Christopher Matthew Hennessy's Blog, page 21

Gay poetry = confessional poetry?!? Say What?

Is this a cultural thing of bad reporting?

From a conference on LGBT literature in the Phillipines:

Before getting into his own presentation, Neil commented that once you identify as something, then you cannot undo it, saying you cannot "un-lesbian yourself." To illustrate further, Neil began his presentation by saying that being gay (or any aspect of LGBT) ceases to be a mere topic or theme in a work, especially for a self-identified LGBT writer, since it already becomes the writer's subject position. He used himself as an example as he demonstrated how his identity as a gay poet frames all of his works, saying that whatever he writes, people would always read it as a gay material since the writer is gay. He then continued to discuss gay poetry being automatically categorized into the confessionalism or confessional poetry style, since in essence, if a gay poet writes about gay lives, it is somewhat automatically confessional in nature – the sharing of one's sexuality, various nuances of coming out, opening about private matters, making the personal public, and also making the personal somewhat political in certain circumstances.

I think that's how gay poetry can (too often) be reduced, perceived.

Advice for queer media makers, bloggers:

A graduate of Concordia talks to her alma mater's school indie newspaper about taking on the queer media world in Canada. The writer "set her name apart in the Montreal journalism scene as a veritable source of all things queer, and is the sassy sister behind Kox & Kuntz, Montreal's gay blog at Xtra.ca."

I'm wondering if you have any advice for queer media makers coming up and out. Or for student journalists, because, I mean, you've been there. Any wise words you'd like to share?

Advice? Tips? Like I said earlier: find your niche. Stay in touch with timely issues. Half of it is being at the right place at the right time, and to keep plugging away and talking to the right people.

For me I like to think of it as a working party, I always find stories that I want to cover, as long as I see it as a melding of work and play. Work and play, you shall succeed.

But I totally remember the hours we used to put into The Link—I used to work my ass off! We worked so hard putting the paper to bed, and that's something I'll even bring up during interviews. Working for 40 hours per week practically for free on top of a five-course workload is intense, and people are dually impressed. Be proud of the work you're doing.

Young men bathing in a river, a woman watches, an invisible hand touches bodies

Know the poem? It's a truly great one. Click here to find out which one it is and to read it.

Jeff Oaks on BAP: "the simplicity of patience"

(Gay) poet Jeff Oaks on BAP recently.

Here he talks about Ginbserg and Carl Phillips and the " "the simplicity of patience." He ends the post with Phillip's poem "King of Meadow."

I didn't like Allen Ginsberg when I first read him.  I didn't get why those long lines and weird language was necessary.  It wasn't until I read the "wrong" book of his–the book that nobody else seemed to talk about–that I "got" him. Kaddish had me weeping by the end, and I realized there might be other ways to approach poets than the one that people urge you toward

….

I remember Carl Phillips' work was once so impossible for me to read that I perceived it almost as garble.  I turned away from it toward the other thousand poets whose lines were clearer.  But his name refused to go away, and it became clear that I had to deal with his work somehow, so I did what I often do: I assigned a book of his for discussion to a class.  That would force me, I thought, to come up with a way to read it.  I took out the line breaks so I could "simply" read the narrative or argument. Then I tried to put them back in without looking at the original poem. That little useful exercise taught me an enormous amount about the relationship between the sentence and the line. What had seemed like a simple relationship was suddenly changed into a much more sensual one, in which music and sense constantly dance around each other.

A goodreads plea

Are you on goodreads?  If you are, please consider adding (and adding a brief review?) of my book of interviews, Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets. I never do this sort of stuff, but I love the goodreads site, and I really want to be a part of that community.  (And it wouldn't hurt the book!) I'm really interested in seeing what people are also reading, saying about other glbt books and poetry in general, and more.

A HUGE thanks to those folks who have already done this.  If you go the site, you can even seen who has ranked me, what other books people are reading that might be similar, and just in general join in the conversation.  Doug Powell is a big user of goodreads and always has awesome recommendations and interesting mini reviews.  So how's that for a testimonial!  Doug Powell! (Love him!)

End of year lists

From Poetry Daily:

The Independent books of the year:

Stephen Knight's list of top poetry collections. (The Independent)

The Guardian's Year in Poetry:

Nicholas Wroe's roundup of 2010′s notable collections. (The Guardian)

Have you seen any lists? Would love to hear about them? Post links in comments and I'll add here.



