Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry [Hardcover]

Queer Lyrics fills a gap in queer studies: the lyric, as poetic genre, has never been directly addressed by queer theory. Vincent uses formal concerns, difficulty and closure, to discuss innovations specific to queer American poets. He traces a genealogy based on these queer techniques from Whitman, through Crane and Moore, to Ashbery and Spicer. Queer Lyrics considers the place of form in queer theory, while opening new vistas on the poetry of these seminal figures.Preface Snags and Gags: Cruising the Difficult Rhetorical Suspense, Sexuality and Death in Whitman's Calamus Poems Reports of looting and insane buggery behind altars : John Ashbery's Queer Poetics A Mirror at the End of a Long Corridor : Moore, Crane, Closure The Magician's Advance: Late Moore Danced Undone: Performances of Resignation and Exhaustion in Crane's Lyrics The End of the Line: Spicer in Love

Poetry lovers should be writing love poems to John Vincent - and not just queer ones. For he has done something very difficult and completely necessary: performed both formalist and thematic analyses of deliberately 'difficult' modern poetry with a view to considering connections between sexual identity and poetic closure. Even readers with an aversion to such poetry will find themselves taken gently by the hand and led through this forbidding terrain by an unusually considerate - yet formidably erudite - critic. Let us hope this isn't Vincent's final word on the subject. - Kevin Kopelson, The University of Iowa

'With Queer Lyrics the study of American poetry should be shaken from its recent doldrums, and queer theory should be roused from its general inattention to literary form.' - Lee Edelman, Tufts University