Enter the Quaniverse

I finally finished reading “Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets” edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones, having received my contributor’s copy a little before the Sydney launch as part of the Queer Thinking event at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras arts festival. I wasn’t in a hurry to finish it, and enjoyed taking my time, putting it down and coming back to it.

The book seems to have appeared at an interesting time, amidst at least three other Australian poetry anthologies, and it’s given reviewers good grist to ponder why we anthologize, to what point it serves, and how this anthology stacks up in comparison to others (very well indeed, I read. The reviews have been good and substantial).

I’ve enjoyed reading the discussion about what could be expected from poems from gay and lesbian writers and how they might conform or destroy expectation; this question seems fundamental to a few of the reviewers (and is explored in the introductions).

But I can be at times (often), intellectually lazy and dreadfully practical. An anthology is a good way to market poetry, it gathers together diverse voices, it provides an organisational structure which will appeal to both a market (i.e. a women’s anthology to women, a gay and lesbian anthology to gays and lesbians) and with any luck, university courses. An anthology does what many university courses do – it chooses an area to explore and study in depth; so Out of the Box makes a founding contribution to the possibility of gay and lesbian poetry being studied in Australia. It also provides a historical record, it archives and displays. Unexpectedly useful to me on a personal basis, I didn’t know that so many of the poets that I meet on the relatively small Sydney scene are gay and lesbian (what happened to my gaydar anyway?) and more relevant, Out of the Box gives me a handy reference guide to what they write! Rather than ask why (anthologize), I simply ask why not (which is opportunistic since this is the third queer poetry anthology I’ve appeared in, and I edited an anthology of Chinese-Canadian poetry a number of years ago).

This is not to gloss over the anthology itself! I think what I most enjoyed was how the poems speak to each other. Foregoing other ordering possibilities such as by poet’s last name or date of birth, and further breaking with the convention of grouping poems by the same poet together, Out of the Box orders its poems in alphabetical order of the title of the poems! Brilliant and unexpected. It allowed me to move between poets and voices and poems and be constantly engaged, surprised by what would appear, still get a hit of biography but not be drawn into comparing older vs newer poets, whether someone is more ‘important’ or ‘better’ than another. That Javant Biarujia’s “fucking the quiff of a runty cassock” appears on an opposite page to Margaret Bradstock’s “Old responsibilities, seasons/ rise up, numinous as Christmas ghosts” gives rise to many possibilities: that you prefer one style or the other, that you can jump from like to dislike or vice-versa with a mere shift of glance, that the contrast between the poems makes you like each a little more, their attributes and personality sharper.

I believe that including gay and lesbian poetry in the same anthology is the more uncommon choice, particularly for a contemporary rather than historical anthology. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen more gay-only anthologies that have reflected a stronger differentiation between both politics and cultures of gay men and lesbians. So, for me it was a joy to discover a number of women poets who provided some of my favourite moments (Wendy Jenkins, Dîpti Saravanamuttu, I’m talking to you – though I also liked being introduced to the formidable Peter Rose).

I was about to say that there feels to me a non-specificity about many of the poems, as if the editorial choice was to go with queer sensibility rather than content, but I’m not sure if that’s true. I did remember feeling with a number of poems that without the mention of a breast here, a phallus there, and the assumed sexual identity of the poet, that they didn’t feel particularly gay – but I think I have to explain that by saying I still don’t quite have a feel of the broad range of Australian poets that I’ve been reading since arriving on these shores in 1999. I often note the embrace of language and experimental poetry and a slight distaste for the confessional and first-person. Compare that to the 50 gay poets in the American “Best Gay Poetry 2008”, edited by Lawrence Schimel, were the majority of works featured are first-person confessionals about sex, dating, HIV, and ex-lovers. There is distance inserted in many of the Australian poems here by wordplay, jokes, intellectualism, perhaps reflection, which strikes me at times as colder and less emotional, and at other times, as more sophisticated and polished. I’ll continue to ponder.

