A groundbreaking new history of urban cruising through the lenses
of urban poets The Poetics of Cruising explores the relationship
between cruising, photography, and the visual in the work of
leading poets, from Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century to
Eileen Myles in the twenty-first. What is it that happens, asks
Jack Parlett, and what is it that is sought, in this often
transient moment of perception we call cruising, this perceptual
arena where acts of looking between strangers are intensified and
eroticized? Parlett believes that this moment is not only optical
in nature but visual: a mode of looking that warrants comparison
with the ways in which we behold still and moving images. Whether
it's Whitman's fixation with daguerreotypes, Langston Hughes's
hybrid photographic works, or Frank O'Hara's love of Hollywood
movie stars, argues Parlett, the history of poets cruising abounds
with this intermingling between the verbal and the visual, the
passing and the fixed. To look at someone in the act of cruising,
this history suggests, is to capture, consider, and aestheticize,
amid the flux and instantaneity of urban time. But it is also to
reveal the ambivalence at the heart of this erotic search, where
power may be unevenly distributed across glances, and gendered and
racialized bodies are marked. Thus, in identifying for the first
time this confluence of cruising, poetry, and visual culture,
Parlett concludes that the visual erotic economy associated with
gay cruising today, exemplified by the photographic grid of an app
like Grindr, is not a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. Innovative,
astute, and highly readable, and drawing on compelling archival
material, The Poetics of Cruising is a must for scholars of queer
and LGBTQ literature and culture, modern and contemporary poetry,
visual studies, and the history of sexuality.
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