Category: literature

Christopher Cox: “A Key West Companion”

 

Photographers Unknown, A Key West Companion

I had met Doris on an earlier trip. She approached me in the supermarket and told me to put back the papayas I’d piled into the shopping basket. “Come over and pick them off the ground outside my fence. I’ll be glad to get rid of them. Take some sapodillas too.” Now she appeared behind the wrought-iron fence with a mild hello, released a tabby cat from her arms, and led me down a narrow brick path into the cool dark garden where hundreds of parakeets and canaries fluttered in several mesh-covered gazebos, each chirping in a different key. 

Doris is a wiry woman with white hair who must be in her mid-eighties. She was wearing a turquoise artist’s smock with both the sleeves torn off at the shoulders. Her eyes were a similar blue. “I’ve been here I don’t know how long,” she said. “I came from South Carolina after World War II. I was a WAVE.” Since then she has been involved in various jobs and projects around the island, mostly in connection with the tourist trade. At present she’s creating a Key West historical museum in her back yard. 

In the center of the garden Doris had built an Indian chickee, a hut made of thatch and berm (local mud) and encircled by a jagged stick fence. “The abode of the southeast Indians,” she announced. “I’m building a miniature in one of my bungalows, with little Indians and itty bitty pigs turning on spits. It’s for my Indian exhibit.”

There are several bungalows around the garden, each of which will house an exhibit based on a different period of Key West history. But the Indian comes first. Doris pointed to the “historically accurate” piles of coral rock that were arranged near the Indian chickee, then to a huge gooseberry tree that shaded the entire garden. “I grew this tree from two seeds I brought back from Katherine Mansfield’s house in the South of France.” she said. “Mouton, Mentone—I don’t remember the name. Don’t ask me any questions; it’s so long ago. All I know is that it’s never produced gooses or berries.” She laughed at her own joke and then stopped for a moment to perk up the purple orchids, vermilion and staghorn fern that grew on the dark trunk of the tree. 

Christopher Cox, The Indians in Doris’s Garden, A Seaport Town, A Key West Companion, 1983, St. Martin’s Press, New York

Born at Gadsden, Alabama in August of 1949, Christopher Cox, birth name Howard Raymond Cox Jr., was an author, editor, director and producer. Along with his position as senior editor of Ballantine Books, he is known for his collaboration within The Violet Quill, a group of seven gay male writers whose work established gay writing as a literary movement. 

One of four children born to prominent banker Howard Cox and Dorothy Trusler, Christopher Cox received his elementary education at  the local Emma Sanson High School. In 1966 at the age of sixteen, Cox was given a summer job in Washington D.C. as a page for Alabama Senator John Sparkman. After his high school graduation, he returned the following summer season to work for Alabama Representatives George Andrews and Armistead Selden. Cox attended the University of Alabama for two years befor moving to New York for a possible career in the  theater.

In the fall of 1969, Cox studied acting at director Herbert Berghof and actress Uta Hagen’s HB Studio in New York City. His first role was as understudy for the Mute in a production of “The Fantasticks”. Using Christopher Cox as his professional name, he performed, directed and wrote both plays and lyrics. Cox was the director of the New Play Series and the Writers Workshop at the Joseph Jefferson Theatre Company for which he produced a dozen works between 1974 and 1976. Cox performed during the 1970s in both Off-Broadway and Broadway productions, including Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona”. During the 1980s, he changed his focus to writing, editing and photography. 

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Christopher Cox was affiliated with the Violet Quill, also known as the Lavender Quill. This group of seven writers are regarded as one of the strongest collective voices of the gay male experience in the post-Stonewall era. Cox, Robert Ferro, Andrew Holleran, Michael Grumley, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore met several times between 1975 and 1981 to read aloud and discuss their works in progress. The agenda of the Violet Quill also included working together to promote the recognition, acceptance and publication of gay literature beyond the boundaries of their own community. 

As a writer, Cox’s memories of Alabama and its people appeared regularly as central themes in his stories. Significant events in his life, such as the suicide death of his uncle Ray in 1956 and his mother’s death from cancer in 1975, became focal points for his writing. From March of 1975 to 1977, Cox served as secretary to composer Virgil Thompson for whom he arranged and catalogued correspondence and music manuscripts before their transfer to Yale University. This position gave Cox access to Thompson’s circle of people as well as his neighbors in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, which included such notables as Dylan Thomas, Leonard Cohen, Arthur Miller and Robert Mapplethorpe. Cox’s 1978 video piece “Neurotic Moon” is a semi-autobiographic work that describes his role as secretary putting together pieces of a famous composer’s life. 

In the 1980s, Christopher Cox worked for publishing firms, most notably E.P. Dutton and Ballantine. He wrote freelance articles and reviews for several papers and magazines, including New York City’s weekly alternative “Soho Weekly News” during its run from 1973 to 1982. Cox published his “A Key West Companion” through St. Martin’s Press in 1983 and, in 1987, his monograph on photographer Dorothea Lange through the fine art photography periodical Aperture. 

In the spring of 1986, Cox met his lifetime partner William R. Olander, an art historian, critic, and curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.. Christopher Cox died in New York from AIDS-related complications on September 7, 1990 at the age of forty-one. His death was preceded by the death of William Olander, also from AIDS-related complications, on March 18, 1989 at the age of thirty-five.

Notes: After internships at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Toledo Museum of Art, William “Bill”Olander held the position of curator of modern art at the Allen Memorial Museum at Oberlin College from 1979 to 1984. He became the Allen Museum’s acting director for his last two years. The co-founder of the Visual AIDS art project, Olander was known for his work with ACT UP/ NY (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, New York).

Both Christopher Cox and William Olander’s writings, personal papers and correspondence files are contained in the Yale Collection of American Literature Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The collection overview for this material can be found at: https://archives.library.wcsu.edu/caoSearch/catalog/cty-br_beinecke-coxc#summary

The Aperture Foundation’s “Dorothy Lange: Masters of Photography, No. 5”, which contains Christopher Cox’s essay on Lange and forty-three black and white images by Lange, can be found in its entirety on the (SCRIBD) website at: https://www.scribd.com/document/514781915/Aperture-Masters-of-Photography-Linda-Gordon-Dorothea-Lange-Dorothea-Lange-Aperture-2014

Second insert Image: Christopher Cox, “A Key West Companion”, January 1, 1983, Paperback Edition, St. Martin’s Press, New York City

Third Insert Image: “Dorothea Lange: Masters of Photography, No. 5”, 1987, Essay by Christopher Cox, 43 Black and White Images by Lange, Aperture Foundation, Millerton, New York

Dario Bellezza: “Crazed, Crazed for Love”

 

Photographers Unknown, Crazed, Crazed for Love

For Pier Vittorio Tondelli

At night we lose sight of the Tiber.
The wind forces open your honeyed
mouth; I taste firsthand
the languid roses of your springtime.

The quick pace of a police officer
perhaps young and willing, or maybe
elderly who gropes for the stairs
confounds the memories and the sky
goes dark–

Crazed, crazed for love, to love
thresholds oblivious and rabid for trade
where I enter without looking for the gloom
within, muted lover, I shout
to get through the days, arrived
midway through life and sated,
but still unknown to myself
restless, high-wired for sex –
inclined to abandon personal grievance,
to abjure, repudiate the celestial spheres
of nightly idleness or of infected Narcissus.
I’ll trample History
out of dishonor or delight.

Dario Bellezza, Crazed, crazed for love, Snakewoman, Translated in 2025 from the Italian by Peter Covino

Born at Rome in September of 1944, Dario Bellezza was Italy’s first openly gay major prizewinning poet, author and playwright. He is considered to be among the best poets of the second half of the twentieth-century due to the veritable variety of his work from epigrams and brash love-lyrics to unfaltering political chronicles.

Bellezza’s elementary education was at Rome’s classical lyceum from which he graduated in 1962. His education led to writing for several Italian literary and poetry magazines, including the 1967-1968 journal “Carte Segrete (Secret Cards)” dedicated to avant-garde and contemporary literature, art and thought. Bellezza began his rise to prominence in the 1960s through his lifelong collaboration with the magazine “Nuovi Argomenti (New Subjects)”, a literary magazine founded in 1953 by Alberto Moravia.

Through his association with literary critic and writer Enzo Siciliano, Dario Bellezza entered the intellectual world of mid-1960s Rome, at a time when Italy was undergoing convulsive ideological confrontations in its culture and politics. Those writers who primarily influenced his work included Italian poet Sandro Penna, French novelist and playwright Jean Genet, symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud whose entire poetic works  would later be translated into Italian by Bellezza, and Elsa Morante, poet, novelist and wife to Alberto Moravia.

Bellezza’s first published prose work was the 1970 “L’innocenza (Innocence)”, a dark partially-autobiographical story of the protagonist Nino, who after recognizing his own homosexuality, chose condemnation rather than acceptance. In 1971, Bellezza’s first volume of poetry “Invettive e Licenze (Invectives and Licenses)” was published by the Milan press Garzanti. Noted for its technical precision, the autobiographically-inspired poems depicted people overwhelmed by bitterness, guilt, scandal, and shame. 

Dario Bellezza’s debut poetry volume was praised by poet, film director and playwright  Pier Paolo Pasolini, prominent in the Roman intellectual scene and a major figure in European cinema and literature. Bellezza was very grateful for Pasolini’s affection and support for his work. Upset and angry at his friend’s death, Bellezza wrote the 1981 biographical essay “Morte di Pasolini” in response to the November 1975 brutal kidnapping, torture, and murder of Pasolini in the Roman coastal neighborhood of Ostia. This was followed three years later by a second work on Pasolini, “Turbamento (Disturbance)”.

In 1983, Bellezza published “io (me)”, a collection of autobiographical poems that described his everyday life and the desperation of his loves. Seeing himself as a highly educated bourgeois man and homosexual bigot, Bellezza suffered from insomnia that he felt was due to feelings of guilt as well as the many contradictions that struggled within him. The difficulty of a secret and clandestine homosexual life in Rome was a predominant topic in both his poetic and prose work. Bellezza cites the systematic refusal of the self as the only salvation from homosexuality in his 1972 “Lettere da Sodoma (Letters from Sodom)”,

Over his twenty-five year career as a writer, Dario Bellezza published more than twenty books, including eight full-length poetry collections, eight novels, two theater plays, and translations from the French. He received the 1976 Viareggio Prize, Italy’s prestigious literary award, for his 1976 poetry volume “Morte Segreta (Secret Death)”. In 1994, Bellezza received the Montale Prize for his poetic work “L’avversario (The Adversary)” and the Fondi la Postora Prize for his play “Ordalia della Croce (Ordeal of the Cross)”

Known for his candid exploration of homosexuality and its complexities in the modern world, Dario Bellezza, in the midst of writing a book about his struggle with AIDS, died a premature death related to complications from AIDS on the last day of March in 1995. He is interred at Campo Cestio (Cimitero Acattolico), Rome, Lazio, Italy.

