Chad Bennett, Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. xiv + 326 pp. $49.95.
A reviewer might feel tempted to trash-talk a book on the juicy topic of gossip. Wouldn’t that be fitting and fun? Alas, Chad Bennett’s Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry is so careful and decorous, it is beyond reproach. The writing is groomed, the research meticulous, the choice of subjects—Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, James Merrill—strikingly diverse. By patiently unpacking a crowd of difficult poems, Bennett shows how twentieth-century poetries have used gossip as mode to expand the formal and rhetorical possibilities of lyric. The word queer does not appear in the book’s title but is central to Bennett’s reading. Gossip has historically been considered the province of women and gay men, the disempowered and socially marginalized. (There is no essential link here; the point is that the devaluation of gossip disempowers these groups the most.) Previous literary critical treatments of gossip have focused on the social, and to some degree feminized, genres of the play and the novel. Poetry meanwhile has been defended as a genre of solitary meditation and private soliloquy. Bennett disrupts these commonplaces, suggesting that lyric, a mode “self-reflexively concerned with the matters of privacy . . . so crucial to gossip,” puts private and public modes of address in tension (2). Poetry thus serves “as a neglected archive” for considering the negotiation of private life and social positioning. This is especially the case for queer subjects, who use gossip to perform “nonce-taxonomic work,” a phrase of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s that recurs repeatedly in Word of Mouth (215). Gossip tells us who is to be trusted and who belongs where; who is in and who is outed.
Stein, the subject of Bennett’s first chapter, is an exemplary figure by which to explore the tensions between publicity and private lyric utterance. For decades the most famous writer nobody had read, Stein redressed this situation with the 1933 publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which she spills the tea (gay code for gossip) about the writers and painters in her Paris circle, to much commercial success. In that same period Stein also wrote the hermetic Stanzas in Meditation, commonly taken as the experimental ballast or antidote to the “audience writing” of the Autobiography. Following the lead of Richard Bridgman, Bennett argues that Stanzas is not so much a volte-face as a lyric meditation on what it means to gossip, and in turn become its object. In a tricky argument, Bennett suggests that the poem’s confusions of “I” and “it” are Stein’s way of mulling over gossip’s ability to objectify its targets. Yet the pronoun that receives the most play in the poem is “they,” making 2,665 appearances. Most critics believe the pronoun refers to the reading public Stein sought in writing the more popular book, and Bennett concurs. The pronoun play in Stanzas is sometimes dizzying, and I was impressed by Bennett’s skills in parsing this long, dense work. If there is anything to be desired here, it would be a fuller excavation of Stein’s reception—how the reading publics of the thirties and fifties (when Stanzas was posthumously published) responded to these works—and how gossip functioned in the period specifically. In Bennett’s very close reading, Stanzas seems a poem that might have been written in the seventies or the nineties—which certainly speaks to Stein’s continued relevance and influence over contemporary literature.
Bennett includes more historical grounding in the second chapter, on Langston Hughes. The opening begins brilliantly, with Bennett’s beautiful handling of an anecdote about gossip and the archive. Writing to Carl Van Vechten, whose papers had just been bought by Yale University, Hughes jokes that he was “about to tell” Van Vechten a piece of juicy gossip, before he grew self-conscious, knowing his letter would enter into the library’s collections (79). Bennett suggests this letter is “prescient” in identifying a “tension between two kinds of archiving: that of the official archive . . . and that of gossip, an ephemeral performance that, in its disregard for the rules of proper proof and comportment, proves queer” (81). This analysis does double duty. First, it suggests a way to negotiate the lacunae in Hughes’s biography (his biographer declared the poet asexual rather than gay in the absence of archival proof). It also introduces the terms for reading Hughes’s great book-length sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred, which operates in a similar “counter-archival” mode (82), drawing on Harlem stoop talk and the implicitly queer gossip of “people of the night” (qtd. in Bennett 122). Bennett also argues against Hughes’s reputation as a poet of transparent simplicity, pointing to the sequence’s numerous moments of obscurity. In addition to the scat-like bebop phrases Hughes incorporates into the work, other sources of obscurity are the “shared opacity” of gossip and the lyric mode itself, each “a kind of private language” (27).
