Edited by Jason Edwards with specially commissioned essays. punctum books, 2017
Bathroom Songs: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet is the first book of essays to consider the poetry of one of the twentieth- and early twenty-first-century’s most important literary, affect, and queer theorists. Acclaimed as one of the “truly innovative” poets of her generation by Maud Ellmann, Sedgwick’s work as a poet is, perhaps, less well known, but is no less compelling than her ground-breaking trilogy of queer theoretical texts: Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Epistemology of the Closet, and Tendencies.
The book includes seven specially commissioned essays considering Sedgwick’s published poetry and writing about poets, by Angus Brown, Meg Boulton, Mary Baine Campbell, Jason Edwards, Kathryn R. Kent, Monica Pearl, and Benjamin Westwood, that range across the complete range of Sedgwick’s work, from her earliest published lyrics through her first collection of poetry, Fat Art, Thin Art, to her part-haiku, part-prose autobiography, A Dialogue on Love, and beyond. In addition, the book contains over forty of Sedgwick’s previously uncollected poems, ranging from her earliest poem on T.E. Lawrence to her final poem ‘Death’, introduced and contextualized by Edwards. – From the jacket copy
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
:::
Part I. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet
Introduction: Bathroom Songs? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet / Jason Edwards
Look with Your Hands / Angus Connell Brown
The Abject Animal Poetics of ‘The Warm Decembers’ / Ben Westwood
Eve’s Muse / Kathryn R. Kent
‘Shyly / as a big sister I would yearn / to trace its avocations’,
or, Who’s the Muse? / Mary Baine Campbell
Queer Therapy: On the Couch with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick / Monica Pearl
Waiting in the Dark: Some Musings on Sedgwick’s Performative(s) / Meg Boulton
Part II. The Uncollected Poems
Introduction: Someday We’ll Look Back with Pleasure Even on This:
Sedgwick’s Uncollected Poems / Jason Edwards
Poems
2006
Death
Bathroom Song
Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit
1988-1997
Pandas in Trees
Untitled (Blake panda poems)
Tru-Cut
Valentine
1981
2/81
1974-1976
Lost Letter
The Palimpsest
Explicit
Hank Williams and a Cat
Jimmy Lane
Jukebox
1971-1973
Die Sommernacht hat mir’s angetan
Phantom Limb
Two P.O.W. Suicides
1969-1971
Once There Was a Way to Get Back Homeward
1968-1969
The Ring of Fire
The Prince of Love in the Desert Night
Artery
A Death by Water
Yellow Toes
Soutine
Another Poem from the Creaking Bed
Cain
The City and Man
Lullaby
No More Dusk
Ribs of Steel
To a Friend
When in Minute Script
To a Swimmer
Untitled (‘Wonder no more upon the mysteries’)
From an Ending for “The Triumph of Life”
1967-1969
T.E. Lawrence and the Old Man, His Imagined Tormentor
Movie Party, Telluride House, Ithaca, New York
Falling in Love over The Seven Pillars
Calling Overseas
What the Poet Thought And What She Found in the Telluride Files:
Epilogue: Teachers and Lovers
The Last Poem of Yv*r W*nt*rs
1965-1967
Saul at Jeshimon [First Variant]
Saul at Jeshimon [Second Variant]
Siegfried Rex von Munthe, Soldier and Poet, Killed December, 1939, on the German Battleship Graf Spee
1964
Lawrence Reads La Morte D’Arthur in the Desert
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Bibliography
Contributors