Ghostly Queer Fathers

‘My friend, another giant of the world sleeps / for good’, Jimin Seo writes of his teacher, Richard Howard (1929–2022), in one of OSSIA’s fifteen poems on and to the recently deceased poet and translator. These poems recall what has since the 1970s been a tradition in gay American poetry: writing poems to Howard in the latter’s signature epistolary style, inaugurated by students and friends such as Rudy Kikel and Paul Monette, following Howard’s own famous address to Hart Crane, ‘Decades’ (1976). Placing himself in this lineage, Seo imitates Howard’s playful urbanity in a number of touching poems (e.g. ‘Richard Asks to Sort Books Together’), which, like their forebears, also allow him to stage his proximity to a great man of letters. He does so sometimes with the embarrassing familiarity of a groupie, sometimes with tough pathos, as in his evocations of Howard’s final years of dementia (‘Do I explain my doddering, / pocked as my brain is by the friction of casting / after my own name?’).

Seo also takes up Howard’s interest in translation, although here in a mode more informed by an un-Howardian poetics of dispersal and opacity. Poems in Korean, about and in the voice of the poet’s mother (‘My son, who builds my body with poetry, are you less unhappy when you turn me into a foreign goddess?’), alternate with the poems in English where Howard appears as a ghostly queer father (‘by a sidelong grammar of paternity’, as Howard said of and to Crane). These poems, some of which have counterparts ...