PCOET also troubles distinctions between oral and written aesthetics in poetry. I find the title of the volume particularly challenging to say out loud, except as something like “pee see owe it”. I can just about manage “p’ck-owe-it”. Whatever way I choose to pronounce it out loud, though, I have to retune the way I think about the relation between how a word looks on the page, and how it is pronounced in the voicebox. I also have to flick through possible alternative scrambles and variations in my mind (and on search engines): “Pecto”, i.e. “pectus”, meaning relating to the chest or the heart, “Pocet[a]”, which means “start” in Spanish, “copt”, which might gesture towards the Coptic language. Or perhaps it’s just a variant / deviant of “poc[k]et” – a little bundle or space to store. There is a sense in which this is a Brechtian technique of defamiliarization. I’m continually in the position of trying to normalise the writing into something I can understand, to make it familiar, but I’m continually frustrated in this attempt, by all the language’s many other possibilities, and by the peculiarity of what I’m reading/saying. Even words and phrases from Melnick’s poetry that are instantly absorbable into my understanding of English vocabularies, such as “but not” and “tone ago” (15), start to seem strange. What I think those words mean, isn’t the only thing they mean in this context, the whole process of reading has been retuned so that “tone ago” also suggests “ton”, “tonnage” “ego”, “not”, “agotada” (Spanish for exhausted). Indeed, near homophones such as “Tobago”, “Tomato” also make themselves heard. This process, which is a sort of supercharging of the interlinked acts of reading and articulating, becomes one of the most thrilling aspects of PCOET as text. Reading PCOET is a performance (even more than other texts). It demands participation where the reader becomes acutely aware of what they are doing, and that they are doing something.
Sedgwick and Andrew Jackson, in the introduction to Performativity and Performance, trace the interlinkings between philosophical performativity and theatrical performance. Through analysis of JL Austin’s sidestepping theatrically performed utterances (and it should be noted, poetically performed utterances too!) for its “parasitic” and “etiolated” (3) qualities, Sedgwick and Jackson demonstrate that the performative is “from its inception infected by queerness” (5), through Austin’s choice of imagery, and that the question “of when and how is saying something doing something” (5) becomes freighted with queer and homosexual politics. Their volume seeks to address “the aptitude of the explicit performative for mobilizing and epitomizing such transformative effects on interlocutory space that makes it almost irresistible- in the face of a lot of discouragement from Austin himself- to associate it with theatrical performance” (15). In what ways is the “C” in PCOET performative? In what way does the “C” constitute an act that occurs in the language itself? Is the “C” parasitic? Does the “C” queer the word “Poet”? All these questions immediately confront the reader of Melnick’s book, as they figure out a relation to that strange “C” which signifies and refuses to signify all at once.
In the foreword to the excellent Feminism is Queer: The Intimate Connection Between Queer and Feminist Theory, Mimi Marinucci quotes Krista Benson with a snappy and “delightfully simple explanation that queer theory is the recognition that ‘Shit’s Complicated’”. One reading of PCOET would be similar – stressing perhaps that “language shit’s complicated”. In its lexical and graphemic play, that is certainly one of the possible communications of PCOET. It is in its dramatisation of questions of legibility that PCOET’s radical queer poetics and radical electrate possibilities become entwined. If this queer reading of PCOET should seem enforced for texts that so redirect attention away from straightforward understandings of identity, voice and expression, it should be noted that Melnick’s self-penned biographical note for Ron Silliman’s anthology In The American Tree suggests an explicit linking and nomadic, anti-professional entwining of queer writing: “The poet’s politics are left, his sexual orientation gay, his family Jewish. He has wandered much, e.g. the France, Greece and Spain (whence his mother’s ancestors emigrated in 1942) As of this writing, he has never held a job longer than a year and a half at a stretch” (602). In Homographesis, Lee Edelman has written on textuality as an inextricable constituent of queer experience, necessitated and to some extent written by the process of rigidification of categorisation of gay sexuality into a “regulatory identity”, and its corresponding processes of “social control” (13):
Homosexuals, in other words, were not only conceptualized in terms of a radically potent, if negatively charged, relation to signifying practices, but also subjected to a cultural imperative that viewed them as inherently textual-as bodies that might well bear a “hallmark” that could, and must, be read. (6)
Edelman’s argument is that around the time that homosexual practices become fixed and categorised into constituting an identity, i.e. in the “transformation from a reading of the subject's relation to sexuality as contingent or metonymic to a reading in which sexuality is reinterpreted as essential or metaphoric” (8), it became necessary for patriarchal heteronormativity to make homosexuality into something de-codable, legible, different, identifiable, in order to protect heterosexualised maleness and masculinity from homosexual masculinity, for which it might pass:
The imperative to differentiate categorically between hetero- and homo-sexualities serves the dominant “heterosexual” principle of an essential (and oppositional) identity while homosexuality would introduce difference or heterogeneity into what passes for the same. Where heterosexuality, in other words, seeks to assure the sameness or purity internal to the categorical “opposites” of anatomical “sex” by insisting that relations of desire must testify to a difference only imaginable outside, and thus “between”; those two “natural,” “self-evident” categories, homosexuality would multiply the differences that desire can apprehend in ways that menace the internal coherence of the sexed identities that the order of heterosexuality demands. (12)
It might seem that the realities Edelman’s argument emerged from, published as it was in the 1990s, are distinct from contemporary realities, following the successes of some queer communities in creating positive, affirmative political strategies to increase visibility, reduce discrimination, and achieve some legal equalities. (Even while these are continually under threat of push-back.) However, once one starts to unravel some of the language around homosexual, transgender and gender-non-conforming communities, both generated from within those communities, and imposed from homophobic and transphobic society, it becomes clear that the relation of queerness to textuality, to legibility, is as heightened as ever. The concept of the “gaydar”, often ironically or not-ironically invoked in gay and lesbian communities, is one example of how this idea of legibility, of reading the signs that mark the differences of homosexual practice. Indeed, they become all the more heightened in a culture where this form of legibility is made manifest through apps and social media. In a recent (November 2018) interview with Rolling Stone magazine, the 20 year old pop star Shawn Mendes opened up about their relation to this heteronormative (although equally practiced by homophobic and homosexual communities) demand to be marked in some way by sexuality:
