“Warm with Tipsy Embraces”

Abstract

This chapter examines Allen Ginsberg’s “Series of Poems on China,” works written during the 1984 US–China Writers’ Conference, as an important example of how cultural diplomacy sometimes enabled the expression of queer intimacies. An iconoclastic literary ambassador, Ginsberg had little interest in contributing to the emerging ties between the People’s Republic of China and the United States, but he did hope to connect on an ad hoc basis with ordinary Chinese citizens. He pursued this goal by sharing poems by Whitman and Williams and by generating his own lyric tributes to China and Chinese writers in an affective, and often homoerotic, manner. Rather than serve as a medium for state expression, poetry for Ginsberg had the capacity to detourn the cultural Cold War, transforming the grand narrative of geopolitics into the fleeting closeness of a same-sex literary encounter.