Ladies, gentlemen, variations thereof, and none of the above, I'm positively giddy with excitement. As many of you school-aged readers will know, at any given point in time there exists a tense stalemate between the forces of good and evil, between darkness and light, between obfuscation and illumination. I am speaking of the uneasy draw between English Literature teachers and barely-literate parents who want to save their children from the dangers of differing perspectives, minority voices, and difficult concepts and feelings. Actually, scratch that. They want to save everyone's children from the dangers of critical thinking. I'm sure if they had their way, we'd all be reading from the Bible and those glurge-tastic "Then Einstein proved to his professor that ANGELS ARE REAL!!11!1!" chain emails. Nearly no book worth reading has escaped scrutiny, including everything ever written by my very favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut. So it brings me great pleasure to announce one fine, albeit short, piece of literature that has utterly escaped the patrol of the censors and the voracious flame of the Inquisitors. Its subtlety, while hiding its meaning, has saved it, because its enemies are unwilling to listen. And also, as mentioned before, barely literate.
A few days ago in my English Lit class, we were asked to analyze a poem from a poet we'd never heard of with a story of who gives a shit. My class is full of very unique, interesting, and bright people, so as usual we had very different opinions on the piece. Some of us found it overly sentimental, like the cheesy motivational posters that the Internet takes great pleasure in parodying. Others liked the author's command of language and the obvious sincerity behind the words. I submit to you, my readers, the poem in question:
Now, upon reading this poem, I could think of only one thing:Wild Geese You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
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| Like Spring Break in Provincetown |
My gaydar lit up like Marcus Bachmann's eyes at an all-you-can-eat hot dog buffet. Not only was I completely, 100%, fuck-me-if-I'm-wrong sure that the author of this poem is a lesbian, but that this is a gay poem. What was to my friends merely an earnest expression of sympathy was to me a haunting expression of empathy, a low and solemn ode to the author's sisters and brothers in queerdom, suffering and even dying alone and in pain.
It's so fucking obvious, goddammit! The part about telling the reader that they don't have to be "good", that they don't have to "repent" for "letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves", isn't that a direct hit to the religious homophobia that is so responsible for the pain and suffering of so many of us? The appeal to nature, to the cosmos, free of human cruelty and bigotry but also of compassion, surely that could have something to do with the fact that a huge number of us find comfort and solace outside? I live near a creek, and when everything gets too much for me, I bike out to a nearby bridge, hide my bike underneath it, and slide down to listen to the running water to be comforted by the stately indifference of the creek bed. And that's just me, apparently nature is kind of a big escape hatch to LGBT youth. Not to mention the emphasis on carnality and the natural state of things. Aren't we all sick to death of the "homosexuality is unnatural" canard? And the final touch, the part that clinches it for me, is when the poet has the subject of the piece "announcing over and over again your place in the family of things". I thought it was obvious that this part is an assurance to the LGBT youth of the world that no matter what their biological family does to them, even if they are scorned, rejected, tortured, or simply ignored, that they will always have a place that they will be welcomed and loved just the way they are.
Many found the poem facile and cloying, because they picked up on the "Be who you are" message and found it trite and cliche. I think it's rather easy of them to say. "Be who you are" is not trite, easy, or fluffy when being who you are earns you the scorn of the people who should love you the most, and the judgement and unequal treatment of the entire country.
Many of my classmates took the first line, disregarded the rest, and announced that the author was a hedonist advocating complete moral overthrow. That hypothesis is completely debunked by this line:
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Doesn't this empathy and compassion between human beings mean infinitely more to the question of ethics than a few archaic rules on how to be "good"? Didn't Jesus comfort the destitute over the objections of the Pharisees? Do you really want to argue with Jesus on morals? I mean, I can and do, but I don't think those classmates are so inclined.
I don't usually get so worked up about literary criticism, but I think you'd be too if you forwarded a brilliant, completely right hypothesis in class, and no one believed you. Worse! I had kept it rather close to my chest during the class discussion for reasons you can imagine, but decided that it was an insight that needed to be shared. As I explained my reasoning, the entire classroom descended into an awkward hush. No one offered points agreeing or disagreeing. And, most unusually for my class, no one brought it up in their analysis, even to disagree. I mean, a few girls disagreed with my decision that the "good" that the poet speaks against is the overly scrupulous, dogmatic farce of ethics, but no one challenged or agreed with my thesis: This is a gay poem written by a gay woman.
The silence was the worst part. In history, LGBT figures get condemned, but none of that is as bad as what more frequently happens: erasure. History deems certain people unworthy of even its disdain, and they are forgotten.
Ingrid, you're being hyperbolic again. Stop it! Isn't it heterosexist to say that you can TELL if someone is gay?, you're thinking. Not if I'm right! The poem that the teacher handed out had a short bio on the back. The poet, Mary Oliver, went to Vassar College as a young woman, and has taught humanities and poetry courses at Case Western Reserve University, Bucknell University, and Sweet Briar College. A Vassar alumnus that is a poetry professor?
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| Like six men fucking five. |
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| Like clipped nails and carabiner key-chains. |
After bugging some sympathetic and curious classmates into a quick Google search, we revealed the following:
On a return visit to Austerlitz, in the late 1950s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her partner for over forty years. In Our world she says "I took one look and fell, hook and tumble."
-Wikipedia
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| Like two women in a loving, committed, four decades long relationship! |
Vindication! Sweet, glorious, utter vindication! All those unperceptive breeders can suck it, because I'm right and they were wrong, wrong, wrong!
Of course, what's the point in being right if you can't tell people about it? So I told my teacher in private, and she said that there are two schools of thought: one that takes the life of the poet into account and one that judges a poem by its words alone. Then she asked me a very important and interesting question: What would I have said if I was wrong, and Mary Oliver had been a straight woman? I thought, then answered thus:
I would have said nothing because if Oliver was straight, it wouldn't be the same poem. I understand that straight people in today's society also deal with themes of rebellion and isolation, despair and the natural vs the unnatural. However, the way it was done could really only be done by a queer author.
I don't think she agreed with me. Maybe I should have mentioned that as a lesbian, I felt a very personal connection to the message of this poem. As much as I hate the simplistic epistemology espoused by some feminists that insist on "a woman's way of knowing", I really do think that the fact that I too am gay in a hostile environment helped me decipher the poem. It resonated with me in a way that it obviously didn't with my classmates.
In a Texas high school classroom, it is acceptable to engage in literary criticism taking into account differing perspectives based on class, race, gender, religious belief, and nationality. I hope one day that analyzing literature in a Texas classroom based on the view from a queer identity will also one day be so acceptable.
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