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The Salt Ecstasies
The powerful and influential last poems of an unsung master, now again available, with a new introduction by National Book Award winner Mark Doty James L. White's The Salt Ecstasies― originally published in 1982, shortly after White's untimely death―has earned a reputation for its artful and explicit expression of love and desire. In this new edition, with an introduction by Mark Doty and previously unpublished works by White, his invaluable poetry is again available―clear, passionate, and hard-earned. The Salt Ecstasies is a new book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, edited by Doty, dedicated to bringing essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print.
63 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
About the author
James L. White
6 books5 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.^
James L. White was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1936. At the age of sixteen, he began his training as a classical ballet dancer and was awarded a scholarship to the American Ballet Theater School. He danced for ten years in America and Germany. After his dance career, he attended universities in Indiana and Colorado, and then taught among Navajo tribes in New Mexico and Arizona. White came to Minnesota to develop a creative writing program for Chippewa children through the Minnesota Writers in the Schools Program. He was the author of four books of poetry: Divorce Proceedings (1972), A Crow's Story of Deer (1974), The Del Rio Hotel (1975), and The Salt Ecstasies (1982). In 1978, White was awarded the Bush Foundation Fellowship for Poetry. He lived in Minneapolis until his death from heart disease in 1981.
James L. White was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1936. At the age of sixteen, he began his training as a classical ballet dancer and was awarded a scholarship to the American Ballet Theater School. He danced for ten years in America and Germany. After his dance career, he attended universities in Indiana and Colorado, and then taught among Navajo tribes in New Mexico and Arizona. White came to Minnesota to develop a creative writing program for Chippewa children through the Minnesota Writers in the Schools Program. He was the author of four books of poetry: Divorce Proceedings (1972), A Crow's Story of Deer (1974), The Del Rio Hotel (1975), and The Salt Ecstasies (1982). In 1978, White was awarded the Bush Foundation Fellowship for Poetry. He lived in Minneapolis until his death from heart disease in 1981.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 11, 2010
(reviewed for lambdaliterary.org)
Part of Graywolf’s wonderful “Re/View” series, which publishes important work by out-of-print and outsider poets, The Salt Ecstasies, one of the jewels in the crown of Graywolf’s impressive poetry catalogue, seems long overdue for such treatment. Luckily, it was worth the wait. Series editor Mark Doty introduces the collection with a thoughtful essay, and has included two previously uncollected poems, as well as excerpts from White’s journals.
In addition to making The Salt Ecstasies available to a new generation of readers and writers—the book, published posthumously in 1982, has been hard to find outside of libraries—this new edition gives us the chance to reconsider White’s work and legacy beyond that of being a ‘poet’s poet,’ unknown to most and idolized by a rarefied few.
White’s outsider perspective permeates much of his work. Whereas the work of his contemporaries leaned heavily on the erotic, political, or erudite, White’s poems, as Doty points out in his introduction, “are heartbroken in that everyday way we recognize; they are the exhalation of a sorrow held so long it’s become as ordinary as it is sharp.” In this way, he is a sort of Minneapolis version of James Schuyler, and a male counterpart to many lesbian and feminist writers of his period.
“Making Love to Myself,” for instance, one of White’s best-known poems, takes a stance on autoeroticism otherwise unheard of among gay men, even down to its title. “Men don’t usually ‘make love’ to themselves,” Doty observes—“they jerk off….” In his plainspoken and poignant free-verse style, White begins
When I do it, I remember how it was with us.
Then my hands remember too,
and you’re with me again, just the way it was.
Free of ego, shock, or posturing, White’s diction and tone invite the reader into this most intimate of moments. “What a sweet gift this is, / done with my memory, my cock and hands”: alloyed with the heartfelt, language that might otherwise be too crude or obvious becomes credible and eloquent. After these lines, though, comes a turn; typical of White’s poems, and, one senses, of his life, the erotic is short-lived, hard to hold:
Sometimes I’d wake up wondering if I should fix
coffee for us before work,
almost thinking you’re here again, almost seeing
your work jacket on the chair.
