Delta Decadent Poetry

Delta Decadent Poetry

“The ability to translate
unconscious forces into
clear articulations of
contextual consciousness”
—Catherine Kodat,
“Unhistoricizing Faulkner,”
Faulkner’s Sexualities

unhistoricist—
poetic compositions
don’t rescue gay texts.

they don’t make gay texts—
more beautiful, more subtly
sophisticated.
_____________________________

“The dramatic parody
and philosophical
nonsense—the
bulging prose and
crude, idiosyncratic
symbolism”—Eric
Sundquist, House Divided

queer reading/writing—
textual revelations
bringing into light.

less-traveled paths thru—
imaginative landscapes
going nowhere fast.
______________________

“A search for a way
to say things that
had not been said”
—Eric Sundquist,
House Divided

delta poetry—
poems more like short stories
than southern novels.

decadent sketches—
nothing’s clear like closure or
representation.
________________

“Only in writing
explicitly about
racial history did
Faulkner become
great”—Catherine
Kodat, ”Unhistoricizing
Faulkner, ”Faulkner’s
Sexualities

queer faulkner poems—
violence, mystery &
decadent desire.

delta poems are—
decadent fantasies not
representations.
_________________________

“Faulkner’s writing
itself as a ‘house
divided’, torn between
a virtuous engagement
with historically derived
literary material and an
eccentric fascination with
experimental and modernist
ideas”—Catherine Kodat,
”Unhistoricizing Faulkner,”
Faulkner’s Sexualities

they don’t culminate—
in a decision nor do
they go anywhere:

they’re not prototypes—
studies for later novels
delta lit models.
_______________________

“The text not homophobic,
homophilic or closeted—
but rather acknowledging
the enigmatic uncontrollable
nature of sexual desire.”
Catherine Kodat, ”Unhistoricizing
Faulkner,” Faulkner’s Sexualities

tres surrealist—
queer linguistic slippages
sexual fantasy.

expanding implied—
miscegenational Other
dinge ménage a trois.
__________________________

“Perversity is an
unhistoricist way of
formulating historicity.”
Catherine Kodat, ”Unhistoricizing
Faulkner,” Faulkner’s Sexualities

younger kid brother—
sketches of southern sex life
older gay brother.

queer texts operate—
in ways both historical,
unhistorical.