Notes: The Poetry Foundation has a May 2025 article on Dario Bellezza written by essayist and poet Daniel Felsenthal, entitled “Drink Me, Lick Me Even” at its online site: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1679372/drink-me-lick-me-even

The online literary site Asymptote has two poems by Dario Bellezza translated by University of Rhode Island Associate Professor Peter Covino: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/dario-bellezza-what-sex-is-death/

An obituary on Dario Bellezza written by James Kirkup for the online “Independent” news magazine can be located at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-dario-bellezza-1303484.html 

There is a collection of Dario Bellezza’s poetry, translated by Italian literature researcher Luca Baldoni, in Volume 1 of the 2006 Italian Poetry Review available as a PDF  at Academie.edu: https://www.academia.edu/44358397/Dario_Bellezza_Selection_of_Poems_Translated_into_English

Top Insert Image: Guglielmina Otter, “Dario Bellezza”, circa 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Interview with Velio Carratoni for Fermenti Magazine

Second Insert Image: Dario Bellezza, “Morte di Pasolini”, January 1, 1981, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore , Milan, Italy

Third Insert Image: Dario Bellezza, “Addio Amori, Addio Cuori”, January 1, 1996, Fermenti Editrice , Rome, Italy

Bottom Insert Image: Guglielmina Otter, “Dario Bellezza”, circa 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Interview with Velio Carratoni for Fermenti Magazine

Hervé Guibert

The Photography of Hervé Guibert

Born at Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine on the fourteenth of December in 1955, Hervé Guibert was a French author and photographer. The author of two-dozen published works, he wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion through a mixture of diary writing, memoir, and fiction. Both his writings and photography were closely linked to his private life. The subjects of Guibert’s writings often became his friends; those whom he loved were often portrayed as celebrities, alternately idolized and exposed.

Guibert’s photographic oeuvre contains interior scenes and landscapes as well as portraits of family, friends and lovers. He worked in black and white with tones drawn to soft grays. Photographs of Guibert’s immediate surroundings, his bookcase or desk, were created with the same intensity as photographs of nudes in his bed. His work is both restrained and subtle, created more for his person or close friends rather than public exposure. Although most of his work remains elusive, never having been exhibited or published, those images that have appeared are cool, confident and emotionally warm.

Hervé Guibert was born into a conservative middle-class family of a veterinary inspector and his wife, a former teacher. He relocated to Paris at the age of seventeen with the hope of becoming an actor or scriptwriter. After his rejection from a Paris film school, Guibert  entered the literary world and, by the age of twenty, was writing dating advice for “20 Ans (Twenty Years)”, a glossy women’s magazine. In 1977, he published his autobiographical novel, “La Mort Propagande (Death Propaganda)”. 

In 1978, Guibert was hired as a photography critic for France’s evening newspaper “Le Monde”. He successfully established himself as a photographer with a photographic literary volume, “Suzanne and Louise”, containing intimate portraits of his great-aunts. In 1981, Hervé Guibert published his “Image Fantôme (Ghost Image)”, an insightful collection of mini-essays on various photographic forms such as family album portraits, photo-booth film strips, and pornographic Polaroids. In this work, Guibert presented photography as tactile, fetishistic and linked to frustrated desires.

In 1982, Hervé Guibert completed his “Les Aventures Singulières (The Singular Adventures)”. This collection of short stories,  published through Éditions de Minuit in Paris, centered on a singular character’s life over a period of three years. He shared the Best Screenplay César Award in 1984 for a collaborative work with opera and theater director Patrice Chéreau on the 1983 film “L’Homme Blessé (The Wounded Man)”.

Guibert was granted in 1987 a two year residency scholarship at Villa Medicis, the site of the French Academy in Rome, where he studied with his friend, the openly gay writer and journalist Mathieu Lindon. In January of 1988, Guibert received a positive diagnosis for AIDS and began to record in his writings what would be the remainder of his life. He was the long-time friend of both Christine and her partner, film director Thierry Jouno, considered the man in Guibert’s life. Guibert married Christine to ensure that his royalty income would pass to her and her two children with Jouno.

In 1989, Hervé Guibert published his highly erotic novella ““Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”, a dramatization of his earlier intermittent relationship with the impulsive and unpredictable teenager Vincent Marmousez. He revealed his HIV status in his 1990 real-life based novel “À l’Ami qui ne M’a Pas Sauvé la Vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life)”. Following the release of this novel, Guibert became the focus of media attention with interviews and several talk show appearances.

Guibert’s last work, “Cytomégalovirus” was a description of his autumn 1991 hospitalization and the increasing blindness he suffered from his illness. In the second week of December in 1991, Guibert attempted suicide by taking digitalin, a heart medication toxic in large doses. Two weeks later, he died at the age of thirty-six in Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, on the twenty-seventh of December in 1991.

Notes: An excellent article on Hervé Guibert’s 1981 essay volume “Ghost Image” can be found on British photographer Felix Pilgrim’s site: https://www.felixpilgrim.com/blog-1/herve-guiberts-ghost-image

The contemporary Vienna gallery Felix Gaudlitz, in collaboration with Attilia Fattori Franchini, organized a 2020 exhibition of Hervé Guibert’s photographic work entitled “…of lovers, time, and death”. The gallery’s article with several of Guibert’s photographs can be found at: https://felixgaudlitz.com/exhibitions/herve-guibert-of-lovers-time-and-death/

Information written by Christine (Guibert) on Hervé Guibert’s partner Thierry Joune and the impact he had on Guibert’s writings can be found at: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/281395860/thierry-jouno

A more extensive biographical article on Hervé Guibert, with additional links, can be found in this blog’s November 2024 archive: https://ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog/2024/11/18/hevre-guibert-he-who-wished-to-be-master-of-the-truth/

Top Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Self Portrait”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, 23.7 x 30.2 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert and Poet Eugène Savitzkaya, New Year’s Eve, Rio nell’Elba, Italy”, 1984, Gelatin Silver Print, Semiotext(e)

Third Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Christine”, 1983, Gelatin Silver Print, 23.8 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert and Thierry Juono, Hotel Gellért, Gesellschaft”, 1983, Gelatin Silver Print

CAConrad: “Be the Storm Love Places in Someone’s Home”

Photographers Unknown, The Storm Love Places in Someone’s Home

            I do not take any
           calls except from
          the century we are in
when there is no bible in my hotel room
 it makes me sad to have no place to put
     my filthy poems for future guests
      it is important to let them know
everyone should bum with abandon as soon as the heat is available
 be a self-styled alarm clock no one can shut off
   be the storm Love places in someone’s home
         are you sure we can handle this
          because I am absolutely certain
           c’mon wind knock us around
             we are a tide that cures ills
               look at us in the mirror
       as soon as the invented language enters
      us something else will vibrate in our skin
     opening door with teeth of the future to
   the place where we let the freer feeling go
when you told me you had been looking for me
        we pressed through every
       invisible barrier between us
     I watched you gently let the gods
   know you are ready to win the lottery
        there were people from the
           19th century alive in my
            lifetime many years ago
              I met some of them
            they are all gone now
             as we hold on to
             the side of one
           another howling down
           the velocity of seconds

CAConrad, Acclimating to Discomfort of the System Breaking Beneath Us, Amanda Paradise, 2021, Wave Books

Born in Topeka, Kansas in January of 1966, CAConrad is an American poet and professor currently teaching poetry at New York’s Columbia University and the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Having worked with the processes of poetry and rituals since 1975, CAConrad is the originator of the poetic format known as “(Soma)tics”, a meditative writing exercise that emphasizes personal perception and experience. 

The child of a Vietnam War veteran and his wife, CAConrad’s early years were spent in the small factory town of Boyertown, Pennsylvania where bullying often occurred. CAConrad began writing poetry while in high school during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, a time in which the AIDS epidemic emerged and friends began dying. Placing poetry as the focus of his life, CAConrad relocated to the city of Philadelphia in 1984  to live openly in a queer neighborhood. 

In Philadelphia, CAConrad began a member of its poetry community and met such writers as Etheridge Knight and Sonia Sanches, both important members of the Black Art Movement,  poet and performer Essex Hemphill, and poet and essayist Gil Ott, who founded Philadelphia’s Singing Horse Press. Other influences on CAConrad’s work include those works by poets Emily Dickinson and Audra Lorde, poet and novelist Eileen Myles, narrative poet Alice Notley, and writer Will Alexander who later became a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize. 

In 2005, CAConrad began writing poetry in the  (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual format, a personal process of writing focused on one’s engagement in the present moment. The first publication of CAConrad’s poetry was the 2006 “Deviant Propulsion” printed through Soft Skull Press. The poems in this collection examined the repression inflicted on queer culture by society and the elimination of the fear produced by that repression. To date, CAConrad has published seven collections of poetry. Among these are the 2017 “While Standing in Line for Death”, winner of a 2018 Lambda Book Award, and the 2021 “Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration”, a 2022 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award winner. 

CAConrad appeared as Jeremiah in the 2015 short film “Boyland”,  directed by Gabe Rubin and Felix Bernstein for the Brooklyn Film Festival. CAConrad was also approached by directors Belinda Schmid and David Cranstoun Welch, both who had seen the poet’s performances in New York and published works, for the production of a documentary. The resulting film “The Book of Conrad”, released in 2016 by Delinquent Films, examined CAConrad’s life and work as well as the horrific murder in Tennessee of his boyfriend Mark Holmes, known as Earth. In 2018, CAConrad and poet Eileen Myles read their work in filmmaker Beatrice Gibson’s 2018 short resistance-documentary “I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead”, a montage of photos overlaid with poetry and music.

“Felix Bernstein interviewed me for The New Museum and he asked me what philosophy has to do with my work. I told him I believe poetry is strong enough. The power of poetry has not failed me like it has failed some poets in recent decades who hoist philosophy to buttress the poem. It is misogynistic to say poetry is too feminine, too weak, needs a man’s ideas to move forward. Love philosophy–go ahead, I am not the least bit anti-intellectual; I simply do not need philosophy to make poetry appear more masculine. Sigmund Freud said, “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.” Not philosopher, but poet. And you can have whatever feelings you want about Freud but no one can disagree that he changed how we view the landscape of human emotion and the origins of feeling. “Everywhere I go” is bold. It is direct and from a man who was as careful with his words as a poet.”  —CAConrad, September 10, 2013 Interview with Christopher Soto, The LAMBDA Literary Review

Notes: The Poetry Foundation has an April 2020 essay article written by CAConrad entitled “Sin Bug: AIDS, Poetry, and Queer Resilience in Philadelphia” which recounts the poet’s life experiences in that city from 1982 during the AIDS epidemic that led to the deaths of many of his close friends. The article can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/featured-blogger/83869/sin-bug-aids-poetry-and-queer-resilience-in-philadelphia

The Poetry Foundation also has a selection of CAConrad’s poems as well as several podcasts produced by the poet which include group discussions and readings from CAConrad’s 2024 “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/c-a-conrad

The Lambda Literary online site has a September 2015 interview between CAConrad and Christopher Soto that discussed the film “The Book of Conrad” and the poet’s belief in the power of poetry as a healing ritual: https://lambdaliteraryreview.org/2015/09/ca-conrad-on-the-film-the-book-of-conrad-and-his-life-in-poetry/  