O’Hara, a lover of “deep gossip” as Allen Ginsberg famously elegized him, is an inevitable subject for a book on gossip and twentieth-century poetry (127). While Andy Warhol (O’Hara’s sometime foe) mused that you “can’t gossip about yourself,” Bennett argues that this is precisely what O’Hara does in his chatty, gossipy poems (156). Bennett places his work against the backdrop of the Lavender Scare—the McCarthyite exposure and expulsion of queers from the government and armed forces—as well as the reigning New Critical and confessional poetic modes of the 1950s and 1960s. This is somewhat familiar territory, but I was impressed by the way Bennett weaves his careful and sensitive close readings in and out of their historical context. Because O’Hara wrote shorter and more recognizably lyric poems, Bennett’s close readings are especially lucid, and he is able to adduce more evidence of the combined negative and positive affects arising from gossip than with Stein or Hughes. I was especially interested in Bennett’s attention to metaphors of waste and spoilage across O’Hara’s work, and the brilliant movement in O’Hara’s great poem “Song” [“Is it dirty / does it look dirty”] between lyric interiority (“run your finger along your no-moss mind”) and the social implications of dishing the dirt (qtd. in Bennett 164). In Bennett’s reading, trash talk “becomes a way of mapping a queer city within the squeaky-clean conformity of the 1950s mainstream cultural terrain” (165).
Bennett continues with the spoilage theme in the fourth chapter’s treatment of Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, which includes the most illuminating use of historical and archival research. I had remembered the queer wit of Merrill’s Ouija-board-based poem, in which the poet channels the spirits of W. H. Auden, Stein, Wallace Stevens, and other artist figures, giving us a portrait of the afterlife as a divine gossip session. What I didn’t remember were the threats of nuclear catastrophe that frame the poem, lending it a sense of urgency. Although the poem’s first installation, The Book of Ephraim, was published in the mid–1970s, Bennett locates the poem’s inception in the McCarthyite 1950s, when George Kennan’s containment theory warned that gays were a threat to national security and thus an unhealthy stain on the national fabric. Bennett suggests this stigmatization extended to the realm of reproductive health. Fears about the nonreproductive capacities of homosexuals became confused and intertwined with hysteria about nuclear fallout and the threat to the human species’ future. Bennett also does clever sleuthing in the archives to explain the poem’s obsession with burning papers, particularly by the Auden figure. A young Merrill suffered trauma when his mother burned incriminating letters between her son and another male; because of the family’s public reputation (Merrill’s father was the prominent banker Charles Merrill), she feared revelation of Merrill’s homosexuality would taint the family name. Bennett also provides a fun reading of the gendered rhetoric of Oujia board advertisements and the connotations of feminine passivity that inform Merrill’s use of it to compose Sandover. The first two thirds of Bennett’s chapter had me itching to return to the queer pleasures of the poem pronto, though I lost patience for a later discussion on “gossip as an occasion and method for thinking about the formal, historical, and philosophical aspects of . . . tone” (216). While I love the skill and dazzle of Merrill’s verse, his own tone can verge on insufferable: “Tone,” Merrill declares, “always sounds snobbish, but without a sense of it how one flounders!” (qtd. in Bennett 213). Poet, heal thyself.
The appearance of Merrill in this study highlights one of its most interesting features: the choice to include poets of markedly different styles, who have been grouped posthumously into camps like “new formalistm” and “post-language.” By not even addressing these divisions, Bennett does credible work in dissolving them, freeing poets and critics to read across party lines. An extension of this approach is Bennett’s clever choice for the coda, to assemble four contemporary poets who serve as inheritors of the earlier poets he treats. The choices are appealing: there is Juliana Spahr, who combines “the repetition and complex simplicity” of Stein (230); John Keene, who gives juicy bodily form to the queer gossip on Hughes; Eileen Myles, a later-generation New York School poet in the O’Hara mode; and D. A. Powell, who updates Merrill’s Ouija-board colloquy to a tea salon of the afterlife for friends who died of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. Bennett’s pairings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets are apt. The reading of Keene’s story “Blues” rendered Bennett’s discussion of Hughes’s sexuality in chapter two even more persuasive. I especially enjoyed Bennett’s take on Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, which he argues to be, like Stanzas in Meditation, about the problems and pleasures of poetic address—”you” in Spahr’s case, instead of Stein’s “they.”
