Tag: gay photography

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.

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

Jaime Gil de Biedma: “How Many Times Do I Remember From You”

Photographers Unknown, How Many Times Do I Remember From You

Do I ever remember
certain nights in June of that year,
almost blurry, of my adolescence
(it was in nineteen hundred it seems to me
forty nine)
because in that month
I always felt a restlessness, a small anguish
the same as the heat that began,
nothing else
than the special sound of the air
and a vaguely affective disposition.
They were the incurable nights
and fever.
The high school hours alone
and the untimely book
next to the wide open balcony (the street
freshly watered it disappeared
below, among the lighted foliage)
without a soul to put in my mouth.
How many times do I remember
from you, far away
nights of the month of June, how many times
tears came to my eyes, tears
for being more than a man, how much I wanted
morir
or dreamed of selling myself to the devil,
you never listened to me.
But also
life holds us because precisely
it is not how we expected it.

Jaime Gil de Biedma, Nights of the Month of June, Fellow Travelers, 1959

Born in November of 1929 in Nava de la Asunción, Jaime Gil de Biedma y Alba was a Spanish poet. He is considered, among his readers, one of the most proficient Anglophiles in the field of contemporary literature originating from the Iberian Peninsula. Gil de Biedma belonged to the “Generation of ’50”, a group of poets born from the cultivated social realism that arose in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. He introduced new techniques into traditional Spanish literature through his use of both dramatic monologue and a diary form of intimate introspection.

Born into a Catalan family with strong conventional values, Jaime Gil de Biedma studied law both in Madrid and Salamanca. As a student in Madrid, he became acquainted with intellectuals such as Gabriel Ferrater and Carlos Barral, both of whom became influential Spanish poets. Gil de Biedma’s lifelong adherence to Anglo-American culture became firmly established by his Oxford studies as a law graduate in 1953 with his reading of works by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender, who would go on to become United States Poet Laureate in 1965.

Gil de Biedma was also fascinated with the work of Spanish poet Luis Cernuda, a member of the “Generation of ’27” who went into self-exile during the Spanish Civil War. Although separated in age by twenty-seven years, both men had several traits in common: great respect for lyrical English, upbringing in a conventional bourgeois family, openness in regard to their homosexuality, and opposition to the Franco dictatorship. Gil de Biedma exchanged many letters with Cernuda and dedicated his 1959 poem “Nights of the Month of June” to him. In the fall of 1962, one year before Cernuda’s death in Mexico, he published a strong tribute to Cernuda that placed him above all other poets of the 1950s.

In regard to his poetry, Jaime Gil de Biedma is a member of Spain’s “Generation of ’50” which included such poets as José Ángel Valente, Francisco Brines Bañó, and Ángel González. The poets in this group, while focused on social issues, were all aware of the literary character of their verse. Partly due to Luis Cernuda’s influence, they introduced to Spain what is now known as poetry of experience, an immediate intellectual experience presented through narration by a fictional-self.

In his work, Gil de Biedma created bridges between English and his birth language of Spanish. He brought his poetry closer to the language spoken on the street by incorporating older Spanish poetic forms such as sestina. Attributed to the twelfth-century troubador Arnaut Daniel, sestina is a fixed verse form containing six stanzas of six lines each, normally followed by a three-line envoi, essentially a postscript in the form of a ballad or dedication. A perfectionist in the composition of his work, Gil de Biedma believed the essential experience in the first reading of a poem was not the understanding of the poem but rather the feeling the verses produce in the reader. The understanding will manifest, sooner or later, when the reader asks why he was so affected.

Gil de Biedma published his first work in 1952, “Versos a Carlos Barral”, a series of poems dedicated to his friend Carlos Barral, poet and literary publisher. This was followed in 1953 by “Segun Sentencia del Tiempo (According to the Judgement of Time)”. In his early work, Gil de Biedma strongly criticized the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The title for his 1952 “Compañeros de Viaje (Travel Companions)” referred to a Trotskyist expression for Communist sympathizers. By the early 1950s, Franco was either suppressing or tightly controlling all political opponents across the spectrum, from communist to liberal democrats and Catalan separatists.