Rachel Zucker of the Commonplace Podcast has an interview with CAConrad that discusses the poet’s life, writings and the (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals at: https://commonplace.today/commonplace-podcast/episode-49-caconrad

For those interested, Delinquent Films’s 2016 “The Book of Conrad”, directed by Schmid and Welch, is available for rental or purchase on Amazon Prime. Filmmaker Matthew Thompson’s short film for the 2025 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival presents CAConrad reading his poem “Golden in the Morning Crane Our Necks”. The film is available for viewing at the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation’s site: https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/golden-in-the-morning-crane-our-necks

Top Insert Image: Matthew Thompson, “CAConrad”, 1993, Gelatin Silver Print, The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation

Second Insert Image: CAConrad, “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return”, 2024, Wave Books, Seattle, Washington

Third Insert Image: CAConrad, “You Don’t Have What It Takes to Be My Nemisis and Other (Soma)tics”., 2023, Penguin Imprint

Bottom Insert Image: Eve Ariza, “CtConrad”, 2019, Color Print, Neopajamas Magazine

Hevré Guibert: “He Who Wished to be Master of the Truth”

Photographers Unknown, He Who Wished to Be Master of the Truth

He had to finish his books, this book he had written and rewritten, destroyed, renounced, destroyed once more, imagined once more, created once more, shortened and stretched out for ten years, this infinite book, of doubt, rebirth, modest grandiosity. He was inclined to destroy it forever, to offer his enemies their stupid victory, so they could go around clamoring that he was no longer able to write a book, that his mind had been dead for ages, that his silence was just proof of his failure. He burned or destroyed all the drafts, all the evidence of his work, all he left on his table were two manuscripts, side by side, he instructed a friend that this abolition was to continue. He had three abscesses in his brain but he went to the library every day to check his notes.

His death was stolen from he who wished to be master of his own death, and even the truth of his death was stolen from he who wished to be master of the truth. Above all the name of the plague was not to be spoken, it was to be disguised in the death records, false reports were given to the media. Although he wasn’t dead yet, the family he had always been ostracized from took in his body. The doctors spoke abjectly of blood relatives. His friends could no longer see him, unless they broke and entered: he saw a few of them, unrecognizable behind their plastic-bag-covered hair, masked faces, swaddled feet, torsos covered in jackets, gloved hands reeking of alcohol he had been forbidden to drink himself.

All the strongholds had collapsed, except for the one protecting love: it left an unchangeable smile on his lips when exhaustion closed his eyes. If he only kept a single image, it would be the one of their last walk in the Alhambra gardens, or just his face. Love kept on thrusting its tongue in his mouth despite the plague. And as for his death it was he who negotiated with his family: he exchanged his name on the death announcement for being able to choose his death shroud. For his carcass he chose a cloth in which they had made love, which came from his mother’s trousseau. The intertwined initials in the embroidery could bear other messages.

Hevré Guibert, A Man’s Secret, Written in Invisible Ink: Selected Stories, 2020, Translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Semiotexte  Publishing

Born in Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine on the fourteenth of December in 1955, Hervé Guibert was a French author and photographer. Through his novels and autobiographical studies, he was influential in changing the French public’s attitudes towards the HIV/AIDS crisis. Guibert wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion, mixing diary writing, memoir, and fiction. His art and his writings were closely linked to his private life. Those of whom he wrote often became his friends, and his loved ones were often portrayed as celebrities, alternately idolized and exposed.

Guibert’s writing style was initially inspired by the work of Jean Genet and, later, Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, a post-war author who explored obsession and isolation through multiple perspectives. Three of Guibert’s lovers played an important role in his life and work: Thierry Jouno, director for the International Theater for the Deaf whom he met in 1976; philosopher and author Michel Foucault whom he met in 1977; and Vincent Marmousez, a teenager who inspired his 1989 novel “Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”.

Born into the conservative middle-class family of a veterinary inspector and a former teacher, Hervé Guibert moved to Paris at the age of seventeen with the hope of becoming an actor or scriptwriter. After his rejection from a Paris film school, he entered the literary world and, by the age of twenty, was writing dating advice for the glossy women’s magazine “20 Ans (Twenty Years)”. In 1977, he published his autobiographical novel/diary, “La Mort Propagande (Death Propaganda)”. 

Guibert was hired in 1978 as a photography critic by “Le Monde”, France’s evening newspaper, and successfully established himself as a photographer with a photographic literary volume containing intimate portraits of his great-aunts. In the same year, Guibert completed his second book “Les Aventures Singulières (The Singular Adventures)”, a collection of stories centered on a singular character, published through Éditions de Minuit in Paris. During the 1980s, Guibert was a reader at the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles (Institute for the Young Blind) in Paris. This experience became the basis for his 1985 “Des Aveugles” which won the Fénéon Prize for that year. 

In 1981, Hervé Guibert published his “Image Fantôme (Ghost Image)”, an insightful collection of essays on various photographic forms such as family album portraits, photo-booth film strips, and pornographic Polaroids. In this work, Guibert presented photography as tactile, fetishistic and linked to frustrated desires. For a collaborative work with his theatrical friend, opera and theater director Patrice Chéreau, Guibert shared a 1984 Best Screenplay César Award for the 1983 “L’Homme Blessé (The Wounded Man)”.

In 1987, Guibert was granted a two year residency scholarship at Villa Medicis, the site of the French Academy in Rome, where he studied with his friend, the openly gay writer and journalist Mathieu Lindon. In January of 1988, Guibert was given a positive diagnosis for AIDS and began work on recording what would be the remainder of his life. In June of 1989, he married Christine, the partner of director Thierry Jouno, so his royalty income would pass legally to her and her two children. 

In 1989, Hervé Guibert published his highly erotic novella ““Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”, a dramatization of his intermittent relationship with the impulsive and unpredictable teenager Vincent Marmousez. In 1990, Guibert revealed his HIV status in his real-life based novel “À l’Ami qui ne M’a Pas Sauvé la Vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life)”. He described in this work the existential effect the virus had on his life, its impact on a complete generation of people, the deaths of friends and lovers, and how AIDS forever transformed humanity’s relationship with desire and sexuality. 

Following the release of his 1990 novel, Guibert became the focus of media attention with interviews and several talk show appearances. He filmed scenes of his daily life with AIDS between July of 1990 and February of 1991. This film, “La Pudeur ou l’impudeur (Modesty of Shamelessness)”, produced by Pascale Breugnot, was broadcasted posthumously on French television in January of 1992. Guibert published two more additional auto-fictional novels that detailed the progression of his illness: the 1991 “Le Protocole Compassionnel” and the “L’Homme au Chapeau Rouge (The Man in the Red Hat)” which was published posthumously in 1992. 

Hervé Guibert’s last work, “Cytomégalovirus” was a description of his hospitalization in the autumn of 1991 and the increasing blindness he suffered from his illness. In the second week of December in 1991, Guibert attempted suicide by taking digitalin, a heart medication toxic in large doses. Two weeks later, he died at the age of thirty-six in Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, on the twenty-seventh of December in 1991. 

A consummate photographer and author, Hevré Guibert had published twenty-five books before his death, five of which were published in the last year of his life. Excellent translations of his work are now readily available through many sites. Several volumes of Guibert’s work can be read online at the Internet Archive

Notes: A selection from Hervé Guibert’s posthumously published “Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991”, translated from the French by author Nathanaël, can be found at the Asymptote Journal site: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/nonfiction/herve-guibert-the-mausoleum-of-lovers/

A 2014 review of “Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991” can be found at the Lambda Literary Organization site: https://lambdaliterary.org/2014/10/mausoleum-of-lovers-journals-1976-1991-by-herve-guiber/

Dennis Cooper’s blog has an excellent article on Guibert’s 1989 “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life” that contains photography by Guibert, a biography, media trailers, book excerpts and a 1993 interview: https://denniscooperblog.com/spotlight-on-herve-guibert-to-the-friend-who-did-not-save-my-life-1989/

There is a noteworthy article by The New Yorker staff writer Julian Lucas from the print issue of September 21st in 2020 entitled “When a Virus Becomes a Muse”. This review of Hevré Guibert’s life and work can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/when-a-virus-becomes-a-muse

Information written by Christine (Guibert) on Hervé Guibert’s partner Thierry Joune and the impact he had on Guibert’s writings can be found at: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/281395860/thierry-jouno

Top Insert Image: Ulf Andersen, “Hervé Guibert, Paris”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, 40.3 x 39. 2 cm, William Talbott Hillman Foundation

Second Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Sienne, 1979”, Edtition of 25, Gelatin Silver Print on Cartoline, 14.5 x 21.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “L’Oisillon, Santa Caterina, Elba”, 1979, Gelatin Silver Print, 14 x 21.7 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Michel Foucault”, 1980, Gelatin Silver Print, 14.5 x 21.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert” Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, September 2020 Issue of The New Yorker

 

Stéphane Bouquet: “Because the Rain is Stopping”

Photographers Unknown, Because the Rain is Stopping

from The Next Loves: I

His look and it took maybe 3
hellos / seconds
only       his head underneath the blue hoodie
he takes off
because the rain is stopping       look here’s
the planner’s confirmation and
someone’s holding an imaginary map of the conversation we’ll say
that and that
the streets will be all orderly
if I stay close inside
the zones he surveys
but it isn’t easy
imagining that the table and the lamp and the evening
sound like his breathlessness when he uncovers me and cleans

from The Next Loves: V

Red t-shirt and husky voice
we do yoga together       much less strong
than I am but so much more beautiful
at the end in savasana when we’re supposed to become
one of those vibrations in the air and the ritual bell
sets us
almost behind absence I can only
think like an animal to live oh oh
oh that long slime desire
stretched out 2 meters away if I
rolled over on him really would that from now on be the only
hope of slowing
because of the sweetness in your bones
the quickness of death against which I recite a rose
       is a rose is a rose is a rose

Stéphane Bouquet, The Next Loves, 2019, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Born at Paris in October of 1968, Stéphane Bouquet is a French author and translator, film critic and screenwriter, poet, actor and choreographer. The son of a French nurse and an American military man, his work covers a wide range of genres, disciplines and literary traditions. 

Stéphane Bouquet earned his Master of Arts in the field of Economics at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris. He is an established translator of poets from the New York School, a group of experimental painters and associated poets who lived and worked in the downtown area of Manhattan in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1949, painter Robert Motherwell had coined the name “New York School” for this group. Members included, among others, painters Larry Rivers, Hedda Sterne, and Alfred L. Copley as well as poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Paul Blackburn, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara. 

Bouquet’s work, both literary and formally innovative, covers a wide range of formats from intricate sonnets and lengthly sequential poems to prose reflections and dramatic compositions that explore personal relationships and contemporary urban life. Influenced by American poets Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, Bouquet incorporates the spoken language of daily life and gay sexuality into his poems. He takes the energy from the poetry of the New York School and blends it with older forms of poetic attitudes from France and Europe to form a personalized approach to life’s details, accidents, and desires.

