Mutsuo Takahashi: “Clean as Leather, Lustful as a Lily”

Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Eleven

“Sleeping Wrestler
You are a murderer
No you are not, but really a wrestler
Either way it’s just the same
For from the ring of your entangled body
Clean as leather, lustful as a lily
Will nail me down
On your stout neck like a column, like a pillar of tendons
The thoughtful forehead
(In fact, it’s thinking nothing)
When the forehead slowly moves and closes the heavy eyelids
Inside, a dark forest awakens
A forest of red parrots
Seven almonds and grape leaves
At the end of the forest a vine
Covers the house where two boys
Lie in each others arms: I’m one of them, you the other
In the house, melancholy and terrible anxiety
Outside the keyhole, a sunset
Dyed with the blood of the beautiful bullfighter Escamillo
Scorched by the sunset, headlong, headfirst
Falling, falling, a gymnast
If you’re going to open your eyes, nows the time, wrestler”

—Mutsuo Takahashi, Sleeping Wrestler, Poems of a Penisist, 2012

Born in December of 1937 in the Fukuoka Prefecture of Japan, Mutsuo Takahashi is a poet, essayist and writer, known especially for his open writing about male homoeroticism. He spent his early years in the countryside of Japan. At three months old, Takahashi lost his father to pneumonia and was left, along with his sisters, by his mother in the care of his grandparents. After his mother returned from mainland China, the family moved to the port town of Moji, just as the air raids by the Allied Powers of World War Two intensified. It was at this time, watching the war in action with his classmates, that Takahashi became aware of his sexual identity, which became a common subject in his first book of poetry published in 1959.

Takahashi graduated from the Fukuoka University of Education, after which he moved to Tokyo in 1962. He continued writing poetry while employed at an advertising company. His first book, published in 1964, was “Rose Tree, Fake Lovers”, an anthology that described male to male erotic love in bold and direct language. Takahashi sent the collection to novelist Yukio Mishima who helped promote Takahashi’s work; a close relationship and friendship resulted that lasted until Mishima’s suicide in 1970.

During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a large existential trend in the literature and culture of Japan, which included an interest in eroticism. In collaboration with his two friends, surreal poet Chimako Tada and poet Shigeo Washisu, Mutsuo Takahashi created the literary journal “The Symposium (Kyōen)”, named after Plato’s famous dialogue.

Written in free verse through the 1970s, Takahashi’s poetry used homoeroticism as an important theme. An example of this is his long poem Ode (Homeuta)”, an epic one-thousand line erotic fantasy poem published by Winston Leyland. He also started writing prose at this time: the 1970 “Twelve Views from the Distance” about his early life, a 1972 surrealistic novella based on his trip to the gay underground of New York City entitled “A Legend of a Holy Place”, and the 1974 “Zen’s Pilgrimage of Virtue”, a homoerotic and humorous retelling of the Buddhist legend of Sudhana.

Traveling through the world, Mutsuo Takahashi broaden his themes by incorporating his knowledge of the history of world literature and art, often including poems of homage to important writers in his collections. In 2010, he produced a small book of poems to accompany an exhibition which presented the work of American assemblage artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell. Still actively using free style verse,Takahashi also wrote traditional Japanese verse and novels, Nō and Kyōgen plays, works of literary criticism, and a libretto written for an opera by composer Akira Miyoshi.

Residing presently in the seaside city of Zushi, Mutsuo Takahashi has been the recipient of a number of literary prizes in Japan, including the Yomiuri Literay Prize, the Takami Jun Prize, the Modern Poetry Hanatsubaki Prize, and, in 2000, the prestigious Kunshō Award fo his contributions to modern Japanese literature.

Hanya Yanagihara: “A Little Life”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Seated Men

“He steps back, still looking. In the painting, Willem’s torso is directed toward the viewer, but his face is turned to the right so that he is almost in profile, and he is leaning towards something or someone and smiling. And because he knows Willem’s smiles, he knows that Willem has been captured looking at something he loves, he knows Willem in that instant is happy. Willem’s face and neck dominate the canvas and although the background is suggested rather than shown, he knows that Willem is at their table. He knows it from the way that JB has drawn the light and shadows on Willem’s face. He has the sense that if he says Willem’s name that the face in the painting will turn toward him and answer; he has the sense that if he stretches his hand out and strokes the canvas he will feel beneath his fingertips Willem’s hair, his fringe of eyelashes.

But he doesn’t do this, of course, just looks up at last and sees JB smiling at him, sadly. “The title card’s been mounted already,” JB says, and he goes slowly to the wall behind the painting and sees its title – “Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story, Greene Street”-and he feels his beneath abandon him; it feels as if his heart is made of something oozing and cold, like ground meat, and it is being squeezed inside a fist so that chunks of it are falling, plopping to the ground near his feet.”

—Hanya YanagIhara, A Little Life

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1974, Hanya Yanagihara is American novelist, editor and travel writer. A fourth-generation resident of Hawaii, she graduated from Smith College, a private liberal arts women’s college in Massachusetts, in 1995. After graduating, Yanagihara worked as a publicist in New York for several years and, later as writer and editor, for the Condé Nast Traveler magazine. In 2015 she became a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

Yanagihara’s first novel “The People in the Trees”, published in 2013, was a fictional memoir of a scientific researcher who, after discovering a turtle with life-prolonging qualities, is convicted of child sexual abuse. It received praise as one of the best novels of 2013.

Hanya Yanagihara wrote her 2015 “A Little Life” over a period of eighteen months. A lengthly novel, it follows the lives of four friends in New York City through college to middle-age, with a focus on the character Jude, a lawyer with a mysterious background and unexplained health issues. A closeness develops between Jude and Willem, one of his three friends, which soon evolves into an intimate relationship troubled by Jude’s hidden past.

“A Little Life” is divided into seven distinct chronological parts, with flashbacks inserted throughout the narrative. The central focus is on the social and emotional lives of the four men, which, through these inner lives, discusses the strengths and limits of romantic love, friendship, and the relationships among men. Seen through shifting first-person perspectives as the story evolves, the narrative eventually focuses on Jude’s own traumatic personal experiences and his interactions with this small group of friends.

James Baldwin: “The Child is Filled with Darkness”

Photographer Unknown, The Child is Filled with Darkness

“In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the children and they won’t talk anymore that day. And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he’s moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they endure. The child knows that they won’t talk any more because if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him.”

—-James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues

“Sonny’s Blues” is a short story written by James Baldwin, originally published in 1957 in the Partisan Review, a small circulation quarterly New York City magazine dealing with politics, literature, and culture. Written in the first-person singular narrative style, the story presents the memories of a 1950s black teacher in Harlem as he reacts to his brother Sonny’s drug addiction, arrest, and recovery.

Baldwin’s story is set in New York City of the post–World War Two era, when an important political and cultural change was occurring. A diverse array of artists from all over the world, learning and borrowing ideas and techniques from each other, converged in the city and made New York a new cultural capital. Despite differences in style and subject matter, these artists were responding, through their work, to what they believed was America’s unique cultural and political crisis.

While the art scene in New York was rapidly expanding, thousands of African American soldiers were returning home from the war and heading north toward communities like Harlem. Instead of finding new job opportunities and equal rights, the returning men found newly constructed housing projects and vast urban slums. Hundreds of homes in Harlem had been leveled to build these housing projects, which would eventually become symbols of urban blight and poverty,. This experience would be faced by thousands of other African-Americans in the years after the war’s conclusion.

Although America in the 1950s was generally more conservative, the groundwork for the 1960s radical political movements was being laid. The civil rights movement, which had begun in the South earluer in the decade, had started to rapidly spread across the country as millions of African Americans began to seek equal rights. Written at this critical juncture in history, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is a testament to the frustration of life in the cities of America and this frustration’s eventual transformation into a political and artistic movement.

Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” was adapted for a short film of the same name by Gregory Scott Williams Jr for his second year project at New York University’s Graduate Film Program. Written and directed by Williams, the short, seventeen-minute film was produced by Seith Mann and starred actor Charles Parnell as the narrator-brother David, and New York-based poet and verbal stylist Saul Williams in the role of Sonny. The cinematography was by Cybel Martin, featuring the music of Gil Scott-Heron and Ray Charles with an original score by composer and pianist John Bickerton. The film can be found in its entirely at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y9CDEfnKvQ

Willem Arondeus

The Artwork of Willem Arondeus

Born in Amsterdam in 1895, Willem Arondeus was a Dutch illustrator, painter and author. At the age of thirteen, he attended the former Quellinus School, now the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where he devoted himself to decorative painting. After a family dispute about his homosexuality, he left home at the age of seventeen and severed contact with his family. Contrary to the general custom of the time, Arondeus, even at a young age, openly talked about his homosexuality in his social circles.

After meeting artists in the neighboring villages of Laren and Blaricum, Arondeus decided to pursue a career as an artist. Traveling to Rotterdam, he studied painting at the city’s school for sculptors, the Quellinus School. He started his writing: work in 1920: and he received, in 1923, a commission for a large mural to be installed in the Rotterdam City Hall. Arondeus moved into the countryside of the central Netherlands to the city of Apeldoom where, in 1933, he met and settled with Jan Tijssen, a young gardener who would remain his partner for the next seven years.

Despite their financial struggles between the years 1923 and 1939, Willem Arondeus produced a significant amount of artwork in this period. He worked as an illustrator for the publications of Dutch poets J. H. Leopold, Pieter Cornelis Boutens and Martinus Nijhoff. He also received commissions for calendars and charity stamps, and painted landscapes in the areas of Amsterdam, Blaricum in northern Holland, and on the Isle of Urk. From 1930 to 1932, Arondeus made nine tapestries with ornaments around the arms of Noord-Holland towns for the County Seat.

Around 1935, Willem Arondeus ceased his visual arts work and devoted himself to his writing. He published two novels in 1938; “Het Uilenhuis (The Owls House)” and “In de Bloeiende Ramenas (In the Blossoming Winter Radish)”, both completed with his illustrations in the fin de siecle style. which embraced symbolism and the decadence movement. In 1939 Arondeus published “Matthĳs Maris: De Tragiek van den Droom (The Tragedy of the Dream)”, a biography of the Dutch mystical painter Matthijs Maris, which eased his financial situation.

In May of 1940, the German army invaded and occupied the Netherlands, and required all, above the age of fifteen, to carry identity cards with all personal information, including religion. By 1941, realizing the danger of his work against the German occupation, Arondeus sent Tijssen back to their home in Apeldoorn. Soon after the invasion, he joined the Raad van Verzet, Council of Resistance, and in the spring of 1942, started an underground periodical “Brandarisbrief (The Brandaris Letter)”, named after the oldest Dutch lighthouse. With other graphical artists like Frans Duwaer, Willem Sandberg and Gerrit van der Veen, Arondeus started to hide Jewish citizens and to falsify identity cards, which eventually totaled over eighty thousand.