In 1965, Jaime Gil de Biedma published a collection of love poems imbued with eroticism entitled “Un Favor de Venus” which was followed by another socially-themed collection, the 1966 “Moralidades (Moralities)”. In 1969, he published his last collection of poems, “Poemas Póstumos (Posthumous Poems)” in which a disappointed Gil de Biedma confronted himself and the facades he had erected around his personal identity. After this volume, he published poems in various literary journals and wrote his 1974 memoir “Diario de un Artista Seriamente Enfermo (Diary of a Seriously Ill Artist)”. Diary entries from February and April of 1960 reveal that Gil de Biedma was already rereading his 1956 notes; in 1971, he began a lengthy and meticulous reconstruction of the written material.

As a homosexual during a strongly conservative period in Spain, Gil de Biedma was essentially forced to lead a double life. As part of a conservative family and, since 1955, holding an important position in the family’s Compañia General de Tabacos de Filipinas, he was a discreet and respectable executive. In the company of close friends, Gil de Biedma was openly gay with a quick wit and sharp tongue. At different times, he had suffered discrimination and blackmail. Gil de Biedma’s poetry was a reflection of this duality as, while he explored themes of love, romance and sex, he never disclosed the gender of the loved one.

Even at the end of his life, Jaime Gil de Biedma was adamant about keeping his poetry neutral. After learning that a journalist wanted to analyze his work from a gay literary point of view, he was distressed and went through great trouble to ensure that the journalist would not take that approach. Ten years before his death, Gil de Biedma stopped writing poetry. He had decided that the persona of the poet James Gil de Biedma had nothing left to say and, subsequently, abandoned that role in literary society. Three years after being diagnosed in 1987, Jaime Gil de Biedma died in Barcelona on the eighth of January in 1990 from complications due to AIDS.

Notes: For the thirtieth anniversary of Jaime Gil de Biedma’s death, Javier Gil Martin, a collaborator of the Adiós Cultural magazine, wrote an article on Gil de Biedma’s “Posthumous Poems”. This article can be found at the Adiós Cultural site located at: https://www-revistaadios-es.translate.goog/articulo/165/JAIME-GIL-DE-BIEDMA-/-POEMAS-POSTUMOS.html?_x_tr_sl=es&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc

Director Sigfrid Monleón’s 2009 biographical drama “El Cónsul de Sodoma (The Consul of Sodom) is a journey through the work and life of Catalan poet Jaime Gil de Biedma. It premiered at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 2010. The film received five nominations at the Goya Awards, including Best Lead Actor (Jordi Mollá) and a Gaudi Awards nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Jordi Mollá).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glenway Wescott: “The Very Apocalypse of Fertility”

Photographers Unknown, The Very Apocalypse of Fertility

“For Alwyn’s grandfather, who was known as “the greatest talker in the country,” used words which no one else understood, words which he did not understand, and words which do not exist, to swell a passionate theme, to confound his neighbors in an argument, and for their own sake. He would say, for example, “My farm was the very apocalypse of fertility, but the renter has rested on his oars till it is good for nothing,” or “Manifest the bounty to pass the salt shaker in my direction.” Something of the Bible, something of an Irish inheritance, something of a liar’s anxiety, made of his most ordinary remark a strange and wearisome oratory.” 

—Glenway Wescott, The Grandmothers: A Family Portrait, 1927, Harper & Brothers

Born in Kawaskum, Wisconsin in April of 1901, Glenway Wescott was an American poet, essayist, and novelist. The oldest of six children born to Bruce and Josephine Wescott, he was an openly gay figure of the 1920s American expatriate literary community in Paris. Wescott, who socialized with Ernest Hemingway in Paris, is considered the model for the young novelist character, Robert Prentiss, in Hemingway’s 1926 “The Sun Also Rises”.  

