On Wayne Koestenbaum’s “Stubble Archipelago”

I’M ALWAYS WARY of claiming this or that critical statement, to be unearthed in this or that essay or letter or diary entry, should serve as a passe-partout to a writer’s project as a whole. And I don’t want to make that claim here either—or at least, not exactly. But when Wayne Koestenbaum observes, in a passage from My 1980s & Other Essays (2013) on the American symbolist Hart Crane, that the “point of queer poetry may also be to make murky, to distort,” it feels like half a revelation about his own work. “His aim was not to neutralize or domesticate desire,” Koestenbaum continues, “but to present it as failed: desire equivocates and betrays.”