Assotto Saint: “Shadows Also Shrinking Early”

Photographers Unknown, Shadows Shrinking Early

between
solitudes of illness
& beatitudes our lips utter
evening settles in this exile of senses for our surrender
one more friend’s death has clocked the day like a tolling bell
biding time we are shadows also shrinking early into destiny
let us gather our pills & swallow all regrets with a kiss
cover each other then weave
dreams of another day
to come.

—Assotto Saint, Life-Partners

Born in Les Cayes, Haiti, on October 2, 1957, Assotto Saint was an American poet, publisher and performance artist. He was a key figure in the LGBT and African-American art and literary culture of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Saint, whose birth name was Yves François Lubin, moved to New York City in 1970 where he enrolled briefly in the pre-med program at Queens College, after which he pursued an artistic career. He adopted the name Assotto Saint for his career, choosing ‘Saint’ in honor of the revolutionary hero Toussaint L’Ouverture, who fought against France for Haiti’s independence, and ‘Assotto’ which is the name of the ceremonial drum used in Haitian Vodou rituals.

From 1973 to 1980, Assotto Saint performed as a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. In November of 1980, he met the Swedish musician and composer Jan Holmgren, who would become his life partner and a collaborator in his artistic career. Saint, along with Holmgren, founded the Metamorphosis Theater company, and Xotika, an electronic pop music group. His theater performance piece entitled “Risin’ to the Love We Need” won second prize from the Jane Chambers Award for Gay and Lesbian Playwriting in 1980.

Assotto Saint became a United States citizen in 1986, after which time he began publishing poetry in anthologies, including the 1986 “In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology”; “Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time” published in 1988; and the 1987 chapbook “Triple Trouble”. He soon founded his own press, Galiens Press, which worked to publish black gay poets. Included among the many works by Galiens Press are “The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets” in 1991 and two of Saint’s own poetry collections, “Stations” in 1989 and “Wishing for Wings” in 1994.

Assotto Saint won a 1992 Lambda Literary Award in the Gay Poetry category as editor of “The Road Before Us” and, in the following year, was a nominee in the Gay Anthology category for “Here to Dare: A Collection of Ten Gay Black Poets”, al work published by his Galiens Press. In 1994, he was a nominee in the Gay Poetry category for his own collection of poems “Wishing for Wings”. Saint also received a fellowship in poetry from New York’s Foundation of the Arts and the James Baldwin Award.

After both Saint and his partner Jan Holmgren were diagnosed HIV-positive, Saint became an AIDS activist and one of the first African American activists to publicly disclose his HIV status. Before his death, Saint appeared in Marlon Riggs’ 1992 film noir “Non, Je Regrette Rien (No Regrets)”, covering the self-disclosure of five HIV-positive black men coping, through their difficult journeys, with the personal and social destruction of the epidemic. Jan Holmgren died on March 29, 1993, and Saint died on June 29, 1994. The couple are buried alongside each other at the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn, New York.

An autobiographical collection of Assotto Saint’s work entitled “Spells of a Voodoo Doll: The Poems Fiction, Essays, and Plays of Assotto Saint” was published by Richard Kasak at Masquerade Books in 1996. This compendium of Saint’s work was collected by Assotto’s friend and literary executor Michele Karlsbert who wrote a brief and heartfelt introduction to the book.

For those interested, the preface written by Assotto Saint to his 1992 anthology “The Road Before Us” can be located at: https://zocalopoets.com/tag/assotto-saint/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hanya Yanagihara: “A Little Life”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Seated Men

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

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

—Hanya YanagIhara, A Little Life

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

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

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

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

James Baldwin: “The Child is Filled with Darkness”

Photographer Unknown, The Child is Filled with Darkness

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

—-James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues

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

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

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

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

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

Timothy Liu: “Tiny Flares Corkscrew Up the Sky”

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

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

Timothy Liu, A Boston Fourth, Poetry, July 1996

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Rechy: “The Coming of the Night”

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

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

—John Rechy, The Coming of the Night

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

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

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

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

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

E. M. Forster: “Madness is Not for Everyone”

Photographers Unknown, Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Fourteen

“Madness is not for everyone, but Maurice’s proved the thunderbolt that dispels the clouds. The storm had been working up not for three days as he supposed, but for six years. It had brewed in the insecurities of being where no eye pierces, his surroundings had thickened it. It had burst and he had not died. The brilliancy of day was around him, he stood upon the mountain range that overshadows youth, he saw.”