Upon his graduation from Wisconsin public schools in 1917, Glenway Wescott enrolled on a scholarship at the University of Chicago. He was a member of its literary circle which included such future writers as Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Arthur Yvor Winters. In the spring of 1919 at a Poetry Club meeting, Wescott met Monroe Wheeler, the twenty-year old founder of the Poetry journal. Their relationship together as a couple would last for almost seventy years until Wescott’s death. Both of their careers grew through these years, Wescott as a published writer and Wheeler as a publisher and the museum director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

In the later part of 1919, Wescott contracted the Spanish flu and withdrew from the university. For health reasons, he relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico where he stayed for several months with friend and poet Arthur Yvor Winters. While recuperating, Wescott produced his first series of poems that was published by Wheeler in 1920 under the title “The Bittems”. He and Wheeler traveled to Europe in the fall of 1921, first staying  in Sussex with English writer and critic Ford Madox Ford before continuing onto Paris. 

With Wheeler’s return to New York City, Glenway Wescott traveled across Europe in 1923 employed as a factotum for the family of banker and philanthropist Henry Goldman. Returning to Wheeler in New York, he finished his first novel, “The Apple of the Eye”, a reflection on his Wisconsin childhood that was published in 1924.  In the following year, the couple took up residence in the French Riviera town of Villefranche-sur-Mer where they quickly became members of its literary and artistic circles. Among  their friends were dancer Isadora Duncan, German pianist Elly Ney, and artist Jean Cocteau. .

In 1925, Wescott published a second collection of poetry entitled “Natives of Rock: XX Poems”. The following year, the couple met George Platt Lynes, a minister’s son from New Jersey who, living in France, was preparing for college. Mutually infatuated, the three men would share a home for seventeen years. Wescott published his second work of fiction in 1927, “The Grandmothers: A Family Portrait”, a series of portraits drawn from his early memories in Wisconsin. This novel won the Harper Prize for that year; the critics’ praise for the best-selling work gained Wescott further recognition. Wescott published a 1928 collection of short stories entitled “Good-bye Wisconsin” that dwelt on the oppressive nature of Midwest life.

By 1930, Wescott, Wheeler and Lynes had settled in Paris, where Wheeler and the wealthy American heiress Barbara Harrison established Harrison of Paris, a book publishing enterprise with the goal of producing high quality limited editions. Although not officially a partner, Wescott provided literary advice and selected manuscripts for publication. Their first venture was a 1930 edition of Shakespeare’s poem “Venus and Adonis” with a cover design by Wescott. After a successful five years, the press was closed in 1935 due to prohibitive cost of production.

After publishing his 1930 novella “The Babe’s Bed”, Glenway Wescott wrote two underwhelming works of nonfiction, the 1932 “Fear and Trembling” and the 1933 “Calendar of Saints for Nonbelievers”. In 1935 with the closing of the Harrison press, he and Wheeler moved back to the United States where they shared a series of Manhattan apartments with now-noted photographer George Platt Lynes. The next year, the three men alternated living between New York and a farm house, named Stone-Blossom, on Wescott’s brother Lloyd’s dairy farm property in Union Township, New Jersey. 

In 1940, Wescott published his most critically-praised novel “The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story”. The short novel describes the event of a single afternoon in the life of Alwyn Tower, an expatriate novelist living in Paris. It is still considered one of the finest American short novels, on par with Faulkner’s “The Bear”. After his 1946 novel “Apartment in Athens”, Wescott ceased writing fiction and concentrated on publishing essays and editing the works of others. His last full-length book was the 1962 “Images of Truth”. Beginning in 1938, he worked in earnest on his journals documenting his life and thoughts. One volume of this extensive work was published posthumously as “Continual Lessons” in 1990.

