Back to gay poets and links!

I've been way for far too long with this kind of post.

Some recent links about gay poets!

Richard Howard's WRITING LIFE

Bruce Snider interviewed on Brian Brodeur's "How a Poem Happens"

Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

I’d been reading the New York School poets, especially Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch. Both were a huge influence on me at the time. In part, I think their work accounts for the poem’s playfulness as well as its discursiveness and use of conversational speech.

I was also influenced by Naomi Shihab Nye’s early work, some of which treats language as a physical object in the landscape, animating it as a quasi-character or concrete force in the poem. I just applied that same strategy to numbers, which, because I’d always had an antagonistic relationship with math, provided me with a natural tension for the poem.

Poetry Foundation spotlights James Schuyler

One of Wayne Koestennbaum's book's back in print!

After eight years in limbo, Wayne Koestenbaum's brilliant musings Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon are back in print, and to celebrate he read to a rapt crowd last night at 192 Books in Chelsea.

Befitting the book's strand-of-pearls structure, he sampled a perfectly rounded passage from a dozen or fifteen chapters with titles like Silent Jackie, Exotic Jackie, Liz vs. Jackie, Jackie and Money, Jackie as Housewife.

The randomness of deconstructed minutiae accumulates to an unorthodox portrait not only of the most famous woman in the world and her power, but inevitably of Koestenbaum himself and his desire, as well as the layers of lost time through which he's sifting.

Begun when she was still alive, the book was originally intended as an act of diplomacy, to explain
Jackie the Icon to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis the person. After she died, Koestenbaum turned it into a sixty page poem addressed to her. That directness was liberating and eventually he was able to return the text to prose. He kept many lines of the poetry in tact and says he still sees the palimpsest.

Questioned afterward about camp, he said his book wasn't ironic: Yes, the voice may be gay but it is emphatically American.

Mark Bibbins On Where Poems Start & Backing Away from the Stinky Dead Beast aka Confessional Narrative, by Martha Silano

Latern Review blog interviews Joseph Legaspi

LR: Can joining a community tangibly change someone’s writing style?

JL: I have one person in mind, whose work was very unstructured. When we review applications, we look not only at craft, but process and potential. This person came to the retreat and was just how we imagined—great person, but very out there. By the end of the retreat, this person’s work was much more reflective, just in those four or five days. Not only did this person manage to make use of form, but for the first time, used images that hearkened from his background as a Filipino American, which I didn’t see before. There were a couple of other Filipino Americans there, and seeing how those other Filipino poets handled and carried themselves I think caused this person to tone down.

"Recycled in Eternity": Contemporary Poetry Review has an article remembering Harold Norse.

BONUS items:

Publication spotlights gay literary magazine GERTRUDE.


Band of Thebes tells us which of the UK's Best 100 books are gay!