Randall Mann: “The Pool Shark Lurked”

Photographers Unknown, The Pool Shark Lurked

Like eelgrass through a glass-
bottom boat on the Silver River,
I see the state, obscured yet pure. Derision,

a tattooed flame crackling
underneath the lewd, uncool
khaki of an amused park worker.

I was the sometimes boy on a leash,
my sliver of assent in 1984 —
as if it were my decision.

The I-75 signage, more than metaphor.
As if I had the right to vote.
The slumber parties then were hidden wood;

the tea so sweet, the saccharin
pink and artificial, like intelligence.
The science sponsored in part by chance.

I made my acting debut with the red
dilettante down the street, “Rusty” Counts,
in Rusty Counts Presents: Suburbs of the Dead,

straight to VHS. My parents phoned a counselor.
A palmetto bug read Megatrends on the fold-
ing chair by our above-ground swimming pool …

The pool shark lurked, but not to fear.
The end unknowable, blue, inmost, and cold,
like the comfort of a diplomatic war.

—Randall Mann, Florida, Poetry, October 2015

Born in Provo, Utah, in January of 1972, Randall Mann is an American poet, the only son of Olympic medalist Ralph Mann. He spent his younger years in Kentucky and Florida, a time in which he was encouraged to read a wide range of literature. In his senior years in high school, Mann’s teachers supported his writing of poetry which he continued into his college years. Mann graduated with a BA and a MFA from the University of Florida. Since 1998 he has lived in San Francisco.

Randall Mann’s poetry is mostly influenced by the English poet Philip Larkin, whose poems are most often reflections of plainness and skepticism, the 1980 Pulitzer Prize Poetry winner Donald Justice who shared his insight into loss and distance, American poet Elizabeth Bishop whose work is formed with precise description and poetic serenity, and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda whose two-volume “Residencia en la Tierra” made him a renowned international poet.

In his work, Randall Mann explores the themes of loss, expectation, brutality, attraction, and the unabashed experiences of living a gay life. He is accomplished in the formalist design of the poem and has a witty sense in where he places his line-breaks. Mann projects a wide range of emotions in his work which is emphasized by the word choice he uses to set the poem’s tone. Usually set in the countrysides around San Francisco or in Florida, his poems often reflect the contrasts between the countryside beauty and the serious social problems inside city life, which includes the spreading of homelessness and random criminal attacks against the gay community.

Mann’s collections include the 2004 “Complaint in the Garden”, which won the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry; “Breakfast with Thom Gunn”, published in 2009 and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the California Book Award; the 2013 “Straight Razor”, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and “Proprietary” published in 2017 and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and Lambda Literary Award.

In addition to his poetry collections, Randall Mann is the author of “The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry”, a 2019 book of criticism in which Mann applies his attention to language, fearlessness, and sharp wit to a collection of musings, reviews, autographical sketches, and readings on the art of poetry. Mann also co-authored the seventh edition of“Writing Poems”, which was published in 2007.

A small collection of Randall Mann’s poetry can be found at the Poetry Foundation located at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/randall-mann#tab-poems

James Merrill: “Joyously Assimilate the Sun”

Photographers Unknown, Joyously Assimilate the Sun

“One summer—was he eight?—
They gave him the seed packet
Along with a 2’ by 4’
Slice of the estate.

To grow, to grow—grim law
Without appeal!
He, after all, kept growing every day. . .
Now this redundant chore.

Up sprouted green enough
For the whole canton, had one know to thin it.
Michaelmas found him eye to ey
With a gang of ruffians.

Not askable indoor,
Whose gaudy, wooden attitudes
(“Like pine cones in drag”)
There was scant question of endorsing

—Much as our droll friend, their legatee,
Would rap from them over the years. For instance
Think twice before causing
Just anything to be.

Then: Hold your head high in the stinking
Throngs of kind,
Joyously assimilate the Sun,
Never wear orange or pink.”

—-James Merrill, Alessio and the Zinnias

American poet James Ingram Merrill was born in New York City in 1926, the son of investment banker Charles E Merrill, co-founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm. Brought up in wealth and having had interest in languages since early childhood, he attended St. Bernard’s, a prestigious New York grammar school. As a teenager, Merrill boarded at the Lawrenceville School, where he began to write poetry and became friends with the future novelist Frederick Buechner. During his attendance at Amherst College, his studies were interrupted when he was drafted for service in the US Army during World War II.

After his return to Amherst College in 1945, James Merrill had his first collection of poems “The Black Swan” published in 1946 privately in Athens, Greece, by his English professor and lover Kimon Friar. Merrill wrote his thesis on the French writer Marcel Proust, and took Proust’s themes of nostalgia, loss, and memory as his own. The fusion of archetype and autobiography became the basis his work; Merrill’s self awareness grew, through the writing of verse, within each successive collection of his poems. Although centered on the self, his poems displayed no urgency to reveal what is hidden and, in that sense, are not considered as confessional.

Merrill graduated from Amherst College with honors in 1947. After spending a few years traveling abroad in Europe, he met writer and artist David Jackson in a New York City comedy club. He and Jackson, who would be his partner for thirty years, settled in Stonington, Connecticut, in 1955. Although he was wealthy his entire life from a trust made early in his childhood, Merrill lived a modest life. Understanding the plight of many artists and a philanthropist in his own right, he founded the Ingram Merrill Foundation in 1956, a permanent endowment that subsidized the arts and public television with grants directly to writers and artists.

