Another Renga

Eric Sneathen is currently a PhD candidate in Literature at UC Santa Cruz. For 2020-2021, he was selected for a CART fellowship, a program for graduate students interested in gaining hands-on knowledge about archival processing and exhibitions. Due to the pandemic, CART was changed into a remote research project. In the following essay, he writes about the experience of working with LGBTQ archival materials, drawing from his interest in the history of queer poetry of the Bay Area and UCSC's Special Collections. As a starting point, he worked with the oral history collection  Out in the Redwoods , a series of interviews about LGBTQ experience and activism at UC Santa Cruz.

I remember arriving in Boston and calling myself a lesbian-identified faggot. I thought that was a badge of honor and I remember saying that to Amy Hoffman, another Gay Community News person, then a managing editor, and she said, "I find that kind of offensive." I thought, well, that's interesting. Maybe I should have my own identity. But I didn't know how to make one. —Scott Brookie, Out In the Redwoods

When I was a teenager I identified (half-jokingly?) as a lesbian. Like so many others, I loved the word too: lesbian. And/Or I wished I could be a lesbian. Or I listened to a lot of women musicians, which seemed unusual, there must be something especially weird and wrong with me: I guess I’m a lesbian. All of the women musicians I listened to wrote the saddest songs, which I loved more than anything. I felt that sad too. I remember my mom and I going to Lilith Fair and being wowed by Erykah Badu and the spectacle of Sarah McLachlan at her shiny black piano. While singing “Thank You,” Natalie Merchant swung around a ribbon wand so wildly that she injured her shoulder. The concert was held at what was then called the Del Mar Fairgrounds, dusty and wide-open. I remember no line for the men’s restroom, and plenty of people hopping out of the women’s line to join me where I was at during the precious interval between acts. It was exciting to be in the restroom with so many people who didn’t look like me. Nor did these people look like the men who usually were in the restrooms with me either. I felt better with them there.

At about the same time, in San Francisco, Cleis Press published a book whose premise still feels radical: Switch Hitters. Edited by Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel, this anthology collects erotica written by gay men and lesbians, but not of the usual kind. As the cover advertises, it’s a book in which “lesbians write gay male erotica… and gay men write lesbian erotica.” Queen and Schimel exude in their introduction, “This is the stuff of genderfuck and solidarity, curiosity and cultural appropriation, and it makes a peculiar kind of sense that queer boys and girls would be trying on each other’s sexual realities for size” (11).

Switch Hitters includes Kevin Killian’s short story, “Renga,” an otherwise uncollected bit of fiction in which a poetess of a certain age has sex with her maid. Everything happens over the course of a day or so at an artist retreat, Fenimore, which is something like the Millay Colony or Yaddo. The story begins, “I could hardly stand up I was so horny and drunk, and I couldn’t get the satisfaction I craved no matter how long or hard I rubbed myself raw” (37). What I adore about this opening is that it could initiate, really, any of Kevin Killian’s short stories. That similarity is a way of bringing attention to the assignment of writing across sexual difference through a refusal to be so different after all. That said, things do get to the point soon enough in the follow-up sentence: “Lust was stinging my clit like a hive of angry wasps disturbed” (37). The antiquated syntax—placing the adjective “disturbed” after the noun “wasps”—keeps the self-conscious humor alive, a self-consciousness that undermines the possibility that “Renga” might be a convincing portrait of lesbian sex and subjectivity. 

For readers familiar with Killian’s style, it’s hard not to see this story of lesbian erotica as an intentionally superficial switcheroo. His familiar themes of death and celebrity frame the poet Jane Heller’s sex with her maid, Lee Ann, who turns out to be (surprise!) one of her many ardent fans. Before the sex there’s the classic memento mori motif: a newspaper headline informs Jane that the supermodel Tina Sutherland has died by suicide. As she confides to Lee Ann later, Jane has built her entire literary career around Tina Sutherland, a confession that prompts Lee Ann to ask Jane whether she and Tina Sutherland had ever met. Jane responds, “No… But you don’t have to know someone to want to create a new universe for her” (43).

Men run strictly parallel to this story of a high-minded afternoon delight. Jane is married, and her husband is away, back home in Berkeley, CA. Still, he won’t stop calling and intruding upon her pleasures! More than once he gives Jane a ring, possibly to console his wife over the loss of her beloved Tina Sutherland. When a pile of the late supermodel’s photographs show up at Jane’s room, she imagines her husband sent them to her. Lee Ann plays handmaiden, delivering the package to Jane, who decides, ultimately, to toss them into the fire. That past, that idealization, all that’s over with. Sex and death are yoked together like the chain of lovers suggested by the two female leads, as their sex with each other reaches back to the untouchable muse that was Tina Sutherland, and then forward to the very real gossip girls that Lee Ann is looking forward to informing all about her entanglements with a certain literary icon.

