This collection of essays has been edited in an openly declared spirit of what ought to be (or: what there ought to be more of). Editor David Hadbawnik writes in his introduction that the volume, like an earlier special issue of the journal postmedieval on “Contemporary Poetics and the Medieval Muse,” emerged out of a frustration with existing norms around periodization and scholarly relevance, the conservatism of institutions, and the shrinking academic job market (postmedieval 6.2: 2015). Describing his motivations in co-organizing an earlier panel at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2011, Hadbawnik emphasizes the organizers’ desire for “experimental, more or less consciously avant-garde and edgy projects that pushed beyond updating medieval material and sought to extend the boundaries and shed new light on their sources;” but is forced to admit to “the difficulty of corralling enough scholars ready and willing to contribute” this kind of work (2, 3). Rather than capturing current, existing trends and tendencies across Medieval Studies, then, this collection makes an explicitly uphill argument in favor of a certain kind of cross-temporal comparative work and seeks to advertise the promise of this approach, in the hope that more scholarship of this kind will follow. Hadbawnik writes that the volume is offered in the “hope that the world of the authors collected...helps create new audiences for contemporary, creative medievalist projects, sparks interest in their medieval source material and languages, and sheds new light on both contemporary and medieval texts” (4).
Based on the essays assembled here, Hadbawnik’s hope is easy to share--but perhaps less in terms of bringing new attention to medieval texts, either as sources or objects of study, and more as an invitation to a showcase of “what the medieval can do” for modern and contemporary poets looking back to the Middle Ages for linguistic and imaginative resources. While the medieval artifacts considered in the various essays are largely familiar (Chaucer, Margery Kempe, an Old English Judith play, saints’ lives and conduct literature, and not least of all, the Middle English language itself), the volume hums and crackles with the poetry (and prose) of modern and contemporary writers far less likely to be known to scholars specializing in Medieval Studies. Importantly, these poets round out a picture of Medievalism that to non-specialists might seem centered on the romantic and nationalist medievalisms of the nineteenth century (think: Ivanhoe or Notre Dame de Paris’s extra gargoyles), or on contemporary pop culture (think: Disney’s Robin Hood or Game of Thrones). Here we have prestigious mid-twentieth-century poets like W. H. Auden, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Anne Sexton as well as more contemporary poets (including spoken word/performance artists) working within a global/intercultural/plurilingual frame, such as Medbh McGuckian, Caroline Bergvall, Patience Agbabi, and Jos Charles. Examining how these writers avail themselves of medieval cultural resources to pursue their own poetic projects--or studying, to reverse the direction, how medieval traditions extend their influence into the creative activities of these writers--yields an image of highly self-aware and intellectual Medievalism, an interface with medieval texts, traditions, and languages that mines what we often call the alterity of the Middle Ages for poetic projects of defamiliarization. Jack Spicer’s dictum that “A poet is a time mechanic, not an embalmer,” which is referenced in the volume’s triple-barreled title, reappears in several of the essays as a sort of motto: the lapse of time between “medieval times” and our own is not something to be memorialized, but fiddled with.
Given modern poetry’s self-conscious problematization of language, it is perhaps no surprise that so many of the collection’s essays explore how modern and contemporary writers return to/reinhabit/adapt/make use of medieval languages. Candace Barrington’s contribution, on contemporary transgender poet Jos Charles’s “Chaucerian ‘anteseedynts,’” examines how Charles harnesses the “malleability and fluidity of Middle English” (68) to create a “space where a non-trans reader could feel something akin to the trans experience” (61). Middle English, a hybrid tongue that makes no secret of how it compiles its Germanic and Romance linguistic antecedents, and that present-day readers can only read through shifting moments of recognition and misrecognition, accomplishes a “transvernacularity” (66) characterized by a “weave of possible meanings” (67). Similarly, Jonathan Hsy and Barrington find in Telling Tales, Nigerian-British poet Patience Agbabi’s “‘remixed’ transformation” (160) of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a temporality-bending medievalism that permits Agbabi to “explore nuanced desires that move across bodies, borders, and time” (162). Importantly, Agbabi’s engagement with her fourteenth-century source texts aims not to supplant the old with the new, but rather to keep the interaction active across time (Hsy and Barrington track Agbabi’s poetic engagement with Chaucer using images of looping, mirroring, and circling back). Hadbawnik’s own essay, which closes the volume, treats Norwegian-French-British poet Caroline Bergvall’s own multilingualism and choice of medievalism as two cognate ways to explore the “friction between [tongues],” her “use of medieval forms of English--Chaucer’s Middle English, as well as Old English and Old Norse--in order to give her some purchase on a sort of in-betweenness in language” (181). And perhaps most strikingly, since a medievalist scholar takes on a role in making the medieval new, Katharine Jager’s essay on Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian’s radically intertextual poem “The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter” highlights how the poet “pilfers” from The Book of Margery Kempe and other examples of late medieval conduct literature as cited and analyzed in an article by medievalist Sarah Salih (152).
