UC Santa Cruz

Since at least the publication of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, postwar poetry in the United States has been heavily influenced by queer writers. However, the various traditions and lineages that comprise twentieth-century queer writing traditions have not always been appreciated in their moment or in the decades following due to, on the one hand, censorship and institutionalized homophobia, and, on the other, code-switching and self-obfuscation. Debates about the role of poetic speech and speech’s relationship to identity articulated in the late 1970’s further devalued the kinds of political poetries of marginalized groups, including queer writers, as well as women and writers of color. Though queer writers were active in the activism in the challenges that eventually brought gay and lesbian studies—and later queer theory and queer studies—to university campuses, queer theory’s primary interest in novels has meant that queer poetics has yet to be appropriately reconsidered.

Focused on the San Francisco Bay Area, this dissertation draws from a number of archival holdings to reconstruct a history of queer poetics stretching from the emergence of a self-consciously American modernism in the 1950’s to the second decade of the twenty-first century, in the midst of a resurgence of anti-capitalist longing decades after the worst of the AIDS epidemic in North America. The dissertation begins with two chapters of literary criticism: the first dedicated to the life and works of editor Donald Allen, the second to the prolific multi-hyphenate, Kevin Killian. Complementing these more traditional chapters of literary criticism are two poetry manuscripts: Minor Work and Don’t Leave Me This Way. These manuscripts extend the concerns of the literary criticism regarding location, lyric speech, and historical feeling, in addition to drawing on archival research. Taken together, these chapters suggest some of the deficiencies in contemporary queer studies and literary history, which have yet to fully account for the lives and works of marginalized poets, even those who should be seen as essential to their composition.