Already established in the 1970s among the finest lyric poets of his generation, Merrill started incorporating extensive occult messages into his work. With his partner David Jackson, he spent more than twenty years transcribing purportedly supernatural communications during séances using a ouija board. Merrill’s 1976 ouija board narrative cycle “The Book of Ephraim” appeared in the collection “Divine Comedies”, which won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Further installments included the 1978 “Mirabell: Books of Number”, which won the National Book Award for Poetry, and the 1980 “Scripts for the Pageant”.

A writer adept at wordplay and puns, James Merrill was a master of traditional poetic meter and form but also wrote many works in both free and blank verse. As he matured, his early polished and concise work changed to a more informal, relaxed and conversational tone. Often compared to W.B. Yeats with whom he shared an interest in mysticism, Merrill published, in three volumes between 1976 and 1980, his epic poem of 560 pages, “The Changing Light at Sandover”. A postmodern apocalyptic epic, it documents, partly in verse forms, the extended conversations of Merrill and Jackson with their spirit guides over the course of two decades. The poem, winner of the 1982 National Book Critics Circle Award, covers the joys and tragedies of man’s powers and the importance of our efforts to make a good life on earth.

After the publication of his epic poem, Merrill returned to writing shorter, whimsical and nostalgic poetry. These included the 1985 “Late Settings”; a 1988 collection of poems, prose poems and a play in verse entitled “The Inner Room”; and in 1995 his last book “A Scattering of Salts”. Merrill also wrote a memoir “A Different Person” in 1993; this book covers the writer’s block he suffered in his early career and his experiences of gay life in the 1950s, where he describes his friendships and relationships.

James Merrill served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, from 1979 until his death and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In addition to his Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Awards, he also was awarded the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. While wintering in Arizona, Merritt died on February 6, 1995 from a heart attack related to AIDS; his longtime partner David Noyes Jackson died in July of 2001. Merrill’s ashes and Jackson’s remains are buried side by side at Evergreen Cemetery in Stonington. Jackson’s former wife and Merrill’s friend, Doris Sewell Jackson, is buried behind them.

Truman Capote: “Occasionally There Were Humans”

Photographer Unknown, Occasionally There Were Humans

“Sometimes on flat boring afternoons, he’d squatted on the curb of St. Deval Street and daydreamed silent pearly snow clouds into sifting coldly through the boughs of the dry, dirty trees. Snow falling in August and silvering the glassy pavement, the ghostly flakes icing his hair, coating rooftops, changing the grimy old neighborhood into a hushed frozen white wasteland uninhabited except for himself and a menagerie of wonder-beasts: albino antelopes, and ivory-breasted snowbirds; and occasionally there were humans, such fantastic folk as Mr Mystery, the vaudeville hypnotist, and Lucky Rogers, the movie star, and Madame Veronica, who read fortunes in a Vieux Carré tearoom.”

—-Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

Rob Jacques: “This Rustic Eden”

Photographers Unknown, This Rustic Eden

. . .hills are turning
curved green against the astonished morning
sneeze-weed and ox-eye daisies
not caring I am a stranger
—-Audre Lorde

A pilgrim moving through on my way
to Wherever or Hereafter, I pull off I-90
into a town whose trees are flushed gold
with autumn, whose one white church
is washed honest and pure in stark fall light,
whose main street is paved with nostalgia,
and I park beside a roadside apple stand,
D’Arcy Spice, Irish Peach, and Silken
in bushel baskets above broad wood boxes
of Granny Smith, Gloster, and Ruby Grand.

I’m 17 again and just as innocent and good
as this rural town. A lanky, blond boy
with ice-gray eyes adds spice to this miracle
of a day, his face youthfully beautiful, and
I smile my greeting as I pick several Pippins
from a box in front of him and think I’d be
blessed to live free in this rustic Eden
without a care from urban storm and stress
as this boy turns away spitting, “Faggot!”
into autumn’s sacred, apple-fragrant air.

—-Rob Jacques, Every Traveler Has One Idaho Poem

Currently residing on a rural island in Washington State’s Puget Sound, Rob Jacques was raised in northern New England, after which he graduated from both Salem State University and the University of New Hampshire. He served as an officer in the US Navy during the Vietnam Era and has completed a civilian career as a technical editor and writer for the US Navy and the US Department of Energy.

Jacques has taught literature courses at Northern Virginia Community College, Olympic College, and the United States Naval Academy. Strongly influenced by the works of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and James Merrill, his poetry explores the metaphysical aspects of life and love, which include the paradoxes that develop as flesh and consciousness interact through one’s lifetime.

Jacques’s “War Poet”, published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2017, is a collection of poems related to his experiences while on active duty in the US Navy. Full of erotic and martial intensity, the poems create a lyrical memoir out of the poet’s time serving as a gay man in the military. Exploring the complex intersections between violence and sexuality, Jacques’s poems alternate between wild abandon and formal rigidity. His work recognizes the self as a primary center of conflict, a body which is charged with understanding the conflux of love and war.

Rob Jacques’s second book of poems, “Adagio for Su Tung-p’o: Poems on How Consciousness Uses Flesh to Float Through Space/ Time”, was published by Fernwood Press in December of 2019. Jacques uses Su Tung-p’o’s poetic lines as epigraphs to introduce his own metaphysical work which looks at the human issues, addressed by poet Su Tung-p’o in the eleventh century, with a twenty-first century perspective.

