Queer Troublemakers

The Poetics of Flippancy

Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350215429
• eBook ISBN: 9781350079373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Irreverent and provoking, the figure of the 'queer troublemaker' is a disruptive force both poetically and politically. Tracing the genealogy of this figure in modern avant-garde American poetry, Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain develops innovative close readings of the works of Gertrude Stein, Frank O'Hara, Eileen Myles and Maggie Nelson. Exploring how these writers play with identity, gender, sexuality and genre, Bussey-Chamberlain constructs a queer poetics of flippancy that can subvert ideas of success and failure, affect and affectation, performance and performativity, poetry and being.

1

The Poetics of Flippancy

In discussing the poetics of flippancy, I want to consider first the queer and shameful lyric ‘I’, primarily as a means by which to approach the self-reflexive and identity-driven writing of Stein, O’Hara, Myles and Nelson. Although many of the works I address move away from the genre of lyric poetry, they each draw on aspects of the lyric which are then transmuted and transformed in relation to specific context. The lyric’s relationship with avant-garde and experimental writing is a fraught one, with various encampments emerging in relation to the use of first person and its bearing on the interiority of the writer themself. In Lyric Shame: The ‘Lyric’ Subject of Contemporary American Poetry, Gillian White argues that ‘given that “expressive lyric” is the chief abjection of a powerful and increasingly canonical avant-garde antilyricism now forty years in the making, it is an identification that opens these poet’s work to shame’ (2014: 2). Identifying the Language poets as the key advocates of an anti-lyric movement, White goes on to track a contemporary lineage of genre shame. This shame is read in dialogue with the avant-garde creating a binary from the experimental and feeling, in which the formally innovative is not able to coexist with the personal expressions of an ‘I’.

This problematic of the ‘expressive’ lyric is perhaps best exemplified by an argument between critic Marjorie Perloff and the poet Eileen Myles. In her article ‘Reinventing the Lyric’, published in Boston Review, Perloff critiqued mainstream poetry writing, suggesting that lyrics focus on regular syntax and ‘the expression of a profound thought or small epiphany’ (Perloff 2012). Looking to create some kind of metaphysical identification with the reader, the seemingly personal becomes formulaic and contrived, relying heavily on easily accessed feeling as opposed to language and form. Perloff even went so far as to write that these poems positioned the ‘lyric speaker as a particularly sensitive person who really feels the pain’ (Perloff 2012). Such an emphasis seems to suggest that claims to pain and feeling allow the speaker to assume a position of martyred authority which might not be substantiated through the verse itself. She goes on to claim, therefore, that Language poetry usefully posed ‘a serious challenge to the delicate lyric of self-expression and direct speech: it demanded an end to transparency and straightforward reference in favour of ellipsis, indirection, and intellectual-political engagement’ (Perloff 2012). Also championing Conceptual Poetry as an antidote to the anaemic feeling of mainstream poetry, Perloff celebrates the negation of ‘the essence of lyric poetry’ (2012) with the feeling speaker usurped by formally experimental writing practices.

Myles took great exception to this understanding of the lyric, writing a response ‘Painted Clear, Painted Black’ for The Volta, critiquing Perloff for eliding feeling poetry with femininity, while praising more masculine modes of writing. Myles wrote that Perloff’s article ‘seems so macho and destructive. In Perloff’s universe one needs to access feeling … in an avant-garde way’ (Myles 2013). Indeed, Perloff’s article does not denounce feeling entirely but seems to suggest that there are superior forms of incorporating the personal into writing. She cites both Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein as strong examples of using personal trauma to create formally innovative pieces, drawing on appropriated material and experimental practice in order to express loss. Myles responded by writing that ‘feeling (how about we try substituting “being female” for feeling just as a stunt) is always a problem (a good one) in literature’ (Myles 2013). Myles genders the lyric, and criticism of it, to highlight the way in which Perloff’s writing serves to silence and marginalize those who might be drawing on personal experience in the ‘wrong way’ as a foundation for the lyric speaker. They write that Perloff’s call for the end of transparency means ‘the refusal of the direct and indirect speech that women and people of colour and queers and other assorted weaklings of the underclass have always employed’ (Myles 2013). While Perloff makes a case for poetic form as being ideological, her rejection of the lyric and general emotional transparency is also a political position, one that, Myles argues, is derived from privilege. This is even reflected in the very style in which the two writers present their arguments, with Perloff’s tone and lack of first person lending the piece an authoritative but distant sense of academia. Myles, by contrast, relies heavily on the ‘I’, making reference to their own gang rape, placing the self as an integral aspect of the argument.

