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Homosexuality Is a Poem: How Gay Poets Remodeled the Lyric, Community and the Ideology of Sex to Theorize a Gay Poetic

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Homosexuality Is a Poem: How Gay Poets Remodeled the Lyric, Community and the Ideology of Sex to Theorize a Gay Poetic View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses March 2015 Homosexuality is a Poem: How Gay Poets Remodeled the Lyric, Community and the Ideology of Sex to Theorize a Gay Poetic Christopher M. Hennessy University of Massachusetts - Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Hennessy, Christopher M., "Homosexuality is a Poem: How Gay Poets Remodeled the Lyric, Community and the Ideology of Sex to Theorize a Gay Poetic" (2015). Doctoral Dissertations. 302. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/302 This Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HOMOSEXUALITY IS A POEM: HOW GAY POETS REMODELED THE LYRIC, COMMUNITY AND THE IDEOLOGY OF SEX TO THEORIZE A GAY POETIC A Dissertation Presented by CHRISTOPHER HENNESSY Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2015 Department of English © Copyright by Christopher Hennessy 2015 All Rights Reserved HOMOSEXUALITY IS A POEM: HOW GAY POETS REMODELED THE LYRIC, COMMUNITY AND THE IDEOLOGY OF SEX TO THEORIZE A GAY POETIC A Dissertation Presented by CHRISTOPHER HENNESSY Approved as to style and content by: ___________________________________________________ Ruth Jennison, Chair ___________________________________________________ Peter Gizzi, Member ___________________________________________________ Henry Abelove, Member ______________________________________________ Jenny Spencer, Chair English Department DEDICATION To my husband and my mother and father, for their patience and love ABSTRACT HOMOSEXUALITY IS A POEM: HOW GAY POETS REMODELED THE LYRIC, COMMUNITY AND THE IDEOLOGY OF SEX TO THEORIZE A GAY POETIC FEBRUARY 2015 CHRISTOPHER HENNESSY, B.A., MARSHALL UNIVERSITY M.F.A., EMERSON COLLEGE Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Ruth Jennison This dissertation approaches the work of three canonical post-war gay poets in an effort to construct a discourse on sexuality and the minoritized writer that argues the lyric functions as a historically contingent, politically invested, value-laden genre in which some subjectivities might be prohibited from or find their expression made to signify in ways that re-inscribe oppression. The first chapter theorizes the possiblitites of a gay poetic and analyzes the gay poet’s subjectivity as one obsessed with the ways in which he is marginalized due to expression. In the chapter on Frank O’Hara, the poet is shown to disfigure the lyric through the unliterary to allow it to speak for the perverse. In the chapter on Jack Spicer, the poet’s concept of ‘we alone’ is shown to outmaneuver subjugating identificatory structures. The chapter on John Wieners shows how his queer failure frustrates the normative lyric’s reception to produce the very marginalizing the gay writer must resist. The final chapter analyzes the poetry published in the years following the beginning of “gay liberation” (1969-1973) and suggests some poets relied on lyric expressivity in their work; others sought to fashion a poetics that married graphic content with radical experimentation and thus produced a more politically and poetically complex liberationist text. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .........................................................................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: HOMOSEXUALITY IS A POEM ....................................................................... 1 2. FRANK O'HARA'S POETICS OF ORGASM AND OTHER PLEASURES: PERVERTING FORMAL VALUES TO THEORIZE A LYRIC OF ‘UNDECIDABILITY’..................................... 66 3. JACK SPICER AND THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY: DIRECT ADDRESS AND THE READER-LOVER........................................................................................................................................134 4. JOHN WIENERS’ ‘POEM AS VERBAL BLOWJOB’: DISRUPTING THE LYRIC, ESCAPING THE CLOSET........................................................................................................................188 5. GAY LIBERATION POETS AND THE “PORNOGRAPHIC POEM”: SEARCHING THE LYRIC FOR RADICAL THEORIES OF HOMOSEXUAL SEX.......................................................239 BIBLIOGRAPHY .........................................................................................................................................314 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: HOMOSEXUALITY IS A POEM “…it has become, in my opinion, imperative to achieve a shifted attitude… towards the thought and fact of sexuality, as an element in character, personality, the emotions, and a theme in literature. I’m not going to argue the question by itself; it does not stand by itself.” (384) —Walt Whitman, “A Backwards Glance o’er Traveled Roads” from Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855-1892 “Homosexual and heterosexual desire and bonds, given their different cultural valuation, have entirely different available narratives, legality, forms of expression, as well as different available relations to abstraction, specification, self-definition, community, ritual, temporality, and spatiality. This is not to suggest that there are not overlaps but rather that any treatment of homosexual desire as simply another form of desire (read, heterosexual) will be fundamentally flawed, if not also in the service of a homophobic fantasy of a world without gay people in it.” (30) —John Emil Vincent, Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry Part 1: “It is the law oF my own voice I shall investigate.” “So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping /our mouths shut? as if we'd been pierced by a glance!” begins a poem entitled “Homosexuality” by Frank O’Hara, unpublished in his lifetime. Because I want to explore here, and indeed throughout the chapters that comprise this dissertation, the deeply and complicatedly imbricated relationship(s) between poetry and homosexuality, it feels appropriate that I begin with a poem that does this just this through its title and through its focus on voice, self, and sex. I have cited the remaining lines of the poem in their entirety: The song of an old cow is not more full of judgment than the vapors which escape one's soul when one is sick; 1 so I pull the shadows around me like a puff and crinkle my eyes as if at the most exquisite moment of a very long opera, and then we are off! without reproach and without hope that our delicate feet will touch the earth again, let alone "very soon." It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate. I start like ice, my finger to my ear, my ear to my heart, that proud cur at the garbage can in the rain. It's wonderful to admire oneself with complete candor, tallying up the merits of each of the latrines. 14th Street is drunken and credulous, 53 rd tries to tremble but is too at rest. The good love a park and the inept a railway station, and there are the divine ones who drag themselves up and down the lengthening shadow of an Abyssinian head in the dust, trailing their long elegant heels of hot air crying to confuse the brave "It's a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world.” O'Hara's poem is about desire and sex, to be certain, but it is also about the speaker claiming an identity and it is about questions of the public and the private. The poem begins with a sly rhetorical question meant to mischievously implicate the reader as well as call into question the speaker's own willingness to fully articulate, open-mouthed, the poem's title: "So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping / our mouths shut?" (The mask may be seen as a precursor to term “the closet,” which historians suggest came later1, though work still continues to be done around this issue.) The vocal declaration is, for the moment, kept in check by a threat of being seen, a threat (sexualized, penetrative) of violence, if the speaker’s outward appearance is recognized as somehow signaling their homosexuality. Just 2 as an assertion of self is being made, uttered in the poem (“It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate”), the poem also not so subtly hints that the speaker's sexual identity includes performing unlawful acts (sex in public places like railway stops and parks) and at any moment can be ‘investigated’ by the authorities. The speaker is daring in how he relishes a transgressive image of sexual self: "It's wonderful to admire oneself with complete candor, tallying up the merits of each / of the latrines." The 'latrines' are New York's public restrooms, where gay men trick for sex and which were also under surveillance because of this. So, while at first the title seems to be an act of agency, of self-definition, the poem invites us to wonder about the consequence of such a public admission. The speaker's declaration of self moves from the rhetorical to the sentimental: "I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world." As I’ve written elsewhere2,
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