Category: literature

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:  Bebe Backhouse reflects on his identity as a young Aboriginal man growing up in a predominantly Aboriginal community in Western Australia in his essay “It’s not over” located at the SCRIBD site: https://www.scribd.com/document/1008830568/BebeBackhouse

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

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

Frank Sargeson: “It Was Well On Into Autumn”

Photographers Unknown, It Was Well On Into Autumn

Nobody lived on the island. There were a few holiday baches but they were empty now that it was well on into the autumn. Nor from this end could you see any landing places, and with the wind blowing up more and more it wasn’t too pleasant to watch the sea running up the rocks. And Fred had to spend a bit of time manoeuvring around before he found his reef.

It was several hundred yards out with deep water all round, and it seemed to be quite flat. If the sea had been calm it might have been covered to a depth of about a foot with the tide as it was. But with the sea chopping across it wasn’t exactly an easy matter to stand there. At one moment the water was down past your knees, and the next moment you had to steady yourself while it came up round your thighs. And it was uncanny to stand there, because with the deep water all around you seemed to have discovered a way of standing up out in the sea.

Anyhow, Fred took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and his trousers as far as they’d go, and then he hopped out and got Ken to do the same and keep hold of the dinghy. Then he steadied himself and began dipping his hands down and pulling up mussels and throwing them back into the dinghy, and he worked at a mad pace as though he hadn’t a moment to lose. It seemed only a minute or so before he was quite out of breath.

It’s tough work, he said. You can see what a weak joker I am.

I’ll give you a spell, Ken said, only keep hold of the boat.

Well, Fred held the dinghy, and by the way he was breathing and the look of his face you’d have thought he was going to die. But Ken had other matters to think about, he was steadying himself and dipping his hands down more than a yard away, and Fred managed to pull himself together and shove off the dinghy and hop in. And if you’d been sitting in the stern as he pulled away you’d have seen that he had his eyes shut. Nor did he open them except when he took a look ahead to see where he was going, and with the cotton-wool in his ears it was difficult for him to hear.

Frank Sargeson, Excerpt from A Great Day, 1940, A Man and His Wife, Christchurch, New Zealand

Born in the New Zealand city of Hamilton in March of 1903, Frank Sargeson was a novelist and short story writer. One of New Zealand’s greatest literary innovators, he broke from colonial literary traditions and developed a style that expressed the rhythms of his native country’s speech and experience.

Born Norris Frank Davey, Frank Sargeson was the son of prosperous businessman Edwin Davey and his wife Rachel, both committed Methodists. He had a secure early life but later regarded it as limited in scope. Sargeson attended Hamilton High School and enrolled in 1921 as an extramural law student at Aukland University College. He worked in the offices of solicitors during the day and studied law in the evenings. Sargeson also stayed for a period at the Ōkahukura sheep farm of his uncle Oakley Sargeson. 

After an argument with his mother in 1925, Sargeson relocated to Aukland to continue his studies; he received his qualification as a solicitor in 1926. Sargeson left New Zealand at the beginning of 1927 and spent two years in Europe where he  explored London’s museums and theaters as well as the countrysides of England, France, Italy and Switzerland. While abroad, Sargeson  made a failed attempt at a novel and had his first homosexual relationship in London.

Upon his return to New Zealand in 1928, Frank Sargeson took the position of clerk in the Public Trust Office at Wellington and concentrated on writing short stories.. A series of homosexual encounters in 1929 led to his arrest and a two-year suspended sentence on the condition that he live with his uncle at the Ōkahukura farm. For eighteen months, Sargeson worked on the farm and wrote continuously. By May of 1930, he had successfully published an article on his European travels in the New Zealand Herald and completed his first novel, though it was rejected by several publishers.

In May of 1931, Sargeson took permanent residence at his parents’ well-worn beach cottage (bach) in Takapuna, a northern suburb of Aukland. He adapted the pseudonym of Frank Sargeson at this time to distance himself from his earlier conviction and as a tribute to his uncle. Sargeson never obtained employment as a solicitor and ultimately relied on homegrown food to sustain himself as he experimented with his writing. Registered as unemployed to be eligible for relief , he sheltered people who were struggled financially or lived on the fringes of society. On of these was Harry Hastings Doyle, a suspended horse trainer ten years his senior, who became his life-partner. Doyle lived at the cottage for extended periods over a span of thirty years, the last being his illness from 1967 until his death in 1971.

Although he had published one story and several articles in Aukland newspapers, Frank Sargeson considered the publishing of the fictional, five-hundred word “Conversations with My Uncle” in a July 1935 issue of the weekly magazine “Tomorrow” to be his first success in the literary world. In 1936, publisher Robert Lowry’s newly established Unicorn Press printed Sargeson’s first book, “Conversations with My Uncle and Other Sketches”. The short stories in this collection displayed the features that would characterize Sargeson’s style: austere, minimalist narration and characters as well as the use of everyday New Zealand spoken English.  

By 1940, Sargeson had established a significant reputation as a New Zealand writer with the publishing of more than forty stories. In the same year, his story “The Making of a New Zealander” won a prize at a New Zealand centennial competition and “A Man and His Wife”, his second short story collection, was published by Caxton Press. Sargeson’s writing had also reached the international market and appeared in journals and anthologies in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. His 1943 novella “That Summer” dealt with the dynamics of male friendship in the isolated New Zealand environment and, as in much of his fiction, contained implicit homoerotic elements. 

In 1946, Frank Sargeson formally changed his birthname to Frank Sargeson so his father could transfer ownership of the Takapuna cottage and its property to him. In the same year, New Zealand’s Internal Affairs changed his benefit allowance into a literary pension which continued until his eligibility for an old-age pension; this extra income allowd him to finance  a new cottage. His friend George Haydn, a Hungarian who had emigrated to New Zealand in 1939 to escape the Nazi invasion, designed a simple, economical dwelling and, with the help of his partner George Rollett, built the new cottage at cost. 

In the 1950s, Sargeson published the 1954 novella “I for One”, two stories and a short autobiographical essay. The majority of his time was spent writing plays, two of which,”The Cradle and the Egg” and “A Time for Sowing”, were staged in Aukland and later published in 1964 as “Wrestling with the Angel”. Sargeson had a burst of creative energy in the 1960s. His novel “Memoirs of a Peon”, based on the sexual adventures of a friend, was published in 1965, “The Hangover” in 1967, and his “Joy of the Worm” in 1969.