It is these scholarly arguments, represented neatly by Myles and Perloff, that adhere shame to the use of lyric writing. Long predating the poetry wars initiated by the Language poets, there was a still a problematic gendering associated with lyric writing. White writes that the lyric was initially associated with ‘overabundant affect (read feminine)’ and was necessarily rehabilitated in the twentieth century ‘as the authentic site of homosocial, hypermasculine self-actualization’ (White 2014: 253). This clear gendering of the lyric’s history leads White to ask ‘what person (of what gender) should be associated with “the lyric I” or its shame?’ (White 2014: 253). The shame identified by both Myles and White is ostensibly feminine and female; it is affect-driven and feeling-orientated. However, this particular strain of misogyny is not purely directed towards women-identified speakers and writers but any manifestation of femininity. It, therefore, could apply to the overly camp speaker, one who stands distinct from the hypermasculine self-actualization of the early twentieth century. This particular form of shame also seems to assume that a feminine expression of feeling is one entirely devoid of formal or structural innovation. Instead of experimentation, there is a sincerity at work that assures the reader of the poet’s capacity to ‘really feel pain’.

In Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry, Charles Altieri writes that the lyric, in fact, exists within a tension of sincerity and artifice:

The desire for sincerity or naturalness, for poetry as communication, seems continually in tension with the highly artificial means required to produce the desired effects at a level of intensity adequate for lyric poetry. The effort to create the image contradicts the image, and we find it hard not to become suspicious about the values claimed for the ethos of naturalness. If we prove so easy to move, or if we are so willing to ignore the artificial means required to produce the desired effects at a level of intensity adequate for lyric poetry, it becomes difficult to trust any of the emotions produced by claims for direct expression. Yet the obvious alternative, the extreme forms of reflexivity exemplified by the post-modern novel, seems a dead end for the lyric.

(Altieri 1984: 15)

The lyric is never a pure instance of feeling being communicated to the reader. Rather than offering forth an uncomplicated representation, the lyric is a tension of the natural, or sincere, and totally artificial. Feeling, then, is complicated through the very nature of constructing poetry, which strays from the genuine into a far more performative and formal approach to emotion. Altieri goes on to claim that ‘the “sincere” self, then, is one poets are tempted to posit as always beyond language’ (1984: 22). The artifice of poetry is such that the sincere self cannot exist within it and any claims to really feel are rendered impossible by the form of communication. Language, through removing the possibility of a sincere self, creates a lyric poetry that is aligned with insincerity and high artifice, as well as a sense of shame.

This speaks usefully to queer identities, which historically have a complicated relationship with both artifice and shame. In Gay Shame, editors David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub write: ‘Gay pride has never been able to separate itself entirely from shame, or to transcend shame. Gay pride does not even make sense without some reference to the shame of being gay’ (2010: 3). The very history of LGBTQ identity leads Halperin and Traub to believe that even the positive and publicly realized aspects of queerness are nonetheless encumbered with shame. This sense of shame is not solely realized through a binary with pride but can also be understood as an important affect that mediates and moves the internal into the external. In ‘Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel’, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes that ‘shame effaces itself; shame points and projects; shame turns itself skin side out; shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self-display, shame and exhibitionism are different interlinings of the same glove’ (2003b: 38). Much like lyric writing and the use of a personal pronoun, shame allows for demonstration and projection, as well as a form of self-revelation that is analogous to being turned skin side out. The self-display and exhibitionism of shame also resonate strongly with the posturing and self-presentation that inevitably haunts usage of the lyric ‘I’. As Sedgwick further suggests, ‘shame is the affect that mantles the threshold between introversion and extroversion, between absorption and theatricality, between performativity and – performativity’ (2003b: 38), all concepts to which I shall return in my specific discussion of flippancy. What is perhaps most important about this relationship between queerness and shame is recognizing that the negative affect seems intrinsically linked to the identity. The emphasis on ‘pride’ as a public celebration of queerness is always haunted by its opposite, shame. Rather than perceiving this as entirely negative, Halperin and Traub ask ‘are there important, nonhomophobic values related to the experience of shame that gay pride does not or cannot offer us?’ (2010: 3). It is perhaps the case that the exhibitionism and self-display of shame, in conjunction with the high artifice of the lyric, might in fact offer up possibilities for the speaking subject. Instead of conforming to success narratives of pride, or attempting to communicate the ‘real feeling’ so derided by Perloff, the combination of queer shame and lyric shame can forge new and divergent paths.