Aware of the prevalence of false identity cards, the Nazi occupation began to compare the cards with the information found in the Municipal Archives. A plan to attack the Archives and destroy all the records was made by Willem Arondeus, Gerrit van der Veen and others. This attack took place on the evening of March 27 in 1943. A fire was set; with the collusion of the local fire brigade to forestall its extinguishing, thousands of cards were destroyed, which hindered the registration process.

Willem Arondeus was arrested on April 1st of 1943 and sentenced to death in June at a Nazi court held at Amsterdam’s Tropical Museum. He took full responsibility for the attack, with the hope others would be spared. Willem Arondeus, along with a group of twelve, was executed on July 1st of 1943 in the North Sea dunes of Overveen. In his last message before his execution, Arondeus, who had lived openly as a gay man before the war, asked his friend, Laura Carola Mazirel, the future jurist and human rights activist, to testify after the war that “Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards.”

In 1984 the Dutch government posthumously awarded Resistance Memorial Cross to Willem Arondeus and the others. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, honored Arondeus in 1986 as a Righteous Among The Nations for destroying Municipal Records of Amsterdam, the result of which prevented the German occupiers from locating many of the Dutch-Jewish population. In 2001 twenty of Arondeus’s homo-erotic poems, written during his life in Urk and inspired by the work of gay Dutch poet Pieter Cornelis Boutens, were published as “Aloof Strophes (Aloof Stanzas)”.

Timothy Liu: “Tiny Flares Corkscrew Up the Sky”

Photographers Unknown, Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Photo Set Twenty-Two

Faces sludging forward on the esplanade
to where we are. What we are is energy—
our bodies angled skyward as fading blooms
parachute towards the earth, the crowd
a spent militia—torn blankets left behind
as we march to the riverfront where
tiny flares corkscrew up the sky to release
delayed reports. The night gives up
its ghost—wreaths of smoke crowning floral
cornucopias that spill a motherlode
of fire onto both sides of the shore,
hoarse voices bellowing out rote words
learned in grade school that take on
meaning in a country of peace where
thousands scream through the dark, waiting
for that twenty-one gun salute.

Timothy Liu, A Boston Fourth, Poetry, July 1996

Born in 1965 in San Jose, California, Timothy Liu is an American poet and author residing in New York City. He earned his BA in English at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and his MA in Poetry at the University of Houston in Texas. Liu also studied at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he met his husband, the artist Christopher Arabadjis.

Liu considers poet and critic Richard Howard, Welsh poet Leslie Norris, and American writer and literary critic Gordon Lish as his mentors. His poetry, based formally on the meter of syllables, explores the themes of identity, violence, sexuality, with the narrator as witness. His works also deal with cultural taboos and situations largely left out of poetic writing.

Timothy Liu’s work includes: the 1992 “Vox Angelica” which won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; “Say Goodnight”, published in 1998 and winner of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award; the 2004 “Of Thee I Sing” winnerof the Poetry Book of the Year Award from Publishers Weekly; the 2005 “For Dust Thou Art”; “Don’t Go Back to Sleep” in 2014; and “Tin House” published in 2018..

Liu’s most recent works include “Luminous Debris: New and Selected Legerdemain 1992-2017” published in 2018 by Barrow Street Books and a finalist in the 2019 Thom Gunn Awards; and his twelfth book of poems, “Let It Ride” published in 2019, which explores how the necessities of life and art join to provide a path forward at midlife.

Timothy Liu has served as a core faculty member at Bennington College’s Writing Seminars and is currently a Professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

For more information on Timothy Liu, including books and poems: https://www.timothyliu.net

Forrest Williams

Paintings by Forrest Williams

Born in North Carolina, Forrest Williams is an American figurative painter who lives and works in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. His extensive education began at Edinburgh University in Scotland where he graduated in 1985 with honors in English Literature and Art History. He next studied at Davidson College in North Carolina, where he earned his BA in English Literature. In 1989, Williams attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, earning Honors in Theater. He earned his Masters of Fine Art in Painting at the New York Academy of Art in 1994.

Most of Forrest William’s figurative paintings contain individual male figures, clothed or nude, in subjective spaces. Similar to the work of Hopper, there is a psychological undercurrent of loneliness and a lack of connection between the characters in the presented scenes. The paintings are staged sets, often with decorative elements, such as arrows, whose figures represent the iconic man caught between desire and doubt, and intimacy and uncertainty. .

Williams exhibited in group show a the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and later had his first solo show there, in which all his work sold. These shows were followed with other solo shows, including three at the Heather Marx Gallery in San Francisco between 2002 and 2007, a 2010 solo show entitled “Crossways” at the Marx & Savattero Gallery in San Francisco, and five solo shows at the AMP Gallery in Provincetown between 2014 and 2019.

“I remember reading that the young Balthus was deeply influenced by Derain’s remark, ‘The only purpose of painting today is the recovery of lost secrets.’ That observation was made almost a hundred years ago now, but it still resonates with me.” — Forrest Willams

The artist’s site can be found at : http://www.forrestwilliams.net

Lorenz Frølich

Paintings by Lorenz Frølich

Born in Copenhagen, Denmark in October of 1820, Lorenz Frølich was a painter, illustrator, etcher and graphic artist. He initially studied in Copenhagen under painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, now referred to as the Father of Danish painting, and in Dresden between 1843 to 1846 under fresco painter Eduard Julius Bendemann. Frølich later traveled to Paris and studied under historical painter Thomas Couture from 1852 to 1853.