Rob Jacques’s poetry has appeared in regional and national journals, including Prairie Schooner, Atlanta Review, American Literary Review, The Healing Muse, Poet Lore, and Assaracus, a quarterly print journal which features the work of a wide representation of gay poets.

Note: For readers who are interested in LGBTQ fiction and poetry, I recommend the publisher Sibling Rivalry Press, the home of the Undocupoet Fellowship and a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit arts service organization: https://www.siblingrivalrypress.com

Tennessee Williams: “Curiously Stirring”

Photographers Unknown, Curiously Stirring

“So successfully have we disguised from ourselves the intensity of our own feelings, the sensibility of our own hearts, that plays in the tragic tradition have begun to seem untrue. For a couple of hours we may surrender ourselves to a world of fiercely illuminated values in conflict, but when the stage is covered and the auditorium lighted, almost immediately there is a recoil of disbelief. “Well, well!” we say as we shuffle back up the aisle, while the play dwindles behind us with the sudden perspective of an early Chirico painting. By the time we have arrived at Sardi’s, if not as soon as we pass beneath the marquee, we have convinced ourselves once more that life has as little resemblance to the curiously stirring and meaningful occurrences on the stage as a jingle has to an elegy of Rilke.”

—Tennessee Williams, Where I Live: Selected Essays

Widely regarded as one of the greatest playwrights in American history, Thomas Lanier Williams, known as Tennessee Williams, was born in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911. He was the second of three children born to Cornelius Williams, a crude talking manager of a Saint Louis shoe company, and Edwina Dakin Williams, the daughter of a minister and an overbearing mother. The troubled home life of the young Tennessee Williams became a source of many characters and themes of plays in his later life.

Williams started his writing early; at the age of thirteen, his first article “Isolated” was published in 1924 by the Ben Blewett Junior High newspaper and, by high school, he had two articles published in national magazines. In 1929, Williams enrolled in the University of Missouri’s journalism department, but was forced by his father in 1932 to leave and take employment. He continued to write while employed and finished two plays that were staged in 1937 by a Memphis theater group: “Candles to the Sun”, a drama dealing with Alabama coal miners unionizing, and “The Fugitive Kind”. The latter play introduced the character who would inhabit most of Williams’ future plays: the marginal figure who, through no personal fault, is a misfit in society but who demonstrates an admirable will to survive.

Williams enrolled at the University of Iowa and graduated in 1938 with a degree in English. In order to submit plays to a New York competition, he changed both his birthdate and name, which from that time on became “Tennessee Williams”. It was this period of his life that he began a habit of traveling and, also, came to the understanding that he was homosexual. In New York City, Williams joined a gay social circle which included fellow writer and friend Donald Windham. Between 1940 and 1948, a series of relationships, often tempestuous and ultimately failing, developed between Williams and men he met in his travels. After returning to New York from Rome in the spring of 1948, Williams met and fell in love with Sicilian actor Frank Merlo, with whom he had an enduring relationship that lasted for fourteen years until drug abuse and infidelities on both sides ended it.

Tennessee Williams’ first professionally produced play, the 1940 “Battle of Angels”, debuted in Boston: however, it failed at its tryout with the audience. The play was withdrawn after Boston’s Watch and Ward Society banned it on the charge that it dealt with such topics as racism, suppressed sexuality, adultery, corruption and murder. Even though Williams rewrote his play several times and worked on it for 17 years, the 1957 rewrite “Orpheus Descending” was also harshly criticized and widely considered a failure.

Williams’ breakthrough hit “The Glass Menagerie”, filled with characters based on his own troubled family, opened in Chicago in 1944 to great reviews. It moved to Broadway the next year and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1945, becoming the first in a long run of successes for Williams. Two years later in 1947, Williams’ drama play “A Streetcar Named Desire” opened, surpassing his previous success and giving him the status as one of the country’s leading playwrights. This play earned him a second Drama Critics’ Award and his first Pulitzer Prize.

Tennessee Williams wrote three more successive plays which brought him critical acclaim: the Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, a 1955 three act play and Williams’ personal favorite, featuring motifs of social mores, decay, sexual desire and repression; the 1959 “Sweet Bird of Youth”, a play written for Williams’ friend Tallulah Bankhead, telling the story of a gigolo and drifter who returns to his hometown as the companion of a faded movie star; and the 1961 drama play “The Night of the Iguana”, based on a previous short story and centered around misfits dealing with their sexual tensions and personal struggles, the central therm being goodness in which lost souls offer each other solace and understanding,.

After Tennessee Williams’ breakup with Frank Merlo in early 1962, Merlo was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Williams returned and cared for him until his death in September of 1963. In the years following Merlo’s death, he descended into a period of nearly catatonic depression and increasing drug use; this resulted in several hospitalizations and commitments to mental health facilities. Williams was never truly able to recoup his earlier success, or to entirely overcome his dependence on prescription drugs.

William’ later plays were unsuccessful and closed to poor reviews. As he grew older, he felt increasingly alone; he feared old age and losing his sexual appeal to younger gay men. In the 1970s, when he was in his 60s, Williams had a lengthy relationship with Robert Carroll, a Vietnam veteran and aspiring writer in his twenties. The two men broke up in 1979, but remained friends, with Carroll receiving one of the only two bequests in Williams’ will.

On February 25, 1983, Williams was found dead at age 71 in his suite at the Hotel Elysée in New York from a toxic level of Seconal. Although writing in his will that he wished to be buried at sea near the spot that American poet Hart Crane died by choice, his body was buried, by the arrangement of his brother Dakin Williams, at Calvary Cemetery in Saint Louis.

