Mere Horizon: The Form of Desire in John Keene’s Poetics

I.

"Dark to Themselves," the eponymous poem of the sixth section of John Keene's Punks, begins with a command, which also serves as an ars poetica:"Invent, experiment: chaos . . . / Liberate the dissonance without killing // the blues."1 This dialectical interplay between "the dissonance" and "the blues," between avant-garde abandon and pure pathos, characterizes Keene's oeuvre. In his refusal to choose one in favor of the other, Keene expertly threads the line between both, and in so doing yields a singular voice and style. His is a poetics of invention, steadfastly committed to "shaking form apart,"2 "deforming it and reforming it . . . unsettling it and resetting it to exploit the cuts and ply them, try them."3 Traversing genres, modes, mediums, personae, and discursive registers, Keene approaches language as the raw material for explorations of the innumerable forms and functions of Blackness. His formal and generic promiscuity is rivaled only by his historico-archival breadth and rigor. What unifies Keene's corpus, across its various and varied preoccupations, is its unwavering experimentalism; its musicality, wit, and willingness to push past the limitations of language toward the chaotic, the unknown.

Punks brings all of this to bear on a wide array of subjects, displaying a dexterous eclecticism characteristic of Keene. While Punks is not a collected works, as an omnibus volume of "New and Selected" poems that spans three decades, its range and scope is significant. Each of its seven sections contains poems which interweave the personal, the conceptual, and the historical, in and through multiple modes and formal approaches: lyrical and post-lyrical; structured and discordant; prosaic and imagistic; pastoral and elegiac. Poems exploring the vicissitudes of Black queer life — sex, friendship, youthful transgressions, love, and loss — are juxtaposed with poetic treatises on Blackness and language, memory, genealogical origins, historical figures, jazz, and the ontology of Blackness. Yet across Keene's meditations on these topics, one consistent concern emerges: desire and its formal qualities.

Throughout Punks, we are met with "desire parsed, down to its constituent elements / to stark cries and unbearable crackling."4 What is revealed in this parsing of desire is a working theory of its contours and modes of operation, pointing to its fundamental imbrication with death in Black queer life. Throughout Punks Keene articulates a blackened mode of desire that manifests not as a futurist longing, but as an immanent deathliness; a desire tethered to death even its most celebratory iterations. In so doing, Keene offers a rejoinder to dominant theorizations of ecstatic queer desire, exemplified by José Muñoz's widely-referenced conception of queerness as a "utopian formation . . . based on an economy of desire and desiring . . . [that] is always directed at that thing that is not yet here, objects and moments that burn with anticipation and promise."5 Queerness as desire, in Muñoz's formulation, is a utopic horizon that grounds a future-oriented, "radical" queer politics, "a queerness that registers as the illumination of a horizon of existence."6   

In contrast, Keene's understanding of desire is rooted in historical memory — the loss of a generation of Black queer men of which Keene was a part, to AIDS — and its continued resonance in the contemporary. Inhabiting this proximity between desire and death produces a singular structure of feeling, which is forcefully rendered in the poem "Elegy: Boston." The poem begins in the throes of memory, presenting us with a speaker reminiscing on a bygone August evening, during which they walked across the Harvard Bridge and reflected upon on friendship that was also something more, something indefinable. The speaker, and the poem, both meditate on impermanence, the belatedness of desire, the repetitive nature of loss. The speaker describes the image of their paramour "dissolving sweetly like a lozenge / on my tongue."7 In reflecting on their relationship this unnamed person, the speaker finds themself overwhelmed: "In like with, not in love with: you. / I already had somebody, what else is there / to do? Suffer, and let the river air it out."8

What initially appears as a conventional lyric lament on the loss of a beloved gradually reveals itself as a meditation on the structure of desire when the poem shifts to the present tense for the speaker to ask,

Here, the specific cause of the present absence of the speaker's object of desire is not revealed directly, but through implication: "KS" — Kaposi's Sarcoma — and the antiviral medication Acyclovir invoke the specter of AIDS death. Presented in list form, alongside the mundanity of "deleted emails," the markers of AIDS and its cataclysmic loss register alongside and among many quotidian moments: appearing as if by free association, in imagistic impressions that mirror the workings of memory with which the poem is concerned. In refusing to provide a spectacularized account of loss to AIDS, the poem points to its ordinariness — how the loss it signals, though very particular and hard-felt in this instance, is also inconspicuous, pervasive. After posing this question, the poem shifts tenses yet again, back to the initial moment of reflection in which it began, before returning, finally, to the present:

The qualifier "mere" positions desire, in its multiplicity, as always out of reach, perpetually fading into the background. As mere horizon, desire is rendered almost banal in its (omni)presence. In this, it is distinct from other figurations of desire as a positively articulated, future-oriented horizon — it presents a looking-forward that is not futurist or ecstatic, but tethered to the loss that permeates the past and present.