In 1959, Glenway Wescott and Wheeler moved into a two-story farmhouse, Haymeadows, on Lloyd Wescott’s new farm in Rosemont, New Jersey. On the twentieth of February in 1987, Glenway Wescott died of a stroke in Rosemont and was buried in the small farmer’s graveyard behind a rock wall at Haymeadows. Two days after Wescott’s death, Wheeler had a stroke that left him blind and partially paralyzed. He died eighteen months later on August 14th in 1988 and was buried alongside Wescott. 

Notes: George Platt Lynes ended his relationship with Wescott and Wheeler in 1943, after falling in love with studio assistant George Tichenor. After a long career as a successful and renowned photographer, Lynes was diagnosed with lung cancer in May of 1955. He took one final trip to Europe and, upon his return to New York City, lived with his brother’s family. Wescott was at Lynes’s bedside when he passed away in December of 1955. 

The Monroe Wheeler Papers, consisting of correspondence, manuscripts and photographs, and the Glenway Wescott Papers, containing notebooks, journals, and correspondence, are housed at the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities of Yale University’s Department of History. 

Chelsea Station, an online magazine devoted to gay literature, has an article written by author Vinton Rafe McCabe entitled “Glenway Wescott: The Man Behind the Writer” that discusses Wescott’s “A Heaven of Words: Last Journals 1956-1984” and “A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories”, both posthumously published. The article can be found at: https://www.chelseastationmagazine.com/2014/05/glenway-wescott-the-man-behind-the-writer.html

Top Insert Image: George Platt Lynes, “Glenway Wescott” Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Bernard Perlin, “Glenway Wescott and Wheeler, Stone Blossom Farmhouse, Hampton, New Jersey” circa 1947, Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: George Platt Lynes, “Glenway Wescott”, 1938, Gelatin Silver Print, David Hunter McAlpin Fund

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “George Wescott and Monroe Wheeler, Nice, France”, 1927, Film Clip Shots, From “When We Were Three””, 1998, Arena Editions

William Dickey: “The Silent Traffic of Bystanders”

Photographers Unknown, The Silent Traffic of Bystanders

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

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

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

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

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

William Dickey, The Death of John Berryman, January 1996

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas A. Powell: “The Spokes of Fortune’s Wheel in Constant Turn”

Photographers Unknown, The Spokes of fortune’s Wheel in Constant Turn

I have had to learn the simplest things
        last. Which made for difficulties….
                                           –Charles Olson

We know from accounts of the judgment of Paris how Love took
first:
the apple burnished by–it turns out–her own husband, working
the bellows,
forging to Discord’s specifications, her need to break the
spaghetti strands
of marriage, her undiluted vitriol, that oversaw his flux and
foundry,
guided the sparking hammer to its urgent deeds.

Spoils of war.

Power, undeterred and wily as it always is, the figural eye and its
agency,
took gladly the second chair, from which advantage
machinations could be seen.
Advised, conferred, deployed the second wave of ships, provided
mercenary aid
to every side and fanned the air, and made her counsel with all
sides, supporting
every one and none, out-waiting tides.

If we believe the Greeks, the spokes of Fortune’s wheel in
constant turn would allow
the last to be the first–beatitudes bestowed upon the losing
side,
a draught of time in which the wily ones, by their equine portage
made
the mind the victor over Love’s inconstancy and strife,
and, over brute acts, gave thought dominion in a golden age. But
that’s just a myth.

Wisdom, you are the last to whom I turn. Not for your spear,
fashioned in that same fire as all bright jealous objects of desire,
But for you shield.
Protect the least of us. Or lift me from this battlefield,
and take me home.

D. A. Powell, To Last, 2019

Born in Albany, Georgia in May of 1963, Douglas A. Powell is an American poet. After finishing his primary education in the California town of Olivehurst, he relocated to Santa Rosa where he entered Sonoma State University. Powell earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1991 and his Master of Arts in 1993. After completing his graduate work, he studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa and received his Master of Fine Art in 1996. 

