Hanging Out Beneath Orlando’s Oak Tree, or, Towards a Queer British Poetry

Nation

‘Dear Shakespeare,’ begins the letter inscribed into bright yellow paint over layers of tabloid homophobia, ‘I’m queer like you.’ Derek Jarman’s unique combination of provocation, cultural insight and way with colour is sorely missed. Tilda Swinton has argued passionately that British cinema needs him now more than ever — but the same could be said of British queer literary culture. The Jarman exhibition at the Serpentine in summer 2008, curated by fellow film-maker Isaac Julien, cast Jarman as a filmmaker and installation artist. Jarman was a diarist, essayist and poet as well as writing dozens of screenplays, yet his writings were nowhere to be seen.

That painted letter, written (as if) by an adolescent, goes on to assert the desire to become an artist like Michelangelo or Leonardo. Jarman often talks in his diaries about the lasting effect of his Italian early childhood on his visual sensibility, its contrast of Mediterranean colour with grey postwar Britain. It’s a contrast that’s vividly enacted in the painting, one that recognises the trans-European heritage of visual arts.

But why not write ‘Dear Shakespeare, I want to be a poet like you?’ This essay is an attempt to think about why the painting doesn’t imagine the burning desire to be a queer English poet. It’s tempting to parallel Jarman’s sense of not being quite English with his being gay. Yet Englishness is one of the great themes of his cinematic work, an image he makes queer over and over in punk sequins and hornpipes and rugby players at an OutRage demo. Likewise, Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando that integrates a lesbian love story and British literary history. Orlando’s monumental award-winning poem The Oak Tree writes her identity as trans and bisexual into the English landscape, as the novel restores to Vita Sackville-West the Great House of which patriarchal inheritance laws deprived her. It’s a playful but political act of literary history, a rewriting.

Yet, in Sally Potter’s film of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Orlando gives up poetry once she becomes a woman. There are good reasons why it would be hard to believe she could become a successful poet in The Present the film imagines: the passing of Section 28 in 1988 as Potter began adapting the novel, the declining role of poetry in public life between Woolf’s era and our own, Orlando’s downward class mobility in the film compared to her aristocratic inheritance in the novel. It’s even harder to imagine that she could articulate her complex, tangled, joyful becoming in contemporary British poetry. Where and how would Orlando come out?

In Gus van Sant’s Milk, recently elected City Supervisor Harvey Milk takes the stage before a vast crowd at a Gay Liberation rally in San Francisco, and tells them to come out. At a moment when that act held a real risk of being fired, kicked out, and kicked, Milk asked that his listeners speak out, beginning with themselves. In return, he offered them the American myth of Everyman’s inclusion in the union. He does so first in the words of the constitution, and then in the words of Emma Goldman, the Jewish Marxist feminist writer — words that are inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, even though their author was expelled by the US as a Communist sympathiser.

Coming out in, or with, a poem has no Emma Goldman precedent in the UK (Woolf’s flight of fantasy notwithstanding). Coming out in a poem might get you excluded from school syllabi, from public office, from the books pages. Coming out in a poem isn’t cool. If you want to say it loud, another form is needed.

Public Space

As Potter’s Orlando discovers, it’s hard to speak queerly once you leave your stately home. Not just because of the love that dare not speak its name, but because poetry dare not speak out. What is the British equivalent of a poem on the Statue of Liberty? Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey. Inward-facing, canonical, traditional, hierarchical, Christian, fusty, locked away. Whatever cultural changes have occurred in the Bush era, the US has retained a tradition of public poetry, of demotic poetry, that was made visible at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Far from the Brahmins of British poetry, US poetry lays claim to poets of the people, and among these to a queer tradition at the roots of its poetics: Whitman, Dickinson. The Civil Rights movement, too, was borne along by poets, with queer voices such as Audre Lorde central to the struggle, poems chanted on marches and painted on the sides of buildings.

There is no British equivalent. It’s hard to imagine a Gay Pride march where Wilde’s De Profundis is chanted. Poetry is not entwined into queer life in the UK because it is not entwined into life. Cool Britannia turned so many arts into “creative industries,” but struggled to find the market value in poetry. For poetry, ars gratia artis persists, an inheritance from the Victorian decadents for whom it was a refusal of art’s responsibility to nation, family and morality. Without the provocation of explicit censorship or a clearly-defined social role, British poetry has adopted fence-sitting as its position, ignoring the occasional splinter in its ars. Which means that it should be a free space for play, and yet it’s circumscribed by a continued domination by an insider circle, the majority of editors being straight, white, middle-class males, projecting and privileging a similar readership (with interests only in those like themselves); those who slip one or more of these definitions are often constrained, consciously or not, by that dominant vision of a readership.

The only book keyworded “homosexuality” in my (liberal, feminist, Ken Livingstone-hosting) secondary school’s library was Brideshead Revisited. Waugh’s cautionary tale of caste persists and pervades both British publishing and (representations of) the gay community. Gay identity is reproduced for the popular imagination, much like poetry, as a decadent affectation of the wealthy, confounding a real literary history of dandies and queens with a theme park fantasy designed to pull in the pink pound. What’s The Line of Beauty but an update, differentiated by its glossy explicitness?