During his academic period, Frølich was influenced, by the impressionist movement through his friends Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Alfred Stevens, and constantly exhibited his work at the salons. Through his friendship with painter Thorald Læssøe, Frølich met painter and graphic artist John Thomas Lundbye, an encounter which swiftly turned into a close relationship. Existing correspondence between the two men shows their friendship was both intellectual and romantic, and lasted until at least 1840.

Nordic sagas and the Danish landscape became the focus of both Frølich’s and Lundbye’s work as they traveled the country to depict the national flora, landscapes and local people. The two artists also did extensive illustrative work, specifically for children’s books. There are several personal works showing the strong bond and collaboration between the two artists during this period: a 1839 portrait of Frølich by Lundbye, now in the Hirschsprung Collection; Frølich’s 1939 “Portrait of the painter J. Th. Lyndbye”; caricatures made by Frølich in 1839 of Lyndbye as a dog; and Frølich’s drawing of the two artists painting outside in June 1839.

Lorenz Frølich produced original etchings for the 1853-55 “Illustreret Danmarkshistorie for Folket (Illustrated Danish History for the People)”; the 1844 “De Tvende Kirketaarne (The Second Church Tower)” by Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger; and the 1845 “Die Götter des Nordens (Gods of the North)”. Frølich’s illustrative work for author Hans Christian Andersen’s stories and the editions published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel in Paris, particularly Frølich’s realistic and candid depictions for the work “Mademoiselle Lili à Paris”, brought him recognition as a renowned illustrator.

Frølich was part of a circle of young Danish artists that, during the 1830s and 1840s, directed their attention towards the creation of a nationalistic form of Nordic art, with the aim of imitating nature in its purest form. He married Carolina Charlotta in de Betou in 1855 and was appointed a professor at Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Art in 1877. For the celebration of Frølich’s eightieth birthday held in November of 1900, Danish composer and violinist Carl Nielsen wrote the “Kantate til Lorenz Frølich-Festen”. Lorenz Frølich died in 1908 in Hellerup, Denmark.

Insert Image: Lorenz Frølich, “Self Portrait”, 1860s, Oil on Canvas, 22 x 18 cm, Private Collection

John Rechy: “The Coming of the Night”

Photographers and Artists Unknown, The Coming of the Night, Gay Film Gifs

“Did those “new gays” spinning about like giddy tops in discos care to know that dancing with someone of the same sex was punishable as “lewd conduct” then? Still, a club in Topanga Canyon boasted a system of warning lights. When they flashed, lesbians and gay men shifted—what a grand adventure!—and danced with each other, laughing at the officers’ disappointed faces! How much pleasure—and camaraderie, yes, real kinship—had managed to exist in exile. Did those arrogant young people know that, only years ago, you could be sentenced to life in prison for consensual sex with another man? A friend of his destroyed by shock therapy decreed by the courts. Another friend sobbing on the telephone before he slashed his wrists— Thomas’s hands on his steering wheel had clenched in anger, anger he had felt then, anger he felt now. And all those pressures attempted to deplete you, and disallow— “—the yearnings of the heart,” he said aloud. Yet he and others of his generation had lived through those barbaric times—and survived—those who had survived—with style.”

—John Rechy, The Coming of the Night

Born in March of 1931 in El Paso, Texas, during the Depression, John Francisco Rachy is a writer, playwright, essayist and literary critic. He attended Texas Western College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in English. Rachy continued his education at the New School for Social Research in New York City, studying under Hiram Haydn, a Random House senior editor. Rachy’s semi-autobiographical works explore the world of social and sexual outsiders and draw upon his gay sexuality and Mexican-American heritage.

John Rachy’s writing career began with the short story “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny”, a gay-oriented story which received the Longview Foundation Fiction Prize in 1961. His first published work, the largely autobiographical novel “City of Night”, was published in 1963 by Grove Press. The novel chronicles the journey of a young Mexican-American from the border town of El Paso into the gay underworld of Times Square, Hollywood Boulevard and the French Quarter of New Orleans during the 1950s. Selling sixty-five thousand hardcover copies, it remained on the New York Times best-seller list for twenty-five weeks and became an international bestseller.

Following the success of “City of Night”, John Rachy has written a large body of work, both fiction and non-fiction. Among his fiction works are: the “Numbers” published in 1967;; “Rushes” published in 1979; the 1999 “The Coming of the Night”; and the 2017 “After the Blue Hour”. Rachy’s non-fiction works include the 1977 “The Sexual Outlaw”, an account of three days and nights in the 1970s sexual underground of Los Angeles, and the 2004 “Beneath the Skin”, an anthology of his essays and literary reviews from The New York Times, Evergreen Review, The Nation, and other publications..

The first novelist to receive PEN-USA-West’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, John Rachy is also the recipient of the 1999 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement presented by Publishing Triangle, an American association of gay men and lesbians in the publishing industry. He is currently a faculty member at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. In 2018 Rachy’s 2017 novel “After the Blue Hour” won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.

Note: An interesting read is biographical author Charles Casillo’s 2002 “Outlaw: The Lives and Careers of John Rechy”, a book which examines the dichotomy of John Rechy’s life as both a respected author and professor, and a hustler on Hollywood Boulevard, with insights from Rachy himself and his family, friends, and colleagues.

Harald Kreutzberg

Hans Robertson, “Portrait of Harald Kreutzberg”, 1931

Born in Liberec, Czech Republic in December of 1902, Harald Kreutzberg was a modern dancer and choreographer, known for his roles in both traditional ballets and expressive dance dramas. He played a major role in the development of the expressionist modern dance in Germany.