Of course, desire knows forms other than diminishment. Across Punks, Keene invokes the joyous forward-march of desire, the unbridled ecstasy of sex, the combustive force of lust. Yet even in the glimpses provided of its most ecstatic valences, Keene's poetic desire is tempered by an ever-present, creeping sense of finitude. This is particularly evident in Keene's usage of metaphor and simile, which frequently present us with the co-articulation of desire and decay. Keene describes, at various points: "the half-life of loneliness, hardening in me like sclerosis";11 "longing spreading like a tumor across their years/together";12 "kind of feeling festers like sepsis/ in darker chambers";13 "metastasizing bodies."14 This recurrent use of images of disease and corporeal decomposition to convey an intensity of feeling serves to reinscribe the indelible link between desire and death, particularly in a Black/queer context. Keene's desiring subject is ever on the precipice of dissolution, of engulfment by death, disease, loss. This formal disintegration — the deformation of the body — is presented as endemic to desiring in itself, its underside, present in its manifold permutations. Desire, then, functions as a reminder of the Black (queer) body's degeneration — rather than portending a horizon of future plentitude, it reasserts the subject's dissolution. Desire is dis-ease. Whereas poetic desire conventionally ruminates on "the death of not-having15 — the subject of enunciation's unbridgeable distance from the object of their attention/affection — in Punks, death appears as the subject's intimate possession, one that underlies all desirous encounters, haunting their every gesture.  In this, the text recalls Dagmawi Woubshet's essential work on lyric mourning and the "death-bound lyric subject" found in Black queer poetry of the early AIDS epidemic.16 The poetic mode and structure of feeling that Keene conjures can be read as a specifically Black queer relation to deathliness and/as desire.

This sense of desire's admixture with dissolution is further dramatized in "Phone Book," a poem in which the ostensibly euphoric flow of queer sociality is consistently punctuated by deathliness. Taking the form of an abecedarian, the poem peruses the names and fortunes of various men, from A-Z (as if flipping through the titular phone book):

The assonant end-rhyme and identical syllabic stresses that appear in the opening couplet — "boarding a plane" and "cratered his brains" — lend the poem a playfulness that starkly contrasts with the subject matter, creating a palpable tonal dissonance. This end-rhyme scheme reappears in various couplets (though it is not consistently held throughout the entire poem). This tonal dissonance mirrors the poem's thematic undertones: "The folly" of black queer existence — the fun shade, the messy parties, the butch queens, the kikis, the torrid love affairs — cannot be extricated from "the terror" — the hospital beds, the unyielding mourning, "the quarry of meds," the burnouts; they are one in the same. The jaunty rhythmicality of the poem juxtaposed with the varied, terrible fates that the men described are subject to — death, disease, addiction, loss, the folly and the terror — can be read as a meta-commentary on the conditions of black queer sociality as such, a mode of living marked by death, in which death's reach knows no bounds: "in any light, trust, the dead can see." This is given in the very form of the poem — as Eugenie Brinkema notes of abecedaria, "the alphabet itself bequeaths the certainty of death that it each time, differently, and yet predictably, names."18 In its progression from "A" to "Z," the poem breaks from the explicit naming of each letter as in the opening line, and instead lets the names of each man stand for themselves, metonymically. However, "Z" appears twice: "Zachary, the Rolodex / Z." The line break between "rolodex" and "Z" reiterates the poem's conscription within the linearity of the alphabet — from "A" to "Z''; "Z" here signifies both the end of the poem's telos and the mark of death, which was always foretold.

II.

What if desire — deathly, ravenous — were a poem?

In "Osmotics," the speaker states,

Here, desire itself is the architect of poetic form, the poet a vessel for its diffusion and construction. Poetry, in other words, is a mode and means of desiring; desire is imbued in the structure of poetry, immanent to poetic language, written on the letter. The letters, the means of articulation, are saturated with desire, and as such they point to an oblivion that is always already on the horizon, that inheres in language itself.

As much as desire and its aforementioned "constituent elements" figure as thematic motifs in Keene's work, ascertainable at the level of content, might it also be evident in the form and shape of his poems, at their syntactical and prosodic levels of enunciation? Might one read Keene's approach to the line — its de/formation, its perpetual fracturing — as a method of theorizing the deathly machinations of desire? How does one's approach to reading Keene's work shift when thought from this lens? These questions are admittedly very speculative, but I would contend that considering desire a question of form, a suggestion latent in the very architecture of his poems, Keene's experimentalism takes on another tenor: his formal daring is where a theory of desire manifests as practice: "one form is bent over another, bowing, ramming, grunting so hard / it seems that . . . the bottom will crumple."20 Desire, then, might be seen as signaling a mode of putting so much pressure on form that it continually threatens to break apart, to "crumple" under the weight of its own inventiveness.

This formal tendency is evident in Keene's other work as well. In the collaborative text Seismosis, Keene's poetry appears alongside various line drawings by the visual artist and poet Christopher Stackhouse. What emerges in the encounter between them is not the standard ekphrastic relation between image and text — wherein the text aims at an impossible capture of the image through poetic language's powers of description — but something far more symbiotic: Keene's poetic lines and voices unravel and fracture, mirroring the chaos of Stackhouse's lines. The distinction between image and text is destabilized. Like Stackhouse, Keene rejects the figural, rejects the groundedness of lyric subjectivity, embracing abstraction and disintegration, testing the very limits of poetic form. Perhaps this is desire at work:

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Tyrone S. Palmer is Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University, where he teaches courses on Black critical theory, poetics, and popular culture. His previous scholarly work has been published in Qui Parle, Critical Ethnic Studies, TOPIA, and The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures. Additionally, he has published poetry and cultural criticism in venues such as Gawker, Callaloo, The Offing, and The New Inquiry. 

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