诗歌是同性恋吗？

by James Crews

On a flight from San Francisco to Chicago a few years ago, I happened to be reading a book of poetry—Charles Wright’s Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems. I was absorbed, but the woman next to me—maybe bored by her own copy of The Da Vinci Code—felt compelled to strike up a conversation about her college-age daughter.

“She’s in school to be a teacher,” the woman said. I caught her eyeing the book now resting facedown on my lap. I was looking down at it too, trying to figure out a way to break off the talk. I didn’t want to hear about how smart her daughter was or that she was single. I didn’t like where this was going.

“Are you in school too?” she asked brightly. She had begun toying with her iPhone as if ready to flip it on any minute and enter my number for her fabulous, well-educated daughter.

I explained that, yes, I was in an MFA program for writing. “I’m a poet,” I confessed. (Why does saying that to strangers always feel like such a confession, a “coming out”?)

“Ohhhhhhh. A poet.” A hand fluttered to her chest. She let out a sigh, seemingly relieved that we might finally enter into a real conversation now that this mystery was cleared up. “I was wondering why a man would be reading poetry on a plane,” she said with a smile.

他

一个

Spencer Short and his first book, Tremolo, come first to mind. The collection was a winner in The National Poetry Series back in 2000, chosen by former U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, and it is a fearless and energetic book, resurrecting Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and others of the New York School. Short should also get an award for Most Poems in a Book that Refer to Drunken Acts. Consider this from “There Is Nothing Not to Be Amazed At”:

What strange algebra all this seems, now.
The drunken, hot-rodding kids. The drunken poets.
The waves slowly erasing the shore with
their tiny, salty hands. It’s enough
to drive you batfuck, C.D. said, talking about
metaphors I think. I’m batfuck for X,
it’s only been three days, & she’s got a boyfriend.

Wh

我

我

As a gay poet who grew up in the rural Midwest and went to school in Wisconsin, I have been deeply affected by Wunderlich’s work, intoxicated with his utter honesty in speaking about love, sex and attachment. He is fearless too, but there is more at stake with his speaker than there is with Short’s. Wunderlich explores life-and-death issues while, reading Short, I picture a graduate student whose troubles lie mostly in stumbling home alone, drunk, still “batfuck for X.” Though I’m taken with Wunderlich, something just under the surface also troubles me a little, and I think it has to do with how he and other gay poets tap into a common language and visual vocabulary to write what we might call The Gay Poem. I think of his prose litany in “Fourteen Things We’re Allowed to Bring to the Underworld”:

L. says Fire, and I understand that, and would take that too. Architecture, fretwork for structure. The miniature tea set for delicacy. Opera for blood. Iron for fortitude and weight. Linen as a reminder of skin. Crystal for simple music. Tin. Leather for harnessing. Paper. Milk. A boat. I’ll stop one short.

When I read these lines, I bristle. This poet’s work creates its own versions of masculinity, but (although he is certainly being playful here) the lines sound somehow fey at the same time. “The miniature tea set” and “crystal” and mention of “opera” bring to mind the stereotype of the erudite gay man, obsessed with style, image and entertaining. And because the poems in The Anchorage do take risks with more openly homosexual subject matter, let me also ask a rather prudish question: If any poet ventures to write explicitly about her or his sex life and the trappings thereof—whether those include whips and harnesses or phalluses—does she/he risk losing more than a few readers who’d prefer not to go there? Do gay poets, who so often (rightfully, I would argue) write about their sexual lives, the pleasures and mutinies of the body—do we risk turning off straight readers? Can poetry afford to lose any more of its readership?

Recently, I was sitting in a café leafing through a copy of Carl Phillips’ Speak Low. I’ve been in love with Phillips’ philosophical musings and lush language for years, taken with his fluid lines that have often (tellingly) been called “athletic” and “muscular,” and which frankly explore the emotional and sexual lives of gay men. A writer-friend stopped by my table as I was reading and asked if he could see the new book. He flipped it open to the Table of Contents and started cracking up.

“What?” I asked. A Carl Phillips poem may make you furrow your brow and sigh, but it will likely not make you laugh.

He read the titles of the poems aloud to me; a partial list: “Conquest,” “Captivity,” “To Drown in Honey,” “Gold on Parchment,” “Porcelain,” “Topaz,” “Volition,” “Reciprocity,” “Sterling,” “Husk.”

“He’s so gay,” my friend said.

如果

Servitude. Conquest. The one who, from the hip, keeps
pushing himself up into the other’s mouth. The one who
takes from behind . . .

Or these lines from “Captivity”:

Oh, sometimes it is as if desire itself had been given form, and
acreage, and I’d been left for lost there. Amazement grips me,

I grip it back, the book shuts slowly: Who shuts it? You?

Though becoming a poet certainly didn’t make me prefer men, the two are related. When I think about my first encounters with poetry, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson instantly spring to mind. They were outsiders, and that stance appealed to a nerdy kid who already felt excluded from the social structures of junior high school. Dickinson and Whitman had fallen in love with the things of the world, and there was a real loneliness in those lines I could relate to. My inexplicable attraction to men had already set me apart from everyone else, and so when poetry came around, I found a way to make use of the loneliness I reasoned I was going to feel either way.

阿宝

Hard work, this business of solitude.
Hard work and no gain,
Mouthful of silence, mouthful of air.
Everything’s more than it seems back here. Everything’s less.

If I could do over my conversation with that woman on the plane, I think I’d now act as a better defender of my own art. I’d gently call her out on her assumptions about poetry and men, and I wouldn’t need poems like Short’s to do so. Maybe I’d say that, with so many writers of both genders attending MFA and PhD programs in Creative Writing, we no longer need to question the masculinity or validity of poetry: everyone’s doing it, and it’s thriving. Ultimately, I would kindly explain to her what power I find in poetry, how much I have inexplicably come to love it over the years (and how much I enjoy sharing it). The question is not whether poetry is particularly gay or not; it is, as always, why we choose to fill our time with the things we do, how often we have no choice in the matter of what calls to us. I think she would have understood.