Maybe that's the problem! Shouldn't it!?!?
I am prompted to ask this by the following letter to the editor from the Irish Independent (in its entirety below)
Discuss!
As a gay man, a media graduate, a civil marriage supporter, and a person generally ignorant of all things poetry, I felt compelled to respond to Kevin Myers's article 'No rhyme or reason . . .' (Irish Independent, November 3).
There are many significant things happening in this country right now, especially the movement by the gay community to secure equal rights.
Mr Myers surely cannot believe that we are anything but second-class citizens in a country which denies us the right to marry, have children and form a family.
While there are many other important issues tackled by many other organisations, I cannot imagine any of these involve quelling the apparent maelstrom of gay poetry threatening to overwhelm the Irish arts landscape.
I have been delighted by (and subjected to) poetry about mushroom sheds, bee boxes, moonlight and daffodils in my short life but apparently, for Mr Myers, it is a stanza too far to write about gay people.
Use your words for better things than this, Mr Myers.
Alan Flanagan
Clontarf, Dublin 3
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5 comments:
I don't know either!?!? The original article is a good example of prejudice. Yet, the published response, to me, is just as worrying. The defence is that gay poetry is harmless. And that defence is made by someone who admits that he knows nothing about poetry. So, how does he know that gay poetry is harmless? He assumes it. But, I feel, that in his ignorance he speaks of a theme that runs through gay poetry--especially in the UK--it wants to be mundane and domestic...something you can handle like the cat (not like your unique cat!)
Yes! That's where I was headed, too!
The original article is indeed prejudiced. But the response is the classic assimilationist line—i.e. we're no bother, we just want to be just like you, only we're no bother, don't worry about us. It's the "we're just like you except we have sex with each other instead of you" assimilationist line. It's the forces within gay culture that think marriage is a more important issue than equal rights—which it's not, but it just goes to show how much the assimilationist line has come to dominate the rhetoric of late.
In all this, the ignorance about poetry, not to say literature in general, is pretty large. But then, this is not really about poetry, it's about another aspect of gay culture.
Gay poetry OUGHT to shake readers up, and be threatening, because poetry itself ought to be threatening, and hake people up! Period.
here here! I'd like to add that gay poetry should shake up gay readers just as much as straight readers, but I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir.
What makes this is even more pathetic is that "gay" and "poetry" have become synonymous in terms of how most people see poetry.
In one way, I'd like to respond to those people by saying, "We will take that as a compliment....and by we I mean both poets and gays!"
Although I am a little late to this discussion, I hope it's okay if I add a word of my own. I think that the problem with gay poetry is that the best of it is dull, the rest of it is lifeless. It still tends to operate (for whatever reasons, sociological, epistemological) only in two dimensions. It is worse than harmless. It is predictable.
We are pretty good plotting our place on the literary map with X and Y coordinates, thinking in oppositions: gay/straight, black/ white, left/right, top/bottom, free verse/formal verse. Even so, it seems to me, something is missing in our artistic conception of ourselves: in Cartesian terms, we might call it the Z axis-the third dimension-homo sapiens in all his perpendicular, ungovernable glory.
Lately, while looking at my penis, as we come and go (like Prufrock's mysterious women) I have been thinking about Michelangelo. Perhaps there is a conceptual problem we have to solve before we can move forward. We are rutting around in a rut: in a sense, I am not sure we see ourselves as fully realized human beings yet, in control of our own destinies.
Were we to grant ourselves this--let us call it Perspective--even in theory, even experiementally, even from the safe and sanitary distance of Art, many more things would become possible...
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