As short as it is, “Renga” is still packed with Killian’s signature sexual hijinx, inserting something strange or “off” in the midst of so many of the usual moans, groans, and climaxes. Because it feels perfectly Kevin Killian, one of my favorite exchanges occurs the first time the venerated Jane Heller and the working-girl Lee Ann have sex. Lee Ann hopes sex will encourage a greater permission and intimacy between the two:

“Can I call you Jane?” she asked, flat on her back, her ass two circles of heat in my hands, her vagina beginning to boil over in my mouth.

I nodded furiously, lapping away. “Me Jane, you Tarzan,” I grunted. Of course your J’s and your T’s sound muffled when you’re penetrating a luscious vagina with your tongue. But she got the message. (40-41)

Permission and intimacy are granted—for Lee Ann and for us, as readers. Despite the absurdity of the dialogue, a strong familiarity is communicated through the second person here: of course this happens when you do this. Queer experience is something a reader is generally familiar with, whether it looks and sounds precisely like what is happening here in “Renga.” 

For example, in addition to this moment of direct address, some readers might be provoked by the mise-en-scène of the story, which arrives like a paraphrase from the hetero-oriented pulp novels of an earlier era. Editors Queen and Schimel pick up on this anachronism: “In Kevin Killian’s ‘Renga,’ we have lesbian passion outside of the context of a ‘woman’s community’; instead, the protagonist hearkens back to the brittle, closeted dykes who populated much pre-Stonewall literature, even though the story seems to be set in an era close to ours” (36). To be addressed by this story is to be caught up in this strange whirl of anachronism and out-of-timeliness, which is both sexual and other-than-sexual. In all the trappings of pulp and parody, “Renga” manages a portrait of sexuality that strains any common understanding of who and what is usually involved. Not precisely writing across sexual difference, this story writes into a kind of common queerness: the bizarre and unexpected phantasmagoria of pleasure and grief. 

The story takes its title from a collaborative form of poetry, the renga, lines of which accrete on Jane’s laptop (her era-appropriate Macintosh PowerBook) throughout the story. Ever the elder, Jane describes the form to Lee Ann: “A renga… is an old Japanese verse form, in which each line makes a poem with the stanza or line immediately before it, though not with the one before that” (42). But she keeps the deeper work of the renga to herself: “Even as I spoke I thought of the sexuality of the verse form, how intimately words roll and buckle up against each other, how the process parallels our own sexual experience, in which we are always moving, like a poem, between one woman and another, a gulf with poetry” (42). Jane then invites Lee Ann to collaborate on a renga with her, but she declines: “I couldn’t… I’m no poet” (42).

Jane’s selection of the renga builds on the story’s self-consciousness concerning the premise of Switch Hitters, but rather than writing across the difference of sexuality, Jane is interested in writing across the difference of race. Here’s how Jane describes her poem: “I was trying to write a renga—for several years I had lived in Japan, studying West Asian verse forms, and trying to adapt a Caucasian female subjectivity to these thorny forests of prosody” (38). Nothing more is said about the matter, but Jane’s intentions beg questions about whether writing across difference is actually naive, possible, ethical, or even a violation. Though, also, there are the questions of how race and class are bound to questions of gender and sexuality—such (unanswered) questions in the midst of all this weird (hot?) sex, mind you. 

Thinking of the dead supermodel Tina Sutherland, Jane is certain she’s got an opening line for her renga—She was the girl whose pussy ruled my world—a line that the narrator believes to be true but uninspired. Jane reflects, “Unfortunately, in poetry, ‘true’ brings little” (38). Despite its deficiencies, the line inspires a working draft of the poem, which is rapidly revised throughout the story. The story ends with this quatrain:

She who brought me the fuck to death has died.

    Hey phoenix, burn this ancient library book,

    to wear my cunt on her face like a mask of love!

   She was the girl whose pussy ruled my world. (45)

Originally, of course, “the girl” referred to Tina Sutherland, around whom Jane had built her universe of letters. But in this final version of the poem, “the girl” Jane refers to seems to be Lee Ann. It is not the language that has changed, but the context.

Such re-contextualization and assemblage is a hallmark of Killian’s poetry generally. His first collection of poems, Argento Series, used the giallo of Dario Argento as a backdrop against which he cast a dazzling array of found texts related to friends—famous and not—who had died during the AIDS epidemic. (The acknowledgement page that introduces the book lists dozens of references, from poets to pop stars.) “Renga” simulates Killian’s own practice as a poet, as Jane collects phrases from the texts all around her—from newspapers, conversations, her thoughts and fantasies. Even though Lee Ann doesn’t see herself as a writer, through Jane she becomes one. 