Here's Matthew Hittinger's list, with lots of GBLT titles.

Hide / Seek….and boo! It's homophobia!

Okay, I'm just getting caught up with the latest news on this. I've blogged about it before. But lots has gone done since.

"Gay Bashing at the Smithsonian by Frank Rich." Read it. The whole thing.  If you haven't heard about the Hide/Seek exhibit and the sad, pathetic, offensive bit of political theater orchestrated by the right regarding this gay/lesbian portrait exhibit, then read Rich.  Trust me.  And below there's more, just a few links from a boatload of stuff out there that's been written on this. It's sad and pathetic, by the way, because the "public outcry" (there was none, it was fabricated) worked the Smithsonian pulled a video.  Yeah, that's offensive, too.  At least there's this good news.  Also, I urge you to go to the NPG's Facebook site and post a comment.  I did.  You can also read the

Rich: "It took only hours after Donohue's initial battle cry for the video to be yanked. "The decision wasn't caving in," the museum's director, Martin E. Sullivan, told reporters. Of course it was. The Smithsonian, in its own official statement, rationalized its censorship by saying that Wojnarowicz's video "generated a strong response from the public." That's nonsense. There wasn't a strong response from the public — there was no response. As the museum's own publicist told the press, the National Portrait Gallery hadn't received a single complaint about "A Fire in the Belly" from the exhibit's opening day, Oct. 30, until a full month later, when a "public" that hadn't seen the exhibit was mobilized by Donohue to blast the museum by phone and e-mail."

And: "It still seems an unwritten rule in establishment Washington that homophobia is at most a misdemeanor. By this code, the Smithsonian's surrender is no big deal; let the art world do its little protests. This attitude explains why the ever more absurd excuses concocted by John McCain for almost single-handedly thwarting the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" are rarely called out for what they are — "bigotry disguised as prudence," in the apt phrase of Slate's military affairs columnist, Fred Kaplan. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has been granted serious and sometimes unchallenged credence as a moral arbiter not just by Rupert Murdoch's outlets but by CNN, MSNBC and The Post's "On Faith" Web site even as he cites junk science to declare that "homosexuality poses a risk to children" and that being gay leads to being a child molester."

Also from the Times: Sexuality in Modernism: The (Partial) History:

On reconsideration, it seems more purposeful, as if specifically designed to avoid any controversy that might distract from the major point it was trying to make: namely, that work of gay artists was fundamental to the invention of American modernism. Or, put another way, difference had created the mainstream.

But how was the presence of difference defined in art? By subject matter? By style? By the sexual orientation of the artist? And isn't gayness, the most familiar form of such difference, a period concept, inapplicable to life and art of a century ago? Today the very word is used for convenience rather than categorically, with "queer" often used. (One way to think of it: gay is something you are; queer is something you choose to be outside of the heterosexual norm.) [CH:Huh?]

…

It is way past time for mainstream art history to acknowledge the shaping role of sexual difference in modern art. And "Hide/Seek," with its many strengths, begins to do so in a persuasively accessible way. Equally important is the need to assess the price that acceptance into history, and into the world, on mainstream terms may exact.

Wojnarowicz believed, as have many artists, that the outsider position is a valuable one, and with difference comes responsibilities, resistance to acceptance at any cost being one. The absence of a sense of that resistance in the show is what disappointed me when I first saw the catalog. It deepened with the removal of the video. And it stays with me still.

Bay Area Reporter reviews reveals this little nugget: "A complementary exhibition, Lost and Found: The Lesbian and Gay Presence in the Archives of American Art, presents letters, photos and printed materials that provide glimpses into the lives of gay American artists, at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, also through Feb. 13 of next year."

I wonder if it's still on after this hotmess.

Some links before the debacle began show the other issues surrounding this.  Thanks to reader Marshall for these:

So Band of Thebes's overview of  Hide/Seek exhibit and the problems he's had bringing it to fruition.

ArtInfo had a piece called " What's Troubling About the Smithsonian's "Hide/Seek" Show"

And the NYT Book Review has its own issues.

book, books, books….and…BOOKS

Richard Labonte's Best of 2010 Book Marks

Plus here are the new (some not even out yet) books I've come across in the past month or so that I've wanted to remind myself of.  All gay/lesbian relevant, and international even!  Enjoy! And post in the comments the books you want!

