Accessibility. Poetry.
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Accessible poetry.
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It sounds dangerously clinical, no?
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The word accessibility has the same ring as the word homosexual.
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The word homosexual was (is) considered pejorative. In the 19th Century, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and other doctors adopted the word homosexual and the definition of it (essentially a pederast) as a diagnosis for mental pathology. It was used in "clinical" practice.
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A definition of poetry may be making the inaccessible accessible, wrote a poet I cannot remember or find with definiteness.
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Mark Halliday define accessibility as an ability to communicate with the common man or woman. That is a good thing, according to him. We don't need "special" readings of poems. A poem is a poem. Read the poem to understand the way it relates to your own life.
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How many times did you have to “read” a patient (how many sessions) before you could diagnose them as a homosexual? Was it all difficult?
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With the proposal of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, some people claim that homosexuals want "special" recognition.
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Halliday hates theory. It's dangerous. (A lot of big words.) They have no love of language. Theory is for people who don't have the talent to be creative writers. They're not equal.
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Proposition 8 revealed that gay men are not equal. They cannot marry as their heterosexual counterparts can.
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Scholar Robert Philen wrote: “... a work’s level of popularity or obscurity can change over time without its level of difficulty particularly.... Instead, the relationship between accessibility/difficulty and popularity/obscurity is more that most popular works tend to be relatively accessible and most difficult works tend to be more obscure...."
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Can one be an accessible homosexual?
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And if so, who would it be?
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Richard Simmons? Rock Hudson? Harvey Fierstein?
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Are you more of an accessible homosexual if you’re in the closet? So people can assume you’re still like them? Or are you more accessible if you’re way out there, relishing your own flamboyance? Like Jack from Will & Grace? And everyone is enjoying you, they feel "in" on the joke? Maybe even on what they see as the joke of homosexuality?
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Is there more of a need for a homosexual poet to be accessible than a straight poet?
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Can you equate accessible gay poetry with narrative/lyric and inaccessible as everything else?
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Can a gay poet afford not to think as much in binaries as their straight male counterparts?
Heterosexual/Homosexual? Right to Marry/Civil Unions, Civil Unions/Nothing, High Probability of Teen Suicide/Much Less Probable? Narrative & Lyric/Experimental? Safe/Unsafe?
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If (autobiographical) narrative is more accessible does that make it more urgent and, in a way, more necessary than the inaccessible?
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Aren’t gay poets going to internalize a need for accessibility when they are made to feel so out of the mainstream, so inaccessible to a pretty good number of people?
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And isn’t perhaps an unconscious internalization of accessibility going occur? Creating an imbalance of what kind of poetry receives what awards, inclusion into anthologies, etc.?
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Based on my experience of teaching poetry for over a decade to college students, I think I can safely identify some gay poets who would be labeled as accessible. Here’s a few: James Allen Hall, Rane Arroyo, Randall Mann, Benjamin Grossberg, etc.
Here are inaccessible ones: Jack Spice, Brian Teare (“Sight Map”), Tom Savage, etc.
Toss-Ups: Jason Schneiderman, Miguel Murphy, etc.
Steve:
ReplyDeleteI think accessibility has more to do with how we read poetry rather than how poets write, regardless of sexual orientation or gender. People expect a text to be readable (i.e. at least follow loose standards of written grammatical conventions) and to have at least an understandable surface meaning that they can easily grasp.
This mean, essentially, that while poets should use all the linguistic tools at their disposal to create multi-layered and intricately rich works, they also must realize that if they want to sell books and get their work out before an audience, they have to at least make the audience feel that they are getting something out of the reading experience, even if the reader entirely misses the point the first, second, or nth time they read the work. If poets are only writing to impress other poets, then sure, be inaccessible, be inscrutable, be closeted, and write only in code that some ideal reader can decipher. But if poets want their work to be more widely read and appreciated, they need to at least leave the door a bit open so the reader is drawn into the piece and wants to spend time figuring it out rather than simply being dismissive of verbal ingenuity and linguistic feats of poetic excellence that confuse the living fuck out of them.
I think every single question you raise is important, but not just for gay poets. Gay poets writing poems about gay issues to a gay audiene doesn't make the poems less accessible to a hetero audience--in fact, it makes the gay experience more accessible. The question is whether gay poets want to make that experience more accessible. Yes, I'm hetero, but if all I do is stay locked in my own world and don't consider the views and experiences of others, that doesn't make me a very good human being. And I think that is an aim of poetry we often overlook: it humanizes us in ways we don't appreciate but should. Students miss this all the time because they are always trying to figure out what a poem means instead of experiencing the poem as an opportunity for inner reflection. Poetry makes us slow down and realize we are not the center of the world. Poetry tells us that we aren't the only ones who struggle with making sense of the beauty and unfairness of the world.
Damn. I re-read that and I sound all new-age-wishy-washy. But I stand by it.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comprehensive, useful, generous comment.
I disagree with your thesis. One can choose to write accessibly or not. One is aware of the vast array of aesthetic, political, personal consequences, good or bad, no?
Steve, do you think accessibility is defined by the poet or the audience?
ReplyDeleteI think a lot about that idea of "access" in my own work. I have purposefully written manuscripts that excluded heterosexual readers (or, most of them) and manuscripts that allowed them in. I am always writing to create an accessible space for my queer audiences, or, at least, I strive to.
I feel safer experimenting with form more than language. I don't want to be misread.
It's a metaphor for my real life.
Steve - you and Matthew seem to be on the same page. You can write as accessibly as you want, and obviously there's a level of intention in the choice, but if the reader doesn't take the requisite number of steps in your direction you could be writing nursery rhymes and he wouldn't get it. I read a bit by Don Paterson the other day that about summed it up. "We read according to an undeclared handicap system, to the specific needs of the author. We meet the novelists a little way, the poets at least halfway, the translated poets three-quarters of the way; the Postmoderns we pick up at the station in their wheelchairs." Presumably the converse is true and the most 'inacessible' poem can be broken into by a determined or dedicated reader. He might not take away everything the poet put into the piece but with patience he'll at least get the something Matthew refers to as making it worth his while.
ReplyDelete