In his career, Tennessee Williams also wrote two novels, “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Snow” in 1950 and”Moise and the World of Reason” in 1975, poetry, essays, film scripts, short stories, and an 1975 autobiography entitled “Memoirs”. In his will, Williams left his literary rights to the University of the South in Tennessee, the funds of which support a creative writing program.

Bottom Image Insert: Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo, Date Unknown, Tennessee Williams Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Hanya Yanagihara: “A Little Life”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Seated Men

“He steps back, still looking. In the painting, Willem’s torso is directed toward the viewer, but his face is turned to the right so that he is almost in profile, and he is leaning towards something or someone and smiling. And because he knows Willem’s smiles, he knows that Willem has been captured looking at something he loves, he knows Willem in that instant is happy. Willem’s face and neck dominate the canvas and although the background is suggested rather than shown, he knows that Willem is at their table. He knows it from the way that JB has drawn the light and shadows on Willem’s face. He has the sense that if he says Willem’s name that the face in the painting will turn toward him and answer; he has the sense that if he stretches his hand out and strokes the canvas he will feel beneath his fingertips Willem’s hair, his fringe of eyelashes.

But he doesn’t do this, of course, just looks up at last and sees JB smiling at him, sadly. “The title card’s been mounted already,” JB says, and he goes slowly to the wall behind the painting and sees its title – “Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story, Greene Street”-and he feels his beneath abandon him; it feels as if his heart is made of something oozing and cold, like ground meat, and it is being squeezed inside a fist so that chunks of it are falling, plopping to the ground near his feet.”

—Hanya YanagIhara, A Little Life

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1974, Hanya Yanagihara is American novelist, editor and travel writer. A fourth-generation resident of Hawaii, she graduated from Smith College, a private liberal arts women’s college in Massachusetts, in 1995. After graduating, Yanagihara worked as a publicist in New York for several years and, later as writer and editor, for the Condé Nast Traveler magazine. In 2015 she became a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

Yanagihara’s first novel “The People in the Trees”, published in 2013, was a fictional memoir of a scientific researcher who, after discovering a turtle with life-prolonging qualities, is convicted of child sexual abuse. It received praise as one of the best novels of 2013.

Hanya Yanagihara wrote her 2015 “A Little Life” over a period of eighteen months. A lengthly novel, it follows the lives of four friends in New York City through college to middle-age, with a focus on the character Jude, a lawyer with a mysterious background and unexplained health issues. A closeness develops between Jude and Willem, one of his three friends, which soon evolves into an intimate relationship troubled by Jude’s hidden past.

“A Little Life” is divided into seven distinct chronological parts, with flashbacks inserted throughout the narrative. The central focus is on the social and emotional lives of the four men, which, through these inner lives, discusses the strengths and limits of romantic love, friendship, and the relationships among men. Seen through shifting first-person perspectives as the story evolves, the narrative eventually focuses on Jude’s own traumatic personal experiences and his interactions with this small group of friends.

Timothy Liu: “Tiny Flares Corkscrew Up the Sky”

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

Faces sludging forward on the esplanade
to where we are. What we are is energy—
our bodies angled skyward as fading blooms
parachute towards the earth, the crowd
a spent militia—torn blankets left behind
as we march to the riverfront where
tiny flares corkscrew up the sky to release
delayed reports. The night gives up
its ghost—wreaths of smoke crowning floral
cornucopias that spill a motherlode
of fire onto both sides of the shore,
hoarse voices bellowing out rote words
learned in grade school that take on
meaning in a country of peace where
thousands scream through the dark, waiting
for that twenty-one gun salute.

Timothy Liu, A Boston Fourth, Poetry, July 1996

Born in 1965 in San Jose, California, Timothy Liu is an American poet and author residing in New York City. He earned his BA in English at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and his MA in Poetry at the University of Houston in Texas. Liu also studied at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he met his husband, the artist Christopher Arabadjis.

Liu considers poet and critic Richard Howard, Welsh poet Leslie Norris, and American writer and literary critic Gordon Lish as his mentors. His poetry, based formally on the meter of syllables, explores the themes of identity, violence, sexuality, with the narrator as witness. His works also deal with cultural taboos and situations largely left out of poetic writing.

Timothy Liu’s work includes: the 1992 “Vox Angelica” which won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; “Say Goodnight”, published in 1998 and winner of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award; the 2004 “Of Thee I Sing” winnerof the Poetry Book of the Year Award from Publishers Weekly; the 2005 “For Dust Thou Art”; “Don’t Go Back to Sleep” in 2014; and “Tin House” published in 2018..

Liu’s most recent works include “Luminous Debris: New and Selected Legerdemain 1992-2017” published in 2018 by Barrow Street Books and a finalist in the 2019 Thom Gunn Awards; and his twelfth book of poems, “Let It Ride” published in 2019, which explores how the necessities of life and art join to provide a path forward at midlife.

