The Shore

by Chris Nealon

Overview

The five poem-essays of Chris Nealon's The Shore give space and voice to the complexity of contemporary life, admitting bafflement and dismay but also creating openings for indiscreet hope. Queer and anti-capitalist, they urge us not to be ruled by our fears, while always ethically navigating the forces—race, class, age, gender, and others—that put us each in different places of power. Nimbly exploring connections among beauty, friendship, and politics, The Shore gives our era of crisis a language at once vernacular and philosophical, in a form that's both teeming and fluid.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940696980
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Chris Nealon is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of two books of literary criticism, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke, 2001) and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (Harvard, 2011), as well as three earlier books of poetry: The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009), and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014). He lives in Washington, DC.

Read an Excerpt

There's a river running backward through this poem to the sources of literature

You'd think that would be a good thing

But I take seriously that beauty is the beginning of terror, in a quarreling way

I do think beauty halfway staves off terror with forms, with dance, with symbols,

And I know we're never far from terror—

But here's the thing: even saying that sounds right-wing

And that's because the right has always practiced terror to insist that we can never get away from it

I say this as a homosexual

Terror—that's the meaning of male homophobia—

It's not a fear of buttfucking, please—it's the punishment of male insouciance, male lightness, a bodily comportment and a vocal inflection that gets heard as

everything is beautiful everything is fine

Those hammer-blows administered to gay boys' skulls—they say NO—we are not free from violence—this is not Arcadia—how dare you flounce around—

So when my colleagues critique The Romantic Symbol, critique the Romantics, for peddling false consolation—

When the modernists champion objectivity, and unsymbolizable allegory,

Because we know better than to trust in pretty symbols but keep forgetting,

Because we need art to remind us that life is hard,

I wonder—

Who are we talking to? I mean three cheers for allegory

But there's a gossamer, a hollow way of symbols, isn't there

There's a way a beaten body looks in silk

I didn't become a professor so I could "demystify" my students

I didn't kiss that boy in 1987 because I'd forgotten terror

Maybe Rilke writing on the dime of the House of Thurn and Taxis knew this

Maybe he didn't just mean, whoa, those angels are intense

Either way when I say "beauty" I don't mean razzle-dazzle, and I don't mean the crucifixion

When I say "terror" I don't mean the Titans

There's a river running backward through this poem to the sources of our struggle with each other

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

The Victorious Ones

You Surround Me

White Meadows

The Shore

Last Glimpse

Editorial Reviews

Political poetry might bring to mind the activist tone of Denise Levertov or the cadenced rhetoric of Gil Scott-Heron. Nealon's version is a more playful and self-aware reverie, finding political unease in the passing thought.
—Johns Hopkins Magazine

Reading Nealon, one feels as though Homer has been reincarnated in sound bites, or as though Coleridge has succeeded in reviving the song of the damsel with her dulcimer, and we realize it is both as delightful and as laughable as we could have imagined. Nealon is both god and jester, beckoning us close even as he warns us to beware.
—The Volta

From the Publisher