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

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

The Word is Sprawl

Photographers Unknown, The Word is Sprawl

Verb: sprawl; third-person singular present “sprawls”; present participle “sprawling”; simple past and past participle “sprawled”.

“There was no special place for him or his little affairs, and he was forbidden to sprawl on sofas and explain his ideas about the manufacture of this world and his hopes for the future. Sprawling was lazy and wore out sofas, and little boys were not expected to talk.”

—-Rudyard Kipling, Baa Baa, Black Sheep, 1888

“A shrewd blow, it caught him off balance, and after one ineffectual stagger he sprawled backward and lay for a moment staring up in blank surprise.”

—-Herman Whitaker, Cross Trails: The Story of One Woman in the North Woods, 1914

The Old English word “spreawilian”, meaning ‘to move convulsively’, has cognates, words having the same linguistic derivation as another, in the Scandinavian languages, such as the Norwegian “sprala”, the Danish “spraelle”, and the North Frisian “spraweli”. These words probably ultimately came from the Proto-Indo-European root “sper-“, meaning ‘to strew’. Usage as a verb meaning ‘to spread out’ is noted as early as 1300 AD. Usage meaning ‘to spread or stretch in a careless manner’ is attested to be from 1745 AD.

Mary Jane Oliver: “Wild Geese”

Photographer Unknown, Wild Geese

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.”

—Mary Oliver, Wild Geese, Dream Works, 1986

Mary Jane Oliver was born in September of 1935 in Maple Heights, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She was an American poet whose work was inspired by nature, rather than the human world, which arose from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild.

As a child, Mary Oliver spent a large amount of her time outside, walking or reading in the pastoral countryside. Writing poetry at the age of fourteen, Oliver was able, at the age of seventeen, to visit the home of the late poet Edna St. Vincent Milley, located in Austerlitz, New York. There she met the late poet’s sister Norma Milley, with whom she formed a friendship. Mary Oliver and Norma spent the next six to seven years at the “Steepletop” estate archiving Edna St. Vincent Milley’s papers.

Mary Oliver’s first collection of poems “No Voyage and Other Poems: was published in 1963 when she was twenty-eight. While teaching at Case Western Reserve University, her fifth collection of poetry, “American Primitive”, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984, Mary Oliver became Poet in Residence at Bucknell University in 1986; Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College in 1991; and later she held the Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College, Vermont, until 2001.

Mary Oliver’s 1990 “House of Light” won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award ,and her 1992 “New and Selected Poems” won the National Book Award. For its inspiration, her work turns towards nature, and the sense of wonder it instillss. Oliver’s poetry is grounded in her memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England, mostly centered around her life in Provincetown in the 1960s.

Influenced by Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emerson, and Shelley, Oliver’s work is fulled with imagery of her daily walks, which refuse to acknowledge the boundaries between nature and the observing self. Known for her unadorned language and common themes, she has been compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shared an affinity for solitude and inner monologues.

On a return visit to Austerlitz, in the late 1950s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her partner for over forty years. They settled largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived together until Cook’s death in 2005. Oliver continued to live there until she relocated to Florida. She valued her privacy and gave very few interviews.

In 2012, Mary Oliver was diagnosed with lung cancer, was treated and given a good prognosis. She ultimately died of lymphoma on January 17, 2019 at her home in Florida at the age of eighty-three.

Richard Siken: “Unfinished Duet”