Timothy Liu has served as a core faculty member at Bennington College’s Writing Seminars and is currently a Professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

For more information on Timothy Liu, including books and poems: https://www.timothyliu.net

John Rechy: “The Coming of the Night”

Photographers and Artists Unknown, The Coming of the Night, Gay Film Gifs

“Did those “new gays” spinning about like giddy tops in discos care to know that dancing with someone of the same sex was punishable as “lewd conduct” then? Still, a club in Topanga Canyon boasted a system of warning lights. When they flashed, lesbians and gay men shifted—what a grand adventure!—and danced with each other, laughing at the officers’ disappointed faces! How much pleasure—and camaraderie, yes, real kinship—had managed to exist in exile. Did those arrogant young people know that, only years ago, you could be sentenced to life in prison for consensual sex with another man? A friend of his destroyed by shock therapy decreed by the courts. Another friend sobbing on the telephone before he slashed his wrists— Thomas’s hands on his steering wheel had clenched in anger, anger he had felt then, anger he felt now. And all those pressures attempted to deplete you, and disallow— “—the yearnings of the heart,” he said aloud. Yet he and others of his generation had lived through those barbaric times—and survived—those who had survived—with style.”

—John Rechy, The Coming of the Night

Born in March of 1931 in El Paso, Texas, during the Depression, John Francisco Rachy is a writer, playwright, essayist and literary critic. He attended Texas Western College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in English. Rachy continued his education at the New School for Social Research in New York City, studying under Hiram Haydn, a Random House senior editor. Rachy’s semi-autobiographical works explore the world of social and sexual outsiders and draw upon his gay sexuality and Mexican-American heritage.

John Rachy’s writing career began with the short story “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny”, a gay-oriented story which received the Longview Foundation Fiction Prize in 1961. His first published work, the largely autobiographical novel “City of Night”, was published in 1963 by Grove Press. The novel chronicles the journey of a young Mexican-American from the border town of El Paso into the gay underworld of Times Square, Hollywood Boulevard and the French Quarter of New Orleans during the 1950s. Selling sixty-five thousand hardcover copies, it remained on the New York Times best-seller list for twenty-five weeks and became an international bestseller.

Following the success of “City of Night”, John Rachy has written a large body of work, both fiction and non-fiction. Among his fiction works are: the “Numbers” published in 1967;; “Rushes” published in 1979; the 1999 “The Coming of the Night”; and the 2017 “After the Blue Hour”. Rachy’s non-fiction works include the 1977 “The Sexual Outlaw”, an account of three days and nights in the 1970s sexual underground of Los Angeles, and the 2004 “Beneath the Skin”, an anthology of his essays and literary reviews from The New York Times, Evergreen Review, The Nation, and other publications..

The first novelist to receive PEN-USA-West’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, John Rachy is also the recipient of the 1999 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement presented by Publishing Triangle, an American association of gay men and lesbians in the publishing industry. He is currently a faculty member at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. In 2018 Rachy’s 2017 novel “After the Blue Hour” won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.

Note: An interesting read is biographical author Charles Casillo’s 2002 “Outlaw: The Lives and Careers of John Rechy”, a book which examines the dichotomy of John Rechy’s life as both a respected author and professor, and a hustler on Hollywood Boulevard, with insights from Rachy himself and his family, friends, and colleagues.

E. M. Forster: “Madness is Not for Everyone”

Photographers Unknown, Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Fourteen

“Madness is not for everyone, but Maurice’s proved the thunderbolt that dispels the clouds. The storm had been working up not for three days as he supposed, but for six years. It had brewed in the insecurities of being where no eye pierces, his surroundings had thickened it. It had burst and he had not died. The brilliancy of day was around him, he stood upon the mountain range that overshadows youth, he saw.”

—E. M. Forster, Maurice

Born on the first of January, 1879 in London, Edward Morgan Forster was a fiction writer and essayist. After his father’s death of tuberculosis in 1890, he and his mother moved to Rooks Nest in Hertfordshire until 1893. This house would serve as the inspiration for his future novel, the 1910 “Howard’s End”. An inheritance from his great-aunt Marianne Thornton in 1887 would enable Forster to live comfortably and pursue a career as a writer.

E. M. Forster attended King’s College Cambridge between 1897 and 1901. There he joined the discussion group known as the Apostles, whose members later constituted the Bloomsbury Group which included Leonard and Virginia Wolff, Giles Lytton Strachey, Clive and Venessa Bell, and artist Duncan Grant. After graduation Forster traveled through continental Europe, visiting Greece and Italy before returning to Surrey, England.

In 1914, by which time he had written all but one of his novels, E. M. Forster visited Egypt, Germany and India with fellow Bloomsbury Group member Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, the British political scientist and philosopher. During the First World War, Forster, a conscientious objector, served in the British Red Cross in Egypt as a Chief Searcher for missing men. Returning again to India in the early 1920s, he became the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of the state of Dewas; the story of which was told in his 1953 non-fiction work “The Hill of Devi”.

After his return to London from India, Forster completed the last of his novels published in his lifetime, the 1924 “A Passage to India”, for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. During the 1930s and 1940s, Forster became a notable broadcaster on BBC Radio and became associated with the British Humanist Association,which opposed censorship and advocated for penal reform and individual liberty.For his published work, he was awarded a Benson Medal by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society of Literature in 1937.

E. M. Forster was open about his homosexuality to his close friends, but not to the public. He had a number of male lovers during his adult life; but he was at his happiest during a two-year relationship with the young policeman Bob Buckingham, who later married. After Buckingham’s marriage, both Buckingham and his wife continued to be included in Forster’s social circle. Others in his social circle included writer Christopher Isherwood, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, composer Benjamin Britten, Belfast-novleist Forrest Reid, writer and editor of “The Listener” J. R. Ackerley, and socialist poet Edward Carpenter and Edward’s lover George Merrill.