Trained at the Dresden Ballet School, Kreutzberg studied under two of the most important figures in modern dance, Mary Wigman and Rudolf Laban, and was a critical link in the aesthetic lineage that gave rise to American choreographer and composer Alwin Nikolais, choreographer and dance educator Hanya Holm, and many other U.S. choreographers.

In 1926, Harald Kreutzberg was in Swiss theater choreographer Max Terpis’s “Don Morte”, a version of Edgar Allen Poe’s novel “The Masque of the Red Death”. A year later, he appeared in the plays “Turnadot and Jedermann” and as Puck for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, both directed by Max Reinhardt. Kreutzberg accompanied Reinhardt to New York City where he began a tour of the United States, Canada, and Europe with the dancer Yvonne Georgi.

While his impact on expressionist modern dance was sweeping Europe, in the United States, Kreutzberg was considered by many as a major force in the development of the male modern dancer. He was not afraid to challenge the gender norms in his time. Kreutzberg tended to incorporate feminine movements and costuming in his performances, especially alongside his dance partner Yvonne Georgi. He specifically inspired male dancers by breaking the stereotypical roles of princes, birds, and mythical gods.

With their international tours from 1928-1931, Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi exposed the public to the style of expressionist dance. Many gay male dancers in Germany also pursued their careers during the years of the National Socialist government. He was the most notable among them as his long-term partnership with his accompanist and composer Friedrich Wilckens was an open secret. While other gay men were imprisoned and forced to wear a pink triangle, Kreutzberg was allowed to tour throughout Germany and abroad.

In 1943, Harald Kreutzberg appeared as a jester in Georg Willhelm’s film “Paracelsus”, in which he performed a modern hypnotic dance. Choreographer George Balanchine and writer Lincoln Kirstein invited him to share a program with the New York City Ballet in the late 1940s. Kreutzberg established his own dance school in 1955 in Bern, Switzerland, and retired from the stage in 1959. He continued to choreograph for others and teach at his school until his death in Bern on April 25, 1968.

Insert Image: German photographer Hans Robertson, who specialized in the genre of dance, took this photo, on December 11, 1902, showing Harald Kreutzberg wearing a headdress for a performance at the Volksbühne in Berlin.

Jameson Fitzpatrick: “A Poem for Pulse”

Photographers Unknown, A Poem for Pulse

“We must love one another whether or not we die.

Love can’t block a bullet

but it can’t be destroyed by one either,

and love is, for the most part, what makes Us Us—

in Orlando and in Brooklyn and in Kabul.

We will be everywhere, always;

there’s nowhere else for Us, or you, to go.

Anywhere you run in this world, love will be there to greet you.

Around any corner, there might be two men. Kissing.”

—Jameson Fitzpatrick, A Poem for Pulse, Excerpt, Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, 2017

Poet and professor, Jameson Fitzpatrick holds a BA and an MFA from New York University, where he now teaches in the Expository Writing Program. His verse defines the cutting edge of contemporary American poetry, telling and retelling the regularity and specificity of contemporary gay experience.

Fitzpatrick’s first publication was the 2014 chapbook “Morrisroe: Erasure” which consists of twenty-four erasures of texts describing a hookup by the avant-garde photographer Mark Morrisroe, who was a pioneer for the more direct, intimate and confrontational, late twentieth-century queer art. Fitzpatrick’s chapbook, inspired by a “man of a certain age” whom he loved, explores the art of those lost to AIDS.

Jameson Fitzpatrick’s second work was the 2018 chapbook “Mr. &” which is centered on the long title poem whose sections purposely slide into one another with slips in logic and lurching sequence structure. The shorter poetic pieces present a modernist view of marriage as a politically ambiguous institution, recently also available to same-sex couples.

His most recent publication is the 2020 “Pricks in the Tapestry”, published by Birds, LLC, a small independent poetry press. The book is a record of Jameson Fitzpatrick’s feelings and thoughts of his life during his mid-to-late twenties, which shows the difficulties a poet has using the self as the subject in a lyric form, Written from the narrative base of Cherry Grove and the Fire Island Pines of Long Island, New York, the characters are placed between the time-held, orgiastic perception of the area and its immense artistic history.

Jameson Fitzpatrick’s poems have appeared in The American Reader, The Awl, The Literary Review, Best New Poets 2017, The New Yorker, and Poetry magazine, among other publications. He is a 2017 NYSCA / NYFA Fellow in Poetry and currently lives in New York City.

Notes: The complete “A Poem for Pulse” can be found at the website “All Your Pretty Words” located at: https://allyourprettywords.tumblr.com/post/145923858388/a-poem-for-pulse-jameson-fitzpatrick

David Felsenthal’s Interview-discussion with Jameson Fitzpatrick on his “Pricks in the Tapestry” can be found at the online magazine “The Believer” located: https://believermag.com/logger/a-review-of-pricks-in-the-tapestry-by-jameson-fitzpatrick/

Countee Cullen: “We Hide the Heart that Bleeds”

Photographer Unknown, We Hide the Heart that Bleeds

“We shall not always plant while others reap

The golden increment of bursting fruit,

Not always countenance, abject and mute,

That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;

Not everlastingly while others sleep

Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,

Not always bend to some more subtle brute;

We were not made to eternally weep.

The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,

White stars is no less lovely being dark,

And there are buds that cannot bloom at all

In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;

So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,

And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.”

