The What Else of Queer Poetry

WHETTING EXCERPTS:

…In queer poetry, desire blooms, and yes, I may just marry my dog—

…Beyond that debate, we remain, in all our queerness, anomalies writing aloud the unimagined territories that language spearheads and explores.  They may fear adventure in my world, but I inhabit theirs in multiple ways—and am them.

…Queer poets especially locate practical alternative means for production and distribution of our work.  These methods typically supersede the accolade-driven capitalist mainstream venues for poetry.

…A queer poetry is one of the very few realms of human conception not beholden to reifying the ideal “what is” or obeying the stultifying rules of specific schools of thought; in that knowledge and with such a history of subversive freedom, we are able to emerge and push past the naming of repressions and injustices;  we are able to pursue the what else.

–CONTINUED at Free Verse (here).

So and So #36

Poetry by Ana Božičević * Brian Howe * Amy King

Designs by Brent Francese

Saturday * February 20th * 8pm * Morning Times * 10 E. Hargett Street * Raleigh, NC

Ana Božičević emigrated to NYC in 1997. Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press, November 2009) is her first book of poems. Her fifth chapbook, Depth Hoar, will be published by Cinematheque Press in 2010. With Amy King, Ana co-curates The Stain of Poetry reading series in Brooklyn. She works at the Center for the Humanities of The Graduate Center, CUNY. For more, visit nightcommute.org.
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Brian Howe is a freelance writer, poet, and multimedia artist living in Durham, NC. His poems and sound art have appeared in many print and online journals, including Drunken Boat, Fascicle, Effing Magazine, McSweeneys.net, Octopus, Soft Targets, andCannibal. He’s the author of three chapbooks: Guitar Smash (3rdness Press), This is the Motherfucking Remix (with Marcus Slease, Scantily Clad), and Foreign Letter (Beard of Bees). His videos (with Ashley Howe) have screened at various NC festivals and showcases. He does a lot of his multimedia jams here: http://glossolalia-blacksail.blogspot.com/.
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Amy King’s most recent book is Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox), and forthcoming, I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press). She teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. For information on the reading series Amy co-curates in Brooklyn, NY, please visit The Stain of Poetry: A Reading Series (http://stainofpoetry.com) andhttp://amyking.org for more.
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Brent Francese graduated with Bachelor’s in Architecture in 2005 from NC State before the turning economy allowed him to explore a variety of creative of avenues. Using a strong graphic background, Brent currently designs logos, blogs and other stand alone graphic art pieces. When he’s not working on graphic design or architecture he’s playing drums with several local bands in the Raleigh, NC area. He lives with his wife Jessie and two dogs Tahoe and Denali.

This Is What a [Feminist] Poet Looks Like

Featuring:
Monday, February 1: Ching-In Chen, Jennifer Bartlett, & Kate Durbin
Tuesday, February 2: Juliet Cook & Kate Schapira
Wednesday, February 3: Kirsten Kaschock & Michele Battiste
Thursday, February 4: Michelle Detorie & Stephanie Strickland
Friday, February 5: T.A. Noonan & Theodora Danylevich
Saturday, February 6: Amy King & Kirsten Kaschock 2

“My Barbaric Bitch of  a Yawp” by Amy King

BARD ROVING READING SERIES

AMY KING & CARA BENSON
Friday, January 29th @ 6 pm
Bard Hall* at Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson NY

*Bard Hall is located near the corner of North Ravine Road and Annandale Road. It is a small, grey, church-like structure–set back from Annandale Road–and should not be confused with the stone chapel located to its left.

click here for more directions

AMY KING

Amy King is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You, Antidotes for an Alibi, Slaves to Do these Things (forthcoming from BlazeVox), and I Want to Make You Safe (forthcoming from Litmus Press). She teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College, and co-curates The Stain reading series in Brooklyn, NY.

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CARA BENSON

Cara Benson is editor of the interdisciplinary book Predictions for ChainLinks. Her newest titles include the book (made), which is forthcoming from BookThug, and Protean Parade (Black Radish Books 2010). Her writing has been published in Belladonna Elders Series #7, Imaginary Syllabi, Spell/ing Bound, as well as in Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation, which won the 2008 bpNichol Prize. She edits Sous Rature, and teaches poetry in a New York State prison.

