In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 248.
What does it meant to read queerly? To intuit some dynamic or desire that lives in the text but is not explicit? To deconstruct a particular performance of gender and sexuality on and beyond the page? In the words of Ramzi Fawaz and Shanté Paradigm Smalls, “Few terms carry as much weight and meaning in queer culture than that of reading.” One of the first poems I read queerly was “To Autumn” by John Keats. The lines “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—” were a source of comfort to my teenage self who felt awkward and ashamed in a heteronormative world. I remember thinking, “thou hast thy music too,” and for a moment, believing it. Unwittingly, I had already begun to read queerly, which is simply a method of survival.
Despite falling in love with literature in English and Chinese, I didn’t know that queer writers existed in either of the languages I knew. I didn’t realize until much later that some of the poets I had studied in my English literature classes were, in fact, queer: Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and Wilfred Owen. In Andrew McMillan’s moving introduction to the anthology 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022), which I coedited, McMillan writes: “…think of Wilfred Owen, the war poet; think of W. H. Auden, the poet of a particular kind of Englishness. These are poets who often survive because there is another claim on their identity—they can neatly fit into another ‘school,’ another ‘movement’—and therefore are palatable for being taught in classrooms, for being read at weddings or funerals, for being remembered.” These poets spoke vividly to me about life and death, love and loss. I recall being intrigued by the final stanza in “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop:
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Despite knowing nothing of Bishop’s own identity, I’d let myself imagine that the “you” in this poem was a woman. There was a sense of something I couldn’t yet name, a kind of covert intimacy in the use of brackets in this final stanza. Close reading became a way of noticing what the Cuban American academic José Esteban Muñoz calls “ephemera.” Muñoz urges us to “think of [queer] ephemera as trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor.” As a keen reader, I found English literature to be an emotional haven in which I could begin to explore my emergent identity. While studying Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, I became fascinated by Viola, who dresses up as Cesario to court Olivia on Orsino’s behalf. The scene where Cesario (Viola) woos Olivia with the words: “Hallow your name to the reverberate hills, / And make the babbling gossip of the air / Cry out ‘Olivia!’” was a memorable moment of queer awakening for me. It was the first time I’d witnessed desire expressed by a woman towards another woman in a literary text, and I recall subsequently devoting hours to an essay covertly titled “An Exploration of Deep-Seated Emotions in Twelfth Night” as a way of sublimating my budding desires. I remember going to the public library and browsing all the reference books on Twelfth Night I could find and feeling—as I was standing among the library stacks—a hesitant and inexplicable joy.
As a starting place for your own writing, recall a poem in which you noticed queer traces. Reread the poem (and read it aloud to yourself). What possibilities lie within? Choose a memorable line or image and use it as a doorway for you to pass through in your own writing. Where does this doorway lead?
Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche (Faber & Faber, 2019), which won the Costa Book Award for Poetry. Bright Fear (Faber, 2023), Chan’s second book, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Writer’s Prize. They coedited the anthology 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022) with Andrew McMillan and served as a judge for the 2023 Booker Prize. Chan is currently a lecturer in poetry at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow at Harris Manchester College in Oxford.
image credit: Debby Hudson
