Category: Uncategorized

I confronted it.

I paginated my thesis manuscript. I broke down the way I was thinking about it. I have poems that I sensed and created as sequences—the longest being 14 poems long—and that ghettoizing of work was preventing me from moving forward. I scattered the sequences over three sections.

It’s 79 poems long. Probably about 90 pages, roughly, but I’m expecting some of these guests to leave the party early.

Oh, and I hate all my poems.

Every time I pick up my stack of thesis poems to order them and provide a general sense of structure, I’m overwhelmed by a feeling of dread.

And then I put them down, and leave the room, and assure myself I’ll do it later.

I was thinking today about the abuses of the phrase “coming out” in recent years. Some of this discussion was prompted by reading half of John D’Emilio’s essay “After Stonewall.” In that writing, he identifies a shift in the queer usage of that phrase: prior to Stonewall, “coming out” was used by queer culture much the same way it was used by debutant society, as an indicator that one had “entered into” adult society and was available for suitorship. The queering of this term, then, naturally implies one’s entrance into queer culture/society. After Stonewall, the phrase became a political term used to denote that one had identified one’s sexuality to both gay and straight societies in an effort to create greater queer visibility (D’Emilio).

Unlike debs, though, queer folks come out of somewhere, and it’s not their mother’s house. The locus origin of out-coming became known as the “closet,” that shadowy place where one hides skeletons, lycra, blue eyeshadow, and other shameful personal habits and vices. I believe this is a post-Stonewall development. Since post-Stonewall queers don’t just come out into queer society, the come out into heterosexual society, they are coming out of a queer closet, a space that restricts the expression of their sexualities and sexual identities. Coming out, then, became the sloughing-off of the perceived shamefulness of queer sexualities and the embracing of the self as a queer person.

The obvious political bias of the heterosexual community is evidenced by their perverse understanding of “coming out.” In their circles, to “come out” is to admit/confess to an activity or trait that is socially undesirable or looked down upon. It does not carry with it any positive aspects among straight people, and their usage of the term in their subculture shows a greater tendency to devalorize queer sexualities and genders.

I get angry when I hear people say they “came out” as a fat person. (This was a frequent instance on talk shows a few years back.) You CAN’T come out as a fat person. People already KNOW you are fat: it is a physical trait. However, you can begin to “own” your fatness, which I believe is how this usage works. Ownership of traits perceived to be undesirable by the majority is a political act that re-valorizes the trait in question. But I think it also begs: is there a fat closet? And what’s in it? Can culture create a closet for a visible trait, devalorized or not? I think not, but the discussion remains open.

The expression “coming out” has morphed into several different usages since it became a maintream way to identify the process through which a queer person requests to be seen as a queer person. It became a transitive verb as people like Michaelangelo Signorile started to “out” people—to “expose” their queer sexualities to the public without their knowledge or consent. “Out” also became an adjective, as in, “Is he out yet?” Interestingly enough, this is one of the first occasions, I think, where it’s cooler to be “out” than “in.”

I read today on the cover of the most recent issue of DETAILS magazine: “Exposing Hollywood’s Closeted Young Republicans.” The Republicans have a closet now too? How much more can our cultural closet hold? Here again, the usage indicates shamefulness—”exposing” is never something we really hope will happen to us, right?

All of this relates back to queer culture and reinforces the shamefulness of homosexuality. If there was nothing wrong with queerness, if our culture didn’t devalorize it and devalorize queer people, there wouldn’t be any need for coming out. We’d already BE out.

In fact, we’d just be.

I just finished creating my profile.

And I’ve been experimenting with that Spahr-inspired collaging, revisiting my Madonna pastiche poem and crossing it with invented and revised memories, quoted journal entries (mine), and a pamphlet on coming out to your parents. It’s going well. Nine pages so far. Don’t know what I’ll keep or toss, but the process has been exciting.

In Juliana Spahr’s “spiderwasp or literary criticism,” she looks at three specific contemporary poets whose work “joins” various and varied poetic schools of thought and aesthetic, and she does this primarily as a response to the classification-based forms of literary criticism that reduce fields of vision rather than clarifying them. It is Spahr’s assertion (which she locates as being in dialogue with several other critics) that categorization of poetic “schools” and such restricts the ability of those poets to transcend themselves. (I think)

What stands out to me most is the poem that reads three ways: Joan Retallack’s “THE BLUE STARES” is fashioned out of italicized snippets of Barbara Guest’s “lost” (out of print) poem “The Blue Stairs”, the capitalized words “THE BLUE STARES” and some lowercase notebook entries by the poet. I’m so interested in this sort of collaging of work: and truly I have experimented with creating a coming out narrative from disjointed Madonna lyrics. (Yes, really.) But like the novel House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski), meaning seems to come from the coexistence and collision of the disparate elements.

House of Leaves, by the way, is freaking genius.

My blog—I’m hoping—will focus on poetry & poetics as I explore some poetic theory.

Other interests: queer theory, film studies, postmodernism. Expect a buffet.