Liberation’s Love-Language: The Politics and Poetics of Queer Translation after Stonewall

Poetry served gay and lesbian liberationists in the years following Stonewall as a mechanism for translating queer experience into a language shared amongst the members of emergent sociopolitical LGBTQ+ communities. Poetry figured prominently in the historical period\u27s activist little magazines, newsletters, and other periodicals as means of doing this work of self-construction and world-building, a simple fact largely unappreciated by both queer studies (which overlooks non-narrative forms) and contemporary American poetry studies (which dismisses much activist poetry as identitarian agitprop). But poetry, due to its formal differences from narrativity, has been a site for queer revolutionary action and imaginaries because it can foreground intimacy and can foment new relational forms, while deconstructing heteronormative codes of self and collectivity. Commonplace associations of queer translation with cross-language literary translation can provide a starting point for my discussion. Activist-poets discussed include anti-carceral gay activist Paul Mariah\u27s translations in ManRoot of French writer Jean Genet\u27s verse; lesbian feminist poet Judy Grahn\u27s figurative translation of the Sumerian poet Enheduanna, reimagining her epic about the goddess Inanna in a lesbian bar; and Beat poet Harold Norse\u27s celebrated homoerotic translations of the ancient Roman Catullus, a decades-long project pre- and postdating Stonewall. Recovering such liberationists translation projects can help us refigure understandings of how queer poetry and queer translation are not just literary products or artifacts from LGBTQ+ history but instead are present and future modalities and processes of political living and becoming

Revelation, Not Revolution: Queer Poetry’s Political Life, as Read through Robert Duncan’s Late Anarchism

Robert Duncan, a homosexual American poet, had conflicted and often self-contradictory relationships with gay liberation and sexual identity politics. Nonetheless, his ideas about eroticism’s centrality to poetic composition could help us reimagine poetry’s potential and its limits for addressing crises now affecting and dehumanizing queer persons.Robert Duncan, poète américain homosexuel, avait des relations conflictuelles et souvent contradictoires avec la libération gay et les questions politiques liées à l’identité sexuelle. Néanmoins, ses idées sur la centralité de l’érotisme dans l’art poétique pourraient nous aider à repenser le potentiel et les limites de la poésie pour faire face aux crises qui affectent et déshumanisent les personnes queer aujourd’hui

Robert Duncan’s Legacies: a Centennial Celebration

2019 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Californian poet Robert Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988), whose work and influence have drawn ever-growing scholarly attention. All of the papers gathered together in this issue began as presentations at “Passages”: The Robert Duncan Centennial Conference in Paris held in June 2019 at Sorbonne Université. Organized by Hélène Aji, Stephen Collis, Xavier Kalck, James Maynard, and Clément Oudart, and co-sponsored by Simon Fraser University, the University at Buffalo Libraries Poetry Collection, Université Paris Nanterre and Sorbonne Université, the three-day conference included three keynote addresses, three plenary panels, ten workshops, a roundtable discussion, and two poetry readings, featuring over 50 presenters and a high number of attendees from around the world. We are pleased to present here eighteen of those presentations, comprising thirteen formal essays along with five more personal testimonies that serve as the coda to each section, and to take this opportunity to reflect briefly on the history of Duncan studies before considering more specifically his modernist, formal, poetic, social, and queer legacies at the century