Cottonwood River Anthology

COTTONWOOD RIVER ANTHOLOGY

Gay Midwestern Realism:

The Death Throes of Romanticism #2

“the audacious hubris of tragedy”

—Joyce Carol Oates

“The Death Throes Of Romanticism:

The Poetry of Sylvia Plath”

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This is the audacious hubris of tragedy—

Midwestern gay poets who think they’re queens

Tragedy queens who think they’re godlike—

When really they just simply die that’s all

They illustrate the error of personality—

The poet both creates and is created by his art

Especially the "I" of gay lyric poetry—

Supposedly free not only of personal life

But free from the progression of gay—

Individual poems presented as autobiography

Gay poets aren’t tres Walt Whitman anymore—

Leaves of Grass adhesiveness just doesn’t stick

The bewilderment and failure of gay poetry—

As Auden said it doesn’t really change things

One can rant and howl like Miss Ginsberg—

But Wichita Sutras just don’t stop wars

Each generation accepts or rejects—

Sympathetically detaches itself from Tragedy

Each tragic action the ultimate condition—

For the collective life of a certain era

Lit crit queens can dissect tragedy queens—

Cruelly or reverentially, attack or glorify

Illustrating how the work of a significant poet—

Helps to explain his era and his own kind

The schmaltz of gay poetry is assumed—

Its kitsch as cultural trash assumed

What needs desperately to be seen is—

How it’s performed for us, thru us, by us

And perhaps in spite of some of us—

The nineteenth hole at the end of the course

The clubhouse lounge concluding scenes—

The first stroke which began centuries ago