Mutual Need and Equal Risk

Dodie Bellamy’s writing is like a séance. Spirits are there, even if they aren’t really there, sharing the text, sometimes the same page, with living bodies—libidinal, desiring, and desirous bodies. Together they engender an ectoplasm of language and images. Bellamy’s writing is neither one thing nor the other: it is at once prose and poetry, essayistic and fictional; it adheres to no single genre and embraces trash culture and literary theory; it has little use for gender orthodoxy. Bellamy the writer-medium is self-effacing and inquisitive and writes frequently from a place of doubt or failure. This is how you know it’s not just her knees bumping the underside of the table. 

She was born in North Hammond, Indiana, in 1951 and arrived in San Francisco from the Midwest in 1978. She was already writing poetry and found her way into poet Kathleen Fraser’s writing workshops at San Francisco State University. In 1981, Fraser directed her to Small Press Traffic, a storefront literary arts center in the Mission District that hosted free workshops conducted by Robert Glück and Bruce Boone. There, Bellamy was introduced to New Narrative, a coterie as much as an approach to writing, one that valued narrative, kitsch, gossip, pop, and confession, especially sexual confession. It was queer and formally agnostic, as Bellamy later recalled in an essay for the Village Voice:

Not for us the simple coming out and falling in love sagas of identity politics, or the expectations of traditional prose, which we saw as logic systems compounding our enslavement to the very definitions we were determined to demolish. The queer writing we envisioned would collapse the boundaries between literary forms and confound the categories of sexuality.

Many figures associated with Small Press Traffic and New Narrative were gay men, and Bellamy found in their work, specifically in its sexual explicitness, a way to liberate writing about female sexuality from objectification. (Bellamy herself has identified as queer.) At the crux of this shakeup was a reimagining of the relationship between writer and reader—“the writer as top, the reader as bottom,” as Bellamy put it. The roles aren’t hierarchical but a power arrangement bound in active, mutual pleasure. Sex in Bellamy’s writing isn’t mere description or a litany of acts; it’s a medium through which other feelings are expressed: eroticism and passion but also humiliation, longing, uncertainty, shame.

In 1981, the same year Bellamy found Small Press Traffic, MTV was launched, Natalie Wood and Jacques Lacan died, and Prince was booed while opening for the Rolling Stones. Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, and the first cases of AIDS were reported in the United States, though Reagan did not publicly utter the word until 1985, after more than 8,000 Americans had died. New Narrative, born of the struggle for gay rights and second-wave feminist politics and poetics, was a bulwark against the Reagan administration and other political and cultural indignities. In The Letters of Mina Harker (1998), Bellamy’s epistolary novel about plague-ridden San Francisco in the 1980s, inspired by Dracula, disorder is transmuted by language: “All that was sick or hysterical about her behavior in day-to-day life could be turned into something valuable through the act of writing.” (And why not? “The monstrous and the formless have as much right as anybody else,” Bellamy wrote.) If Glück and Boone’s workshops were a crucible, they were also a locus of writerly freedom and safety, a place to try out vulnerability and instability, what Bellamy calls “glorious fuckedupness.” As she wrote, “Any student of Bob and Bruce had the exhilaration of participating, on the one hand, at the cutting edge of something entirely new, and also the sheer comfort of the oldest cradle in the world, that of a mother and father creating a world for their young ones.”

The workshops also introduced Bellamy to the writer Kevin Killian. They made an unlikely pair. “He was this weird guy who wrote even weirder poetry and drank too much,” Bellamy later wrote. “Besides, everybody knew he was gay, very gay.” Nonetheless, they married in 1986 and were together until his death from cancer last year—a gay man and a queer woman who were friends, lovers, partners, and collaborators. Over the decades, they helped forge a supportive community of writers in the Bay Area that built on and expanded Glück and Boone’s legacy. Together they edited the literary and art journal Mirage #4/Period(ical) and the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977–1997 (2017), and they were regular fixtures at readings. “About an evening you would say Kevin and Dodie were there,” Eileen Myles has said; critic and curator Glen Helfand once called them a “San Francisco power couple.” Most of Bellamy’s books are dedicated to Killian, and his spirit suffuses her writing. He appears as a literary helpmate; in The TV Sutras (2014), for instance, he advises her to write extra sutras and edit out the weaker ones. “Having been married to me for 26 years,” Bellamy writes, “he knows I’m never as pure as I claim to be.” He also occasionally appears as a character (he is KK in The Letters of Mina Harker, Mina’s prize as she possesses Dodie’s body).

