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

Raymond Carrance

The Artwork of Raymond ‘Czanara’ Carrance

Born in Paris on the twenty-fourth of January in 1921, Raymond Carrance was a French photographer and book illustrator whose work became known under the name Czanara. One of the little-known erotic artists of the twentieth-century, he began his career as a costume and set designer for theatrical companies and as a graphic designer for commercial brands, among which was France’s mineral water company Perrier.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Raymond Carramce was commissioned to create elaborate etchings and lithographs as illustrations for published editions by author Pierre Jules Renard and playwright Cyrano de Bergerac. He also illustrated a 1951 edition of Henry du Montherlant’s classic theatrical play “La Ville Dont le Prince Est un Enfant (The City Whose Prince is a Child)”. Clarrance also received a commission for seventeen copper engravings as signed illustrations for a 1971 limited edition folio which included writer Jean Giono’s “Le Chant du Monde: Bourg-Le-Reine (The Song of the World)”. This folio was a special tribute to Jean Giono who had passed away on the eighth of October in 1970.

As a photographer, Carrance’s private catalogue of homoerotic work is reminiscent of the magical-realist style of his contemporaries, the painters Paul Cadmus and Jared French. His images are simple compositions without extensive detail, distinctly European in style and reverential in nature. Carrance’s unique work contained both simple nude portraits and dreamlike scenes composed with overlaid graphics. The desired atmosphere of these collaged male nude scenes was established by layers of superimposed photographs depicting props, flowers, bodily details, or simple patterns and shadows. Carrance exhibited both his photographic and illustrative work in several venues throughout Paris during the 1960s and 1970s.

Raymond Carrance died in Paris on the fourth of June in 1998 at the age of seventy-seven. He passed in obscurity without heirs; his entire body of work was sold at auction. Carrance’s work was rediscovered by art collector David Deiss who acquired the contents of Carrance’s atelier from a Lyon bookseller upon his death. Focused on the discovery of unknown artists of significance, Deiss is responsible for publishing the 2007 monograph “Czanara: Photographs and Drawings”, an imprint of Carrance’s work through Antinous Press. This imprint was the first book published by creative director Sam Shahid’s new press.

Nicole Canet, publisher and owner of the Parisian gallery “Au Bonheur du Jour”, exhibited her collection of Carrance’s drawings and photographs at her gallery in 2010. The gallery and its publishing arm are known for their focus on early European homoerotic photographers; Canet is recognized for her work as a researcher and archivist of sexual sociology in Paris.

Note: For those interested, the Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art gallery has an extensive collection of Raymond Carrance’s photographs, drawings and engravings on their site. The gallery also carries the work of such artists as Jim French, Jean Cocteau and Greg Gorman, among others. Their site is located at: https://wesseloconnor.com/exhibits/czanara/index.php

Top Insert Image: Raymond Carrance, “Flanders, Belgium”, circa 1950-1960s, Vintage Print, 24 x 18 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Raymond Carrance, “Venice”, circa 1950-1940s, Vintage Print, 18 x 17 cm, Private Collection

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

Barry Webster: “The Whole Forest Goes Silent. . “

Photographers Unknown, The Whole forest Goes Silent

In the evenings, Sam performs exercises to prepare his body for love-making with Franz. He practices kissing (something he’d once hated) by smooching deer lips, antelope ears, frog anuses, and the great, whiskered muzzles of sleeping bison. He improves his petting skills by necking with juniper bushes and pine tree trunks with such passion that the bark snaps and sap runs, or with such tenderness that the whole forest goes silent and swallows nest in his hair.

Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones, 2012, Arsenal Pulp Press

Born in Toronto in 1961, Barry Webster is a Canadian musician, translator, and writer of fiction, short stories, and non-fiction. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at the University of Toronto and his Master of Arts in Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal. Webster is a classically trained pianist with two Associate Diplomas, ARCTs, from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Fluent in French, English and some German, he has translated some of his novels into French.

Webster’s first book of stories, “The Sound of All Flesh”, published by Porcupine’s Quill, won the 2005 ReLit Award for the best collection of Canadian short fiction; it was also a finalist for that year’s Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction presented by the Quebec Writers’ Foundation. This magic-realist collection of stories follows the lives of such people as a hydrophobic competitive swimmer, an opera singer who bathes in tubs of margarine for inspiration, and a travel writer whose terrified of having his photo taken. Webster’s stories from “The Sound of All Flesh” were short-listed for the National Magazine Award and the Canadian Broadcast Company-Quebec Prize.

Barry Webster’s 2012 novel entitled “The Lava in My Bones” is an ecologically-based novel, written in a magic-realist style, that is narrated from various perspectives. The storyline, divided into elemental sections such as rock, air, and water, follows Sam, a Canadian geologist, who attends an academic conference in Switzerland. There he meets the young, sexually active Franz, a swinger who awakens Sam’s nascent homosexuality. “The Lava in My Bones” is a fantasy story through which the connection between lovers, the dysfunction of families, and personal links to the planet we inhabit are examined. Webster’s novel was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Ferro-Grumley Foundation and Publishing Triangle’s annual Literary Award, and the 2013 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LBGTQ Emerging Writers presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada.

Barry Webster has participated at numerous literary series, among which were the Saints and Sinners Festival in New Orleans, Berlin’s Takl Galerie Series, the National Gallery of Ottawa, Vancouver’s Raw Exchange, and muliple literary programs on CBC Radio. Webster’s work has appeared in various publications including The Toronto Star Event, The Washington Post, Fiddlehead Magazine, and The Globe and Mail, Canada’s foremost news media company. After periods in various European cities, Barry Webster currently resides in East Montreal.

“I once attended a panel discussion where the topic was ‘Canadian Literature: Quiet Writing for a Quiet Nation.’ Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers is anything but quiet. It rants, seethes, and uses humor as a machete. The hyper-sensual language and extravagant fantasy of the erotic trysts between the narrator, his lover ‘F,’ and the ghost of saint Catherine Tekakwitha changed my understanding of fiction. I realized that thinking outside traditional heterosexual binaries requires a new template and so-called ‘realism’ can simply reinforce the status quo. Beautiful Losers showed me that literature could re-imagine what sexuality can be rather than merely slavishly reproducing the surface of life.”

—-Barry Webster, Montreal, The Query Project, September 2015, Plenitude Magazine

Note: Barry Webster’s website, which include a list of his published work, can be found at: http://www.barrywebster.ca/index.html

Plenitude Magazine is Canada’s only queer literary magazine. It promotes the development and growth of LGBTQ+ literature through online publication. The magazine can be found at: https://plenitudemagazine.ca

Top Insert Image: Camille Martin, “Barry Webster”, 2018, Color Print, Rogue Embryo Website

Header Photo Set: Fifth Image: Francesco Merlini, “Hua Hin”, The Farang Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Robin Francis Blaser: “Though It May Be One”

Photographers Unknown, Though It May Be One

the truth flies hungry, at least and otherous,
of which—-though it may be one—-Kafka said troublingly,
it has many faces

the faces one wants, tripping the light shadows of its
skin colours of its wordy swiftness, angry and solvent,
of its loud remarks

                                             as of feeding flocks                              one
year, one, among the smallest birds in the Northwest, flew
into the house          a darting, panic thought          at the walls
and grasses            perched on the top right corner of the frame

of Tom Field’s painting wherein adulterous Genji is found
out—so Lady Murasaki reads from her blue scroll—-and
permitted me to take it in my hand soft, intricate

mind honouring and lift it out into the air
and the next year, again, one flew into the house,
almost certain, like a visitor, gold-crowned winged

floating about          odd discoveries          and alighted on the brim
of the lasagna dish          my hand trembled as I took it up
and moved slowly to lift it out of the window          into

the air a kind of thinking like everybody else
looking for a continuing contravention of limits and
of substance

for Sharon Thesen

Robin Blaser, A Bird in the House, The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser, 2006, University of California Press

Born in Denver, Colorado in May of 1925, Robin Francis Blaser was an American-Canadian poet, essayist and editor. A member of San Francisco’s Berkeley Poetry Renaissance of the 1940s, he established himself as a key figure on the west coast of British Columbia and a prominent influence among Canadian experimental poets.

The son of Ina Mae McCreedy and Robert Augustus Blaser, Blaser spent his early years at small railroad depots in the desert areas of Idaho where his grandmother worked as a telegrapher. Through the efforts of his mother and grandmother, he was able to attend the University of California at Berkeley where he studied under the renowned German historian Ernst Kantorwicz, known for his 1957 work on medieval political theology “The King’s Two Bodies”. In 1946, Blaser met poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan and participated in the cultural scene which would be known as the Berkeley Renaissance. Along with Black Mountain poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, they were pioneers in the emerging new postmodern poetry movement.

Robin Blaser graduated in 1955 with a Master of Arts in Literature and a Master in Library Science. His degree in library science enabled him to obtain a position in Boston at Harvard’s Widener Library. During his four years in Boston, Blaser met fellow poets John Wieners, Ed Marshall and Steve Jonas; he would take weekend trips to New York City to visit poets Frank O’Hara and Donald Allen. After a year of traveling in Europe, Blaser returned in 1960 to San Francisco where, over the next five years, he wrote such poems as “The Moth Poem” and the first four works of “Image-Nations”, a series that he continued to expand over three decades.

By 1965, the Berkeley scene had changed; friends were feuding and Jack Spicer had just died in August from alcoholism at the age of forty. In the following year, Blaser read his work at a poetry festival in Vancouver and accepted a teaching position in the English department at the newly-opened Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. In 1974, he became a Canadian citizen and met his life-long love David Farwell. They would reside together in a gracious duplex on Trafalgar Street in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver for thirty-five years until Blaser’s death. In 1986, Blaser took early retirement from the university but continued to write, lecture, and teach at Naropa University’s summer writers’ program in Boulder, Colorado.