As the speaker goes on to ponder his break with his working-class lover, self-pleasure seems all but gone. The pervasive pull of loss and longing are stronger than those brief moments of joy, stronger even than fantasy, so the poem is aborted: “I just have to stop here Jess. / I just have to stop.”
If so many of White’s poems are about not fitting—frequent themes are loss, aging, being overweight, illness, isolation, and a bittersweet childhood—they tell us much about the human heart. They also debunk assumptions about gay life and gay literature pre- and post-Stonewall, the closet on one side of the riots and liberation and free love on the other. White’s potential partners, then, are just as likely to be closeted, or ’straight,’ as not—if they seem fickle or reluctant as a result, there are also moments of vulnerability and tenderness that are lacking from other more modern, liberated, cocksure writers. From “The First Time:”
Sometimes I’m their first.
Sweet, sweet men.
–
We’re bunglers when it’s really good:
bow legs, pimply backs, scrawny chest hair,
full of mistakes and good intentions.
Another poem on similar themes, “Lying in Sadness,” sparkles with striking images and emotions that seem instantly relatable, yet particular to the speaker’s experience. “I love you completely as salt” in the first stanza, and later “You exhale a fist of memory,” followed by the last stanza: “When you return to something you love, / it’s already beyond repair. / You wear it broken.”
In his journal from October 1979, White demanded bare honesty of himself: “Don’t be afraid, Jim. Sometimes this will hurt you but there is also great beauty in your life. Don’t be afraid, Jim, or if you’re afraid, just go on and do what you do have to do: tell it, tell the story.”
Writing on the cusp of the decade, White trained his pen on age-old, deep-seated fears and desires that for many of his fellow gay writers were sublimated beneath the post-Stonewall frisson of political and sexual liberation, and then sidelined by the political and sexual stridency that the AIDS crisis demanded. Writing in the spaces between, before, and outside those zeitgeists, White explored the sublimated and unearthed the sublime.
White knew how painful it could be to stare directly into what we fear—including the ways in which many of us today still feel alienated, different, and indelibly queer. Perhaps writers and readers at this moment in queer history are again willing to take up the work White started 30 years ago; in so doing, we may come to a deeper, more personal sense of liberation, and even connectedness—to ourselves, to each other.
Part of Graywolf’s wonderful “Re/View” series, which publishes important work by out-of-print and outsider poets, The Salt Ecstasies, one of the jewels in the crown of Graywolf’s impressive poetry catalogue, seems long overdue for such treatment. Luckily, it was worth the wait. Series editor Mark Doty introduces the collection with a thoughtful essay, and has included two previously uncollected poems, as well as excerpts from White’s journals.
In addition to making The Salt Ecstasies available to a new generation of readers and writers—the book, published posthumously in 1982, has been hard to find outside of libraries—this new edition gives us the chance to reconsider White’s work and legacy beyond that of being a ‘poet’s poet,’ unknown to most and idolized by a rarefied few.
White’s outsider perspective permeates much of his work. Whereas the work of his contemporaries leaned heavily on the erotic, political, or erudite, White’s poems, as Doty points out in his introduction, “are heartbroken in that everyday way we recognize; they are the exhalation of a sorrow held so long it’s become as ordinary as it is sharp.” In this way, he is a sort of Minneapolis version of James Schuyler, and a male counterpart to many lesbian and feminist writers of his period.
“Making Love to Myself,” for instance, one of White’s best-known poems, takes a stance on autoeroticism otherwise unheard of among gay men, even down to its title. “Men don’t usually ‘make love’ to themselves,” Doty observes—“they jerk off….” In his plainspoken and poignant free-verse style, White begins
When I do it, I remember how it was with us.
Then my hands remember too,
and you’re with me again, just the way it was.
Free of ego, shock, or posturing, White’s diction and tone invite the reader into this most intimate of moments. “What a sweet gift this is, / done with my memory, my cock and hands”: alloyed with the heartfelt, language that might otherwise be too crude or obvious becomes credible and eloquent. After these lines, though, comes a turn; typical of White’s poems, and, one senses, of his life, the erotic is short-lived, hard to hold:
Sometimes I’d wake up wondering if I should fix
coffee for us before work,
almost thinking you’re here again, almost seeing
your work jacket on the chair.