—E. M. Forster, Maurice

Born on the first of January, 1879 in London, Edward Morgan Forster was a fiction writer and essayist. After his father’s death of tuberculosis in 1890, he and his mother moved to Rooks Nest in Hertfordshire until 1893. This house would serve as the inspiration for his future novel, the 1910 “Howard’s End”. An inheritance from his great-aunt Marianne Thornton in 1887 would enable Forster to live comfortably and pursue a career as a writer.

E. M. Forster attended King’s College Cambridge between 1897 and 1901. There he joined the discussion group known as the Apostles, whose members later constituted the Bloomsbury Group which included Leonard and Virginia Wolff, Giles Lytton Strachey, Clive and Venessa Bell, and artist Duncan Grant. After graduation Forster traveled through continental Europe, visiting Greece and Italy before returning to Surrey, England.

In 1914, by which time he had written all but one of his novels, E. M. Forster visited Egypt, Germany and India with fellow Bloomsbury Group member Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, the British political scientist and philosopher. During the First World War, Forster, a conscientious objector, served in the British Red Cross in Egypt as a Chief Searcher for missing men. Returning again to India in the early 1920s, he became the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of the state of Dewas; the story of which was told in his 1953 non-fiction work “The Hill of Devi”.

After his return to London from India, Forster completed the last of his novels published in his lifetime, the 1924 “A Passage to India”, for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. During the 1930s and 1940s, Forster became a notable broadcaster on BBC Radio and became associated with the British Humanist Association,which opposed censorship and advocated for penal reform and individual liberty.For his published work, he was awarded a Benson Medal by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society of Literature in 1937.

E. M. Forster was open about his homosexuality to his close friends, but not to the public. He had a number of male lovers during his adult life; but he was at his happiest during a two-year relationship with the young policeman Bob Buckingham, who later married. After Buckingham’s marriage, both Buckingham and his wife continued to be included in Forster’s social circle. Others in his social circle included writer Christopher Isherwood, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, composer Benjamin Britten, Belfast-novleist Forrest Reid, writer and editor of “The Listener” J. R. Ackerley, and socialist poet Edward Carpenter and Edward’s lover George Merrill.

Forster’s “Maurice” was written between 1913 to 1914, revised twice in 1932 and 1959, and finally published posthumously in 1971. A tale of gay love in early twentieth-century England, it follows the protagonist Maurice Hall from his school days into a relationship in his older years. The novel was inspired by the cross-class relationship between poet Edward Carpenter and his working-class partner George Merrill, both of whom served as the models for Forster’s gay characters, Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder.

After completing a first draft by 1914, Forster tentatively showed the novel to select friends, and continued to do so over the forthcoming decades, reworking it as time passed. The openly gay novelist Christopher Isherwood saw the draft in its various revisions on a few occasions, and repeatedly implored Forster to publish it. However, Forster continued to insist on it not being published.

Despite the passing of time and of individuals, to whom he felt the revelation of his homosexuality would hurt most, Forster believed there had been no profound progression since the days of Oscar Wilde’s conviction, an incident that flooded the papers when he was sixteen, and thought that public attitudes had only incrementally shifted, from, in his words, ‘ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt’. Instead, he bequeathed the manuscript of “Maurice” to Isherwood, and, a year after Forster’s death, the novel was finally published.

E. M. Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King’s College Cambridge in January of 1946. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honor in 1953. Forster was honored in 1969 with membership in England’s Order of Merit, and, through his lifetime, received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature in sixteen separate years. E. M. Forster died at the age of ninety-one of a stroke on June 7th, 1970 in Coventry, Warwickshire. His ashes were scattered in the rose garden of Coventry’s crematorium, near Warwick University.

Note: E. M. Forster had five books published in his lifetime, one published posthumously, and one, “Arctic Summer”, never finished. His work included “Where Angels Fear to Tread”. published in 1905; the 1907 “The Longest Journey”; “A Room with a View”, published in 1908; the 1910 “Howard’s End”; “Passage to India” published in 1924; and his “Maurice” published in 1971. Although Forster was against having his work presented in any form other than literature, all his books, with the exception of “The Longest Journey”, his personal favorite and most autobiographical, have been made into either plays, films, or both.

An article by Professor Kate Symondson on E. M. Forster’s gay fiction can be found at the British Library’s site located at: https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/e-m-forsters-gay-fiction

Jameson Fitzpatrick: “A Poem for Pulse”

Photographers Unknown, A Poem for Pulse

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

Love can’t block a bullet

but it can’t be destroyed by one either,

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

in Orlando and in Brooklyn and in Kabul.

