Indolence, Politics, and the Good Gray Poet, Part 2

Posted on September 11, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

Walt Whitman and Harry Stafford, 1878.

A Blog Post by Reuben Gelley Newman

To see the first half of this two-part post, click here.

National context undeniably informs the poetry we create, and America’s conflict and social upheaval during the late 19th century often intersected with Whitman’s personal life and poetry. He tended wounded soldiers in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, bearing witness to the turmoil it unleashed. Readers both lambasted and celebrated his overtly hetero- and homo-erotic poems, which inspired British intellectuals to advocate for acceptance of homosexuals in the 1870s and 80s. Although he outwardly denied any homosexuality, he had relationships with men almost 40 years younger than him, including George and Susan Stafford’s son, Harry, whom Whitman met at a printing shop. (There’s an obvious power imbalance considering the age gap and Whitman’s cultural status, and it’s impossible to tell exactly how equitable the relationship was. From letters, it seems like it was relatively consensual, if tumultuous, but we should probably still be skeptical.)

Drawing on these rich and complex experiences, he wrote obviously political poems, such as his elegies for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain, My Captain.” His erotic poems, including the famous homoerotic “Calamus” ones, were also socially conscious in their disregard for Victorian prudishness. But his expressions of indolence — particularly during his time at the Staffords’ farm in southern New Jersey — can hardly be political, right?

I’m not so sure. Today, I don’t feel as if “indolent” poems, or poems that express joy more broadly, get all that much traction in the poetry market. (Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities seem like exceptions to this.) But reading Specimen Days, I wonder if indolence, in the sense of “love of ease,” can be a counterpart to and part of the political.

For poets from marginalized backgrounds, or even for Whitman — who, as I said in Part 1, was disabled later in life, though hardly “marginalized” — perhaps writing openly about pure joy or indolence could be empowering. Recall the definition of “indolent” that reads “free from pain.” Freedom from pain, of course, is virtually impossible for any human to experience, and that kind of indolence might be even rarer for marginalized poets. Still, “Indolent” writing could serve as an important contrast to taut, emotional poems that explore political situations or recount injustices against the speaker. It could also simply exist by itself. Although it’s important to be aware of the political, no one has to write “political” poetry. It’s a political choice to write a “nature poem,” say, whatever that is — but it’s not necessarily a bad choice.

And that brings us back to Indolent Books. As Michael said, “indolent” refers to some of our “slowly progressing” poets. (Although not all of them are slowly progressing—take Logan February, who has published two chapbooks and whose first full-length collection is coming out next year!) But Indolent’s mission is also strikingly political. Look no further than our online projects What Rough Beast and HIV Here & Now, and our mission statement:

Ultimately, Indolent publishes books the editors care about. The main criteria are that the work be innovative, provocative, risky, and relevant. Indolent is queer flavored but inclusive and maintains a commitment to diversity among authors, artists, designers, developers, and other team members.

Does this political mission mesh with the historical definitions of “indolent” I’ve discussed? I don’t know. What I do know is that “indolent” and “political” poetry have coexisted for centuries, since well before our good gray poet. As Whitman realized, literature can be an escape, a fantasy, and a utopia: a place free from pain. But his optimistic vision of America was also grounded in political reality. I think such grounding is deeply necessary for poets, both personally and collectively. We need not be optimistic, of course; our poems can turn grief into anger. But whatever our viewpoint, through writing our own hurt and our nation’s, we might begin to free ourselves of pain.

In addition to interning here at Indolent, where he edits the blog, Reuben Gelley Newman is an undergraduate at Swarthmore College. His work appears in Alexandria Quarterly, What Rough Beast, and HIV Here & Now, and is forthcoming in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, 2nd Edition.

“Some Days It Seems We’ve Found It”: Jacques J. Rancourt’s “In the Time of PrEP”

Posted on August 16, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Book Review by Reuben Gelley Newman

In 1993, the black gay HIV+ poet Melvin Dixon, in his speech “I’ll be Somewhere Listening for My Name,” charged future generations, “by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us.” Jacques J. Rancourt’s chapbook In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018) not only takes up that charge, describing a present both startlingly different and unnervingly similar to Dixon’s past, but takes us to a somewhere where Dixon, perhaps, could be listening. In this somewhere, Rancourt can title a poem “I Don’t Go to Gay Bars Anymore,” then continue: “someone tells me & sure enough / another boards up.” In this somewhere,

The speaker both wants to live in that precarious Jerusalem — Rancourt’s San Francisco — and prays, simply, to live and to be seen. But this “holy city / swollen with light & sound…won’t last,” and its danger resounds through Rancourt’s tender, precariously balanced poems.

The chapbook begins with the expansive “Love in the Time of PrEP” — a title echoing Gabriel García Marquez’s famous book — in which the speaker and his husband are haunted by a rainbow, a “broken spectre,” while climbing a volcano. Everything is refracted — space, time, history — and the poem transitions seamlessly between intimacy and reflection, ending with “two Berkeley freshmen” who

This poem is on one level a plea for remembrance, but it also values those freshmen’s naivety. The chapbook’s epigraph, from the queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, reads: “My approach to hope…can best be described as a backward glance that enacts a future vision.” Rancourt’s own “backward glance” links the boy’s foolishness with that of some gay men in the ’80s who contracted HIV. He sees, in the present, a world where those boys can act “as if none of this every happened”: a world both freer and scarier. And in the future, he envisions a world where, perhaps, remembrance of tragedy can foster greater appreciation of our relative freedom.