As the speaker goes on to ponder his break with his working-class lover, self-pleasure seems all but gone. The pervasive pull of loss and longing are stronger than those brief moments of joy, stronger even than fantasy, so the poem is aborted: “I just have to stop here Jess. / I just have to stop.”
If so many of White’s poems are about not fitting—frequent themes are loss, aging, being overweight, illness, isolation, and a bittersweet childhood—they tell us much about the human heart. They also debunk assumptions about gay life and gay literature pre- and post-Stonewall, the closet on one side of the riots and liberation and free love on the other. White’s potential partners, then, are just as likely to be closeted, or ’straight,’ as not—if they seem fickle or reluctant as a result, there are also moments of vulnerability and tenderness that are lacking from other more modern, liberated, cocksure writers. From “The First Time:”
Sometimes I’m their first.
Sweet, sweet men.
–
We’re bunglers when it’s really good:
bow legs, pimply backs, scrawny chest hair,
full of mistakes and good intentions.
Another poem on similar themes, “Lying in Sadness,” sparkles with striking images and emotions that seem instantly relatable, yet particular to the speaker’s experience. “I love you completely as salt” in the first stanza, and later “You exhale a fist of memory,” followed by the last stanza: “When you return to something you love, / it’s already beyond repair. / You wear it broken.”
In his journal from October 1979, White demanded bare honesty of himself: “Don’t be afraid, Jim. Sometimes this will hurt you but there is also great beauty in your life. Don’t be afraid, Jim, or if you’re afraid, just go on and do what you do have to do: tell it, tell the story.”
Writing on the cusp of the decade, White trained his pen on age-old, deep-seated fears and desires that for many of his fellow gay writers were sublimated beneath the post-Stonewall frisson of political and sexual liberation, and then sidelined by the political and sexual stridency that the AIDS crisis demanded. Writing in the spaces between, before, and outside those zeitgeists, White explored the sublimated and unearthed the sublime.
White knew how painful it could be to stare directly into what we fear—including the ways in which many of us today still feel alienated, different, and indelibly queer. Perhaps writers and readers at this moment in queer history are again willing to take up the work White started 30 years ago; in so doing, we may come to a deeper, more personal sense of liberation, and even connectedness—to ourselves, to each other.
May 31, 2012
The first story I ever published, in 1992, was in the James White Review, a now defunct journal of stories and poems and essays by gay men. I never knew who James White was until a couple months ago, when I heard the poet Mark Doty speak about him – specifically, about going to the library where White's papers were housed. These “papers” turned out to be one plastic box filled mostly with diaries. Doty talked movingly about the experience of encountering these handwritten pages and realizing that he may have been the first person who had ever read them; a lost life was conjured up in words written decades ago.
Like all diaries, White’s were filled with self recriminations (I should stop smoking, I should lose weight, does anybody like me?), but then every now and again Doty would come across a poem that would knock him out. Now White’s collection “The Salt Ecstasies” is being reissued.
The poems here are quite clear in their meaning. Sometimes they’re about someone the poet has loved or fucked and wants to preserve ("I pant hard over this poem/ wanting to write you again"... "). Sometimes they’re about general desire ("some understanding between men"). Sometimes they’re about death or loss or submission, or his mother or an old woman named Ruth with an eye patch, or hookers. My favorite is an elegiac historical poem, "Syphilis Prior to Penicillin,” speaking of sailors and prostitutes: "They were a cavalier and doomed lot,/ trying to hold back the dawn/ in their foreign hotels."
The poems are sad and not especially "hopeful" but they're beautifully and genuinely written, and they filled me with a kind of excitement about being alive – alive enough to write a poem even if you're hating yourself, even if you're sad, even if you're lonely and all you can write about is the guy you’ll never get to fuck again.
Mark Doty spoke about the importance of keeping in print the words of forgotten poets, saying, "Culture is something we make. The energy we put into making something last is all we have." James White didn't live very long, and wasn't very well known, but he has left this compact, haunting legacy, and his reputation deserves another look.
