Chris Nealon - Taking inspiration from a long poetic tradition of self-referential frame devices, Nealon wrote the poems so that each refers to the others, and each is built out of poems within poems—like late-capitalist medieval dream visions in which the poet describes writing a poem, or wishes he were writing, or finds himself startled awake

 

Christopher Nealon, Heteronomy, Edge Books, 2014.

Chris Nealon's HETERONOMY is built out of five long poems, including "The Dial." Together they form an overlapping set of mediations on love and friendship and political life. Taking inspiration from a long poetic tradition of self-referential frame devices, Nealon wrote the poems so that each refers to the others, and each is built out of poems within poems—like late-capitalist medieval dream visions in which the poet describes writing a poem, or wishes he were writing, or finds himself startled awake. What's the poem, and what's the frame? It's hard to say—and perhaps because of that, these poems find in the figure of the poet an image of embarrassing self-inflation and comic limitation. They are dedicated to everyone who's felt that way.

The textbook definition of heteronomy is "subjection to an outside force." Johns Hopkins English professor and poet Chris Nealon puts that idea into emotional terms when talking about why he chose it for the title of his new poetry collection. "I think it's a way of talking about feeling powerless sometimes," he says. "The Dial," the first Heteronomy poem he wrote, was shaped during the first wave of the 2011 Occupy movement and during the University of California at Berkeley faculty's response to austerity measures. Nealon used to teach there, and many of his friends and former colleagues were involved in that fight.
"'The Dial' is structured as a dream poem because it felt like dreams were the only way in which I could be with the people who were doing the stuff I most admired," he says. "The rest of the poems, written in the years after that, were about coming to terms with what happens when an exciting political moment subsides and you return to the rhythm of feeling like you're not powerful, you're not connected to other people, [and] you can't change anything."
Political poetry might bring to mind the activist tone of Denise Levertov or the cadenced rhetoric of Gil Scott-Heron. Nealon's version is a more playful and self-aware reverie, finding political unease in the passing thought, as in this excerpt: "The species-shame, the American shame we feel on the left—we teach ourselves/that shame is what will mark us off from the right—it's immobilizing—/The thing that should distinguish us from the right is the refusal of all exploitation."
"The Dial" and the other poems leapfrog through time—an overheard conversation in a café bleeds into musing about hip-hop artist Nicki Minaj and Harry Potter and wondering who would listen to Theodor Adorno audiobooks while on the commuter train—as the poet-narrator in each instance searches for big-idea meaning in the everyday. Heteronomy is a collection of meditations that recognize that pop culture can spark existential anxieties as seriously as contemporary philosophers, and that appreciating Adrienne Rich's poem "The Phenomenology of Anger" doesn't rule out being moved by A Taste of Honey's disco gem "Boogie Oogie Oogie."
Nealon arrived at his juggling of time and meaning in Heteronomy by going really old school: the Middle Ages. "I was thinking a lot about time in terms of how poets of my generation have been using it in interesting ways, being playful with it, imagining it as reversible, sometimes circular or something you can visit in nonlinear ways," he says. "And I was also thinking about how, frankly, medieval poets wrote about poetic meaning, in particular meaning around moments where poets gesture at their own poem, or gesture at the fact that they've been writing a poem. That was one of the most liberating discoveries for me, that I could be the poet who was describing being a poet having just written a poem. That opened up my sense of form in the poems."
Nealon's use of such meta-commentaries, often derided as postmodern relativism, is informed by 13th-century poets responding to narrative prose acquiring intellectual prestige over poetry. Poets at the time realized that by playing with framing devices they could convey other
types of knowledge rather than mere information. Poems could touch on the mystical, the melancholic, or
the erotic in ways that prose couldn't. "You would think such self-gesturing might make everything inward-looking and navel-gazing," Nealon says. "But when done well it has the opposite effect, making the poem a kind of porous space into which the world can speak."
His balance of pop culture's emotive potency and mischievous pathways into other realms recalled, for this reader, American novelist Thomas Pynchon. This was before discovering that Nealon taught a Pynchon class in spring 2014 or that "The Dial" includes a quote from Pynchon's Against the Day as an epigram. Nealon is a fan as well. "I think Pynchon's been boxed into a narrative of the clever '60s radical postmodernist who wants to disrupt all the conventions of narrative fiction and he's a showoff—which, he certainly is—but his sense of humor is everywhere in his novels and this is the heart of Pynchon for me. His sense of humor and his humaneness crisscross with his political outrage and sense of compassion in ways that I just don't see many other places."
The same could be said for Heteronomy. The poems move with a pop song's accessibility while freighting the emotional weight of a short story. The comic and the serious coexist in the same observation: "You'll have seen the faces of the women thinking, really? I still have to remind/you not to grope me in the commune?"
"Just as there's good and bad versions of love poetry, there's good and bad versions of political poetry," Nealon says. "And like a lot of poets before me and poets of my generation, I want to figure out how to do it in a moving and powerful way." - Bret McCabe

