Content area
Abstract
Opera on TV is a collection of poems that explores the concepts of aesthetics and politics and the connections between these two zones of activity. Thematically, the poems deal with issues of gay identity, nostalgia, the possibilities and limitations of language, the professional side of art making (publishing, reading), and the role of state institutions and economic structures in making life intelligible in specific ways—defining the terms by which we understand everything from love relationships to political identity to aesthetic practice. Formally, the poems employ the traditional lyric mode, prose poems, numbered lists, and dialogues, and the identity of the speaking subject is, to varying degrees, concealed or revealed. In this way, many of the poems enact formally some of the thematic concerns with identity politics and representation. Ultimately, formal and thematic concerns overlap in these poems, which draw attention to artifice while discussing the various roles with which art is tasked, from the purely aesthetic, to the personal, to the political.
