Christopher Matthew Hennessy's Blog, page 17

"a large-scale 'flight from masculinity' induced by external stresses"

Reading log: 2/4/2011:

A fascinating peak into the  late 50′s and early 60′s:

"As often as not, a male homosexual orientation, according to several psychoanalysts, emanated from the disorders of the mid-twentieth century–depression and war, the generalized anxiety of the nuclear age, intense competitive demands placed on males, pressure to conform, the rapid pace of technological change, shifting roles and increased expectations of American women. Under such conditions, male homosexuality became not a defensive response against immature infantile desires or unresolved Oedipal conflicts, but in Abram Kardiner's words, a large-scale 'flight from masculinity' induced by external stresses."

–Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, John D'Emilio

'dying in black and white we fight for what we love / not are'

"reticence is paid for by a poet in his blood or ceasing to be

blood! blood that we have mountains in our veins to stand off jackals

…

dying in black and white we fight for what we love

not are

– moments from Frank O'Hara's "Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets"

{with thanks for Henry Abelove's Deep Gossip}

QueerType for February

Thanks to QueerType for the shout-out regarding my debut poetry collection. Check out the other February news here.

"And they looked at me and said, 'Mr. Hall, we understand that you have homosexual tendencies.'"

So cool, so fitting for my frame of mind, and so wonderful that this is student-generated…

The cult of the gay masculine

I'm really sorry I've not been bloggin' recently. I am suddenly swamped and panicky with work I need to do for my "research" stage of my program. (If sanyone has books to suggest on the topic of gay identity formation vis-a-vis literature or social change, I'm aaaaalllll ears.

Speaking of….

Queer Histories Reading log: 2/1/2011

from "Where Have All The Sissies Gone?" by Seymour Kleinberg, 1978, Christopher Street…

"…Young gay men seemed to have abjured effeminacy with universal success….The homosexuals who adopt images of masculinity, conveying their desire for power and their belief in its beauty, are in fact eroticizing the very values of straight society that have tyrannized their own lives. It is the tension between this style and the content of their lives that demands the oblivion of drugs and sexual libertinism. In the past, the duplicity of closeted lives found relief in feminine camping; now the suppression or denial of the moral issue in their choice is far more damaging. The perversity of imitating their oppressors guarantees that such blindness will work itself out as self-contempt."

cited in The Other Side of Silence, James Loughery

'This is the phenomenology of risk, and we are expert at it."

Queer Histories Reading log: 1/23/2011

Gay poet and writer George Whitmore as cited in Ian Young's The Stonewall Experiment:

It is 1981 and I am in the basement of the Mineshaft. Like most everyone else here, I have come to prove a point. The point is that we can do this without flinching. Oh, we might say we come here to have fun or let off steam, but there's an undercurrent here, a subtext. It is the element of risk. It is not just the risk of disease. It is that we have learned to witness certain acts with a jaded and sceptical eye…. It looks dangerous, but is it really? This is the phenomenology of risk, and we are expert at it.

"The specific is in the dirt the vegetables grow in, the poets then eat, it's an American soil."

A moment from a a Q & A with queer poet CA Conrad:

Do you believe there is anything specifically American about American poetry past and present? Is there American poetry in the sense that there is said to be American painting or American film?

OF COURSE!  My collaboration with my good friend and brilliant American poet Frank Sherlock The City Real & Imagined (Factory School Books, 2010) is such a testament!  The very opening of the book is the very American and new translation of the word Philadelphia which you may want to know in order to caress the chin in imagining what is American poetry, in this American idiom.

What is specifically American in all of this?  What scholar can be as agile as simply reading a Frank O'Hara poem?  All your answers are there.  What is absorbed in reading will suffice.  Gertrude Stein, Pattie McCarthy, Garrett Caples, Kevin Varrone, Charles Olson, Eileen Myles, Jonathan Williams, Allison Cobb, Hoa Nguyen, Alice Notley, kari edwards, Joseph Ceravolo, Ron Silliman, Anselm Berrigan, Karen Weiser.  These are merely a few American poets who can say is BEST through their poems, and better than anything I can muster for you.

