The theme of this year\u2019s LGBT+ History Month is \u2018Body, Mind, Spirit.\u2019 To celebrate and recognize this, the School of English\u2019s Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Writing has put together a list of poems available online\u2014written by LGBT+ poets\u2014that explore and reflect these themes.\n<\/p>\n
Whether you\u2019re a budding LGBT+ poet or simply a reader looking to engage with LGBT+ poetry, this list offers access to a range of voices each articulating individual experiences of what mind, body and spirit can mean.<\/p>\n
Small Talk<\/em><\/a> by Alok Vaid-Menon, an Indian-American gender-non-conforming transfeminine writer and performance artist (they\/them), is a prose poem about interconnectedness, forms of relation and the ways in which we create ourselves through language.<\/p>\n \u201cas if language is all that we are. i believe that we are more than language.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0<\/em>I Sing the Body Electric<\/em><\/a> by nineteenth century American poet Walt Whitman (he\/him) is a joyful celebration of the human body in all its forms and constituent parts; an exuberant and triumphant love-letter to the human corporeal form.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cThe lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and <\/em>clean,<\/em> \/ The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n our happiness<\/em><\/a> by queer American poet Eileen Myles (they\/them) captures a reflective moment of quotidian beauty. A poem of quiet connection, it recreates in short lines of sparing, unworked language, the remarkable in the everyday and the contentment to be found in small, shared human intimacies.<\/p>\n \u201clater we stayed<\/em> \/ in the darkened \/ apt. you sick \/ in bed & me \/ writing ambitiously \/ by candle light \/ in thin blue\/ books\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n To the Man Who Shouted \u201cI Like Pork Fried Rice\u201d at Me on the Street<\/em><\/a> by queer Korean-American poet Franny Choi (she\/her) is a ruthless critique of the racialized objectification and sexualized exoticization of Asian women. Reflecting back, with fierce irony, a multitude of stereotypes and tropes about women\u2014and Asian women in particular\u2014the poem is a powerful reclamation of identity from the mire of Western patriarchy.<\/p>\n \u201ctaste like<\/em>\u00a0dried squid. lips puffy \/ with salt. lips brimming \/ with foreign so call <\/em>me \/ pork. curly-tailed obscenity \/ been playing in the mud. dirty meat.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Read ‘Mind’<\/a>\u00a0and ‘Spirit’<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The theme of this year\u2019s LGBT+ History Month is \u2018Body, Mind, Spirit.\u2019 To celebrate and recognize this, the School of English\u2019s Centre for Gender, Sexuality … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74034,"featured_media":3418,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21640,230630,124,26567],"tags":[239864,22926,1225],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3403"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3403"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3488,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3403\/revisions\/3488"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}