Stéphane Bouquet is the author of eight collections of poetry as well as a book of essays on poems, the 2018 “La Cité de Paroles (The City of Words)”.  Two of these collections have been translated into English by poet Lindsay Turner: the 2019 “The Next Loves”, a collection of frank, sometimes rueful, love poems that trace the intimacy in contemporary gay life: and the 2023 “Common Life”, three poems, a play and three short stories of everyday queer life, politics, and social gatherings. Bouquet has also published three books on film history: the 2008 “Sergei Eisenstein”, Soviet pioneer in the theory and practice of film montage; the history of American filmmaker “Gus van Sant” in 2009, and the 2012 “Clint Fucking Eastwood”, an analysis of the popularity of Eastwood’s films in France . 

As a screenwriter, Bouquet wrote twenty screenplays for feature films, non-fiction films and short films. Of these, he is best known for the 1998 comedy “1999” which he co-wrote with actor and comedian Franck Amiack; the 2000 comedy “Hors Jeu (Out of the Game)” directed by Bouquet and co-written with Amiack; the 2009 comedy short “Nuts” written and directed by Bouquet; and the 2024 television film “The First Eternal” written by Bouquet and now in pre-production. Bouquet also directed Palanquée Films’s 2013 “Douce Nuit (Silent Night)” and UniFrance’s 2009 “Gauche Droite (Left Right)” and 2013 “Maman est Là (Mom is Here)”.

Having a long-standing interest in performance arts, Stéphane Bouquet has given workshops for choreographers at the Centre National de la Danse in Paris and, for stage directors and actors, classes at Switzerland’s La Manufacture in Lausanna. He is a recipient of a 2003 Prix de Rome and a 2007 Mission Stendhal Award, a literary award promoted by the Institut François d’Italie and the French Embassy in Italy to reward the best translators of contemporary French literature to Italian. 

Bouquet’s literary work has been featured in France and internationally at festivals, residencies, and events, including the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair and the 2018 Toronto Festival of Authors.

Notes: A 2024 research article by poet and translator Lindsay Turner, entitled “Translating Utopia: Stéphane Bouquet’s Queer Futurities” can be found at Duke University Press’s Romantic Review website: https://read.dukeupress.edu/romanic-review/article-abstract/115/1/134/387783/Translating-UtopiaStephane-Bouquet-s-Queer?redirectedFrom=fulltext

For the Poetry Society of America, Lindsay Turner wrote a short article, entitled “Visiting Poet: Lindsay Turner on Stéphane Bouquet”, that discussed Bouquet’s 2019 “The Next Loves” poetic collection which she had translated into English: https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/visiting-poet/bouquet

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s “Full Stop” literary review has an article by writer John Steen on Stéphane Bouquet’s “The Next Loves” at: https://www.full-stop.net/2019/10/16/reviews/john-steen/the-next-loves-stephane-bouquet/

An English translation by Lindsay Turner of Stéphane Bouquet’s poem “As an Excuse” can be found at Louisiana State University’s online literary and arts journal “NDR” produced by graduate students in its MFA Program of Creative Writing: http://ndrmag.org/translations/2020/05/as-an-excuse/

Second Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “Common Life”, February 2023, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “The Next Loves”, September 2019, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Charles Henri Ford: “Better Watch Out for the Next Cyclone”

Photographers Unknown, Better Watch Out for the Next Cyclone

And you may not have hair as curly as the alphabet
but if your googoo eyes were a bundle of germs
there’d be an epidemic
With your greenhorn complexion
and your grasswidow ways
you’d make a butcher kill a granite cow
and weigh the gravel out for hamburger.
I mean you’d start the eskimos stripteasing,
give dummies the shakes,
get  flyingcircuses  to  crawl  on  their  hands  and  knees.
No I wouldn’t put it past you.
Just let somebody set you on the fence,
by  gosh  foulballs  would  be  annulled
and home-runs the rule.
The weather forcast that overlooked you, baby,
sure better watch out for the next cyclone,
seeing how my uptown’s flattened,
and  my  downtown  a-waving  in  the  wind.

Charles Henri Ford, I Wouldn’t Put It Past You, The Breathless Rock, Flag of Ecstasy: Selected Poems, 1972, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles

Born in Hazelhurst, Mississippi in February of 1908, Charles Henri Ford was an American poet, novelist, and artist whose career spanned and influenced twentieth-century’s modernist era. In his lifetime, he exhibited his artwork in Europe and the United States, published over a dozen collections of poetry, directed experimental films, and edited the American literary and surrealist art magazine “View”.

Charles Henri Ford was the first of two children born into the southern Baptist family of Charles and Gertrude Cato Ford. He acquired his formal education at Catholic boarding schools in the American South and had one of his first poems published by The New Yorker magazine in 1927. Ford became part of the modernist literary movement with the publishing of his monthly “Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms” in 1929 and 1930. The magazine introduced new talents such as authors James Farrell and Paul Bowles as well as published submissions by such writers as Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams.

Through “Blues” magazine, Ford communicated with the young novelist Parker Tyler who introduced him to both the poetry and men in the Village areas of Manhattan. Together they collaborated on a novel, “The Young and the Evil”, a fragmented account of bohemian gay life, drag balls and cruising. After his magazine ceased publication, Ford traveled to France and became a member of Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris. Through Stein, he became acquainted with members of the American expatriate community which included such artists and writers as Natalie Clifford Barney, Kay Boyle, Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim, Janet Flanner and Djuna Barnes.

Ford had a brief affair with Barnes and traveled with her to Tangiers, Morocco where, while waiting for the publication of “The Young and the Evil”, he typed Barnes’s completed novel “Nightwood” for its publication. Ford returned in 1934 to Paris where he met Russian-born surrealist painter and designer Pavel Tchelitchew, a former Stein protégé whose work was gaining recognition. This creative and loving relationship developed into a strong, though occasionally tempestuous, bond that lasted for twenty-three years. In late 1934, Ford and Tchelitchew left Europe and returned to New York City where they settled into an East Side penthouse.

In 1938, Charles Henri Ford published his first full-length book of poems “The Garden of Disorder” which contained an introduction written by author William Carlos Williams. Influenced by the poetic works of Jean Cocteau, Ford felt that poetry had a relationship with all forms of art, be it a novel, essay or theatrical production. His poetry is easily noticed for its surrealistic format of short spurts of words; however, he also adapted his style to political poetry such as the work he published in the American Marxist magazine “New Masses” , at that time a politically oriented journal which covered anti-lynching and equal rights for women.

In 1940, Ford and Parker Tyler collaborated on the avant-garde and surrealist art magazine “View”, a quarterly publication that established New York as a center of surrealism. The magazine interviewed local artists as well as the many European surrealists who had fled the war in Europe. Contributions to the magazine came from many prominent artists including Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marc Chagall and René Magritte, among others. A publishing imprint of “View” magazine, View Editions, was established to publish monographs and volumes of poetry, two of which were André Breton’s 1946 “Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares” and Ford’s 1959 “Sleep in a Nest of Flames”.

Charles Henri Ford and Tchelitchew moved in 1952 to Europe where they continued their artistic careers. Ford had a 1955 photography exhibition “Thirty Images from Italy” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, followed by a 1956 solo exhibition of drawings and paintings in Paris. In July of 1957, Pavel Tchelitchew, now a United States citizen, died at the age of fifty-eight in Grottaferrata, Italy, with Ford by his bedside. His body was taken to Paris and interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Ford returned to New York City in 1962 and began to associate with the underground filmmakers and artists involved in the Pop movement. He began to experiment in collage images and created a series of lithographs with spliced-typefaces, acid colors, and pop culture images. A visual form of concrete poetry, these “Poem Posters” were exhibited in 1965 at New York’s prominent Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery on Madison Avenue. In the latter part of the 1960s, Ford focused on directing his own films, the first of which was the 1967 “Poem Posters”, a documentary of his recent exhibition, later entered into the Fourth International Avant-Garde Festival in Belgium. Ford’s second film, the 1971 “Johnny Minotaur”, was a surrealistic film-within-a-film that combined Greek mythology of Theseus and the Minotaur with erotic imagery of male anatomy and sexuality. Only one surviving print of the film is known.

Charles Henri Ford relocated in the early 1970s to Nepal where he purchased a house in Katmandu. In 1973, he hired local teenager Indra Tamang to cook and be his photography assistant. Tamang became basically Ford’s surrogate son, caretaker, and artistic collaborator for the rest of Ford’s life. They toured India and the Mid-East, resided for a period in Paris and Crete, and finally relocated to New York City. Ford purchased an apartment for himself and Tamang in The Dakota, a building that faced Central Park and was well known for its artistic tenants among whom was the actress Ruth Ford, Charles’s sister. Settled in the city, Ford created a series of art projects incorporating his collage materials and Tamang’s photography.

In the 1990s, Ford edited an anthology of articles previously published over the seven-year history of “View” magazine. Published as “View: Parade of the Avant-Garde, 1940-1947”, the 1992 volume’s introduction was written by Ford’s longtime friend, author and composer Paul Bowles. In 2001, Ford published selections from his diaries in a volume entitled “Water from a Bucket: A Diary 1948-1957” that covered the period from his father’s death to the death of Tchelitchew. In the same year, he participated in a two-hour documentary on his life, entitled “Sleep in a Nest of Flames”, directed by James Dowell and John Kolomvakis for Symbiosis Films 2000.

On the twenty-seventh of September in 2002, Charles Henri Ford died in New York City at the age of ninety-four. In his will and testament, Ford left some paintings and the rights to his co-authored novel “The Young and Evil” to Indra Tamang. Ruth Ford died in August of 2009 at the age of ninety-eight; she bequeathed her and her brother’s apartments to Tamang who had been both companion and caretaker. In 2011, Tamang carried Ruth and Charles Ford’s ashes to Mississippi where they were buried in Brookhaven’s Rose Hill Cemetery.

