AMERICAN POET Charles Henri Ford (1908–2002) and his “surrogate son” Indra Tamang share a chapter in Scott Herring’s intriguing, fact-filled, opinion-strewn book of bio-criticism, Aging Moderns: Art, Literature, and the Experiment of Later Life, which focuses on six 20th-century Modernist artists and writers.
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Reviews of Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry, My Mother Says, Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski, Swollening: Poems, Friedrich Nietzsche (Critical Lives), and the album Homosexual by Darren Hayes.
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Brief reviews of Novel Approaches to Lesbian History, Pathetic Literature, Less is Lost, and A Minor Chorus.
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Brief reviews of the books A Short History of Queer Women, Brother Alive, Jazzed, and Love Poems of a Gay Nerd; and the album Bronco.
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What makes Richard Howard so discomforting and so important (the two in my mind are always linked) was his insatiability, not just as an intellectual, not merely as a translator, critic, and poet, but as a sensibility that could never see enough, never feel enough, never know enough, who wished to feel each moment not just in itself but as part of a continuity of moments that we share together. Nothing could be queerer than this insatiability.
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THE FIRST GLIMPSE I had of Thom Gunn was his picture in a poetry anthology titled The Modern Poets, edited by John Malcolm Brinnin and William Read. It was assigned as a textbook in an English literature class I was taking at Emory University in 1963, with consequences for me that the teacher could not have anticipated. That anthology was the first to include pictures of the poets alongside their selection, a bonus that always makes the reader curious about how the writer’s appearance bears on the work itself.
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Brief reviews of Abuela in Shadow, Abel in Light; Places of Tenderness and Heat; House Fire; Queer Nature; Verdant; Dot & Ralfie; and Immoral, Indecent & Scurrilous.
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BEST KNOWN for her poetry, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886 –1961) was also a novelist, memoirist, essayist, translator, and famously the lover of one of the richest women in England, Annie Winifred Ellerman (1894–1983), better known as Bryher. H.D. and Bryher were true lovers for over forty years.
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Fernando Pessoa began inventing alternate selves: fictional beings who peopled his imaginary universe and manifested their identities by producing letters, stories, and poems.
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In Brocken Spectre, the present moment is always haunted, not only by the past, but by the suggestion of something divine that can never be adequately named or proved. The poems grapple with questions of faith from the perspective of an uncertain believer. “Once, I believed in God,” he admits in “Golden Gate Park.” But for all his admitted uncertainty, that space where belief once stood inside him still feels largely occupied. All of the poems remain alert to evidence that there’s more to life than that which we can rationally perceive.
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