As people surged into the building, he was on the upper balcony and he blew me a kiss. That was the moment I came out, because I realized that gay men had this kind of freedom to do these outrageous things like blow each other kisses from a balcony in front of hundreds of people, to a friend who many dozen of yards away and I thought, that’s me. I’m the kind of person who wants to blow kisses at other guys. —Scott Brookie, Out in the Redwoods

I’ve never met Scott Brookie, but I have met the man who interviewed him for the “Out in the Redwoods” project: Patrick Letellier. Or, at least, Patrick and I swapped a few Facebook messages a few years back. Our time at UCSC never overlapped, though it’s interesting to imagine this web of connections between Patrick Letellier and myself, in which we are connected, loosely, through our shared social relationships: Julie probably knows him, I’d guess, or maybe Michael. The kind of queer life that Scott and Patrick talk about—the chain of events linking the 1970s to their interview in the early 2000s—feels familiar but distant, like a pop song I’ve mostly only heard on the radio or in a shopping mall or a shitty bar somewhere. From what I’ve gathered, Santa Cruz really used to be something else. And now it’s just this. Could I be any more vague? Well, for me, such vagueness has been the defining character of queer life in Santa Cruz. It’s terrifically Californian in that way.

During my first visit to UCSC’s Special Collections, before I became a CART fellow, I came to see a rare gem of a book, the  Kaliflower anthology . Published in 1980 and now sold for about $1000 by used book dealers online, the Kaliflower anthology highlights some of the best and strangest pieces written and distributed by the Kaliflower commune, which was founded in San Francisco in 1967. Members of the Cockettes and Angels of Light lived there, including Hibiscus, and it’s also associated with disco queen Sylvester, though he never was a resident. The Kaliflower anthology is one of those magical items—the crystallization of a lost world of gay acid freaks and exhibitionist weirdos, folks who really had some fucks to give about the injustice and oppression all around them. Reading its pages today remains a challenge, though, for the language, the imagery, and the contributors’ conclusions are a tough dose of a bygone utopianism. It’s not just AIDS, neoliberalism, the collapse of USAmerican hegemony. It's a restricted world that I feel attuned to, even though it's not mine. To claim a kinship to that other San Francisco requires a leap of imagination—one that might actually be all those things provoked by Switch Hitters.

In UCSC professor Deborah Gould’s Moving Politics, an emotional history of ACT UP that partially draws from her experience, there’s a passage early on that I think of quite often, as someone who has now spent a fair amount of time in archives. During a visit in 1994 to the New York Public Library’s exhibit dedicated to the Stonewall Riots, she was moved, unexpectedly, by the movement of movements into history: “Immensely enjoying myself, I was winding my way through the exhibit when I turned the corner and came face to face with images, documents, and ephemera from ACT UP, included as a part of this history. I stopped, stunned, overtaken by ambivalence… We were moving from the streets into history, a shift made quite apparent in this museum-like exhibit, where ACT UP joined other movements safely encased behind glass. Given the continuing AIDS epidemic, history was not exactly what or where we wanted to be, and my immobility was due in part to a belated realization that the movement was indeed coming to an end” (42-43).

A library is all about access. Access is all about restriction: the right people accessing the right materials. Can such a statement be merely descriptive? Probably not. I think about my several journeys into archives all over the country—the access I've gained by elaborate application processes, institutional status and/or funding, the "free time" of a graduate student, personal charm, and outright determination. Access is all about shape-shifting. To the best of my ability I put my queer skills to use, poring over the books and pamphlets that were once mailed clandestinely across the world. Now they're tended to carefully. No dust. They have a certain value now. Again, that ambivalence, when a text is moved from the general stacks to special collections, where it is preserved like a rare specimen in a test tube. They are rare, aren't they? I guess that's the point: the conditions of these texts' production—the conditions that led publishers to produce these things as ephemera, in cheap additions, in such limited quantitites in the first place—those conditions aren't unmade retroactively, even as social attitudes change. Those forces (e.g. homophobia) aren't dispelled, they are right there with me under those bright lights. They are producing such value at least as much as my research.

When I came to flip through the pages of the Kaliflower anthology, I grew angry about how restrained I was in this space—the photos I could take (and under what conditions), the comforts I was allowed. When I read rare books of poetry, personal letters, and precious miscellany under the ceaseless fluorescent bulbs of an archive, I respond emotionally. I feel like friends are on the other side of a thick glass pane, trapped. I’m grateful for the work of librarians and archivists, who endeavor to preserve the materials that have been made so scarce by happenstance and those other forces less benign. Still.