The chapbook’s cover, an untitled collage by the artist Barton Lidicé Beneš, depicts a little boy playing with HIV pills and birds — whose bodies are made of the pills — eating them. To me, this juxtaposition of pills and play evokes the freshmen’s naivety and recalls Dixon’s devastating quip: “As for me, I’ve become an acronym queen: BGM ISO same or other. HIV plus or minus. CMV, PCP, MAI, AZT, ddl, ddC. Your prescription gets mine.” Rancourt is not an “acronym queen” — though PrEP, as he notes, stands for “pre-exposure prophylaxis, a pill taken daily to reduce the chances of HIV infection” — but there is play in his danger, and danger in his play.

Indeed, the sheer joy of Rancourt’s language and imagery shines through despite the constant threat of death. “The jizz drifts like smoke” through the “holy Jacuzzi” in “At the Place of Bathhouses,” but “what has happened before / will happen again—the fog belt will roll in with the chill / of the dead…” The incantatory “Litany” takes its wordplay seriously: every line begins with the words “One man,” yet midway through the poem we read how “One man slept with ten men & survived / Ten men slept with one man & died.” Instead of confronting a homophobe, the speaker of “The Counter-Protester in the City” leaves his wedding cake topper on a bench nearby, while his younger self

In the Time of PrEP comes on the heels of a very different book addressing HIV/AIDS in the present, Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead. For Smith, the “us” is more specific: black, queer, and HIV+. But the book rings with a similar yearning for utopia: “please, don’t call / us dead, call us alive someplace better” (“summer, somewhere”). These books — along with many, many more by queer writers of all colors and genders — answer Dixon, who ends his speech with a plea to support gay and lesbian publishing, because, he insists, “our voice is our weapon.” Rancourt’s voice, with its wide-ranging depiction of grief, love, and history, is not only a weapon but a medicine. In “The Fall,” there’s a boy who, during sex,

Imagine Dixon’s name spoken back into the past, echoing throughout the well of history. Imagine his name spoken into the future, “a backward glance that enacts a future vision” where queer, HIV+ voices can thrive. I’ve only hinted at the importance of religion to Rancourt’s work, but perhaps we can think of his vision as, rather than mere “hope,” an act of faith. Though the litany of men Rancourt remembers remain chillingly nameless, he prays for them — and prays for a different future — despite their anonymity. In The Time of PrEP speaks queer identities to the past, present, and future. It searches for that somewhere we might never truly reach.

Writing Classics Queerly

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post by Reuben Gelley Newman

I’ve been thinking recently about the politics of writing a poem called “Ganymede and the Eagle.” You may be familiar with Yeats’ poem “Leda and the Swan,” which describes the Greek god Zeus taking the form of a swan and raping a human woman. But in the myth, Zeus also soared down from Olympus as an eagle to take a boy, Ganymede, to be his cupbearer. The story had obvious homoerotic subtext, and Ganymede’s name eventually morphed into the Latin word “catamitus,” a boy or effeminate adult male kept for anal sex by an older man, and the equivalent word “catamite” in early modern English.

Wait a second, adolescents “kept for anal sex by an older man?” Isn’t that child abuse? From a modern perspective, of course. From an ancient perspective, no. The Greeks in particular had a tradition of pederasty, in which young men were sexually pursued by older men and at least in theory received educational and moral mentorship as well.

This seems like a horribly unequal power dynamic to us, and it was. Many wealthy Greek and Roman men could have sex with women, boys, and slaves at their whim. It was also considered unmanly to bottom, or be in the “passive” role, and some poets dissed their enemies through sexual insults. For example, in one poem, the Roman poet Catullus tells his friends: “I will butt-fuck you and skull-fuck you, Aurelius, you pussy-boy, and Furius, you cocksucker!”

That’s a translation taken from a Huffington Post article by Indolent’s Michael Broder where he argues that this wasn’t hatred so much as camp. There’s definitely a debate to be had there, but the point is, however inequitable ancient Greece and Rome were, we can also recognize their queerness today. That’s what drives my desire to write about them.

Already, though, by thinking about it as “Ganymede and the Eagle,” I’m implying that Zeus rapes Ganymede like he rapes Leda in Yeats’ poem. I’m making it more familiar (if still horrific) to modern sensibilities by framing it as cis-white-God-rapes-young-innocent-boy. But who am I to do that? Is this how I’m sympathizing with the #metoo moment in an inauthentic way? And why do I need classics to do that anyways? Is classics just a bunch of Western canonical bullshit that writers are obsessed with?

I don’t have answers, but I can hint at some. I’m trying to talk about different ways queerness has been conceptualized across time, and how there’s queerness, in some form or another, everywhere. I’m queering classics, something poets like Carl Phillips and Reginald Shepherd have done for a while. I’m not at all the first to queer the Ganymede myth, either: see Jericho Brown’s powerful and chilling take here.

This trend fits into the broader paradigm of poets and other writers rethinking classics, as exemplified by feminist poems like Carol Ann Duffy’s “Eurydice” (available on Genius, of all places!) or epics like Derek Walcott’s Omeros. Because classical culture has influenced Western civilization in so many ways—both good and bad—I think this is important work.

But I’m trying to do it self-consciously. Right now, there are actually two poems: one a stripped-back retelling of the myth, the other a prose poem, weaving Ganymede in with broader concerns about Jewishness, queerness, and my own identity. They’re both ambitious, and I’ve gone through several drafts of each. In the first, I’m trying to portray Ganymede as more than just a passive victim, but I still wonder if I should write yet another poem in Ganymede’s voice, as Carl Phillips does with Leda in “Leda, After the Swan.” The second one has the potential to be too sprawling and disjointed, something I’ve worked hard against.

The joy of it is that I’m taking risks and asking myself the hard questions: about how poems can be political, about the politics of writing about classics, and about my own positionality. Although I feel like the poems are relatively finished now, who knows where they’ll take me? Their making, like the subject matter, is quite queer indeed.