The specific is in the dirt the vegetables grow in, the poets then eat, it's an American soil.

Jack Spicer, Stephen Jonas, John Wieners, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Carol Mirakove.  Reading American poets, loving poetry, but loving poetry through American poets, this is what I say to your questions about specifics.

Found poem, collage, or something else? "Brushy Skewerings"

BRUSHY SKEWERINGS*

– starring John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Larry Rivers, & a hand-painted orange

And a scene it was:

amorous,               rivalrous

and incestuous;

at once avant-garde

and avant-garde in reverse.

"…"The heroic artist battling, alone, some existential sublime"…"

Set against lovers, O'Hara and Rivers,

knee to knee as they worked:

lithographs like valentines,

poems like jokes, drawing friends

into notes and hand-painted oranges.

Pretty pamphlets like

the thin, fragile invisible—

a library shelf.



Poetry was pushing.

Prickly.

Art was.

Old ground, new, moves.

Remember the context?

Mounting tension rivers

a lecherous painter

as his vampy shrink.

Mr. Ashbery, a touchy-feely jock

touching and feeling Momma's sculptures,

Momma sent up the psychic.

Angst held dear the more polemical money.

…"Longtime Lovers Give Bravura Performance As Cash-Crazed Tycoons"…

And Thugs play corporate in the boardroom.

The friction of their meeting

makes this moment

glow.

 

*Once in a while I read something I immediately know I want to turn into a a poem.  Strangely it's often a newspaper story.  Such a thing happened today. The following is comprised of only words found (%95 of the time in the same order) from this newspaper review about something close to my heart and my interests. I've only changed punctuation and at times slightly re-ordered a word or two.

"September Elegies"

Randall Mann has a moving poem on the death of bullied gay teens last year via PoemFlow.

          in memory of Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg, Billy Lucas, and Tyler Clementi

"Practically every poem either of us has written seems to me to be about love in some form or another."

"Practically every poem either of us has written seems to me to be about love in some form or another."  You'll be surprised who said that to whom.

This is a weird little exchange that's part of a longer, weirder exchange John Ashbery did  with Kenneth Koch in the 60s.  The talk of "physical love" and this moment, directly below, interest me the most:

JA: Well, we might just as well have forgotten it, for all the difference it makes. Also what about sex, which seems to make no appearance in either of our works – that I can think of at the moment.

KK: Do you mean the details of sexual intercourse? Practically every poem either of us has written seems to me to be about love in some form or another.

See how that moment comes up in the fuller exchange below and click here for the full transcript.

 

JA: It seems to me that forgetting plays a bigger role in our poems than either of us is willing to own up to. Not only do we forget the place where we live, as I pointed out earlier –

KK: You did not say that. You said we didn't write about the place in which we live.

JA: Well, we might just as well have forgotten it, for all the difference it makes. Also what about sex, which seems to make no appearance in either of our works – that I can think of at the moment.

KK: Do you mean the details of sexual intercourse? Practically every poem either of us has written seems to me to be about love in some form or another.

JA: Well, so what happened to those details?

KK: I hope they are still there.

JA: Look again.

KK: Yes, I've just gotten word that they are still there. On the other hand, there are a number of things that would not be out there at all if we didn't write about them.

JA: Does this mean that you think these things are important?

KK: What things?

JA: What it is that's there.

KK: Do you mean the things we write about or the details of physical love?

JA: The things that wouldn't be there unless we wrote about them, blockhead.

KK: It is you who are the blockhead for not making your questions clearer.

JA: Maybe this has some bearing on the topic of our discussion.

KK: In what way?

JA: I can't remember what it was that we were talking about.

KK: You seemed to be talking about ambiguity; and then you seemed to think that being a blockhead had something to do with it.

JA: I think we should clear up the question as to whether the ambiguity in our work is the result of modern life's having made us so ashamed of our experiences that we cannot write about them in any other way, or whether we feel that if we turn quickly around we'll discover something that wouldn't have happened otherwise.