The contours of the American discourse of the critique of “totalization” would make for an entire book; arguably, Martin Jay’s splendid Marxism and Totality would be its prequel. In any case the best current example of this argument is probably to be found in the work of the philosopher Jacques Rancière, who, for instance, described his work this way in a 2007 interview:

What interests me more than politics or art is the way the boundaries defining certain practices as artistic or political are drawn and redrawn. This frees artistic and political creativity from the yoke of the great historical schemata that announce the great revolutions to come or that mourn the great revolutions past only to impose their proscriptions and their declarations of powerlessness on the present. (Rancière, ArtForum, March 2007)

Again, notice that it is Marxist theory, not capitalism, that oppresses.

—  Christopher Nealon, The Matter of Capital, 169

Oh and Juliana if you read this—

I tried to be a peasant looking at a picture of an angel but I couldn’t believe in love until I got to the creation of the animals
—how they launch into life from out of the void,
blind—all of history ahead of them—and that’s when I thought of you—like do those robins ever settle in at night and just think Best. Nest. Ever
That’s the subject of this poem

                       excerpt from “THE DIAL” 

HETERONOMY

You may recall from an earlier poem that I was kicked out of heaven for using the N-

word

Well –

Not exactly – it was more of a bardo … and I was really just quoting –

But it made me wonder – what’s the difference between shame and karma?

This is not figured out by thinking so much as by returning from the dead
Which means I guess if poetry were television

this would be a kind of Season 6 of Buffy –

I mean I’m back

My friends have brought me back

*

As from a dream I woke into my life and wondered at the architecture
It was nothing special: Farragut North

But coming up from under it was sweet to smell the earth
It was sweet to hear the young pronounce on what the critics to date have

overlooked

I had the last three words of my novel composed but I couldn’t make the story

reach them

Part of me was thinking, wait, that time-warp-island show is still on the air?
Part of me thought, shut up journalism and act like the advertising you are

Walls within walls / a clear enclosure / Roman fountains and a curvature that

always keeps you safe / If you want to be safe

And from my window you could see the weapons corridor
I followed it down hollows, I followed it down dales

Virginia, Alabama, California –

But once again my story became a poem: a poem in which I wake to find I’ve missed

the social history that added a “z” to “for real”

False fronts on the empty condos / balconies that aren’t / unpaid rent and plant life

tacked on as an afterthought

It was sweet to smell the earth

The poem was the horizon

*

Meanwhile against the grain of the general austerity the capital rebuilds itself

Holes dug deep by work crews drawn from far beyond DC – DC feeling layered like

an Alexandria

And what does a poet know about that? Next to nothing –

Though I do wonder, what if all the little cafes had names that were just three-letter

acronyms, and the property developers were called Aquarius and Paradise?

Meanwhile against the grain of the general austerity, I’ve got time away from work

*

Watching a newborn, especially at night, is like watching someone return from the

forest – someone you can tell has only just now folded up a tent –

Or in reverse – a tent fold up itself – become just sticks – at last geometry – slim

enough to get beneath the rind of the world and slip back out …

Standing over him at night I wish I understood topology

How does the soul come back around? Is it shuffled like a deck of cards? Is it

instantaneous? Does it happen only at antipodes?

At midnight on the first of March – at 38 degrees and 50 minutes – I lay in dreams

I wobbled mid-meridian

I did though have a vivid sense of coming back into the size of things

Night had knit the streets together

Child-world / diorama / miniature of valley under stars

Then the melancholy feeling that the miniature had maybe been the actual size – that

what I took for actuality was just projection …

4am – embarrassed by the unegoic chirring of the birds – ego drowning out what’s

evident from even just the lightest breeze –

Connectedness –

Environmentalists of a certain stripe like to point out scornfully how many diapers the

average American baby goes through in its first few years –

Sure –

But there’s also simply what it means to be a species, which is to soak up resources and

create waste –

I mean look at that goose shit –

The species-shame, the American shame we feel on the left – we teach ourselves that

shame is what will mark us off us from the right – it’s immobilizing –

The thing that should distinguish us from the right is the refusal of all exploitation –