Robin Blaser was a prolific writer; he wrote eleven books of essays; fourteen collections of poetry; the libretto for an opera entitled “The Last Supper” by English composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle: and several works of translation. He studied the classics written in the original Latin and Greek and was fluent in German, French, Portuguese, and Italian. Following the example of German-born American historian and political theorist Hannah Arendt, Blaser sought through his poetry to restore the public world as a space where differences could be seen through multiple points of views.

Blaser’s poetry is filled with fragments, allusions, intersections of memory and myth, and concepts from philosophers and other poets. Like his friend Jack Spicer, he used the serial-poem format that enabled him to repeatedly return to ideas through different angles. Most prominent of these works are the numbered “Image Nations” and the series “The Truth is Laughter”, a part of his 1993 “The Holy Forest”. Blaser sought to redefine the lyric as not something presented by a solitary, insular voice but rather by a world larger than one human experience.

Robin Blaser’s collections of poetry include the 1964 “The Moth Poem”, the 1968 “Cups”, “Syntax” in 1983, and the 1995 “Nomad”. His poetry and prose has been published into three collections: the 2007 “The Holy Forest”, Miriam Nichol’s 2006 “The Fire”, and the 2002 “Even on Sunday: Essays, Readings and Archival Materials on the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser”. He received the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Recognition Award in 2006. Two years later, Blaser’s 2007 “The Holy Forest” was awarded the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize.

In 2005, Blaser received the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor, for a lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation. After a fierce struggle with cancer, Robin Francis Blaser passed away at the St. James Cottage Hospice in Vancouver on the seventh of May in 2009. He was survived by his brother, sister and loving partner David Farwrll, who passed away unexpectedly in January of 2020 at their Vancouver home. Robin Blaser papers, correspondence, and photographs are housed in the Special Collections and Rare Books department of the Simon Fraser University.

Notes: For those interested, I have noted two articles written about Robin Blaser’s poetry and life. The first one is the Dooneyscafe August 2003 article written by Blaser’s intimate friend Stan Persky. This article which covers the early formative years of Blaser’s poetry can be found at: https://dooneyscafe.com/about-robin-blaser/

A second article is Miriam Nichols 2017-2018 “I Am Writing a Biography”. This article contains many sections dealing with Robin Blaser’s life and his “project” as a poet. This article can be found at the Itinéraires website located at: https://journals.openedition.org/itineraires/3663?lang=en

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Robin Blaser at Berkeley”, 1960, The Electronic Poetry Center, Buffalo, New York

Michael Walsh: “Whispering to the Nearby Warriors”

Photographers Unknown, Whispering to the Nearby Warriors

At Jeffers Petroglyphs

By their initials and first names
scratched into quartzite

underfoot, I know the culprits: Otto
like a fancy scar

on a buffalo’s flank, Sven
muddling the lines of a glyph,

the meaning of its shape forgotten, and Judy
who needed to record the date

of defacement. I hear her story from the guide:
how she stole her father’s chisel,

chipped her way into a turtle’s back,
how much shame she brought

to her family in this search for the lost meanings
hidden within the shapes of the letters,

written on a shell next to the sun, an attempt,
if I’m generous,

to contrast two languages and find,
in the mixed -up symbols,

the trees of her homeland cut down long ago.
She still lives. I believe, on some days,

wherever she is, she hears the forest mumbling
when the wind blows across the carved twigs

of her name, out here, whispering to the nearby warriors,
asking forgiveness for this trespass.

Michael Walsh, The Kids Who Carved into Petroglyphs, The Dirt Riddles, 2021

Michael Walsh is a poet and writer, an independent scholar, and a creative writing instructor. With an early interest in writing, he began his studies at Illinois’s Knox College in 1993. Walsh studied under Poet-in-Residence Sheryl St. Germain and the Philip Sydney Post Professor of English Robin Metz, both of whom made an impact on his writing career. Supported by his professors, Walsh was able, as a Queer student, to connect and have meaningful conversations with the faculty. He graduated with his Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing in 1997.

After a period of reflection on his past studies during a stay at his family’s farm, Walsh entered the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities from which he graduated with his Master of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing. His first collection of poetry, “The Dirt Riddles”, was published in 2010 by the University of Arkansas Press; this volume won the Miller Williams Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. Walsh’s poetry collections also include two chapbooks through Red Dragonfly Press, the 2003 “Adam Working the Garden” and the 2011 “Sleepwalks”. His 2021 “Creep Love”, published by Autumn House Press, was a Lambda Poetry Award finalist.

Michael Walsh is the editor of the 2022 “Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology”, the first eco-queer anthology of contemporary nature poetry that magnifies and centers LBGTQ+ voices and perspectives. It contains work from over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Expanding the genre of nature poetry and offering new views on queerness and the natural world, the anthology features poets Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Bianco and Allen Ginsber, as well as, emerging poets such as Jari Bradley, Alicia Mountain and Eric Tan.

In recognition for his work, Walsh was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship in Poetry and a Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship. After residing in Minneapolis for more than two decades, Michael Walsh now lives with his husband in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin where he continues to develop his eco-queer and literary teachings.

Michael Walsh’s website, which includes information on readings, lectures and poetry manuscript reviews, is located at: https://www.michaeltwalsh.com

Header Image (Eight): Danny Lyon, “Showers”, 1968, Gelatin Silver Print, Detail, 35.6 x 27.9 cm, Private Collection

Top Insert Photo: Adam Nelsen, “Michael Walsh”, Date Unknown, Color Print

Mario Stefani: “Victorious We Will Come Out”

Photographers Unknown, Victorious We Will Come Out

Vittoriosi usciremo
Non farmi ricordare i giorni che sono passati
se tu ancora tornerai a me come una volta
vittoriosi usciremo da questa lunga lotta con il tempo
ci attend forse maggiore felicità del passato
(la forza degli occhi il riconoscere in noi
che vivi siamo del nostro amore).

Victorious we will come out
Don’t make me remember the days that have passed
if you will come back to me as it once was
victorious we will get out of this long struggle with time
perhaps greater happiness than in the past awaits us
(the strength of the eyes, the recognition in us
that we live, we are of our love).

Mario Stefani, Vittoriosi Usciremo, Il Male di Vivere, 1968

Born in August of 1938 in Venice, Mario Stefani was an Italian poet and journalist. He graduated with a Master of Arts degree in Literature; his thesis examined the letters of sixteenth-century author and playwright Pietro Aretino, an influential figure in Venice’s art and politics. Stefani worked on Professor Neuro Bonifazi’s literary research team at the University of Urbino. He began a career as a journalist employed by the Venice newspaper “Il Gazzettino” and, later. became a contributor to the “Literary Political Observer”, “Arena”, and “Resto del Carlino”.

Mario Stefani’s poetry is mostly written in Italian. Stefani’s deceptively simple poems are characterized by a clarity of expression that bring forth his own experiences, often imbued with nostalgia. His two collections of Venetian-dialect poetry, written in the late 1960s, were composed of that era’s simple Venetian style without any linguistic experimentation. Prefaces to Stefani’s collections were written by such notables as novelist and essayist Aldo Palazzeschi, biologist and novelist Giuseppe Longo, and poets Giovanni Raboni and Andrea Zanzotto.

In 1960, Mario Stefani published his first collection of poetry “Desiderio della Vita (Desire for Life)”. In the course of his career, over twenty volumes of Stefani’s poetry were published. Included among these collections are the 1961 “Giorno Dopo Giorno (Day After Day)”, the 1968 “Come el Vento ne la Laguna (Like the Wind in the Lagoon)”, and “Il Male di Vivere (The Evil of Living)” published in 1968. Stefani’s “Elegie Veneziane (Venetian Elegies)”, published in 1971, won the first prize Bergamo Award for poetry.

Other notable poetry collections by Stefani include the 1974 “Poesie per un Ragazzo (Poems to a Boy)’, “In Debito con la Vita (In Debt to Life)” published in 1984, and “ Una Quieta Disperazione (A Quiet Despair)”, published posthumously in 2001. In 1981, Stefani’s “Nessun Altro Dio (No Other Gods)”, a collection of fifty-five poems, was translated into English by Anthony Reid, a translator and personal friend of Stefani, and published with annotations by illustrator Martin Pitts.

In addition to his poetry, Mario Stefani also published several short stories: the 1986 “At the Table with Margherita”, “Excellent Cakes and Vicious Virtues” in 1987, and the 1988 “Metamorphosis of a Dog and Other Tales”. In addition to the Bergamo Prize, Stefani was awarded the Prize of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, and prizes at festivals in Milan, Gabicce, and Abano. American writer John Berendt devoted a chapter on the life of Mario Stefani, entitled “The Man Who Loved Others”, in his 2005 non-fiction book of Venice’s interesting inhabitants, “The City of Falling Angels”. In 2013, literary scholar Flavio Cogo published “Mario Stefani and Venice: Chronicles of a Great Love”, which examines Stefani’s love for Venice through his writings and his political and cultural engagements.

Mario Stefani became an openly gay in the 1970s. He worked for a period as an high school teacher of literature and was an active member of Italy’s Radical Party for decades. Stefani also hosted a popular unscripted television show. His poems were included in school text books and set to music in 1973 by composer Roberto Micconi for a performance at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory of Music in Venice.

In the middle of February of 2001, graffiti featuring the quote “Loneliness is not being alone; it’s loving others to no avail. Mario Stefani” appeared on a wall by Venice’s Rialto Bridge. Three weeks later on the fourth of March, Mario Stefani committed suicide by hanging himself in his kitchen. His estate, valued at one million dollars, was per his request given to the local fruit vendor whose young daughter had inspired Stefani’s work.

In 2002, Stefani created an archive of his work which consists of sixty-eight hundred volumes from his personal library, articles related to his cultural work and twenty-six artworks including paintings and graphics. This archive is housed in the museum collection of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, a cultural institution in Castello, Venice.

