2011
Queer Seriousness
I'm researching for something I'm currently writing and I came across something I think I've posted here before, about the painter and writer Joe Brainard and queer seriousness. I've been thinking about O'Hara but this is also of interest in the rather long piece. Oh, and it mentions Tim Dlugos and I am currently devouring his Fast Life: Collected Poems just out. So, here's the quote from the piece that interests me and hopefully others:
However, once we attend to Brainard himself on the issue things appear anything but straightforward. In an interview with Tim Dlugos in 1980, he said:
'Most artists are very straight, I mean straight in their seriousness and in what they're trying to do. I think I'm a lot more sensual, I mean a lot more ga-ga than that – but on purpose. No, not on purpose.' (Lewallen 2001: 18)
Thus Brainard suggests that straightness is not only a sexuality, but also an attitude, a serious attitude, which his art departs from by dint of what we might therefore call its 'un-straight', deliberately 'ga-ga' sensuality. This is not to suggest however – at least upon my reading – that the homosexuality of Brainard and his work be considered simply as non-serious and trivial, and judged accordingly. Instead, and more interestingly, Brainard might be read here as inviting us to consider how his work might be taken as providing an alternative approach to serious meanings, ones which we might construe in terms of an un-straight seriousness, a 'queer' kind of earnestness.
Brainard's own commentary here might be taken as example of just such a queer earnestness. For even as he makes such an earnest comment about the nature of his work he quickly moves to undermine its serious import by swiftly contradicting himself ('I'm a lot more ga-ga on purpose. No, not on purpose'); demonstrating in the process his own interpretive uncertainty, and maybe even appearing a bit 'ga-ga' himself as he is called upon to talk about his art. Thus, in a manner akin to Andy Warhol's tricky and calculated pronouncements about his own work, Brainard casts doubt upon his own authority, especially when called upon to comment straightforwardly upon his art, appearing perhaps as the stereotypically befuddled fag when faced with matters of hard intellectual thought. Similarly, on the subject of the relationship of this 'un-straight' seriousness to his sexuality, Brainard says in the same interview:
'I'm not really sure that has anything to do with being gay, though, 'cause I think my work is very sensual, very lush and all that, but I'm not sure that has to do with being gay. If I was straight it might be that way too. I don't know.' (Lewallen 2001: 100)
The uncertainty of this statement is mirrored by another one written in his 1981 book 'Nothing to Write Home About': 'I can't see that being a gay painter makes any difference whatsoever, except that now and then my work seems shockingly 'sissy' to me'. (Lewallen 2001: 83) Both of these statements are interesting to me here because they keep in play clashing and dissonant perspectives on homosexuality: it is seen both as insignificant for an understanding of Brainard's art whilst, at the same time, as being something just written all over it.
In some respects such statements proffer an interesting challenge to the (queer) interpreter not to take homosexuality too seriously in attending to Brainard's work whilst playfully acknowledging that it might indeed be the most fundamental thing about it.
May 23, 2011
Saints and Sinners
Brad Richard, Michael Montlack, Jeff Mann and Bryan Borland get some poetry love in this article about Saints and Sinners in NOLA. So bummed I missed it this year! Here I come 2012!
The writer of the article talks about a panel she was at and says:
…is now not the time to put aside all these references to other – the heteros, the woman or the men, the family as Borland had described his gay friends and to incline ourselves to inclusiveness? Isn't that what I was feeling ….That diversity feels better than same?
[Montlack] said
he had gone to a LAMBDA literary retreat in Los Angeles where it was noted that the 50 to 60 year-old lesbians were hanging out with the 20 to 30 year-old gay boys, who commented in the 1970s that would have never happened. And recently in New York at a reading by David Trinidad who had published a collection of the late Tim Dlugos poems, a young lesbian asked if she could read one because yes, lesbians read what gay men write and vice versa.
I sort of like that the writer doesn't answer her own question and lets Montlack's statement do it for her/us in a way. And even Montlack's response is less 'answer' than evidence. How far that evidence extends to others' experiences and what that evidence means is something I'm always happy to think about when immersed in our wonderful world of GLBT literature!
May 21, 2011
May 20, 2011
"[W]e…need to re-assess the relationship between 'gay' & 'poetry.'
Surf on over to Lambda Literary Online and read a really quite wonderful interview between Stephen Motika and Brian Teare. Motika asks some excellent questions. And Teare covers some territory I'm most definitely interested in…for example, these remarks about Thom Gunn.