We will be everywhere, always;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Countee Cullen: “We Hide the Heart that Bleeds”

Photographer Unknown, We Hide the Heart that Bleeds

“We shall not always plant while others reap

The golden increment of bursting fruit,

Not always countenance, abject and mute,

That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;

Not everlastingly while others sleep

Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,

Not always bend to some more subtle brute;

We were not made to eternally weep.

The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,

White stars is no less lovely being dark,

And there are buds that cannot bloom at all

In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;

So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,

And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographer Unknown, We are Flesh and Breathe

“When I am feeling depressed and anxious and sullen

all you have to do is take your clothes off

and all is wiped away revealing life’s tenderness

that we are flesh and breathe and are near us

as you are really as you are I become as I

really am alive and knowing vaguely what is

and what is important to me above the intrusions

of incident and accidental relationships

which have nothing to do with my life

when I am in your presence I feel life is strong

and will defeat all its enemies and all of mine

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

sick logic and feeble reasoning are cured

by the perfect symmetry of your arms and legs

spread out making an eternal circle together

creating a golden pillar beside the Atlantic

the faint line of hair dividing your torso

gives my mind rest and emotions their release

into the infinite air where since once we are

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Word is Sprawl

Photographers Unknown, The Word is Sprawl

Verb: sprawl; third-person singular present “sprawls”; present participle “sprawling”; simple past and past participle “sprawled”.

“There was no special place for him or his little affairs, and he was forbidden to sprawl on sofas and explain his ideas about the manufacture of this world and his hopes for the future. Sprawling was lazy and wore out sofas, and little boys were not expected to talk.”

—-Rudyard Kipling, Baa Baa, Black Sheep, 1888

“A shrewd blow, it caught him off balance, and after one ineffectual stagger he sprawled backward and lay for a moment staring up in blank surprise.”

—-Herman Whitaker, Cross Trails: The Story of One Woman in the North Woods, 1914

The Old English word “spreawilian”, meaning ‘to move convulsively’, has cognates, words having the same linguistic derivation as another, in the Scandinavian languages, such as the Norwegian “sprala”, the Danish “spraelle”, and the North Frisian “spraweli”. These words probably ultimately came from the Proto-Indo-European root “sper-“, meaning ‘to strew’. Usage as a verb meaning ‘to spread out’ is noted as early as 1300 AD. Usage meaning ‘to spread or stretch in a careless manner’ is attested to be from 1745 AD.

Mary Jane Oliver: “Wild Geese”

Photographer Unknown, Wild Geese

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.”

—Mary Oliver, Wild Geese, Dream Works, 1986

Mary Jane Oliver was born in September of 1935 in Maple Heights, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She was an American poet whose work was inspired by nature, rather than the human world, which arose from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild.

As a child, Mary Oliver spent a large amount of her time outside, walking or reading in the pastoral countryside. Writing poetry at the age of fourteen, Oliver was able, at the age of seventeen, to visit the home of the late poet Edna St. Vincent Milley, located in Austerlitz, New York. There she met the late poet’s sister Norma Milley, with whom she formed a friendship. Mary Oliver and Norma spent the next six to seven years at the “Steepletop” estate archiving Edna St. Vincent Milley’s papers.

Mary Oliver’s first collection of poems “No Voyage and Other Poems: was published in 1963 when she was twenty-eight. While teaching at Case Western Reserve University, her fifth collection of poetry, “American Primitive”, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984, Mary Oliver became Poet in Residence at Bucknell University in 1986; Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College in 1991; and later she held the Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College, Vermont, until 2001.

Mary Oliver’s 1990 “House of Light” won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award ,and her 1992 “New and Selected Poems” won the National Book Award. For its inspiration, her work turns towards nature, and the sense of wonder it instillss. Oliver’s poetry is grounded in her memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England, mostly centered around her life in Provincetown in the 1960s.

Influenced by Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emerson, and Shelley, Oliver’s work is fulled with imagery of her daily walks, which refuse to acknowledge the boundaries between nature and the observing self. Known for her unadorned language and common themes, she has been compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shared an affinity for solitude and inner monologues.

On a return visit to Austerlitz, in the late 1950s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her partner for over forty years. They settled largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived together until Cook’s death in 2005. Oliver continued to live there until she relocated to Florida. She valued her privacy and gave very few interviews.

In 2012, Mary Oliver was diagnosed with lung cancer, was treated and given a good prognosis. She ultimately died of lymphoma on January 17, 2019 at her home in Florida at the age of eighty-three.