Jericho Brown: “I Am What Gladiators Call a Man in Love”

Photographers Unknown, I Am What Gladiators Call a Man in Love

I don’t remember how I hurt myself,
The pain mine
Long enough for me
To lose the wound that invented it
As none of us knows the beauty
Of our own eyes
Until a man tells us they are
Why God made brown. Then
That same man says he lives to touch
The smoothest parts, suggesting our
Surface area can be understood
By degrees of satin. Him I will
Follow until I am as rough outside
As I am within. I cannot locate the origin
Of slaughter, but I know
How my own feels, that I live with it
And sometimes use it
To get the living done,
Because I am what gladiators call
A man in love—love
Being any reminder we survived.

Jericho Brown, Colosseum, The New Testament, 2014, Copper Canyon Press

Born in April of 1976 in the Louisiana city of Shreveport, Jericho Brown is an American poet, writer and educator. In 1995, he earned his Bachelor of Arts at the historical Dillard University where he was a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. Brown graduated with his Master of Fine Arts from the University of New Orleans and earned his Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Houston.

From 2002 to 2007, Jericho Brown was a teaching fellow in the University of Houston’s English department. He was a visiting professor for the MFA program at San Diego State University in the spring of 2009, as well as, an assistant English professor at the University of Sand Diego. Brown is currently an associate professor of English and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. In addition to his duties at Emory, he has taught at conferences and workshops, including the University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival.

Brown’s first publication was the 2008 “Please”, a winner of the American Book Award. The poems and prose contained in this volume explore, through recollections of family, history and culture, the intersection of love and violence that surrounds the identity and sexuality of both the African American and male personae.

Jericho Brown’s second work was the 2014 collection of poems “The New Testament”. Lamenting the erasure of culture and ethnicity, he examined the issues of race, masculinity and sexuality by means of elegies, myths, and fairy tales. This collection won the American Book Award, the Whiting Award for Poetry, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. “The New Testament” also won the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a literary award to honor written works that make contributions to the understanding of racism and the rich diversity of human culture.

Brown published his third collection “The Tradition” through Copper Canyon Press in April of 2019. The work in this volume examines our modern traditions developed in a time when terror is the norm. Juxtaposed with themes of the natural world are poems that expose the numbness of society to issues of sexuality, racism, sexual assault, gun control, and police brutality. This third collection by Brown won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize, as well as, a place in the finals for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In October of 2020, Jericho Brown traveled to his hometown of Shreveport to accept the John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence from Centenary College’s Department of English. He is also the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s literary work has appeared in multiple publications including The New Republic, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Buzzfeed, Jubilat, and volumes of The Best American Poetry.

Notes: Jericho Brown’s website includes both poems and prose, interviews, and scheduled lectures and readings. The site is located at: https://www.jerichobrown.com

A reading by Jericho Brown of work from “The Tradition”, recorded in Spain just after he won the Pulitzer Prize, was originally aired on Poetry Spoken Here. It is now available again on SoundCloud located at: https://soundcloud.com/poetry-spoken-here/special-rebroadcast-pulitzer-prize-winner-jericho-brown-reading-at-the-unamuno-author-festival

Top Insert Image: Taylor Carpenter, “Jericho Brown”, 2016, Color Print, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Bottom Insert Image: Audra Melton, “Jericho Brown”, 2020, Color Print, Arts & Culture Section, Garden & Gun

Max Jacob: “The Winged Horse Contains My Passion”

Photographers Unknown, The Winged Horse Contains My Passion

The farmers call me by name on the roads
as they might tell a skylark from a thrush
but they know the names of the animals better
than mine, for my name is Dolor.

If that which I love weighs upon my wound, it pains it;
if it weigh only upon summer, it is the field that suffers.

What will feed summer and my love if not that sorrow,
since my love and summer can no longer feed on joy?

The swan disappears in the slant of branches,
and the naked muses take me in their arms;
the winged horse contains my passion
and the wild flowers spread for me.

Max Jacob, Ballad of the Country Exile, 1939 (Original French Composition)
Translation by Harvey Shapiro for Poetry, Volume 76 Issue 2, May 1950

Born in July of 1876 in Quimper, a prefecture of the Finistère department of Brittany, Max Jacob was a French poet, writer, critic and painter. His poetry, a complex blend composed of Breton, Parisian, Jewish and Roman Catholic elements, was instrumental to the new directions of modern poetry in the early twentieth-century. In addition to his birth name, Max Jacob used two pseudonyms for his writings, Morven le Gaëlique and Léon David.

At the age of eighteen, Max Jacob relocated to Paris’s Montmartre artist community in 1894, a time when Symbolism was at its peak. He supported himself through a series of odd jobs including teaching piano and freelancing as an art critic. In the summer of 1901, Jacob met the twenty-year old Pablo Picasso who had arrived in Paris with no knowledge of the French language. Both struggling financially, they shared a studio flat on the Rue Ravignan and named their residence Bateau Laviour for its resemblance to laundry boats floating on the Seine. Through various social connections, Jacob and Picasso became friends with poet and novelist Guillaume Apollinaire and artists Jean Hugo, Christopher Wood, Jean Cocteau and Amedeo Modigliani.

As a homosexual, Jacob attempted to achieve a sense of belonging in France, whose moral attitudes, politics, and institutions excluded him. Even though homosexuality had not technically been illegal under the Napoleonic Code since 1810, police still harassed gay men in the name of public order. Although Jacob was not involved in politics, he remembered the miscarriage of justice and antisemitism involved in the 1896-1899 Dreyfus Affair and saw first-hand the racist questioning of the French Jewish community regarding their patriotism.

In the fall of 1906, Max Jacob told friends he received a vision of the Christ. After which, he began to embrace Catholicism and was eventually baptised in 1915. He fictionalized this spiritual vision in the 1911 “Saint Matorel (Saint Matthew)”, illustrated by Pablo Picasso, and the 1919 confessional work “La Defense de Tartufe”. Jacob began to find an audience for his literary work in France with his first collection of unique prose poetry, the 1917 “The Dice Cup” which was well received in Parisian literary circles. In 1921, he published a volume of free verse poetry entitled “Le Laboratoire Central”.

Disenchanted with his life in Paris, Jacob sought a change and became a lay associate at the Benedictine community in Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, where he lived on a small income earned from selling his gouache paintings. Jacob spent two long periods in association with the Benedictine community, the first from 1921 to 1928 and the second from 1936 to 1944. Though the church met his spiritual needs, he still had a series of infatuations with artistic men which he expressed through letters of spiritual and stylistic advice. Jacob later produced a series of love poems that proclaimed his desires, abeit in a heterosexual style similar to what Marcel Proust wrote about his chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli.

Despite half of his live as a practicing Catholic and being awarded the Legion of Honor, Max Jacob was arrested by the Gestapo in February of 1944. Taken to the city of Orléans, he was place in a ten by ten meter military cell with sixty-five other Jewish men, women and children. On the twenty-sixth of February, Jacob and the others were packed into a train and hauled to the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris. During his stay at this train station, Jacob sent out written pleas for help to his friends and influential people who might possibly intercede.

Jacob was next sent to the Drancy internment camp where, after surrendering his gold watch and money, he was registered and numbered. Given a green sticker, Jacob was scheduled to leave on transport number sixty-nine on the seventh of March. He developed severe pneumonia in the internment camp and, due to the lack of medicine, suffered severely for two days. Max Jacob died in the evening of the fifth of March, two days before the scheduled transport carried 1,501 people to Auschwitz.

Director Gabriel Aghion’s 2007 biographical drama “Monsieur Max” was a film that covered the life of Max Jacob from the First World War until his death in 1944. The role of Jacob was played by French actor and director Jean-Claude Brialy. This was Brialy’s last role before his death in May of 2007; he was survived by his partner, Bruno Finck.

Notes: For those interested in more information on the life of Max Jacob, there are two excellent online articles worth reading:

Mardean Isaac’s 2021 article “Max Jacob and the Angel on the Wall” at the Arts & Letters section of the online Tablet located at: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/max-jacob-angel

Poetry editor Rosanna Warren’s October 2020 “The Death of Max Jacob”, excerpted from her book “Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters”, at the Arts & Culture section of The Paris Review located at: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/10/14/the-death-of-max-jacob/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Max Jacob”, 1922, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Amedeo Modigliani, “Max Jacob”, 1916, Paris, Oil on Canvas, 92.7 x 60.3 cm, Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio

Third Insert Image: Jean Cocteau, “Manuel Ortiz de la Zarate, Moishe Kisling, Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso, and Paquerette Meeting for Lunch”, 1916, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Roger Toulouse, “Max Jacob”, 1942, Oil on Canvas, 61.2 x 53 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, France

Flower Field Gif: https://rivermusic.tumblr.com

Oswell Blakeston: “And the Moral Seems to Be. . .”

Photographers Unknown, And the Moral Seems to Be . . .

In winter, Miss Jansson paints in her very comfortable studio in Helsinki; but in summer, she comes to the island and draws Moomin.

Max said, “Don’t you ever feel inspired to paint the Finnish countryside in summer?”

“It’s all so damned green,” she answered.

Then she told us about the squirrel, the one squirrel which has appeared on the island; and it slept under her neck and tried to collect food there. As the relationship between artist and squirrel developed, the squirrel came to expect a game at four o’clock in the morning. Tove Jansson had to get out of bed and pretend to be a tree. The squirrel would run up and down her frozen limbs.

One day, the squirrel disappeared. He may have jumped on a floating plank, for later he was reported to have appeared on another island. It must have been the same squirrel, for he positively forced open the tent of some campers, and—he was not welcome. It was four o’clock in the morning.

As soon as Miss Jansson learnt of the incident, she immediately rowed to the other island. She called. She stood about the place looking like a tree. But the squirrel never showed a whisker. Perhaps he’d sailed off again on a romantic Odyssey, looking for another squirrel and using his curly tail as a sail. And the moral seems to be that it is not enough to be a tree!

