bathroom songs Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) bathroom songs: eve kosofsky sedgwick as a poet. Copyright © 2017 by editor and authors. This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 In- ternational license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2017 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-947447-30-1 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-947447-31-8 (ePDF) lccn: 2017957440 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Cover image: Photograph of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick with Buttons (Dayton, c. 1954) by Leon Kosofsky. Bathroom Songs Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet Edited by Jason Edwards To our dear friend Hal — who made it all possible — who’s always so kind. Sarah McCarry, What would we do without you? How much less we’d know. Contents Part I Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet | 15 Introduction Bathroom Songs? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet Jason Edwards | 17 1 Look with Your Hands Angus Connell Brown | 77 2 The Abject Animal Poetics of ‘The Warm Decembers’ Ben Westwood | 85 3 Eve’s Muse Kathryn R. Kent | 111 4 ‘Shyly / as a big sister I would yearn / to trace its avocations’, or, Who’s the Muse? Mary Baine Campbell | 139 5 Queer Therapy: On the Couch with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Monica Pearl | 151 xi 6 Waiting in the Dark: Some Musings on Sedgwick’s Performative(s) Meg Boulton | 169 *** Part II: The Uncollected Poems | 177 Introduction Someday We’ll Look Back with Pleasure Even on This: Sedgwick’s Uncollected Poems Jason Edwards | 179 The Uncollected Poems Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit | 207 Death | 208 Bathroom Song | 209 Pandas in Trees | 211 Untitled (Blake panda poems) | 221 Tru-Cut | 222 Valentine | 223 2/81 | 224 Lost Letter | 225 The Palimpsest | 234 Explicit | 235 Hank Williams and a Cat | 236 Jimmy Lane | 237 Jukebox | 238 Die Sommernacht hat mir’s angetan | 239 Phantom Limb | 240 Two P.O.W. Suicides | 241 Once There Was a Way to Get Back Homeward | 242 The Ring of Fire | 243 The Prince of Love in the Desert Night | 244 Artery | 245 xii A Death by Water | 246 Yellow Toes | 247 Soutine | 248 Another Poem from the Creaking Bed | 250 Cain | 252 The City and Man | 253 Lullaby | 254 No More Dusk | 255 Ribs of Steel | 256 To a Friend | 258 When in Minute Script | 260 To a Swimmer | 261 Untitled (‘Wonder no more upon the mysteries’) | 262 From an Ending for ‘The Triumph of Life’ | 263 T.E. Lawrence and the Old Man, His Imagined Tormentor | 271 Movie Party, Telluride House, Ithaca, New York | 272 Falling in Love over The Seven Pillars | 274 Calling Overseas | 275 What the Poet Thought And What She Found in the Telluride Files: | 276 Epilogue: Teachers and Lovers | 277 The Last Poem of Yv*r W*nt*rs | 279 Saul at Jeshimon [First Variant] | 280 Saul at Jeshimon [Second Variant] | 281 Siegfried Rex von Munthe, Soldier and Poet, Killed December, 1939, on the German Battleship Graf Spee | 283 Lawrence Reads La Morte D’Arthur in the Desert | 286 *** Bibliography | 291 Contributors | 301 xiii Acknowledgments I am grateful to the History of Art department at the University of York and the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Foundation, for funding the conference that formed the origin of many of the chapters of this book. I want to thank Ben Madden, for talking Merrill with me, and much else. It has also been nothing but a pleasure to work with both Eileen Joy and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei at punctum books. I shall be eternally in the debt of Hal A. Sedgwick and Sa- rah McCarry for giving me access to the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick archive, and to Wabi-Sabi, its resident divinity, for keeping me company there. I will probably never get over Hal’s generos- ity in suggesting that Sedgwick’s uncollected poems be a part of this volume. My ridiculous love for Hal, Sarah, and all the contributors to this volume knows no bounds. Finally, to Eve, who I think about every day and whose life and work mean the world to me. As Shawn Colvin says of Joni Mitchell, “me wimp, you master”. Master, I lay this succulent mouse at your door. I probably got almost everything wrong but I hope you didn’t just hate this. xiv Part I EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK AS A POET introduction Bathroom Songs? