Davy Knittle

Queer Urban Poetics

On Erica Hunt’s 'Arcade': control / temporality / the past in the present

Erica Hunt reading the Frank O'Hara poem "Music" at The Poetry Project's Fiftieth Anniversary celebration of 'Lunch Poems.'

In Arcade, poet Erica Hunt’s 1996 collection and collaboration with the artist Alison Saar, the speaker describes herself as moving, through her stuckness and frustration, “against bureaucratic seizures of the possible.”[1] The collection articulates a poetics of refusal, sometimes from a woman-identified subject position, sometimes as a woman of color, or as a mother of color. In other moments, as in the book’s title poem, the speaker’s identity is undisclosed.

On Frank O'Hara’s Lunch Poems / queer / attention

In Michel De Certeau’s classic essay “Walking in the City,” he describes walking as composition and argues that walkers’ “bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it.”[1] Frank O’Hara’s 1964 collection, Lunch Poems, produces a textual account of his speaker’s walking, an account that queerly articulates the city by means of the presences and absences of what he pays attention to and records. O’Hara’s city in the poems is a queer assemblage created by his speaker (who is commonly read as O’Hara), out of his quotidian procedures of moving through and “writing” the city by compiling what he sees into a gloss on what his city is. 

In Michel De Certeau’s classic essay “Walking in the City,” he describes walking as composition and argues that walkers’ “bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it.”[1] Frank O’Hara’s 1964 collection, Lunch Poems, produces a textual account of his speaker’s walking, an account that queerly articulates the city by means of the presences and ab

On Rachel Levitsky's 'Neighbor': scale / urban systems / representation

Rachel Levitsky’s 2009 poetry collection, Neighbor, takes up the relationship between neighbors as it occurs between people in an apartment building who share walls and floors, but also as it affords other intimacies. Levitsky’s figure of the neighbor contains the idea of the neighbor (a person who lives near you, and whose proximity can produce a mutual, if fragmentary, knowledge of one another’s quotidian lives) alongside neighborliness at a range of competing and simultaneous scales. 

Rachel Levitsky’s 2009 poetry collection, Neighbor, takes up the relationship between neighbors as it occurs between people in an apartment building who share walls and floors, but also as it affords other intimacies. Levitsky’s figure of the neighbor contains the idea of the neighbor (a person who lives near you, and whose proximity can produce a mutual, if fragmentary, knowledge of one another’s quotidian lives) alongside neighborliness at a range of competing and simultaneous scales. In one poem called “Neighbor,” Levitsky writes,

On Susan Landers's 'Franklinstein': queer / neighborhood / preservation

It’s often the closing thoughts of critical works in and around urban history that show the author at their most utopian.

Bodies-cities part 1: Queering geographic information

What are the normative units of urban space? For residents, among them are the neighborhood and the block, the street and the school catchment. For planners, they include the census tract and the district, the zip code and the precinct. In a recent article in Area, “Crossing Over into Neighbourhoods of the Body: Urban Territories, Borders and Lesbian-Queer Bodies in New York City,” geographer Jen Jack Gieseking borrows Gloria Anzaldúa’s usage of “borders” and “crossing over” to push against the existing containers for sorting urban space and the bodies that use it. Gieseking writes: “‘Crossing over’ then queers the geographic imagination of cities; when queered, urban territories ebb and flow and are not fixed to boundaries defined by the elite and/or propertied” (Gieseking 263).