Oswell Blakeston, Sun At Midnight, 1958 Travel Book, The Archipelago, Page 85, Publisher Anthony Blond, London

Born to a family of Austrian origins in May of 1907, Henry Joseph Hasslacher was an English writer, poet, and filmmaker. He used the pseudonym Oswell Blakeston during his career, a reference to his mother’s maiden name and to English poet and essayist Osbert Sitwell.

Oswell Blakeston left his home at the age of sixteen; he subsequently became a stage magician’s assistant, a cinema organist, and an assistant cameraman at Gaumont Studios where he worked alongside the young David Lean. In August of 1927, Blakeston joined the staff of the Pool Group’s magazine “Close Up” as the protégé of the publication’s editor Kenneth Macpherson. He contributed a total of eighty-four articles to all but four of the journal’s issues, more than any other writer.

While writing for “Close Up”, Blakeston worked in various capacities in the British film industry. In 1929, he first tested his directorial skills with the short film “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside”, which was based on the popular British music hall song of the same name. Working alongside American photographer Francis Bruguière, Blakeston directed and produced the short 1930 film “Light Rhythms”. This strictly abstract film, one of the first in England, added new dimensions to Bruguière’s experimental photographic work through the use of moving light sources, superimpositions, and elements of music. The film score was composed by Jack Ellitt and played on piano by Donald Sosin.

Among Oswell Blakeston’s early literary endeavors was his co-editorship with Herbert Jones of the small magazine “Seed” from 1932 to 1933. Under the pseudonym of Simon, he collaborated with novelist and screenwriter Roger Buford on the writing of four mystery novels: the 1933 “Murder Among Fiends”, “Death on the Swim” in 1934, the 1935 “Cat with a Moustache”, and “The Mystery of the Hypnotic Room” in 1949. Blakeston also wrote novels and story collections, as well as, ten volumes of poetry under his own name. His fifteen books of fiction were wide ranging in scope and included a number of works that mixed gay themes with suspense and detective plots.

Blakeston contributed writings to British writer and poet John Gawsworth’s published short-story anthologies. He also collaborated on works with Matthew Phipps Shiell, also known as M. P. Shiel, a writer of supernatural horror and science fiction whose “The Purple Cloud” remains his best known work. Blakeston is known in the literary world for a number of publication firsts. His 1932 “Magic Aftermath” was the first fiction published with a spiral binding and his 1935 crime novel “The Cat with the Moustache” contained one of the first descriptions of a hallucinatory experience with peyote or mescal.

In the 1950s, Blakeston was a frequent contributor to “ArtReview” and other periodicals including “John O’ London’s Weekly” and “What’s On in London”. In addition to his novels and poetry, Blakeston published cookbooks, travel adventures, works on photography and cinematography, and two books on animals, “Working Cats” and “Zoo Keeps Who?”. Most of his literary work was produced for publication by small presses and speciality publishers and thus is no longer in print. Recent interest in Blakeston’s writings has resulted in reprints of his more popular works; more obscure volumes appear occasionally at more specialized venues.

Blakeston met painter Max Chapman at the end of the 1920s. Chapman had attended London’s Byam Shaw School of Art where he studied under and became friends with painter Charles Ricketts. Ricketts and his life-time companion Charles Shannon were part of the literary and artistic circle that included Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. Blakeston and Chapman became life-long partners and lived together at a residence named “Lobster Pot” in Mousehole, a small fishing village in Cornwall. Through his association with Chapman, Blakeston met and became friends with modernist writer Mary Francis Butts and poet and author Dylan Thomas.

Both Blakeston and Chapman became fixtures of the Cornish artistic scene. Blakeston’s paintings were a mix of abstract and expressionistic imagery executed in a small scale. His 1982 “Adolescence”, though influenced by Chapman’s work, is stylistically closer to the Pop Art movement; it is currently housed in the collection of the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Blakeston exhibited his artwork in over forty solo shows and one-hundred group shows. In 1981, he shared an exhibition with Max Chapman at the Middlesbrough Art Gallery. Blakeston’s paintings are housed in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Belfast’s Ulster Museum, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, and galleries in Poland, Finland and Portugal.

Blakeston and Chapman’s portraits were drawn by painter and sculptor Sven Berlin, a member of the St. Ives artistic community: Blakeston’s portriat in 1939 and Chapman’s in 1941. These portraits became part of a series entitled “St. Ives Personalities”, that is now held in a private collection. A portrait of Blakeston painted by Max Chapman was part of a 1976 exhibition of portraits held at the Camden Art Centre. Oswell Blakeston died on the 4th of June in 1985. Max Chapman continued to paint until his death, fourteen years later, on the 18th of November in 1999.

Notes: Although listed at the British Film Institute registry and mentioned in Michael O’Pray’s “The British Avant-Garde Film 1926 to 1995”, Oswell Blakeston’s film “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside” seems not available for viewing. His 1930 “Light Rhythms” is however available for viewing at the Light Cone Experimental Film site located at: https://lightcone.org/en/film-5793-light-rhythms

Since the 1930s, one of Oswell Blakeston’s passions was the history and architecture of follies, costly ornamental buildings with no practical purpose that were usually built in gardens or parks. He amassed a collection of county files, notes and clippings on the subject. A short article on this topic can be found at The Folly Flâneuse’s site located at: https://thefollyflaneuse.com/oswell-blakestons-folly-suitcase/

Additional information on Oswell Blakeston’s life and published works can be found at the Social Networks and Archival Context site located at: https://snaccooperative.org/ark:/99166/w6087wx3#biography-collapse

Top Insert Image: Howard Coster, “Oswell Blakeston”, 1930s, Photo Session, Half-Plate Negative Print, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Oswell Blakeston, “Pass the Poison Separately”, 1976, Publisher Catalyst, Ontario

Third Insert Image: Oswell Blakeston and Francis Bruguière, “Few Are Chosen, Studies in the Theatrical Lighting of Life’s Theatre”, 1931, First Edition, Scholartis Press, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Oswell Blakeston, “The Night’s Moves”, 1961, First Edition, Publisher Gaberbocchus Press, London

Bottom Insert Image: Howard Coster, “Oswell Blakeston”, 1930s, Photo Session, Half-Plate Film Negative Print, National Portrait Gallery, London

Edward Prime-Stevenson: “The Pale Blue and Fawn of a Lieutenant”

Photographers Unknown, The Pale Blue and Fawn of a Lieutenant

“The kiosque-garden was somewhat crowded. At a table, a few steps away, sat only one person: a young Hungarian officer in the pale blue and fawn of a lieutenant of the well known A-Infantry Regiment. He was not reading, though at his hand lay one or two journals. Nor did he appear to be bestowing any great amount of attention on the chattering around him, in that distinctively Szent-Istvánbely manner which ignores any kind of outdoor musical entertainment as a thing to be listened-to. An open letter was lying beside him, on a chair; but he was not heeding that. I turned his way; we exchanged the usual sacrament saluts, in which attention I met the glance, by so means welcoming, of a pair of peculiarly brilliant but not shadowless hazel eyes; and I sat down for my coffee. I remember that I had a swift, general impression that my neighbor was of no ordinary beauty of physique and elegance of bearing even in a land where such matters are normal details of personality. And somehow it was also borne in upon me promptly that his mood was rather like mine. But this was a vague concern. What was Hecuba to me? -or Priam, or Helen, or Helenus, or anybody else, when for the moment I was so out of tune with life!”

—Edward Prime-Stevenson (Xavier Mayne), Imre: A Memorandum, 1906, The English Book Press, Naples, Italy

Born in Madison, New Jersey in January of 1858, Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson was an American author and journalist. Under his birth name or some variant, he wrote with some success many different types of literature including magazine fiction, literary and music criticism, travel essays, poetry, and works on esoteric subjects such as cartomancy, a form of fortune telling interpreted through randomly chosen cards. Prime-Stevenson is also known for his young adult books, written in his early career, and his later overtly homosexual works that place him among America’s earliest gay authors.

Edward Prime-Stevenson was the youngest of five children born to Presbyterian minister Paul E. Stevenson and Cornelia Prime who was born in a distinguished family of academic and literary figures. After studies in both the classics and law, he received his Juris Doctor degree and became a member of the American Bar Association. However, Prime-Stevenson never practiced law but chose instead to pursue a literary career. During the 1880s, he began a career as a critic in York City for Harper’s Weekly, a political magazine, and as book reviewer and music critic for the weekly Independent.

Near the end of the 1880s, Prime-Stevenson met a pivotal figure in both his personal and professional life: Harry Harkness Flagler who was heir to part of the Standard Oil fortune and eventual president of the New York Philharmonic Society. Both men shared a love of music and literature; however in 1893, they became estranged just before Flagler’s marriage to Anne Lamont. Prime-Stevenson dedicated his last two books to Flagler, a man he continued to admire.

At the age of twenty-nine, Prime-Stevenson began to publish young-adult books whose stories were centered on close homoerotic friendships among adolescents. The first of these was the 1887 “White Cockades: An Incident of the Forty-Five”, a romance-adventure set during the 1745 Jacobite uprising in England. This was followed by the 1891 “Left to Themselves: Being the Ordeal of Philip and Gerald”, a fast-paced boys’ adventure tale in the tradition of Horatio Alger, which followed the lives of young Gerald Saxton and the older youth Philip Touchstone. During their developing relationship, the two boys are shipwrecked on an island and later discover they are being stalked by a mysterious, predatory figure.

Well educated and speaking several languages, Edward Prime-Stevenson had interests in both European and Asian literature as well as esoteric subject matter. In 1897, Edward Prime Stevenson published “The Square of Sevens, and the Parallelogram: An Authoritative Method of Cartomancy with a Prefatory Note”. Published through New York’s Harper & Brothers, this elaborately produced volume of seventy two pages purported to show the mysteries of card-divination.

