‘Like Love’ serves as an intellectual genealogy of a singular poet and critic
Though Maggie Nelson’s new collection, “Like Love: Essays and Conversations,” is anchored in its second half by her stunning personal remembrance,
”My Brilliant Friend: On Lhasa de Sela,” some readers may be disappointed to learn that the book is not a memoir. Instead, “Like Love” is a personal intellectual genealogy, both a chart of Nelson’s influences, collaborators, and intimate friendships, and a map of her mind at work, 2006present.
Though she identifies as a poet, Nelson’s renown stems from her work as a memoirist, specifically “The Argonauts,” a book about queer family, transitioning, parenting, and aesthetics which exemplifies Nelson’s special talent for blending personal narrative, theory, poetics, and storytelling into potent criticism.
In “The Argonauts,” winner of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle citation in criticism, Nelson claims that her writing process has always felt “more clarifying than creative.” Frequently, she elucidates her thoughts in nonfiction by citing other poets and theorists. Lacing quotations from her intellectual ancestors and her literary contemporaries through her prose, Nelson models a form of thinking through discourse that underwrites her straight-ahead books of art criticism such as “The Art of Cruelty” (2011) and “On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint” (2021).
Reading “Like Love” is akin to entering Nelson’s workroom to look at her maquettes, her conceptions in development, before we see them fully realized in the works above. It opens and closes with Nelson “woodshedding” in conversation with two of her central collaborators, Wayne Koestenbaum and Eileen Myles, respectively.
Nelson was 18 years old when she first saw Eileen Myles read her poetry at a public event. Myles, a tremendous multiform literary artist, has had a generative influence on Nelson’s own writing practice. “I can still see,” Nelson writes in “On Freedom,” “the little green Semiotext(e) paperback of Myles’s 1991 collection, Not Me, lying on a table at St. Mark’s Books, can still see myself picking it up for the first time, not knowing how much ‘freedom to’ was about to rush into my world.”
Reading Myles and Nelson thinking together three decades after their “introduction” is a delicious revelation. As a conversationalist, Nelson darts between interrogative and anecdotal modes, threading in strands of analytical thought. Reading her in discourse with Björk, Brian Blanchfield, and Jacqueline Rose, I’m reminded of an insightful claim that the British writer Olivia Laing once proffered: “the Nelsonian unit of thought is the paragraph … [it] allows for swerves and juxtapositions.”
“Like Love” is a shifting collage of chronologically arrayed review-essays, conversations, forewords, tributes, elegies, and art catalog essays. The collection is born out of Nelson’s art criticism. In her brief, restless preface, she explains that at the beginning of her career, poetry led her to art writing. Each invitation to contribute to an artist or exhibition catalog teaches “me more about how the act of bestowing attention serves as its own reward. And how such engagement attaches and reattaches me to curiosity, to others, to life, especially when my own spirits have dimmed.” Her efforts on Matthew Barney, Tala Madani, Sarah Lucas, and Kara Walker engage the art works intensely; thus the essays are thorny, knotted, sometimes dizzying reading.
Nelson knows that her attempts at explanation may distract us from looking at the art itself: “Probably, language does not make art happy. Language doesn’t always make me happy. But sometimes, you must explain. And not just because someone asked, or because we live in a culture of explanation, but because one wants to. Needs to. The language rises up, an upchuck. Words aren’t just what’s left; they’re what we have to offer.”
Since we only have words to offer each other, as we attempt to hold the cruelty of others at bay while forging freer lives together, Nelson also suggests that we ought to perhaps appreciate and even learn to dwell in irony, ambiguity, complexity, and contingency. Her formidable essays on Fred Moten, Alice Notley, and Ben Lerner are strong examples of this practice.
In her essay on Hervé Guibert, Nelson, considering that author’s influence on her own writing, names her “riotous, motley heritage,” which includes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Carolee Schneemann, Judith Butler, and everyone from “Paul Preciado to Claudia Rankine to Gloria Anzaldúa to Anne Carson to Hilton Als to . . . James Baldwin to Roland Barthes to Audre Lorde,” among many others.
The members of Nelson’s canon are “characterized by ravenous intellectual appetite; a wry and unflinching devotion to chronicling corporality; a dedication to formal experiment, up to and including the detonation of genre; and a certain curiosity and fearlessness where others might expect (or project) shame.” They are what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls “liberating gods.”
In “On Freedom,” Nelson argues that freedom is neither a destination nor a thing to be attained or accomplished. In “Like Love,” Nelson tells us that Simone White’s poetry confronts the persistent dilemma of “trying to be in and with the impossible murk of ‘freedom as chimeric’ on the one hand, and ‘it is too much to ask, to give it up,’ on the other.” Instead of regarding this as a stifling impasse, Nelson suggests we follow White and meet this dilemma “with a questing spirit.” Throughout “Like Love,” Nelson is herself a poet of the question spirit.