After the death of long-time partner Harry Doyle, Frank Sargeson published several collections of earlier works, among which were the 1972 “Man of England Now” which included the novella “A Game of Hide and Seek”,  and the 1973 “The Stories of Frank Sargeson”. Sargeson also chronicled his life in a set of three memoirs: “Once Is Enough” in 1973, the 1975 “More Than Enough”, and “Never Enough: Places and People Mainly” in 1977. These autobiographies were published in 1981 as a single volume entitled “Sargeson”. 

By 1980, Sargeson’s health had begun to decline. He was suffering from diabetes and congestive heart failure; he also had a mild stroke shortly before his seventy-seventh birthday. The onset of prostate cancer and senile dementia added to his deterioration. Frank Sargeson was admitted to the North Shore Hospital in December of 1981 and died there on the first of March in 1982. The Frank Sargeson Trust was formed to preserve his Tukapuna home as a museum and maintain a literary fellowship. Sargeson’s ashes were spread under a loquat tree in the newly renovated property’s garden in June of 1990.

Notes: The Frank Sargeson Trust website, which contains a chronological biography of Sargeson as well as the history of his Takapuna house, can be found at: https://franksargeson.nz

The essay introduction to Sargeson’s 1964 “Collected Stories: 1935-1963” is available through the Victoria University of Wellington’s Electronic Text Collection located at: https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-PeaFret-t1-body-d12.html

Frank Sargeson’s “A Great Day” in its entirely can be found at: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/great-day-sargeson/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Frank Sargeson”, 1927, Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: John Reece Cole, “Harry Doyle and Frank Sargeson, Cottage at Takapuna, Aukland”, early 1950s, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Dave Roberts, “Frank Sargeson”, circa 1970-1980, Gelatin Silver Print, Flickr Images

James Kirkup: “Behind Its Music Laughs the Mouth of Pan”

Photographers Unknown, Behind Its Music Laughs the Mouth of Pan

Lips hardened by winter’s dumb duress
Part on this other, broader smile of youth
That masks deep shyness in its shallow kiss,
While silently behind its music laughs the mouth
Of Pan, and mourns the skull of a severer myth.

The keen and thick-fringed eyes denote
Languor, delight, astonishment or grief,
Interpreters expressive of the heart
That makes the lake dance, and the leaf.

Boy, in cupped hands hold whatever passion time invents:
Fire your tiny forges with gigantic sound, and fill
Heaven with your fierce harmonics! Inspire those instruments,
Aeolus, lyre and grove-hung harp, that now miraculously thrill
Our childhood, the toy that trembles to an ancient will!

James Kirkup, Boy with a Mouth Organ, June 1951, Poetry Review, Volume 42 Number 3 (May-June)

Born in South Shields, County Durham in April of 1918, James Harold Kirkup was an English poet, author, dramatist, travel writer and accomplished translator of prose, verse and drama. The only son of a carpenter, Kirkup received his initial education at Westoe Secondary School in South Shields and later earned a degree in Modern Languages at Kings College, Durham University. During World War II, he was a conscientious objector and worked as an agricultural laborer for the Forestry Commission in the Yorkshire and Essex regions. Kirkup also taught for a short period at Colwall, Malven’s Downs School where poet Wystan Hugh Auden had been an educator.

Kirkup’s first volume of poems, “The Drowned Sailor and Other Poems”, was published in 1947 by London’s Grey Walls Press. From 1950 to 1952, he was the first Gregory Poetry Fellow at Leeds University, a position that made him the first resident university poet in the United Kingdom. During this residency, Kirkup published his first substantial collection of poetry, the 1951 ”The Submerged Village and Other Poems”, through the Oxford University Press, one of the most prestigious publishers of contemporary poetry in the English language. Between 1952 and 1963, he published five more poetry collections though this press.

In 1952, James Kirkup moved to Gloucestershire and became a visiting poet at the Bath Academy of Art and Design until 1955. After a brief period of teaching at a London grammar school, he decided to relocate to Europe in 1956. Kirkup taught for three years at several European universities, including Spain’s University of Salamanca. Invited to teach at Tohoku University in Sendai, he arrived in Japan at the beginning of January of 1959. During his thirty years in the country, Kirkup held the position of an English Literature professor at several Japanese universities.

Kirkup recorded his first experience of Japan in his 1962 “These Horned Islands: A Journal of Japan”. He described his travels in Japan and the country’s effect on his life in his 1970 prose volume “Japan Behind the Fan”. Kirkup discussed the various art forms he encountered in Japan, including its poetry, theater, and Noh dramas, in a subsequent volume published in 1974, “Heaven, Hell and Hara-kiri: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Superstate”.

James Kirkup’s study of the Japanese poetic art of haiku would remain a strong influence on his work, one that would engage him for the rest of his life. Delighted by his many discoveries in Japan, Kirkup published many collections of haiku poems. Among these are the 1968 “Paper Windows: Poems from Japan” and the 1969 “Japan Physical” which contains “Song of the New Mats: Thirteen Haiku”, a set of haiku poems describing the scent of green tatami mats. 

After settling in the Principality of Andorra, Kirkup began an arrangement in 1995 with James Hogg and Wolfgang Görtschacher of the University of Salzburg Press for the republication of his earlier out of print books. He also offered new manuscripts that established the Salzburg imprint as his principal publisher. This two-year collaboration resulted in more than a dozen publications including “A Certain State of Mind”, “Broad Daylight: Poems East and West”, “Tanka Tales”, and the two volume collection “Collected Shorter Poems: Omens of Disaster (Volume 1)” and “Once and For All (Volume 2)”. 

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, James Kirkup published over one hundred-fifty volumes of poetry, translations, autobiography and travel writing during his lifetime. He died in Andorra at the age of ninety-one in May of 2009. His papers are held at Yale University, the University of Leeds, Yorkshire, and at the South Shields Library in South Tyneside, Tyne and Wear, England. Kirkup’s poem “Ghosts, Fire, Water” from his 1995 anthology “No More Hiroshimas: Poems and Translations” was adapted by New Zealand composer Douglas Mews for unaccompanied choir and alto solo. Mew’s musical adaptation has been performed worldwide since 1972.

