John Wieners and Queer Creation; and Unshut, The Dreams of Goat, Bight of the Knot, and Papigo

Abstract

The critical dissertation herein establishes a Lacanian, queer-theoretic framework to illuminate the poetry of John Wieners. It finds that the psychical topology proposed by Lacan—the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary orders—together with concepts including extimacy, sublimation, and jouissance, have a remarkable ability to explicate Wieners’ queer, poetic voice. Conversely, it finds existing queer theory, even that which is embedded in Lacanian thought, fails to account for fundamental aspects of his output. Supplementing the Lacanian framework with concepts from the writings of Sigmund Freud, Giorgio Agamben, and others, it shows that Wieners’ poetry points to new avenues for queer theory, in particular with relation to sociality and the temporal, as well as new (or lost) approaches to queer poetics. Chapter One looks at Wieners’ poetry in the context of extimacy, a Lacanian concept that complicates the distinction between interiority and exteriority. Chapter Two argues that Wieners, often considered to be a confessional poet, in fact transcends the confessional mode. Chapter Three shows how sublimation (the cultural, rather than sexual, expression of excess libidinal energy) operates in Wieners’ poetry. Drawing on Agamben’s work on temporality, in particular the concept of messianic time, the fourth and final chapter demonstrates how Wieners shows us that queerness always mandates a contemporary mode of artistic creation. The following creative portfolio is comprised of four collections of original poetry, some of which draw on Lacanian concepts, all of which draw on queer experientiality.