Writing Queerly

In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 249.

How does one write queerly? Is it to unearth what often remains unsaid (due to fear) in light of existing societal norms? Is it simply allowing oneself to breathe freely on the page? One of the first essays that made me realize I could write was Audre Lorde’s influential “Poetry Is Not Luxury,” which made me feel that poetry could be a living, breathing force in my own life. Like most wonderful things in life, I came to Lorde’s work by chance or serendipity, upon seeing her poem “A Litany for Survival” stuck unceremoniously on a college friend’s wall right above their bed. In her essay, Lorde writes: “I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile wordplay that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean…. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” Adrienne Rich echoes Lorde in her book of essays What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Norton, 2003). Rich exhorts the reader to “[t]ake that old, material utensil, language, found all about you, blank with familiarity, smeared with daily use, and make it into something that means more than it says. What poetry is made of is so old, so familiar, that it’s easy to forget that it’s not just the words, but polyrhythmic sounds, speech in its first endeavors (every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome).” 

At the age of twenty-seven, I was ready to attempt to write in the voice of my most hopeful self, to try to “[break] a silence that had to be overcome.” I began writing poems that would eventually become my debut collection, Flèche. The French term flèche denotes an offensive technique commonly used in the sport of fencing. As a former competitive épéeist, I use this cross-linguistic pun to evoke the queer, racialized body as both vulnerable “flesh” and weaponized “flèche.” In one of the book’s earlier poems, titled “Practice,” I use the motif of fencing as a means of examining the fraught relationality between two female/nonbinary bodies in combat, and the ache that emerges during one’s realization that one is queer in a heteronormative world, recalling the author Jack Halberstam’s observation that “the social and symbolic systems that tether queerness to loss and failure cannot be wished away.” 

In the world of the poem, the speaker grapples with the physical hurt of being stabbed in the chest and simultaneously reels from the symbolic ache of not being able to admit to a sense of attraction: “I would feel yellow / blooms of ache where the girl I thought was beautiful / had pierced my heart.” There is also a deep sense of foreboding at one’s realization that this “fairytale with a twist” cannot last once practice is over. The closeted speaker needs to code-switch between a state of openness and one of stealth, thus admitting: “Hours later, I would transform,” shedding the fencing uniform which feels congruent with their identity while changing into the school uniform, a dress which increasingly no longer fits who the speaker is becoming.

I encourage you to find a motif that draws on something you’re familiar with (i.e. a sport, a hobby, or something new that you’ve been learning/practicing). Use the jargon inherent in that practice as a central motif for your poem. What new meanings might emerge from drawing on language you’re familiar with while bringing it into a novel context? 

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.