In 1961, Robert Rauschenberg was invited to make a portrait for the inauguration of Iris Clert’s new gallery in Paris. The story goes that Rauschenberg forgot and, in a pinch, sent a telegram that read, “THIS IS A PORTRAIT OF IRIS CLERT IF I SAY SO.” His contribution redefined portraiture and the piece helped to change our ideas about both art and identity. Rauschenberg’s “I” is every viewer, and we manifest the image. Everything is subjective.

Lisa Summe’s new collection Say It Hurts (YesYes Books, 2021) is a sharp and lovely self-portrait. “Light as a Feather     Stiff as a Board” opens the collection. This poem ends with the proclamation: “When a lesbian     writes a poem / it’s a lesbian poem,” which in turn begins a complicated push and pull, an undercurrent that rushes throughout Summe’s text. Is identity subjective or objective?  Queer writers know how homophobia lives in a readers’ experience of literature. Every queer writer who has sat silent in a workshop while a group of eager MFA candidates express confusion about a poem because they cannot imagine a queer speaker will stand up and applaud this poem. I have argued for years that poems themselves have their own orientation and identity. Summe’s collection confirms my belief and settles the argument. This beginning is a poetic rosetta stone, and the line helps readers to understand not just the self-portrait of Say It Hurts but the queer canon.

Summe’s “Coming Out” poems are memories exposed like nerves. Fittingly, we can’t read just one coming out poem; the poems must come out over and over throughout the collection. Like many of the poems in Say It Hurts, Summe’s second “Coming Out” grapples with the father and child relationship. Opening with, “There’s the story some parents tell their kids / that if you return a fallen bird to its nest // it will be abandoned,” this poem illustrates one of Summe’s many talents; we are quietly held by a narrative while the poem builds to an unforgettable turn. “Coming Out” ends with this truth: “If death / cannot soften my father, I do not know // what can. Return a bird to its nest / & it will be fed as if it was never gone.”  Throughout the collection, as in this poem, we are given objective details but we are always left to question. Despite often plain and direct language, the reader must decide “what is the right thing / in a world full of right things / growing out of wrong things / with the ferocity of dandelions.”  

The collection’s “Selfie” poems again illustrate the duality of symbolic and mimetic. A selfie is a self-portrait laden with the connotation of frivolity. Summe’s selfies are sensuously painted language; they emphasize the symbolism of the collection. And these selfies are anything but frivolous. In “Selfie at the Symphony,” Summe writes, “You’d hold my neck so gently like I’m alive & I am. I’m not going to make a metaphor about how you can play me or say anything else about how you might touch me if I were an instrument. I love you.” In Summe’s direct and literal language, she sometimes rejects Rauschenberg. This is not a subjective moment. We are told this is not metaphor, not symbolic. However, in the same poem, Summe asks, “What if my mouth were full of strings like an instrument?” And then beautifully closes with, “Here is where I play you something with my mouth, where my heart earns its keep.”  

Summe’s gift to the reader is duality. While the collection is, in many ways, a self-portrait, many of the poems are love poems, intimate and physical: “Your bare hands. My god. This the night / we run out of nothing but breath, / the night we run miles with our mouths.”  In “Girl of My Dreams,” tender observations—“You’ve been waiting for me all along. I know this because of the way our shoulders touch.”—combine with fairytale—“It’s raining the lighting bolts kids city out, little zigzags made of yellow construction paper. I’m the helicopter pilot in this storm & you’re the girl I rescued from the tallest tower of a castle on fire.”  This beauty and wonder borders on innocent. But the love poems are weaved with elegies. Over and over we must let go, say goodbye, watch memory fade, live in an ending. We are told that “it’s okay / to walk away.”

Perhaps one of the most intriguing themes of the collection is masculinity. The poems explore the father again and again, the speaker’s father or a lover’s father. In “Selfie as a Dyke,” Summe writes, “The problem with being a dyke is men. // is your father, who you text once in a while / because he’s your father & you want to like him . . . it is at this point you realize here is another // poem about your father, his mouth / unable to say the word daughter.”  The tension over masculinity is palpable, both toward the father and internal. In another poem, Summe writes, “I liked to do boy things like play baseball & wing sticks like swords in the woods so I didn’t see why I couldn’t be a boy for you.”

Summe’s nod to Rauschenberg both undermines and reinforces his intent to redefine the portrait. Summe shows us that the hurt detailed in Say It Hurts is not subjective, these are queer poems and the collection is at times dark, objectively painful. Yet the book is a version of portraiture that requires reader participation. We are invited into the work. This is a gorgeous collection of duality: memory and dream, love and elegy, subject and object; every poem contains the “intensity of the stranger we are, // but with the tenderness of reuniting, / as if we’ve missed each other all along.”

January, 2021