I just don’t think self-hatred is what shame is for

I do think shame is a species of pride – crushed, inverted pride – and speaking as

someone who has been continuously ashamed since the age of 13, I think I can

say regret is better

Those dancers make me feel I’ve wasted my life

On the other hand so be it

At least in middle age I have intermittent access to this mostly un-trippy sense of

cosmos, which I’ve come to see as a poetic resource –

That doesn’t suck –

There’s a kind of Colorado in me

Alpine valley under stars –

There’s a lemon-yellow sunlight over the harbor in Sydney –

And in poetry I sense that everyone can go there

We don’t suck, do you hear me?

If we failed it was by cruelty to each other, not because of human nature

*

There’s a moment near the end of “Down at The Cross” where Baldwin writes,

“When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those

wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered,

What will happen to all that beauty?”

This never fails to make me think of Hurston, startled and amused by white

standoffishness –

“How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

She calls the vantage from which this thought is possible “Cosmic Zora” –

And you wonder why I was curious about the N-word

*

Here in Union Station – pigeons sailing through the ductwork overhead

At intervals along the wall a gleaming video of plans for renovation

It alternates with episodes of a single long low-budget telenovela by TSA –

It is glorious

But whoever builds it – who will build the ductwork in the 22nd century?

I remember Chris Sturr telling me about a date he had once with a little Cambridge

preppy, eating underneath the atrium of some 80’s Atheneum, and saying with

staged innocence, gee, I wonder what all this will be used for, after the revolution …

“Gleaming” is an Oppen word, he uses it for opulence, for decadence

It doesn’t apply right now – DC’s no New York – but it may gleam yet

Speculation architecture for the contractor class

Rooftop pools and tiki torches

And underneath all that? And inside it?

*

I wrote a little book of poetry

while Rome burned. Rome burned

in 2001. In Latin

it was called, It’s All Good –

Friends far away

Poetry a joke

Alone on my memory foam

When the sun rose –

Rome is in Seattle

The ferry ride is nine songs long

This one wants to be late grunge but it’s just grunge-themed

This one’s bridge is in a minor key, toying with dolor

I want to say “roil” and have it mean “head-rush”

I need to write “sound” and have it mean “history”

Making time pass – accumulating stuff to make a shape with – it’s not even experience, it’s too thin –

Shapely stupor

Stupid vapor

The roil of the sound

*

I almost called that one “Prose Merlin,” since I kept rewinding the playlist

Also because loneliness is prose, if in prose you feel the world pass by around you

But maybe that’s more Rip van Winkle –

Heroes, sidekicks, anti-heroes –

Each more lonely than the other

*

It’s a delicate thing, to touch down lightly on heroic narratives for purposes not epic

I’d hate to end up Alexandrian – making snarky little lyric figures out of earlier escapades, thinking there’s          no future –

“And if one’s life is meaningless and existence is pointless, if the emperor

should fall from his parade horse or choke on a fishbone and the bad

times rush back, sweep through the boulevards, burn down the library?

Idle, foolish, neurotic thoughts. There is no danger here …”

That’s WR Johnson on Callimachus – completely charming – but boy that passage

makes me blush –

Twice over actually – first because what poet living in the great metropoli today

doesn’t recognize her city in it?

Second because elite obliviousness is always coded gay

*

To feel as if by actual touch the curve of the pulsing forearm gripping the handle in

front of your seat –

To look up saying sorry as you bump the elbow of that forearm on your way out of the

train –

The kernel of that feeling – the part that comes from far away –

I think whenever you felt it, in austere modernity above a skyline, or in the back of some

pub on the pilgrim’s way –

I think wherever you are when you feel this, you’re in a kind of meadow –

And – I don’t know how to explain – I think no matter how we all go down together, by

whichever combination of terminal failures –

Whether the landscape after is a ravaged wasteland or a wide plain, hushed –

I think however we die out, we’ll have died in that meadow

*

On the final night of the insomnia in which I wrote this poem I had a visit from a demon

named Lysander

It was a homoerotic demon – he was shirtless, and muscular, and wearing headphones,

which he placed on me

The purpose of this I think was to make me feel my heteronomy
The headphones played the sound of suffering

It made no harmony – it wasn’t like white noise, or any threnody –
It was the sound of time itself in agony

And throughout the long expanding minutes when that sound was all I heard, I spun

around the axis of Lysander’s eyes – his statue-eyes and creaturely eyes    by
turn –

Then something entered them – he was beseeching me –

I saw what demons are –

And just when I could bear no more he slipped the headphones off me –

Just as I was crying out,

“No! Please – will this never end?”

