The Limits of the Spotlight: Queer Poetry and the Confines of Visibility

open_access
Open Access
Author:
Kloehr, Colby
Area of Honors:
English
Degree:
Bachelor of Arts
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Christopher Dean Castiglia, Thesis Supervisor
Kevin Michael Bell, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
poetry
queer
rhetoric
LGBTQ+
politics
Abstract:
To be a Queer American poet has never been simply a matter of writing poems. It has meant living a life in which desire, danger, recognition, and erasure existed in constant tension. Queer poets live in a world where their deepest attachments are both omnipresent and unspeakable, where the most meaningful connections often occurred through the quick moment of passing by another Queer person on a street, in a movie theater, or across a noisy bar. This fleeting intimacy, a glance or gesture lasting only seconds, became a central grammar of Queer experience. As a result, Queer poets developed a poetics attuned to this, to the pulse of contact that vanishes as quickly as it arrives. To be a Queer American poet means learning to make art out of these glancing encounters. To treat these small brushes of public intimacy as sites of longing and recognition for another Queer person. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz, Richard Dyer, Samuel Delany, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, George Chauncey, and especially the poetry of Frank O’Hara, we can see that Queer poetics emerged not despite these fleeting interactions but because of them. The Queer poet became a record-keeper of moments that were at once casual and impactful, invisible yet defining. In these passing encounters, Queer poets discover a world rich with feeling: evanescent and beautiful. Furthermore, upon analysis of the contemporary poetic works of Queer American poets such as Danez Smith, Chen Chen, and Franny Choi, a truth about the modern Queer experience emerges. One that is deeply concerned with cultural identity, race, visibility, and the expectations of the heteronormative society. Altogether, this thesis aims to establish where we have come from and who we continue to be as a community of Queer poets, both of which shape us into who we ultimately are.