Photographer Unknown, Unfinished Duet

- At first there were too many branches
  so he cut them and then it was winter.
  He meaning you. Yes. He would look out
  the window and stare at the trees that once
  had too many branches and now seemed
  to have too few. Is that all? No, there were
  other attempts, breakfasts: plates served,
  plates carried away. He doesn’t know
  what to do with his hands. He likes the feel
  of the coffeepot. More than the hacksaw?
  Yes, and he likes flipping the chairs,
  watching them fill with people. He likes
  the orange juice and toast of it, and waxed
  floors in any light. He wants to be tender
  and merciful. That sounds overly valorous.
  Sounds like penance. And his hands?
  His hands keep turning into birds and
  flying away from him. Him being you.
  Yes. Do you love yourself? I don’t have to
  answer that. It should matter. He has a
  body but it doesn’t matter, clean sheets
  on the bed but it doesn’t matter. This is
  where he trots out his sadness. Little black
  cloud, little black umbrella. You miss
  the point: the face in the mirror is a pale
  and naked hostage and no one can tell
  which room he’s being held in. He wants
  in, he wants out, he wants the antidote.
  He stands in front of the mirror with a net,
  hoping to catch something. He wants to
  move forward into the afternoon because
  there is no other choice. Everyone in this
  room got here somehow and everyone in
  this room will have to leave. So what’s left?
  Sing a song about the room we’re in?
  Hammer in the pegs that fix the meaning
  to the landscape? The voice wants to be
  a hand and the hand wants to do something
  useful. What did you really want? Someone
  to pass this with me. You wanted more.
  I want what everyone wants. He raises
  the moon on a crane for effect, cue the violins.
  That’s what the violins are for. And yes,
  he raises the moon on a crane and scrubs it
  until it shines. So what does it shine on?
  Nothing. Was there no one else? Left-handed
  truth, right-handed truth, there’s no pure
  way to say it. The wind blows and it makes
  a noise. Pain makes a noise. We bang on
  the pipes and it makes a noise. Was there
  no one else? His hands keep turning into
  birds, and his hands keep flying away
  from him. Eventually the birds must land.

—Richard Siken, Unfinished Duet, Crush

Born in New York City in February of 1967, Richard Siken is an American painter, poet, and filmmaker. He studied at the University of Arizona, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and later a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry.

Richard Siken is one of the co-founders and editors of Spork Press, established in 2001. Besides publishing its “Spork” literary magazine, the press produces novels and chapbooks, some of which were released in serial form. Siken received a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment of the Arts and two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants.

Influenced by the 1991 death of his boyfriend, Richard Siken wrote his collection of poems “Crush” which was published by Yale University Press.. A powerful literary work that is confessional, gay, and infused with eroticism, “Crush” won the 2004 Yale Younger Poets Competition, and received the Lambda Literary Award for “Gay Men’s Poetry” in 2005, and the Thom Gunn Award from Publishing Triangle in 2006. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Siken’s most recent work, his second book of poems, “War of the Foxes”, was released from Copper Canyon Press in 2015. With interwoven lyrics, fables, portraits and landscapes, Siken confronts the ways in which we look to art for meaning and purpose. The poems in “The War of the foxes” show the fallacies inherent in a search for truth, both in the world outside and within the self.

Richard Siken currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.

Richard Siken: “I Am the Wind”

Photographer Unknown, I Am the Wind

“I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble but I am invisible, blackbird over the dark field but I am invisible, what fills the balloon and what it moves through, knot without rope, bloom without flower, galloping without the horse, the spirit of the thing without the thing, location without dimension, without a within, song without throat, word without ink, wingless flight, dark boat in the dark night, shine without light, pure velocity, as the hammer is a hammer when it hits the nail and the nail is a nail when it meets the wood and the invisible table begins to appear out of mind, pure mind, out of nothing, pure thinking, hand of the mind, hand of the emperor, arm of the empire, void and vessel, sheath and shear, and wider, and deeper, more vast, more sure, through silence, through darkness, a vector, a violence, and even farther, and even worse, between, before, behind, and under, and even stronger, and even further, beyond form, beyond number, I labor, I lumber, I fumble forward through the valley as winter, as water, a shift in the river, I mist and frost, flexible and elastic to the task, a fountain of gravity, space curves around me, I thirst, I hunger, I spark, I burn, force and field, force and counterforce, agent and agency, push to your pull, parabola of will, massless mass and formless form, dreamless dream and nameless name, intent and rapturous, rare and inevitable, I am the thing that is hurtling towards you…”

—Richard Siken, Lovesong of the Square Root of Negative One, War of the Foxes

Richard Siken currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.