All the monads silent –

“Of course,” he said,
and touched my ear.

Christopher S. Nealon, The Matter of Capital, Harvard University Press, 2011.

read it at Google Books


Nealon makes a strongly compelling case in this book that 'capital' and its crises have continued to pervade and magnetize much of the most cannily powerful poetry of the last century. He gives a nuanced yet succinct account of this extensive and complex history. The thoroughness of his scholarship and the trenchancy of his method enable him to perform this daunting task with authority and assurance. His study will interest scholars as well as non-academic readers. Indeed, with this book, Nealon is likely to join the select company of a handful of critics of poetry, such as Charles Altieri and Maria Damon, whom poets actually read. (Michael Moon, Emory University)

The Matter of Capital brilliantly reimagines how we understand 20th-century Anglophone poetry. Clear-eyed about the signal poetry of the present and its relation to the dominant thoughts of our era, it locates both within an agile and fearless history of ideas that reaches into deep tradition and into the future that looms before us. Most remarkably, it does so by discovering what has been hiding in plain sight: poetry's attunement to the regime of capital, in an age which resists and resents such thought. In this sense the book offers not only a breathtaking work of poetics, but the itinerary of an idea exactly when this is most needed and most challenging to confront. In the finest sense, this book is invaluable . (Joshua Clover, University of California, Davis)

Boldly taking on, in best Benjaminian fashion, the relation between poetry and capitalism, Chris Nealon offers compelling readings of poets' responses to socio-economic change, both as poetic theme and as determinant of aspects of poetic form. Whether discussing the range of poets or taking on the critics who he believes have obscured poetry's relation to capitalism, he is stimulating, shrewd, and provocative. (Jonathan Culler, Cornell University)

Chris Nealon knows his poets inside out. Taking delight in the micro details and endless syntactical possibilities of material life, he makes a stunning case that capitalism and consumer culture are indeed the stuff of which poetry is made. (Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University)

The Matter of Capital is a gift for anyone who wonders about the relationship between art and political economy. It is a superhero of a book, able to leap centuries at a single bound; spinning a web that constellates Pound, Auden, Ashbery, Spicer, Hejinian and some very recent poets; zipping back and forth across the membranes that divide and link poetry and capitalism. As a theorist, historian, and critic, Nealon is no stranger to poetic tone, but this book's chief resource for imagining life differently is its pedagogical rhythm. Establishing a tempo that is both jaunty and deliberate, Nealon slows down the manic pace of life under late-late capitalism, and gives it a new pulse. The beat that emerges is relaxed, capering, and exhilarating. (Sharon Marcus, Columbia University)


