From time to time, we read a poem that seems perfect, but then again, not quite. There’s something in it, an image, a line, we resist or don’t understand. We say the poem would have been better if this part of it had been omitted or done differently.
A case in point for me comes in “Queer” (2012), where Frank Bidart confronts memories of a hidden identity and then declares a breakthrough, a revelation.
I like the piercing directness of the title “Queer.” Some in the LGBTQ+ community have embraced this word to affirm who they are, and so it is for Bidart. But he’s aware of the meanings that were linked to it in decades past. I’m in my seventies, and I remember the cruelty and contempt that “queer” conveyed in the 1950s and beyond about same-sex desire and relationship. It’s jarring to recall the derision and disgust with which many people hurled “queer” at boys and men they mocked as girlish.
I felt the hurt of the word myself, the kick to the ribs, for instance, I received from my high-school basketball coach when I twisted my knee and fell to the floor at mid-court. He looked down at me with disdain: “Get the f-up, you fag–, what are you, queer?” I wasn’t, but to my coach, the weepy hurt in my eyes showed I might be or could be. His command was that I should stop whimpering and toughen up.
As you move through this poem, I hope you’ll come to share my admiration for it. Yet there’s a line midway I have trouble with, and perhaps you’ll pause at it too:
Queer
Lie to yourself about this and you will forever lie about everything. Everybody already knows everything so you can lie to them. That’s what they want. But lie to yourself, what you will lose is yourself. Then you turn into them. * For each gay kid whose adolescence was America in the forties or fifties the primary, the crucial scenario forever is coming out— or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. * Involuted velleities of self-erasure. * Quickly after my parents died, I came out. Foundational narrative designed to confer existence. If I had managed to come out to my mother, she would have blamed not me, but herself. The door through which you were shoved out into the light was self-loathing and terror. * Thank you, terror! You learned early that adults’ genteel fantasies about human life were not, for you, life. You think sex is a knife driven into you to teach you that.
“Queer” is forthright, passionate, vividly imagined and executed. Where, then, is my moment of hesitation?
It’s “Involuted velleities of self-erasure,” a line that brings me to a halt because I can never recall what “velleities” means. Once again, I look it up: velleity, velleities, from medieval Latin velleitas, from Latin velle, “to wish”; the lowest degree of desire; imperfect or incomplete volition; a slight wish; a faint hope.
I’ve never heard anyone use this word in conversation, and I can’t remember encountering it in a book. I can’t even pronounce it, and it puzzles my students when I teach Bidart’s poem in class. It’s one of the few words not in Shakespeare, nor is it in Samuel Johnson’s massive 1755 dictionary. The OED dates “velleity” from the early seventeenth century. Its first meaning is: “the fact or quality of merely willing, wishing, or desiring, without any effort or advance towards action or realization.”
I can imagine “Queer” without this word and line. The reader could transition from the hammering repetitions of “Or not” to “Quickly,” the sudden, dramatic announcement of the speaker becoming visible, emerging into identity at last after the deaths of his parents. But that’s not the choice Bidart made, and it has taken me multiple readings to begin to understand why.
I think that Bidart wants the thick-on-the-tongue jammed obscurity of “velleities,” with the adjective “involuted” (that is, complicated or abstruse) conjoined to it, to make us feel the twisting and warping of a person who can’t be who he is, whose desires must be cancelled. It’s like an eraser in a hand that’s fated to keep rubbing at marks on a page. The force we apply doesn’t make it clean; the traces remain.
The coil of conflicted feeling is this: you must come out; you cannot; you already are out; they know it, but you must say otherwise; everyone, you included, is lying all the time.
“Involuted velleities of self-erasure”: Bidart has written this line for himself, not for the reader. It gets at who he was and what he went through: he endured and survived it, and now he has the self-possession to identify and speak his queerness and write this poem, with its wrenching memories. We must accept the line, and him, as they are.
From examples like this, I’ve come to realize that when I read poems, sometimes I focus too much on myself. In a way, that’s inevitable, and there’s nothing inherently bad or wrong about it. We read a poem and ask: How do I respond to this line, image, voice, poem? Does it speak to me? But the risk, the mistake, is neglecting also to ask: What’s this poem doing for the person who wrote it? For a literary work has meaning for the writer who created it—intention, purpose, and significance.
To read is to become intimate with hearts and minds of others, entering worlds of desire and choice that poets describe and that differ from our own. I need to be careful about first impressions and the judgments I attach to them. We want to understand how others see themselves and seek and find the language to say who they are and what matters to them most. Each time I read Bidart’s “Queer,” I’m reminded how essential this is. It was a poem for him before it became one for me.
William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he enjoys teaching courses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other American writers. His recent publications include essays on Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway.
