UC Irvine

After Tradition: The Tease of a Queer Lyric challenges the metaphor of literary inheritance by arguing that the history of queer poetics is a series of affective affiliations rather than a linear, inherited tradition. My work undisciplines a linear view of queer poetics by proposing a new theory of a queer reading: a theory of a queer lyric. Through focusing on three different poets from three different centuries, my project shows how the changing expressions of queerness in poetics opens the space for inventive potentiality. My research focuses on the long, but also woefully understudied intersection between queer theory and lyric theory. While modern scholars of poetics have certainly published extensively on queer poets, there is little work done on how queerness and lyric are explicitly useful when paired together. Accordingly, queer theory also does not often address queer poetics. Since literary criticism struggles with queerness and lyric, I argue that inventing a theory of queer lyric reading is a way of historicizing queer poetics. If the notion of linear tradition presents an ontological problem for queer history, I offer queer lyric as a mode of asserting how queer poetics is historical. Affective affiliation between queer poets assumes that queerness, much like the word lyric, is a moving target. I trace this history by focusing on the poetry of Walt Whitman, Frank O’Hara, and Jericho Brown. I perform sustained, slow readings of their poems and the criticism that surrounds each poet to show how literary criticism has responded to them. In some cases, I also explain how scholars even fail to address and even exclude poets from literary traditions. Queer lyric reading does not assume that queerness necessarily needs to be a pathological inheritance or reproduction. Instead, I show how modern literary criticism in queer poetics made inheritance a tempting default and called it tradition.