[Nealon’s final chapter in The Matter of Capital (2011) revisits material from a seminal 2004 essay, “Camp Messianism, or, the Hope of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism” (American Literature 76.3 [Summer 2004], 175-193). In that 2004 essay, he considered contemporary poetry in relation to “really, really late capitalism” in which capitalism appeared “in a fully globalized and triumphant form, the destructive speed and flexibility of whose financial instruments alone make Nixon’s lofting the dollar off the gold standard in 1971 look thoughtful and conservative” (177).  In 2004, Nealon found volatility in markets that had “an order of magnitude beyond even the ricochets of the early twentieth century”: “If Adorno and Horkeheimer made much of how the Enlightenment’s dream of the equality of all people had become the nightmare of the interchangeability of all people,” he wrote in 2004, “that interchangeability could now said to have become entirely liquid, even quicksilver.”  He also wondered whether “the Enlightenment’s dream of the equality of all people had become the nightmare of the interchangeability of all people.”  In 2004, Nealon could still suggest that “late-late capitalism gives texture to our leaves” in a fashion that was “murmuringly,” noting the solicitation “day and night by a kind of manic mass culture that seeks, even more aggressively, to stuff our attention to the gills.” By 2011, when the essay was revisited and revised, the economic crisis of 2008 had instituted itself at every level, and “disaster capitalism” had become a widely-circulated term. But if we now understand global capitalism’s recent phase as constituting “a series of political, environmental, and financial disasters, the best recent poetry allows us to see something like that history’s obverse – the story of how selves are solicited to participate in this phase of the life of capital, and of how they struggle to respond to the tones of that solicitation, which range of course from  murmur to threat” (The Matter of Capital, 146). Rankine’s Don’t Le Me Be Lonely, in Nealon’s words, uses “a mixture of lists, images, and poetic prose to look back on the dot.com boom of the 1990s from midway through the Bush administration” (Matter, 147). Nealon notes Rankine’s interest in the “mixed-race figure of posthistory, Keanu Reeves’s character Neo from The Matrix” (1999) as exemplifying what Joshua Clover calls “the dreamlife of the boom” in which hackers actually outmaneuver “the megacorporations that give them amazing toys to play with and colonized their daily lives” (148). In Rankine’s telling, the sequels to the first film suggest a “symptom of what came after – a crash; a war” … and “the franchise, succumbing to the spectacukar logic its prequel seemed to critique, became as disposable as the boldfaced pamphlet the poet tosses aside” (148) after examining the words “BE LIKE JESUS.”]
Rankine’s suggestion that the end of history is now a kind o disposable waste (“salvation narratives are passé”) turns her thoughts in a different direction, to the burdens of history, especially the burden of racial violence and its repercussions in the emotional lives of those who witness it. Much of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely struggles with this problem, which we might describe as the struggle to give meaning to broken lives, or meaning to death, in a context where historical hope seems passé, and where its becoming passé is explicitly linked to its having ballooned into an empty spectacle. The simple word that Rankine uses for this is “sad” – a word that appears throughout the book, and that she links to racial violence, historical hope, and the value of life.
The word comes up, for instance, in a meditation on the death of James Byrd Jr. – a 49-year-old black man who was dragged top his death, tied to a truck, in Jasper, Texas, in 998. Rankine accuses George W. Bush of not caring about the death because he could not recall the details of the case (it was very high-profile, and he was governor of Texas at the time). Then she writes.
[Nealon quotes the passage beginning “I forget things too …”
and ending with words: “too close to dead is what I think.”]
Rankine’s indictment of Bush almost immediately becomes a query to herself, a forlorn investigation of the “deepening personality flaw” that, like her deflated retirement account, acquires an acronym – “IMH” – and that teeters on the edge of pathologization. But she demurs from Cornel West’s diagnosis of blck “nihilism” in favor of a contradictory and tendential account of sad blackness and black sadness: “too scarred by hope to hope” – and “too close to dead.” This relation to death has a history; it’s someplace people are headed.  And though that history is older by far than the phase of capitalism Rankine inhabits, she insist again and again that part of what keeps it in the register of inarticulate pain is the way it becomes spectacular – part of the news, just what’s on TV.  Indeed, the epigraph to the book, taken from Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1939), addresses this problem directly:
And most of all beware, even in thoiught, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear.
 … Throughout the book Rankine draws on what we might think of as her poetry’s cousins and antecedents – Hegel, [Paul] Celan, [Czeslaw] Milosz, [Cesar] Vallejo, and Césaire, for instance, establishing touchstones for the poet, many of which center on remarks about happiness and suffering. …
One of the functions of this work of citations, I think, is to protect the poet and her work from being drowned out by other media – not least television, which threatens to numb and depress the poet by making all life, because it streams uninterruptedly at her through the screen, equally worthless. But there is no absolute dichotomy in Rankine’s book between poetry and televison, between life that “can not matter” and the work of genius that connects each life. Instead Rankine slyly acknowledges the allure of TV, as well as a variety of other media films, Internet search engines, and newspaper writing. Rankine makes analogies to these other media throughout Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, using them to establish a poetic method through which the uncertain value of life can be tested out.
[Nealon argues that Rankine “maintains a lyric attitude” though her poems are mostly written in prose paragraphs, through “associative leaps and startling juxtapositions” and sets in motion analogies between the “lyric” and the “other textual and linguistic forms” the book records, so that the book as a whole “comes to feel like a scrapbook of commonplace book,” though a scrapbook in part composed of images from television, of television, that makes the “image-stream both as a toxic or atonal part of the book’s lyric surround, but also as an ironic domestication of the image stream … made slightly comic ... by the relatively low-tech simulation of their appearance on the page” (152).
The textual environment Rankine assembles thus establishes “lyric” as a master category meant to be intellectually powerful enough to withstand the intrusions of the image stream, even to take energy from it, even to mock it. But because the book also positions itself as a personal and idiosyncratic collection of clippings, it also foregrounds the vulnerability of the scrapbook in the face of the spectacle. There is no final adjudication in this pas de deux between the will to power of the lyric and the humility of the scrapbook, no judgment day – after all, “Salvation narratives are passé.” …
From “Bubble and Crash: Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism,” Chapter Four in The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 147-149, 151-152.  - www.modernamericanpoetry.org/criticism/christopher-nealon-dont-let-me-be-lonely

CHRISTOPHER NEALON ON CRISIS | JOSHUA CLOVER ON CRISIS

Christopher Nealon, The Joyous Age, Black Square Editions, 2004.