Prime-Stevenson left the United States at the turn of the century to travel throughout Europe; as he traveled, he continued to freelance for newspapers in both London and New York. A large inheritance from a maternal uncle enabled Prime-Stevenson to settle permanently in Europe where he divided his time between Florence, Italy, and the Swiss city of Lausanne on the shore of Lake Geneva. This inheritance also allowed him to travel freely and to self-publish and distribute books on a variety of subjects.

Prime-Stevenson used his birth name for his important studies on homosexuality. For his two book-length works on homosexuality, he took great care to insulate himself, through the use of the pseudonym Xavier Mayne, from the reprisal common to the period in which he worked. Prime-Stevenson’s 1901 novel “Imre: A Memorandum” was privately printed, under the name Xavier Mayne, by the Naples publisher Rispoli. This novel, an openly homosexual romance story, marked a turning point in LBGTQ literature due to its positive ending. Previous publications on the topic emphasized misfortune and often death as a result of such relationships. The novel’s lead character Oswold, who is spending the summer at a Budapest language school, meets the Hungarian calvary soldier Imre at a cafe nestled in the city. Despite all the circumstances that surround them, their relationship continues to endure.

Edward Prime-Stevenson’s second major work was the 1908 “The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life”. This non-fiction work is a defense of homosexuality grounded in scientific and historical research. Throughout his career, Prime-Stevenson sought to dispel falsehoods surrounding the history and social acceptance of homosexuality. Seeking to defend homosexuality as a natural result of human evolution, he offered his theory of intersexes; Prime-Stevenson identified two of the intersexes while leaving room for more to be defined in the future. He rejected the binary of masculine and feminine, both of which fail to describe the vast majority of humanity, in favor of a broader spectrum of sexual identity.

Using the terms Uranian and Uraniad, which align with gay and lesbian respectively, Prime-Stevenson attempted to define these types, call attention to historical examples, and critique the societal condemnation and persecution of such individuals as degenerate or criminal. To provide the historical, legal, and scientific context for his work, he read almost everything then available about homosexuality. Prime-Stevenson interviewed physicians, psychiatrists, and workaday people from many different backgrounds. His conclusions, then not generally accepted socially or scientifically, stated homosexuality was neither an abnormality nor a disease. It was in fact inborn, a normal and natural temperament. This study, perhaps the first to approach homosexuality from a scientific, historical, personal and legal point of view, is recognized today as a landmark in queer literature by academics around the world.

While in Capri during his European stay, Edward Prime-Stevenson met the French novelist and poet Jacques d’Adelsward-Fersen, who was in self-imposed exile with his long-time lover Anthony “Nino” Cesarini, a model for many known artists. Prime-Stevenson dedicated his work “La Biblioteca di Dayneford” to d’Adelsward; this work is the only one translated into Italian by Prime-Stevenson. Using a printer in Florence, he published, under his real name, a collection of short stories in 1913 entitled “Her Enemy, Some Friends, and other Personage”, which contained numerous references and information on homosexuality. In 1928, Prime-Stevenson published a volume of music criticism entitled “Long-Haired Iopas: Old Chapters from Twenty-Five Years of Music-Criticism” through The Italian Mail, a Florence press.

Prime-Stevenson continued his writing throughout the 1920s and 1930s, primarily articles about music. With the outbreak of World War ii, he retreated to the neutral city of Lausanne, Switzerland. Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson died in Lausanne of a heart attack on the twenty-third of July in 1942 at the age of seventy-four. Today, he is remembered as having marked a turning point in English literature and for being an outstanding observer of the early 20th century LGBT scene.

Note: For those interested, the Oxford University Press has an article by Kristin M. Franseen in their Music & Letters section, Volume 101, Issue 2 entitled “Onward to the End of the Nineteenth Century: Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Queer Musicological Nostalgia”. The article considers the intertextual relationships between his musical and sexological writings. The article is located online at: https://academic.oup.com/ml/article/101/2/300/5760330

Alan Hollinghurst: “A Drink, a Glow of Resolve and Sensible Postponement”

Photographers Unknown, A Drink, a Glow of Resolve and Sensible Postponement

“In truth the memoir was a game of postponement – a trick he played on himself almost daily, and fell for every time. There would be a poor and evasive morning, with letters to write as well, and a number of phone calls that had to be made; then lunch, at a place not necessarily close, and several things to do after lunch, with mounting anxiety in the two hours before six o’clock: and then a drink, a glow of resolve and sensible postponement till the following morning, when, too hung-over to do much work before ten, he would seek infuriated refuge, about eleven forty-five, in the trying necessity of going out once more to lunch. Over lunch, at Caspar’s or at the Garrick, he would be asked how work was going, when it could be expected, and the confidence of the questioner severely inhibited his answers – they had a bottle of wine, no more, but still the atmosphere was appreciably softened, his little hints at difficulties were taken as mere modesty – ‘I’m sure it will be marvelous’ – ‘It will take as long as it takes’ – and he left fractionally consoled himself, as if some great humane reprieve were somehow possible, and time (as deadline after deadline loomed and fell away behind) were not an overriding question. In the evenings especially, and towards bedtime, half-drunk, he started seeing connections, approaches, lovely ideas for the work, and sat suffused with a sense of the masterly thing it was in his power to do the next morning.”

-Alan Hollinghurst, The Sparsholt Affair, 2017, Picador Publishers, London

Born in May of 1954 in Stroud located in the Cotswold area of Gloucestershire, Alan James Hollinghurst is an English novelist, short story author, poet and translator. Continuing the tradition of Christopher Isherwood and Edward Morgan Forster, he presents in his work the protagonist’s gay orientation as a given fact and, building on that fact, examines both the complexities and mundane aspects of everyday gay life.

Born the only son to a bank manager father and a relatively emotionally-distant mother, Hollinghurst was raised in a politically conservative and financially comfortable family. He lived in all-male boarding schools from the age of seven to seventeen. Hollinghurst studied literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1975. Upon receiving his degree, he taught for one-year terms on the Oxford campus at Somerville, Magdalen and Corpus Christi colleges. For his 1980 Master of Philosophy thesis, Hollinghurst wrote on the strategies adopted by such writers as Leslie Poles Hartley, Ronald Firbank and E. M. Forster to covertly express their sexuality in an age of stigma and prosecution.

In 1981, Alan Hollinghurst lectured at University College London and, in the following year, joined the staff of London’s weekly literary review, The Times Literary Supplement, where he edited the art and poetry pages before serving as deputy editor from 1985 to 1990. While working at the Times, he devoted his writing to poetry and published his first major collection, “Confidential Chats with Boys”, in 1982. This volume of poems was based on physician William Lee Howard’s 1911 sex education book of the same title which was adopted as standard by numerous boys’ schools.

Hollinghurst began work on four different novels before a grant allowed him to concentrate on his 1988 “The Swimming-Pool Library”. He presented his finished novel to his former housemate Andrew Motion, a subsequent Poet Laureate, who at that time was employed by London’s publishing house Chatto and Windus. The story is centered around Will Beckwith, a privileged, cultured and promiscuous gay man who meets the elderly aristocrat Lord Nantwich. This chance meeting and the later reading of Nantwich’s diaries lead Will to re-evaluate his own sense of the past as well as his family’s history. “The Swimming-Pool Library” won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1988 and, in the following year, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

As a result of this successful literary debut, Alan Hollinghurst received an advance for his next novel, which allowed him to purchase a house in London’s Hampstead Heath and concentrate fully on writing fiction. His second novel, the 1994 “The Folding Star”, dealt with the incommunicable obsession of a middle-aged tutor for his seventeen-year old Belgian student. The tutor, Edward Manners, becomes involved in affairs with two men and, after introduced to the world of Symbolist painter Edgard Orst, is ultimately caught in the memories of his own adolescence and first love affair.

Hollinghurst’s third novel, the 1998 “The Spell”, used the satirical and romantic style of a weekend in the country plot to follow the changing relationships within a group of friends and occasional lovers. This work was followed by the 2004 three-part novel “The Line of Beauty”. Set during the Thatcher years between 1983 and 1987, the novel followed the life of the young, middle-class gay protagonist Nick Guest. Through exploring the realities of Nick’s tense and intimate relationships and life as a gay man, Hollinghurst examined the themes of hypocrisy, drugs, privilege and homosexuality during the time of England’s emerging AIDS crisis. “The Line of Beauty” won the high-profile 2004 Man Booker Prize with its fifty-thousand pound stipend and became the first gay novel to be so honored. It was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

Alan Hollinghurst’s fifth novel, the 2011 “The Stranger’s Child” which, told over the course of decades, revolves around a minor poet’s successful published poem and the resulting changes in his work and life. Received positively by critics, the novel was on the Man Booker Prize longlist, the Walter Scott Prize shortlist, and the winner of the 2013 Prix du Meilleur Livrr Étranger, France’s best foreign book prize. Hollinghurst’s sixth novel, the 2017 “The Sparsholt Affair”, explores the changing attitudes towards homosexuality as seen through the lives of two Englishmen: a teenager attending Oxford during the Second World War, and his later openly-gay son in London just after England decriminalizes homosexuality.

Hollinghurst currently lives in London with his partner Paul Mendez, the British author who authored the 2020 semi-autobiographical novel “Rainbow Milk” published by Dialogue Books, a Little, Brown and Company imprint.

“I grew up reading certain writers like Iris Murdoch who was very interested in sexual ambivalence and often created gay characters, usually from a cultured or academic background. I’m not sure how many straight writers I’ve read who create gay characters successfully from the inside, though I agree about Anthony Burgess and (his novel) “Earthly Powers”. — Alan Hollinghurst, 2017, Guardian Interview with Alex Clark

Note: For those interested, an interview between writer Peter Terzian and Alan Hollinghurst, “Alan Hollinghurst, The Art of Fiction No. 214”, is available through “The Paris Review”, a literary magazine featuring original writing, written interviews, podcasts and art. The article or a subscription to the magazine is available for purchase at: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6116/the-art-of-fiction-no-214-alan-hollinghurst

Jack Anderson: “A Leap into the Unknown”

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

Look in the Salon des Refusés of most periods
and there will hang the homosexuals
labeled by critics
“contrary to nature”.

