Queer Poetics

This chapter begins with the assertion that poets have expressed queer desire in unique ways throughout history and across cultures. Besides examining the work of poets who express queer desire, it traces the history and highlights key characteristics of queer poetics in the United States while underscoring the contributions of queer poets of color. The possible manifestation of queer desire in homosocial spaces can be considered an integral element of queer poetics. Queer poets were adept at planting and transmitting queerly coded messages in their works. Whitman, Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gertrude Stein are good examples. Queer poetics largely emerges in the United States with writers like these via the visibility or possibility of queer desire present in their works and/or in public discourses on their identities. Queer poetics has a lengthy and complex history in the United States, and poets have expressed queer desire in ways that reflect their unique experiences and identities.