And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.
-Audre Lorde, “Used of the Erotic”
The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas— for my body does not have the same ideas I do.
-Roland Barthes, “Textual Pleasure”
If stanza means “little room,” a poem is an entire house. If sound is a unit of breath, a poem is also a body. What does it mean to synthesize both metaphors— the house of the poem is a body, the body of the poem is a house— when reading the erotic poetry of queer women, and how is that synthesis a necessary key in understanding the construction of these poems specifically?
Entering the terrain of these questions elucidates the above Audre Lorde and Roland Barthes quotes, because both speak towards the making of a queer erotic poem as an act of pleasure in and of itself, one that curates pleasure for the reader. Looking specifically at line and line break in the poetry of Eileen Myles and Gertrude Stein through Barthes’ theory of textual pleasure and Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” helps to illuminate how exactly these acts of pleasure-making when writing about lesbian sex is also an act of liberation.
Defining a poem as queer requires an acknowledgment of its existence within the sociopolitical homophobic landscape pulsating in and around the poet and reader. Whereas queerness itself is the resistance to sexual oppression, queer poetry is an arm, an extension and realization of resistance enacted with language. Employing Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” means that a lesbian poem aimed at depicting queer sex is in resistance to the language of patriarchy that imposes heteronormativity and thus, lesbian erasure. What language construction is this, that can refuse patriarchy in a queer erotic poem? An intimate investigation of Eileen Myles and Gertrude Stein, two lesbian poets who often write the erotic, shows the body itself as the house— the place to leave from and return to— of this language construction.
In the lesbian poetics of Myles and especially in their poem “Bleeding Hearts,” the speaker seems always conscious of all their menstruating body can make. This particular poem of Myles is consequently queer not just because its maker is queer, but because of its form. The lines pace themselves down the spine of the page with short, quick line breaks. In mimicry of the erotic, the gaze of the reader must travel down one long thin line, like the spine of a lover’s body, as the language moves through the mind and mouth of the reader, in order to reach the poem’s end.
In her collection Waves of Blood, a genre-bending unflinching look at menstruation, genocide, and the role of the poet-teacher, Ariana Reines writes that the construction of a poem always replicates both death and orgasm simultaneously. In breaking a line, Reines argues that the language contained within that line for the purpose of constructing its own little world within the world of the poem, ends. In French, “orgasm” translates to “little death”— the end of a line is marked by wordless space, much like death and orgasm transcend diction.
It is this attention to line break that can be applied specifically to Myles’s poem “Bleeding Hearts” to understand its construction as a lesbian erotic poem. Myles begins this poem with a question that is immediately answered by the speaker: “Know what / I’m jealous of? Last night.” The speaker goes on to unravel the image of their “pussy / Bleeding & shaking / wet with / memory / grief & relief.” Already, the use of the word “pussy” pricks the reader’s attention. Further, this characterization of an erotic part of the body is one of personna, as the pussy is described like its own body experiencing its own feelings. Is this what makes the poem queer AND erotic? If we consider how this personification is in direct opposition to the sociopolitical context that this poem exists within– to the laws that limit and remove queer and female autonomy– we see how a pussy as its own entity allows Myles to enter the erotic through the autonomy of their body and the body of their lover. Myles continues “Bleeding Hearts” with a meditation on the pain of possessing a pussy because that possession comes with the pain of menstruation. Here, the metaphor of lesbian love as a force that is given to one at birth, becomes a force that causes “so much beauty / & pain.” Many queer readers may also feel the echo of their own loves as something uncontrollably beautiful and painful at once.
The rest of the poem’s construction as lesbian and erotic hinges on shape. Myles’s lines “change / everywhere / coins falling / all over / the bed / & death / is a dream” begets the application of Reines’s belief in the simultaneity of sex and death. Because of these sharp and constant line breaks, Myles is able to force the proximity between “bed” and “death,” shoving the image of a body on a bed poised to receive sex, inside the image of a body on a bed poised for death. The frequency of each line break here quickens the breath of the reader, evokes the erotic.
“Bleeding Hearts” ends with the speaker’s birth; this creates a contradiction. The poem began with “last night” as a metaphor for an ending— in this poem, the end of a night of sex— but ends with an image of the speaker looking down at “mounds” of bodies on top of each other, with the lines “is it / love or / war. The hollow / creeping / cheek / where / I / was / born.” The speaker seems to be asking, are these bodies fucking or fighting? And was I made from those same tangled forces? Myles’s frequency of short lines in this stichic poem requires the reader to slow down until they reach this ending. The use of the noun “cheek” as a birthplace keeps the poem’s focus on its queerness, on the body of the woman, the womb as the place where all bodies are made, the mouth as the resting place for the tongue that makes and forms language. With the tension made to end the poem on the speaker’s— the maker of the poem who has delivered sex to another woman, who possesses the pussy from which women originate and return to— origin, the poem collapses all of its metaphors into one. How beautifully painful to hold the entirety of that collapse in the word “born.” The reader is asked to consider lesbian eroticism in a light of ars poetica— that which has brought us into a world of pleasure has also brought us into the language of suffering.