—-Countee Cullen, From the Dark Tower, Copper Sun, 1927

Born on May 30, 1903, Countee Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children’s writer, and playwright who was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Raised in a Methodist parsonage by the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen and his wife, he attended and graduated with honors from the De Witt Clinton High School in The Bronx, New York. In 1922, Cullen entered New York University.

Already having written poems since the age of fourteen, Cullen’s first published poems were in The Crisis magazine, under the leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Opportunity, a magazine of the National Urban League. Soon after this, he began to be published in Harper’s, the Century Magazine, and Poetry, founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe. Cullen won several awards, including second prize in a contest, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, for his poem “Ballad of the Brown Girl”.

Countee Cullen graduated from New York University in 1923. In 1925, Harper & Brothers published Cullen’s first volume of verse, “Color”, and he was admitted to Harvard University to pursue a masters in English. Written in a traditional style, “Color” celebrated black beauty anddeplored the effects of racism. A landmark of the Harlem Renaissance, the book contained “Incident” and “Heritage”, probably Cullen’s most famous poems, and “Yet Do I Marvel”, his poem on racial identity and injustice. A year after his volume’s publication, Cullen graduated from Harvard with a masters degree in 1926.

Cullen worked as assistant editor for Opportunity magazine, where his column, “The Dark Tower”, increased his literary reputation. His poetry collections “The Ballad of the Brown Girl” and “Copper Sun”, both published in 1927, explored similar themes as “Color”, but they were not so well received. Many in the black community felt he did not give the subject of race the same attention he had given it previously..

Countee Cullen was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928 which enabled him to study and write abroad. He traveled back and forth several times between France and the United States during the years 1928 to 1934, publishing four volumes of poetry by 1929. Shortly after in the early 1930s, Cullen’s work was almost completely free of racial subject matter, focused instead on idealized beauty and classic romantic subjects.

Cullen’s only novel “One Way to Heaven”, a social comedy of lower-class blacks and the bourgeoisie in New York City, was published in 1932. He taught French, English, and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York City from 1934 until the end of his life. In his last years, Cullen wrote mostly for the theater, including adapting the novel “God Sends Sunday” into the 1946 Broadway musical “St. Louis Woman”.

Countee Cullen developed his Eurocentric style of writing from his exposure to Graeco-Roman Classics and English Literature, work he was exposed to while attending prestigious universities like New York University and Harvard. Cullen found inspiration in Greek mythology to explore the themes of race and identity in his work. Influenced also by the Romantic movement of writers, he believed African-American poets’ use of a more traditional style of writing poetry would allow the building of bridges between the black and white communities.

Countee Cullen died from high blood pressure and acute kidney injury on January 9, 1946. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City. The Harlem branch of the New York Public Library was named the Countee Cullen Library in his honor. In 2013, Cullen was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.

Insert Image: Winold Reiss, “Countee Cullen”, 1925, Pastel Portrait on Illustration Board, 76.1 x 54.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

Note: “From the Dark Tower” is a sonnet that focuses on the injustices of racism, as the speaker notes that white people deprive black people of the fruits of their labor. However, the speaker, who is black, is confident that this will not be the case forever, ultimately suggesting that such hardships build strength and resiliency. In turn, the speaker sets forth the optimistic belief that black people will one day triumph over racist oppression and reap the rewards of their hard work.

Yukio Mishima: “The Dark Nectar in the Little Room”

Photographer Unknown, (The Dark Nectar in the Little Room)

“Suddenly the full long wail of a ship’s horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room – a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale’s back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. Full of the glitter and the frenzy of night, the horn thundered in, conveying from the distant offing, from the dead center of the sea, a thirst for the dark nectar in the little room.”

Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Born in January of 1925, Yukio Mishima, pseudonym Hiraoka Kimitake, was an author, poet, playwright, actor, model and director. He is widely considered to be one of the most important Japanese writers of the twentieth century.

Having failed physically to qualify for military service, Mishima worked for a Toyota factory, and after World War II, he studied law at the University of Tokyo. His first novel, “Kamen no Kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask)” is a partly autobiographical work that describes with exceptional brilliance a young gay man who must mask his sexual preferences from the Imperial Japanese society around him. This work brought Mishima immediate acclaim, after which he devoted his full energies to writing.

Mishima followed up his success with several novels whose main characters are tormented with either psychological or physical problems, or obsessed with unattainable goals. Among these works are: “Ai no Kawaki (Thirst for Love)” published in 1950 and “Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors)” published in 1954. In addition to novels, essays, and short stories, Mishima wrote plays of Japanese Nõ drama which included “Kindai Nõgaku Shu (Five Modern Nõh Plays)” in 1956 and “Sado Kõshaku Fujin (Madame de Sade)” in 1965.

Yukio Mishima’s “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” was published in Japan in 1963 and translated into English by writer and scholar John Nathan in 1965. The novel explores the vicious nature of youth that is sometimes mistaken for innocence. The protagonist Noboru, a thirteen year old boy, is thrilled when a his widowed mother is romanced by a sailor, who Noboru idolizes as a rugged heroic man of the sea. When the sailor gives up life onboard the ship for marriage, rejecting what Noboru holds sacred, Noboru and his friends respond with violence.

Mishima was deeply attracted to the austere patriotism and martial spirit of Japan’s past, which he contrasted unfavorably to the materialistic Westernized people and the prosperous society of Japan in the postwar era. On November 25, 1970, after having that day delivered the final installment of his work “The Sea of Fertility” to his publisher, Mishima and four of his students, Shield Society followers, seized control of the commanding general’s office at a military headquarters near downtown Tokyo.