A UNIVERSITY or a university-dominated town is no place to grow a native culture in, tempting as are the film clubs, bookstores, museums, lectures and libraries. Universities are almost always dominated by capitalist values and tradition-bound virtues, despite a veneer of revolutionary ferment. Students are given a modicum of freedom of expression, which is completely overpowered by their having accepting the schools' concept of what their lives are all about. Lately there has been a spate of "alternatives" conferences held at one campus or another. Should we ignore them, picket them, or attend them? Why let's attend them... in a criminal capacity... unannounced... unkempt... staggering with sexual attractiveness... luring the young... out from their safety vaults... back into boldness of action... —Kaliflower (n.d.)

I checked out this stained copy of Phil Andros’s The Boys in Blue in 2018, and now I don’t know how I’m going to return it. I took pictures of the book’s cover, a spread of pages, and its due slip, and I posted them to Facebook in state of awe. I’ve never read this book; I just think these pages are incredible:

I wrote this as a caption to my queer triptych: "Sometimes the dissertation almost writes itself. As some of you know, I'm a Ph.D. student down at UC Santa Cruz, where I'm at work on a history of LGBTQ literature of San Francisco (1960-). Lately, I've been rooting through the story of Don Allen, editor of the New American Poetry anthology, trying to figure out his views on Gay Liberation and literature's relationship to ‘the movement’ as he called it. It's fascinating that so little work has been done on Allen, given his influence on post-45 US poetry. So here I am, digging…

Well, this is UCSC's copy of Phil Andros's (Samuel Steward's) Boys In Blue, complete with ‘the movement’ of some library patron. Boys In Blue was the first of SS's books Allen would re-print under his Perineum Press imprint. (Had Allen's tastes—or was it his financial shrewdness?—been different, Samuel Delany's Hogg might have been published by Perineum.) 

I'm such a sucker for sentimentality—I find it heartwarming, looking over the circulation record for the book, to think that deep in the worst years of the epidemic (1986-1995) someone made use of Boys In Blue, returned it, left it for me. I finished Juliana Spahr's Du Bois's Telegram today, which was a lot of things, including insightful, brilliant, breathless, urgent, strange. I know that literature doesn't make much happen, but I look at these pages, I want to show them to you too, to say something like, but what about this?” 

These days, in the midst of a pandemic, my time as a graduate student is coming to an end. I guess that feels fine. The books I need for my research—those I can afford and access—I buy used and have mailed to my apartment in Oakland.

I hope there’s still time to write my chapter on under-known poet Paul Mariah, whose early work was published by Alta’s Shameless Hussy Press, the first feminist press in North America.  In her interview with Irene Reti for the Regional History Project , Alta says, “...I’m the only feminist publisher in the 1970s who published men. All the others only published women. I decided to do it according to statistics the way they were when I started the press. When I started the press 94 percent of the books were by men. So with Shameless Hussy 94 percent of the books are by women.” This is as close as the conversation gets to Paul and his work, so I’m left with some questions about why Alta found him and his poetry worthy of publication, of being published by her feminist press when the divisions between feminists and gay men were often held so firmly. Even still, through the intimacy that an oral history creates, I can overhear Irene and Alta (and Alta’s daughter Lorelei) speak about those other women whose work has meant so much to me: Pat Parker, Judy Grahn, Ntozake Shange, among them. 

For now, in those many boxes stored off campus are the  archives of Shameless Hussy Press , which might still unlock a few secrets about Alta and Paul that I can put to use. We’ll see. And what are these "secrets," in any case? The fact of the archive already signifies plenty about the brutality of the past. Sometimes the archive feels more like a value-generating monument to our own ignorance than a catalyst for real answers or justice. The archive is a swirl of material valuable, priceless, and worthless at once.

Among the many texts I looked at while researching the archives at UCSC: the first anthology of Asian/Pacific lesbian writing,  Between the   Lines , published in 1987 and edited by Cristy Chung, Alison Kim, and A.K. Lemeshewsky.

In the brief preface that begins the anthology, the editors concede, "We are aware that none of the writers included are of Pacific Island heritage, yet we choose to call this a Pacific/ Asian lesbian anthology. We do so, claiming the name as a political identity, as sisters in solidarity."

Even in the absence of, at a distance from, crossing the assumed boundaries between us— writing can signal solidarity and relation, a revolutionary otherwise in a world that constantly asks us to forget, misremember, deny, and move on already, just get on with it. The archive is filled with "secrets," I suppose, but it is also full of examples of this kind of otherwise, this queerness of time and space. The archive is the emotional laboratory in which the status quo of the present is electrified, and something that has seemed inert finally rises off the table, readied to step into its own life.