Richard Siken: “Unfinished Duet”

Photographer Unknown, Unfinished Duet

- At first there were too many branches
  so he cut them and then it was winter.
  He meaning you. Yes. He would look out
  the window and stare at the trees that once
  had too many branches and now seemed
  to have too few. Is that all? No, there were
  other attempts, breakfasts: plates served,
  plates carried away. He doesn’t know
  what to do with his hands. He likes the feel
  of the coffeepot. More than the hacksaw?
  Yes, and he likes flipping the chairs,
  watching them fill with people. He likes
  the orange juice and toast of it, and waxed
  floors in any light. He wants to be tender
  and merciful. That sounds overly valorous.
  Sounds like penance. And his hands?
  His hands keep turning into birds and
  flying away from him. Him being you.
  Yes. Do you love yourself? I don’t have to
  answer that. It should matter. He has a
  body but it doesn’t matter, clean sheets
  on the bed but it doesn’t matter. This is
  where he trots out his sadness. Little black
  cloud, little black umbrella. You miss
  the point: the face in the mirror is a pale
  and naked hostage and no one can tell
  which room he’s being held in. He wants
  in, he wants out, he wants the antidote.
  He stands in front of the mirror with a net,
  hoping to catch something. He wants to
  move forward into the afternoon because
  there is no other choice. Everyone in this
  room got here somehow and everyone in
  this room will have to leave. So what’s left?
  Sing a song about the room we’re in?
  Hammer in the pegs that fix the meaning
  to the landscape? The voice wants to be
  a hand and the hand wants to do something
  useful. What did you really want? Someone
  to pass this with me. You wanted more.
  I want what everyone wants. He raises
  the moon on a crane for effect, cue the violins.
  That’s what the violins are for. And yes,
  he raises the moon on a crane and scrubs it
  until it shines. So what does it shine on?
  Nothing. Was there no one else? Left-handed
  truth, right-handed truth, there’s no pure
  way to say it. The wind blows and it makes
  a noise. Pain makes a noise. We bang on
  the pipes and it makes a noise. Was there
  no one else? His hands keep turning into
  birds, and his hands keep flying away
  from him. Eventually the birds must land.

—Richard Siken, Unfinished Duet, Crush

Born in New York City in February of 1967, Richard Siken is an American painter, poet, and filmmaker. He studied at the University of Arizona, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and later a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry.

Richard Siken is one of the co-founders and editors of Spork Press, established in 2001. Besides publishing its “Spork” literary magazine, the press produces novels and chapbooks, some of which were released in serial form. Siken received a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment of the Arts and two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants.

Influenced by the 1991 death of his boyfriend, Richard Siken wrote his collection of poems “Crush” which was published by Yale University Press.. A powerful literary work that is confessional, gay, and infused with eroticism, “Crush” won the 2004 Yale Younger Poets Competition, and received the Lambda Literary Award for “Gay Men’s Poetry” in 2005, and the Thom Gunn Award from Publishing Triangle in 2006. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Siken’s most recent work, his second book of poems, “War of the Foxes”, was released from Copper Canyon Press in 2015. With interwoven lyrics, fables, portraits and landscapes, Siken confronts the ways in which we look to art for meaning and purpose. The poems in “The War of the foxes” show the fallacies inherent in a search for truth, both in the world outside and within the self.

Richard Siken currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.

Richard Siken: “I Am the Wind”

Photographer Unknown, I Am the Wind

“I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble but I am invisible, blackbird over the dark field but I am invisible, what fills the balloon and what it moves through, knot without rope, bloom without flower, galloping without the horse, the spirit of the thing without the thing, location without dimension, without a within, song without throat, word without ink, wingless flight, dark boat in the dark night, shine without light, pure velocity, as the hammer is a hammer when it hits the nail and the nail is a nail when it meets the wood and the invisible table begins to appear out of mind, pure mind, out of nothing, pure thinking, hand of the mind, hand of the emperor, arm of the empire, void and vessel, sheath and shear, and wider, and deeper, more vast, more sure, through silence, through darkness, a vector, a violence, and even farther, and even worse, between, before, behind, and under, and even stronger, and even further, beyond form, beyond number, I labor, I lumber, I fumble forward through the valley as winter, as water, a shift in the river, I mist and frost, flexible and elastic to the task, a fountain of gravity, space curves around me, I thirst, I hunger, I spark, I burn, force and field, force and counterforce, agent and agency, push to your pull, parabola of will, massless mass and formless form, dreamless dream and nameless name, intent and rapturous, rare and inevitable, I am the thing that is hurtling towards you…”

—Richard Siken, Lovesong of the Square Root of Negative One, War of the Foxes

Richard Siken currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.