This allows for the concept of the queer lyric to emerge. Fundamentally different to the normative lyric, one for whom heterosexuality is assumed, the queer ‘I’ is required to find different formations of poetic expression. In Queer Lyrics (Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry), John Emil Vincent suggests that ‘queer lyrics do not simply record lives lived and feelings felt. At their best, they offer performances, or demonstrations of living and feeling’ (2002: xiiv). This description of the queer lyric seems to resonate with the ways in which experimental writing, as understood by Perloff, have challenged the simple epiphanic model of lyric writing. Rather than the poem appearing as an expression of feeling or moment of realization, albeit expressed through artificial means, the experimental or queer lyric performs and demonstrates. The pretence of naturalness, therefore, falls away in favour of a recognition of the inherently staged aspects of poetry writing itself, as well as the demonstrative and performative aspects of identity and feeling. Vincent further suggests that in exploring ‘nonheterosexuality’, queer poetry strains against category definitions, calling both sexuality and the lyric into question. That said, he recognizes that ‘much of the most exciting modern and contemporary poetry hovers at this edge, its lexical and affective power arising from the unmappable, but somehow accessible journeys out of and back into the known’ (Vincent 2002: 1). To me, this question of accessibility resonates with the argument between Myles and Perloff regarding the ‘transparency’ of poetry. Where ‘accessible’ might seem negative for an experimental poet, in this particular context it seems to relate to allowing the reader access, a necessary measure for them to orientate the difficult space of the poem. This begs the question, however, of the ways in which a queer poetics differs from other forms of experimental or innovative writing. Vincent, having drawn parallels, makes a useful distinction, writing ‘homosexual and heterosexual desire and bonds, given their different cultural valuation, have entirely different available narratives, legality, forms of expression, as well as different available relations to abstraction, specification, self-definition, community, ritual, temporality and spatiality’ (2002: 30). In spite of the overlaps between contemporary writing and the queer lyric, queerness is dictated to by the forms of expression and cultural contexts in which the identity manifests itself. The social difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality inevitably results in different relationships with language, narrative, legality, as well as concepts such as self-definition and community.

The queer lyric’s relationship to performance and demonstration as well as cultural manifestations, narrative, expression, abstraction, specification and self-definition all have an important place in relation to making trouble. Stein’s Lifting Belly, for example, uses repetition and iteration to create a same-sex interaction between an ‘I’ and ‘you’ that seems endless. Euphemistically describing the female orgasm as cows coming out, and relating pleasure to sound, the text offers a temporality for the lesbian sex act that is both continuous and present, exceeding and stretching the heteronormative sexual encounter. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by contrast, uses both performance and demonstration to allow for Stein’s own self-definition. Masquerading as her lover, Stein performs an inter-couple drag act, in which taking on the role of Toklas allows for the poet to write herself into a community and identity. The queerness of displaced selfhood bends and worries identity stability and interchangeability among the two female figures. O’Hara, by contrast, uses his ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ to claim true abstraction for the first time in literary history. While his text moves with a confident slipperiness, offering too many referents for the reader to orientate fully, the work does not border on abstraction in spite of its claims. Instead the manifesto and the poems explore community as a form of self-definition, turning sex into a lens for approaching creative production. Myles manages similar performances of self, with a speed of movement that is analogous to O’Hara’s. Their promotional video serves as a useful lens through which to understand this rapidity, as well as approach their posturing dykehood. Myles demonstrates an uncertainty of selfhood, all the while confidently occupying a prominent position within all of their work. Maggie Nelson, perhaps more theoretically reflective on her status as a queer writer, uses The Argonauts to discuss her relationship with language, recognizing its failure to express coherently and fully, as well as its failure to best represent the self.

The queer lyric, therefore, is an important term for all four writers, even while they might deviate from the ‘I’ driven poems of self-identity and feeling. They all exhibit qualities of queer lyric writing, if that is to be understood as the jarring against boundaries of feeling, performing and gesturing identity, all the while questioning and challenging their chosen forms of expression. The works I study directly address the artifice and ‘act’ of writing but make space in which ‘nonheterosexuality’ can be explored, all through the foregrounding and presence of a self. They do not experiment with a fragmented or disrupted selfhood, but rather play with a more consolidated, performative self who is consistently deployed across a range of genres. For me, the queer lyric as an area of exploration is therefore vital in spite of Stein’s playful third-person address, O’Hara’s manifesto, Myles’ self-interrogatory prose and Nelson’s memoirs. Stein’s work The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas foregrounds artificiality and posture, undermining any ideas of the authentic self while still attempting some form of self-definition. Indeed, Stein’s elliptical work and her novel do not match the form of lyric writing at all, but simply mobilize some of the poetics of the queer lyric as understood by Vincent. O’Hara’s manifesto, Myles’ promotional video and poet’s novels and Nelson’s critically inflected memoirs do not constitute lyric writing in the true sense of the form, even while their poetry does. Thus, while the queer lyric seems troublesome to the genre as a whole, these four writers further trouble the place of the ‘I’ within poetry, mobilizing aspects of queer lyricism to facilitate expression within other genres. As such, they map onto understandings of the queer lyric, even while they deviate from it, further challenging the simplicity of categorization that occurs between genre. Both the poem and prose are a space for performance, one that always thwarts an easy clarity of self-expression. It is possible that in their move beyond poetry, all four writers are enacting a sense of failure; the genre is too concise, uncertain, elliptical to express everything.