Walt Whitman: “I Exist As I Am”

Photographer Unknown, I Exist As I Am

“I exist as I am, that is enough,

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware I sit content.

One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself,

And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,

I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,

I laugh at what you call dissolution,

And I know the amplitude of time.

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Part 20, Leaves of Grass

“Song of Myself”, one of the most famous of Walt Whitman’s works and a poem that represents the core of his poetic vision, was one of the original twelve pieces in the 1855 first edition of “Leaves of Grass”, published at Whitman’s own expense. Originally published without sections, the final edition consists of thirteen hundred lines arranged in fifty-two separate but connected works.

Like most of the other poems in “Leaves of Grass”, this poem was revised extensively, reaching its final form in 1881. “Song of Myself” is a sprawling combination of biography and poetic meditation, with Whitman using symbols and sly commentary to get at important issues. Composed in a series of vignettes with small, precisely drawn scenes, the poem is written in Whitman’s signature free verse style.

This poem did not take on the title “Song of Myself” until the 1881 edition. Previous to that it had been titled “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” and, in the 1860, 1867, and 1871 editions, simply “Walt Whitman.” The poem’s shifting title is suggestive of the theme Whitman examined in this piece. As Walt Whitman, the specific individual, melts away into the abstract “Myself”, the poem explores the possibilities for communion between individuals.

Following its 1855 publication, “Song of Myself” was immediately singled out by critics and readers for particular attention, and the work remains among the most acclaimed and influential in American poetry. Public acceptance, however, was slow in coming. Social conservatives denounced the poem as disregarding norms of morality due to its obvious depictions of human sexuality.

Note: An interesting read from The Walt Whitman Archive is James E Miller’s “Sex and Sexuality” which deals with the themes of sex and sexuality in Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. The commentary can be found at: https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_49.html

Caio Fernando Abreu: “At the Edge of the Open Sea”

Photographer Unknown, At the Edge of the Open Sea

“Then you come and come to me and invade me and take me and ask me and lose me and spill over me with your eyes always on the run and open your mouth to release new stories and again I complete like this, without urgency, and concentrate whole in the things you tell me, and so silent, and so submissive, I chew you inside me while you stab me with slow delicacy making it clear in each promise that it will never be fulfilled, that I must expect nothing but this colorful mask, that you want me because that’s how you are—

At the edge of the open sea ”

— Caio Fernando Abreu, Dragons Don’t Know Paradise

Born in September of 1948 in Santiago, Brazil, Caio Fernando Loureiro de Abreu, as a young man, moved to Porto Alegre where he published his first short stories. In 1967, he joined the Letters and Performing Arts studies at the Federal University of Rio Grande de Sul, and later its dramatic arts program. Abandoning both lines of study, Caio Fernando Abreu decided to do journalistic work in the central and southern areas of Brazil.

In 1968, Calo Fernando Abreu moved to São Paulo and joined the newsroom of Veja Magazine, a country-wide weekly news magazine. A frequent visitor of trendy bars, he became friends with singer and songwriter Agenor de Miranda Araújo Neto, better known as Cazuza, an openly bisexual man who helped change public attitudes about AIDS in Brazil. Abreu became a prolific journalist and literary writer, producing short stories, novels, chronicles and drama works.

During the middle of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1968, Calo Fernando Abreu was pursued by the Department of Political and Social Order, a repressive branch of the government, but found refuge in the São Paulo country estate of poet and novelist Hilda Hilst. In 1971, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, working as a researcher and editor for the magazines “Leia Livros”, “Manchete”, and “Paus e Filhos”.

Fleeing the military regime in 1973, Calo Fernando Abreu entered self-exile in Europe, living and subsisting on odd jobs in London and Stockholm, France, the Netherlands, and Spain. In 1974, he returned to Porto Alegre and resumed his literary career. Besides his own literary works, Abreu continued writing for the theater and for the press medium, with relocations to Rio de Janeiro in 1983 and São Paulo in 1985.