Last words: the introductions are fantastic and complement each other well. I appreciated Farrell’s close reading of a number of poems. They won’t appeal to the casual reader of poetry; I found them smart and engaging; Jones’ analysis similarly informative but moreso, the lovely and concise history of publishing gay and lesbian poetry.

I was amused at the Sydney launch that the same word kept repeating again and again. ‘Handsome.’ as in “What a handsome book”. It’s such a beautifully designed book, the graphic matte cover, the unusual almost square shape. Robert Gray at this year’s writer’s festival referred to the book as the perfect hardware, you can take it anywhere, you can drop it and it won’t break. The poems here are elevated by the form in which they are presented.

Books are years in the making, and it was a few years ago that Tom Cardamone, asked whether I’d be interested in contributing an essay to a collection about favourite gay books that were out-of-print. Tom and I had connected with each other through a tenuous link or two. He had written a positive review of my collection of sex fiction, but he’d also done a review of a book that I was also about to review for an internet magazine. I asked him whether he’d have a look at it.

This explanation may seem unnecessary, but it is as an example of how people connect with each other, across space and time, and form bonds and sometimes community. To be honest, while I immediately thought of a book I could write about, I wasn’t so sure about the concept of the anthology. Was it sellable? Would it be interesting? It seemed somehow obscure to me, gay writers writing about books no longer available. The point being? Was it to capture something lost? Try to get the books republished? Or simply a historical document?

To counter the possibility of the book being too academic, too esoteric, I wrote my essay with a particular intent – I would talk about why the book appealed to me in an accessible way, how it related to my journey as a gay man and a writer, and knowing that others may not possibly ever read it, demonstrate a bit of the book’s beauty (My choice was Patrick Roscoe’s “Birthmarks”. Ironically, when I sent him a fan e-mail telling him I’d be highlighting his book, he responded with anger about how the publisher had ruined it from his original intent.)

I was amused on reading the finally-published book, in a beautiful edition by Haiduk Press – gorgeous cover and a delicious feel to the pages – that this was the approach taken by most contributors, and that the collection is not obscure, but an interesting and unique approach to gay history and gay men’s lives featuring engaging and lively prose about something we love and why we loved it. As much as literary merit, the books featured in this anthology, pointed ways for gay men to survive, live and love, gave hope and possibility, and told us that we were not alone.

It was a fascinating social history to discover so many works with gay content written at times with so much gay oppression, whether a 1924 novel by Glenway Westcott, or young adult novels from 1969 and 1972. The breadth of the collection (there are 28 essays in all) spans a long period of gay history. Many of the early books reviewed featured rich, older gay men with much younger lovers, living in high society in New York or in European cities, some involved with hustlers; this was followed by an exploration of the many novels to come out of the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Another major strand is about gay men looking for and finding themselves (or who they hoped to be) whether in more recent novels featuring black gay characters, awkward gay teenagers, or men facing oppression, or in love, or at play.

I found it interesting how often contributors knew the authors of the books they wrote about, as friends and colleagues, or perhaps because they’d tracked them down as fans: a comment both on how small the gay literary world is but also how emotional ties affect how we view art. Rather than making the book feel like a club of insiders though, I think this aspect of the book spoke well to how we make connections and community and friendships.

I was also struck by a common tone of nostalgia and regret. It makes sense. After all, this book is called the “lost library”, it is about books that are no longer available, that the contributors long to see in print again, or perhaps that their authors were still alive. At the same time, it is a meeting of writers, who are often in the trade of capturing memories and romanticizing the past, and gay sensibility, which often is about wanting to be someone else or wanting to be a better self, or feeling “special” or “different” and turning that uniqueness to advantage. Bill Brent quotes an unpublished passage by Paul Reed about a man who spends so much time longing for his past that he turned regret into an artform.

Even if this melancholy doesn’t appeal to you, I think any gay man interested in gay identity and history will find “The Lost Library” engaging, be swept into conversations about why and how we love men, the moments we knew we were gay, the realizations that life would be just fine, and the signposts, in the form of books, that showed us the way. Not only about books, this anthology has fine writing in it, which makes a good tribute to the gay writers featured.