After giving a ten minute speech from a balcony to assembled servicemen below and getting an unsympathetic response, Mishima committed seppuku in the traditional manner, disemboweling himself with his blade, followed by decapitation at the hands of a follower.

Notes: Photographer Eikoh Hosoe took the insert photograph of Yukio Mishima. The link that follows is a talk Hosoe gave at a Twentieth Masters Tribute to Yukio Mishima: https://americansuburbx.com/2010/06/eikoh-hosoe-subject-matter.html

For a more extensive biography on Yukio Mishima: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201124-yukio-mishima-the-strange-tale-of-japans-infamous-novelist

Henry Scott Tuke

Henry Scott Tuke, “T.E. Lawrence as a Cadet”, 1921-22, Oil on Canvas, 42.5 x 52.7 cm, Clouds Hill Dorset, National Trust

Born in York on June 12th of 1858 into a prominent Quaker family, Henry Scott Tuke was an English visual artist, both a painter and photographer. His father was Daniel Hack Tuke, a well-known medical doctor specializing in psychiatry, who campaigned for the humane treatment of the insane. In 1859 the Tuke family moved to Falmouth, where Daniel Tuke established a practice.

Encouraged to draw and paint from an early age, Henry Scott Tuke was enrolled in 1870 at Irwin Sharpe’s Quaker school in Weston-super-Mare, where he remained until the age of sixteen. In 1875, he enrolled at the Slade School of Art under etcher and painter Alphonse Legros and historical painter Sir Edward Poynter. Tuke won a scholarship which supported his training at the Slade and his 1880 studies in Italy. Between 1881 and 1883, he was in Paris where he met Realist movement painter Jules Bastien-Lepage, who was associated with the beginning of Naturalism. It was Bastien-Lepage who encouraged Tuke to paint en plein air, painting outdoors within the landscape.

While studying in France, Tuke decided to move to Newlyn Cornwall where many of his Parisian and Slade School friends, including painters Thomas Cooper Gotch and Albert Chevallier Tayler, had already formed the Newlyn School of painters. Attracted to the fishing village’s fantastic light, cheap living and the availability of inexpensive models, these artists were fascinated by the everyday life in the harbor and nearby villages and took this as the subject of many of their paintings.

After he exhibited his work at London’s Royal Academy of Art, Tuck received several important commissions. With his style of rough, visible brushstrokes, more impressionistic than those of the other painters, he distanced himself after a short time from the Newlyn School. During the 1880s, Tuke became friends with Oscar Wilde and other prominent poets and writers including poet and cultural historian John Addington Symonds. In 1885, Tuke returned to Falmouth, a secluded part of Cornwall with a mild climate where many of his major works were produced.

In his time at Falmouth, Tuke focused on maritime scenes and portraits, earning most of his income from his work as a maritime painter. He used a converted old fishing boat as a studio and living quarters in the summer and, in winter, rented two rooms in a cottage situated between Pennance Point and Swanpool Beach. This cottage remained Tuke’s permanent base until his death. While living there, he produced his 1888-89 “All Hands to the Pumps”, showing sailors manning the pumps during a rough sea storm; “The Sailing Lesson” in 1892; and the 1914 ship portrait “Four Masted Barque”, commissioned by its owner.

Henry Scott Tuke became an established artist and was elected to full membership of the Royal Academy in 1914. Sometime in 1923, he visited Jamaica and Central America. There he created from 1923 to 1924 several watercolor scenes, such as “Tobacco Cay, British Honduras”. However in penetrating the interior of Belize, Tuke became ill and was forced to return home, where he never fully recovered his health. After a long illness and suffering a heart attack in 1928, he died, a year later, in March of 1929. In his will Tuke left generous amounts of money to some of the men, who as boys, had been his models.

Moving between Cornish-based artist colonies and the London art scene, Tuke presented a stylistic fusion of progressive en plein air paintings executed with a vivid palette and loose impressionistic handling of lighting and brushwork. Although remembered today mainly for his oil paintings of young men, Tuke, in addition to his achievements as a figurative painter, produced as many portraits of ships as he did human figures. A prolific artist, he produced over thirteen-hundred known works during his career.

Note: Among Henry Scott Tuke’s friends and models was a high school cadet, T. E. Lawrence, who later became famous as the iconic Lawrence of Arabia. In the painting “T. E. Lawrence as a Cadet”, done at Newporth Beach, near Falmouth, Tuke painted the young Lawrence getting dressed after a swim. As Lawrence was in his thirties in the early 1920s, it is most likely that this scene was composed using an earlier sketch drawn by Tuke, possibly from 1905.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Henry Scott Tuke”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print, Tate Museum, London

Second Insert Image: Henry Scott Tuke, “Jamaica”, 1924, Oil on Panel, 39.5 x 32 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Henry Scott Tuke, “The Green Waterways”, 1926, Oil on Canvas, 122 x 112 cm, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, Lancashire, England

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “William Ayers Ingram and Henry Scott Tuke, Pennance Point”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print, Tate Museum, London

Juliusz Martwy

Juliusz Martwy, “At Night”, 2008, Watercolor, Ink, Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 25 x 35 cm, Artist’s Private Collection

Born in Warsaw in 1977, Juliusz Lewandowski, known as Juliusz Martwy, is a self-taught Polish artist. He began his career with illustrations for an edition of French writer Isidore Lucien Ducasse’s “The Songs of Maldoror”, written under his nom de plume Comte de Lautréamont, and illustrations for the literary works of Marquis de Sade, famous for his libertine sexuality. Martwy draws inspiration for his work from the figurative styles of expressionism, cubism, the New Objectivity, and Russian traditional painting.

