Christopher Matthew Hennessy's Blog, page 19

Hiddden History (including Essex Hemphill, Tim Dlugos and "Poets and Pornographers")

I just recently discovered a now-defunct column on the site The New Gay that I can't believe I missed while it was running. (Thank god for the internet's achive.) It's called Hidden History and it was written by Philip Clark.  As I was looking over the titles of the various columns (go here) , I was immediately attracted to the one on poet Essex Hemphill.  Here's a snippet of Clark's column where he's writing about Hemphill's triumphant Ceremonies.

"American Wedding" turns the placement of a cock ring on one's lover into a powerful act of union. "Black Machismo" pulls no punches as it addresses the issue of the sexual objectification of black men: "Metaphorically speaking / his black dick is so big / when it stands up erect / it silences / the sound of his voice." Even Hemphill's less political, more romantic poems have memorable rhythms and images, as in "Black Beans," where one lover tells another that "Times are lean, Pretty Baby, / the beans are burnt / to the bottom / of the battered pot," but still "Our souls can't be crushed / like cats crossing streets too soon." The poems in Ceremonies defy the odds: they are both topical and current, crafted

and accessible, highly specific to the black, gay experience, yet universal in their concerns.

Here's more from a column on "Poets and Pornographers" which talks about Tim Dlugos among other things.

Finishing at Cornell, I continue my journey, eventually traveling to Toronto. There, I stay at the home of Ian Young, a longtime gay poet and publisher, and his partner, Wulf. By now, I've been able to find out what happened to most of the poets whose work I drank from during high school. Some seemingly disappeared, some went on to greater renown as writers. Many died from AIDS. In the basement of his home, Ian keeps a grand, sprawling archive of gay poetry books and chapbooks, history texts, and letters from authors. We spend one morning together in that basement while I comb through shoeboxes stuffed with poetry. Names both familiar and foreign rise to the surface as I remove handfuls of books at a time. Other hours, we sit in his living room, talking about gay authors. Occasionally, Ian reaches over to the shelves near his chair and pulls down items he knows I'll be interested in, or walks from the room and reappears with a stack of books.

…

…

All of us are making our way in this world on the shoulders of those women and men who came before, whether or not we are ever fully aware of it. For those of us who are gay and lesbian, the history of those who came before is often hidden. To call history "hidden" might imply activity: that someone has willfully covered up the past. Certainly, this is true for much of gay and lesbian history—people whose identity has historically been feared and hated are less likely to leave open records of their lives, and all too often, relatives and friends have made a habit of "cleaning up" the historical record by destroying evidence. But often as not, history is actually hidden passively: by benign neglect, by accidents of memory, by simply not looking.

I feel it is our obligation as gay men and lesbians to fight this passivity by actively seeking out and learning about our history. No one will do this for us, and I fear that the world will be all too eager to let gay and lesbian histories disappear. It's the same impulse that causes many heterosexuals to say, "I don't mind gays and lesbians, I just wish they weren't so open about their sexuality." Instead, let's be tremendously open, not only about our own lives and dreams, but about those of the people who helped us be able to proclaim them.

Really good stuff, Philip! THANKS!

Frank O'Hara video and a poem

VIDEO: Our Life in Poetry: Frank O'Hara Poetry Reading & Discussion
Participants: Michael Braziller, Mark Doty, David Lehman
Video can be seen by clicking here:
http://philoctetes.org/Past_Programs/...  *

I was transcribing an interview just yesterday and this poem came up, so I thought I'd add it to the post, below.  (What's YOUR FAV. O'Hara poem? Let's make a list!)

"You Are Gorgeous and I'm Coming"

Vaguely I hear the purple roar of the torn-down Third Avenue El
it sways slightly but firmly like a hand or a golden-downed thigh
normally I don't think of sounds as colored unless I'm feeling corrupt
concrete Rimbaud obscurity of emotion which is simple and very definite
even lasting, yes it may be that dark and purifying wave, the death of boredom
nearing the heights themselves may destroy you in the pure air
to be further complicated, confused, empty but refilling, exposed to light

With the past falling away as an acceleration of nerves thundering and shaking
aims its aggregating force like the Métro towards a realm of encircling travel
rending the sound of adventure and becoming ultimately local and intimate
repeating the phrases of an old romance which is constantly renewed by the
endless originality of human loss the air the stumbling quiet of breathing
newly the heavens' stars all out we are all for the captured time of our being.