For many gay poets who came of age long before Gay Liberation, the passage from a pre-Stonewall poetics to a post-Stonewall poetics was a difficult one even if they were already out to themselves and their loved ones. On the one hand, they had already figured out a successful way to navigate a career in poetry either more (like Duncan) or less out (like Gunn); on the other, how out they were in their poetry did not necessarily correlate to how out they were socially, and vice versa. And though, in spite of major internal opposition, Gunn did eventually manage to answer the call to come out in his poems and engage both gay desire and leather culture as content, he did so at first at great expense to his reputation as a poet—Passages of Joy in particular was lambasted by many critics, a fact we tend to forget now, after the great critical and popular success of The Man with Night Sweats.
But given how difficult it was for him to engage gay subject matter in his poems, it was particularly instructive to watch Gunn respond to AIDS in his journals: the losses he sustained heightened a previously muted commitment to a gay community politics. His journals from the late '80s and early '90s show him determined to one day do justice in verse to a vanishing culture, the idealistic body politics of Gay Liberation. Many of the poems of Boss Cupid were written in almost ethnographic homage to a culture he saw as lost to AIDS, the foreground of that book being not only how loss but also how eros travels through the individual bodies of the body politic.
And Motika's question about "how you've come to define yourself as a poet and individual in relation to this myriad of affiliations in Northern California and at the national/international lever?….how your thinking about queer identity and community has shifted over the last decade?" leads to this:
If I could boil down the literary experience of my last eleven years into one sentence, it would be this: I don't have to choose. Which is to say, I no longer feel the necessity to be a certain kind of poet or to embody consistently one poetic tradition.
On the one hand, I think this has meant that my aesthetic appears to change a great deal from book to book, but I'd argue that, as Olson does in "The Kingfishers," "What does not change/is the will to change." Each of my books has generally represented a period of time in which I've explored a distinct set of formal, conceptual, experiential or thematic questions as variously as possible—and generally a book has ended when I no longer feel the desire or energy to engage with that set of questions. Often those formal, conceptual and thematic questions are most strongly tied to or inspired by my own experience, and so I also see the autobiographical impulse as a consistent connection between the books. It should be obvious that all along I've most admired poets like Brenda Hillman, whose work consistently responds on a formal and conceptual to the demands of lived experience.
On the other hand, I'm aware that the stance of "not having to choose" might at first appear politically problematic. How can a poet stand for something, if they won't stand still? I know some queer readers experienced Sight Map as a less "gay" book than The Room Where I Was Born or Pleasure, and some of these readers raised questions about the work's relationship to what we often call "gay poetry." Because I so often find its contemporary definitions problematic, I've explored the history of defining "gay poetry" quite often in my recent critical writing about poetry and poetics.
Some of the poets who've most inspired and given permission for these changes—Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Thom Gunn, Frank Bidart, Reginald Shepherd, and Aaron Shurin—are gay poets, and yet their work is, for very different reasons, often absent from mainstream discussions of "gay poetry." That they are all gay poets is a fact that many definitions of gay poetry have yet to take into account, though Timothy Liu's fabulous Word of Mouth collects them all (and many more) between its covers. Yet few critical accounts of gay poetry have been as generous and rigorous as Liu's, and I think it's fair to say that we as a community need to re-assess the relationship between "gay" and "poetry." I'd argue that both terms are far more stretchy than we generally allow them to be, and that this conceptual stretchiness is a quality that we too rarely take advantage of. It would be a political gift for us to reassess what it means for a body of poetry to be "gay"; it would be an aesthetic gift for us to reassess what it means for a gay-identified writer to work as a poet.
May 18, 2011
'Queers are students of sublimity'
And other moments from an interview with one of my all-time favorite writers, Wayne Koestenbaum….including this back and forth….
MS: I should have gotten to this earlier but I need to know this. Would you say that your work has a queer or gay sensibility? B) does that even exists? And C) what is it, if it does exist?
WK: A) Yes, my work does have it. B) It exists in a thousand different forms in every decade, every country, and C) my kind of queer sensibility concerns more elements than I can ever begin to name. Honestly. But you probably intuit some of these variables. The types of bodies that are desired. Adamant specificity in enumerating erotic urges. Love of performance and performers. Themes of silence and sequestration and confinement, combined with themes of explosiveness and volcanic eruption. Artificiality. Privileging of aesthetics over utility.