Notes:  The Haiku Foundation has an excellent article by David Burleigh which discusses Jame Kirkup’s life in Japan and his strong interest in the haiku form. The article can be found at: https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/files/original/f021d52af5d1ffe7ff926ca47d2b0e99.pdf

For many years, James Kirkup was an obituary writer for the British online newspaper, The Independent. He wrote some three-hundred obituaries, many of them faxed to the news service from his home in Andorra. The Independent’s obituary for Kirkup can be found at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/james-kirkup-poet-author-and-translator-who-also-wrote-approximately-300-obituaries-for-the-independent-1685745.html

James Kirkup’s collected papers and audiovisual materials in the Archives at Yale are located at: https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/resources/833

 

Patrick Anderson: “With a Harsher Cry Birds Bury My Stolen Heart”

Photographers Unknown, My Bird-Wrung Youth

My bird-wrung youth began with the quick naked
voice in the morning, the crooked calling,
and closed in the quiet wave of the falling
wing, dropping down like an eyelid–
O syringing liquid
song on the bough of flight and at night, light falling,
the nested
kiss of the breasted

ones floating out to sleep in a cup of colours:
wren’s flit and dimple, the shadowy wing of the curlew
spent between stone and fern in the hollow,
the barn-raftered swallow and far at sea the rider
gull on the billow
all night, all night kept sleep till steeply
the pillow
threw morning cockcrow

up in a column of straw and blood. In childhood
days opened like that, whistled and winked away,
but now with a harsher cry birds bury
my stolen heart deep in the wild orchard,
and whether they prettily
play with the plucked bud here or marry
a cloud, I
am lost, am emptied

between two sizes of success. For, clocking
past ceiling and dream sailing, they drop down
to pick apart in a nimble and needed rain
my limbs in love with longing, yet till I long
for my twin in the sun
they rise, they almost form, to be born
with a song
in a seventh heaven!

And I alone in the ambivalence
of April’s green and evil see them still
colonizing the intricately small
or flashing off into a wishing distance–
their nearer syllables
peck through the webs of every loosening sense
and in their tall
flight’s my betrayal.

Patrick Anderson, My Bird-Wrung Youth

Born in the village of Ashtead, Surrey, in August of 1915, Patrick John MacAllister Anderson was an English-born Canadian poet, journalist, travel writer and autobiographer. Influenced by the works of Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, his poetic work, which became a major force in shaping Canadian poetry,  was distinctive for its rapid juxtaposition of contrasting images. 

Patrick Anderson was educated at the University of Oxford where he earned both his Bachelor and Master of Arts. In 1938 with a Commonwealth Fellowship, he studied at New York’s Columbia University. While in New York, Anderson met Marguerite ‘Peggy’ Doernbach, who became his wife; together they relocated to Montreal in September of 1940. Anderson taught at Montreal’s Selwyn House School, an English-language independent boys’ school, from 1940 to 1946. After receiving his professorship, he taught at McGill University in Montreal between 1948 and 1950. 

Anderson quickly became part of Montreal’s artistic life and, due to his wife’s interest, became a member of the Labor-Progressive Party. In March of 1942 he, along with poets Francis Reginald Scott, Abraham Moses Klein, and Patricia Kathleen Page, founded Montreal’s literary magazine, “Preview”, a socially and politically committed literary journal inspired by the work of the 1930s English poets. In 1943, critic John Sutherland, owner of the rival magazine “First Statement”, published a review of Anderson’s poetry that suggested homoerotic themes in the writing. Anderson, married at that time to Doernbach, threatened to sue, an action which resulted in Sutherland printing a retraction.

Patrick Anderson was still an influential editor at the “Preview” during its merger with Sutherland’s “First Statement” in 1946. However, he resigned in 1948 when Sutherland viciously attacked poet F. R. Scott’s 1946 collection “Poems”. Anderson had privately published in England two collections of his juvenile poetry: the 1929 “Poems” and the 1932 “On This Side of Nothing”. In 1945, John Sutherland’s First Statement Press published Anderson’s first Canadian chapbook of poems “A Tent for April”. The poems in this collection contain lush, often metaphysical imagery that contained an undertone of sublime sexuality. Anderson’s 1946 “The White Centre” continued the style and themes of his previous volume. The speaker, now in adulthood, looks back on his childhood and also ponders what it means to be Canadian, particularly in a time of war. 

During the post-war years, Anderson returned occasionally to England and continued his connections with several of its literary circles. During his professorship at McGill University’s Dawson College, Anderson’s marriage finally disintegrated and he decided to accept a lectureship at the University of Malaya. Anderson’s poetic account of those years, the 1953 biographical “The Colour as Naked”, opened with poems of his British childhood and youth, continued through his life in Quebec, Malaysia and New York, and ended with the poem “Leaving Canada”, a farewell to his home for a decade. 

Patrick Anderson returned to his home country of England where he remained for the rest of his life, except for a few guest lectures in Canada during the 1970s. He worked as a teacher and entered into a same-sex relationship with Orlando Gearing. During the period between 1955 and 1972, Anderson published five works of prose of which parts of three dealt with his experiences in Canada: the 1955 “Snake Wine: A Singapore Experience”, the 1957 “Search Me, Autobiography-The Black Country, Canada, and Spain”, and “The Character Ball: Chapters of Autobiography” published in 1963.

Literary context, eccentric character and exotic experience were central concerns in Anderson’s prose works. The overtly homosexual experience became an important focus in his later poetry. This interest was further manifested in Anderson’s editing, a collaboration with Alistair Sutherland, of the 1961 “Eros: An Anthology of Male Friendship”, a collection of excerpts from novels, journals, poems and essays on the friendship between men that is sexual in some way. This volume was published by New York’s Arno Press as part of a series entitled “Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature”.

In 1964 and 1969, Patrick Anderson published two travel accounts, “The Smile of Apollo: A Literary Companion to Greek Travel” and “Over the Alps: Reflections on Travel and Travel Writing”, which covered the grand tours of Scottish biographer James Boswell, Lord Byron and author William Beckford. Anderson continued to write poetry even as he wrote his prose and travel works. In 1976, he published “A Visiting Distance—Poems; New Revised and Selected”. Anderson’s final volume of poetry and last published work was the 1977 “Return to Canada: Selected Poems”.

Patrick Anderson died in March of 1979 at the age of sixty-three in the civil parish of Halstead, Essex, England. Despite his published memoirs and travel writing, he treated his sexual identity as a private matter and declined the inclusion of his work in a 1972 anthology of gay- male literature. 

Notes: There was some discrepancy about Patrick Anderson’s same-sex partner in the researched articles; the name of Alistair Sutherland was mentioned in several. For this posting, I am referencing Canadian writer Blaine Marchand’s August 2015 article of an interview with Patricia Kathleen Page, a close early friend of Anderson and a co-founder of the 1942 “Preview” literary journal. She stated in 1976 that Patrick eventually left Doernbach and lived for the rest of his life with Orlando Gearing. The Blaine Marchand article for Plentide Magazine is located at: https://plenitudemagazine.ca/query-project-blaine-marchand/

All twenty-three issues of the “Preview” literary journal from 1942 to 1945 are available to read online or as downloads at the Canadian Modernist Magazines Project’s website at: https://www.modernistmags.ca/mags/preview/

Ian Young: “I Was Watching Jimmy—“

Photographers Unknown, I Was Watching Jimmy

At a party of university people
Jimmy and I sat on a bed
that seemed to be floating.
The whisky-drinkers
were making identical comments,
dancing ever so slowly,
and eyeing each other.
One girl had put Christmas ornaments
on her ears,
and a long-haired kid
read poems at the wall.