Now, to use a familiar set of distinctions, what
exists but is not nature must be art;
yet art is also an imitation
of some process of nature: so art, too, is natural,
whatever its manner.

Art may evolve through accretions of tradition
or leap ahead into the unknown.
This form of expression, the gay life
so maddening and unimaginable to some,
necessarily involves a leap into the unknown,
for its traditions, such as they are, are shadowy.

Note how, on every side, images proclaim
and sustain the straight life. In parks and town squares
one may behold the monumental figures of, say,
Cohibere guarding his family from the Amplecti,
of Scruta and Amentia denouncing the barbarians,
or of the marriage of Turpa and Insulsus on the battlefield.

Images of the gay life, in contrast, are obscure, are
curiosities kept locked from the public in cabinets: in consequence,
gay lives must style themselves with craft,
with daring. Many fail. Even so,
some grow amazing and beautiful.

And since such triumphs are typically achieved
amidst general bewilderment and in defiance
of academic theory, the gay life
deserves to be ranked among
the significant examples of art, past and present.
And because it has disordered whatever may be
the accustomed ways of seeing in its time,
it is therefore avant-garde,
naturally avant-garde.

Jack Anderson, A Lecture on Avant-Garde Art, Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, Editor Timothy Liu, 2000

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in June of 1935, Jack Anderson is an American poet, dance critic and dance historian. He has contributed numerous reviews on dance performances for both the “New York Times” and “Dance Magazine”. Anderson is also known for his scholastic work on dance history and eleven volumes of poetry.

In his formative years, Jack Anderson studied piano and acted in theater groups before his departure to college. He earned his Bachelor of Arts at Northwestern University with a major in Theater and minors in English Literature and Philosophy. Anderson completed his graduate studies at Indiana University where he earned his Master of Arts in Creative Writing. He pursued further studies at the University of California, Berkeley, until a position became available at the “Oakland Tribune”.

Anderson joined the staff of the weekly news publication in 1959 as a copy boy. He was promoted after one year to assistant drama critic and, in addition to his work at the Tribune, began writing dance criticism for both the English periodical “Ballet Today” and America’s leading dance periodical “Dance Magazine”. After relocating to New York in 1969, Anderson was a member of the editorial staff of “Dance Magazine” until 1970, after which he continued to contribute reviews until 1978.

While living in London with his partner, dance historian and writer George Dorris, Jack Anderson was deputy dance critic from 1970 to 1971 at the “Daily Mail” under critic and broadcaster Oleg Kerensky. In 1972, he became the New York correspondent for London’s “Dancing Times” magazine. Already writing and teaching dance history, Anderson along with George Dorris founded the scholarly journal “Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts”, which became one of the genre’s leading periodicals. In 1978, he joined Anna Kisselgoff and Jennifer Dunning as the dance critics for “The New York Times”, where he remained until 2005.

Drawn to poetry throughout his adult life, Anderson published his first two collections of poetry in 1969: “The Hurricane Lamp” and “The Invention of New Jersey”. His subtle yet witty poems often explore themes of urban life and travel. Anderson has the urban sophistication and the alertness to create often lurid tales that in a strange way make sense. Among his many volumes are the 1978 “Toward the Liberation of the Left Hand”, “The Clouds of That Country” published in 1982, the 1990 “Field Trips on the Rapid Transit”, and “Backyards of the Universe” published in 2017. In recognition of his work, Anderson received a creative writing fellowship and a literary award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Recognized as both an effective teacher and lecturer, Jack Anderson has taught dance history and criticism at the University of Adelaide in Australis, the University of Minnesota, the North Carolina School of the Arts, the University of Oklahoma, and New York’s New School, among others. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Anderson has produced seven books on various aspects of dance. Among these are the 1979 “The Nutcracker”, the “Ballet & Modern Dance” available in three editions, and the 1981 “The One and Only: The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo” which won that year’s José de la Rorre Bueno Prize for best English-language writing in dance history.

Note: Jack Anderson and George Dorris, a dance scholar and now retired English professor, had known each other slightly at Northwestern University. They later met in 1965 on the Lincoln Center subway platform after a New York City Ballet performance. They have traveled together throughout the world and become friends with dance scholars in many countries. In 2006, they were married in Toronto and currently reside in Manhattan, New York.

A collection of six poems by Jack Anderson can be found at the Poetry Foundation website located at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jack-anderson#tab-poems

The second edition, recently updated, of Anderson’s “Ballet and Modern Dance: A Concise History” is available through Amazon.

William Dickey: “The Silent Traffic of Bystanders”

Photographers Unknown, The Silent Traffic of Bystanders

Henry went over the edge of the bridge first; he always did.
Then Mr. Interlocutor and Mr. Bones, then the blackface
minstrels
with their tambourines. You have to empty out
all the contents before the person himself dies.

The beard went over the edge, and Stephen Crane,
and the never-completed scholarly work on Shakespeare,
and faculty wives, and a sheaf of recovery wards
white-tiled in the blue shadow of the little hours.

He loosened his necktie and the recurrent dream
of walking out under water to the destined island.
His mother went over in pearls; his father went over.
His real father went over, whoever his father was.

He thought to go over with someone, hand in hand
with perhaps Mistress Bradstreet, but someone always
preceded him.
The news of his death preceded him. It hit the water
with a fat splash and the target twanged.

When there was nothing to see with or hear with, the
silent traffic
of bystanders wrapped in snow, his only body
let itself loose, turned and waved before it went over
to what it could never understand as being the human
shore.

William Dickey, The Death of John Berryman, January 1996

Born in Bellingham, Washington in December of 1928, William Hobart Dickey was an American poet and educator. While his talent was known to critics, Dickey worked on his poetry without actively promoting it and, thus, was largely unknown to the general public. In his work, he often used abstract ideas that contained both insight and feeling. Dickey expressed his personal visions through poetry and gave preceptive observations on life that spoke to his readers.

William Dickey attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon where he earned his Bachelor of Arts, with a novel as his thesis, in 1951. With an awarded Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, Dickey earned his Master of Arts in 1955 at Harvard University and his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa in 1956. As a Fulbright scholar, he studied from 1959 to 1960 at the University of Oxford’s Jesus College.

Dickey studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop under poet John Berryman, a major figure in American poetry in the latter half of the century and a key figure in Confessional Poetry, a form which focused on extreme moments of individual experience. Barrymore, whose childhood was shaken by the suicide death of his father, developed his own style and is best known for his 1964 “The Dream Songs”, short lyric poems of eighteen lines in three stanzas. Dickey studied in Barrymore’s intense poetry workshop with such poets as Henri Coulette, Donald Justice, Jane Cooper, and Robert Dana.

In 1959, William Dickey published his first volume of poetry, “Of the Festivity”, a balanced collection of humorous and serious works expressing keen observations on life. Selected by scholars as being culturally important, “Of the Festivity” was chosen by Oxford’s Professor of Poetry William Hugh Auden as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. In his 1971 volume “More Under Saturn”, Dickey wrote darker toned poems with an added degree of cynicism to their humor. For this collection, he won a 1972 silver medal from the Commonwealth Club of California.

Dickey’s sixth volume of work “The Rainbow Grocery” was also published in 1971. It later received the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press in 1978. The poems in this volume, which achieved a balance between humor and seriousness, were more loosely constructed, more sexual, and more frenzied than the poems in “Of the Festivity”. Dickey published seven more volumes of poetry. Among these are the 1981 “The Sacrifice Consenting”, “Brief Lives” and “The King of the Golden River”, both published in 1985, the 1994 “In the Dreaming”, and his last volume, the posthumously published 1996 “The Education of Desire”.

William Dickey, after receiving his Masters at the University of Iowa, taught English at Cornell University from 1956 to 1959. After returning from Oxford in 1960, he was an assistant professor of English at Dennison University in Granville, Ohio until 1962. At which time, Dickey joined San Francisco State University’s faculty as a Professor of English and Creative Writing and taught until his 1991 retirement. In 1988, he was the editor of the tenth-anniversary edition of the established literary journal “New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly”. In 1990, the journal returned to its original 1978 name “New England Review”.

Dickey lived in San Francisco with life-partner Leonard Sanazaro, a poet and teacher of English and Creative Writing at San Francisco’s City College. Due to complications from a series of HIV-related surgeries, William Hobart Dickey died at the age of sixty-five at San Francisco’s Kaiser Hospital in May of 1994.

Notes: William Dickey’s poem “The Death of John Berryman”, an elegy to his former professor, was completed shortly before Dickey’s death. It was published posthumously in the January 1996 issue of “Poetry” and in the 1997 anthology “The Best American Poetry”.

Living as a gay man in San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic, William Dickey used the Hypercard program on his first Macintosh to produce a total of fourteen “Hyperpoems”, unique documents of gay life in San Francisco during the epidemic. Writer Matthew Kirscherbaum, with the assistance of Dickey’s literary executor Susan Tracz, extracted those files and added them to the Internet Archive. Organized into two volumes, they can be found at: https://archive.org/details/william_dickey_hyperpoems_volume_1 https://archive.org/details/william_dickey_hyperpoems_volume_2

Richard Barnfield: “On Whose Faire Front a Poet’s Pen May Write”

Photographers Unknown, Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Sixteen

Cherry-lipt Adonis in his snowie shape,
Might not compare with his pure ivoric white,
On whose faire front a poet’s pen may write,
Whose roseate red excels the crimson grape,
His love-enticing delicate soft limbs,
Are rarely fram’d t’entrap poore gazine eies:
His cheeks, the lillie and carnation dies,
With lovely tincture which Apollo’s dims.
His lips ripe strawberries in nectar wet,
His mouth a Hive, his tongue a hony-combe,
Where Muses (like bees) make their mansion.
His teeth pure pearle in blushing correll set.
Oh how can such a body sinne-procuring,
Be slow to love, and quicke to hate, enduring?