After his formal studies, D. A. Powell began a career as a poet and university professor. He has taught at New York’s Columbia University, Sonoma State University, San Francisco State University and the University of Iowa. He also served as the Biggs-Copeland Lecturer of Poetry at Harvard University. In 2004, Powell left Harvard to take a teaching position in the English department at the University of San Francisco. 

Powell’s work blends the mythology of gay culture with his own distinctive voice and personal experiences. His first exposure to poetry was through Dudley Randall’s anthology “The Black Poets”. An early exposrue to such authors as Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange and Alice Walker also played an influential role in Powell’s development. While exploring local bookstores, he came across T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste land and Other Poems”. Eliot’s poetic  influence can be seen in Powell’s use of fragmented life experiences later reconstructed in verse on paper.  

In his work, D. A. Powell mixes both conventional and non-conventional techniques of poetic format. There were no titles to his early poems; the poems’ working titles were their first lines. Similar to the work of E. E. Cummings, the first letter of a new sentence is not capitalized. Shifting between popular culture and more complicated themes like religion and AIDS, Powell uses rhetorical devices, such as puns, to serve as bridges between these separate areas of experience. Open typographical spaces are often inserted in the middle of his lines that in effect lend pause to the cadence of the poem.

Powell’s first published collection was the 1998 “Tea”, a work he started the day he arrived in Iowa for grad school. This early work gathered reference material from both high and low culture: Whitman’s poetry and biblical heroes to Hollywood romances and Batman’s Robin. In 2000, Powell published “Lunch”, layered poems of memories from childhood and adolescence fractured by his adulthood and diagnosis of HIV. His third collection, the last of this trilogy, was the 2004 “Cocktails”, a contemporary Divine Comedy composed from witty and eloquent poems born of the AIDS pandemic. “Lunch’ was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and “Cocktails” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

D. A. Powell’s 2009 “Chronic” was a work of wildly varied subject matter with effects drawn from contemporary free verse. The poems contained colloquial clichés, odd punctuation, parenthetical marks, lack of capitalization and quotes without any ascribed credit. Among the poems included in this volume were  “clown burial in winter”, “clutch and pumps”, and “cancer inside a little sea”. In February of 2010, Powell won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his work. “Chronic” also won the 2009 California Book Award. Powell’s next work “Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys”, published in 2012, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for that year. 

Powell was made a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011 and in 2019 received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Notes: Additional poems by D. A. Powell can be found on the PoemHunter website located at: https://www.poemhunter.com/d-a-powell/

There is a more comprehensive article on D. A. Powell’s poetry collections, entitled “D. A. Powell’s Unruly Elegies” and written by Christopher Richards, in the online New Yorker Magazine that is worth reading. This Page-Turner article can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/d-a-powell-poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographers Unknown, A Graven Image of Desire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographers Unknown, We All Have Wings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7.
Heroes do not always get heaven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographers Unknown, I Tried to Hold the Angel Underneath Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Trinidad: “My Spirits Are Lifted”

Photographers Unknown, My Spirits Are Lifted

Depressed because my
book wasn’t nominated
for a gay award,

I lie on my couch
watching—not listening to—
the O.J. trial.

Byron, who senses
something’s wrong, hides under the
bed until Ira

comes home, carrying
a bouquet of beautifully
wrapped tulips. I press

the mute button. “This
is your prize,” he says. “Guess what
they’re called.” A smile in-

voluntarily
overcomes my frown. “What?” “Red
Parade.” “That sounds like

the name of an old
Barbie outfit,” I say. “That’s
exactly what I

told the florist. And
you know what she told me?” “What?”
“When she was a girl,

she turned her Barbie
into Cleopatra: gave
her an Egyptian

haircut and painted
her nipples blue.” “How cool.” “Yeah,
but now she thinks that

her doll would be worth
eight hundred dollars if she
hadn’t messed it up.”

