Resilience and Fortitude Prevail in “Gay Poems for Red States” https://ift.tt/eSoZxsQ
In March 2023, Republican lawmakers in Kentucky passed bill SB 150, which provides teachers with the right to refuse to use a student’s preferred pronouns and, among other restrictions, requires doctors who are currently providing medical treatment to transgender people to stop. The headlines resulting from these sweeping decisions echo a statement an administrator once made to Kentucky poet and former teacher Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. – “No one will protect you, including me.”
In Carver’s poetry collection, Gay Poems for Red States, poems with a resilient speaker counter the injustice of legal decisions which affect the LGBTQ community in Kentucky and nationally. They assert that the beauty of life is accessible and possible for everyone and, most significantly, it explores Appalachia’s natural vastness and its history of being an unwelcoming place to anyone identifying as “other.”
The collection’s preface is one that readers should not ignore. In it, the author conveys the necessity for “speaking uncomfortable truth,” which is “never easy and serves only to bring light to darkness.” The preface also attests to how ignorance and legislation threaten an individual’s career and their safety. The author states, “There comes a time when anyone working within a problematic, dysfunctional or toxic system asks themselves if they can continue to resist that system while maintaining dignity and integrity. There comes a time when any minoritized person asks, ‘Am I safe here?’” These statements set the collection’s tone, but they accompany a sad reality: In the education profession in states such as Kentucky, very few places exist for members of the LGBTQ community.
Poems like “Creek” embody an Appalachian voice. The speaker’s personal depths and otherness intertwine with those of the landscape which the poem venerates. The speaker makes statements like, “I became the valley bottom and my holler” and “I am a creek. / I am dangerous.” However, just like Appalachia itself, the speaker remains resilient despite the adversity they face and the external pressure to change. The speaker reflects, “I flood. / I keep on going, probably till the ocean, / and I start at the head of a holler.” Place and environment are integral to the speaker’s – and the poem’s – development. The geographic and topographic shifts that the speaker identifies mirror the personal shifts in identity and self-acceptance.
“Neckbones” bears an authentic voice, one that transports readers into a different place, time and cuisine. It’s a celebration of self and place via food, in the speaker’s case neckbones and gravy. The speaker affectionately describes “mamaw:” “My mamaw wore a red bandana on her head / and played Ralph Stanley when she swept the carpet.” The mamaw figure seems timeless, and her timelessness resonates with how the speaker describes the reliance on another Appalachian staple – gravy – with statements like “Morning or evening, biscuits or beans.” However, they also create a sense of familial and cultural preservation which culminates as the stanza concludes:
Love is enveloping
and everyone knows
that in the mountains
homemade gravy is love.
At first the imagery and message are simple. However, readers can reach a different conclusion: the mamaw accepts the speaker despite the speaker’s queerness; she shows her love and acceptance via a culinary act and mountain culture staple.
In the context of nationwide book bans in school libraries, which have primarily targeted BIPOC and LGBTQ literature, the poem “Library” serves as a reminder about the educational portals school libraries open, particularly in rural areas where diversity and multiculturalism are limited. The speaker communicates how reading not only allowed them to transcend place, but also self: “In only a few years’ time I was / a white girl in the fifties whose anger kept her alive.” From this point, the speaker focuses on other marginalized voices – “a sister from Brooklyn who just wanted to be seen” and “a daughter of Chinese immigrants misunderstood by her / disappointed mother.” The specific identification of who the speaker encounters in books attests to the transformative and expansive power of reading – one that a large swath of American society seems to have forgotten.
“Reassurance” reads like a minimalistic, quiet prayer. Consisting of only six lines, it is poignant and direct. The speaker addresses everyone, but clearly identifies those who are “not the same / as everyone else.” The speaker offers hope in the face of adversity. They remind readers that one can “be thankful” while still wanting “things to be better / at the same time.” This message echoes the resilience and fortitude in the collection’s preface. It also reminds readers that the pursuit of positive changes in society are necessary and forever in development.
Gay Poems for Red States possesses a defiant, resilient voice which resounds loudly above the cacophony of hate and backlash permeating discriminatory legislative decisions. Even though it is not overtly a protest collection, this book stands in solidarity against discrimination with other LGBTQ-focused works such as KB Brookins’ Freedom House. The poems also celebrate a place otherwise associated with oppression, racism and discrimination, uplifting the healing aspects of a misunderstood natural landscape historically and greedily stripped of its resources. Gay Poems for Red States is immediate and necessary, and it emerges at a critical point in education, society and publishing.
POETRY Gay Poems for Red States Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.
University Press of Kentucky
Published June 6, 2023
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