Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners

Positively Not: A Talk about Poetries and Traditions

82 Brian Teare i. Re­ ject I’d like to offer you a ques­ tion: is there a dif­ fer­ ence ­ between heg­ e­ mony and ­ poetic tra­ di­ tion? Sup­ pose by heg­ e­ mony we mean the dom­ i­ nance of one so­ cial group over an­ other, dom­ i­ nance main­ tained by “a rul­ ing class . . . [that ­ creates] cul­ tural and po­ lit­ i­ cal con­ sen­ sus ­ through un­ ions, po­ lit­ i­ cal par­ ties,­ schools, media, the ­ church, and other vol­ un­ tary as­ so­ ci­ a­ tions” (Gram­ sci, as ­ quoted by Hain­ sworth, “Gramsci’s Heg­ e­ mony The­ ory”). And sup­ pose by ­ poetic tra­ di­ tion we mean both how “poetic his­ tory . . . is held to be in­ dis­ tin­ guish­ able from ­ poetic in­ flu­ ence since ­ strong poets make his­ tory” and how the “re­ la­ tions ­ between poets [are] . . . akin to what Freud ­ called the fam­ ily ro­ mance” (Bloom, The Anx­ iety of In­ flu­ ence, 5, 8). It fol­ lows from these words of An­ to­ nio Gram­ sci and Har­ old Bloom that ­ poetic tra­ di­ tion could be de­ fined as one form of heg­ e­ mony whose major con­ trol­ ling meta­ phor is that of the hetero­ sex­ ual fam­ ily. Be­ hind this meta­ phor is a struc­ ture that fuses na­ tion, race, sex, gen­ der, and sex­ u­ al­ ity into one rul­ ing class whose lin­ e­ age is a for­ mula for dom­ i­ nance we learn by going to ­ school, by brows­ ing the ­ shelves of our li­ brar­ ies and book­ stores, by read­ ing an­ thol­ o­ gies, and, po­ ten­ tially, es­ says such as this Pos­ i­ tively Not A Talk about Poe­ tries and Tra­ di­ tions Positively Not 83 one. We learn, lit­ er­ ally, to re­ pro­ duce the hetero­ sex­ ist meta­ phor, the very one that under­ writes the po­ ten­ tial era­ sure of gay poe­ tries. Which be­ hav­ ior begs an­ other ques­ tion: just how vol­ un­ tary are our as­ so­ ci­ a­ tions? Per­ haps heg­ e­ mony is both more sub­ tle and ­ easier to­ achieve than we think; per­ haps in choos­ ing es­ says to read we might more be vig­ i­ lant and ­ self-critical! Per­ haps we ­ should keep in mind what fem­ i­ nist poet and ­ critic Susan Howe ­ writes in her intro­ duc­ tion to The Eu­ rope of ­ Trusts: Mal­ ice dom­ i­ nates the his­ tory of Power and Prog­ ress. His­ tory is the­ record of win­ ners. Doc­ u­ ments were writ­ ten by the Mas­ ters. . . . This is my his­ tor­ i­ cal con­ scious­ ness. (11, 13) In this light, I’d like to offer a re­ lated, ­ though per­ haps more pro­ voc­ a­ tive ques­ tion: ­ what’s the dif­ fer­ ence ­ between heg­ e­ mony and “gay ­ poetic tra­ di­ tion”? What if, by bor­ row­ ing the same fa­ mil­ ial meta­ phor and psycho­ an­ a­ lytic vo­ cab­ u­ lary on which Har­ old Bloom ­ relies, gay ­ poetic tra­ di­ tion ends up being a doc­ u­ ment writ­ ten by the Mas­ ters, a doc­ u­ ment in which only Power and Prog­ ress and Priv­ i­ lege write books that get in the hands of read­ ers? And fur­ ther: ­ what’s to be ­ gained by bet­ ter de­ fin­ ing our in­ di­ vid­ ual writ­ ings in re­ la­ tion­ ship to any heg­ e­ mony, es­ pe­ cially a sex­ ual, fa­ mil­ ial one, if, as Ju­ dith But­ ler ­ writes in The ­ Psychic Life of Power, the re­ sult will be that “what­ ever you say will be read back as an overt or sub­ tle man­ i­ fes­ ta­ tion of your es­ sen­ tial homo­ sex­ u­ al­ ity”; ­ what’s the use if “the one who in de­ fi­ ant ‘outness’ de­ clares his/her homo­ sex­ u­ al­ ity only to re­ ceive the re­ sponse, ‘Ah yes, so you are that, and only that’” (93)? In other words: who ben­ e­ fits most from a def­i­ ni­ tion and prac­ tice of “gay ­ poetic tra­ di­ tion”? Gay poets who, in mim­ ick­ ing the heg­ e­ monic struc­ ture of a hetero­ sex­ ist lit­ er...