The playgrounds and basements of Brooklyn and Berkeley teem with neo-avant-something poets who smash prose sense to bits while preserving syntax, and who claim that the resulting jumbles reveal a radical critique of life, the universe, or old tennis shoes. Nealon's bracing and bitter debut both enters and mocks the tradition of kaleidoscopic, difficult poetry as grand social critique, and makes most new work in that mode sound sloppy or bland by contrast."—Stephen Burt

Christopher Nealon, Plummet, Edge Books, 2009.

As with many books, description of Chris Nealon's latest, fails, yet in this case it also, unusually, falls. A few moments of demonstration rather than description: "nothing you read will help you now"; "I am not gay, I am from the future!"; "Classicism: build your buildings so that even conquering hordes will be like, No way." Plummet is a post-catastrophic work written largely before the current all-American, i.e. global, plunge--imagine a kind of clairvoyant O'Hara distracted by Adorno, and Bear Stearns. It's that pit of the stomach feeling, when plummeting one goes from high to low--that's that pit of the stomach feeling--in the pit, of the stomach. "Will there be sirens? Toxins? I imagine violence miming reconciliation and then back again." The Believer reporter Stephen Burt observed of his previous collection The Joyous Age that "Nealon's bracing and bitter debut both enters and mocks the tradition of kaleidoscopic, difficult poetry as grand social critique, and makes most new work in that mode sound sloppy or bland by contrast." In other words, as it says in this new collection "Lifted from the cadences you know and then let fall.

Internationally renowned as a scholar of modern poetry and gay and lesbian writing, Nealon is also a formidably intelligent, decidedly challenging poet. This sophomore effort (after The Joyous Age) tends to self-interrogation, self-mockery, and an almost desperate knowingness about every topic under Nealon's blistering sun—politics and political theory, sex, urban life, commerce, language itself. I am not gay, I am from the future! one page announces; Chase after the new, but remember people like it when you repeat yourself, another poem says. Like Joshua Clover (to whom the book is dedicated), Nealon can sound abrasive, tired beyond argument, worn out by his own sophistication, or else eager to encompass, mock, and surmount various trends: some poems apparently made by Google-sculpting (arranging results of Internet searches) may be too au courant to last. Yet Nealon's self-consciousness also provokes compellingly: Hold fast to your integrity until it becomes Art Song and you have no friends. The poems present, mull, and sometimes undercut the very presuppositions (that we can ever listen to one another; that we can know what makes us happy or sad) that let other poets write poems at all. Nealon sets himself apart from all convention, sounding comfortable nowhere: that discomfort, that sense of restless, fast inquiry, gives much of his new work its peculiar, dissonant force. - Publishers Weekly

Chris Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall. Duke UP, 2001.

read it at Google Books

American gay men and lesbians in the first half of the twentieth century—poems by Hart Crane, novels by Willa Cather, gay male physique magazines, and lesbian pulp fiction. Nealon brings these diverse works together by highlighting a coming-of-age narrative he calls “foundling”—a term for queer disaffiliation from and desire for family, nation, and history.
The young runaways in Cather’s novels, the way critics conflated Crane’s homosexual body with his verse, the suggestive poses and utopian captions of muscle magazines, and Beebo Brinker, the aging butch heroine from Ann Bannon’s pulp novels—all embody for Nealon the uncertain space between two models of lesbian and gay sexuality.

The “inversion” model dominant in the first half of the century held that homosexuals are souls of one gender trapped in the body of another, while the more contemporary “ethnic” model refers to the existence of a distinct and collective culture among gay men and lesbians. Nealon’s unique readings, however, reveal a constant movement between these two discursive poles, and not, as is widely theorized, a linear progress from one to the other.
This startlingly original study will interest those working on gay and lesbian studies, American literature and culture, and twentieth-century history.