Christopher Matthew Hennessy's Blog, page 9

My book page is live! And I am ecstatic

My official book page is now up on my publisher's website! SO PSYCHED! It contains my four blurbs and there's even a order button for pre-orders. It's real it's real it's real! Thank you Brooklyn Arts Press!

I wrote the poems I wanted to write

You know what, I can honestly say the poems that comprise my forthcoming book, they are the poems I wanted to write.  I feel completely at peace with the book. That's big for me.  Because….

at some point during the process of preparing my first book of poems for publication, I thought to myself, "Oh, I'm so glad this book is happening. I can finally get on to the work of writing the poems I was meant to write."  I am so ashamed that I had this thought.  I realized almost as soon as I thought it that it was artificial, was pretense, was knee-jerk, was shallow, and patently counter to my real experience of writing the poems.  But I think it's a feeling we're conditioned to have, to think our "real" writing is the writing that awaits us and that our past poems are junky.  I would like us to denounce this attitude. I would like us to think back to when we were writing our poems, to value that experience—to value how it made us feel, to value the emotional truth we sought and found during it, the problems we came upon and left as problems because that's the human space of longing we occupy day to day, the words that arose from the muck to startle us into clarity one moment and complexity the next.

Here endeth my sermon.

Been caught tweeting

Several new tweets to be discovered on the right side of the screen. That is all.

Four things I'm excited about

I've listed these in ascending order of excitement level, saving the very most exciting for the last.

4) That I've been tweeting up a storm lately.  See my most recent tweets on the right side of this page!  And follow me @identity_poetic!

3) That Lawrence Schimel of Midsummer Night's Press fame has started an open directory of gay poets over at Google + , which I've now joined.  Are you a queer poet? Join the list!

2) That the issue of American Poetry Review with my interview with John Ashbery is now out!  (Speaking of which, if you saw my blog URL at the end of that article and came looking for more information about my book of interviews with gay poets –warning: shameless plug — please surf on over here (Amazon) or here (Bn.com) or here (Powells) to purchase a copy.)

1) That Brooklyn Arts Press has my book cover and a blurb on its webpage!  Ain't she a beaut!  So excited and so glad to have such an awesome publisher! And so thankful to those who blurb the book!

"…This man is not dangerous, answers to any name / Responds to love…"

His aliases tell his history: Dumbell, Good-for-nothing

Jewboy, Fieldinsky, Skinny, Fierce Face, Greaseball, Sissy.

Warning: This man is not dangerous, answers to any name

Responds to love, don't call him or he will come.

—from Edward Field's "Unwanted"

July's QueerType news is up

Here it is: July's QueerType

Congrats to David Groff: "Bastille Day Films has optioned David Groff's Nobody's Child, in which a single New York mother and a doggedly unattached gay man find their friendship rocked by her diagnosis of cancer and the needs of her young son."

Anne Lister, 1816: "That it had been known to me, as it were, by inclination."

My Internet buddy and blog reader Marshall is reading selections from the diary of Anne Lister (1791-1840), a lesbian who wrote a huge amount in a coded language in her journals, which were thankfully saved. Marshall copied out the following passage, which he says "is an account of a conversation she had with a new romantic interest, Anne Belcombe, whose conscience is troubling her about sex with Anne. (The reference to Sir T.H. is to is a local married minister about whom there were rumors that he had sex with men.)"

It's a great example of how, despite Queer Theory's insistence, I believe we need to remember that people pre-1870′s experienced their sexuality in ways we today we find very similar.  Read the entry. It's a fascinating look into the past.

Wednesday, November 13, 1816,

"She asked if I thought the thing was wrong — if it was forbidden in the bible & said she felt quere (sic) when she heard Sir Thomas Horton mentioned. I dexterously parried all these points — said Sir T. H.'s case was quite a different thing. That was positively forbidden & signally punished in the bible — that the other was certainly not named. Besides, Sir T. H. was proved to be a perfect man by his having a child & it was infamous to be connected with both sexes — but that [there] were beings who were so unfortunate as to be not quite so perfect & , supposing they kept to one side [of] the equation, was there no excuse for them. It would be hard to deny them a gratification of this kind. I urged in my own defense the strength of natural feeling & instinct, for so I might call it, as I had always had the same turn from infancy. That it had been known to me, as it were, by inclination. That I had never varied & no effort on my part had been able to counteract it. That the girls liked me & had always liked me. That I had never been refused by anyone & that, without attempting to account for the thing, I hoped it might, under the circumstances be excused."

