Essays
Two Anthologies
Jeffery Beam
Not since the Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse has a gay anthology demonstrated for me what is best in queer lit. Having a strong dislike for confessional and overly autobiographical poetry, I have tired of hearing one poet after another's political rant or coming out story. In Love Speaks Its Name and Word of Mouth editors McClatchy and Liu have aimed rather higher—for experiment and craftsmanship married to content. Love Speaks is essentially a pillow book, sized for the pocket, the nightstand drawer, or under the rumpled pillow. Word of Mouth succeeds as a major survey of twentieth century American gay poems.
Liu, in his critical and reasoned introduction, explains that his anthology "does not limit itself" to "poems that seemed more daring by way of content than by choice of form or even by way of poetic lineage." Previous anthologies have admirably offered the work of mostly young activist or gay ghetto poets at the expense of new and older unknown poets. The more interesting poets here write "quieter poems" that "might elude most finely tuned gaydar." Liu cheerfully hopes he might "complicate the issue of just how useful the term 'gay American poetry' is for our time and generations to come." McClatchy's book, focusing solely on love, confirms the argument Liu puts forth in his. Word closes with a fine afterward by Rodney Phillips of the New York Public Library's Berg Collection. Phillips observes that the poets here "perhaps for the first time as far as gay anthologies go" "who are pretty much self-identified as gay, also identify themselves just as importantly as poets" making an anthology where "each of these 'qualities' seem pretty much equal."
Poets in "louder" previous anthologies might argue with Phillips's statement, and some might find many of the poems here "old-fashioned" in their unwillingness to say some things outright—working through metaphor as well as out-spokenness. That's the difference. Poetry's strength rests in metaphor's ability to reach multiple layers of understanding—oftentimes lost in poetry of rhetoric. The poetry in Mouth is not dumb-downed and expects its readers to ponder deeper implications.
Mouth offers an extensive bibliography of the poets' works, but sadly, offers no snapshot biographies, which would have further enhanced the usefulness of the anthology. Arranged chronologically, it's great fun to find James Merrill (with too few poems, alas) between Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara. The greatest discovery for me was Leland Hickman's "Yellowknife Boy" with its Ginsbergesque throttling and pungent poignancies in which the poet's family and his love for men interlace into a shamanic trance of man-love and father-love "in emergence from dadspace gentle." Beautiful work.
Mouth succeeds and fails singularly. More intelligent than almost any other previous anthology, it still suffers from that which deadens much celebrated gay poetry (and poetry in general) in our time—being too frequently self-referential and provincially urban. Poets of the countryside and natural world like Will Inman still get short shrift (where is Inman?). (Southern gay poets are noticeably, as always the case, virtually absent from both anthologies.) Too many of the poems replay the usual personal litanies of relationship / crises / conquests. Contrary to Liu's eschewing of poetic lineage, many of the poets know (or knew) each other and use their poems for private conversations and social climbing. Centuries from now this moment in gay lit will be viewed as obsessed by chatty style over substance and experiment. In this sense, Word is somewhat schizophrenic, yet the craftsmanship of the poems in general saves the book from a slippery confessional slope. I admire Frank O'Hara's work, he was one of the first gay poets I studied, but every poem of his reminds me of the insular gift, the oftentimes vacuous silliness of the confessional stream, he helped give to American and gay poetry. As a whole, the older poets don't suffer as much from the weary homogenized styles of the young.
Poems and poets worth mentioning: Joe Brainard's "I Remember" is one of the great twentieth century poems, avoiding confessional egocentricity by bombarding the reader with a universal flood of remembrances of the world of things. Southerner Thomas Meyer's "Love's Dial" I have acknowledged before as one of the most stately and impassioned gay love poems ever written. One wishes for a bit more of James Broughton—his antic nursery rhymes are missing. Where are Ronald Johnson's early poems—masterpieces of open field nature-based mysticism? And Jonathan Williams' odd, comic, and on-the-spot satiric later poems? Bowers, Spicer, Duncan, Jonas, Gunn, Dickey, and James White, offer poems of distinction and delight. Wieners' classic "Two Years Later" is a treasure. The more contemporary poets tend, in my view, to be either too precious or too casual—one can be either without sacrificing craft, but it's much harder. Carl Phillips frequently flies above the sheep, as does Reginald Shepherd whose elegant yet clarified formalities mix image and sexual fact with delft and energizing wit: "I come / through the door, I came and was / conquered by tensed thighs, taut buttocks." Justin Chin successfully satirizes and elegizes simultaneously the brokenhearted beauty and sadness of gay cruising life—with its competition, decay, lust, loneliness, desperation, thrills, titillations, and decadence.
In a relative handful of poems from Virgil through Michelangelo and Shakespeare and on to Whitman, A.E. Housman, Lorca, Pasolini, Noël Coward, Bessie Smith, Gertrude Stein, Baldwin, Rich, Rukeyser, Schuyler, Weiners, Meyer, Doty, and Hemphill, McClatchy has done the unthinkable. Placing no historical or locational limits on itself, Love Speaks offers a thorough historical survey of western gay poetry in a small package. All the big names are here with a nice smattering of young poets who you may or may not have heard of. Unfortunately no bios or bibliography are offered—just the birth and death dates of the poets. Love poetry is, in my view, the hardest to write and McClatchy has chosen well. I have returned over and over again to this anthology and never tire of rereading the many classic poems herein. While most of the poems here are somewhat more restrained experimentally than in Word they remain heralds of the poetic craft. McClatchy seems to hit upon the thing that I believe allows both volumes to succeed so well—"The poems here have all been written by men and women whose desires for love, over the centuries, have been condemned and persecuted. In earlier days this forced them to learn how to disguise their desires. But then, that is what poems do as well. To hide something is to conceal it; to disguise something is to reveal it but only to those who know how and where to look. The very conventions of poetry were devised to encode experience, to make it less obvious and thereby more true. To make a metaphor, after all, is to describe something in terms of what it is not, the better to apprehend what it is."
Bravo, I say. Let poets continue to disarm by cunning, rather than revealing all. I much prefer mystery in my poems. Nothing wrong with going naked (in body, politics, or psychology)—a time and place for that too. We can have both can't we? These two anthologies remind us of the power of metaphor to reveal, of subterfuge to supplant, and of the roundabout way being a much more interesting one than the plain ahead path.