Library Journal blog: hot poetry titles for spring, include C. Dale Young:", C. Dale Young (Torn. Four Way. Mar. 2011. ISBN 9781935536062. pap. $15.95) seems admirably placed to consider the human being as both spiritual entity and physical process; he's not only a Grolier Prize–winning poet—and poetry editor of the New England Review—but a practicing physician."

And this from the same list: "A noted critic (his Orpheus in the Bronx was a National Book Critic Circle finalist) as well as a Pushcart Prize–winning poet, Reginald Shepherd died in 2008 but left Red Clay Weather (Univ. of Pittsburgh. Feb. 2011. ISBN 9780822961499. pap. $14.95) as a parting gift. It represents a life well lived—but cut off midflight."

After Spicer: Critical Essays, John Emil Vincent, ed. "The first critical book dedicated to the work of poet Jack Spicer: The beauty and difficulty of Jack Spicer's poetry continues to resonate with contemporary audiences nearly fifty years after his death. After Spicer brings together work by ten eminent literary scholars to provide a long overdue exploration of Spicer's legacy even as it continues to unfold. As editor John Emil Vincent notes, it is Spicer's "boundary crashing"—in his poetry, poetics, and politics—that makes his work so powerful and relevant today. fter Spicer extends the conversation between poet and reader that Spicer considered essential to the composition and survival of poems. Incisive essays by Maria Damon, Norman Finkelstein, Kelly Holt, Catherine Imbriglio, Kevin Killian, Michael Snediker, Anita Sokolsky, and Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, provide an overview of Spicer's oeuvre—his poetry, letters, plays, and his only novel—and explore his work in relation to queer theory, audience, religion, the lyric, and seriality. These essays give us crucial insights into Spicer's transition from a regional cult figure to a canonical postmodern poet."

Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book:"This magisterial work, long awaited and long the subject of passionate speculation, is an unprecedented exploration of modern poetry and poetics by one of America's most acclaimed and influential postwar poets. What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. developed into an expansive and unique quest to arrive at a poetics that would fuel Duncan's great work in the 1970s A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the work of H.D., Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell, and many others, Duncan's wide-ranging book is especially notable for its illumination of the role women played in creation of literary modernism. Until now, The H.D. Book existed only in mostly out-of-print little magazines in which its chapters first appeared. Now, for the first time published in its entirety, as its author intended, this monumental work—at once an encyclopedia of modernism, a reinterpretation of its key players and texts, and a record of Duncan's quest toward a new poetics—is at last complete and available to a wide audience."

Selected Prose Works of C.P. Cavafy: "The poems of C. P. Cavafy, even when fragmentary or incomplete, have a stamp of finality about them; they seem permanently incised, like inscriptions recovered from antiquity. The same cannot be said of Cavafy's prose. His essays and reflections are restless, hesitant, darting. That makes them all the more precious. They reveal to us a Cavafy shorn of pince-nez and sleeve garters; still at a slight angle to the universe, as E. M. Forster memorably described him, but somehow more cozily akimbo."

Unauthorized Voices, Essays on Poets and Poetry, 1987-2009, Marilyn Hacker:

"For over twenty years, award-winning poet, translator and editor Marilyn Hacker has been writing incisive criticism and reviews of contemporary poetry, with particular attention to the work of feminist poets, dissident poets, poets whose work merited more attention from the American (and sometimes British) reading public. Unauthorized Voices includes pieces on Adrienne Rich, Hayden Carruth, Elizabeth Bishop, Tony Harrison, Marilyn Nelson and June Jordan, on French and Francophone poets including Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Emmanuel Moses, on poetry and politics, and on the contemporary sonnet, all affirming Hacker as an original, unabashedly opinionated American critical voice"

In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology

Brian Teare's Pleasure reviewed.

Lastly, not new, but still worth posting because I just got to meet the author of this reviewed book in the flesh a little while ago: a review of Michael Snediker's Queer Optimism.  I got to meet John Vincent (of upcoming After Spicer fame and Queer Lyrics before that) at the same event. I was peeing my pants.

Franco has wrapped on Hart Crane movie

I didn't even realize they'd start shooting!  That was fast. Also, he not only directed it but is starring as Crane. Can't picture it.  Okay, so what gay poet is next for Franco?

Bad Writing: The Movie

With an appearance by one of our favorite poet, D. A. Powell, among many others. I'd love to screen this for my students.