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

Photographers Unknown, My Bird-Wrung Youth

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick Anderson, My Bird-Wrung Youth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian Young: “I Was Watching Jimmy—“

Photographers Unknown, I Was Watching Jimmy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jimmy DeSana

The Photography of Jimmy DeSana

Born in Detroit in November of 1949, Jimmy DeSana was an American artist and a key figure in New York City’s East Village punk art and New Wave scene in the 1970s and 1980s. His work, as a conceptual artist, conveyed that ers’s radical spirit and initiated a new approach to photographing the human body.

Born James Arthur DeSana, DeSana spent his early years in Atlanta, Georgia. His interest in photography began as a teenager through photographing the city’s suburban landscapes and both friends and acquaintances. DeSana studied at the University of Georgia where he he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1972. For his thesis, he printed the 1972 series “101 Nudes”, a collection of fifty-six halftone black and white photographs of nude and partially nude figures posed inside or just outside houses. The figures, friends as well as himself, were seen from different viewpoints and sometimes only partially. Those partial anatomical views were reminiscent of earlier abstract work created by visual artist Man Ray.

In 1973, Jimmy DeSana relocated to New York City and settled in the vibrant East Village area of Manhattan. As a street photographer doing commercial assignments for magazines as well as occasional record-album commissions, he shot the musicians who habituated late-night clubs and bars. These portraits included punk and New Wave figures such as Debbie Harry, Billy Idol, Richard Hell, Laurie Anderson and others. This commercial work supported DeSana’s photographic artwork in the studio. He was also active in the new correspondence art movement in which artists mailed their work through chain letters. Mailed out in 1973, DeSana’s nude self-portrait was later featured in a 1974 magazine published by the Canada’s conceptual artist collective, General Idea.

In 1978, DeSana’s photographs of the human body were shown in Washington D.C. at the “Punk Art” exhibition sponsored by the Washington Project for the Arts. In 1979, he had his first exhibition at the Stefanotti Gallery on West 57th Street in New York City. In the same year, DeSana published his first collection entitled “Submission”. a volume of surreal, queer and humorous images that situated his life and art within the queer and counterculture experiences. The published volume was created in collaboration with author William S. Burroughs.

In 1980, Jimmy DeSana began to experiment with color photography. His “Suburban” series continued his use of human bodies twisted into androgynous sculptural forms that challenged the viewer. In this series, DeSana began to also photograph commonly found objects in staged surrealistic settings.The images of this exploration of sexuality, gender and consumer issues had almost a nightclub atmosphere with their powerful, almost garish, colors of vibrant greens, pinks and mauves. To create his staged tableaus, DeSana used tungsten lights that imbued the surrealistic scenes with unnatural pigments.

Shortly after 1985, DeSana was diagnosed with HIV and began to experience its symptoms. Continuing his work, he began the “Remainders” series that marked a move from the human body toward abstracted objects. This series featured everyday objects, such as balloons and aluminum foil, seated in dreamlike atmospheres lit in spectral hues.

Jimmy DeSana died, at the age of forty, from an AIDS-related illness at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on the twenty-seventh of July in 1990. He left his estate to photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons who, in collaboration with Salon 94 Gallery, managed the estate for nearly a decade. The DeSana estate is currently co-managed by Simmons and New York City’s contemporary P.P.O.W. Gallery, one of Manhattan’s longest-running galleries now based in the city’s Tribeca district.

The photography volume “Jimmy DeSana: Suburban” was published by Del Monico Books/Brooklyn Museum in 2015 and included texts by filmmaker Laurie Simmons as well as art curators Dan Nadel and Elisabeth Sussman. A 2022 edition entitled “Jimmy DeSana: Submission” was published, also by Del Monico, with texts by Simmons, author Drew Sawyer, and Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak. The first museum retrospective of DeSana’s work, curated by Simmons and Drew Sawyer, was held in late 2022 at the Brooklyn Museum.

Notes: All images in the header group, unless noted otherwise, are from the Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Top Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Smoke: Self-Portrait”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Second Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Cowboy Boots”, 1984, Vintage Cibachrome Print, 48.3 x 32.4 cm, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Third Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Cardboard”, 1985, Silver Dye Bleach Print, 48.3 x 32.4 cm, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, Untitled (Self-Portrait with Graduation Cap), 1978, Polaroid Photo, Diego Cortez No Wave Collection, Cornell University

Terence Winch: “We Have Judged Our World”

Photographers Unknown, We Have Judged Our World

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

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

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

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

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

Terence Winch, Urban Turtles, 2008, PoemHunter Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacques J. Rancourt: “Where to Begin?”

Photographers Unknown, Where to Begin?

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

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

than the dark night sky.

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

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

that Sam describes for me.

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

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

of men who may
or may not have been-

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

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

sorry, sorry, sorry.

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

the cluster of small towns
I come from,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Hamberger: “He Bequeths the Gift of Breath”

Photographers Unknown, He Bequeths the Gift of Breath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Keene: “Murmurs Linger After the Blue Frost”

Photographers Unknown, Murmurs Linger After the Blue Frost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Notes: 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

Auteur Shutter: Studies in Photography has an excellent article entitled “Czanara (Raymond Carrance): Homoerotic Surrealist Photography”, including various reference links, on its site: https://auteurshutter.wordpress.com/2025/07/04/czanara-raymond-carrance-exploring-homoerotic-surrealist-photography/

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