Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry

Four Gay American Poets

Four Gay American Poets The four poets I write about here have all been for med, at various removes, by the confluence of gay liberation (and the liber atory movements of the 1960s and 1970s in general) and what have been called the new American poetries. Both the new social movements and the new American poetries (neither ver y new anymore) seek to see and seize the world in a new way , to transform the apparently given, if only (only!) by seeing it as and for itself for the first time. Concomitantl , both movements have conceived of identity , poetic and social, as process rather than product, flux rather than fixi . For these poets, social identity (or rather , social identities) comprises only one element of their complex and polyvalent work, and it is constantly in motion, a work in progress, made not found. Much of the social thr ust of Aaron Shurin’ s poetr y, for example, calls into question settled notions of identity, while Donald Britton’s work often eschews the presentation or production of individual selfhood at all. All four poets continue and develop an experimental strain in American poetr y, playful and ear nest at once, and one that always begins with and returns to the word as the building block of the poem. Their predecessors, many themselves gay , include such diverse poets as W alt Whitman, Rober t Duncan, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashber y. In their various ways all four poets investigate, invigorate, and even interrogate language and its relations to the world, not as an academic exercise or a pastime, but as an essential aspect of being in the world and making a world for oneself, and even of remaking the world. For all of them, the poem proposes a world of possibility that adds to and often argues with the world as it presents itself to us. 140 Aaron Shurin and the Paradise of For ms Aaron Shurin’s poetry has been formed within the dual matrix of gay liberation culture and avant-garde poetry (as he writes, “I was born, as it were, into Projective V erse, theories of ‘or ganic form’ and ‘composition by field’”), with Robe t Duncan as the crucial linking figure. Indeed, he and Duncan were clos friends, a relationship, in Shurin’s words, “built around mutual poetic concer ns: the vitality of lyric writing situated within a framework of postmoder n investigations of for m and language .” Love and language, sexuality and textuality , have been central themes and central modes in Aaron Shurin’ s poetr y since the beginning of his career, and for him these two things have been keys to liberation both personal and social. His has never been a poetry of uncomplicated self-expression, but a poetry that seeks both to embody and to incite transfor mation; the linguistic transfor mations of the poetr y are the model (and hopefully the catalyst) for the larger transformations it proposes and points toward. (Denise Lever tov was an early mentor for many years and, as a deeply lyric poet with strong political commitments , was a model for Shurin’ s “emerging sense of lyric mission and social activism.”) In this way he is ver y much the inheritor of poets like Shelley, and he has written that his goal has always been “to sustain and remake” the Romantic tradition. As he puts it, he has struggled to articulate a cultural political ethos with “an intuited position” on the Romantic continuum. In the shape of his poetic career that becomes clear in his selections for his 1999 selected poems volume, The Paradise of Forms (a retrospective shape that begins with 1980’ s Giving Up the Ghost, since he excludes selections from his previous books), questions of intersubjectivity , the bar riers separating persons (and kinds of persons), and the possibility of overcoming those barriers—of different selves intertwining, interpenetrating, and even merging—have always been central to Shurin’ s work. In “Raving #25, Vernal Equinox,” which even in its title evokes liminality , the equinox being the point at which winter and spring hinge on and melt into one another, he writes of the body lying down with the bicameral mind “in the split field of / darknes &light / half of each over blackland / half over white.” Even as 141 he lays out the divisions, the poet leaps over them, starting with the image of the body reuniting with the...