In 1995, while visiting in France, Calo Fernando Abreu found out that he was HIV positive. In a series of three letters called “Letters to the Beyond the Wall”, published in the newspaper “O Estado de São Paulo”, he revealed that he had contracted the AIDS virus. Caio Fernando Abreu returned home to Porto Alegre permanently to live with his parents. He enjoyed the last two years of his life gardening, before dying in Porto Alegre on February 25, 1996.

Caio Fernando Abreu’s narratives come from the subjectivity of a bisexual man in his mid-forties who has AIDS. The characters in his books live and function in the periphery of society; they are in many ways equivalent to queer characters in North American literary traditions. In his most famous, short-story book “Os Dragōes Não Conhecem o Paraíso (Dragons Don’t Known Paradise)”, the majority of characters are either gay or seem to be. A camp writer, Abreu’s works are full of examples of queer sensibility, and of multiple appropriations of mainstream heterosexual society into queer narratives.

The discourse of AIDS was already present in Abreu’s writing from the beginning of the epidemic in the 1980s. He is, along with his friend Cazuza and Brazilian singer and songwriter Renato Russo, one of the most recognize Brazilian artists to have died of AIDS.

Frederico Garcia Lorca: “I Sing Your Restless Longing”

Photographers Unknown, I Sing Your Restless Longing

“I sing your restless longing for the statue,

your fear of the feelings that await you in the street.

I sing the small sea siren who sings to you,

riding her bicycle of corals and conches.

But above all I sing a common thought

that joins us in the dark and golden hours.

The light that blinds our eyes is not art.

Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.”

—Frederico Garcia Lorca

Poet and playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca was born on June 5, 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a farming village in the province of Granada, Spain. He studied law at the University of Granada, before entering in 1919 Madrid’s Residencia de Estudiantes to focus on his writing.

In Madrid, Lorca joined the “Generation of ’27”, a group of avant-garde artists which included Salvador Dali and surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel. This group introduced Lorca to the surrealist movement, which would later greatly influence his writing. Through this group, Lorca met and developed a long friendship with Dali, who would later design the scenery for the Barcelona production of Lorca’s 1927 play “Mariana Pineda”.

Lorca published numerous volumes of poetry during his career, beginning with the 1918 “Impresiones y Paisajes”, a prose work in the modernist tradition chronicling his sentimental journeys through Spain as a student. He often incorporated elements of Gypsy culture, Spanish folklore and ‘cante jondos’, or deep songs, in his themes of romantic love and tragedy.

Frederico Lorca’s two most successful poetry collections were “Canciones (Songs)”, published in 1927, and the 1928 “Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads)”. “Romancero Gitano” was especially daring for the time with its exploration of sexual themes and made Lorca a celebrity in the literary world. In 1930, he traveled to New York City, where he found a connection between Spanish deep songs and the African-American spirituals he heard in Harlem.

Upon his return to Spain, Lorca co-founded La Barraca, a touring theater company that performed in town squares both Spanish classics and his original plays, including the 1933 “Blood Wedding”. Throughout the 1930s, he spent much of his time working on plays, including a folk drama trilogy: “Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding)” in 1933, “Yerma (Wasteland)” in 1934, and “La Casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba)” in 1936. Despite the threat of a growing fascist movement in his country, Lorca refused to hide his leftist political views, or his homosexuality, while continuing his ascent as a writer.

In the middle of August 1936, at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was arrested at his country home in Granada by General Franco’s soldiers. He was executed, shot without trial, by a Nationalist militia squad a few days later. His body was never found.

Frederico Garcia Lorna, due to the inclusion of homo-romantic themes in his work, was heavily censored during his lifetime. Described as a ‘socialist’ and ‘participant in abnormal practices’, he was a target of the Franco-era government and had his work banned in Spain until 1953. Now considered one of Spain’s greatest poets and playwrights, Lorca, in a career that spanned just nineteen years, revitalized the basic strains of Spanish theater and poetry.