Notes: Charles Henri Ford’s 1991 “Out of the Labyrinth: Selected Poems” is available in its entirety on the Document.Pub site: https://dokumen.pub/out-of-the-labyrinth-selected-poems-0872862518-9780872862517.html

An exhibition review entitled “Charles Henri Ford: Love and Jump Back” by Demetra Nikolakakis for “Musée: Vanguard of Photography Culture” magazine can be found at: https://museemagazine.com/culture/2021/2/25/exhibition-review-charles-henri-ford-love-and-jump-back

The Artforum magazine has an informative 2003 article, written by Michael Duncan, on Charles Henri Ford and his association with novelist Parker Tyler and artist Pavel Tchelitchew: https://www.artforum.com/columns/charles-henri-ford-165330/

The Film-Makers’ Cooperative site has short articles with stills on Charles Henri Ford’s two experimental films “Poem Posters” and “Johnny Minotaur”: https://film-makerscoop.com/filmmakers/charles-henri-ford

Matthew D. Kulisch, one of three curators for the Backwords Blog, wrote an article for the site entitled “Charles Henri Ford: Association and America’s First (Queer) Surrealist Artist” : https://www.backwordsblog.com/single-post/2016/10/12/charles-henri-ford-association-and-americas-first-queer-surrealist-artist

The September 2024 issue of Noah Becker’s “White Hot Magazine” has an article entitled “Love and Jump Back: Photography by Charles Henri Ford at Mitchell Algus”, written by Mark Bloch: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/henri-ford-at-mitchell-algus/4984

Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Charles Henri Ford”, 1930-1940, Gelatin Silver Print, 26.4 x 21.9 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Charles Henri Ford, “Poem Poster (Gerald Malanga as Orpheus)”, circa 1965, Photolithograph, Image 98.4 x 68.1 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Third Insert Image: Robert Geisel, “Charles Henri Ford, The Dakota, NYC”, 1989, Vintage Print

Fourth Insert Image: Charles Henri Ford, “Poem Poster (Soul Map / Jayne Mansfield), circa 1965, Photolithograph, 99.1 x 69.2 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Charles Henri Ford (and Indra Tamang), The Dakota, NYC”, 1997, Gelatin Silver Print, 27.9 x 35.6 cm, Brooklyn Museum, New York

Allen Barnett: “Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches”

Photographers Unknown, Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches

      Horst was also the one in the article with AIDS. Every day at 4 A.M., he woke to blend a mixture of orange juice and AL721—a lecithin-based drug developed in Israel from egg yokes and used for AIDS treatment- because it has to be taken when there is no fat in the stomach. For a while, he would muffle the blender in a blanket but stopped, figuring that if he woke us, we would just go back to sleep. He laughed doubtfully when I told him that the blender had been invented by a man named Fred who had died recently. It was also the way he laughed when Perry phoned to say their cat died.
      Stark asked Noah, “Don’t you think you were a little hard on Perry?”
      Noah said, “The next thing you know, he’ll be getting an agent.”
      I said, “We’re all doing what we can, Noah. There’s even a role for personalities like his.”
      He would look at none of us, however, so we let it go. We spoke of Noah among ourselves as not having sufficiently mourned Miguel, as if grief were a process of public concern or social responsibility, as if loss was something one just did, like jury duty, or going to high school. His late friend had been a leader at the beginning of the epidemic; he devised a training program for volunteers who would work with the dying; he devised systems to help others intervene for the sick in times of bureaucratic crisis. He was the first to recognize that AIDS would be a problem in prisons. A liberal priest in one of the city’s prisons once asked him, “Do you believer your sexuality is genetic or environmentally determined?”. Miguel said, “I think of it as a calling, Father.” Dead, however, Miguel could not lead; dead men don’t leave footsteps in which to follow. Noah floundered.
      And we all made excuses for Noah’s sarcasm and inappropriate humor. He once said to someone who had put on forty pounds after starting AZT, “If you get any heavier, I won’t be your pallbearer.” He had known scores of others who had died before and after Miguel, helped arrange their funerals and wakes. But each death was beginning to brick him into a silo of grief, like the stones in the walls of old churches that mark the dead within.

Allen Barnett, The Times as It Knows Us, Excerpt, The Body and Its Dangers, 1990, St. Martin’s Press, New York

Born in May of 1955 at Joliet, Illinois, Allen Barnett was an American short story writer, activist and educator. He initially studied theater at Chicago’s Loyola University and later relocated to New York City to further his studies and acquire work as an actor. Barnett studied at Manhattan’s The New School and at Columbia University where he earned his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 1981. 

In the late 1980s, Barnett worked for American music industry executive Herbert Breslin, who was influential in the early careers of many in the music field, most notably Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo. In 1986, Barnett published his first short story “Succor” in “Christopher Street”, an American gay-oriented magazine founded in New York City by publishers Charles Ortieb and Michael Denneny. 

Learning of the published story, Herbert Breslin forwarded Allen Barnett’s short stories to St. Martin’s Press, a major Manhattan publisher with six imprints, that was founded by England’s Macmillan Publishers. Through St. Martin’s Press, Barnett’s short story “Philostorgy, Now Obscure” was published in “The New Yorker” magazine, a serious publisher of essays, fiction and journalism. 

Barnett lived in New York City at a time when AIDS was building into an epidemic force. It became a vicious disease that was occurring within an environment of medical ignorance as well as indifference on the part of both the political and media establishments. Barnett was one of the earliest volunteers for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a task he continued year after year. He was also a co-founder in 1985 of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) that sought to end homophobic reporting by media organizations. Through the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Barnett was an AIDS educator for New York’s 23rd Street YMCA.

Allen Barnett only published one volume of short stories in his lifetime, “The Body and Its Dangers”, published in January of 1990 by St. Martin’s Press. This book is widely regarded as one of the most significant depictions of gay life at the height of the AIDS crisis. In 1991, Barnett’s collection was an nominee for the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award and the winner of the  Ferro-Grumley Award for the year’s best LBGTQ fiction. It also won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction in the same year. 

Barnett died in New York City from AIDS-related causes at the age of thirty-six on the fourteenth of August in 1991. A memorial service was held in mid-September at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

Notes: One of Allen Barnett’s most notable short stories is “The Times as It Knows Us”. Contained within his 1990 “The Body and Its Dangers”, the story follows its protagonist, Clark, who struggles through life after the recent death of his lover. The full story is available for reading at Harvard’s Resources for Loss located at: https://scalar.fas.harvard.edu/resources-for-loss/the-times-as-it-knows-us-by-allen-barnett-contributed-by-colton-carter

Editor Tom Cardamone’s 2010 “The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered” contains twenty-eight essays including one by Christopher Bram that examines Allen Barnett’s life and work. Although there appears to be no recent reprints, used copies are available through various venues; it is also available on Kindle.

Jubi Arriola-Headley: “An Oracle Done Hiding At Last”

Photographers Unknown, An Oracle Done Hiding At Last

Imagine now how your fingertips throb (1)
in silence, wild, (2) an oracle done hiding at last,
all the mystery made, (3) all the grave markers,
all the crude headstones – water-lost, (4) I think
by now the river must be thick (5) – red is the operative
word. (6) What a relief it would be to scream yourself hoarse, (7)
let the empty stage receive the light, (8) linger only with
healthy ideas. Salty ones. (9) God give us a long winter
and quiet music and patient mouths. (10) (We talk about God
because we want to speak in metaphors, (11)
como un demonio sin freno, (12) between hot dog stands
and hallelujahs.) (13) Change our fates, shoot down
the plagues, beginning with time, the children sing to you. (14)
Ha. (15) You have to face the underside of everything
you’ve loved; (16) there will be no more sons. (17)

1. Olga Broumas, (…imagine now/how your fingertips throb,,,)
2. Cecilia Vicuña, “Jungle Kill”
3. Carl Phillips, “Unbridled”
4. Natasha Trethewey, “Elegy for the Native Guards”
5. Natasha Trethewey, “Elegy” (I think by now the river must be thick)
6. Linda Dove, “Fear is a Hummingbird Drunk on Taillight”
7. Raymond McDaniel, “No, You Shut Up”
8. Jon Davis, “Gratitude”
9. Alain Border, “Sleep Log”
10. Adam Zagajewski, “A Flame”
11. Jericho Brown, “To Be Seen”
12. cecilia Vicuña, “Horticultura”
13. Matthew Olzmann, “My Invisible Horse and the Speed of Human Decency”
14. Arthur Rimbaud, “To A Reason”
15. Jubi Arriola-Headley
16. Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-One Love Poems” (Poem V)
17. Chelsea Dingman, “Elegy for Empty Rooms”

Jubi Arriola-Headley, Cento, original kink, 2020, Sibling Rivalry Press

Born in Boston, Jubi Arriola-Headley is a Black queer first-generation American poet and author whose work explores the issues of joy, manhood, and vulnerability. In his work, vulnerability is the key to preserving one’s own authenticity and humanity. With the hope that you will be loved regardless, one has to take the risk of being known for who you really are.

The son of Barbadian parents, Jubi Arriola-Headley is a descendent of a long line of Caribbean story tellers. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Miami and is a 2018 PEN American Emerging Voices Fellow. Arriola-Headley’s work explores the themes of masculinity, vulnerability, joy, rage and tenderness. His poems have been published with Southern Humanities Review, Nimrod, The Nervous Breakdown, and the Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. 

Currently, Arriola-Headley is the author of two collections of poetry, the first being “original kink” published in 2020 by the Sibling Rivalry Press in Arkansas. This volume of poems, written in casual speech rhythm, relentlessly probes the issues of family dynamics, manliness, injustice, and cruelty, both self-inflicted and imposed. The “original kink” collection was the recipient of the 2021 Housatonic Book Award for Poetry presented by Western Connecticut State University.

Jubi Arriola-Headley’s second volume of poetry “Bound” was released in February of 2024 by Persea Books, a New York press co-founded by Michael and Karen Braziller. A collection of lyrical poems in varied poetic format, “Bound” boldly examines conventional notions of race, sexuality, gender and pleasure in an attempt to create a world where Black and queer individuals can live without trauma. Plotting a new path to life, Arriola-Headley points out what it means to be human and how we can find freedom and liberation in the very spaces we thought would destroy us. 

Arriola-Headley is currently working on a memoir in an essay format. An essay from this work, entitled “Pissant”, explored his teenage years in 1980s Boston, the racism he faced, his queer desires, and the hyper-masculinity of his immigrant father. This excerpt won the first place 2023 Prize for Creative Nonfiction presented by Florida’s First Pages organization, a non-profit that recognizes and encourages emerging writers. 

Jubi Arriola-Headley currently lives with his husband on ancestral Tequesta, Miccosukee, and Seminole lands in South Florida. His website, which contains selected poems, interviews and videos, is located at: https://www.justjubi.com

Notes:  A video is available online at the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation site on YouTube showing Jubi Arriola-Headley reciting his poem “Superhero Origin Story (S. O. S.)”. 

An October 2020 interview between Jubi Arriola-Headley and PEN America’s Jenn Dees and Michelle Franke can be located at the Pen America site: https://pen.org/the-pen-ten-jubi-arriola-headley/

A 2024 audio interview between Poetry Foundation’s Ajanaé Dawkins and Brittany Rogers and poet Jubi Arriola-Headley can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/audio/1530526/jubi-arriola-headley-vs-masculinity?query=jubi%20a

Reginald Shepherd: “Late Rain Clings to Your Leaves, Shaken by Light Wind”

Photographers Unknown, Late Rain Clings to Your Leaves, Shaken by Light Wind

For Robert Philen

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
when there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name

Reginald Shepherd, You, Therefore, 2007, Fata Morgana, Green Tower Press  

Born in New York City in April of 1963, Reginald Shepherd was an American poet, essayist and educator. A careful observer of language, he was a skilled craftsman who could transform fragments of potential poetic material into cohesively molded poetry.

The son of Blanche Berry, Reginald Shepherd spent his early years with his sister Regina Graham in the housing projects of Bronx, New York. Although raised amid the hardships of the tenements, he found inspiration in the many books that his mother was able to afford. Following the death of his mother just prior to his fifteenth birthday, Shepherd and his sister were cared for by their aunt Mildred Swint at her crowded, three-room house in Macon, Georgia. 

Shepherd earned his Bachelor of Arts at Bennington College in Vermont, and his Master of Fine Arts degrees in Creative Writing at Rhode Island’s Brown University and the University of Iowa. In his last year at the University of Iowa, he was awarded the 1993 Discovery Prize by New York’s 92nd Street Y, a prominent arts and cultural center in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. 

