Showing posts with label queering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label queering. Show all posts

Monday, January 4, 2010

Google-Fu

So I Googled myself tonight. It's a new year, figured I should try it, see what's out there of me. On page 24 of the returned results (most of which are repeats on different feeds of poems I've had on Indiefeed, but a decent number are poems in online journals), I find this teaser:

It´s jeff stumpo, who blogs here. And he´s a cutie! too bad he´s straight! ;-) but he does wonder if he could identify as a "queering poet." that´s a start. ...

I really want to know who wrote that about me. The actual link provided is effectively dead - it leads to a concert venue site that doesn't contain anything real so far as I can tell. I'm just curious. So if anybody out there has better search engine skills than I do, come to my rescue!

Friday, April 24, 2009

I'm a Queering Poet(?)

I recently popped in at Steve Fellner's blog, in which he says,

I like to think of [Alice Notley] as queer. In the broadest sense possible. Her rejection of PoBiz, her rejection of white, middle-class values; she refuses to be categorized, shifting her poetic project from narrative to the experimental and back to lyrical in a mere second.


This question of who is or is not a queer writer is recently in my mind due to conversations with a friend of mine who has been wondering whether or not to identify as a queer poet. She is bisexual, but her personal sexuality rarely arises in her writing. On the other hand, she does a lot to question norms both social and sexual in her work, leading me to suggest to her that she is a "queering poet." That is to say, the emphasis is on what she does rather than who she is. The emphasis is on the question rather than the answer. The emphasis is on mini-narratives, not a grand all-encompassing one. The emphasis is, to my joy, on guiding the reader through a process rather than presenting said reader with an object.

With that in mind, can I identify as a queering poet as well? I want to say yes, based on the nature of my work, but I think I need some friends and colleagues to weigh in, to argue against a straight male as being able to queer. Some devil's advocates, as it were (but play nice, please, in the process of doing so).