“Here I want to see those men of hard voice. Those that break horses and dominate rivers; those men of sonorous skeleton who sing with a mouth full of sun and flint.”

—Frederico Garcia Lorca

Ken Kesey: “Dragging Men Up by Their Hands”

Photographers Unknown, Dragging Men Up By Their Hands

“It’s like… that big red hand of McMurphy’s is reaching into the fog and dropping down and dragging the men up by their hands, dragging them blinking into the open. First one, then another, then the next. Right on down the line of Acutes, dragging them out of the fog till there they stand, all twenty of them, raising not just for watching TV, but against the Big Nurse, against her trying to send McMurphy to Disturbed, against the way she’s talked and acted and beat them down for years.”

—-Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Born in September of 1935, Kenneth Elton Kesey was an American novelist, essayist, and countercultural figure of the 1960s. Graduated from the University of Oregon in 1957, he began writing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1960, following the completion of a graduate fellowship at Stanford University in creative writing.

While at Stanford University, Ken Kesey participated in an Army-funded experiment at the Veterans Administration Hospital, which involved hallucinogenic drugs. The discovery of the effects of the drugs prompted Kesey to study alternative methods of perception. To further his study, he later made the decision to work as an orderly at the Menlo Park mental hospital in California, where he encountered questionable treatments for patients.

From these observations, Ken Kesey concluded that society makes ordinary people crazy and that society, itself, prevents people from functioning in it once again. This conclusion inspired Kesey to write “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, a book he considered to be a rail against the unspoken repressive rules of society.

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is one of America’s most challenged and banned novels. In 1974, residents in Ohio, considering the book pornographic and glorifying criminal activity, sued the local Board of Education to remove the novel from classrooms. Between 1975 and 1978, several school districts in New York, Oklahoma, Maine and Idaho removed the novel from the schools, with the Freemont High School in St Anthony, Idaho, firing the teacher who assigned it. Challenges against the novel being in school curriculums periodically occurred until 2000.

Note: The film adaption of the 1962 published novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, starred Jack Nicholson and was directed by Miloš Forman. It was released in 1975 by United Artists. The film went on to win five Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

David Abram: “They Spill Rain Upon the Land”

Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Thirteen

“Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attention; things expose themselves to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds; rocks snag lichen spores from the air and shelter spiders under their flanks; clouds converse with the fathomless blue and metamorphose into one another; they spill rain upon the land, which gathers in rivulets and carves out canyons…”

—David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

David Abram is an American ecologist and philosopher best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology,the study of the structural experiences of the ‘self’, with ecological and environmental issues.

David Abram introduced the term “the more-than-human-world” in his 1994 book “The Spell of the Sensuous”, which received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. This term was gradually adopted by other scholars and theorists, and became a key phrase in the broad ecological movement. Abram has also referred to this concept more recently as “the commonwealth of breath”.

Abram advocated a reappraisal of “animism”, the belief system that all objects, places, plants, and creatures possess a distinct spiritual essence, as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview. He held that this view, a belief system of many indigenous people, is one which roots human cognition in the sentient human body, while affirming the ongoing entanglement of our bodily experience with the remarkable sentience of other animals, each of which perceives the same world that we perceive yet from a different perspective.

David Abram, a student of traditional, indigenous systems of ecological knowledge, gave voice to the entwinement of human subjectivity not only with other animals but also with the varied sensitivities of many plants upon which humans depend and the bioregions that surround and sustain our communities.

In 2010 Abram published “Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology” which was a finalist for the 2011 Orion Book Award and the runner-up for the PEN America Edward O. Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing. Using his knowledge of indigenous cultures, Abram explores our human entanglement with nature and shows that awareness, or the mind, is not an exclusive possession of the human species but a clear aspect of the biosphere itself, one in which we, along with other living things, steadily participate. This book has since become a classic of environmental literature.

Antonio Botto

The Poet: Antonio Botto

Born in Concavada, Portugal, in August of 1897, António Botto was one of Portugal’s first openly gay writers, a ‘poète maudit’, cursed poet, whose unapologetic and candid verses about homosexual life and passion were both praised and reviled.