Once in water, the
tulips begin to unclench—
ten angry fists. Their

colors are fierce, like
Plath’s “great African cat,” her
“bowl of red blooms.” Poor

Sylvia, who so
desperately wanted awards,
and only won them

after she was dead.
Byron jumps up, Ira sits
down and massages

my feet. “You guys.” My
spirits are lifted by their
tulips, kisses, licks.

David Trinidad, Red Parade, Plasticville, Turtle Point Press, 2000

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1953, David Trinidad is a contemporary American poet know for his masterful use of popular-culture references in his work. He attended California State University at Northridge where, as an undergraduate, he took Introduction to Literature with poet Ann Stanford. It was Stanford who introduced Trinidad to the genre of found poetry in 1972. 

Trinidad earned his Bachelor of Arts in English at California State University in 1979. Relocating to New York City in 1988, he studied at Brooklyn College where he earned in 1990 his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Among the poets who have influenced Trinidad are Ann Stanford, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, Ted Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara. In particular, the autobiographical style of such poets as Sexton, whose work he discovered in 1975,  and O’Hara can be seen in Trinidad’s work.

 While at Northridge, Trinidad edited its literary journal “Angel’s Flight” and became friends with poet Rachel Sherwood, fellow student and co-founder of “Angel’s Flight”. An automobile accident in July of 1979 severely injured Trinidad and proved fatal for Rachel Sherwood. Her friends established the annual Rachel Sherwood Poetry Prize at Northridge in her honor; Trinidad also created the Sherwood Press and published, in collaboration with Yarmouth Press, the 1981 book of Sherwood’s poetry “Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening”. 

In the early 1980s, David Trinidad was one of a group of poets active at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California. The group, which included such writers as Dennis Cooper, Amy Gerstler and Bob Flanagan, gave readings and published literary books and magazines such as “Little Caesar Magazine” and “Barney: The Modern Stone-Age Magazine”. Through interchange of ideas and poems between the collective’s members, Trinidad met other poets such as Tim Dlugos from New York and Elaine Equi from Chicago. 

While living in New York City, Trinidad was active in The Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church from 1990 to 1991 and in The Writer’s Voice at the West Side YMCA Center for the Arts. In 1991, he published his first book of poems, entitled “Pavane”.  Trinidad has authored seventeen volumes of poetry which include the 1985 “Monday, Monday”; the 1987 “November”;  the 1994 “Answer Song”, which includes the more focused and intimate poem “Driving Back from New Haven” based on a conversation with AIDS-diagnosed poet Tim Dlugos; and the 2007 “Late Show” which contains the long prose poem “Classic Layer Cakes”. Trinidad’s most recent work is the 2022 “Digging to Wonderland: Memory Pieces”. 

In addition to his own work, David Trinidad has edited several collections of Tim Dlugos’s poetry: the 1996 “Powerless: Selected Poems 1973-1990”; the Lambda Literary Award winner “A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos” published in 2011; and the 2021 “New York Diary”. He has also edited collections of works by Ann Stanford and Emily Dickinson, as well as co-edited the 2007 anthology “Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry”. 

Since 1996, Trinidad has been with the Writers at Rutgers Reading Series  of the Department of English at Rutgers University and the Masters of Fine Arts Creative Writing Program at New York City’s The New School for Social Research. Trinidad’s awards include, among others, the Michael Tuck Foundation Fellowship from Brooklyn College, New York’s Fund for Poetry Award, Blue Mountain Center Fellowship from New York, and an artist’s fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. David Trinidad’s personal papers are housed at Fales Library at New York University.