Reginald Shepherd published his first collection of poetry, “Some Are Drowning”, in 1994 through the University of Pittsburgh Press. This collection of passionate poems was chosen by poet and professor Carolyn Forché for the Association of Writers & Writing Program’s Poetry Award. Shepherd’s second collection “Angel, Interrupted”, a volume of lyrical, introspective and streetwise poems, was published in 1996. This was followed three years later by “Wrong”, a poetic collection seen through a historical perspective of events marked by desire, disease, and difference, all aspects of human consciousness. 

In 2003, Shepherd’s “Otherhood” was published through the University of Pittsburgh Press. This fourth collection explored the issues of desire, power, blackness, whiteness and the relationship of man and the natural world. “Otherhood”, which referenced these themes through alternating rapid and hypnotic rhythms, was a finalist for the 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize administered by the Academy of American Poets. 

Reginald Shepherd’s last volume of poetry in his lifetime, “Fata Morgana” was published in 2007 by Green Tower Press. An intense and mournful collection of lyrical poems fashioned from a mixture of mythology, personal experience, natural science and politics, “Fata Morgana” explored the journey through personal sorrow and loss until its transformative end. This collection by Shepherd was the winner of the Silver Medal of the 2007 Florida Book Awards. 

Shepherd was the editor of the 2004 “The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries” and the 2008 “Lyric Postmodernisms”. He was the author of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist “Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry” and its sequel “A Martian Muse: Further Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry” published posthumously in 2010. A posthumous collection of Shepherd’s poetry, entitled “Red Clay Weather”, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2011. 

Reginald Shepherd died in Pensacola, Florida, on the tenth of September in 2008 after a long battle against colon cancer. He was survived by his long-term partner Robert Philen, his sister Regina Graham and his aunt Mildred Swint. A National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation grant winner, Shepherd published over four-hundred poems in his career in both collections and anthologies. 

Shepherd taught both Literature and Creative Writing at Cornell University, the University of West Florida, Northern Illinois University, and Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Iowa. He was the recipient of a 1993 Paumanok Poetry Award, the 1994-1995 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, an  Illinois Arts Council Poetry Fellowship in 1998, and a 2000 Saltonstall Foundation poetry grant.

“The poem, when it is at its best, when we are at our best, is a kind of agon (struggle) between the poet and the language, and the poet has to bring all his or her resources to bear, or it’s not a real struggle at all, just a performance.”- Reginald Shepherd, “Taking Dictation from a Martian Muse”, Blog Entry, January 2007

Notes:  In addition to his poetic and essay writings, Reginald Shepherd authored a poetry, literature and art blog for many years. This site contains many articles discussing Shepherd’s own poetic thought-process as well as the work of those  poets he admired. Reginald Shepherd’s Blog can be found at: http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com

A review of Reginald Shepherd’s 2008 collection of essays “Orpheus in the Bronx” originally appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of “Rain Taxi”, a Minneapolis-based book review and literary quarterly publication. It is currently available for reading on The Mumpsimus blog located at: https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2019/07/orpheus-in-bronx-by-reginald-shepherd.html

On the Poetry Foundation site, there several poems as well as a section in which Shepherd offers a revealing portrait of himself and his poetry: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/reginald-shepherd 

A 2003 extensive interview between Reginald Shepherd and writer Brenda Gaines Hunter for Pleiades Magazine has been reissued through the Medium site at: https://medium.com/@bgaineshunter/an-interview-with-reginald-shepherd-e4c60dd328df

Mark Wunderlich: “I Sometimes Hear the Call to Return”

Photographers Unknown, I Sometimes Hear the Call to Return

This was the time of year we would go into the frozen forest—
leaves stripped, only a few birds ticking in the bare trees, fields shorn,

corn trash a dull gold. Sometimes snow would fall, and I can recall
the exact sound of its muffling, quieting whiteness crackling down.

Of our hunting party, only two of us are alive—
grandparents long dead, father and nephew dead, their bones

all on the ridge top with the others. The town is shabbier now,
middle classes disappeared, leaving the ancient, the angry and the slow.

My cousin is returning home—to a place he reviled—
having run out his luck in the West. His plan

is to move into the garage on the old homestead, which of course
is no plan at all. I sometimes hear the call to return,

come back to the shady valley with its reliable breeze,
the crumbling brindle bluffs, a brandy old fashioned made with 7UP

waiting for me on the sticky bar of the Golden Frog,
recognition registering with those I meet when they see

my father looking back from inside my aging face. That place
don’t fade—the one that made me—bone isotopes belie

the soil’s iron and chalk, my talk inflected (sorry sounds like sore).
What’s more is that I want to go, but won’t.

I’ll stay here, 2000 miles away, amidst an older Eastern decay.
It turns out I have some local dead here as well:

Fifth Great-Grandfather Christian Servoss—colonial Dutchman
from the Palatine, who died in some wintertime foolishness

crossing the frozen Mohawk. His two boys watched him
and his horses drown in that not-very-impressive watercourse.

One of those boys made it to Iowa, and disappeared,
but not before he reproduced, becoming Fourth Great-Grandfather

to yours truly, and so on. My remaining colonial dead
lie in the dirt near Palatine Bridge, their names effaced

from marble by acid rain. I wish I didn’t care about them, but I do.
It matters to have this ghost clan near—this family I never knew.

Mark Wunderlich, My Local Dead, 2022, Poem-A-Day, Academy of American Poets

Born at Winona, Minnesota in 1968, Mark Wunderlich is an American poet and educator. A serious poet who experiments with content, form and style, he constructs compositions whose lines conjure memories and sensory experiences. Wunderlich’s work covers a wide range of themes: the struggles of nature, the shared essence of man and beast, the preservation of self-respect, and human desire.

Raised in the rural Buffalo County of Wisconsin, Wunderlich attended Concordia College’s Institute for German Studies before transferring to study English and German literature at the University of Wisconsin. After earning his Bachelor of Arts, he attended New York City’s Columbia University School for the Arts where he earned his Master of Fine Arts. Wunderlich’s graduate thesis at Columbia was the poetry collection, “The Anchorage”, which he finished in 1999 while living in Provincetown, Massachusetts. At Provincetown, he became friends with poet Stanley Kunitz, a mainstay of the town’s literary community and a former New York State Poet Laureate.  

Mark Wunderlich’s debut collection of poems “The Anchorage” was  published in 1999 by the University of Massachusetts Press and later received the Lambda Literary Award. Accepting the body as the soul’s anchor, this autobiographical collection of poems examines the body’s movement through a landscape of desires. Presented through lyrical letters and intimate dialogues, the diversely formatted poems discuss the dichotomies between love and illness, urban and rural life, homosexual desire and familial tensions. 

Wunderlich’s second collection, “Voluntary Servitude”was published in 2004 by Minnesota’s Graywolf Press. The protagonist in these poems is both servant and master to family, memory, sex and lover. The physical and psychological limitations and releases of relationships, particularly at the breaking point, are examined through these works. Using a variety of poetic forms at different levels of emotion, Wunderlich presents these complications of human desire through a series of images set in alternating vistas from rural Wisconsin to exotic destinations such as Austria and Turkey.

Mark Wunderlich’s third collection of poems was the 2014 “The Earth Awaits” published by Graywolf Press. The majority of these poems are what Wunderlich calls ‘house prayers’ fashioned after those in the late eighteenth-century prayer-books written by Pennsylvania-settled German immigrants. The title itself, “The Earth Awaits” is a reference to an Anglo-Saxon ritual prayer song said or sung during the honey harvest to prevent the swarming of bees. In these poems, Wunderlich evokes, using folklore and historical sources, the time when every setting, thought and action was permeated with ritual. 

The fourth collection by Wunderlich is the 2021 “God of Nothingness” published by Graywolf Press. The poems in this collection again address, with the same personal, queer and rural aesthetics, the issue of ordinary rural life in the natural world. These poems embrace regret, grief and death as they dwell on the issues of family bonds, nature, and the experience of one’s self identity. Infused with familial ghosts and haunting memories, this entire collection serves as a narrative map of Wunderlich’s life. 

Mark Wunderlich was awarded two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Fellowship from the Amy Lowell Trust, created in honor of imagist poet Amy Lawrence Lowell. 

As an educator, Wunderlich has taught at Stanford University, Ohio University, Columbia University, San Francisco State University and Barnard College. At Vermont’s Bennington College, he is a member of the literature faculty and Director of the Graduate Writing Seminars. 

Mark Wunderlich’s official site is located at: https://www.markwunderlich.com

Note: The Virtual Memories Show has a podcast interview, Episode 417, with Mark Wunderlich located at: https://chimeraobscura.com/vm/

As a general note for those interested in poetry, I would recommend the online Contemporary Poetry Review which contains a wide range of both contemporary and historic writers. A review of Wunderlich’s “The Earth Awaits” is also on this site: https://www.cprw.com

Bebe Backhouse-Oliver: “Take Me to the Ocean Where My Heart Once Drowned”

Photographers Unknown, Take Me to the Ocean Where My Heart Once Drowned

take me outside to the place we both knew so well
when i’d hold your hand while walking barefoot
even though the soil was littered with bindis
but i preferred the earth to know who i was
from the taste of my blood and the way it filled with grains of sand
than to have to speak my name in a language it could never understand
with a voice i was still discovering

take me to the mountain we would go to sit
and watch the stars fall past the edge of the earth
like they were always destined to do
let me think of the people i used to know when i was small
and remember the things i forgot about them
the pieces of gold that captured my heart into loving them
and the ways they hurt me that saw me quickly let them go

take me to the ocean where my heart once drowned
as people in barely-there swimsuits watched me stand
in waves that broke on the shoreline
as my bones shattered beneath the forceful hands of the sun
and all its reasons for keeping the world alive in a chorus of separate songs
let me dance in the sand one more time
while you take photographs of the footprints i leave behind
so i can remember their rhythm long after i’ve left them

take me to the tree outside the home where i grew up
and i’ll carve my name into its bark
beside the one i made at nine years old
i’ll climb its branches and stretch my arms out so
i’m taller than the leaves
and higher than the light that bleeds over them
i’ll feel the greatness of everything you’ve given me
the power of all i am
and i’ll know this to be a journey of infinite steps
that encase golden prayers in the face of a western wind
trusting i’ll be going home and knowing i’ll never be coming back

Bebe Backhouse-Oliver, the light that bleeds, more than these bones, 2023, Magabala Books, Broome, Australia

A descendant of the Bardi Jawi people of the Kimberley region of north-Western Australia, Bebe Backhouse-Oliver is a poet, writer, illustrator and leader of diverse community projects. His work embraces issues of love, loss, identity, sense of country, and both Aboriginal and gay existence. Oliver has for many years maintained his home in Naarm, the traditional Central Kulin Nation name for the specific area now known as Greater Melbourne.

In addition to studies in classical piano and composition, Bebe Oliver began writing at an early age,. His initial work was creative stories and, later, poetry and memoir-based journal-format stories. These written works served as an outlet for all the challenges he experienced as a young Aboriginal boy with a suppressed identity. Oliver’s first published work was a 2018 story he submitted for entry in author Anita Heiss’s biographical anthology entitled “Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia”.

