Might the first-person critical-creative voice be a marker not of identification with one’s subject, nor of the collapsing of critical distance, but rather a different kind of creative act that affords new critical possibilities? Jack Parlett has spoken of the autobiographical sections in his 2022 book, Fire Island: A Queer History, as designed to sidestep the presumptions of authority that academic writing invokes (depends upon). Parlett describes the “relief” of “confessing” a personal investment in his subject, of not hiding behind the conventions of objectivity. Both statements suggest a much more complex relation to the authorial ‘I’ than either readers of confessional writing or critics engaging with terms relating to forms of identity might expect.

Fire Island’s “main event” is still history – which “I never quite left behind” there, he says, chronology providing the “scaffolding” for the book. But Parlett’s next project will be written wholly in the first-person. Forged in the “lyric chamber” of Kate Bush’s song, ‘Love & Anger,’ which “felt a bit like being ventriloquised” when he first heard it, the song asks what it means to try to communicate one’s feelings to another, charting the limits of what can be spoken about, of what can be told, and to whom (sister, priest). “Can you tell it to your heart?” Bush asks. The song conjures another person – whom the speaker loves, towards whom they are angry – and insists, “We could be like two strings beating | Speaking in sympathy”. Bush resists the expected, as ever. Strings don’t beat. Sympathy doesn’t always speak but often listens. For Parlett the song captures what he calls, brilliantly, the “triangulated self of confession”, in which the ‘I’ becomes a ‘you’ with which it is in dialogue. The song itself seems to speak for Parlett, as he listens to it, its differing voices and personae in direct conversation with his own.

In Fire Island Parlett explores the work of Reginald Shepherd, whose poem ‘Icarus on Fire Island’ (published in Callaloo in 1998) explores “community, risk and interracial desire.” It begins with an authorial ‘I’ split between two loves, two possibilities. This is not Shepherd’s ‘I’, but Shakespeare’s. Borrowing from Sonnet 144, Shepherd’s poem fuses the politics of race underwriting the gay beach party culture of Fire Island with the complexities of Shakespeare’s highly racialized depiction of differing forms of beauty and desire.

Two loves I have, each one
too fair for me to be completed
in his eyes

Reading Shakespeare’s words in Shepherd’s poem I am struck, as always, by the fact I misremember them (‘Two loves have I…’) and, for the first time, by the singularity of that ‘I’, its resemblance to the numerical ‘1’, juxtaposed against the ‘Two loves’. Shepherd sketches the “perfect skin” of the blue-eyed, white, “tan” men on the beaches of Fire Island. “I couldn’t want them less,” his speaker states flatly.

Instead, turning again to Shakespeare’s sonnet at the volta of his own poem, Shepherd’s speaker imagines himself a kite dancing on the breeze:

Since shunning pain
I ease can never find, I’ll score the sky
with string, and there incise my name,
until the gusts decline.

Shepherd had a number of long-term health conditions that caused him intense pain (including kidney stones brought about as a side-effect of the medication that kept his HIV at bay), and once imagined the day in which he might be without pain as “a poem in itself”. Speaking with Shakespeare’s verse, this creative-critical engagement brings out the ways that pain and release from it are inseparable in that sonnet, as they are in ‘Icarus on Fire Island’. The flight that might be an escape scores, the kite’s string cuts; the name written on the sky is not a celebratory declamation of the speaker’s sense of self but an incision, a wound. To reach like a kite for the sky, to seek an escape that is also an affirmation, is to risk the hard-won identity that underwrites the ‘I’ of the poem.

Sonnet 144 ends with the impossibility of knowing whether the speaker’s two lovers are in fact in a sexual relationship with one another:

Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

These two angels inspired Derek Jarman, who features the sonnet heavily in Angelic Conversation, his 1985 film about queer desire as told through Shakespeare’s poems (Jarman was a visitor to Fire Island himself, Parlett notes). The “bad” and “good” angels figure for Shakespeare’s speaker the fear of a sexually-transmitted disease (“the flaming irritation of venereal disease,” in Colin Burrow’s note on these lines), resonating with Shepherd’s reflections on the HIV epidemic that was sweeping Fire Island in the 1980s and 1990s. “Though I’ve not written much poetry about it, there is something both poetic and reproachful to poetry in HIV’s literalization, its materialization, of the sex/death nexus so common as a poetic trope. It certainly has always made sense to me that pleasure could lead to death,” Shepherd writes in his essay, ‘Illness and Poetry’. Shakespeare’s angels pose the question of what risks attend the splitting of the self into dialogic parts, and what richness a more complex version of the ‘I’ can offer too.

The complex possibilities of the first-person voice continue to shape, and to trouble, Parlett’s work, as they underscored Shepherd’s, and Shakespeare’s. A sense that this voice might embody a dialogic aspect – existing in dialogue with those (writers, artists, lovers, selves) who have gone before – is fundamental to the possibilities that writing in the first-person can offer, possibilities both creative and critical. As Bush asks, “What would I do without you?”