I was watching Jimmy—
his hands
holding a towel
and a book of Prévert—
his bare legs
and the curve of his prick
under the cut-down jeans.
The people all looked at us,
their mouths open,
and began to fade away
just as our bed drifted out the window.

They were waving good-bye
as I took pictures of Jimmy
with an imaginary camera.

Ian Young, Double Exposure, 1970, Double Exposure, New Books, Trumansburg, New York

Born in January of 1945, Ian Young is a Canadian poet, editor and publisher, literary critic and historian. A graduate of the University of Toronto, he founded the Catalyst Press in 1970, Canada’s first gay publishing company that printed over thirty works of poetry and fiction by Canadian, American and British writers until its closure in 1980. 

Ian Young’s first published collection of poetry was the 1969 chapbook “White Garland: 9 Poems for Richard” published through Cyclops Press. This was followed by the 1970 chapbook “Double Exposure” published by New Books in Trumansberg, New York. The chapbook “Lions in the Stream”, a collection by poets Ian Young and Paul Mariah, was published in 1971 by Catalyst Press, as was the 1972 “Some Green Moths” and the “Invisible Words” in 1974.

Young is best known for his editorial work on the 1973 “The Male Muse: A Gay Anthology” published through Crossing Press. Contributors to this collection of early gay poetry included Oswell Blakeston, Robert Duncan, James Kirkup, James Liddy, and John Wieners, among others. Young also edited the 1976 “The Male Homosexual in Literature: A Bibliography”, a basic guide to English-language works of drama, fiction, poetry and autobiographies concerned with male homosexuality or having male homosexual characters. Works were specifically identified as to author, title, publisher and date with works of primary importance marked for convenience. A second edition was published in 1982. 

As a researcher and historian, Ian Young has published several works. In 1995, he published the “Stonewall Experiment: A Gay Psychohistory”, a study that examines self-identity, motivations, behaviors and the belief systems that had shaped the gay community. The study covered such issues  as poetry, advertising and Hollywood cinema. In collaboration with author John Lauritsen, Young published the 1997 “The AIDS Cult: Essays on the Gay Health Crisis”. His 2012 “Out in Paperback: A Visual History of Gay Pulps” was an examination of gay mass-market paperback cover art and its contribution to the development of gay popular culture.

 In 2013, Young published “Encounters with Authors: Essays on Scott Symons, Robin Hardy, and Norman Elder”, a memoir of those three gay Canadian authors and activists. Scott Symons was a revolutionary fiction author and award-winning journalist who left his privileged life for one in exile; Robin Hardy abandoned a future career as an attorney to advocate for the emerging gay movement; and Norman Elder, an explorer and Olympic equestrian, had his career cut short by then existing laws against homosexuality.  

In 2017, Ian Young published “London Skin and Bones: The Finsbury Park Stories”, a collection of stories about early 1980s Finsbury Park. The stories are centered on that blue-collar London neighborhood of anarchist poets, shop boys, stoned philatelists and gay skinheads who mingled and endured the repressive government during the era of Margaret Thatcher. This collection of interwovern vignettes was published by the imprint Squares & Rebels.

In 2020, a bibliographic supplement to “The Male Homosexual in Literature” was published. It included titles overlooked in the bibliography’s Second Edition, plus works written before the 1981 cut-off date but published later. Included in the supplement were works published for the first time in book form such as the original text of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, posthumous works including the diaries of Christopher Isherwood and Joe Orton, unexpurgated editions of James Jones’s “From Here to Eternity”, and newly translated classics such as Marcilio Ficino’s “Alcibiades the Schoolboy”, the letters of Marcus Aurelius and John Henry Mackay’s novel “Fenny Skaller”.

Ian Young’s work has appeared in such periodicals as “The Gay & Lesbian Review”, “Canadian Notes & Queries”, “Rites” and “Continuum”, as well as more than fifty anthologies. He was also a regular columnist for “The Body Politic” from 1975 to 1985. Young is a member of Poets & Writers, a literary organization serving poets, fiction writers, and creative non-fiction writers. It is a source of small presses and literary agents as well as readings and workshops. 

Notes: The imprint Squares & Rebels was created in 2012 by Handtype Press to initially publish books about the LBGTQ experience in the Midwest; however, it has expanded to include books that explore the queer and/or disability experience regardless of region. The Squares & Rebels site is located at: http://www.squaresandrebels.com/books/index.html

Terence Winch: “We Have Judged Our World”

Photographers Unknown, We Have Judged Our World

Small green couch in the living room. I come home at night and sit in it.
‘Law & Order’ is on TV. I have a glass of cheap cabernet and make eggs
for dinner. It gets later and later. I hit the mute button and listen
to the old clock on the piano tick, then tock. I wash my dishes.
I choose tomorrow’s work clothes.

I said to my barber, ‘Give me a haircut that looks exactly
like Frank Sinatra’s wig,’ and he did. My barber is a very nice, gay Egyptian.
I take a hot bath and listen to right-wing talk radio, which I find very relaxing.
I keep wondering where everyone went.

The dog was just here, I’m positive. I can smell dog. There’s another
strange odor in the bathroom. Perfumey. Or maybe it’s Lysol or 409.
The toothpaste is cinnamon flavored.
I spray a ‘Fresh Outdoors’ scent throughout the house.

Maybe I am all alone. Which is not what I really want. I want a party
going on in every room. I want guests in the guest room. I want people taking baths in the bathroom. I consult Each Day a New Beginning for today:
‘We have judged our world and all the situations and people in it
in terms of how their existence affects our own.’

I remember a conversation I had this afternoon with a colleague
about urban turtles. Could they really survive in the fast-paced city? Sure, he
said.
I don’t really care. A friend of mine died in November and I think about him
all the time. I stopped calling him because he never initiated contact with me
and I didn’t like that. But a week or so before he died, he said to me:
‘I always loved seeing you. I loved being in your presence.’
Now he is always talking to me from the beyond, as he had threatened to.
It’s his voice, then the tick tock of the clock, then his voice again.

Terence Winch, Urban Turtles, 2008, PoemHunter Archive

Born in the Bronx section of New York City in November of 1945, Terence Patrick Winch is an Irish-American poet, author and musician. His work frequently focuses on his early experiences in the Bronx, his Irish-American identity, and his interests in music. 