Barnfield, Sonnet 17, Cynthia, Printed for Humfrey Lownes, London, 1595

Born in the village of Norbury in the Borough of Stafford at the beginning of June in 1574, Richard Barnfield was an English poet. Best known for his poem “As It Fell Upon a Day”, he is the only Elizabethan male poet, apart from Shakespeare, to address love poems to a man.

The son of a gentleman, Richard Barnfield was brought up in the county of Shropshire at The Manor House in Edgmond. After his mother’s death in 1580, his upbringing was supervised by his aunt Elizabeth Skrymsher. As a youth, Barnfield was deeply influenced by the ancient Roman poet Virgil’s work and the contemporary poet Sir Philip Sidney’s 1591 “Astrophel and Stella” which popularized the use of sonnet sequence.

Barnfield studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, beginning in November of 1589 and received his degree in February of 1592. However, he did not stay to earn his Masters degree as was the custom. It is believed Barnfield relocated to London circa 1593 and was sufficiently wealthy to live a life as a writer without the struggle his contemporaries endured. At the age of twenty-one in November of 1594, he anonymously published “The Affectionate Shepherd”, a volume of romantic six-line stanzas. This collection, basically a paraphrase of Virgil’s second Eclogue, was successful; however, it was controversial for its time from a moral point of view due to its openly homosexual references.

In January of 1595, Richard Barnfield published his second collection, “Cynthia, with Certain Sonnets, and the Legend of Cassandra”. This volume had a signed preface dedicated to William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby. In the preface, Barnfield distanced himself from the homoeroticism in his previous work by saying he was imitating Virgil. Though still containing references both explicit and homoerotic, this collection is an early study of both Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser’s work. In addition to a twenty-sonnet sequence, the volume included the poem “Cynthia” written in the fixed verse form invented by Spenser for his epic poem “The Faerie Queen”.

Barnfield’s third and final book of poetry, written when he was twenty-four, was the 1598 “The Encomion of Lady Pecunia”, a work of six-line stanzas in praise of money. Though its contents registered a decline in poetic quality, there is an early celebration of Shakespeare inside, entitled “A Remembrance of Some English Poets”, which celebrates the English poet alongside such Elizabethan poets as Spencer, Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel. Originally attributed to Shakespeare, Barnfield’s “If Music and Sweet Poetrie Agree” and “As It Fell Upon a Day” are also in this third volume.

Richard Barnfield’s last appearance in print was a 1605 reprint with updates of his “Lady Pecunia”. Little is known of his life from this date until his death in 1620 at the age of forty-six in Shropshire, a county in the West Midlands region of England. Having become less important than his more famous contemporaries, Barnfield’s work was neglected for a long time; however, the current age has been kinder to his reputation. The fact that his poetry was mistaken for Shakespeare’s work is a testament to Barnfield’s ability. His sonnet sequences are often referenced currently as examples of homoerotic poems of the period.

“The Affectionate Shepherd” and “Sonnets” were published in 1998 and 2001 as limited-edition art books with illustrations by Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jensen. The publishing press was Old Stile Press in Catchmays Court, Monmouthshire, England.

Note: An excellent article by Ed Simon, entitled “Richard Barnfield: The Rival Poet’s Lover”, examines Barnfield and his admiration for fellow renegade poet Robert Greene. This extensive and informative article can be found at the online “The Fortnightly Review” located at: https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2016/04/richard-barnfield/

A discussion of Richard Barnfield’s twenty sonnets in his 1595 “Cynthia” can be found at the online “Mencuneutics” site located at: https://eshuneutics.blogspot.com/2009/10/sonnets-of-richard-barnfield.html

Algernon Charles Swinburne: “There Was a Graven Image of Desire”

Photographers Unknown, A Graven Image of Desire

There was a graven image of Desire
            Painted with red blood on a ground of gold
            Passing between the young men and the old,
And by him Pain, whose body shone like fire,
And Pleasure with gaunt hands that grasped their hire.
            Of his left wrist, with fingers clenched and cold,
            The insatiable Satiety kept hold,
Walking with feet unshod that pashed the mire.
The senses and the sorrows and the sins,
            And the strange loves that suck the breasts of Hate
Till lips and teeth bite in their sharp indenture,
Followed like beasts with flap of wings and fins.
            Death stood aloof behind a gaping grate,
Upon whose lock was written Peradventure.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Cameo, Poems and Ballads, 1866

Born in London in April of 1837, Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, novelist, playwright and critic. He was one of the most accomplished lyric poets of the Victorian era and was a renowned symbol of rebellion against the conservative values of his time. The explicit and often obsessive sexual themes in some of his work shocked many readers; however, his primary preoccupation, implicit in his poetry and explicit in his critical writings, was the nature and creation of poetic beauty.

The eldest of six children of a wealthy Northumbrian family, Algernon Charles Swinburne grew up at the family’s home, East Dene, in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wright and the London home at Whitehall Gardens in Westminster. Considered frail and nervous as a child, he had fearlessness and energy to the point of being reckless. From 1849 to 1853, Swinburne attended Eton College where he wrote poetry and won prizes in both French and Italian. He later attended Oxford’s Balliol College from 1856 to 1860 with a brief period of expulsion in 1859 for publicly supporting the attempted assassination of Napoleon III by Felice Orsini, a revolutionary leader who was convinced that Napoleon was the chief obstacle to Italian independence.

During his time at Oxford, Swinburne became a member of the painter Lady Pauline Trevelyan’s intellectual circle at her country house, Wellington Hall. He met the brothers William Michael and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painter Simeon Solomon, designer William Morris and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle of artists and writers. Swinburne spent his summer holidays at Capheaton Hall in Northumberland, which was the house of his grandfather, Sir John Swinburne, 6th Baronet. After his grandfather’s death in September of 1860, Algernon Charles Swinburne stayed with Scottish artist and poet William Bell Scott in Newcastle.

The following year, Algernon Charles Swinburne visited the French enclave of Menton on the Riviera and stayed at the Villa Laurenti to recover from excessive use of alcohol. In December of 1862, Swinburne traveled with William Scott and his guests to the coastal town of Tynemouth in northeast England and relocated to London where he began an active writing career. In 1866, Swinburne published his collection “Poems and Ballads” which brought him instant notoriety, especially the poems “Anactoria” and “Sapphos” written in homage of Sappho of Lesbos, the ancient Greek poet. Other poems in the volume include “The Leper”, “Hymn to Proserpine” and “The Triumph of Time”.

Swinburne is considered a poet of the Decadent Movement; centered in Western Europe, the movement followed the ideology of excess, the superiority of human fantasy and aesthetic hedonism over logic and the natural world. Many of Swinburne’s early works dealt with subjects considered taboo in the Victorian era and led to him becoming a person not welcomed in high society. Although he continued to write love and nature poetry, Swinbourne’s work after the first volume of “Poems and Ballads” became increasingly devoted to the issues of republicanism and revolutionary causes.

Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote in a variety of poetic forms, including Sapphic stanzas, an ancient Greek verse form of four unrhymed lines. He also devised a poetic variation, called the roundel, based on the medieval French Rondeau form. The roundel consists of nine lines each having the same number of syllables, plus a refrain after the third and last lines.The refrains are repeated to a certain stylized pattern: they must be identical to the beginning of the first line and must rhyme with the second line. Swinburne published a book of these particular poems entitled “A Century of Roundels” in 1883 dedicated to his poet friend Christina Rossetti, the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Through out the 1860s and 1870s, Swinburne drank excessively and often, until his forties, suffered random physical collapses for which he required care until his recovery. In 1879, his friend and literary agent, Theodore Watts-Duncan, intervened during a time when Swinburne was dangerously ill. Watts-Duncan isolated Swinburne at a suburban home in Putney where he gradually withdrew him from alcohol and association with many former friends and habits. Swinburne stayed thirty years with Watts-Duncan who is generally credited with saving Swinburne’s life and encouraging him to continue writing to his old age. During his time in Putney, nature and landscape poetry began to predominate, as well as poems about children. Among this period’s works were the 1889 “Poems and Ballads, Third Series” and the 1904 “A Channel Passage and Other Poems”.

In addition to his poetry, Algernon Charles Swinburne published volumes of literary criticism. His familiarity with a wide range of world literatures contributed to a critical style rich in quotation, allusion, and comparison. Swinburne is especially noted for his studies of Elizabethan dramatists and many poets and novelists of French and English origins. He also wrote witty and insightful essays, notably “Notes on Poems and Reviews” and “Under the Microscope”, that were responses to criticism of his own works. Swinburne wrote one serial novel published under a pseudonym, the 1901”Love’s Cross-Currents”. A second novel, “Lesbia Brandon”, was unfinished at his death and is theorized, inconclusively, to be a thinly disguised autobiography.

Algernon Charles Swinburne died in London on the tenth of April in 1909 at the age of seventy-two. Even early critics, who took exception to his subject matter, commended his intricate and evocative imagery, alliteration, and bold, complex rhythms.

