Queer theory persistently debates the timeliness, identities, and evidence of sexuality, and probes how history and historiography operate. Historical poetics is the study of poetry within its context and the elucidation of the institutional and ideological forms that made readers recognize and understand poetry as such in their historical moment. Both queer theory and historical poetics are suspicious of the transhistorical stability of their scholarly concepts. Yet historical poetics has rarely been coupled with queer theory or sexuality studies.
Queer historical poetics asks us to consider how textual practices were queer in their own time, rather than to seek out queerness as evidence of latent homosexuality before the modern coherence of that identity. It reconsiders what counts as an historical archive of queerness and how scholars should read it. Lisa L. Moore (a speaker for this session) asks in her Lambda Literary Award-winning book Sister Arts: “If we have queer texts, what in particular do we need from historically queer people?” Queer historical poetics—and the speakers on this panel—begin to address this question from the point where Moore ends, reexamining the categorical relationships between queer texts and queer people.
So rather than assume a “homosexual tradition” in American poetry (Robert K. Martin), find “some minor gay American Poets” whose “homosexuality is evident in their writings” (Stephen Foster), or discover the suppressed poetics of homosexual panic among Puritan America (Walter Hughes), the speakers on this panel will present their research on how queer theory and sexuality studies can inform our understanding of poetics and poetic form in historical contexts (and raise questions about historical reading of literary archives has influenced sexuality).
Benjamin Kahan will look at Swinburne’s association with ideas about masochism and a historical literary form called “galliambics,” which recalls the eunuch songs of the goddess Cybele from Anatolia and appears in classical Roman poetry by Catullus. Cliff Mak will examine how the relationship between modernism and “cybernetics” appears in Marianne Moore’s poetics, especially in regard to her ambiguous sexuality. Lisa Moore will revisit some of her foundational questions about queerness and feminism by returning to a literary genre that often bedevils categorization—the verse novel—from Anna Seward’s Louisa: A Poetical Novel (1789) to Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1995). Nikki Skillman looks at the visual and formal elements of the author Jos Charles, who works against the generic expectations of lyric in the performative and self-concealment of transness. Each presenter will deliver 10-12 min. "flash" talks with the remaining time devoted to discussion with the audience. The organizer and presider will particularly encourage engagement with the audience rather than sequential, back-and-forth Q+A, since the purpose of the panel is to introduce practitioners from different subdisciplines to one another.
The panel is constructed to engage with questions about the visibility (or invisibility) of historical forms and sexual identities, and questions about how they change across time. Its participants draw upon authors and archives that span from eighteenth-century England to contemporary American verse-making while connecting with queer studies, historical literary studies, trans studies, and visual poetics. The panel is organized to provide a diverse range of speaker positions and subject matters and to foreground the way that questions of queerness and form have been at the forefront of literary criticism in the past half century. Its goal is to invite conversations across multiple disciplinary domains to assess how queerness and sexuality studies can extend and rejuvenate historical poetics, and how historical poetics can inform ongoing conversations in queer studies about historiography and the value of literary forms.