Christopher Matthew Hennessy's Blog, page 15
March 10, 2011
A plea
Please tell the young people you teach and mentor that they deserve respect and that no gatekeeper or power broker has the right to poison our relationships to creative expression. Our current system(s) exist due to our complicity of silence. There's no hope to change it I can see. But the next generation, if shown another route, a route of respect and dignity, just might take that route when they rise.








Born That Way blog on CNN.com
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsadLx...
So of course the topic of ' born that way' = essentialism comes up. Sigh. There's a reason essentialism touches people, folks. I'm just sayin'. You can be the most brilliant queer theorist in the world, but we feel and not think love, and that love is the engine of our sexual difference. IMHO, this is one of the reasons theory can only take us so far. This is coming from someone who was studied queer theory and has a use for it at times. If we're going to interrogate our essentialist bent, we MUST also interrogate our constructivist bent. So, that being the case, we wonder: Even post QT, essentialism hasn't lost its hold in the public imaginarium (Lady Gaga, this Born This Way blog, ad infinitum). So what's behind all this? That's a far more interesting question, I think, than is critiques on folks for being essentialist.








March 9, 2011
Elizabeth Bishop links, audio, etc.
Okay, I had really wanted to blog about Bishop on the ocassion of her birthday and recent new books, but I didn't have the time. Even so, I thought I should share these links:
The case of the Times sad, pathetic review in which the reviewer writes: "For most of two decades, Bishop lived in Brazil, having fallen in love with a Rio aristocrat while recovering from an allergic attack after eating cashew fruit." Um…um… what's wrong with this picture? Ridiculous! The Times?! 2011!? Puh-lease. AmericaBlog covered it. Shocker of shockers the reviewer was Logan. Sigh. Here's the piece.
We definitely need this, then: Henri Cole audio introducing and reading Bishop's (love poem) "The Shampoo."
Lastly, Bishop on Vogue.com, of all places.








The body of Frank O'Hara, the single blue eyeball
The body of Frank O'Hara—the broken nose, the bouncy gait, the jaunty posture—was a special fixation, almost the Mont Sainte-Victoire of this coterie [of painters and poets]. Rivers especially ranged across media to figure out how O'Hara's personal dynamism might be captured in static form; his plaster bust of O'Hara, its single blue eyeball suggesting the effaced and white-washed grandeur of the classical past, is one of the show's highlights.
– from a long review of "Painters & Poets" that was at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery through March 5. the New York Review of Books blog (yes, apparently they have a blog!)
You might remember this WEIRD poem I wrote about it a while back.








March 8, 2011
A new blog for to watch: Literary Magpie
Here's a moment to consider:
Q: I like this. In a talk, Eileen Myles said that (and I am paraphrasing here) that as queer people we widen the range of human experience. We record an outsider's point of view from our work and that is one of the things that gives it great value, the ability to stretch the scope of possibility.
Who are some poets who have influenced and changed you or your work?
A: As I mentioned earlier, Frank O'Hara is a huge influence on me. He showed me a different way of approaching poetry. He wrote so much from his own experience. His poems are grounded in his life in New York with his friends, and yet they connect to much bigger themes and can really make you think. Richard Tayson is also a big influence on me. He is a contemporary poet and one of the first I read as a young man in college that really got at the inter-workings of a gay relationship. His poems made me realize how raw and direct my poems could be, but how they could also have a great beauty to them. Tony Hoagland is also an influence. I was encouraged to read him in grad school by my thesis advisor who thought I could learn from him. What is interesting about Hoagland is that we are both concerned with the personal in connection to the wider American culture, but he comes from a very different point-of-view, so our poems are similar, yet so different.








March 7, 2011
"I will outlove you" — a new name to gay poetry
Brooklyn Rail recently published a poet who describes himself as "a GAY poet in the tradition of homoSEXual writers, thinkers, and doers throughOUT time immemorial." NATHANIEL A. SIEGEL is the author of the chapbook Tony (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs). I'm not sure some of you will dig his poem (it strikes me as drawing on the fervor of the 70s but also obviously playing with it, maybe even screwing with it?) but check it out. It's a strange animal. It's called "man to manifesto with quote 'Change everything except your loves' Voltaire" and its first line is "nathaniel fucked jonathan." I do like the final line–"I will outlove you" as it plays nicely off "outlive" in the previous line.








March 6, 2011
Something deeply sexy about understanding why we're here
I've noted before C.Dale Young's latest book Torn. Here's an interview my good buddy RJ GIbson did with Young:
Check out this wonderful moment:
RJG: The beloved and devotion show up throughout these poems, definitely. But they're complicated relationships. Especially the idea of devotion and, most especially, devotion's practice. It creates an interesting tension. You have these tightly constructed poems that are contesting with their own content. Did you have a particular model in mind for how these poems dealt with their own tensions?
CDY: I don't have a model for how these poems dealt with their tensions. I do know that for five of the eight years I spent writing the majority of the poems in this book I obsessively re-read a lot of Donne's poems. I was drawn to their complexities of emotion, the ways in which emotion could be restrained or released, the ecstasy of loving a God one could never really know physically but wanted to know physically. Is there anything more homoerotic than reading the ecstatic poets? There is something deeply sexy about trying to understand why we have been put on this earth.








March 5, 2011
'Godfather' of British gay publishing
I get 'reviewed'
Oh, I can't resist this! A blogger reviewed the first issue of Assaracus, in which my poems can be found, and he had nice things to say about my work. It's so rare one gets "reviewed" like this that I just have to share it here. I hope you'll pardon the immodesty. Here's what he says about me:
"Christopher Hennessy has real talent for taking subjects as old as time and presenting them in a way that makes you think you have never heard of them. My thoughts lingered on his words, for which he has a real knack, and, before long, I was identifying the emotions, hopes, and fears that are showcased in his craft."
Check out the rest of the review here!
Order the issue here!








March 3, 2011
"Thou canst read nothing except through appetite"
Reading log 3/2011
Not new, but just because I never realized this was published after Crane's death and its title, "Reply," was given to it by his literary executor, Samuel Loverman, also a gay man.
REPLY
Thou canst read nothing except through appetite
And here we join eyes in that sanctity
Where brother passes brother without sight,
But finally knows conviviality…
Go then, unto thy turning and thy blame.
Seek bliss, then, brother, in my moment's shame.
All this that balks delivery through words
Shall come to you through wounds prescribed by swords:
That hate is but the vengeance of a long caress,
And fame is pivotal to shame with every sun
That rises on eternity's long willingness…
So sleep, dear brother, in my fame, my shame undone.
"What seems truly appalling [to those who are homophobic], and what Crane remind is in 'Reply,' is the possibility that homosexuality might lay claim to earthly bliss without agreeing to suffer for it." — Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: lesbian and gay historical emotion before Stonewall







