Given the extent to which queer writers have played starring roles in most of what we think about when we think about the representative movements and innovations of modern American poetry, this chapter takes up the question of the association between poetry and queerness, asking how the aesthetic invention that characterizes modern American poetry might be related to the expressive capacities of sexuality. My limited and speculative response to this question focuses on how poets, and particular poems, have exploited the queer affordances of the lyric genre. The historical rhyme between the “queer” and the “poet” across the first half of the twentieth century evinces how the uneasy consolidation of aberrant sexual practices into modern homosexual identity coincides with the uneasy consolidation of poetry, in all its diversity, into a particular understanding of the lyric. If the twentieth century presents the gradual conflation of poetry and lyric, modern queer poets found in the lyric’s shared set of expectations a means of living within the social and its reductive demands for visibility, intelligibility, and transparency, while still holding space for the strange or unknowable.

In this chapter, I argue that Asian American modernists Yone Noguchi, Sadakichi Hartmann, and José Garcia Villa experimented with the orientalist styles that were made popular by poets Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. Writing during the period of Asian exclusion in the USA (1882-1946), these three poets responded to the ideological contradictions between elitism and universalism that were present in Whitman’s and Pound’s poetry by calling for a more democratic and egalitarian America. Noguchi’s and Hartmann’s Japanese American haiku and tanka and Villa’s style of “reversed consonance” — “a new method of rhyming…which has never been used in the history of English poetry” — also articulate a queer diaspora that exposes heteronormative structures of power and calls on the USA to be more inclusive of racial and gay others. They do so by using nonbinary motifs in their poetry which critique the binary structure of racial exclusion: native/foreign. These nonbinary motifs are what theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call “rhizomatic,” which is a theoretic concept that organizes ideas through nonhierarchical multiplicities. The rhizomes of their poetry are composed of “deterritorializing” the normativity of Asian exclusion and heterosexuality and “reterritorializing” the American landscape through inclusion. Despite their politics of inclusion, their works problematically objectify women.