Notes: A collection of Algernon Swinburne’s poetry can be found at “My Poetic Side” located at: https://mypoeticside.com/poets/algernon-charles-swinburne-poems

Algernon Charles Swinburne was very impressed with the writings of fellow poet Victor Hugo. He visited the fief of Guernsey and Sark in the Channel Islands to follow in the footsteps of his hero. An article on Swinburne’s visit to Guernsey and Sark which includes excerpts of his poems to Hugo can be found at the Priaulx Library site located at: https://www.priaulxlibrary.co.uk/articles/article/victor-hugo-and-guernsey-algernon-charles-swinburne-king-sark

An extensive 2004 article on the life of Algernon Charles Swinburne by Rikky Rooksby for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography can be found at: https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-36389;jsessionid=9236C8557201601EE0BDA8060AD6D1FB?aulast=Gosse&date=1912&genre=book&sid=oup:orr&title=The%20life%20of%20Swinburne&mediaType=Article

Top Insert Image: Edward George Warris Hulton, “Algernon Charles Swinburne”, circa 1850-1909, Gelatin Silver Print, Hulton Archive

Second Inset Image: William Bell Scott, “Algernon Charles Swinburne”, 1860, Oil on Canvas, 45.7 x 33.2 cm, Balliol College, University of Oxford

Third Insert Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Algernon Charles Swinburne”, 1860, Pencil on Paper, 33 x 35.6 cm, Mark Samuels Lasner Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Algernon Charles Swinburne”, 1862, Watercolor on Paper, 17.8 x 15.2 cm, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England

Emanuel Xavier: “We All have Wings. . .”

Photographers Unknown, We All Have Wings

“Ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars;
see that ye not be troubled;
all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet”
-Matthew 24:6

1.
I escape the horrors of war
with a towel and a room
Offering myself
to Palestinian and Jewish boys
as a ‘piece’ to the Middle East
when I should be concerned with the untimely deaths
of dark-skinned babies
and the brutal murders
of light-skinned fathers

2.
I’ve been more consumed with how to make
the cover of local fag rags
than how to open the minds
of angry little boys
trotting loaded guns
Helpless in finding words
that will stop the blood
from spilling like secrets into soil
where great prophets are buried

3.
I return to the same spaces
where I once dealt drugs
a celebrated author gliding past velvet ropes
while my club kid friends are mostly dead
from an overdose or HIV-related symptoms
Marilyn wears the crown of thorns
while 4 out of the 5 weapons used to kill Columbine students
had been sold by the same police force
that came to their rescue
Not all terrorists have features too foreign
to be recognized in the mirror
Our mistakes are our responsibility

4.
The skyline outside my window
is the only thing that has changed
Men still rape women
and blame them for their weaknesses
Children are still molested
by the perversion of Catholic guilt
My ex-boyfriend still takes comfort
in the other white powder-
the one used solely to destroy himself
and those around him
Not the one used to ignite and create carnage
or mailbox fear

5.
It is said when skin is cut,
and then pressed together, it seals
but what about acid-burned skulls
engraved with the word ‘faggot’,
a foot bone with flesh
and other crushed body parts

6.
It was a gay priest that read last rites
to firefighters as towers collapsed
It was a gay pilot that crashed a plane
into Pennsylvania fields
It was a gay couple that was responsible
for the tribute of light
in memory of the fallen
Taliban leaders would bury them
to their necks
and tumble walls to crush their heads
Catholic leaders simply condemn them
as perverts
having offered nothing but sin
Queer blood is just rosaries scattered on tile

7.
Heroes do not always get heaven

8.
We all have wings . . .
some of us just don’t know why

Emanuel Xavier, War & Rumors of Wars, Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier, 2021, Queer Mojo Publishing

Born in Brooklyn, New York in May of 1970, Emanuel Xavier is an American poet, author, editor, and LBGTQ activist. Associated with the East Village art scene of New York City, his roots include the underground ballroom pageant culture that originated in New York and the Nuyorican movement, a cultural and intellectual movement of poets, writers, musicians and artists of Puerto Rican descent. In addition to his success as a poet and a writer, Xavier is a strong advocate for gay youth programs and Latino gay literature.

Abandoned by a father he never knew, Emanuel Xavier was raised by his Ecuadorian mother and her live-in boyfriend. He grew up during the 1970s in the mostly immigrant community of Bushwick, a part of the Brooklyn community district. Xavier’s primary education was at a prdominantly white elementary school in Queens, where he experienced racism. Banished from his home at the age of sixteen after revealing that he was gay, Xavier survived on the streets as an underage prostitute at the Christopher Street piers by the West Side Highway.

While surviving on the streets, Xavier also became involved with the 1980s ball scene. This LBGTQ+ subculture of African-Americans and Latinos organized their own pageants in opposition to the racism experienced in the established drag queen pageant. Racially integrated houses, essentially alternative families of supportive friends, many estranged from their original homes, competed in multiple categories for trophies and cash prizes. Xavier befriended many members of the trans world and was active with the House of Xtravaganza. In 1998 with the help of dancer and choreographer Will Ninja, he established the House of Xavier and the Glam Slam, an annual downtown arts event.

Emanuel Xavier returned to his birth home under strict rules and graduated from the Grover Cleveland High School in Queens. He studied at St. John’s University where he received his BFA in communications. Xavier relocated to the West Village where he supported himself dealing at the city’s gay nightclubs and working at the local A Different Light, at that time one of a chain of four LGBT bookstores. In 1997, Xavier self-published his first volume of poetry, a chapbook entitled “Pier Queen” whose classic poems “Tradiciones” and “Nueva York” launched his career as a spoken word artist. This published collection became a trailblazing early example of a new generation of queer Latino writers. Xavier’s 1999 semi-autobiographical novel “Christ Like”, despite a small press run, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and reprinted in 2009 by Rebel Satori Press.

In 2001 after the collapse of the World Trade Center, Xavier helped create Words to Comfort, a poetry benefit held a the New School in Manhattan. His poem “September Song”, included as part of the initial National September 11 Memorial & Museum website, was later published in his 2002 collection “Americano”. As an editor, Xavier was nominated for the Anthologies category of the Lambda Literary Award for his work on the 2005 “Bullets and Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry”. He published his third full-length collection “If Jesus Was Gay” in 2010 which was followed two years later by “Nefarious”. Both of these collections were selected by the American Library Association for its Over the Rainbow Book List.

Emanuel Xavier’s website, which includes video interviews, spoken word performances, and available copies of Xavier’s blacklisted poetry collections, can be found at: https://www.emanuelxavier.org

An interview between Emanuel Xavier and Charlie Vázquez, a founding member of Latino Rebels and the director of the Bronx Writers Center, can be found on the online Latino Rebels site located at: https://www.latinorebels.com/2016/07/25/radiance-gay-poet-emanuel-xavier-on-living-life-raw-and-pushing-back/

Franklin Abbott: “I Tried to Hold the Angel Underneath Me”

Photographers Unknown, I Tried to Hold the Angel Underneath Me

I tried to hold the angel underneath me
to still the beating of his wings
with the beating of my heart
to part his lips with the sharp pink dagger of my tongue
to taste his ambrosia breath as it comes out
hard and fast from the purple pump of his lungs
to touch whatever I can of his density
             somewhere between color and form
             an almost intangible shimmering
                          amber smoke
to whisper in the wind of his ear
I want you inside and out
more than ever have I wanted
and see in this soft moving cloud/memory/
             premonition/waking dream
like fight through water
his trembling yes
that falls down into the yoke of my being and then I know
                          this silken cocoon
finely woven with my family fears
will one day relax
and i no longer caterpillar
will fly high, sweet and fast
into his invisible embrace

Franklin Abbott, The Golden Shadow, Mortal Love: Collected Poems, 1971-1992, 1996

Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1950, Franklin Abbot is an American psychotherapist, writer, poet, artist and gay activist. His formative years were spent in the cities of Birmingham, Buffalo and Nashville. In his youth, Abbott was always very independent in exercising his own individuality and found an outlet for his creative energy in the Order of DelMolay, a character and leadership development organization for young men.

Abbott earned his undergraduate degree at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, and his Master of Social Work at the University of Georgia. After college, he worked at a facility for mentally challenged adults and children and became active in other social activities. In 1979, Abbott became one of Atlanta’s first openly gay professionals when he began private practice as a psychotherapist specializing in individual, couples and family therapy.

During the 1970s, Franklin Abbott became associated with America’s radical faerie community. This community was a loose, global organization of mostly male queer people who shunned assimilation into mainstream society and focused on environmental issues, the numerous aspects of spirituality, and anarchism. Today, one of its main centers in the United States is a two-hundred acre faerie sanctuary/safe queer space at Short Mountain in central Tennessee, just southeast of Nashville. For twenty years, Abbott spent time at the community where he served as poetry editor of its unofficial journal “RFD” and worked with the journal “Changing Men”.

A leading organizer in Atlanta’s gay community, Abbott has facilitated many self-help and healing workshops on gay identity and other issues. He co-founded the Atlanta Circle of Healing and, in 2008, established the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival, now a year-round series of events, as well as a partnership with the Decatur Book Festival . Throughout the years, Abbott has maintained a close correspondence with many poets and activists, among these were Harry Hay, a co-founder of the Mattachine Society; San Francisco Renaissance poet James Broughton; and Haitian-born American poet Assotto Saint, who was a key figure in LGBT and African-American art and culture.

Franklin Abbott edited and published three anthologies on the issues of men and gender: the 1987 “New Men, New Minds: Breaking Male Tradition” discussing how men of today are changing the traditional roles of masculinity, the 1990 “Men and Intimacy: Personal Accounts of the Dilemmas of Modern Male Sexuality”, and the 1993 “Boyhood: Growing Up Male”, boyhood narratives and poems by accomplished writers from around the world. Abbott is the author of two books of poetry: the 2009 “Pink Zinnia” and “Mortal Love: Selected Poems, 1971-1998” published in 1996. As a songwriter and poet, he released in 2017 a compact disc entitled “Don’t Go Back to Sleep”.

Note: A digital copy of Franklin Abbott’s “Mortal Love: Collected Poems, 1971-1992” can be found in the digital collections of the Georgia State University Library located at: https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/lgbtq/id/1547

A two-hour video of a 2018 interview between Franklin Abbott and film producer Kate Kunath on Abbott’s life and work can be found at the online site OUTWORDS which captures and preserves the stories of LBGTQ+ elders in order to build community and catalyze social change. The interview is located at: https://theoutwordsarchive.org/interview/abbott-franklin-2/