Just as Bellamy reconfigured the relationship between writer and reader, her relationship with Killian capsized categories that typically apply to sex, sexuality, and romantic love. “Sometimes our lovemaking felt like lesbian sex, sometimes like gay sex,” she wrote in an essay about her marriage in 2000, “but it never felt like straight sex … With Kevin, it felt like we were two people in mutual need and at equal risk.” I think of this idea, of mutual need and equal risk, as a scalable metaphor—for personal intimacy, for avant-garde writing (as New Narrative was), and for the gay community in the grip of an untamed plague spread largely by sex. For Bellamy and Killian, sharing the risks was freeing. “We both lived with a lot of secrets,” Killian said in conversation with Bellamy, “perhaps all young people do. Because we were writers, we could give up our shame and our covert sexualities easier than others among our peers, our forebears, and those who have come after us. It’s strange to think that we might have been the luckiest generation to have lived in the twentieth century.”

This conversation between Bellamy and Killian appears in Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind (Semiotext(e), 2020), a new book born out of a year-long series of private discussions and public events at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, in San Francisco, that were informed and inspired by Bellamy’s writing. Edited by Anthony Huberman and Jeanne Gerrity, the book is the first publication devoted to examining Bellamy’s work and ideas and is, appropriately, a collaged endeavor: a loving introduction, a profile of Bellamy, an adapted lecture on her primary concerns, and a more academic essay on vulnerability and vulgarity, as well as a handful of photographs and documents. (Among the latter is Bellamy and Killian’s 1985 declaration of friendship, signed in blood, which states, “We will be together no matter who or what or who comes between us because they can’t touch it.”) The book’s final piece, the dialogue between Bellamy and Killian, was intended as a way to contend with his cancer diagnosis, to imagine life extending out in time ahead of them. Each week for a year they would select a topic and converse, aiming for a thousand words, but by week 8 the plan had faltered; he was on a breathing tube, and she was composing on her own. Still, she conjures his spirit: “I know you sent me this love tonight; you sparked my heart so I wouldn’t feel afraid. I will miss you so much, but I know you’ll never leave me.”

***

Bellamy’s bibliography is slippery, in part because the notion of categories, of genre, is antithetical to her body of work, which thrives on formal and narrative indeterminacy. “Sometimes I feel like a role model without a role,” she has said. “To me, being queer means doing without the false solace of categories.” She found a way to do in prose what she wanted to do in poetry, and yet the energy and voice of poetry are essential to the prose. This intermingling of genres is indicative of her work at large. The Letters of Mina Harker, for instance, is billed as a novel but reads like a book-length lyric poem or epistolary enjambment, and her essays are hybrids of memoir, fiction, letters, and academic inquiry.

The ambiguousness of her bibliography is also a result of small-press publications’ going out of print; of the collection of various shorter works in new publications, some of which have themselves gone out of print (Bellamy’s publication history is, if nothing else, an ode to the dedication and daring of small presses); and of her tendency to pluck passages and fragments of her own writing and resettle them in new work. There is a kind of déjà vu inherent in reading her. “I feel like a pervert from the sex manual my mother hides in her cedar chest,” she writes in Academonia, published by Krupskaya in 2006. That same line recurs in Mother Montage, a chaplet published by Belladonna Press in 2008. Mother Montage entirely comprises passages excerpted from The Letters of Mina Harker, Pink Steam, and Academonia, plus excerpts from the essays “MLA Barf” and “CCA Barf.” These latter pieces were originally delivered as lectures, then combined under the title Barf Manifesto and issued as a chapbook by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2008. In 2015, they were gathered with other essays into When the Sick Rule the World, published by Semiotext(e). Parts of Pink Steam, published by Suspect Thoughts Press in 2004, are drawn from Mina Harker, first published by Hard Press in 1998 and reissued in 2004 by the University of Wisconsin Press, as well as Feminine Hijinx, Bellamy’s first book, published by Hanuman in 1990. (Both Pink Steam and Feminine Hijinx are out of print; when books meant to capture unavailable work are themselves unavailable, the writing feels doubly elusive.) This entanglement is vampiric—the way one piece of writing sticks its fangs into another. Her language “feels hungry,” Huberman writes in Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Minds. It’s part of her larger urge to “take, suck, and consume other people.”

Collage is an essential part of Bellamy’s writing, particularly in her two volumes of prose-poetry: Cunt-Ups, published by Tender Buttons in 2001 and again in 2018, and Cunt Norton, issued by Les Figues Press in 2013. Cunt-Ups contains 21 chapters composed according to William S. Burroughs’s cut-up method, in which source texts are literally dismembered and recombined to form new works. Bellamy soldered together her own texts with those by others; the poems were finished when she had exhausted her own bits of writing. The work is lyrically pornographic. Bodies of indeterminate gender engage in sex that is messy, violent, and frenzied, alien and alienating. Sex acts and desires are disembodied and have taken on a life of their own:

And then your blood will be in my cock in your cunt, your nipples dragging through my totally cliched heart, opening like a big silly, and yes my heart, your balls slapping against me and you would be sucking and meaning.