Antonio Botto was born in a working class neighborhood, and lived by working a series of menial jobs. He was poorly educated, gaining most of his knowledge from the books in the bookshop where he clerked. In his mid-twenties, Botto entered civil service as a administrative clerk in the state’s offices. He worked briefly in Zaire and Angola, before returning to Lisbon in 1925, where he worked as a civil servant.

Botto’s first book of poems “Tovas” was published in 1917, followed by “Cantigas de Saudade” in 1918, “Cantares” in 1919 and “Cançōes do Sul” in 1920. Botta’s fourth book of poems, entitled “Cançōes (Songs)”. was first published in 1921 and was largely ignored until his friend, the poet Fernando Pessoa, published a second edition in 1922 under his own publishing company and publicly praised the work.

Conservatives reacted strongly against the poems and denounced them as ‘Sodom’s literature”, leading authorities to ban the book in 1923. This public scandal in the Lisbon society granted Botto a life-long notoriety. After the scandal subsided in 1924, the ban was lifted, enabling Botto to publish several revised editions of his “Cançōes “.

On November 9, 1942, Antonio Botto was expelled from the civil service for disobeying a superior’s orders; wooing a male co-worker, addressing him with ambiguous words with tendencies condemned by social morals; and for writing and reciting verses during working hours, thus disrupting workplace discipline. After this dismissal, Botto attempted to earn his livelihood by the royalties from his books, and writing articles and critiques in newspapers.

With little funds and deteriorating health from refusing treatment for syphilis, Antonio Botto raised funds through recitals for passage to Brazil in 1947. Well received upon arrival, he attended banquets and tributes throughout Brazil. He resided in Sāo Paulo until 1951, when he moved to Rio de Janeiro, surviving on royalties, writing articles and columns in Brazil’s newspapers, and doing radio shows; but gradually his situation deteriorated.

Rejected in his attempts for repatriation to his home country of Portugal, Botto fell seriously ill in 1956 and was hospitalized for a time. On March 4, 1959, he was run over by a motor vehicle, with the result of a broken skull, and went into a coma. Antonio Botto died on March 16, 1959. His remains were transferred to Lisbon and have been buried since 1966 in the Alto de Sāo João Cemetery.

In his writings, Botto’s poetic voice, personal and intimate, revels in eroticism while expressing the ache of longing, silence, and suffering. Gaining acclaim and notoriety, he was both hailed as one of the great Portuguese poets of his day and condemned for his frank depictions of male to male desire. Antonio Botto and his work fell into oblivion after his death in 1959. However, within the last ten years with the rising interest in gay history, his works, including biographies of his life, have been issued in new editions available both in Portuguese and English.

Fernando Pessoa: “Life that Wants Nothing Can Have No Weight”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Twelve

“Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life that wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.”

—Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic

Born in June of 1888 in Lisbon, Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language.

Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not capture their true independent, intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. Each of these heteronyms possessed distinct biographies, temperaments, philosophies, appearances, writing styles, and even signatures.

In 1905, Pessoa attended university in Lisbon, however, after two years he left, educating himself by sequestering in the National Library to read literature, history, philosophy and religion. He began writing short stories, some of them under the name “David Merrick”, as well as poems and essays, most often in English or French and occasionally in Portuguese.

A life-long outsider, Pessoa lived with relatives or in rented rooms, chain-smoking, writing, reading, and working as a translator for firms with overseas connections. Throughout his life, Pessoa grappled with the possibility of insanity, spurred on by his grandmother’s mental illness, but he was never able to draw conclusions about himself either way.

“I’ve divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.” —Fernando Pessoa, talking about his heteronyms

For a thorough and fascinating article entitled “Fernando Pessoa and His Heteronyms” by Carmela Ciuraru, please visit the Poetry Society of America located at: https://poetrysociety.org/features/tributes/fernando-pessoa-his-heteronyms