Bennett layers an additional argument onto the coda: that the World Wide Web has led to a new proliferation of information, affecting the forms contemporary poets use in their writing. In the face of data waste, social media bubbles, and fake news, it makes sense that “[g]ossip should be a keyword for the inquiry into recent poetries of appropriated language” (228). However, this promising line of inquiry does not quite fit the poets assembled, since they rarely if ever use appropriated language or technological supports to write their poems. On the other hand, Bennett’s grouping implicitly addresses the ways queer subjects forge connections with their forebears, finding a sense of belonging in the face of a historical invisibility. I would have welcomed more explicit analysis of the ways gossip creates these imagined affiliations among queer poets, although this would require Bennett to address the work gossip does in the social field outside the poem. (Certainly there are many excellent critical studies that already treat poetic friendships and coteries—among the New York School especially—by Andrew Epstein, Lytle Shaw, and Reva Wolf, among others.) Bennett suggests that gossip in poetry can be a “community-making performance” (229), and I am eager to think more about how poems do this work—that is, how they are received in their time, and how gossip about these figures may encourage queer communities to coalesce.
This absence of the social also raises a question about how socio-historical analysis in queer studies ought to inform aesthetic criticism. I think it is fair to say that Bennett is more interested in lyric theory than queer theory. His engagement with recent work in queer studies is glancing, with only brief treatments of Sedgwick’s and Roland Barthes’s views on gossip (very brief in the case of Barthes, who hardly warmed to the subject at all). What work does queer do in Bennett’s analysis? The figures Bennett examines are perceived as possessing queer sexual identities, and he brings forward several aspects of queer history—McCarthyism, the Lavender Scare—that usefully illuminate the poems. But there is a perhaps strategic fuzziness that enters into his use of the word in both poetic and social contexts. When invoked poetically, the word queer sometimes refers to formal errancy or a deviation from traditional lyric into hybrid form: “Like Hughes, Keene asks us to think about the queerness of form, beyond or even apart from explicit sexual context” (236). Yet I found it tricky to pin down what makes Hughes’s poetic voice in Montage “a queer reverberation, or echo” of his appropriation of Harlem stoop-gossip rather than his own voice (84). Bennett seems to be connecting Hughes’s suppression of his authorial voice to a definition of queer as “not so much . . . the representation of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender identities as the baffling of sexual or gender identity categories” (21). Does it follow that a poet’s use of appropriated language is queer because it is tantamount to a “baffling” of identity? With Hughes, the answer seems to be yes; Bennett identifies in Montage “not a refusal to tell but a queer effort to tell otherwise” (82). If telling it slant is a crucial part of queer poetic form, does that make O’Hara’s flamboyant and forthright self-gossip less queer? Does Merrill’s quite open discussion of his partnership with David Jackson disqualify him? (For that matter is Emily Dickinson, the authority on telling it slant, queer as well?) In Word of Mouth, the poets’ perceived sexual identities—as gay, lesbian, bisexual, polyamorous—seem a primary qualification for their inclusion. Could the same study be undertaken with poets we don’t perceive as LGBT, if they do similar work “queering” lyric form through gossip?
While it doesn’t address the meta-subject of criticism, Bennett’s book opens up welcome space to think about critics themselves— or perhaps reviewers is the better word—as performing something akin gossip in their writings and talks, trashing certain poets’ reputations, lifting others into the fold. With an appealing subject and insightful readings, Bennett’s book has the benefit of opening up many such areas for speculation and study, while announcing the emergence of a capable and exacting critical voice into the conversation.
Footnotes
Christopher Schmidt is professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York and City University of New York’s Graduate Center’s MA program in liberal studies. He is the author of The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and The Next in Line (Slope, 2008). He has published articles on Vik Muniz and Andy Warhol, and reviews of Tirza True Latimer’s Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art and Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing. He is the project director for a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities for “Global Cities: Diaspora and Cosmopolis,” Humanities Initiatives at Community Colleges, 2015–2018. He is currently writing a critical-creative piece on Elizabeth Bishop, Roberto Burle Marx, and landscape representation in mid-century Brazil.