Notes: In 2015, a candid interview with David Trinidad was conducted by educator and lecturer Bryan R. Monte for the Amsterdam Quarterly which publishes and promotes writing and art in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This informative interview can be found at the Amsterdam Quarterly’s site: https://www.amsterdamquarterly.org/aq_issues/aq14-radio-tv-film/david-trinidad-straighforward-and-candid/

The black and white image of three tulips was taken by the award-winning English photographer Dianna Jazwinski who is based in West Sussex. An editorial photographer, she specializes in gardens, plants, forals for horticultural magazines, and books and catalogues. Jazwinski’s website is located at: https://diannajazwinski.co.uk

Reinaldo Arenas: “As Long As the Sky Whirls”

Photographers Unknown, As Long As the Sky Whirls

For Lázaro Gómez

As long as the sky whirls
You will be my redemption and my doom,
magnetic vision,
lily in underwear,
salvation and madness
every night waiting.
As long as the sky whirls
no infernal could be a stranger
because I have to take care that that would not harm you,
No joy would go by inadvertent
Because in some way I have to reveal it to you,
As long as
the sky
whirls
you will be the truth of myself,
the song and the venom,
the danger and the ecstasies,
the vigil and the sleep,
the dread and the miracle.
As long as the sky whirls . . . but perhaps the sky whirls?
Well: as long as the sky exists.

As long as
the sky
exists
you will be my pain most noticeable,
my loneliness most tragic
my bewilderment unanimous
my perpetuous silence
and my absolute consolation.
As long as the sky exists . . . but perhaps the sky exists?
Well: as long as you yourself exist.
As long as
you yourself
exist
you will be the mirror and the time,
the infinity and the imminent,
the memory and the unusual
the defeat and the verse,
my enemy and my image.
Because there would be no more suns than the ones you yourself radiate
like there would be no other penance than to know that you exist.
But perhaps you do exist?

New York (May 1985)

Reinaldo Arenas, Mientras el Cielo Gire, 1989, English Translation 3003 Lázaro Gómez Carriles

Born in Aguas Claras in July of 1943, Reinaldo Arenas Fuentes was a gay Cuban poet, playwright and novelist known for his criticism of Fidel Castro, the Cuban Revolution and the ensuing government in Cuba. He was the author of the memoir “Before Night Falls”, written after Arenas’s escape to the United States in 1980. The memoir narrates his experience in the Cuban dissident movement and years as a political prisoner.

After moving to the city of Holguin as a teenager at age fourteen, Reinaldo Arenas became employed at a guava paste factory. Around 1958 when living conditions in the city worsened, he decided to join Castro and his revolutionary movement. Arenas spent ten days at the guerrilla headquarters in Velasco but was turned away. Once the guerrilla commandant realized that President Fulgencio Bastista’s secret police were already searching for Arenas, he accepted him into the group.

At the age of sixteen, Arenas was awarded a scholarship at La Pantoja, a captured Batista military camp that was converted into a polytechnic institute. Students attending took major courses in Marxist-Leninism in which they had to master the USSR manuals of  the Academy of Sciences and the Political Economy. Cuban Marxist theorist Blas Roca’s “Foundations of Socialism in Cuba” was also required reading. Arenas graduated with a degree as an agricultural accountant, but would later describe his education as indoctrination. 

In the early 1960s, Reinaldo Arenas relocated to Havana where he enrolled in a planning course at the University of Havana. While in the program, he worked for the National Institute for Agrarian Reform. During this time, Arenas began to live his life as a gay man, albeit secretly for fear of ending up in a Military Unit to Aid Production (UMAP), a term which basically described a concentration camp for Christians, suspected Cuban dissidents and LBGT people. A previous relationship Arenas had with a man, later arrested and sent to a UMAP camp, led to Arenas being listed as a gay man by the Cuban Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. 