The violence in the poems stems in part from their manner of production, the act of scissoring through text and reconfiguring the fragments. Bellamy thinks of the cut-up as a male form, but this pornographic Frankensteinian creation is, she says, “my version of Take Back the Night,” a way to upend women’s relegation to the erotic over the pornographic and to object over subject. “The parts that feel best to me are my male difference and my vagina,” she writes in Cunt-Ups.

In Cunt Norton, Bellamy sharpens her blades on the Norton Anthology of Poetry, cutting at the manifold limitations of canon making. She interpolates porno-erotic text into 33 poems, from Chaucer and Spenser through Whitman and Crane to Ginsberg and Ashbery. The lone woman poet and Black poet—Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes—represent the token inclusion of three women and four Black poets in the 1975 edition of the Norton anthology, the latter of whom, the volume’s editors boasted, “amplify the presentation of that tradition.” Bellamy does this wan pluralist Utopia one better by amplifying in the other direction and tokenizing the tokens. In the end, no one is spared, and Bellamy’s cunted canon is hot and deliciously funny:

My cunt won’t stop exclaiming as I receive your secret oar. (Crane)
 
My hard-on is pretty hard but I have to go on. (Frost)
 
My c-ck, it growth beanshoot harde against thy softe side that I may on thee ride til sonne rise morning harde. It is exciting, allas—I am so ful of joye and solas, hot for thee in thy rental car. (Chaucer)
 
My wet beast is a sacrifice—heap my pyre with your goods. (Pound)
 
This season you think your pussy’s in your twat, but it seems to leap up for my L. L. Beanstalk. (Lowell)

Both books depict desire feeding on itself, urgent and unslaked (perhaps unslakable). The language, overheated and explicit and seemingly aleatoric, doesn’t merely express this dervish of desire but mirrors it: fever and devotion become form on the page.

***

In Bellamy’s writing, language and the body are inextricable, if not synonymous, and often the body can express what language cannot. This is especially true in Cunt-Ups, which collapses the distinction again and again.

I used to have brains but now my tongue moves aback and forth along you.
 
My fingers have turned into poems like a very real possibility.
 
You are saying that writing before making it out of our mouths would have to be a kind of fucking, right? If I loved you beyond words, would you kneel?
 
My clit reads the words.

Echoes of Roland Barthes, who, in A Lover’s Discourse, calls language a “skin”: “I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.” The acts done to the body could be a kind of Morse code or sign language. In The Letters of Mina Harker, Bellamy writes, “An affair is my smallest unit of desire if marriage is a sentence, an affair is a word, it may not go anywhere but at least it means—getting laid is a mere jab of punctuation dot dot dot a tremor that wasn’t meant to me but I held it anyway dot dot the body.”

But Mina Harker troubles the enticingly erotic body with death. The book’s body/language is dangerous, formed with the kinds of sentences that will push readers off a balcony and cause “fissures in your reading mind,” as Renee Gladman, a younger writer associated with New Narrative, writes in Calamities (2016). For example, consider how Bellamy negotiates menace, eroticism, and subtle kitsch all in one passage:

Fingers wrap around my neck, pull me towards his whiskered face my cells open like snowflakes and KK says, “I can only push my words so far like a knife through butter, then the butter stops and the knife is still useful, and the knife is so useful.” From my open throat dark rivulets curve; it’s like whispering to oneself and listening at the same time I lie back and he ravages me like the Amazon rain forest.

Bellamy once referred to Mina Harker as “the text of a body at war.” As a reimagined tale of Bram Stoker’s character Mina, who is bitten by Dracula, it strikes me as a narrative in which death is liberated from the act of dying; a wishful reimagining of AIDS, too, perhaps—writing as a way to hold lost friends, their bodies in a state of perpetuity, living if not alive. A body ravaged by Dracula’s blood or by a virus doesn’t cease to be a body, or a desiring one at that, and a body, like language, has memory. Every letter in the book was actually sent to someone, many to Sam D’Allesandro, a New Narrative writer who died from AIDS in 1988, at age 31. (In a beautiful mirroring of this unusual network of queer relationships, Bellamy’s and Killian’s papers were combined and sold together to Yale University, with D’Allesandro’s papers incorporated—like a body, protected—into theirs.) Mina marks Sam’s death by bemoaning that she has nowhere to mail her letters to him. “It’s lonely writing to the dead—words and words and words,” she writes. “Now that I’m married and you’re dead I have all the time in the world for you but the question is what world.”

