Author Note: Adam Meisner

Adam Meisner’s poem “Stage Directions for the Opening Scene of the Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry” appeared in The Puritan Issue 45: Spring 2019. As part of our author note series, he talks about some of his influences.

I picked up a used copy of Robert K. Martin’s The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979) a few years ago at Ottawa’s Black Squirrel Books. (The author had signed this copy “for Douglas LePan with admiration”—LePan being the gay Canadian poet whose work is now not widely remembered.) I was drawn to the cover illustration of an older, bearded man in a wool suit—presumably Walt Whitman. The man is seated at a wooden desk where he writes by an oil lamp. There is a gentle, patient smile on his face, almost as though he were waiting for someone to approach him with a question. Perhaps, I thought, the book might give me some sort of insight into how my own writing—as a queer person—related to a longer tradition of gay poetry, and so I bought the book.Once I got home, however, I put the book on my nightstand where it stayed untouched for many months. In part this was because I worried the book would disappoint. It was nearly 40 years old, and I suspected outdated. The fourth section of the book, for example, was titled “Some Contemporary Poets,” and listed Allen Ginsberg, Thom Gun, and James Merrill—all of whom had been dead for a decade or more.In its place, I started to read Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House and Other Plays—and I read these plays voraciously. I especially loved their stage directions: they were imaginative and evocative—and rather than being prescriptive, they invited further collaboration from the actors, directors, and designers who would interpret her work for the stage. Take, for example, the opening stage directions for Act 2 of Ruhl’s The Clean House:

Ana lies under a sheet.Beautiful music.A subtitle projects: Charles Performs Surgery on the Woman He Loves.Charles takes out surgical equipment.He does surgery on Ana.It is an act of love.If the actor who plays Charles is a good singer,it would be nice if he could singan ethereal medieval love song in Latinabout being medically cured by loveas he does the surgery.If the actress who plays Ana is a good singer,it would be nice if she recovered from the surgeryand slowly sat up and sang a contrapuntal melody.When the surgery is over,Charles takes off Ana’s sheet.Underneath the sheet,she is dressed in a lovely dress.They kiss.

What songs might the actors sing? How will the surgery be performed as “an act of love”? What will the dress look like? The possibilities for interpretation seem infinite. What also struck me was how Ruhl’s stage directions read like poems with their line breaks, enjambment, and swift, efficient language. As I read through Ruhl’s plays, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry remained unread at my bedside. I felt I ought to read it—but as with many things I feel I ought to do, I avoided the book. Perhaps, I thought one evening, I’m simply more interested in reading plays at the moment, and that’s why I can’t bring myself to read Martin’s more theoretical text. And then I thought of how I might be more inclined to read The Homosexual Tradition if it were a play—perhaps a play written entirely in stage directions that held the same poetry found in Sarah Ruhl’s writing. It was this idea that prompted me to write Stage Directions for the Opening Scene of the Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry.In my take on the homosexual tradition in America poetry, I reference both what I imagine might be included in Martin’s text (Walt Whitman, for one), as well as what surely must be missing (the AIDS epidemic, which had yet to happen when the book was published). I wrote these references in the language of stage directions that may or may not be impossible to perform beyond the stage of the reader’s imagination. It became an exercise in disregarding all practical application, perhaps to the extreme of what Ruhl does—how could any director, for example, stage skeletons becoming dust? At the poem’s close, I’ve posed a question that I’ve been asking myself lately: are we nearing an end to the so-called homosexual tradition in American poetry—by which I mean an end to gay writing in broader contemporary poetry? I have my suspicions that writing about gay identity may be coming to an end for a couple of reasons. For one, gay as an identity category is slowly losing traction to the more inclusive queer. In addition to this, as mainstream (read: straight) audiences have come to develop a strong taste for writing from gay and queer writers, they’ve also developed expectations for what that writing ought to include—often, the tropes of trauma. (Vivek Shraya has written an excellent essay related to this idea titled “How did the suffering of marginalized artists become so marketable?” in Now Magazine.) I suspect such expectations may soon lead to a refusal from gay and queer writers (as well as writers from other marginalized communities) to broach identity in their writing altogether—or at least in the terms that have become marketable. And if a change in broader gay/queer writing isn’t inevitable, it may be that I merely sense a change about to come in my own writing. I’ve noticed that whenever I send out a package of poems to literary journals for potential publications, the ones that are quickly selected are those that deal blatantly with my identity as a gay/queer person. This has, in turn, shaped my work: in the last few years, I’ve caught myself writing poems almost exclusively about my identity because I know they will reach an audience. More recently, however, I’ve started to tire of writing about my experiences of gender and sexuality—and so an end to a homosexual tradition in my own writing may be near. What might I write about in place of identity? I’m not sure. And I’m not even sure I can divorce myself from it entirely. Perhaps the answers lie in Robert K. Martin’s The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry: perhaps I’ll find the focus of my future work in what gay writers wrote about before they could write openly about their identity. I’m committed to picking up Martin’s book as soon as I’ve finished writing this text. I’m hopeful that I’ll discover a way forward from their past.