The son of Irish immigrants, Terence Winch spent his early years in the Irish neighborhood of the Bronx. He earned his Bachelor of Arts at Iona University in New Rochelle, New York, and received his Master of Arts in English from Fordham University in 1969. Just before completing his doctorate dissertation, Winch relocated to Washington D.C. in 1971. Iona College later awarded him a honorary doctorate degree in 2014. 

In the early 1970s, Winch joined a group of poets that met above the Community Book Shop in the Dupont Circle area of Washington D.C. Known as Mass Transit or the Dupont Circle School, this group included such writers and poets as Ed Cox, Tim Dlugos, Michael Lally, Tina Darragh, and Doug Lang, among others. The Mass Transit group published its own magazine, Mass Transit, and engaged in both public poetry readings and discussions on civil and gay rights, gender equality and civil activism. After the Community Book Shop closed in 1974, members met at other venues and some organized their own publishing press. Winch, along with Michael Lally and others, co-founded their publishing imprint, Some of Us Press.

Although primarily a poet, Terence Winch has also published both fiction and non-fiction works. He has to date published nine volumes of poetry and two story collections, the 1989 collection of short stories “Contenders” and 2004 collection of non-fiction stories “That Special Place”. Winch’s first volume of poetry, the 1985 “Irish Musicians/American Friends”, won an American Book Award. His second poetry collection, the 1994 “The Great Indoors”, was chosen by poet Barbara Guest, a Robert Frost Medal winner, for the 1996 Columbia Book Award. Winch’s most recent poetry collections include the 2018 “The Known Universe” and the 2023 “The Ship Has Sailed” published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. 

For twenty-four years, Winch worked for the Smithsonian Institute, a U.S. government complex of museums and both educational and research centers. For the majority of his time at the Smithsonian, Winch was Head of Publications at the National Museum of the American Indian. Between 1994 and 2008, he produced five recordings for the Smithsonian Institute that focused on Native American literature and music. Among these were “Creation’s Journey: Native American Music” and “Wood That Sings; Indian Fiddle Music of the Americas”. 

As a musician, Terence Winch played traditional Irish music from childhood. In 1977, he co-founded, along with his brother Jesse and his own son Michael, the band “Celtic Thunder” which plays both traditional and original Irish music. Winch wrote much of the band’s material for its three albums, the latest album being “This Day Too: Music from Irish America” on the Free Dirt label. The best known and most covered of Terence Winch’s compositions is the song “When New York Was Irish” from the Free Dirt-produced album of the same name. 

Winch received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry and was named the winner of a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He was a regular book reviewer for the Washington Post from 1975 to 1981 and has contributed work to such publications as The Dictionary of Irish Literature, The Oxford Companion to American Poetry, and New York City’s The Village Voice. Winch has also interviewed many leading Irish authors for the cable television series “The Writing Life”; he was himself  interviewed for the series in 1998 by poet and Georgetown University’s Professor of English Roland Flint.

Notes: Terence Winch’s website, which covers his poetry, prose and music, can be found at: https://www.terencewinch.com/index.html

A short 2017 interview with Terence Winch conducted by Carolyn Farrar for Fordham University’s online Fordham News can be found at: https://news.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/seven-questions-with-terence-winch-musician-songwriter-poet-author/

Jacques J. Rancourt: “Where to Begin?”

Photographers Unknown, Where to Begin?

First, we’re skinny-dipping,
Sam & I, in a pond in Tennessee,

which is his idea, I should say,
& the tree with the rope swing
looms darker

than the dark night sky.

Second, the harvest moon,
which we came here to see,

is nowhere to be found,
instead the sky burning with stars
I can’t see without my glasses

that Sam describes for me.

Third, I’ve made no promises
to monogamy, but am not sure
about those who have.

I spent my twenties riding
trains through cities leaving
behind hotel rooms

of men who may
or may not have been-

I never asked. The world of men
who have sex with men
is a chrysalis, a paper lantern

the hornets fill
with sound. Underwater, our feet
keep touching. Sorry, Sam says

sorry, sorry, sorry.

I imagine his wife after
a bath, wrapping her hair
in a towel. I imagine

the cluster of small towns
I come from,

each with its own abandoned factory
with its own broken windows-
The world of men

who have sex with men
keeps to itself as the rock
hurled through the last

intact glass. you know? Sam says
about fidelity as we stroke

from one shore
to the next. What we don’t do

doesn’t matter. He towels off,
the moon peers over
the ridge, silvers the pond

at its skirts & the bed
beneath me, which is dark
& crowded with dead leaves.

Jacques J. Rancourt, Where to Begin?, The Baffler, Issue: Mind Cures No. 41, September 2018

Born in 1987 in southern Maine, Jacques J. Rancourt is an American poet, editor and educator who spent his formative years living with his father in an off-the-grid cabin at the Appalachian Trial’s northern terminus. In 2009, he received a Bachelor of Arts in English and Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Maine, Farmington. Rancourt earned his Master of Fine Arts in Poetry in 2011 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. During his studies at Wisconsin University, he served as the poetry editor for Devil’s Lake, the graduate-run journal of its creative writing program.

As an educator, Rancourt has worked as a middle-school principal, English Curriculum Coordinator and English teacher in Palo Alto, California. He also designed in 2014-2015 a core communications curriculum for an enrichment school program in Singapore. Rancourt has taught creative writing classes at the university level and served as an undergraduate thesis advisor. He has led workshops for prison inmates, underserved youth in the Upward Bound program, and summer high-school students at Stanford, Duke and Northwestern Universities. Rancourt currently lives with his husband in San Francisco, California.

Jacques Rancourt’s first full-length collection “Novena” was published by Pleiades Press in February of 2017. Inspired by the novena, a nine-day Catholic prayer seeking intercession from the Virgin Mary, the poems in this volume explore the complex issues of faith, beauty, desire and justice. The intercession sought by this “Novena” is a prayer for the outcasts and the maligned, LBGTQ people, those in prison and all those who continue to suffer. This collection, a fresh poetic exploration of the Roman Catholic faith interwoven with surreal and supernatural elements, was awarded the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. 

Rancourt’s 2018 chapbook “In the Time of PrEP” is a sequence of interrogative poems that examines how the AIDS crisis had shaped and continues to shape queer identities. Born in the year the anti-retroviral drug AZT was released, Rancourt examines the gap between past and present generations, those who watched loved ones die and the later generation distanced from the crisis. As in his “Novena” collection, he draws on Biblical imagery to illustrate both the risk and joy of desire that is seen in every aspect of nature.

