Bathroom Songs

Book excerpt: Bathroom Songs: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet is the first book of essays to consider the poetry of one of the twentieth- and early twenty-first-century's most important literary, affect, and queer theorists. Acclaimed as one of the "truly innovative" poets of her generation, by Maud Ellmann, Sedgwick's work as a poet is, perhaps, less well known, but is no less compelling than her ground-breaking trilogy of queer theoretical texts: Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Epistemology of the Closet, and Tendencies. The book includes seven, specially commissioned essays considering Sedgwick's published poetry and writing about poets, by Angus Brown, Meg Boulton, Mary Baine Campbell, Jason Edwards, Kathryn R. Kent, Monica Pearl, and Benjamin Westwood, that range across the complete range of Sedgwick's work, from her earliest published lyrics through her first collection of poetry, Fat Art, Thin Art, to her part-haiku, part-prose autobiography, A Dialogue on Love, and beyond. In addition, the book contains over forty of Sedgwick's previously uncollected poems, ranging from her earliest poem on T.E. Lawrence to her final poem 'Death', introduced and contextualized in a second essay by Edwards. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Part I. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet Jason Edwards - Introduction: Bathroom Songs? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet Angus Connell Brown - Look with Your Hands Ben Westwood - The Abject Animal Poetics of 'The Warm Decembers' Kathryn R. Kent - Eve's Muse Mary Baine Campbell - 'Shyly / as a big sister I would yearn / to trace its avocations', or, Who's the Muse? Monica Pearl - Queer Therapy: On the Couch with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Meg Boulton - Waiting in the Dark: Some Musings on Sedgwick's Performative(s) Part II. The Uncollected Poems Jason Edwards - Introduction: Someday We'll Look Back with Pleasure Even on is: Sedgwick's Uncollected Poems Poems Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit - Death - Bathroom Song - Pandas in Trees - Untitled (Blake panda poems) - Tru-Cut - Valentine - 2/81 - Lost Letter - The Palimpsest - Explicit - Hank Williams and a Cat - Jimmy Lane - Jukebox - Die Sommernacht hat mir's angetan - Phantom Limb - Two P.O.W. Suicides - Once There Was a Way to Get Back Homeward - The Ring of Fire - The Prince of Love in the Desert Night - Artery - A Death by Water - Yellow Toes - Soutine - Another Poem from the Creaking Bed - Cain - The City and Man - Lullaby - No More Dusk - Ribs of Steel - To a Friend - When in Minute Script - To a Swimmer - Untitled ('Wonder no more upon the mysteries') - From an Ending for ' e Triumph of Life' - T.E. Lawrence and the Old Man, His Imagined Tormentor - Movie Party, Telluride House, Ithaca, New York - Falling in Love over The Seven Pillars - Calling Overseas - What the Poet ought And What She Found in the Telluride Files: - Epilogue: Teachers and Lovers - The Last Poem of Yv*r W*nt*rs - Saul at Jeshimon [First Variant] - Saul at Jeshimon [Second Variant] - Siegfried Rex von Munthe, Soldier and Poet, Killed December, 1939, on the German Battleship Graf Spee - Lawrence Reads La Morte D'Arthur in the Desert