Tag: gay photography

Howard Roffman

The Photography of Howard Roffman

Born in Philadelphia in April of 1953, Howard Roffman is an American lawyer, marketing director, author and photographer. He is best known for his work on the Star Wars franchise as Lucasfilm’s head of Licensing and for his series of photographic art books of gay-positive images published in Berlin by Bruno Gmünder. 

The son of a Jewish family in a white middle-class section of Philadelphia, Howard Roffman’s interest in photography and awareness of his gay identity began early in his life. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and, later, the University of Florida College of Law where he received his Doctor of Law degree in 1977. Roffman served as a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and later at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a law firm in Washington DC.

As an author, Roffman spent years of research for his first nonfiction book, the 1976 “Presumed Guilty: Lee Harvey Oswald in the Assassination of President Kennedy”, a volume published by A.S. Barnes that examined the Warren Commission Report. His second nonfiction work, “Understanding the Cold War: A Study of the Cold War in the Interwar Period”, was published by the Associated University Press in 1977.  

Howard Roffman joined Lucasfilm in 1980 initially as legal counsel but was eventually promoted to general counsel. In 1986, he became the company’s Vice-President of Licensing, a position that included overseeing daily operations, identification of licensing partners, and the execution of agreements. Roffman was instrumental in the 1991 launch of the Star Wars novel franchise. Timothy Zahn’s “Heir to the Empire”, the first of this novel series, was on The New York Times Best Seller list for nineteen weeks. 

In 1999, Roffman was appointed President of Lucas Licensing, a subsidiary of Lucasfilm that owns the licensing rights to the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” film series. In this position, he acted as Executive Producer for the highly successful “Star Wars: In Concert” tour, a series of concerts featuring a choir and symphony orchestra synced with footage from the Star War saga films displayed on a three-story LED screen. 

In early 2012, Howard Roffman became a Senior Advisor at Lucasfilm; however in the latter part of the year, he returned to full-time management of the Star Wars franchise. Roffman’s leadership with Star Wars licensing has been credited for redefining the licensed merchandise business. His work became the template used by many major media companies, including Disney which acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. Chosen by Brandweek magazine as the 1997 Entertainment Marketer of the Year, Roffman was inducted into the Licensing Hall of Fame in 2012. 

In 1991, Roffman began a career in photography through his meeting a young gay San Francisco couple who were seeking a photographer. By introducing his work to people on the street as well as at fairs and malls, he developed his skills and gradually built an impressive body of work. Over the last three decades, Roffman has published twenty-three volumes of portraiture photography and numerous magazine articles and calendars. After many years of shooting black and white film, he presented his first collection of digital color images in January of 2009, “Private Images, Bel Ami”, published through Bruno Gmünder.

Howard Roffman serves as the Executive Vice President of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Film Society. He has aided in the financing of several acclaimed documentary film projects. Among these were directors David Weissman and Bill Weber’s 2011 “We Were Here”, which illuminated the personal and community issues raised by the AIDS epidemic, and directors Jeff Orlowski, Jerry Aronson and Paula DuPré Pesmen’s 2012 “Chasing Ice”, a multi-year chronicle of the earth’s melting glaciers. 

Howard Roffman’s photographic work is represented by Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art, a gallery that specializes in vintage and contemporary photography: https://wesseloconnor.com

Notes: The September 2019 issue of the online Metrosource magazine has an article on Howard Roffman’s photographic career at: https://metrosource.com/howard-roffman-gay-nude-photographer-star-wars/

Medium: Human Stories & Ideas has a short article on Howard Roffman and a link to a 2017 video interview entitled “Messing with a Classic” in which he discusses Lucasfilm and his work with “Star Wars” saga: https://medium.com/@wayofthewarriorx/howard-roffman-tv-interview-guy-who-was-in-charge-of-the-eu-l-l-ca33735117d2

Second Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “Pictures of Fred”, 2000, Bruno Gmünder, Berlin, Germany

Third Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “John, Gary and Kris by the Stoop”, 1995, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 25, 36 x 36 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “Three”, January 1997, Second Edition, Bruno Gmünder, Berlin, Germany

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

Photographers Unknown, An Oracle Done Hiding At Last

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographers Unknown, The Greatest Glory Will Be Theirs Who Fought

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographers Unknown, Behind Its Music Laughs the Mouth of Pan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Photographers Unknown, My Bird-Wrung Youth

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick Anderson, My Bird-Wrung Youth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian Young: “I Was Watching Jimmy—“

Photographers Unknown, I Was Watching Jimmy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terence Winch: “We Have Judged Our World”

Photographers Unknown, We Have Judged Our World

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

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

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

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

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

Terence Winch, Urban Turtles, 2008, PoemHunter Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stanley Stellar

Photography by Stanley Stellar

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1945, Stanley Stellar is an American photographer whose five decades of work captured the beauty and vitality of the LBGTQ community of New York City. His work followed its life through the 1969 Stonewall Riots, the first Gay Pride Parades and evolving Gay Liberation Movement, as well as the realities of the HIV/AIDs epidemic. As a participant and a documenter, Stellar produced works that have become historic and cultural references for both the young and old.