Narcissism and echoes

These problems of selfhood and representation move me away from the lyric into a reckoning with Narcissus. Initially, I want to think about the mythological figure in relation to queerness and self-recognition, and then probe it further as a strategy of ironic expression that might allow for a poetics of flippancy to emerge. In Ovid’s myth, Narcissus was a young, handsome man, who fell in love with his own reflection. Continually surrounded by admirers, Narcissus was incapable of reciprocation, only feeling a pull of desire when he first beheld himself in the surface of water. In some ways, this seems analogous to the loneliness of the lyric ‘I’ and reflective of the writer’s attempt to express their uncertainty within the surface of a text. Locked within a self-referential form, the lyric is at once the identity of the speaker and their mirrored reflection. The uncertainty of the lyric, thus, can usefully be considered as a form of flawed, reflective surface. What is especially interesting about Narcissus is that his self-knowledge led to his demise; if he had been kept from his true nature, or true reflection, then tragedy would not have befallen him.

Due to the nature of Narcissus loving his own reflection, the figure can be, and is, aligned with same-sex relationships, where attraction emerges in relation to sameness as opposed to difference. In Reflecting Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic, Steven Bruhm writers that this association ‘conflates homosexuality with egoism and selfishness and with self-delusion and excessive introspection’ (2001: 2). Egoism can easily be affixed to lyric writing, manifesto and memoir, with the intense focus on the self constituting a form of excessive introspection. Bruhm’s writing thus offers an important rehabilitation of Narcissus, in which he is positioned as a productive queer figure, one I interpret as useful for considering the queer troublemaker. Rather than same-sex lyrics purely expressing what Perloff dismisses as ‘real feeling’ and a lack of poetic complexity, the queer Narcissus engages in the expression of selfhood with greater dynamism and experiment. Bruhm writes that ‘queer Narcissus refuses knowledge and re-fuses it, as much plagued by the fleeting chimera of self-knowledge as he is constituted by it’ (2001: 16). In the work of Stein, O’Hara, Myles and Nelson there is a continued rejection of the established, dominant discourses, simultaneous to the creation of alternative orientations and forms of knowledge. The fleeting chimera of self-knowledge, which is represented through both memoir and the use of the lyric ‘I’, is as much an attempt to know the self as a celebration of the self’s uncertainties. It is this very relationship with knowledge and the self that constitutes a queer Narcissus, as well as a troubling of the assumptions that could be made for queer self-expression within the form of lyric (and various other manifestations of ‘I’). Queer troublemaking, thus, is realized in the use of an imperfect ‘I’ and the flickering nature of knowledge, rejection and constitution.

The relationship with knowledge exhibited by Narcissus is evident in the four queer troublemakers of this book. Stein’s posturing as Toklas to explore her own identity creates a series of mirrorings that simultaneously generate and reject knowledge. The façade of Toklas is analogous to the water in the Narcissus myth, creating a reflective surface through which the subject of the writing, Stein, is able to see herself better. Myles establishes similar relationships with selfhood, relying on the moniker Eileen Myles, as well as the lyric ‘I’, while refuting any true knowledge of their own identity. Myles’ work is heavily dependent on consistency of voice, in conjunction with a continual denial of fully constituted selfhood. In this way, both writers resonate with the Narcissus of Bruhm’s writing, in that the self is ‘the centralizing, unifying trope whose presence only bespeaks his absence, whose self-identification can only engender the slippages of desire’ (Bruhm 2001: 18). This concept of presence and absence speaks to O’Hara’s lyric writing, in which the continual movement and lightness of the central figure constitutes a tension of there and not-there. Indeed, Myles describes O’Hara’s writing as ‘queenie’ and ‘slippery’ on account of the way that both desire and selfhood were constituted through continual mobility. Nelson’s fixation on the failure of language to express experience is also a form of presence and absence. The Argonauts, for all of its words and theorizing, is ultimately lamenting the absence of true, easily expressible, meaning. While these writers, then, mi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Poetics of Flippancy
• 2. ‘He Cannot Understand Women. I Can’: Gertrude Stein and the Camp Butch
• 3. ‘There’s Nothing Metaphysical about It’: Frank O’Hara’s Flippant Manifesto and the Poetry of Tight Trousers
• 4. ‘Who Are These Idiots Writing These Poems?’: Eileen Myles’ Pornographic Tone and Mutable Categories
• 5. ‘Was Harry a Woman? Was I a Straight Lady?’: Tensions of Heteronormativity, Assimilation and the Second Person
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Imprint