Other essays read more diffusely for how the medieval literary inheritance prompts, inhabits, haunts, or otherwise presses itself into the creative practice of modern and contemporary poets. If McGuckian’s citational practice involves picking at bits of medieval textuality (thanks to Salih’s scholarship) and reassembling them into her own work, Christopher Roman argues that Anne Sexton seeks to “remove herself from the confinement of the normal...through the investment in a relationship with God” (51), a relationship that “is sensual and harkens back to the ritualism indebted to medieval mystics” (45). Here medieval mysticism serves less as intertext and more as a model or set of models to mime in a different historical context. Daniel C. Remein begins a somewhat overstuffed essay by contemplating how an experimental performance of the Old English play Judith stages--literally--the relationship between translation and performativity in modern and contemporary interactions with the medieval. Remein then movingly and persuasively calls for reading certain of W. H. Auden’s early “Watershed” poems as translations--at some distance--of the Old English poem The Ruin: if it cannot be demonstrated that Auden composed his own poems with the medieval model at hand, “The Ruin is nonetheless at work in the poem in some strange way” (99). And in a stranger way still, Sean Reynolds explores Peter O’Leary’s practice of “mycological translation” (136), a mushroom-y way of bringing forward the medieval Finnish epic The Kalevala that both creates a new figure for how texts interact with one another through translation and helps us imagine modes of survival on a damaged planet.
The collection unquestionably features a lively and varied array of medievalisms, likely indeed to inspire more work of this kind. But are these medievalisms queer? Not necessarily, and some definitely more than others. I have chosen to highlight the interest and quality of the collected essays without reference to the furtive and fugitive appearance of the word queer throughout the volume in order to make the point that most of them work just fine when understood under the simpler rubric used for the 2015 postmedieval issue, “Contemporary Poetics and the Medieval Muse.” In that earlier effort, co-edited by Hadbawnik and Reynolds, only one of the essays--by Christopher Roman, published in the new book as well--flags itself as queer, while the essay contributed by Hsy and Barrington, they admit, unwittingly misgenders the speaker of Agbabi’s Telling Tales, prompting them to return to Agababi’s poetry together for Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms. Barrington’s solo-authored contribution to the edited collection does make a clear claim to queerness, though a speculative one: her thesis is that Jos Charles’s use of a transtemporal English “create[s] an affective space which allows the readers to feel...a certain trans experience by immersing themselves into a destabilizing experience” (79). Roman’s reading of Anne Sexton’s “Queer Theopoetics,” for its part, grounds its argument in queer theology and names what is queered in Sexton’s poems, from language (through “fluidity and indeterminacy,” 51), to the body (conjuring a sexuality with “no bodies to speak of, no orifices, no penetration, only skin surfaces, only sound,” 54), to death. But with the exception of Hsy and Barrington’s co-authored essay, the collection does not bear consistent witness to the long-standing and ongoing work of queer medievalism or queer theory, with some essays citing little to no queer scholarship.
