Christopher Matthew Hennessy's Blog, page 11
June 16, 2011
Just a plug
Pardon the interruption. It's been a while since I've stooped but of course this is what we need to do from time to time. Have you checked out my book, a collection of interviews with major (gay) poets? I also have a debut collection of poems forthcoming from Brooklyn Arts Press. We now return you to your regularly scheduled surfing.
James Franco/Hart Crane having sex
Wonder if this movie will have much to do with Crane's poetry or just a chance for Franco to be shocking: straight actor having gay sex on screen (see description below). Ooooo. What would really be shocking? If the film were about Crane's poetry in a substantial way.
June 10, 2011
Cool Limbo by Michael Montlack
My buddy Michael Montlack is celebrating the release of his first full-length book of poems, Cool Limbo! Michael edited the My Diva book, which I'm proud to be included in!
Here's what people are saying:
Lambda reviewer Brent Calderwood pens a fine review of the book, glossing several important poems. Near the end he summarizes, "Chock-full of literary experiments, topical references, unabashed sexual themes, and a raconteur's easy tone, Cool Limbo takes the kinds of risks that first books rarely do. At 100 pages (almost twice the number typical for a debut collection), even the length is risky."
FROM THE publisher: (and keep reading for great blurbs from a roster of amazing writers)
Cool Limbo is a series of dazzling portraits that are accessible yet complex, hilarious yet poignant, down-to-earth yet ethereal. Like its cover, which features the title poem's sexy 70′s chick lounging—stoned—by the pool (as she neglects the water-winged kids she's supposed to be babysitting), the book is the best kind of party—unofficial, unpretentious, and unabashed. And everyone's there "on plastic lawn furniture…with six packs and lit cigarettes:" From Liz Taylor, Gertrude Stein, and The Golden Girls, to Orpheus, Vanity Smurf, and Stevie Nicks. Poem after poem, these figures somehow mingle with the poet, in the not-so-still life studies of his boisterous family and friends, building a narrative about the departure from suburbia to the big city (from the ghost of a boy to a realized though sometimes-haunted man)—all while commenting on, as Elaine Equi puts it, the "constantly shifting sexual codes" assigned to men and women alike. Few places can you find a poem about a gay porn star that concerns itself with the meaning of objectivity and art just pages after a charged feminist manifesto called "If Hello Kitty Had a Mouth." But beyond that colorful variety of subject and theme, not to mention his mastery of dialogue and what Mark Bibbins calls "devious one-liners," what's most remarkable about this poet in his debut collection is his ability to confront the serious and painful while never abandoning his sharp sense of humor and playful spirit.
Recommendations
Like Montlack, I grew up on Long Island, and it seems this talented poet has got the suburbs exactly right. Lighting up his poems are distinctive, amusing portraits of the women in his life—from schoolgirl days through their East Village punker phase to matrons playing Mah Jongg. With a few drag queens thrown in. However, as seen through his gimlet eye, liberation hasn't made the 'boys' happier or connecting with someone easier. Though having a mechanic father who accepts him is quite a tribute to the openness Gay Rights have brought. A memorable collection, and fun to read!
—Edward Field, author of After the Fall, Poems Old and New
Cool Limbo navigates a lavish parade of constantly shifting sexual codes, zeroing in with wit and precision on such topics as the pursuit of beauty, the lure of indifference, the gaudy charm of the suburbs, and mortality. Even the somber pieces maintain a tone that celebrates subversive pleasure. These are poems you'll want to cruise.
—Elaine Equi, author of Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems
Satire and nostalgia may seem like an unwieldy pairing, but Montlack pulls it off, gleefully dishing out devious one-liners while creating warts-and-all portraits of friends and family with generosity and insight. His raucous but wise misfits join in a chorus promising that in Cool Limbo, we'll never be alone.
—Mark Bibbins, author of The Dance of No Hard Feelings
With an unabashed "Uncle Mame" penchant for pop and camp, Montlack's meticulous ear for urban banter is used to maximum effect—hilarious, compassionate, and frank, as well as delightful.
—Cyrus Cassells, author of Beautiful Signor
Cool Limbo strikes a chord for any gay man who grew up an honorary citizen in a community of hard-knock divas—"ladies in waiting with truck-driver mouths/ and illegal tattoos." But this female paradise is also inhabited by gal pals, their mothers, silver screen icons, even Hello Kitty—each earthly goddess preparing the boy for the inevitable expulsion into the terrible/beautiful world of men. Montlack's poems, sparkling with awe and ethos, celebrate those days as lessons which will enable a man to offer "some of that female love" to another man.
—Rigoberto González, author of Other Fugitives and Other Strangers
June 9, 2011
The best gay books of all time, chosen by the best LGBT writers
As I've said before I LOVE LISTS! And yes, I know all the risks that come with making lists. But they're fun so get over it. So….The best gay books of all time, chosen by the best LGBT writers — The Good Men Project Magazine, by Benoit Denizet-Lewis.
He writes:
I wish someone had given me a list of required gay reading when I was coming out. Gay men gave me a lot of things back then (porn, theater tickets, crabs), but no one gave me book titles. As a young gay man, I could have used a literary roadmap to help me put my experiences—and my feelings—in some historical and sociological context. As a young writer, I could have used being better read. Why didn't anyone tell me that I needed to know who Paul Monette was?