Forster’s “Maurice” was written between 1913 to 1914, revised twice in 1932 and 1959, and finally published posthumously in 1971. A tale of gay love in early twentieth-century England, it follows the protagonist Maurice Hall from his school days into a relationship in his older years. The novel was inspired by the cross-class relationship between poet Edward Carpenter and his working-class partner George Merrill, both of whom served as the models for Forster’s gay characters, Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder.

After completing a first draft by 1914, Forster tentatively showed the novel to select friends, and continued to do so over the forthcoming decades, reworking it as time passed. The openly gay novelist Christopher Isherwood saw the draft in its various revisions on a few occasions, and repeatedly implored Forster to publish it. However, Forster continued to insist on it not being published.

Despite the passing of time and of individuals, to whom he felt the revelation of his homosexuality would hurt most, Forster believed there had been no profound progression since the days of Oscar Wilde’s conviction, an incident that flooded the papers when he was sixteen, and thought that public attitudes had only incrementally shifted, from, in his words, ‘ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt’. Instead, he bequeathed the manuscript of “Maurice” to Isherwood, and, a year after Forster’s death, the novel was finally published.

E. M. Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King’s College Cambridge in January of 1946. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honor in 1953. Forster was honored in 1969 with membership in England’s Order of Merit, and, through his lifetime, received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature in sixteen separate years. E. M. Forster died at the age of ninety-one of a stroke on June 7th, 1970 in Coventry, Warwickshire. His ashes were scattered in the rose garden of Coventry’s crematorium, near Warwick University.

Note: E. M. Forster had five books published in his lifetime, one published posthumously, and one, “Arctic Summer”, never finished. His work included “Where Angels Fear to Tread”. published in 1905; the 1907 “The Longest Journey”; “A Room with a View”, published in 1908; the 1910 “Howard’s End”; “Passage to India” published in 1924; and his “Maurice” published in 1971. Although Forster was against having his work presented in any form other than literature, all his books, with the exception of “The Longest Journey”, his personal favorite and most autobiographical, have been made into either plays, films, or both.

An article by Professor Kate Symondson on E. M. Forster’s gay fiction can be found at the British Library’s site located at: https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/e-m-forsters-gay-fiction

Jameson Fitzpatrick: “A Poem for Pulse”

Photographers Unknown, A Poem for Pulse

“We must love one another whether or not we die.

Love can’t block a bullet

but it can’t be destroyed by one either,

and love is, for the most part, what makes Us Us—

in Orlando and in Brooklyn and in Kabul.

We will be everywhere, always;

there’s nowhere else for Us, or you, to go.

Anywhere you run in this world, love will be there to greet you.

Around any corner, there might be two men. Kissing.”

—Jameson Fitzpatrick, A Poem for Pulse, Excerpt, Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, 2017

Poet and professor, Jameson Fitzpatrick holds a BA and an MFA from New York University, where he now teaches in the Expository Writing Program. His verse defines the cutting edge of contemporary American poetry, telling and retelling the regularity and specificity of contemporary gay experience.

Fitzpatrick’s first publication was the 2014 chapbook “Morrisroe: Erasure” which consists of twenty-four erasures of texts describing a hookup by the avant-garde photographer Mark Morrisroe, who was a pioneer for the more direct, intimate and confrontational, late twentieth-century queer art. Fitzpatrick’s chapbook, inspired by a “man of a certain age” whom he loved, explores the art of those lost to AIDS.

Jameson Fitzpatrick’s second work was the 2018 chapbook “Mr. &” which is centered on the long title poem whose sections purposely slide into one another with slips in logic and lurching sequence structure. The shorter poetic pieces present a modernist view of marriage as a politically ambiguous institution, recently also available to same-sex couples.

His most recent publication is the 2020 “Pricks in the Tapestry”, published by Birds, LLC, a small independent poetry press. The book is a record of Jameson Fitzpatrick’s feelings and thoughts of his life during his mid-to-late twenties, which shows the difficulties a poet has using the self as the subject in a lyric form, Written from the narrative base of Cherry Grove and the Fire Island Pines of Long Island, New York, the characters are placed between the time-held, orgiastic perception of the area and its immense artistic history.

Jameson Fitzpatrick’s poems have appeared in The American Reader, The Awl, The Literary Review, Best New Poets 2017, The New Yorker, and Poetry magazine, among other publications. He is a 2017 NYSCA / NYFA Fellow in Poetry and currently lives in New York City.

Notes: The complete “A Poem for Pulse” can be found at the website “All Your Pretty Words” located at: https://allyourprettywords.tumblr.com/post/145923858388/a-poem-for-pulse-jameson-fitzpatrick

David Felsenthal’s Interview-discussion with Jameson Fitzpatrick on his “Pricks in the Tapestry” can be found at the online magazine “The Believer” located: https://believermag.com/logger/a-review-of-pricks-in-the-tapestry-by-jameson-fitzpatrick/

Countee Cullen: “We Hide the Heart that Bleeds”

Photographer Unknown, We Hide the Heart that Bleeds

“We shall not always plant while others reap

The golden increment of bursting fruit,

Not always countenance, abject and mute,

That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;

Not everlastingly while others sleep

Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,

Not always bend to some more subtle brute;

We were not made to eternally weep.

The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,

White stars is no less lovely being dark,

And there are buds that cannot bloom at all

In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;

So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,

And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.”