In his introduction, Hadbawnik faces the question--what is so queer about this collection?--head-on, but answers it obliquely via a very well-worn quotation from David Halperin’s 1997 book Saint Foucault, in which the queer is defined as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant...not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative” (5). [1] To discuss queerness in the nineties was to come back again and again to similar questions: could anything be queer? Could anyone? If we have mostly agreed that those questions are most usefully left open, it is nevertheless the case that queer scholarship has really amounted to something substantive and specific in the years since: not a bounded identity, by any means, but a conversation, a community. Hadbawnik goes on to state, programmatically, that “Queer forms of engagement--for the purpose of this volume, queer medievalisms--would tend to make the personal political; they would be oppositional to received norms; and they would involve the performative” (5). Fair enough--but it is hard to shake the feeling that Hadbawnik is here trying to justify what is queer about the essays he has collected for publication in this volume (the second volume, it is worth noting, in De Gruyter’s “New Queer Medievalisms” series), rather than gesturing toward the very long-standing and active body of queer medievalist scholarship with which the authors in the collection are only sparsely and unevenly in conversation. All of this is to say that while the collection has clear value, it is difficult to argue that the volume is a necessary addition to the bookshelf of Queer Medieval Studies (though some of the collected authors do make their own contributions to that body of scholarship elsewhere).
The point, to be perfectly clear, is not about identity, but community, as I stated above. And so the good news is that this collection does invite readers into a quite vibrant community of scholars and poets--some more queer-oriented, others less or not especially--unified in their attention to modern and contemporary poetics but also extravagantly diverse in terms of languages, theoretical approaches, methodologies, and of course relationships to the Middle Ages. To illustrate this point, I have saved the collection’s first essay for last: Robin Tremblay-McGaw’s reflection on the queer medievalism of Robert Glück’s experimental “New Narrative” prose fiction Margery Kempe (first published in 1994 and recently re-released by The New York Review of Books). Tremblay-McGaw is both a member of Glück’s San Francisco Bay Area/experimental poetics community and an insider relative to queer scholarly debates (full disclosure: Tremblay-McGaw and I were both graduate students in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz many years ago, and carpooled for a time from our homes in San Francisco). Her thesis ably combines the strains of inquiry promised in the collection’s title, arguing that Glück’s Margery “uses transtextuality and collaboration/community to interrogate gender, appropriate the already-made, and to reveal and revel in the paradox, the punctum of the ‘real fictional depth’ at the heart of ‘the made-up’” (17). [2] Glück’s community is emphatically queer--though Margery Kempe was published in the earliest years of what came to be called queer theory and does not bear witness to that insurgent intellectual movement per se--but also emphatically creative, poetic, and invested in the making/sharing/dissemination of experimental literature. Tremblay-McGaw demonstrates how both queerness and participation in the San Francisco Bay Area experimental writers’ community constitute, for Glück and his friends (including Tremblay-McGaw herself) a shared experience of life lived outside the bounds of the normative, yielding a shared recognition of “the fabrications, desires, complicities, and constructions of narrative and self'' that characterize New Narrative in the 1990s (26). One of the real pleasures of Tremblay-McGaw’s essay is that she footnotes like a medievalist, but her ample notes are full of the evidence of literary collaborations and debates (including “poetry wars”!) not likely to be familiar to many medievalists, and therefore potentially of great interest to readers persuaded by Hadbawnik’s persistent hope that experimental contemporary poetics and medievalism/medievalists can be friends.
A final note on community. Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms: Time Mechanics is missing one of the hallmarks of an edited collection published by an academic press: a list of contributors including institutional affiliation. While it might have been helpful to include websites or contact information for authors, the omission of the traditional contributors list seems like a welcome adjustment to our new normal, in which scholars are less and less able to rely on full-time academic employment and the tenure track, and more and more likely to be producing intellectual work alongside other kinds of labor (teaching in and out of the university, translating, creative writing, etc.). Dispensing with institutional affiliations has the added benefit of putting aside the implicit hierarchies that come along with institutional prestige. In the case of this volume, what we see instead of US Higher Ed as an industry characterized by dramatic and growing inequality is an intentional community of poets and scholars, seemingly well acquainted with one another and supportive of each other’s work, thinking in conversation with one another even when doing so is not so easy. And I count that among the collection’s important contributions.
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Notes:
1. David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 62.
2. The last reference is to “Robert Duncan’s framing of self as ‘a made up thing’” (17). Robert Duncan, The Years as Catches: First Poems (1939-1946) (Berkeley: Oyez, 1966), x.