Marriage Is a Metaphor

…an infinite series of possible encounters…

The marriage equality issue isn’t ultimately about marriage, at least, not for me. Simply and quickly put, the entire debate is yet another public opportunity to voice who deserves rights, discrimination, bastardizing, and acceptance, no hate or holds barred.  Of course, technically (& on the surface of all this), I’d like the same civil rights as any other couple if I ever choose to have the government sanction my partnership, but moreover, people love to express their superiority over another group through public proclamations of “how things are” and call their opinions “arguments.”  Just listen to the actual descriptors:  ”unnatural”, “illicit”, “against God’s will”, “gross”, “unAmerican”, etc. as though embracing such a conservative act (and marriage is very much a public statement of conservation) is a privilege for the chosen “right” people and not the “bent” gays, who are really just incorrect beings breaking laws merely by existing.

Marriage has become a metaphor for arguing over whether the queer community should be evicted and forced to live in the shadows of the “correct” society.  In this way, those who see themselves as “straight” are able to assert their correctness by defining themselves in direct opposition to “gays”.  Obviously, this is Binary Thinking 101 in which we define, not just in opposition, but hierarchically:  one term knows it exists, and confirms it, by pointing at the other presumably-separate one and then noting its own superiority — in Binary Thinking 101, one term is always valued above the other.  Western thinking sucks for this very reason:  we separate and prioritize in a one-above-the-other fashion as though simplistic thought is the best way of maneuvering through the world; we don’t want to acknowledge that things are a lot more gray and complex and interrelated (& interdependent!) than “I am white because you are black” or “I am man because you are woman” because if we did, then we’d have to shed our hierarchical positioning and, in the process, fear losing what tiny bit of power we hold in the entire system.  That’s why bisexuals and “forays” into “other” same-sex relationships aren’t “real” and are downgraded.  They must be dismissed as illegitimate acts or temporary “freak” blips in the “normal” course of things.

Same holds true for stay-at-home fathers who don’t abide by traditional roles (among many other “unusual” examples I don’t have time to list) – they are “perversions” of manhood who receive a lot of mockery from “real men” often.    ”You are feminine but I am masculine.”  Anything that doesn’t fit the correct view of the tyranny of the norm becomes a target to ignore or publicly ridicule until it hides in shame or morphs into its proper role.  Mainstream values need these blips on the radar to stay in power, and all of what I’m touching on is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.  So yes, “Marriage equality” is only one more way into publicly announcing exactly what the “norm” should be, and from my perspective, it’s pretty bleak.  Can’t we find another way, or ways, to be in relation to each other that escapes the misery of positioning you over me over the next guy – who is “better”, who has the “best” stuff?  I’d give it all away if we could have one big friggin’ potluck and enjoy each other’s company until the end, when we’ll all be scrambling for clean water and dry land…

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EXCERPT from “What Would MLK Have Said About Gay Rights? Ask His Wife”

“Like Martin, I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others”, she would tell black civil rights leaders angered by gays and lesbians comparing their struggle to their own. She would quote her husband and say, “I have worked too long and hard against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concern. Justice is indivisible.”

She also fought off bigots who would co-opt MLK’s message and try to make it their own. In 2002, anti-gay advocates sought to repeal Miami-Dade County’s equal rights law by sending out fliers saying that King would be outraged at its gay-inclusive nature. Coretta responded through a statement put out by the King Center for Nonviolent Change saying, “I appeal to everybody who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brother and sisterhood for lesbians and gay people.”

When George W. Bush came out on the White House lawn and, in a bid for reelection, told the press he supported a Constitutional ban on gay marriage, Coretta again spoke up and reminded America of King’s legacy: “Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union. A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriages.”

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EXCERPT FROM NPR:

Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.) became part of the civil-rights movement while he was a teenager. From 1963 to 1966, he chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And he became a close associate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Lewis has been a congressman since 1987.

GROSS: I’ve heard some African-American leaders say that it’s wrong to make a connection between the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement because discrimination against African-Americans and discrimination against gays are completely different things. And being gay and being black are completely different things. What’s your take on that?