Throughout his life, Arenas developed friendships and had relationships with many gay men. Various friends and acquaintances he knew pledged their loyalty to the Cuban regime in exchange for their safety. Many became informers for the government and reported other men, often friends or those with whom they had relationships. The government’s intention, in addition to seeking out dissidents, was to find gay and bisexual men and either persecute and jail them or turn them into informers. Although the reward for cooperation with the regime meant life outside of prison, the price to pay for living as an informer was to participate publicly in acts of repudiation denouncing your anti-regime beliefs or homosexuality.

In 1963, Reinaldo Arenas moved to Havana to study at the School of Planification and later at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Havana, where he studied literature and philosophy. He began working in 1964 at the National Library José Marti. Maria Teresa Freye de Andrade, who was the director of the National Library, officially transferred Arenas from his position at the National Institute for Agrarian Reform to a position at the National Library. When Fidel Castro appointed Police Captain Sidroc Ramos as the library’s director, Areans left his position at the library and became an editor for the Cuban Book Institute until 1968.

Arenas’s writings were beginning to gain recognition in the Cuban literary world in the 1960s. He received a literary award for his 1967 novel “Singing from the Well” at the Cirilo Villaverde National Competition held at the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists. In the year before, Arenas’s “El Mundo Allucinante (This Hallucinatory World)” was awarded First Honorable Mention by the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists. Although there was no better entry in the competition for that year, the judges refused to give the First Prize to Arenas; as a result, no First Prize was given in 1966. By 1967, Arenas’s critical writings and openly gay life were bringing him into conflict with Cuba’s communist government. 

From 1968 to 1974, Reinaldo Arenas was a journalist and editor for the literary magazine “The Cuban Gazette”. In 1974, Arenas was charged and convicted of ideological deviation and publishing abroad without official consent. He escaped from prison and tried a failed attempt to leave Cuba on a tire inner tube. Rearrested in southern Havana, Areanas was imprisoned in El Moro Castle, used at that time as a prison for rapists and murderers. By writing letters for illiterate prisoners, he maintained his life in prison and was able to obtain paper for his own scholarly work. Arenas was caught and severely punished for attempting to smuggle his work out of prison. Threatened with death, he was forced to renounce his work and was finally released in 1976.

Arnenas fled to the United States during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, a mass migration organized by Cuban Americans with the consent of Cuban President Fidel Castro. In 1987, Arenas was diagnosed with the AIDS virus. He continued to write, speak against the Cuban government, and mentor many Cuban exile writers. After battling AIDS for three years, Reinaldo Arenas died of an intentional overdose of drugs and alcohol in December of 1990 in New York City. In 2012, he was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display on Chicago’s North Halsted Street, which celebrates LGBT contributions of world history and culture. 

Reinaldo Arenas published a significant oeuvre of work in his life. In addition to his two poetic volumes “El Centro” and “Leprosorio”, he wrote a set of five novels, the “Pentagonia” series,  which recounts life in post-revolutionary Cuba. Volumes included in this series are “Singing from the Well”, “Farewell to the Sea”, “Palace of the White Skunks”, the satirical “Color of Summer” and “The Assault”. Arenas’s second and best-known novel  “Hallucinations”, also published under the name “The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando”, was smuggled out of Cuba and first published in France in 1969. 

Arenas’s autobiography “Before Night Falls”, written after his escape from Cuba and published in English in 1993, was listed on the 1993 New York Times Best Books of the Year. This book became the 2000 film of the same name, directed by painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel; the role of Arenas was played by Spanish actor Javier Bardem. The film version of the book was listed as one of the Top Ten Movies of the Year by the American Film Institute, nominated for the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice International Film Festival with filmmaker Schnebel winning the Grand Jury Prize and Bardem winning Best Actor.

Reinaldo Arenas’s papers, typescript drafts, essays, interviews, newspaper articles, correspondence and other documents are housed in the Princeton University Library.

Note: Several interesting articles on Reinaldo Arenas and his work can be found on the eclectic blog website Byron’s Muse. The articles can be located at: https://byronsmuse.wordpress.com/tag/reinaldo-arenas/