One of the most interesting books I came across looking at gay poetry in the 70s and 80s is Ship Desert Boat Cargo (1981), published by the recently deceased dancer/choreographer Jonathon Appels under the pseudonym John Robinson. It’s prefaced by his friend James Barrett, who went on to a career as a classicist. They met in a Greek class taught by Norman O. Brown (whose books I myself loved in high school) at UC Santa Cruz, which should make you expect that this will be weird and pretentious. And it will!
SDBC sort of participates in one of the streams of gay poetry from the era, which is the California, and particularly Bay Area avant-garde. But it doesn’t really seem to be an aesthetic informed by such methods as the parataxis of LANGUAGE, or by vatic-cosmic shouting, or again by urban gossip and name-dropping of other poets to constellate a network. Barrett does point in his preface to a kind of disjuncture—gaps between nouns—as central to Appels’ experimental poetics, but he routes it through the moderns of two generations before, through Gertrude Stein and the contemporaneous rediscovery/valorization of the aesthetics of the classical fragment, especially from Sappho.
Appels writes in short, stubbly lines that don’t always flow one into the other, or could be read either as flowing or not flowing, with some lines appearing as if they were indeed only pieces of text left after an erasure of a now missing whole. Barrett probably oversells both the originality of this technique (hadn’t there already been a lot of fragment and erasure?) and its centrality to Appels’ practice (a number of the poems read, in fact, fairly straightforwardly), but I am fascinated by his argument in favor of this method, which frames it as enacting in its suspension of ordinary grammar and of cause-effect relations between substantives a couple of intriguing dynamics.
First, the erotic. Nouns juxtaposed without evident copulas—problematic copulation—the friction of fragmentary parts adumbrating but never forming a sure whole are, Barrett suggests, closer to what sex is like than regular sense-making sentences can be. In this, he’s not far from the sort of thing that Barthes says, or Bloom says in his reading of The Symposium in Love and Friendship—the experience of the erotic cannot be directly represented but can be as it were textually performed through the dispersal of authorial voice and 'meaning’ in the form of the dialogue (Bloom) or through, in Barthes’ case, a complicated argument about how ‘love’, although a verb as well as a noun, can in some sense never be conjugated.
There’s some suggestion from Barrett that the foregoing is somehow especially true of homosexual sex/love/desire—which I guess, again, is true to a certain lineage coming out of Plato. And this all is, I suppose, critically distinct from the suggestion that disjuncture between sentences expresses the fragmentation of the contemporary subject of late capitalism (Language) insofar as it’s both working on a smaller unit than the sentence and trying to adequate itself not to ‘our era’ of economic and psychic life, but to the phenomenology of eros as disclosed intermittently across the history of ‘our’ (human but also homosexual) tradition from Sappho to Stein.
Second, and speaking of history, the fragment points to loss of the gay past, oblivion and silencing, which thus makes the scant words extant treasures, loose jewels—but, Barrett adds, as we read from one fragment to another and make a sense out of them, that interpretive fusion releases us from the past (in which we wonder, how does this fragment follow from that one), from the temporal sequence of reading line by line, into a sudden experience of merger in which things briefly hang together in the present (this is itself an erotic experience—and Barrett says, although I’m not sure why it would be, a homoerotic one).
Now this all seems to be a not-really-reinventing-anything variant of modernist poetry that was by no means the edge of anything in 1981, but I am enlivened by the sweeping claims on its behalf! While I am often annoyed and frustrated when people posit essentialist sorts of aesthetics, such that there’s something black about rhythm (see Fanon complaining about this in Black Skin, White Masks) or southern about rhetoric, or gay about poetics as varied as the Swinburnian purple of Crane and the camp banter of O’Hara, I have to admit 1. that lots of artists have been guided in their practice by such beliefs so that, even if they’re a kind of nonsense to be dissolved by attention to history (see, the historian says, how diverse and complex the record is—you can’t go around essentializing!) that same history shows us that nonsense has been and is central to art 2. it’s fun to make claims like this!
In truth, I think any form will bear any content (and maybe ‘form’ and ‘content’ are handicaps to thought anyway)—and ‘the homosexual experience’ or the essence of history, the erotic, etc., could be figured in unimaginably many (contrary) ways. But as I’ve been working the past few years on people like Shelby Foote or Richard Howard who had to set themselves to learning from forebears how to write, respectively, southern and gay (it turns out that you write southern by adding Proust to Faulkner, and you write gay by doing camp Browning), I feel increasingly like not only should I be benignly tolerant of other writers’ affectively necessary false beliefs, but maybe I should give myself more leeway to make what are, objectively, indefensible and even unhinged statements about the forms in which gay (or southern, or liberal, or contemporary, or whatever) writing must be written.
Anyway, here’s some of the poems, which perhaps don’t live up to the promises Barrett made for them—or indeed even much correspond to his descriptions. Which is itself a poetics of disjuncture!