In contrast to Myles’s very short lines and deployment of narrative, the work of Gertrude Stein resists narrative with the utilization of end-punctuated lines that are syntactically jumbled, sometimes to the point of near-nonsensicality. Despite these differences in poetic construction, however, Stein, like Myles, also works within the language of queer resistance, because of her consistent refusal to follow sentence-level language construction rules and because the content of her poems revolves around her own lesbianism. Stein’s long poem “Lifting Belly” is characterized with the frequent repetition of the line “Lifting belly is so kind” repeated often enough in the poem to become a kind of touchstone, an insistence on the image that the language of the line conjures: a woman’s belly lifted from the implied bed she rests on, her arched back a bodily response to orgasm. Stein places this line/image in the poem so often that every time the reader’s mind wanders, they are required to return to “lifting belly.” In a world in which lesbianism is often discounted, ignored, and/or erased, forcing the reader back to this image again and again is a kind of resistance because it insists on the visibility of lesbian sex. Still, though the idea of a lifted belly is an erotic one, the existence of this repeated line itself is not enough to make the whole poem one of lesbian eroticism; it is its existence within the poem’s surrounding images that bends the reader’s interpretation of this line as erotic.
An excerpt from “Lifting Belly:”
Lifting belly is so kind.
Lifting belly fattily.
Doesn’t that astonish you.
You did not want me.
Say it again.
The phrase “Lifting belly is so kind” as a stand-alone makes no logical sense. It is because Stein turns it over and over, sometimes even reordering it slightly, that it starts to pull us into the world of the poem enough to derive not meaning from it, necessarily, as that is not what Stein seems interested in, but insistence. Stein seems to be telling her reader to watch her break the expectations of language to praise the pleasure she can bring to her lover. Further in the poem are the words “butter,” “fattily,” “strawberry,” “wives.” Stein places the image of a woman’s arched back next to object words, like these, that are associated with the home space– feminized words. They’re also words that require the tongue to move through each section of the mouth. All of this comes together in service of the poem’s queer eroticism.
Those excerpted lines are also an example of how the whole poem connotes a conversational sentence structure: questions are asked, the next line at least feels like an answer– “Doesn’t that astonish you,” says the speaker, and the addressee responds, “You did not want me.” Even the presence of a “you” conjures an implied lover as both participant in and recipient of the poem. That intimacy carries into the repeated image of the body arching up from its (implied) resting place on a bed. The reader sees the space made between skin and bed, feels that space in the air between the conversational construction of the poem. This space is what Roland Barthes calls tmesis and is reminiscent of the space made by a line break in the house of the poem (which, for Stein, is end-punctuated but a break nonetheless) as the place that somatically mirrors the experience(s) of death and orgasm as two permanently-intertwined experiences. But Barthes isn’t concerned with feminist space-making, though his theory of textual pleasure is about edge-making– tmesis is the joy a reader derives from skimming parts of a text and creating meaning from fragmentation, between the edges of language only (and necessarily) partially-understood. Barthes argues the role of the writer is to make a text that makes the reader feel desired and which makes the reader desire the text enough to engage tmesis. If the predictability of language is one edge, and language content is another, this all occurs in the gap between the two. When those edges either collide or stretch apart, the reader’s attention and intrigue is heightened– desire leads to pleasure.
Like the slip of clothing off a shoulder, Barthes believes this experience to be sexual. Though he was concerned mostly with prosaic narratives, it can be extended into poetry especially when we consider poetics to be largely concerned with pattern making and breaking. Specifically when turning back to Stein, the tmesis that Barthes names as the source of a reader’s pleasure, is realized fully in the space of Stein’s lifted belly. Another contradiction: Stein’s lines are punctuated like whole sentences, or at least, like sentences spoken in conversation— but they conjure emptiness, wordlessness. In the air beneath an arched back, in the wordlessness of a line break, is the chasm between grammar rules and cohesive meaning-making across the horizon of the page.
Stein can also be read as performing the spectacle of female eroticism, specifically lesbianism, by placing domestic objects around the page like the display of objects, often food objects, on a platter for viewing by readers. To return to Barthes, this platter is a display of desire, because it harnesses the reader’s imagination for what can be taken into the body in the context of the feminine. But what Barthes did not— perhaps, could not— include was that this display, because of Stein’s line construction, becomes a resistance to language expectation in a way that is inherently queer. It forces the body of the reader to process the display as units of sound. Reading a poem is, after all, the body’s processing of words, and words are a processing of breath. The next lines after the above excerpt are “Strawberry. / Lifting besides belly. / Lifting kindly belly. / Sing to me I say.” The reader’s mind consumes each image in turn, the reader’s breath rises and falls with the belly in the poem. The context of Stein’s chosen diction is severed from the diction itself; the nonsensicality of each punctuated line returns the reader to their body, through their breath, by way of the display of the image. Is this enough to say that Stein’s “Lifting Belly” is, in and of itself, an act of queer resistance? A gap emerges in the collapse of the expectation of the sentence and the expectation of the objects within that sentence. And in that gap, two opposing questions: What of the woman, is she not a spectacle? What of the lesbian reader, does she not feel herself inside the liberatory house of the text?
Asking questions about houses, about women, and about lesbian love and the role of language returns us (maybe as it always should) to Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” in which Lorde articulates what Barthes cannot: eroticism is inherently powerful— for women, for poets, for queer people, for queer women poets. “And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love,” writes Lorde, because “the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation.” Eileen Myles and Gertrude Stein show that when an erotic poem is constructed in service of that eroticism, resistance pulsates through every room in the house. The reader is offered a gift– come into this house, into this body I have made, and feel what this is like with me. Especially in the hands of lesbian writers, language is powerful because it requires the body. It won’t let us look away.
