“MORE AND MORE I dread futility,” confesses one of Adrienne Rich’s speakers in Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. “Maybe I couldn’t write fast enough. Maybe it was too soon,” Rich muses in another poem, as if her message might be better understood by future generations.
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Reviews of Inside This House by Pam Crow and Chain of Fools : A Donald Strachey Mystery by Richard Stevenson.
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Short reviews of Parthian Stations, Blackbird and Wolf: Poems, The Late Show, and My Body.
MoreIN 1949, alerted by his friend William Burroughs that his name had appeared in compromising letters seized by police in a drug raid, a 21-year-old Allen Ginsberg worried where to secure his journals and manuscripts of poems lest authorities suddenly descend upon his own apartment and confiscate these records of his drug experimentation and of his inner conflicts over his homosexuality.
MoreFEW QUEER WRITERS plant their flag as firmly at the intersection of poetry and politics as does black lesbian poet Cheryl Clarke. This is clearly evidenced by Clarke’s latest book, a collection of her best known and most powerful essays (including “Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance”) interspersed with equally powerful and resonant poems.
MoreFUNNY, MOVING, FURIOUS, and dazzling, Eleanor Lerman’s Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds (Sarabande, 2005) sounds the note of the times, the era of American Imperialism, the days of our Bush-filled lives. Lerman is able to capture brilliantly the wacky and weary sense of stymied idealism of a generation that grew up hoping for better things for America.
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Reviews of In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot, and School of the Arts: Poems.
MoreRECENTLY, a first-of-its-kind book, Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets was published by the University of Michigan Press, a collection of interviews with some of the most prominent poets alive who also happen to be gay. On the occasion of the book’s release last June, The Gay & Lesbian Review asked interviewer Christopher Hennessy to invite all of the poets who appear in the book to write a paragraph about how their artistic sensibilities have been shaped by their identity as gay men. Their thought-provoking answers appear below, …
More… That was the beginning of our friendship. Our conversations were few and never about poetry, but I was also reading his work and became intrigued by his use of meter and rhyme. In an era of beat poetry and language poetry and abstract poetry that I couldn’t grasp, Gunn both challenged and comforted me with his formalism. He also excited me with his imagination …
More… If poetry anthologies are any indication of what various segments of society are thinking about at a given moment in time, gay anthologies show not only the importance of rendering visible a love continually at risk. They also trace an arc of how our concept of gay love has changed over time. The first gay male poetry anthologies, which began appearing with the 1973 publication of The Male Muse followed by Angels of the Lyre (1975) and Orgasms of Light (1977), contain many poems that show gay men’s search for an identity. …
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