- p. 5, Helena Whitbread, (Ed.), The secret diaries of Miss Anne Lister, 1988 (2010, pb)

The editor Helena Whitbread says of the journals: "What we read is an authentic depiction of the fictionalized scenarios provided by writers of her day: Mrs. Gaskell's small town of Cranford; Jane Austen's genteel society novels; and given the wildness of the Yorkshire countryside around Halifax and Anne Lister's passionate love affairs, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights."

"When will gay marriage's time come in literature?"

"When will gay marriage's time come in literature?" from The New Republic.

I have real problems with the final paragraph of this piece! If I get a chance will explain more later, but I'm off to spend some quality time with my man.

The Gay Bar …and a poet

For my graduate research I'm looking into queer places and how they are part of the historical fabric of gay poetry.  So I was stoked to see yesterday that Slate has a series on the gay bar.  If you've done any reading about gay history in the U.S. in the 20th century, you know how important the gay bar has been as a site of gathering, of passing on information, and of sexual connection (and much more), though it's not without its problems of course (e.g. men's bars that wouldn't allow lesbians).  Today, Slate folllows up its initial article by asking famous folks about their first experience at a gay bar.  I couldn't resist sharing J.D. McClatchy's here:

J.D. McClatchy, poet and editor of the Yale Review

It seems in retrospect I must have been looking for one all my life. As a child I was forever "playing house" with neighborhood girls or managing some hapless puppet theater or makeshift grocery store—all of them imaginary "clubs," places apart and friendly. As a high-school student in downtown Philadelphia, I even managed to find—up three flights of musty gloom—the local office of the Mattachine Society, and slowly turned its revolving wire bookrack … looking for what? I never had anything but handmade sex during college, but as a freshman at Georgetown in 1963, I went to my first gay bar, the Georgetown Bar & Grill. It was only gay on every other Thursday for two hours. There were communal tables and pitchers of beer. I sat at one, quivering with what I supposed was fear but was probably the desire that "something" would happen. It did. An older man sitting next to me put his hand on my thigh and asked if I wanted to go to a party. For a moment, I was paralyzed. Then, without paying, without a word, without looking back, I fled. What I fled to was a future—six or seven long, lonely years later—when I dared to go back to a gay bar in New Haven. Silly that it took me so long to get where I was always going, but in those years—sure, in Manhattan and San Francisco there had always been a few fern and muscle bars—the world was deliberately, sadly empty. We only had our hearts.

Dlugos' "hunger for the transcendent"

A review of Dlugos' The Fast Life in bookforum:

A snippet:

…Dlugos may be the great poet of the AIDS epidemic, above all in "G-9," a remarkable long poem in short lines whose meditative prosody owes more to James Schuyler, perhaps, than to O'Hara. The poem, named for the ward at Roosevelt Hospital where Dlugos was being treated, is astonishingly clear-eyed in facing the fate he shared with so many of his friends—"There are forty-nine names / on my list of the dead, / thirty-two names of the sick." Yet he finds a sort of peace in his gratitude for the gift that allowed him to face down his illness: "the unexpected love / and gentleness that rushes in / to fill the arid spaces / in my heart, the way the city / glow fills up the sky / above the river, making it / seem less than night."

Dlugos was, of course, not only an AIDS poet, and his early work, which he began writing more than a decade before the onset of the AIDS crisis, is characterized by gossipy banter and a playful take on pop culture (see "Gilligan's Island"). But it won't do to exaggerate the changes that came over Dlugos's work when he first got sober and then got sick. Under the wit of his earlier writing—but not very far under—was always that hunger for the transcendent that had led him to the Christian Brothers as a teenager, and for which his enthusiastic assent to the Baudelairian directive Enivrez-vous was perhaps just another disguise.