- Frank O'Hara

 

 

*[not sure why wordpress won't let me paste in a link!]

Breaking news: Over the Rainbow list announced

"The Over the Rainbow readers  are VERY PROUD to announce their  inaugural list of 108 adult books…"[from GLBT Round Table of the American Library Association]

Poetry

Borland, Bryan. My Life as Adam. 2010. 121p. Sibling Rivalry Press, $14.00. (978-0-57805117-8).

Dumesnil, Cheryl. In Praise of Falling. 2009 (July). 78p. University of Pittsburgh Press, $14.95.  (978-0-8229-6041-6).

Enszer, Julie R. Handmade Love. 2010. 62p. Midsummer Night's Press, $11.95. (978-0-9794208-5-6).

Luczak, Raymond. Mute. 2010. 62p. Midsummer Night's Press, $11.95. (978-0-9794208-6-3).

Xavier, Emanuel. If Jesus Were Gay & Other Poems. 2010. 135p. Queer Mojo/Rebel Satori, $14.95. (978-1-60864-032-4).

Check out the complete list by clicking link above.

Attention Readers of Gay Interest texts: Clear your calendars!

Thanks to a blog reader here who is amazingly well-read and an all-around smarty pants, I offer up his "Upcoming Books" list he kindly sent to me. (Thanks, Marshall!) Lots of different kinds of books —from poetry titles to academic texts —here to check out.  Have something to add? Please do so in the comments section.

This month:

Memon, Madhavi. Shakesqueer: A queer companion to the works.

Halley, Janet. After sex: On writing since queer theory.

Martin, Brian.  Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France.

Brookes, Les.  Gay male fiction since stonewall.

February

Adams, Mary.  Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity, and the Limits of Sport.



Lonely Christopher. The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse.

March.

Angles, Jeffrey. Writing the love of boys: origins of bishonen culture.

Frankel, Nichola. The picture of doran gray: an annotated, uncensored.

Koh, Jee.  Seven studies for a self portrait.

Young, Dale C.  Torn.



April

Haas, Steven.  George Platt Lynes: The Male Nudes.

Jordan, Mark. Recruiting young love: how christians talk about homosexuality

Reed, Christopher. Art and homosexuality.

May

Dlugos  Tim. Fast Life.

Bronski, Michael,   A queer history of the United States.

Murphy, Kevin. Historicizing gender and sexuality.

Vitiello, Giovanni.  The libertine's friend: homosexuality and masculinity in late imperial china.

June

Evangelista, Stephan. The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe.



July

Bruder, Helen.  Queer Blake.Wilson, James. Bulldaggers, pansies and chocolate babies.



October

Russell, Paul.  The Unreal Life of Sergey Vladimirovich Nabokov.

September

Kong, Travis. Chinese Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy

Syme, Alison. A touch of blossom: John Singer Sargent and queer flora.

October

Edge, Deckie. The Noel Coward Reader

"I too having lost faith / in language, have placed my faith in language."

I found that line from a post on a favorite blog of mine called for southern boys who consider poetry.

Click on that link to see who wrote the line and to read Saeed's post about which poems from 2010 which he "placed his faith in."  I like this idea, how he phrases it and how he differentiates it from the "poems that saved my life" kind of thing.

Not that there has to be a gay angle, but Saeed is a gay poet and at least two of the poems on his list are by (gay) poets:

"Another Elegy" by Jericho Brown

"Song on the Subway" by Ocean Vuong

Duncan and H.D. and "The Homosexual in Society"

It's out! It's Out!

The H.D. Book (The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan)

Jed Pearl at the New Republic wonders if it is the book that "could save American art."

Pearl brings up Hide /Seek and Duncan's "The Homosexual in Society":

I have been reading The H.D. Book off and on for the past month or so. Duncan's bold words have lifted my spirits at a time when the worlds of art and literature that I care about seem not only dangerously embattled but, worse yet, hopelessly distorted and demoralized. The Guggenheim Museum has had a huge hit this fall with "Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936," an exhibition in which some of the grandest achievements of cosmopolitan modernism are wrenched into a scheme that leads straight to the totalitarian abhorrence of modernism. And the culture wars have heated up again. A flagrantly opportunistic right-wing attack on the inclusion of a video by David Wojnarowicz in the exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, has been met not by a high-spirited and altogether necessary defense of the freestanding value of art but instead by liberal parochialism and identity politics. I would not presume to imagine what Duncan would have thought about either of these exhibitions, though I expect he would have been pleased that Jess [his life partner] is included in "Hide/Seek." Duncan's 1944 essay, "The Homosexual in Society," published in Dwight Macdonald's short-lived magazine, Politics, is mentioned in the catalogue of "Hide/Seek," but I am not sure if the organizers see Duncan's point, for he views the gay artist not as the spokesman for a particular identity but as a member of a larger community devoted to "a creative life and expression," and inextricably tied to "a devotion to human freedom, toward the liberation of human love, human conflicts, human aspirations."