—-Countee Cullen, From the Dark Tower, Copper Sun, 1927

Born on May 30, 1903, Countee Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children’s writer, and playwright who was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Raised in a Methodist parsonage by the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen and his wife, he attended and graduated with honors from the De Witt Clinton High School in The Bronx, New York. In 1922, Cullen entered New York University.

Already having written poems since the age of fourteen, Cullen’s first published poems were in The Crisis magazine, under the leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Opportunity, a magazine of the National Urban League. Soon after this, he began to be published in Harper’s, the Century Magazine, and Poetry, founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe. Cullen won several awards, including second prize in a contest, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, for his poem “Ballad of the Brown Girl”.

Countee Cullen graduated from New York University in 1923. In 1925, Harper & Brothers published Cullen’s first volume of verse, “Color”, and he was admitted to Harvard University to pursue a masters in English. Written in a traditional style, “Color” celebrated black beauty anddeplored the effects of racism. A landmark of the Harlem Renaissance, the book contained “Incident” and “Heritage”, probably Cullen’s most famous poems, and “Yet Do I Marvel”, his poem on racial identity and injustice. A year after his volume’s publication, Cullen graduated from Harvard with a masters degree in 1926.

Cullen worked as assistant editor for Opportunity magazine, where his column, “The Dark Tower”, increased his literary reputation. His poetry collections “The Ballad of the Brown Girl” and “Copper Sun”, both published in 1927, explored similar themes as “Color”, but they were not so well received. Many in the black community felt he did not give the subject of race the same attention he had given it previously..

Countee Cullen was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928 which enabled him to study and write abroad. He traveled back and forth several times between France and the United States during the years 1928 to 1934, publishing four volumes of poetry by 1929. Shortly after in the early 1930s, Cullen’s work was almost completely free of racial subject matter, focused instead on idealized beauty and classic romantic subjects.

Cullen’s only novel “One Way to Heaven”, a social comedy of lower-class blacks and the bourgeoisie in New York City, was published in 1932. He taught French, English, and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York City from 1934 until the end of his life. In his last years, Cullen wrote mostly for the theater, including adapting the novel “God Sends Sunday” into the 1946 Broadway musical “St. Louis Woman”.

Countee Cullen developed his Eurocentric style of writing from his exposure to Graeco-Roman Classics and English Literature, work he was exposed to while attending prestigious universities like New York University and Harvard. Cullen found inspiration in Greek mythology to explore the themes of race and identity in his work. Influenced also by the Romantic movement of writers, he believed African-American poets’ use of a more traditional style of writing poetry would allow the building of bridges between the black and white communities.

Countee Cullen died from high blood pressure and acute kidney injury on January 9, 1946. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City. The Harlem branch of the New York Public Library was named the Countee Cullen Library in his honor. In 2013, Cullen was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.

Insert Image: Winold Reiss, “Countee Cullen”, 1925, Pastel Portrait on Illustration Board, 76.1 x 54.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

Note: “From the Dark Tower” is a sonnet that focuses on the injustices of racism, as the speaker notes that white people deprive black people of the fruits of their labor. However, the speaker, who is black, is confident that this will not be the case forever, ultimately suggesting that such hardships build strength and resiliency. In turn, the speaker sets forth the optimistic belief that black people will one day triumph over racist oppression and reap the rewards of their hard work.

Yukio Mishima: “The Dark Nectar in the Little Room”

Photographer Unknown, (The Dark Nectar in the Little Room)

“Suddenly the full long wail of a ship’s horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room – a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale’s back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. Full of the glitter and the frenzy of night, the horn thundered in, conveying from the distant offing, from the dead center of the sea, a thirst for the dark nectar in the little room.”

Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Born in January of 1925, Yukio Mishima, pseudonym Hiraoka Kimitake, was an author, poet, playwright, actor, model and director. He is widely considered to be one of the most important Japanese writers of the twentieth century.

Having failed physically to qualify for military service, Mishima worked for a Toyota factory, and after World War II, he studied law at the University of Tokyo. His first novel, “Kamen no Kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask)” is a partly autobiographical work that describes with exceptional brilliance a young gay man who must mask his sexual preferences from the Imperial Japanese society around him. This work brought Mishima immediate acclaim, after which he devoted his full energies to writing.

Mishima followed up his success with several novels whose main characters are tormented with either psychological or physical problems, or obsessed with unattainable goals. Among these works are: “Ai no Kawaki (Thirst for Love)” published in 1950 and “Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors)” published in 1954. In addition to novels, essays, and short stories, Mishima wrote plays of Japanese Nõ drama which included “Kindai Nõgaku Shu (Five Modern Nõh Plays)” in 1956 and “Sado Kõshaku Fujin (Madame de Sade)” in 1965.

Yukio Mishima’s “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” was published in Japan in 1963 and translated into English by writer and scholar John Nathan in 1965. The novel explores the vicious nature of youth that is sometimes mistaken for innocence. The protagonist Noboru, a thirteen year old boy, is thrilled when a his widowed mother is romanced by a sailor, who Noboru idolizes as a rugged heroic man of the sea. When the sailor gives up life onboard the ship for marriage, rejecting what Noboru holds sacred, Noboru and his friends respond with violence.

Mishima was deeply attracted to the austere patriotism and martial spirit of Japan’s past, which he contrasted unfavorably to the materialistic Westernized people and the prosperous society of Japan in the postwar era. On November 25, 1970, after having that day delivered the final installment of his work “The Sea of Fertility” to his publisher, Mishima and four of his students, Shield Society followers, seized control of the commanding general’s office at a military headquarters near downtown Tokyo.