In an effort to right those wrongs, and to do my part to promote gay cultural literacy in a time of vanishing gay bookstores and vanishing attention spans, I've asked some of the country's most interesting and iconic LGBT writers—including Michael Cunningham, Edmund White, John Waters, and Patricia Nell Warren—to suggest five books that every LGBT person should have on his bookshelf (or Kindle).
Not many poets asked (maybe three?). Sigh. Poets mentioned include Weiners, Schuyler, Myles, Campo, Manrique, Lorde, Merrill, Bishop, Auden, but sometimes the book mentioned isn't their poetry.
Many mention Genet, Andrew Holleran, Alan Hollinghurst, Christopher Isherwood, Anne Carson, Herman Melville, Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf, Edmund White, Alison Bechdel, J.R. Ackerley, and Tony Kushner.
But check out Allan Gurganus' list!
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Collected Poems by Arthur Rimbaud
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Complete Poems by Constantine Cavafy
Three out of five are books of poetry! And who could blame him for including Proust and Wilde!
Found (spam)Poem: "The Theory of Much Erection"
This was spam from an erectile dysfunction ad. I have changed hardly anything about it though I did add the title.
THE THEORY OF MUCH ERECTION
Freud lends this smoke by combining up a dangerous therapy of much erection, which his gay poet, the future of an generic overnight, founded: the useful life of area, risk, and popularity. His natural profession, poetry, erectile dysfunction used during this art, made his partner.
Scandalous anatomical after-effects for numbers under 19 women is encouraged—in the mixed-orientation. And spectacular technology for liars is not fed by it.
GLBT publishers, hurrah!
Yesterday, I posted this on Facebook:
Sometimes I just like looking at my bookcases. What great books I'm lucky to own! Such formidable work done on GLBT themes and issues! There are too many authors to list, but TELL ME WHO YOUR FAVORITE GLBT PUBLISHER is!
So, who is it?
June 8, 2011
The transaction of desire
I recently read, almost in an entire sitting, which is rare for me, Garth Greenwell's new book, Mitko. The slim, elegantly written and psychologically complex narrative tells of an American living in Sofia, Bulgaria who meets a young man he pays for sex. The book feels like one or two long, undulating paragraphs, a movement I relished as it enabled me to fall into the waves of Greenwell's luxuriously rich syntax and to enjoy his poetic sensibility as a prose stylist. The content of the book is equally captivating, a simple but moving story of the narrator's relationship to this enigmatic Mitko. As his desire and need grow, the relationship becomes a kind of crucible of internal conflicts, which ultimately prompts a dramatic conclusion that leaves the reader wondering if catharsis is really possible when it comes to unrequited love.
I thought I'd share a wonderful passage I enjoyed. As I sat down, I just kept on typing. Hope you enjoy!
"My fatigue had become a kind of agitation now, I felt antsy, on edge, opening and closing the book still lying unread on my lap. I hadn't found in it what I wanted, as I say, what I found in it before, the recovery of something like nobility from the mawkishness and share of desire, the sense that sex, even the most usually devalued—stray meetings in dark rooms or the shadowy commerce of my own evening—burned with genuine luminosity, rubbing up against the realm of the ideal, ready a the slightest provocation to be transfigured, to become, as sex is always wont to do, metaphysics."
"…I lay next to him thinking, as I had had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn't welcomed and reflected, even if that reflection is contrived. And also how lonely, what a kind of absolute isolation and exclusion, even as Mitko was right next to me, naked now and stretched out beside me with his arms behind his head, granting me an unrestricted access that did nothing to assuage my sense of the lack of him, even as it was his warmth next to me that I strove to feel as I brought myself off."
"Nor was it the first time he caught [my own false tones, my search for the appropriate pitch], and indeed it was the key of my own peculiar music, this ambivalence that spurs me first to one course of action and then to another, a process of expansion and contraction, so that my entire life, it sometimes seems to me, resembles nothing so much as a kind of grotesquely laboring lung."
June 7, 2011
I'm a Twitter maniac!
Don't forget to check out my Twitter feed to your right —–>
I've been Tweeting up a storm of interesting links, etc. lately!
Follow me @identity_poetics
Join in the conversation
The Beloit Poetry Journal recently asked four poets tot take part in a symposium on gay poetics. "[T]he editors all felt that what the journal was able to fit within the eight pages at the "back of the book" opens up an important conversation, one that needed to continue in a more capacious venue—and with voices beyond the original discussants'. And so, for the month of June, we have migrated the conversation to the Poet's Forum, hoping you and others will join in."
JOIN THE CONVERSATION HERE! The poets await your questions!
If you're able, post a comment here to let us know you've asked a question so we can surf on over and get up to speed.
June 6, 2011
Motion Studies, poems by Brad Richard
From a review of my buddy Brad Richard's lastest book:
"Like the painter and poets before him, Richard contends with nature in its beauty and destruction, and he makes with his poems a stalwart against the coming end, an attempt to capture motion and to still the moment."