Another quote:

Where Clement Greenberg, in his 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," saw the modern artist in flight from the heterogeneity of modern life, for Duncan the task of the modern artist is precisely to wrest some new alchemy from life's crazy quilt richness. No wonder Duncan speaks so warmly about collage—the art brilliantly practiced by his life partner, Jess—where "from what has been disregarded or fallen into disregard, genres are mixed, exchanges are made, mutations begun from scraps and excerpts from different pictures …form the figures of a new composition."

Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Duncan's (1919–1988) great meditation on modernism's last remaining question mark finally sees print. Published as the first volume in California's Collected Writings of Robert Duncan series, this lovingly prepared volume presents this long critical work, written in 1960 and 1961, in its full form for the first time. It brilliantly reconstructs the dynamics of Pound, Williams, and H.D.'s complex, charged, evolving poet relations, and of H.D.'s eventual departure from the modernist mainstream into a classicism that exasperated Williams, but clearly fascinates Duncan. It reveals Duncan's own poetic relationship to H.D., with whom he corresponded late in the latter poet's life. It tracks a canonical murder, by which critics (beginning with Randall Jarrell) systematically exclude H.D. from the modernist pantheon. And it shows Duncan, whose great longer works lay ahead of him, struggling to find a poetic kernel within H.D.'s oeuvre. While this book is staged as an elaborate defense of H.D.'s work, and especially her austere and archaic-seeming late poetry, it is best read as the daybook of a poet as he absorbs, thinks through, departs from, returns to, and loves a major antecedent. (Jan.)

Tóibín's latest gets big gay review in Globe

A Boston Globe reviewer doesn't shy away from the gay content in Colm Tóibín's latest book, a collection of short stories. The gay content doesn't always come up shining, however.  I've not read the book so I can't comment. If anyone has, please chime in!

The reviewer writes that seven of the stories, "several of them gay-themed, share a gray emotional uniformity; their protagonists frozen in a dim regret muffled by overmastering pride."

Later, he writes "Tóibín is writing the prideful imprisonment of anomie; the author, who is gay himself, has created a set of gay characters so involved in their own feelings that these wither from sheer airlessness." [Not even sure what he's getting at here.]

Now it gets racy! Should we wonder if graphic straight sex would be considered 'bordering on the pornographic"? Again, I haven't read the book.  Maybe it is that hot.

In "The Pearl Fishers'' a reclusively self-sufficient thriller writer recalls having sex, vividly described, with another schoolboy; it is lust, though, without feeling. There is even less feeling and even more graphically rendered sex, bordering on the pornographic, in "Barcelona, 1975'' — a young man's account of male orgies in Catalonia around the time of Franco's death.

But then the review ends like this: "Tóibín, author of the immensely human "Brooklyn,'' breaks into the preponderant chill of this collection, with a tale of gay love as tender as it is extravagant."

Thanks one and all

Just a quick note to say thanks to all those who commented, left posts on my Facebook page, and sent my emails! I've tried to respond to each and every one, but if I missed you — THANKS!  This has been a week to remember!

A blog on gay history, art, etc.

A new find that may prove to have some good posts. It's called simply enough Gay Art and History. Recent posts have included "Gay History = Human History" and "Love poems. . from the Middle East to the Bay of Bengal, were usually male love poems. Rest a moment, traveler, and read a few."

QueerType for January 2011

QueerType for January is hot off the e-press. Here are some highlights:

In May, Beacon will publish Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States.

Over the last four months, Philip Clark has been publishing an online series at The New Gay called "Fifteen from 1984″ that discusses fifteen gay and lesbian writers who appeared at the New York City outlet of A Different Light bookstore in 1984, among them Sarah Schulman, David Leavitt, Quentin Crisp and Jane Chambers.

QueerType has been named as one of the Top LGBT Blogs on the Guide to Online Schools' list found here: http://www.guidetoonlineschools.com/library/best-lgbt-blogs.

For those who check out the above list of websites, tell us if you find any finds!