Stanley Stellar studied photography and graphic design at New York City’s Parsons School of Design, one of the oldest schools of art and design in New York City. Upon graduation, he began work as art director for the advertising agency Art Direction. Stellar’s career during the 1970s  included countless book designs as well as editorial design and art direction for numerous magazines and publishing houses.

Stellar’s purchase of a Nikon camera in 1976 began his career as a photographer. Among the artists who influenced him were fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar known for his black and white portraits, and Bruce Davidson, a regular photographer for “Life” and “Look” magazines. Stellar, however, developed his own style and began photographing unequivocally gay images of men that reflected the world he knew. 

Stanley Stellar’s work concentrated on the everyday life of gay men in New York City. He initially began taking street photographs of men with tattoos on their arms, as an inquiry about a tattoo made the request for a photograph easier. Stellar shot many images of gay men walking and gathering on Christopher Street as well as meeting at the abandoned warehouses and piers in Manhattan’s West Village.

One of Stellar’s most iconic street photographs, the first to be mass-produced on postcards, was a 1970 photo of a young man, who after having his arm tattoos photographed, lifted his shirt to show two bright bird tattoos on each chest muscle. Taken at a time when tattooing was illegal in New York City, this single shot by Stellar became a homoerotic image nobody had ever made before.

Stanley Stellar’s early design experiences, essentially photo-journalism, are apparent in all of his work; they all  display a simplicity of composition, recurrence of themes, and honest unembellished depictions of the subject. Throughout most of Stellar’s years of documentation, homosexuality was still illegal in many states; it was not until 2003 that all laws against same-sex activity were invalidated. Stellar’s photographs captured the confidence, intimacy and the energy of the LBGTQ community through all those difficult years.

Stellar’s photography has been shown in many galleries throughout the United States and Europe and has been featured in many international magazines. From May to July in 2011, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art featured an exhibition of Stellar’s work entitled “Stanley Stellar: Photographer”. This exhibition coincided with the release of Stellar’s 2011 publication “The Beauty of All Men”, curated by author and publisher Peter Weiermair. In 2018, Stellar published a second collection of photographs entitled “Into the Light: Photographs of the NYC Gay Pride Day from the 70s Till Today”, through the Bruno Gmeunder Press.

Represented by the Kapp Kapp Gallery on Manhattan’s Walker Street, Stanley Stellar had three solo exhibitions in the gallery. The first show was the 2019 “Photographs 1979-1992” which was followed in 2020 by “Night Life”, an exhibition of twenty-four images documenting New York’s queer nightlife between 1981 and 1992. Stellar’ third exhibition with Kapp Kapp was the 2022 “Stanley Stellar: The Piers (1976-1983)” which featured a suite of unseen photographs of the Christopher Street Piers. The Piers exhibition was held at the grand opening of Kapp Kapp’s Tribeca gallery. 

“When I was an editorial art director in the 70s, I used to think I wanted to design other people’s photographs graphically. Possess them in that way. Then in 1976, it became clear to me that I wanted to take my own images of what I had never freely seen, of who and what I was hungry to see, to record my existence through my individual vision of it. 

A combination of masculinity, detail, individuality and human vulnerability catches my eye. Men who are at home within themselves, alive in their ability to share some spark of their humanity with me. Men who have an inner life and an inner light that I recognize within me, within both of us.” —-Stanley Stellar

Notes: Stanley Stellar’s website with archived images and contact information is located at: https://www.stellarnyc.com

Kapp Kapp Gallery’s article on Stanley Stellar’s exhibitions can be found at: https://www.kappkapp.com/artists/stanley-stellar/media

David McGillivray’s 2023 article entitled “Six Pictures by Iconic Photographer Stanley Stellar that Captured Male Beauty in All Its Glory” is located at the Attitude section of Yahoo News: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/6-pictures-iconic-photographer-https://uk.news.yahoo.com/6-pictures-iconic-photographer-stanley-130415741.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAIwNAmykxGP71NvJgEczfNbjN6iGpmJ3cDlrIaDDOBhi0Wq4U-

New York-based writer Miss Rosen has written a short article about Stanley Stellar on her photography site Blind located at: https://www.blind-magazine.com/stories/new-york-queer-love-on-the-west-side-piers/

Tony Wilkes’s January 2022 article on Stanley Stellar for the online art magazine AnOther, can be found at: https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/13813/a-lost-utopia-stanley-stellar-s-portraits-at-new-york-s-gay-piers-kapp-kapp

Top Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Portrait of Stanley Stellar”, 1981, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, “Late Afternoon”, 1980, The Piers Series,  Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, Untitled, circa 2000s, Color Print

Fourth Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, “Danny, September”, 1982, The Piers Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, “At a Pay Phone on the Corner of Christopher and Bleecker Streets, NYC”, 1981, Gelatin Silver Print

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

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.