LEWIS: I do not buy that argument. And today I think more than ever before, we have to speak up and speak out to end discrimination based on sexual orientation. Dr. King used to say when people talked about blacks and whites falling in love and getting married—you know one time in the state of Virginia, in my native state of Alabama, in Georgia and other parts of the South, blacks and whites could not fall in love and get married. And Dr. King took a simple argument and said races don’t fall in love and get married. Individuals fall in love and get married. It’s not the business of the federal government, it’s not the business of the state government to tell two individuals that they cannot fall in love and get married. And so I go back to what I said and wrote those lines a few years ago, that I fought too long and too hard against discrimination based on race and color not to stand up and fight and speak out against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

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It is important to remember that there are real differences in the case of gay marriage and so- called mixed marriages. The situation of a lesbian or gay couple in 2004 is not the same as that of an interracial couple in the 1930s, when miscegenation laws carried criminal penalties, when whites were nearly unanimous in their condemnation of interracial marriage, and when the specter of lynching hovered over discussions of interracial sex.

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There are only two objections to same-sex marriage that are intellectually honest and internally consistent. One is the simple anti-gay position: “It is the law’s job to stigmatize and disadvantage homosexuals, and the marriage ban is a means to that end.” The other is the argument from tradition — which turns out, on inspection, not to be so simple.

~~~

Everything today encourages us to see the dark side, the folly, the impossibility, not just of utopia but [even] of an anti-utopian heterotopia where we’d have a project in common besides selling our commodified labor, intellectual or otherwise. Everything encourages us to think we face a choice between detached houses in a row, where we cook our dinners in private, or else the gulag. But there can be—can’t there?—community without tyranny. Sure, the company of misfits would make you feel bad sometimes; but it also feels bad to have nothing to look forward to but marriage, work and TV. Maybe [this heterotopia] would always be a failure. But then atomized private life under the market is doomed to failure too, if we think of happiness, excitement, joy, or surprise [as things we want]. You’ve got to pick your failures—and I’d like to fail in good company instead of all on my own.

Towards Still Another Universe…

Slaves to Do These Things is now available on Amazon (SPD later) for order – enjoy!

“I’m portable. My mind travels / the verse and valleys of whole people says the poet.” Correct! Readers of this book will discover their own memories. They will melt in them, amazed, lullabied, dramatized, shocked that they exist. Amy King is a true bard.

— Tomaž Šalamun

Smoke n’ hott, these poems emerge as “… audible diamonds that cut,” where Rock is King & candor disarms paranoia, or, in King’s case, downright dismembers it: “Forgive me, I am the final/ seminary soul to check your shape/ in the dress of that embalming line.” Passengered adeptly under the influence of Lorca, Neruda maybe, (“Buried by midnight/ I am a warm/ fly in amber.”) the reader wants to shout, GO DUENDE!!!

—Jeni Olin

“Amy King is a poet’s poet, highly respected in the contemporary world of letters. Her latest collection of poems reveals why.

Mistress of a mythic surrealism that is laced at times with bawdy language, Amy combines images like “moldy dark stools in back room encounters” with “Michaelangelo turning crosshairs to sunshine.” Unusual juxtapositions like these compel the reader to turn the page, discover more. Divided into five acts, this collection of poetry arcs like a prize-winning drama, a volume that should be in everyone’s hands and on everyone’s shelf!”  –The Tower Journal

“While the imperious imperialism of the title speaks of inequality, distance, and irony, King’s latest book, her third from BlazeVOX, actually draws and holds the reader close. You’ll feel understood by this book as it speaks of birth, divinity, and the sociocultural moment that may have you weary. I like King’s invocation of American angst in poems such as ‘Stimulus Package’ and ‘Everything Happens At Once’; the former ends with the lines ‘we ignore the dress of death/ when they mirage America back,’ while the latter begins with ‘the government wants their money,/ retirement shrinks its future,/ I am stuck at the bottom of alert/ that is only a test/ of what?’ She grabs and inverts the crummy corniness that keeps people up at night.

It’s a strength of Slaves to Do These Things that such unadorned phrasing coexists well with its opposite: arresting noun phrases, carefully concatenated. Thus, ‘Everything Happens At Once’ invokes not only government, retirement, phones, and doors, but also ‘fortune’s dial tone,’ ‘the fields of water crocus/ set adrift with handmade paddles,’ and ‘houses in swollen grass.’ Elsewhere, you’ll find ‘chalk blown sky of rabbit tails,’ ‘a calico sky in an earlobe’s kerchief,’ and a deft definition: ‘Moustache: a salt & pepper mole rat’—has it been said better? I wish I could see with my eyes half of the things that King describes.” –The University of Arizona Poetry Center

Sample poem — Verse Daily, “State of a Nation”

Sample poem — Ashok Karra, “The Always Song”

Review — The Tower by Robert Philben

Interview — Bookslut

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To Understand, a Window