It’s not an explicitness that has surfaced in British poetry of any sexual stripe. Despite apparently relaxed social codes, there’s a nostalgia for gay culture to remain, in the title of the anthology of pre-20th century gay literature, pages passed from hand to hand. Why else call London’s gay literary night Polari (a naming that excludes the Yiddish, Romani and working-class origins of Polari in favour of its later gay male — and upper class — usage). What Jarman resisted was a persistent British embarrassment at what poetry (and queer poetry even more so) deals with — emotions, the body, yearning, transgression, secrets, boldness, messiness — at the shocking intimacy of what poetry can fire. We’re here, we’re queer — but that here is circumscribed, crypto-queer in code and wink. We don’t want the personal to be political. Praise song, elegy, ode, essay, ballad, epic: these are where love dare not speak its name.

There are two confusions operational here: first, that queerness is a matter only of the heart and loins, that it falls only into the erotic/romantic territory of lyric (and there codedly so, with as few references to bodily fluids as possible); secondly, that because lyric poetry depends on codes, on revelations and unravellings, so too should poets. In Paper Houses, Michèle Roberts discusses the twin threads of her life, as a lyric poet who declares that inventing new forms to write the bodily and personal to be, in and of itself, political, and as a feminist activist. To write intimately, dense with metaphors, and speak out clearly and incisively are not presented as contrasting but as contiguous activities.

Roberts is describing the heady days of 1970s London, the era that also shaped Jarman and Potter, days of squats and parades and possibility. Of the Split Britches and Raging Beauties, of feminist small presses and black gay men’s theatre. As charted by Roberts (and too few others), the mid- to late ‘70s appear as an era in which a queer public space was being realised, not on dominant culture’s terms, but from grassroots. The Women’s Press published writers like Ismat Chugtai, a Pakistani woman whose collection The Quilt talked explicitly about lesbianism. The BFI Production Board supported provocateurs like Isaac Julien and Pratibha Parmar, who were concerned with race, class and disability as they inflected sexual and gender identities.

How did a queer culture that supported Julien’s Looking for Langston — not only a beautiful documentary, but a brilliant essay-poem on transnational queer literary community — become the mainstream viewership for The Line of Beauty? The coincidence of the Conservative government’s economic and cultural policies, and the AIDS epidemic. More than coincidence, confluence: arts cuts, the refusal of research funding for scientists concerned about HIV, and Section 28 all flowed from the same neo-conservative ideology. At the moment that the queer community faced the challenge of speaking out about HIV/AIDS, it also faced censorship in the form of Section 28 and the loss of many of its brightest artists and agitators. AIDS erased a generation whose work we will never have — but the disease’s effect was compounded by a ban on the “promotion” of homosexuality by schools and public-funded bodies.

Yet AIDS also presented an opportunity for acceptance, as public sympathy revived and intensified the Victorian idea of queerness as itself a disease that could be regarded with that peculiarly British tolerance that is at once pity, disgust and schadenfreude. OutRage was derailed into sentimentality, with sickness and grief becoming the prevailing narrative form, a lost language of cranes that left little trace in British poetry. Where are the great AIDS elegies? Where could they have been published? What would they have sounded like, with all the rage and desire drained from them by conformity to the love lyric loaded with male privilege? Where are the inverted blazons forcing the reader to look at the body ravaged but surviving?

Canon

Where would they have looked for a form other than Tennyson’s In Memoriam? Perhaps to Gertrude Stein. Not an obvious choice for an AIDS poetics, perhaps, but one made convincingly by John Greyson in his new film Fig Trees, which uses Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts as a framework for a documentary about two AIDS activists, Tim McCaskell and Zaki Achmat. Playing with the place of opera in queer culture, Greyson also celebrates Stein’s queer language, her slippage and physicality. This Stein — romantic, erotic, attentive to the body — isn’t the one I was offered at university, the “difficult” poet with her Cubist eye (as sanctified by Picasso) on grammar and material culture.

What could be queerer, though, than a poet obsessed with pronouns and furniture? Not to mention her love of “lifting belly” — a major Modernist text that has been out-of-print for twenty years. Stein is tokenised within the Modernist canon (from which Orlando was long excluded as frivolous). And to be included she had to be de-sexed: masculinised, disembodied, depoliticised, leached of humour and desire. Bonnie Kime Scott’s monumental The Gender of Modernism has helped to recast Modernist literature as a space of gender play and sexual experimentation that textually parallels the lives of the Bloomsbury group.

Stein, Woolf, HD, the members of Nathalie Barney’s salon are the lesbian bridge between the pages passed from hand to hand — covered either with lascivious male imitations of Ovid (Donne, Pope) or with sentimental crypto-Christian verse (Michael Field) — and Kathy Acker, who combined in-your-face sexuality with in-your-face politics and theory. Yet the canon that the 1970s were so busily and brilliantly blowing up has got stuck. Projects of reclamation, such as Alison Hennegan’s The Lesbian Pillow Book, have focused on decoding sexual identity and sexual acts to demonstrate that lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans folk have existed throughout history, writing and being written about. But they perpetuate the association between queerness and codedness, suggesting that to speak queerly cannot be to speak clearly.

