Liu

Ashley mentions below that “we are more apt to attach someone’s sexuality to their identity if they are outside of the ‘norm’ of heterosexual society. We probably wouldn’t think to ask Liu how his sexuality affected his writing if he was a heterosexual man.”

So how does knowing Liu is gay affect my reading of “More Than Half the Leaves Already Down”? Well, despite knowing that and despite trying to read the poem through an LGBT lens, I see no evidence of homosexuality in it. The speaker and the addressed could be male or female, gay or straight. And only a few phrases, “such romantic / foreplay” and “This was the dance I had always wanted,” indicate an erotic relationship between the two characters. Without those, the poem could just as likely be describing a homosocial or heterosocial relationship as it could be referring to an erotic one. Well, I guess some of the words in the canoeing images have sort of erotic connotations: “sudden tenderness. . . . [E]ach stroke suspended . . . our bodies leaning.” Again, though, the genders of the characters are undefined, and inconsequential, as far as I can tell. Gender and sexual preference don’t seem to matter much to the poem, which appears to me to be about finding joy and love in spite of death and hardship.

(Unrelated to LGBT theory, here’s something I really like about “The Quilt”: it has some great line breaks. For instance, take a look at the last four stanzas, how the line breaks add so much depth to a single sentence. If the sentence were prose, it would read, “That story has not changed, but we will go on loving, embracing our own grief, our lives split open like a book where the names are written.” But with line breaks, “That story // has not changed, but we will” becomes “but we will / go on loving, embracing,” which becomes “embracing // our own grief, our lives.” Very cool.)