A word washed ashore:  Bookslut

Tiny out-of-order excerpts:

This phenomenon, in my book, is referred to as “finding your balls online.”

I was pretty sick for a solid year after 36 years of very good health. My encounter with mortality was finally real (no longer the 20-something who wasn’t afraid to discuss death in the abstract), unexpected and difficult for me.

So one needs the occasional odd houses made of clay and graffiti to break us out of our insistent searches for security and certainties via the steady and familiar structures. Because none of it is true in the immortal ways and a house made of bricks is as arbitrary as a house built underground, complete with Mediterranean gardens and fishpond.

If you can have “online sex,” order pizza online, watch old Miss Cleo commercials online, why not pray to Mother Mary electronically? I’m a fan of the online extension.

Talking about political issues on the Internet, which keeps public records of these discussions if so desired, is an important way to disseminate information; and in reality, poets of all people should be politically engaged in using language in public ways — if there ever was a definition of a poet, in my book at least. Freedom of speech is one thing, but that freedom requires dissemination if it is to have any impact or influence, so unless you own a television or radio station, your protest on your local street corner isn’t going to be picked up by Channel 2 News. But the Internet is something of a leveler; if you can get folks talking about an issue you feel strongly about, you can advance understanding and cause a ripple in the status quo tides that want to wash over and drown us out. You can throw your oars into the Internet sea and make those metaphorical waves and change minds if you’re persuasive and determined enough. You can be heard, at the very least, and also change your own mind. As I noted on my blog recently, oppressions need silence to thrive; I won’t enable all of those –isms by letting the bullies shut me up…

Interview continued on Bookslut here —

(p.s. The underground home to which I refer is Forestiere.)

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Blizzard Is a State of Mind…

Claude Cahun — “I Am in Training:  Don’t Kiss Me”

On the day after the blizzard of ‘09 rushed up the coast and swallowed us fluffy white frio, Verse Daily has posted a poem from my new forthcoming book (to appear in days)!

“State of  a Nation” speaks of things…

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Blizzard is a state of mind!  That’s outside the body…

“Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous.”- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1

Personally, I Use a Nice Beaujolais…

Personally, I use a nice Beaujolais to engine my poems now and then.  But hey, whatever works:

Hypnotist finds himself getting very creative~

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And in other news, some fine words about Ana Bozicevic’s and my own new book, straight outta Arizona:

“While the imperious imperialism of the title speaks of inequality, distance, and irony, King’s latest book, her third from BlazeVOX, actually draws and holds the reader close. You’ll feel understood by this book as it speaks of birth, divinity, and the sociocultural moment that may have you weary…”

Continued at The University of Arizona Poetry Center!

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The Tower Journal also nicely notes Amy King’s and Ana Bozicevic’s new books!

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Why Competitions Divide and Water-down (or How Capitalism Culls Profit from Hopeful Poets)

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Poetry Cornered:  ”In a consumerist world where speed and image rule, poetry’s emotional meanings are being lost.”

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In the Dark responds to “Poetry Cornered”

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Poet laureate attacks Afghanistan war in Christmas poem

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Sherman Alexie makes ESPN Sports

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Al Gore pens a poem

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New Issue of HOW2

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A poem on the mapping of the genome sits amida series of vignettes on “Food for Risen Bodies”

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Review of John  Ashbery’s Planisphere by Helen Vendler

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Contemporary Poetry as Fan Culture?

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Poetry Best Sellers Of 2009

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No Tell:  Best Poetry Books of 2009

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Sarah Palin and William Shatner do beat poetry on “Tonight Show”

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Complex Alliances

Dolores Park in the Castro, November 2009

Of course, Judith Butler states it all so much more succinctly than my previous post (in interview with Nina Power):

The second problem is that lesbian/gay rights, and the rights of sexual minorities, need to join with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-war movements and are, in many instances, already joined together. There is no bonafide feminism, for instance, that is not also anti-racist. Similarly, there is no struggle for the rights of sexual minorities that is worthy of the name that does not affirm the cultural diversity of sexual minorities. Further, it is important to understand “minoritization” strategies as effecting both sexual and religious minorities – another reason why complex alliances are crucial.