Stein’s playfully dense coding, whose unravelling of everyday language draws attention not to the unnameability of queerness or sex, but to the instability — that is, queerness — of all language, is one rebuttal. What’s lacking in contemporary British poetry is others: not in a tokenised, one queer-poet-per-press way, but as a movement that incorporates queer and feminist voices, that takes a queer approach to language, as is the case with post-LANGUAGE poetry in the US. Such a movement requires magazines like Chroma and Brand, the presence of poetry in LGBT events such as Homotopia. (But such communitarian sites become a double bind unless there is an aperture through which the work they cultivate and celebrate can emerge, and take effect, in public space.)

On the one hand, queer identity often leads artists to rethink their relation to dominant forms, narratives, languages, genres and modes of publication, aligning them with small presses, experimental theatre companies, communitarian projects, and independent spaces towards the creation of a thriving alternative community. On the other hand, this is not a remit for funding organisations and (the conservative elements of) the publishing industry to declare that queer poetry has its space — off to the side — and so we should put up and shut up. Tokenisation continues to militate against queer writers in Britain, where they are allowed as the exception — Carol Ann Duffy the “exceptional” poet, who is allowed her place in the pantheon (almost) despite her gender and sexuality (which, only ten years ago, was enough to exclude her from consideration for the Laureateship). Exceptionalism not only cuts writers off from the communities in which their work may be formed — and may be read — but also makes it difficult for them to speak politically either in their work or from the platform that it has given them.

Queer poetry is not, and cannot remain, a ghetto, but needs to be recognised — like queer lives — as part of the stream of human existence, and more specifically for this article as part of the heritage and ongoing formation of British literary culture. That means rethinking how queer poetry comes into public spaces, from literary festivals to libraries, as well as rethinking the demands with which that geography of visibility comes ringfenced — the subtle censorship of sexuality, the coy refusal of pronouns, the curtailing of inappropriate emotions, the implicit suppression of political speech.

As a public space — taught in schools and universities, presented on radio and television, underlying references in criticism and in poetry itself — the canon needs remapping. Or we need to recognise that it has always been being remapped, and read Mary Robinson’s spirited and sexy rewriting alongside Pope’s Sappho. Andrew Motion is keen on the reinsertion of the Bible into literary studies, which has been accepted for its conservative and canonical intentions; but it opens up the rediscovery and reception of — for example — Samuel haNagid’s David and Jonathan poems as part of our literary (because biblical) heritage. Written in al-Andalus, haNagid’s poems blend the erotic yearning of the Psalms and Song of Solomon with the Arabic poetry he was reading, inspired by the tradition of pre-Islamic homoerotic love lyrics.

Reading haNagid’s poems alongside Abu Nuwas, gay poet of golden era Baghdad, enlarges the definition of “our” heritage geographically as well as historically. That enlargement could extend to make space in anthologies and festivals for contemporary queer writers from former British colonies; not only those resident in England and writing politely within English traditions, but those “reinventing the enemy’s language,” as Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird entitle their collection of Native American women writers. Salt’s Earthworks series, which includes queer poets Qwo-Li Driskill and Deborah A. Miranda, draws indigenous writers into the ambit of English and British poetry, arguing not for a colonial parroting but for influences traded in both directions. British poetry needs to recognise its magpie assemblage of traditions from Italian sonnets to Persian lyric. Queer community, as a transnational ideal, offers the strength of its internationalism to a redefined British poetics.

Such a redefinition in turn offers a new, broader and deeper engagement in poetry, a wider public space in which it can be heard. As a thread of poetic concern, sexuality and gender identity offer an immediate and thrilling point of entry for adolescent readers in particular, as they look to articulate their own experiences of desire and becoming. The continued censorship of queer literature in schools is as grating and denying a prejudice as the overwhelming whiteness of the literary syllabus. Censorship works to deny that literature is a reflection of the whole of human experience. That etiolation is poetry’s loss.

Body

The next wave of queer poets will be called to speak publicly because the political sphere continues to invade their bedrooms, their diaries, their desire, however liberal we pretend to be. They will come out because the government is coming to get them, whether explicitly or in the coded forms of the bullshit that lingers on as religious fear of the flesh, Victorian morality, neo-liberal commodification of the body, and patriarchal denial of the body as site of politicised experience.

Those with privilege and power can’t expect these poets to be grateful for the creation of public spaces. They will be (we are) angry at having been silenced, edgy from having to find their own history and forms, but — infused with the possibilities learned from hundreds of their forebears — they will be brilliant, blazing because to be queer is to look with new-fangled eyes at the body.

We have to begin with the body. Like James Kirkup’s centurion in the infamous poem “The Love That Dares Speak Its Name,” we need to take

… in [our] arms —
the tough lean body

of poetry and rewrite it. Look at it hard with desire and curiosity. Not the inevitable — and disembodied — male-authored “my-naked-girlfriend” blazons that floods the mailboxes of literary magazines, but something tougher and leaner. The buzz of a poetry against the warm bark of Orlando’s oak tree where world and body kiss.