Poetry: “Queer” by Frank Bidart

September 7, 2017 Mike Zonta 1 Comment

Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.

Everybody already knows everything

so you can
lie to them. That’s what they want.

But lie to yourself, what you will

lose is yourself. Then you
turn into them.

For each gay kid whose adolescence

was America in the forties or fifties
the primary, the crucial

scenario

forever is coming out—
or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not.

Involuted velleities of self-erasure.

Quickly after my parents
died, I came out. Foundational narrative

designed to confer existence.

If I had managed to come out to my
mother, she would have blamed not

me, but herself.

The door through which you were shoved out
into the light

was self-loathing and terror.

Thank you, terror!

You learned early that adults’ genteel
fantasies about human life

were not, for you, life. You think sex

is a knife
driven into you to teach you that.

Frank Bidart

Frank Bidart who was born in California in 1939, was educated at the University of California at Riverside, and at Harvard University, and has taught at Wellesley College in Massachusetts since 1972.

For the past nine years he’s been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets .

(Submitted by Michael Kelly)

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One thought on “Poetry: “Queer” by Frank Bidart”

Michael Kelly says:

September 7, 2017 at 11:54 am

Thanks Mike for posting the full poem. The excerpt had an impact and was personally meaningful to that queer self of me.
The whole poem is much more dramatic and had more punch. However, it’s more about him; I emphasize.
Michael

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— Peter Solomon in The Lost Symbol

“Have an open-mind, but don’t let your brains fall out.”
— Jacob Needleman

“When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.”
— Jacob Needleman in his new book What is God?

“A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.”
— G.K. Chesterton

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only at night.”
— Edgar Allan Poe

“Give thanks to unknown blessings already on their way.”
— Native American proverb at cafe in San Francisco

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
–e.e. cummings

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Bathtub Bulletin

Poetry: “Queer” by Frank Bidart

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Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more