Oliver relocated to Melbourne to study at the Victorian College of the Arts. After returning from a period of travel overseas, he became established as a producer and director of theater, festivals, and public art projects across Australia, New Zealand, France and Belgium. A leading designer of projects for diverse communities, Oliver is a co-chairperson of Melbourne’s biannual Blak & Bright First Nations Literary Festival; he is also a Board Director of the publishing house Magabala Books. Through his senior leadership positions, Oliver has fostered many opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists to showcase their work, thus allowing Traditional Culture to publicly thrive. 

In March of 2023, Magabala Books published “More Than These Bones”, Oliver’s debut collection of poems that details his journal through both heartbreak and self-discovery. Each poem is set in a different location and, often accompanied by a photograph or drawing, adds another dimension to his life story. Oliver’s writing is also featured in the anthology “Nangamay Mana Djurali”, a collection of voices from the Australian black queer community. Edited by Alison Whittaker and Steven Lindsay Ross, the anthology shows the diverse perspectives of life experienced by Aboriginal queer people in contemporary Australia. 

Bebe Backhouse-Oliver’s website is located at: https://www.bebeoliver.com

Notes Magabala Books is Australia’s leading Indigenous publisher. Committed to nurturing the talent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytellers, the publishing house offers awards, creative grants and scholarships. Magabala Books also sponsors cultural projects including audio-visual installations, recordings of elders’ stories, and developing the book illustration skills of Kimberley Aboriginal artists. The Magabala Books website is located at: https://magabala.com.au

“Tadra / Buar (To Dream)”, a poem by Bebe Oliver and Fiji poet Daniel Sipeli, can be found, with a video recitation by Oliver, at the Red Room Poetry website: https://redroompoetry.org/poets/bebe-backhouse/tadra-buar-dream/

John Horne Burns: “That City in the Middle of the Sea”

Photographers Unknown, That City in the Middle of the Sea

Hal walked around the Galleria. He stuck his hands into his pockets, swaggered a little, and tried to smile at everyone. Often his smiles were returned. But he didn’t follow them up. His was the disinterested smile of God the Father surveying the world after the sixth day. And Hal had never seen so many soldiers whose free time hung like a weight on their backs, as their packs had hung in combat. They sat at the outside tables of the bars and drank vermouth. They wore shoulder patches of three divisions. Their faces were seamy or gentle or questioning or settled or blank. No other people in the Galleria Umberto had so many nuances on their lips as the Americans Hal saw there.

After looking in all the shop windows and all the posters and traversing both sides of the X-shaped pavement that bisected the Galleria, Hal sat down at one of the tables. He knew that he was in the tiniest yet the greatest city of the world. But it hadn’t the fixed pattern of a small town. It was a commune of August, 1944, and its population changed every day. These people who came to the Galleria to stand and drink and shop and look and question were set apart from the rest of the modern world. They were outside the formula of mothers and wives and creeds. The Galleria Umberto was like that city in the middle of the sea that rises every hundred years to dry itself m the sun.

John Horne Burns, The Gallery, Excerpt: Third Portrait (Hal), 1948, Harper & Brothers, New York

Born at Andover, Massachusetts in October of 1916, John Horne Burns was an American writer who, in his short life, published three works of which the best known was the 1947 best-seller “The Gallery”, An author whose first publication was well-received by critics, Burns  and his work eventually became largely forgotten.

The eldest of seven children of an upper middle-class Irish Catholic family, John Horne Burns was educated at St. Augustine’s School by the Sisters of Norte Dame and later at the Phillips Academy where he studied music. At Harvard University, Burns studied and became fluent in French, German and Italian; he also wrote several fictional works, none of which were published. Burns graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1937 with a Bachelor of Arts in English, magna cum laude. After his graduation, he became a teacher at the Loomis School, a private boarding and day preparatory school in Windsor, Connecticut.

Although opposed to America’s decision to enter World War II, Burns was drafted as a private into the United States Army in 1942. He attended the Adjutant General’s School in Washington D.C. and received a commission as Second Lieutenant. Sent overseas in 1943, Burns served as a military intelligence officer in the cities of Casablanca and Algiers. Later transferred to Italy, he spent a year and a half censoring mail sent by prisoners of war. Burns lived during this period of service near the Galleria Umberto I, a partially destroyed shopping arcade frequented by soldiers, prostitutes and beggars. This galleria would provide the setting for his first novel. Burns was discharged from military service in 1946, at which time he returned to his teaching position at Loomis School. 

A man of both isolationist tendencies and an intense competitive nature, John Burns completed his first novel “The Gallery” in 1946 while teaching at the Loomis School. Published in 1947, the novel is composed of nine portraits of local women and soldiers interspersed with eight recollections narrated by an anonymous American soldier. Issues raised in the novel include economic and social inequities, homosexual experiences in the military, the impact of the Allied occupation on the population of Naples, and the assertion of individuality within the war effort. “The Gallery”, an unconventionally structured literary work, received high praise from critics and such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Heller, Edmund Wilson, and Gore Vidal.  

Burns became a man sought for his views on literature and would occasionally write a complimentary review. However, he became well-known for his strong, often caustic, reviews of both his peers and more established writers including such prominent men as Thomas Wolfe, Somerset Maugham, and James Michener. In 1949, Burns published his second novel, the satirical “Lucifer with a Book” that was based on his life experiences at the Loomis boarding school. He expected better reviews than those received by his first novel; however, the critical response to this work was dismal. 

Disheartened by the reviews, John Burns returned in 1950 to Italy where, designated a famous author by the local paper, he settled in Florence’s Hotel Excelsior, a famous expatriate gathering place along the Arno River. Burns wrote and published his third novel, the 1952 “A Cry of Children”. In this novel, he told the story of a man with a brilliant career as a concert pianist who is led by his mistress into a bohemian world of vice and depravity, only to be redeemed later by the very things he left behind. Although Burns’s third work also received uniformly negative reviews, some critics still thought that Burns was a writer of future distinction.

While working on a fourth novel, Burns supported himself by writing an article on the city of Florence for the American travel magazine “Holiday”. He eventually gained a reputation in Florence as a person who drank to excess and complained of rivals, critics and both friends and enemies. At the end of July in 1953, the publishing firm Harper & Brothers rejected Burns’s fourth book “The Stranger’s Guise”. In August while sailing with his Italian boyfriend just south off the port city of Livorno, Burns had a seizure. Five days later on the eleventh of August, he was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of thirty-six. 

Tom Burns, John’s younger brother, hired a well-connected American lawyer in Rome to investigate Burns’s death; however, nothing suspicious was found. Originally interred in Italy, John Burns’s body was later exhumed by his family and buried at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts. His short stories, poems, articles, photographs, and novels, including his final unpublished “The Stranger’s Guise”, are housed in the collections of the Boston University.

Notes: Writer Jerry Portwood has an interview with essayist David Margolick, author of “Dreadful”, a biography on the life of John Horne Burns, at the online July issue of Out magazine: https://www.out.com/entertainment/art-books/2013/07/18/john-horne-burns-gay-icon-david-margolick-gallery-military

The Lambda Literary also has a 2013 interview with author David Margolick that covers  John Burns’s life and legacy: https://lambdaliterary.org/2013/07/david-margolick-john-horne-burns-and-the-dreadful-life/

A dissertation by Mark Travis Bassett entitled “John Horne Burns: Toward a Critical Biography” can be read as a free PDF download from MOspace, an online thesis extension of the University of Missouri: https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/35623

An online version of John Horne Burns’s 1948 “The Gallery” can be read for free at the Internet Archive site located at: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.168101/page/n5/mode/2up

For those interested, author David Margolick’s 2014 biography on John Burns, “Dreadful”, was published by Other Press and is available as both an ebook and paperback through various retailers.

Wilfred Owen: “The Greatest Glory Will Be Theirs Who Fought”

Photographers Unknown, The Greatest Glory Will Be Theirs Who Fought

Head to limp head, the sunk-eyed wounded scanned
Yesterday’s Mail: the casualties (typed small)
And (large) Vast Booty from our Latest Haul.
Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned;
“For,” said the paper, “when this war is done
The men’s first instinct will be making homes.
Meanwhile their foremost need is aerodromes,
It being certain war has just begun.
Peace would do wrong to our undying dead,–
The sons we offered might regret they died
If we got nothing lasting in their stead.
We must be solidly indemnified.
Though all be worthy Victory which all bought.
We rulers sitting in this ancient spot
Would wrong our very selves if we forgot
The greatest glory will be theirs who fought,
Who kept this nation in integrity.”
Nation?–The half-limbed readers did not chafe
But smiled at one another curiously
Like secret men who know their secret safe.
(This is the thing they know and never speak,
That England one by one had fled to France
Not many elsewhere now save under France).
Pictures of these broad smiles appear each week,
And people in whose voice real feeling rings
Say: How they smile! They’re happy now, poor things.

Wilfred Owen, “Smile, Smile, Smile”, Poems, 1920, Chatto and Windus, London

Born on the eighteenth of March in 1893 at the Oswestry villa Plas Wilmot, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was an English soldier and one of the leading poets during the First World War. His poetry, in contrast to the patriotic verses of earlier war poets such as Rupert Brooke, focused on the horrors of war, its tenches, the traumatic sufferings, and the deaths. 

The eldest of four children to Thomas Owen and Susan Shaw, Wilfred Owen was born at the comfortable home of his grandfather Edward Shaw. After Shaw’s death and the sale of his home in early 1897, Thomas Owen relocated the family several times due to his employment as a railway stationmaster before settling in Shrewsbury in 1907. Wilfred Owen received his initial education at the Birkenhead Institute and then, for his last two years, at Shrewsbury’s Wyle Cop School. 

Raised as an evangelical Anglican of the Church of England, Owen was a devout believer in his youth, in part due to his strong relationship with his mother. He discovered poetry in 1904 and was early influenced by the Bible and the English Romantic poets, particularly the works of William Wordsworth and John Keats. In 1911, Owen passed his matriculation exam at the Wyle Cop School; however, he did not achieve the first-class honors necessary for a scholarship to a university. 

In return for free lodging, Wilfred Owen became a lay assistant to the Vicar of the village of Dunsden from September of 1911 to February of 1913. This support enabled him to attend classes in botany at the University of Reading and, with later endorsement from the head of its English Department, receive free lessons in Old English. In 1913, Owen obtained the position of a private English and French tutor at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux, France; his experience at the school led to private tutorage for a local French family. Through this family, Owen met the French satirical poet and essayist Laurent Tailhade with whom he would maintain frequent correspondence. 

At the outset of war between France and Germany in August of 1914, Owen considered his options and made the decision to enlist in the British war effort. He felt that military life afforded him the opportunity to leave the confines of study and develop a sense of honor and bravery, in essence it was a reconciliation of his impulse to art and action. After recovering from diphtheria, Owen returned to England in the autumn of 1915 and enlisted in the Artist’s Rifles, an officers’ training camp. On the twenty-ninth of December in 1916, Second Lieutenant Owen of the 2nd Manchester Regiment and his men left London aboard ship for France and the Western Front, . 

