from Love Letters to My Husband
from Love Letters to My Husband
from Love Letters to My Husband
The letter is addressed to all. Knowledge discerns things and orders divisions. The letter, which
supports the murmur of the indiscernible, is addressed without division.
Every subject can be traversed by the letter, that is, every subject can be transliterated.
This would then be my definition of an egalitarian freedom within thought: A thought is free
once it is transliterated by the small letters of the matheme, by the mysterious letters of the poem,
by the way in which politics takes things literally [à la lettre], and, finally, by the love letter.
—Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics
Author Note
:: What’s the matter? Correspondence is a matter of addresses. All one needs to know is that the
poems began as open love letters (a paradox) addressed to an imaginary Audience, who I once
called my Husband. Some are cribbed, others are erased. Still others are “written.” Feel free to sing
them especially in the book-within-a-book of Palace Songs, where I started finding an Audience in
people’s leavings and in experience. That was because I tuned into those co-responders on my
actual honeymoon, which after before I was wed (and certainly before I was married) to the One,
who is my husband but not the Husband who is both Everyone and No One. Where’s any of this
going? Somehow Life, love, war – or, politics. :: -ek
Eric Keenaghan's creative and critical work examines the relationship between poetry, politics, and intimacy. His poetry and poetics essays has appeared in such venues as Jacket 2, EOAGH, ixnay, and The Portable Boog Reader. He is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry (Ohio State University Press), and his critical essays on global or American queer poetry, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Duncan, Luis Cernuda, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Ronald Johnson, and other subjects have appeared in various journals and edited collections. Currently, Eric is working on a critical study of anarchism and American poetry (Life, Love, and War), a volume of poems (Love Letters to My Husband), and a series of poetics essays (Etudes). He lives in Hudson, New York and teaches at the University at Albany, SUNY.