An important part of Martwy’s collective works are the autobiographical threads, through which he presents the universal problems of human nature. He deals with social, political and moral issues in his paintings, both historical and contemporary, such as the past civil war in Spain, the French Revolution, and the current political situation in Poland.

Apart from multi-faceted genre scenes, Juliusz Martwy paints intimate figurative portraits within spaces that depict small narrative, often erotic, incidents. His palette varies from scenes executed in tones of exclusively one color to those with either contrasting or complimentary colors. The portrayed figures, who readily express their emotions to the viewers, are composed through the use of strong lines and blocks of color.

In 2011, Martwy had his initial exhibition of work at London’s Showcase Richmix Gallery in Bethnal Green. He entered his work at the 2011 Modern Fine Art International Artists Group Exhibition held at London’s Westbank Gallery. Martwy also showed in the 2011 Polish Erotic Art exhibition held at the Museum of Eroticism in Cracow, and later in 2014, as part of the Group Exhibition of EroArt at Warsaw’s Erotic Expo. In 2017, Martwy had a solo exhibition at the Talinn Portrait Gallery in Estonia. His work has been available through the Catharine Miller Gallery located in the Chelsea area of London.

More of Juliusz Martwy’s work and contact information may be found at the artist’s Behance site: https://www.behance.net/juliuszlewandowski

Frank O’Hara: “We are Flesh and Breathe”

Photographer Unknown, We are Flesh and Breathe

“When I am feeling depressed and anxious and sullen

all you have to do is take your clothes off

and all is wiped away revealing life’s tenderness

that we are flesh and breathe and are near us

as you are really as you are I become as I

really am alive and knowing vaguely what is

and what is important to me above the intrusions

of incident and accidental relationships

which have nothing to do with my life

when I am in your presence I feel life is strong

and will defeat all its enemies and all of mine

and all of yours and yours in you and mine in me

sick logic and feeble reasoning are cured

by the perfect symmetry of your arms and legs

spread out making an eternal circle together

creating a golden pillar beside the Atlantic

the faint line of hair dividing your torso

gives my mind rest and emotions their release

into the infinite air where since once we are

together we always will be in this life come what may”

—Frank O’Hara, Poem (A la Recherche d’Gertrude Stein), 1959

Born on March 27, 1926 in Baltimore, Maryland, Francis Russell O’Hara was an American poet, writer, and art critic. He spent his youth in Grafton, Massachusetts, and studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. In service during World War II, O’Hara was stationed as a sonar man on the destroyer USS Nicholas in the South Pacific.

When education funding became available to veterans, Frank O’Hara attended Harvard University. Despite his love of music and expertise on the piano, he switched his major to English and graduated with a degree from Harvard in 1959. While at Harvard O’Hara met poet and art critic John Ashbery and began publishing his own poems in the Harvard Advocate, the art and literary magazine of the college.

O’Hara did his graduate work at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, winning a major scholarship, the Hopwood Award, given to aspiring writers. After a failed attempt at a novel, he wrote ninety poems in a few months and two plays. O’Hara received his MA in English Literature in 1951 and moved in September of that year to New York City with Joe Lesueur, who was his roommate and sometime lover for the next eleven years. Settled in New York City, he continued to write seriously while employed at the Museum of Modern Art, where he became an assistant curator.

O’Hara’s early poetic work was considered both provocative and provoking. In 1952, his first volume of poetry, “A City Winter, and Other Poems”, with drawings by artist Larry Rivers, attracted favorable attention. O’Hara also wrote essays on painting and sculpture, and reviews for the magazine ArtNews which were considered brilliant.

Frank O’Hara’s association with painters Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns, leaders of the New York School group of writers and artists, became a source of inspiration for his highly original poetry..O’Hara attempted to produce with words the effects these artists had created on canvas. In certain instances, he collaborated with the painters to make “poem-paintings,” paintings with word texts.

In the summer of 1959, Frank O’Hara met Canadian ballet dancer Vincent Warren, often described as the true love of O’Hara’s life. Appearing in O’Hara’s poetry, Warren became the subject of O’Hara’s best love poems, including “Poem (A la Recherche d’Gertrude Stein)”, “Les Luths”, “Poem (So Many Echos in My Head)”, and “Having a Coke With You”. Many of these poems to Warren are collected in the volume “Love Poems (A Tentative Title)”, published in 1965.

Frank O’Hara’s poetry is basically autographical, based more on his observations of life rather than the exploration of his past. An urban poet, he constantly wrote during his daily routine, recording his thoughts for later use or sending them off in letters. O’Hara was known to treat poetry as something to be done in the moment with a frank directness that often erased the line between public and private. Influenced by Puerto Rican-American poet William Carlos Williams, he also used everyday language and simple statements, split at intervals, in the form of staccato.

In the early morning of July 24, 1966, Frank O’Hara was struck by a jeep on the beach of Fire Island, New York. He died the next day of a ruptured liver, at the age of forty. O’Hara was buried in Green River Cemetery on Long Island. Painter Larry Rivers, along with poet Bill Berkson, art critic Edwin Denby, and René d’Hamoncourt, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, delivered eulogies. His long-time lover Vincent Warren, devastated by the loss, returned to Canada and became a celebrated dancer and dance historian, passing away in October of 2017.

Note: More extensive information on Frank O’Hara’s life and work can be found at the Poetry Foundation located at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=frank+o%27hara