Beginning in January of 1917, Wilfred Owen spent almost four months with his regiment in various sections of the front line. On the second of May, Owen returned home with a diagnosis of shell shock that made him unfit to lead troops. By June, Owen was being treated at Craiglockhart Hospital located just outside Edinburgh, Scotland. It was during period that he emerged as a true poet with a burst of creative energy that lasted several months. Owen edited “Hydra”, the hospital journal, and wrote such poems as “The Sentry”, “The Show”, and “Dulce et Decorum Est”. 

After one month at the hospital, Owen met his fellow patient, the well-published poet Siegfried Sassoon who had been serving with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in France. Owen regularly began showing his poetry to Sassoon who introduced him to other writers and poets in Edinburgh’s artistic circles including Sassoon’s close friend, poet and fellow Fusilier Robert Graves. Convinced that the war ought to be ended, Owen had by this time found his creative stimulus in a compassionate identification with both the wounded and the soldiers still in combat..

Discharged and judged fit for light regimental duties, Wilfred Owen spent the winter in North Yorkshire and was later posted in March of 1918 to the Northern Command Depot in Ripon where he composed a number of poems including “Futility” and “Strange Meeting”. In spite of a strong desire to remain in England to protest the continuation of the war, Owen returned to his comrades in the French trenches at the end of August. On the first of October in 1918, he led units of the 2nd Manchester Regiment to storm enemy strong points near the village of Joncourt in northern France. Owen was awarded the Military Cross for his courage and leadership in these battles.

On the fourth of November while leading his men on a crossing of the Sambre-Oise Canal, Wilfred Owen was shot and killed. His body was buried in a corner of the Communal Cemetery of Ors, between two of his men, W. E. Privates Duckworth and H. Topping. One week later, the Armistice became official and World War I was ended. The War Department telegram announcing Owen’s death reached his parents in Shrewsbury on Armistice Day as the town’s bells were ringing. After the war’s end, Siegfried Sassoon had waited in vain for word from Owen, only to be told of his death several months later.

Having personally experienced the horrors of war, Wilfred Owen was keenly  aware of the fragile balance between the days spent mending fears and the remembered war experiences that occurred during sleep. His own dreams seemed to undo whatever progress was made each day, a fact he believed that was shared by many of his fellow soldiers. For Owen, his writing depended on the honesty of describing his own war experiences. He felt his duty as a writer was to educate the public to the true nature of combat and its endless, unforgiving ramifications.

Notes:  Wilfred Owen only published five poems before his death; these appeared in critically acclaimed literary journals during the first half of 1918. Although he had started preparing his first poetry collection for publication, he was killed in battle before he finished the work. “Poems” was published posthumously, with an introduction by Sassoon, in December of 1920. 

The Poetry Foundation has an extensive biography on Wilfred Owen which includes  twelve poems and related articles. This article can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wilfred-owen

On the Warfare History Network site, writer and historian Philip Burton Morris has an interesting article entitled “WWI Author: The Writings of Wilfred Owen” which discusses Owen’s life and poetry during the war years. The article is located at: https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-writings-of-wilfred-owen/ 

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Wilfred Owen’s Last Portrait, August 1918”, 1931 Reprint, The English Faculty Library, Oxford University, The Wilfred Own Literary Estate

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Manchester Regiment Officers, Wilfred Owen (Center), circa 1915-1918, Detail, Gelatin Silver Print, Warfare History Network

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Wilfred Owen”, 1915-1918, Vintage Photo, English Faculty Library, Oxford University, Wilfred Owen Literary Estate

Julien Green: “A World He Brushes Past Without Seeing”

Photographers Unknown, A World He Brushes Past Without Seeing

Paris est une ville dont on pourrait parler au pluriel, comme les Grecs l’a fait avec Athène. Car il y a beaucoup de Paris et celui des touristes n’a qu’une relation superficielle avec celui des Parisiens. Un étranger qui traverse Paris dans en voiture ou en autobus et qui va d’un musée à l’autre n’a aucune idée de ce monde qu’il ne voit pas, bien qu’il soit dans elle.

Personne ne peut affirmer de connaître bien une ville s’il n’a pas perdu son temps dans elle. L’âme d’une grande ville ne laisse pas se comprendre légèrement. Pour qu’on se familiarise vraiment avec elle, on doit dans elle, on a dû s’ennuyer et pâtir un peu dans elle. Bien sûr, chacun peut s’acheter un guide de la ville et constater que tous les monuments indiqués sont là. Mais, à l’intérieur de la frontière de Paris, une ville qui est accessible autant dure que Tombouctou l’était autrefois se cache. 

Paris is a city that might well be spoken of in the plural, as the Greeks used to speak of Athens, for there are many Parises, and the tourists’ Paris is only superficially related to the Paris of the Parisians. The foreigner driving through Paris from one museum to another is quite oblivious to the presence of a world he brushes past without seeing.

Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well. The soul of a big city is not to be grasped so easily; in order to make contact with it, you have to have been bored, you have to have suffered a bit in those places that contain it. Anyone can get hold of a guide and tick off all the monuments, but within the very confines of Paris there is another city as difficult to access as Timbuktu once was. 

Julien Green, Paris, 1987, Illustrator: Jean William Hanoteau, Publisher: Les Bibliophiles du Palais, Paris 

Born in Paris in September of 1900, Julien Hartridge Green was an American writer who spent most of his life in France. Over a seventy-year career as an author, he wrote novels,  essays, several plays, a journal written daily from 1919 to 1998, and a four-volume autobiography. In 1971, Green had the honor of being the first non-French national to be elected a member of the Académie Françoise. He had been awarded the Académie’s grand prize for literature in the previous year.

Julien Green was the youngest of seven children born to American parents Edward Green, a native of Virginia, and Mary Adelaide Hartridge from Savannah, Georgia. The family had emigrated and settled in Paris seven years before his birth. Raised in a traditional Protestant home, Green received his education in French schools including the city’s distinguished Lycée Janson-de-Sailly. After his mother’s death in 1914, he became a Roman Catholic two years later. 

After sitting for the French baccalaureate in 1917, Green served as an underage volunteer ambulance driver during the first World War, initially for the American Field Service and then for the American Red Cross. He entered the French Army in 1918 and served in an artillery unit until the end of the war. At the invitation of his uncle Walter Hartridge, Green studied from 1919 to 1922 at the University of Virginia, his first direct contact with the United States and its Southern culture. 

Julien Green returned to France in 1922 and began his career as a writer. His first published work in French was a critique entitled “Pamphlet Contre les Catholiques de France”, written under the name of Théophile Delaporte. In 1926, Green published his first novel “Mont-Cinère (Avarice House)” through philosopher and publisher Jacques Maritain who later published Green’s 1927 novel “Adrienne Mesurat (The Closed Garden)”. Until his death in 1973, Maritain remained a loyal friend, supporter and regular correspondent to Green

In the early 1930s, Green returned to the United States and began work on a novel set in the American South during the 1800s, an effort he abandoned after learning that Margaret Mitchell was nearing publication on her 1936 “Gone with the Wind”. Green’s Southern epic would be a three-volume saga written in France. The first volume “Les Pays Lointains (The Distant Lands, Dixie I)” was published in 1987. “Les Étoiles du Sud (The Stars of the South, Dixie II)” was published two years later. Both of these were reprinted in English in 1991 and 1993, respectively. The third volume of the saga, “Dixie (Dixie III)”, was published in both French and English in 1995.

In 1938, Julien Green began the publication of journals that provided a chronicle of his personal, literary and religious life as well as the atmosphere and events in the French capital. He extensively edited each of the journals to suppress accounts of his and others’ sexual adventures as well as the opinions he had expressed candidly to others. Of the nineteen volumes in the series, only two were published before the German invasion in 1940. Publication resumed after the war with volume three, “Devant la Porte Sombre (1940-1943)”, in 1946. The final volume, “Le Grand Large du Soir (1997-1998)”, was published in 2006.

After France’s surrender in July of 1940, Green fled Paris for the city of Pau in southwest France near the Spanish border. He was able to obtain visas for himself and his long-time partner, journalist Robert de Saint-Jean, for passage to Portugal from which they sailed on the 15th of July to New York City. After a brief stay with a cousin in Baltimore, Green was mobilized in 1942 by the United States Office of War Information to serve as a French-speaking broadcaster for the Voice of America. While in New York, he wrote his first English work, the  1942 memoir “Memories of Happy Days” and gave lectures at both Mills and Goucher colleges. Green also translated two works by French poet and essayist Charles Péguy into English and wrote articles for periodicals. 

After his return to Paris in late September of 1945, Julien Green continued the editing and publication of his journals. In the next fifteen years, he published four major novels: the 1947 “Si J’Étais Vous (If I Were You)”; the 1951 ““Moïre” set in Charlottesville, Virginia; the 1956 “Le Malfaiteur (The Transgressor)”; and the 1960 “Chaque Homme dans sa Nuit (Each in His Own Darkness)”, a novel of a young Catholic troubled by homosexual urges. Between 1963 and 1974, Green published four volumes of memoirs that had been written before his published journals. In the third volume of this set, the 1966 “Terre Lointaine (Love in America)”, Green described how he became aware of his homosexuality while at the University of Virginia. These four memoirs were reissued in 1985 under the title “Jeunes Années”. 

Julien Hartridge Green died in Paris on the thirteenth of August in 1996, shortly before his ninety-eighth birthday. His remains were entombed in a chapel designed for him at St. Egid Church in Klagenfurt, Austria. After his death, Green’s adopted adult son, novelist and playwright Éric Jourdan, served as executor of Green’s estate. Controversy surrounded Jourdan’s attempts to control and censor Green’s publications. After Jourdan’s death in 2015, his executor Tristan Gervais de Lafond supported the publication of an uncensored edition of Green’s journals; the first volume of this set was published in 2019.

Notes: Julien Green had been for many years the companion of author and journalist Robert de Saint-Jean whom he met in November of 1924. They lived together in an intimate and physical open  relationship for most of the inter-war years. Green and Saint-Jean frequented Paris’s popular gay clubs, traveled together in the 1920s and 1930s through Europe, Tunisia, and the  United States, and spent months together in London during the mid-1930s. For his body of work, Robert de Saint-Jean received in 1984 France’s literary award, the Prix Marcel Proust. He died in Paris at the age of eight-five in January of 1987.

The National Endowment for the Humanities’s online magazine “Humanities” has a feature article entitled “Julien Green: The End of a World”, written by NEH research fellow Francis-Noël Thomas. This article on Green’s life in Paris can be found at: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/julyaugust/feature/julien-green-the-end-world

A complete list of Julien Green’s hundred seventy-two published works can be found at the GoodReads site located at: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/36431.Julien_Green

Top Insert Image: George Hoyningen-Huene, “Julien Green”, 1930, Gelatin Silver Print, Vanity Fair 

Second Insert Image: Julien Green, “Journal (1928-1939)”, January 1958, Limited Edition, Volume Nine of Ten, Publisher Librairie Plon, Paris

Third Insert Image: Carl van Vechten, “Julien Green”, 1933, Gelatin Silver Print

Fourth Insert Image: Julien Green, “Les Pays Lointains”, 1987, Publisher Éditions de Seuil, Paris

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Julien Green”, circa 1971, Gelatin Silver Print