***

In TV Sutras, Bellamy remembers a picture that hung on the wall by her bed when she was in a cult. (She was a member of this New Age cult for a decade before drifting out of it and finding the New Narrative coterie.) The picture showed a cityscape of Jupiter. “If I closed my eyes and raised my vibrations,” she recalls, “I could leave the tracked houses of my youth and visit this realm, where there was so much space between molecules reality itself was effervescent.” In an interview with Bookforum in 2014, she evokes Foucault’s description of the hidden grid of systems that determine how we make sense of the world, systems we absorb without noticing or questioning. I think of the blank spaces in the midst of these grids, like the widely spaced molecules on Jupiter, and imagine Bellamy elbowing her way between them, forcing them even farther apart until they break and drift and reconvene elsewhere in some new configuration.

I think, too, of Jack Spicer’s dictation theory of poetry, that the source of his poems was elsewhere, somewhere outside of his conscious mind—“whether it’s an id down in the cortex which you can’t reach anyway, which is just as far outside as Mars, or whether it is as far away as those galaxies which seem to be sending radio messages to us with the whole of the galaxy blowing up just to say something to us.” The poet receives these transmissions and records them; the poet is a medium. This is what Bellamy does in the first part of TV Sutras: she acts as a New Age receptor for messages transmitted from her television. She records the first words that strike her after switching on the TV, together with a brief description of the scene and a commentary of the message. For “Sutra 3,” Bellamy hears the line “Do you believe I’m in more deep shit than you are” and onscreen sees “dark haired man talking to blonde woman in car.” The message tells her, “Do not be discouraged by past difficulties. It’s all a continuum. Start where you are.” Each sutra is a meditative Rosetta Stone, transcribed and interpreted with sincerity, “even if that sincerity makes me cringe afterward,“ she writes.

In his introduction to A Lover’s Discourse, Wayne Koestenbaum writes that “to liberate love’s subtleties, and observe their play, one must first escape the postures and mythologies, the figures of speech, that surround the pleasurable/painful state of being enamored.” This is how Bellamy writes. In the way she undoes syntax and punctuation, structure and meaning, freeing her language from the traditional modes of expression so that what she says can feel as open and pliable as the way she says it. “Banish the message,” Koestenbaum writes lovingly of Barthes’s aim. “Preserve the exhalation that surrounded it. Investigate the perfume that the message leaves behind.” In a letter to Killian, Dodie as Mina writes, “I, Mina Harker, do, have always and will always see through the logical by means of the imaginal, leave the intentional for the ambiguous.”

***

I jumped at the chance to write this essay when my editor suggested the subject. But after I agreed to it, the obvious question came up—what do I have to say about Bellamy and New Narrative? A familiar panic rose inside me: nothing nothing nothing. I read and reread everything closely. I was blown away by it, and … well, I’m cribbing from Bellamy’s Barf Manifesto here, specifically the part where she agrees to be on a panel to present a paper on form and life narratives. She wants to get a handle on Eileen Myles’s essay “Everyday Barf” for a class she’s teaching, and that experience—of desperately wanting to grasp the totality of someone’s writing, its form, meaning, and sublimity—becomes the subject of Bellamy’s paper. And the story of this struggle—to understand Myles’s essay, to write the paper, to present it, together with her self-doubt and panic and a half dozen tangents—becomes the paper itself. I, too, wanted to get inside Bellamy’s work, to grapple with the work she has made, wanted the form of my own writing to reflect the form of hers.

At the end of the paper, Bellamy admits that with each new reading of “Everyday Barf,” her perception of it changes. “With each iteration,” she writes, “I could write another frame recontextualizing Eileen’s and my Barfs, and the piece could reflect and expand ad infinitum, like one of those drawings where a person is looking at a reflection of a reflection of themselves in a mirror or holding a box of cereal and on the box of cereal is a picture of themselves holding a box of cereal and on that box of cereal is a picture of themselves holding a box of cereal and on and on. Cereal—why am I thinking of cereal?”

The point, put far too simply, is that meaning is manifold and expansive; comprehending it requires imbibing and regurgitating, constant reappraisal. It’s exchanging your brain for a tongue and putting fingers on your poems. This is “the Barf as a literary form … Hierarchies jumble in the thrill, in the imperatives of purge.” This essay is my Barf—a Barf, not the only one. Bellamy is long overdue for the kind of survey that Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind provides: multiple, reflective framings. In his essay for the book, Andrew Durbin recalls stealing a copy of Barf Manifesto from a party on the advice of a boyfriend, and this anecdote ignites his consideration of the ways, both personal and literary, in which the manifesto is significant. In closing, he admits that there was no boyfriend but that once he’d written him into the narrative, he couldn’t take him out. The boyfriend is there, even if he isn’t really there, and serves a purpose—for the story, for the writer, and for the reader. Bellamy’s writing is likewise a constant renegotiation between the text, the characters, the writer, and the act of writing and of reading. I am sure of Bellamy’s humor, sensitivity, sensualism, and intuitive, tangible brilliance. She is “your throbbing pussy savior … Know me. Keep me. Kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss me, here on the sidewalk somewhere north of Gold.”