After giving a ten minute speech from a balcony to assembled servicemen below and getting an unsympathetic response, Mishima committed seppuku in the traditional manner, disemboweling himself with his blade, followed by decapitation at the hands of a follower.

Notes: Photographer Eikoh Hosoe took the insert photograph of Yukio Mishima. The link that follows is a talk Hosoe gave at a Twentieth Masters Tribute to Yukio Mishima: https://americansuburbx.com/2010/06/eikoh-hosoe-subject-matter.html

For a more extensive biography on Yukio Mishima: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201124-yukio-mishima-the-strange-tale-of-japans-infamous-novelist

Rainer Maria Rilke: “Be Ahead of All Parting”

Photographer Unknown, Be Ahead of All Parting

“Sei allem Abschied voran, als wäre er hinter

dir, wie der Winter, der eben geht.

Denn unter Wintern ist einer so endlos Winter,

daß, überwinternd, dein Herz überhaupt übersteht.

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were

behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.

For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter

that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Be Ahead of All Parting, (The Sonnets to Orpheus: Book 2: Xiii), First Stanza

A short biography of Rainer Rilke is located at: https://ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog/2020/09/10/the-shadow-and-the-light/

Image reblogged with many thanks to: https://doctordee.tumblr.com

Frank O’Hara: “We are Flesh and Breathe”

Photographer Unknown, We are Flesh and Breathe

“When I am feeling depressed and anxious and sullen

all you have to do is take your clothes off

and all is wiped away revealing life’s tenderness

that we are flesh and breathe and are near us

as you are really as you are I become as I

really am alive and knowing vaguely what is

and what is important to me above the intrusions

of incident and accidental relationships

which have nothing to do with my life

when I am in your presence I feel life is strong

and will defeat all its enemies and all of mine

and all of yours and yours in you and mine in me

sick logic and feeble reasoning are cured

by the perfect symmetry of your arms and legs

spread out making an eternal circle together

creating a golden pillar beside the Atlantic

the faint line of hair dividing your torso

gives my mind rest and emotions their release

into the infinite air where since once we are

together we always will be in this life come what may”

—Frank O’Hara, Poem (A la Recherche d’Gertrude Stein), 1959

Born on March 27, 1926 in Baltimore, Maryland, Francis Russell O’Hara was an American poet, writer, and art critic. He spent his youth in Grafton, Massachusetts, and studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. In service during World War II, O’Hara was stationed as a sonar man on the destroyer USS Nicholas in the South Pacific.

When education funding became available to veterans, Frank O’Hara attended Harvard University. Despite his love of music and expertise on the piano, he switched his major to English and graduated with a degree from Harvard in 1959. While at Harvard O’Hara met poet and art critic John Ashbery and began publishing his own poems in the Harvard Advocate, the art and literary magazine of the college.

O’Hara did his graduate work at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, winning a major scholarship, the Hopwood Award, given to aspiring writers. After a failed attempt at a novel, he wrote ninety poems in a few months and two plays. O’Hara received his MA in English Literature in 1951 and moved in September of that year to New York City with Joe Lesueur, who was his roommate and sometime lover for the next eleven years. Settled in New York City, he continued to write seriously while employed at the Museum of Modern Art, where he became an assistant curator.

O’Hara’s early poetic work was considered both provocative and provoking. In 1952, his first volume of poetry, “A City Winter, and Other Poems”, with drawings by artist Larry Rivers, attracted favorable attention. O’Hara also wrote essays on painting and sculpture, and reviews for the magazine ArtNews which were considered brilliant.

Frank O’Hara’s association with painters Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns, leaders of the New York School group of writers and artists, became a source of inspiration for his highly original poetry..O’Hara attempted to produce with words the effects these artists had created on canvas. In certain instances, he collaborated with the painters to make “poem-paintings,” paintings with word texts.

In the summer of 1959, Frank O’Hara met Canadian ballet dancer Vincent Warren, often described as the true love of O’Hara’s life. Appearing in O’Hara’s poetry, Warren became the subject of O’Hara’s best love poems, including “Poem (A la Recherche d’Gertrude Stein)”, “Les Luths”, “Poem (So Many Echos in My Head)”, and “Having a Coke With You”. Many of these poems to Warren are collected in the volume “Love Poems (A Tentative Title)”, published in 1965.

Frank O’Hara’s poetry is basically autographical, based more on his observations of life rather than the exploration of his past. An urban poet, he constantly wrote during his daily routine, recording his thoughts for later use or sending them off in letters. O’Hara was known to treat poetry as something to be done in the moment with a frank directness that often erased the line between public and private. Influenced by Puerto Rican-American poet William Carlos Williams, he also used everyday language and simple statements, split at intervals, in the form of staccato.

In the early morning of July 24, 1966, Frank O’Hara was struck by a jeep on the beach of Fire Island, New York. He died the next day of a ruptured liver, at the age of forty. O’Hara was buried in Green River Cemetery on Long Island. Painter Larry Rivers, along with poet Bill Berkson, art critic Edwin Denby, and René d’Hamoncourt, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, delivered eulogies. His long-time lover Vincent Warren, devastated by the loss, returned to Canada and became a celebrated dancer and dance historian, passing away in October of 2017.

Note: More extensive information on Frank O’Hara’s life and work can be found at the Poetry Foundation located at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=frank+o%27hara