Like all diaries, White’s were filled with self recriminations (I should stop smoking, I should lose weight, does anybody like me?), but then every now and again Doty would come across a poem that would knock him out. Now White’s collection “The Salt Ecstasies” is being reissued.
The poems here are quite clear in their meaning. Sometimes they’re about someone the poet has loved or fucked and wants to preserve ("I pant hard over this poem/ wanting to write you again"... "). Sometimes they’re about general desire ("some understanding between men"). Sometimes they’re about death or loss or submission, or his mother or an old woman named Ruth with an eye patch, or hookers. My favorite is an elegiac historical poem, "Syphilis Prior to Penicillin,” speaking of sailors and prostitutes: "They were a cavalier and doomed lot,/ trying to hold back the dawn/ in their foreign hotels."
The poems are sad and not especially "hopeful" but they're beautifully and genuinely written, and they filled me with a kind of excitement about being alive – alive enough to write a poem even if you're hating yourself, even if you're sad, even if you're lonely and all you can write about is the guy you’ll never get to fuck again.
Mark Doty spoke about the importance of keeping in print the words of forgotten poets, saying, "Culture is something we make. The energy we put into making something last is all we have." James White didn't live very long, and wasn't very well known, but he has left this compact, haunting legacy, and his reputation deserves another look.
September 21, 2025
I'm so glad that Graywolf reprinted this. I especially love the opening poem, An Ordinary Composure probably because I am partial to prose poems. I also love the poem sequences Gatherings and Poems of Submission. I suspect White's strengths are displayed best through resonance, a ripple of images and themes.
Also, Doty was spot-on in quoting the following lines in his introduction:
A few weak poems here and there, but still a really good collection. Can't wait to read his earlier works.
Also, Doty was spot-on in quoting the following lines in his introduction:
In this joyous season I know my heart won't die
as you and the milk pods open their centers
like a first snow in its perfection of light.
(from Skin Movers)
A few weak poems here and there, but still a really good collection. Can't wait to read his earlier works.
May 19, 2017
Unrestrained and direct while simultaneously multilayered and ambiguous, The Salt Ecstasies has certainly found it's way into my heart, like a xenomorph's blood through the floor of the Nostromo. White's final collection of poetry is saturated in sadness and regret, one wonders how it doesn't drown in all it's melancholy; each verse draws attention to the authors loneliness and longing, riffing on nostalgia for a decayed world of hookers, sailors and gay bars where many had long turned their back on survival. What saves The Salt Ecstasies from utter submersion is White's honesty, which is held up by his grandiose metaphors and imagery; and more importantly, beneath the morbidity and pessimism, lies the smallest hint of hope.
January 5, 2021
The poem "Making Love to Myself" makes me want to rate this at 5 stars as it is just so far beyond brilliant.
I also really wish that I could read the rest of this uncollected/unpublished memoir that we are given a glimpse of in the last section of this book as it is truly compelling.
Oh, and kudos to Mark Doty for writing an introduction to a poetry book that was absolutely worthwhile, something I am not sure I have encountered before.
I also really wish that I could read the rest of this uncollected/unpublished memoir that we are given a glimpse of in the last section of this book as it is truly compelling.
Oh, and kudos to Mark Doty for writing an introduction to a poetry book that was absolutely worthwhile, something I am not sure I have encountered before.
August 23, 2022
I don't often read a lot of gay poets that actually have depth and substance to their work. This was very good.
January 9, 2024
So much salt, so much blue. Words selected with laser-like precision.
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September 26, 2011It was with a dour scowl that I first eyed a slim, musty, and altogether grim copy of James L. White’s The Salt Ecstasies. I was juggling the rigors of professorship while completing my MFA, and White’s was one of a dozen inter-library loans (most of which were rare and/or out of print) I needed to inhale upon arrival as part of my required coursework. According to the card sleeved in its back cover, the book hadn’t felt a reader’s hands in years, and I bristled at being assigned a collection of poems seemingly forgotten by the universe. What I quickly found within those yellowed pages, however, were the most candid, authentic, and compelling poems about American eros that I had ever read...Read the rest at the site
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July 6, 2010I won this on First Reads.
June 5, 2013
Just fabulous....
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews