Luis listens to Lohengrin: Luis Cernuda’s desire across queer time

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, I consider three of Luis Cernuda’s poems dealing in art and spectatorship as models for how he might have imagined queer erotic desire. Analyses of two of Cernuda’s ekphrastic poems show how the poet made both aesthetic and erotic experience perceptible and palpable within intertwined bodily and temporal relations. I read these ekphrastic exercises in light of Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza’s “poetic memory” as a concept that anchors poetic forms to a spectral and recurrent temporality exacted in the bodies of poet and reader. Then, I turn to one of Cernuda’s later poems, “Luis de Baviera escucha Lohengrin”, in order to demonstrate how poetics and performance converge in the poet’s work. “Luis de Baviera” exemplifies the experience of materially felt desires across time and links Cernuda (and, us, his readers) to a history of (male homo)erotic attachments. In the article’s conclusion, I suggest centering Luis’s modes of feeling as a method to make reverberations of affect and relation cohere as a shared knowledge outside of and against historical time.