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet Jason Edwards An Important Writer of, and on, Poetry? Waking in the morning, I remember first I’m grown up. I have some money and a car and anything I want, to cook and eat, and (in the horrid, doggerel blank verse in which I — no, not “think” — but breathe, and represent continually to my own ear the place of my unthinkingness) repeats, repeats some vapid version of a Shakespeare phrase, “Yet Edmund was beloved.” Waking alone, yet E- is beloved. Also: “an important writer of fiction and poetry,” of criticism and poetry, of course, it’s meant to say, but ‘fiction’, in this empty register, scans, so “fiction” in my head it always is. — Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘The Warm Decembers’1 1 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Fat Art, Thin Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 147. 17 Bathroom Songs Bathroom Songs represents the first study to consider the poetry of one of the most significant literary theorists of the late-twen- tieth and early-twenty-first centuries, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Most renowned for her trilogy of ground-breaking, queer-theo- retical texts — Between Men: English Literature and Male Homo- social Desire (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990), and Ten- dencies (1993) — Sedgwick was, from the outset, and always in her mind a poet. For example, as Hal A. Sedgwick documented, all of the entries on his wife’s CV from 1967 to 1975 were prizes for poetry.2 In 1977, Sedgwick submitted her first book of poems, Traceable, Salient, Thirsty, to various presses, containing key po- ems from the previous four years; but the volume, bafflingly, failed to find a publisher. Undeterred, Sedgwick began work, the following year, on her most ambitious poem: ‘The Warm Decembers’ (1978–1986), a meta-Victorian novella that would find a home in Fat Art, Thin Art (1994), the only collection of poetry Sedgwick published during her lifetime. The volume was acclaimed as a “work of poetic distinction and indispensable human use” by fellow poet Allen Grossman, and as a “thrilling experience” by literary critic Maud Ellmann, who thought the poems proved Sedgwick one of the “truly innovative” poets of her generation. Richard How- ard, meanwhile, located Sedgwick in a tradition of American critic-poets, whose critical and poetical interests were closely entwined.3 In 1999, Sedgwick published a second book of poetry, A Di- alogue on Love — considered in this volume, in the context of queer therapy, in a deeply informed essay by Monica Pearl. The book represented a haibun memoir of Sedgwick’s psychothera- py with Shannon Van Wey. Employing a seventeenth-century Japanese form, much loved by James Merrill, the volume wove together haiku and prose. The book was also a key companion volume, and partly an autobiographical guide, to Fat Art, Thin Art. 2 Hal. A Sedgwick, ‘A Note on ‘The 1001 Séances’’, GLQ 17.4 (2011), 452–453. 3 All cited on the flyleaf to Fat Art, Thin Art. 18 Bathroom Songs? Mindful of such details, Bathroom Songs develops, in four ways, our sense of what Hal Sedgwick characterized as his wife’s “complex and changing relation” to poetry, especially her own.4 Firstly, by providing, in this essay, an unusually ‘fat’ — indeed potentially ‘obese’ — introduction to Sedgwick’s collected poet- ry and writings about poets; one taking advantage of her prefer- ence for corpulent aesthetics. The first part of the book then in- cludes six alternately svelte and generously proportioned essays, on Fat Art, Thin Art and A Dialogue on Love. The second part of the book subsequently includes more than forty of Sedgwick’s previously uncollected poems, ranging from the final narrative poem and lyrics she published before her death in 2009 to the earliest writings of her adolescence. These poems are prefaced and contextualized, in a seventh essay, within the context of Sedgwick’s broader corpus. Beyond Novel Gazing: Numerous Poems are Being Read and Written In spite of her fame as a novel gazer, Sedgwick wrote repeat- edly about the English, European, American, and East Asian poetic canons, penning eleven essays on poetry across her ca- reer.5 These included ‘The 1001 Seances’, on Merrill (1975);6 Walt ‘Whitman’s Transatlantic Context: Class, Gender, and Male Ho- mosexual Style’ (1983);7 ‘Swan in Love: The Example of Shake- speare’s Sonnets’ (1985);8 Alfred Lord ‘Tennyson’s Princess: One 4 Sedgwick, ‘A Note’, 453.