Jacques Rancourt’s second full-length collection, “Broken Spectre” was a 2019 editor’s choice selection for the Alice James Award. This volume is about the voices of those who have passed, our connections to the past, and our navigation of the present aa well as the future. Through the poems in this collection, Rancourt seeks not only to reconcile own his past and future but also those of the LBGTQ community as a whole. The poems in “Broken Spectre”, varying in structure, create a visual art form across the page. Rancourt uses line breaks, overlapping lines, and lines isolated by white spaces as visual elements to sculpt each poem’s final shape.

Fellowships held by Rancourt include:  a five month residency from the Cité Internationale de Arts in Paris, a Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. He was awarded scholarships from both the Sewanee Writers’s Conference and Bread Loaf, the oldest writers’ conference in the United States. 

In addition to his published collections, Jacques Rancourt’s individual poems have been published in magazines such as the Boston Review, New England Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, and Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. His work has also appeared in such anthologies as Dzanc Book’s “Best of the Net” and Dorianne Laux’s 2014 “Best New Poets” from Samovar Press. 

“Reading, after all, is a practice in empathy. After the AIDS crisis had begun to settle, there seemed to be an “Eisenhower Years” movement where the queer narrative was flattened in order to become more digestible and heteronormative for a straight audience. We were rebranded and made approachable, and as a result, part of the wide and beautifully diverse representation of our queer community was suppressed. My hope for the queer community is that our art, which has never shied away from representing our true selves, can continue to come out and be embraced fully by a more open-minded, non-queer audience.”

—Jacques J. Rancourt, In the Time of PrEP: An Interview with Jacques J. Rancourt, The Georgia Review, Conversations, Fall 2023

Notes: Jacques Rancourt’s website, which includes books and events, can be located at: https://www.jacquesrancourt.com

An extensive and informative conversation occurred between Jacques Rancourt and Interlochen Review editors Genevieve Harding and Darius Atefat-Peckham in October of 2017. Rancourt went into great detail discussing his life, work process, and his passion for poetry. This session can be found at the Interlochen Review site: http://www.interlochenreview.org/jaques-rancourt-2

An interview between writer Divya Mehrish and Rancourt on his 2019 collection “Broken Spectre” can be found at the online literary site The Adroit Journal located at: https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-thirty-nine/a-conversation-with-jacques-j-rancourt/

The BiGLATA Book Club has a video interview and reading with Jacques J. Rancourt on his work process and “Broken Spectre” collection. It is located on YouTube as BiGLATA Book Club: Broken Spectre with Author Jacques J. Rancourt Williams Alumni

Robert Hamberger: “He Bequeths the Gift of Breath”

Photographers Unknown, He Bequeths the Gift of Breath

And they all forsook him and fled. And there followed him a certain young
man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid
hold on him: And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.
St Mark, Chapter 14, Verses 50-52

He’s my firmament.
I hang on every word,
lassoed by considering the lilies,
by camels and needle eyes,
bread of life and light of the world.

I studied his mouth, hour by hour,
until I confessed a thirst for his throat
exposed below the beard,
his wrists, slender gazelles
when loose sleeves slip to reveal them.

What could I do
but give up everything
to sip his shadow?
He admits me to his gaze,
permits my passion. He lets me stay.

I could have been the woman
who stroked the edge of his robe,
who wiped his heels with her hair.
His men buzz as if he’s honey
as if we might swallow him whole.

Tonight’s moon notes his cry
among the camellias.
He kneels to call the air father.
Saints snore while I shiver in linen,
keeping my chilly vigil.

My prayer marries his:
Run with me now where no God
can catch us. He walks instead
to swords and spears and glamour,
one man kissing another.

When they prod a blade at my ribs
I leap from their net,
wrestle free from my sheet
as water strips a skin.
My glimmer swims naked through fig trees.

He leaves me to my betrayal
between the olive groves.
He bequeaths the gift of breath
to my body’s temple.

Robert Hamberger, Gethsemane Nude, Torso, 2007, Redbeck Press, Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK

Born in Whitechapel, East London in 1957, Robert Hamberger is an English poet, author and educator. He studied English Literature from 1975 to 1978 at Sussex University, a highly-ranked university in Brighton, United Kingdom. Hamberger was awarded his Master of Arts in Social Work from Leicester University in 1988. 

Following his graduation, Hamberger worked for thirty-eight years in social work for the Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and West Sussex County Councils. During his residence in the East Midlands, he established the Corby Writers’ Workshop and the Wellingborough Writers’ Workshop. Hamberger also participated in the East Midlands Art’s first New Voices Tour and edited four anthologies by local writers. He currently resides in Brighton with his husband Keith Rainger, who lends his translation skills to Hamberger’s work.

Robert Hamberger prefers writing outside the literary mainstream. He has particular interests in working-class, pro-feminist, radical and queer writings. He uses his own experiences of fatherhood, marriage and separation, loss of friends and queer identity as the foundations for his examinations of love, death and memory. As such, his work remains very personal and true to his self-identity. In addition to publishing his work, Hamberger has taken part in numerous readings online as well as poetry festivals and workshops. Most recent of these was the October 2023 reading and panel on “Genre-Bending and Queering Words” at the Coast is Queer Festival held at Sussex University.  

Hamberger’s first full-length collection of poems “Warpaint Angel” was published by Five Leaves Press in 1997. Its poetry explores the experience of fatherhood and existence as son, the meaning of family and friendship as well as the nature of love. The volume is a mixture of casual, frank narratives and lyrical poems both tough and delicate. Hamberger’s “Rule of Earth”, a winner in the 2000 Poetry Business Competition, is a chapbook that contains a sequence of twenty-one love sonnets. These sonnets describe both the daily routines and ecstasy of a gay relationship, which is unexpectedly impacted by heart disease. 

Robert Hamberger’s 2002 collection of first-person poems, “The Smug Bridegroom”, explores the experiences of fatherhood, love and change which, through shifts in family relationships, lead to both a marriage breakup and renewal of hope. The 2007 “Torso”, Hamberger’s third full-length collection, continues his exploration of existence as father, son, lover and poet. Included among its sequences are a celebration of Federico Garcia Lorca’s love sonnets, elegies for a friend, and queer interpretations of sacred texts. 

Hamberger’s fourth collection entitled “Blue Wallpaper” was published by Waterloo Press several months prior to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2019. Divided into six subtitled sections, this volume of sixty-one personal poems contains sonnets, elegies, free verse, and other poetic forms with the topic of love between men frequently central. Among the poetry in “Blue Wallpaper” are works centered on familial memories from Hamberger’s youth, his mother’s dementia, the poets he admires, mythical and natural creatures, the work of Arthur Rimbaud, and the deaths of close friends during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. “Blue Wallpaper” was shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize, an annual United Kingdom literary prize established for LBGTQ+ literature.

Kept in an asylum for four years, the peasant poet John Clare escaped in 1841 and walked over eighty miles to his home in Northamptonshire. Suffering from poor mental health, Clare was attempting to reunite with Mary, his idealized first love, unaware she had died three years prior. In 1995 with his personal life in crisis and mental health fragile, Robert Hamberger retraced poet John Clare’s route over a four-day walk. In June of 2021, he published his finished “A Length of Road”, a work part memoir, part-literary criticism and part travel-log. The volume is a deep, poetic exploration of the issues of class, gender, grief, masculinity and sexuality as seen through Hamberger’s own life as well as the autobiographical writings of poet John Clare.   

Notes: Robert Hamberger”s website, which contains readings on videos, interviews, writings and contact information, can be located at: https://www.roberthamberger.co.uk

Popsublime is an interesting literary, film and pop culture review site that has be publishing online since 2010. It has a review by the site’s author on Robert Hamberger’s 2002 “The Smug Bridegroom”. The article is located at: https://popsublime.blogspot.com/2010/08/robert-hamberger-smug-bridegroom-five.html

John Keene: “Murmurs Linger After the Blue Frost”

Photographers Unknown, Murmurs Linger After the Blue Frost

when night hovers in the square
moon sheets the avenues and glare
from headlights glaze the lone chestnut
murmurs linger after the blue
frost and subdivisions arriving
in crates like tangerines from the ghost
orchards of Chile
beauty is especially dangerous under pressure
to feel your lips on my throat like a wire
or a Beretta slowing firing under water

remember what I cannot bear the leaving
lost hours the embarrassed fragrance of surrender
like a midnight novena on November first
still standing on the naked slopes after dynamite
shears away bedrock and rangers sweep over
brush searching for missed embers and clues
whatever you find there pocket for yourself
keep the lock of my hair sulphur tang of my skin

still burning on your tongue a signal fire
black as your fingers on a compass I turn
on and on never ceasing to ponder the strange
economy of ladders or breakdancers
men’s eyes when they lie writhing
like dolphins through a narrow strait
out into the broad way of a bay the sound
of phosphorous as it catches fire
which is the soul rising into the air without
fear; you, your eyes or dawn, opening

John Keene, The Soul is Always Beautiful, Punks: New and Selected Poems, 2021, The Song Cave Press

Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1965, John R. Keene Jr. is an American poet, writer, translator, educator and artist. Born into a Catholic family, he attended parochial schools and graduated from the Saint Louis Priory School, ministered by the Benedictine monks of Saint Louis Abbey. 

John Keene earned his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College where he was a staff member of the art and literary magazine, the “Harvard Advocate”, and member of Harvard’s Black Community and Student Theater. Elected a New York Times Foundation Fellow, Keene received his Master of Fine Arts from New York University. He is both a lifelong member of the Dark Room Collective, an influential African-American poetry collective that promotes greater visibility to emerging writers of color, as well as a Graduate Fellow of Cave Canem, a Brooklyn, New York-based organization that supports MFA programs and writing workshops for African-American poets across the United States.

Keene’s fictional debut was his novel “Annotations” published through New Directions Press in 1995. A fiction work of experimental poetic text, the novel explored those questions that revolve around identity in its forms of race, social class and sexuality, both gay and straight. These issues were examined through a re-creation of Keene’s life as a black youth in St. Louis with references to the historical and cultural events of the 1940s and 1960s. 

In May of 2015, John Keene published “Counternarratives”, a collection of thirteen short fiction stories and novellas. This collection, which ranges over five centuries of history, examined lives marked by the pressures of their time. Its stories, drawn from memoirs, detective stories, newspaper accounts and interrogation transcripts, created new perspectives of our past and present. In one story, Huckleberry Finn meets his former raft-mate Jim after an absence of several decades; in another story, Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia meets American poet Langston Hughes in New York during the Depression. In 2016, “Counternarratives” received the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, an organization dedicated to the promotion of multicultural literature.

Keene published his first collection of poems “Seismosis” in 2006. Featuring line drawings by Christopher Stackhouse, this sophisticated conversation between writing and visual art is a cohesive study of abstraction in both mediums. In 2016, Keene published a second art-poetry book “Grind” in a collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner, best known for his two photo art books “In Most Tides an Island” and “The Amnesia Pavilions”. In the same year Keene published “Playland”, a collection of old and new poems. 

In December of 2021, John Keene published “Punks: New & Selected Poems”, a seven-section collection containing historic narratives of loss, lust and love. Keene’s poems, whose cast of characters include historic Black personalities as well as friends and lovers, addressed the issues of grief, AIDS, desire and oppression. All the stories are told through a wide range of poetic forms, all of which Keene has mastered. “Punks” was the winner in 2022 of the National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. 

Keene was formerly associate professor of English and African-American studies at Illinois’s Northwestern University and has taught at Rhode Island’s Brown University, New York University and at Indiana University’s Writer’s Conference. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the African-American and African Studies Department at Rutgers University-Newark, as well as a teacher in its Masters Creative Writing Program. In addition to all his educational positions, Keene served for several years as an editorial board member of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s African Poetry Book Fund which promotes and publishes African poetry. 

Among John Keene’s translation work is the 2014 “Letters from a Seducer”, a translation of Brazilian magic-realist author Hilda Hilst’s novel “Cartas de um Sedutor”, one volume of a tetralogy that tells the story of an amoral, wealthy man who seeks an answer to his incomprehension of life through sex. This translation by Keene was selected for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award Fiction long list. He has also translated French, Portuguese and Spanish works by such writers as Jean Wyllys, Alain Mabanckou and Mateo Morrison, among others. 

Among Keene’s many awards are the 2000 AGNI John Cheever Short Fiction Prize, the 2005 Whiting Award for Fiction/Poetry, the 2016 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prise for Fiction, and the 2019 Harold D. Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Notes: An extensive interview with John Keene by American poet Jeffery Renard Allen on Keene’s “Annotations” and “Counternarratives” can be found at the online literary site Big Other located at : https://bigother.com/2022/06/18/from-the-archives-an-interview-with-john-keene-by-jeffery-renard-allen/

The Brooklyn Rail has a conversation between John Keene and his fellow professor from Rutgers University, novelist Akil Kumarasamy, in which they discuss each other’s work. This discussion can be found at:  https://brooklynrail.org/2023/02/books/John-Keene-in-conversation-with-Akil-Kumarasamy

Photograph Eight of the Header Collection: Romy Maxime, “Brothers James and John, Cape Town”., Brothers and Sisters Series, Gelatin Silver Print, OATH Magazine, South Africa

Romy Maxime is a Swiss South African photographer and videographer known for her enigmatic portraits, fine art prints, lifestyle, advertising and fashion work. She is based between Cape Town, South Africa and Zurich, Switzerland. Maxime’s photo “Brothers James and John” was the winner in 2023’s annual Lensculture Portrait Awards. Her website is located at: https://www.romymaxime.com

Alfred Edward Housman: “The Colour of His Hair”

Photographers Unknown, The Colour of His Hair

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

‘Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;
In the good old time ’twas hanging for the color that it is;
Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair
For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.

Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid
To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;
But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see and stare,
And they’re haling him for justice for the colour of his hair.

Now ’tis Oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet
And the quarry gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare,
He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.

Alfred Edward Housman, Oh Who Is That Young Sinner, First Draft Summer 1895
Published 1939, Collected Poems,’Additional Poems’, Number 18

Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire in March of 1859, Alfred Edward Housman was an English classical scholar, educator and poet. Recognized as one of the foremost classicists of his era, he emerged as a poet with his 1896 “A Shropshire Lad”, a collection of works espoused by a simple youth preoccupied with the idea of early death. 

The eldest of seven children to Edward Housman and Sarah Jane Williams, Alfred Housman was educated at King Edward’s School in Birmingham and later at Bromsgrove School. In 1877 at the age of eighteen, he won a scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he studied the classics. Though introverted by nature, Housman developed strong friendships with two roommates, Moses John Jackson, who became the principal of Sind College in Karachi, and Alfred William Pollard, a future bibliographer and scholar of Shakespearean texts. 

At Oxford, Housman knew that emendation, the revision and  correction of scribal errors in classical texts, would be his life’s work. So, he studied accordingly. In 1879, Housman earned a first on his exam for Moderations but failed the Finals due to his neglect of ancient history and philosophy. He returned in September for the Michaelmas term to retake the exam and achieved the lower-grade pass degree. Housman, who was homosexual, fell in love at Oxford, for the first and only time, with his classmate Moses Jackson who was heterosexual. This unreciprocated love would remain a constant throughout Housman’s life and play a role in the creation of his poetry, an emotional and physiological experience for him.. 

After Oxford, Housman joined Jackson in London to work as a clerk in the Patent Office. They shared lodgings with Jackson’s brother Adalbert until 1885 at which time Housman found a flat of his own. Two years later, Jackson took a position in Karachi, India as an educator; he returned in 1889 to marry and resided with his wife and family in India until his retirement. Learning in 1922 that his friend, now back in England, was dying from stomach cancer, Housman wrote thirty-seven pages of poems that were published in early 1922. A copy of the collection was sent the hospital where Jackson was being treated. Jackson read the poems in October, a few months before his death in January of 1923. 

Housman’s most sustained period of poetry composition was during his professorship at University College. Of the work he produced during this period, his 1896 “A Shropshire Lad” became his best effort. After its rejection by Macmillan Company, it was published by Kegan Paul at Housman’s expense; at his insistence he took no royalties from Kegan Paul. Over two years, the book sold very slowly until Grant Richards, who became a lifelong friend, published five-hundred copies in 1897. Sold out, two more editions were printed and three-thousand copies sold by 1902. 

Profoundly affected by his mother’s death when he was twelve, Alfred Housman’s poetic themes largely dealt with time, seen by Housman as the enemy, and the inevitability of death. He frequently dealt with the plight of the young soldier, in which sympathy for the youth was balanced with patriotism of the nation. Housman also saw, through its changing seasons, death in nature; however, he regarded this manner of death with a stoic outlook rather than one of complete pessimism. Although the universe is seen in his poetry as cruel and hostile, his work also extolled the preciousness of both youth and youth’s beauty. 

In 1922, Housman published his “Last Poems” which greatly added to his reputation. His place in the poetic world was further enhanced by British composers setting his work to music. The cycle of poems from “A Shropshire Lad” were wet to music in 1904 by composer Arthur Somervell.  As of 2023, there have been six-hundred and forty-six musical settings of Housman’s poems. Among these are Ribert Vaughan Williams’s 1909 “On Wenlock Edge” for sting quartet, tenor and piano, George Butterworth’s 1911 “Six Songs fro A Shropshire Lad”, and John Ireland’s 1920 song cycle “Land of the Lost Content”.

Alfred Edward Housman died at the age of seventy-seven in April of 1936 at Cambridge, England. After his death, his brother Laurence published several collections of works by Housman among which include the 1936 “More Poems” and 1939 “Collected Poems”. In 1936, Laurence deposited an essay, “A. E. Housman’s ‘De Amicitia”” at the British Library with the proviso that it not be published for twenty-five years. This essay discussed Alfred Housman’s homosexuality and his love for Moses Jackson. Despite his own caution in public life and the conservative nature of the era, Housman was fairly open in his poetry about his love for Jackson.

Notes: A 2021 article by Veronica Alfano, a Research Fellow at Australia’s Macquarie University in Sydney, on the life of Alfred Edward Housman can be found at the Yellow Nineties 2.0 site located at: https://1890s.ca/aehousman_bio/

Alfred Edward Housman’s poem “Oh Who Is That Young Sinner” was written in the summer of 1895, a few months after the crimainal trial of poet Oscar Wilde on charges of gross indecency under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which applied to same-sex activity. In his poem, Housman criticized the imprisonment of Wilde by stating that Wilde’s homosexuality was natural and created by god/nature and, as such, should not be condemned. Housman, himself gay, avoided the fate of his contemporary but, as seen in the poem, was very sympathetic to Wilde’s plight. Housman died before homosexuality was decriminalized in England during the 1960s.

More information on the trials of Oscar Wilde can be found at Professor Douglas O. Linder’s “Famous Trials” website located at: https://famous-trials.com/wilde/327-home

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Alfred Edward Housman”, 1894, Vintage Bromide Print

Second Insert Image: Agnes Miller Parker, Illustration for “A Shropshire Lad”, Woodcut, 1954 Edition, George G. Harrap, London

Third Insert Image: Francis Dodd, “A. E. Housman”, 1926, Charcoal on Paper, 37.5 x 27.3 cm National Portrait Gallery, London

Fourth Insert Image; Agnes Miller Parker, Illustration for “A Shropshire Lad”, Woodcut, 1954 Edition, George G. Harrap, London

Bottom Insert Image: Emil Otto Hoppé, “Alfred Edward Housman”, circa 1911, Vintage Bromide Print, 29.7 x 25 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London