Susan Sontag Is a Bear!

by Annie Liebowitz

I found this image at the amazing celebrity photo blog Life in Pics.

If you you love Susan Sontag as much as I do (more now, of course!), here's an article about her I wrote for Lambda Literary.

‘Dustan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master'

 Ed. by D.A. Powell and Kevin Prufer

Reviewed by Brent Calderwood for LambdaLiterary.org

We’re told not to judge a book by its cover, but just look at the pillow-lipped, sleepy-eyed poet gazing out from a soft-focus 1940s sepiatone on Dustan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master and your hunch is bound to be right. What’s inside is just as out of the ordinary as it looks: quirky, rarefied, romantic, and unabashedly epicene.


For this first offering in Pleiades Press’s Unsung Masters Series, esteemed poet-editors D.A. Powell and Kevin Prufer have unearthed a rare gem, and in the process rescued Thompson from becoming a literary footnote. As they explain in their introduction—which gamely balances academic rigor with engaging narrative—information about Thompson was hard to come by. He had virtually dropped off the literary map by the 1950s, even though his World War II-era work was well-published alongside that of Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden and others.

Powell and Prufer offer valuable insights into why Thompson remains elusive: the burning of literary bridges, a midlife conversion to Catholicism, and his own stipulation against posthumous republication of his first two collections of poetry—the poetry that was best-received and also most homoerotic.

Thankfully, the editors, by means of scholarly detective work and presumably a healthy dose of charm, have gained permission to publish a modest selection from those two volumes, as well as from his later narrative and poetic work. Their assiduous selections make a persuasive case for the inclusion of Thompson’s work among the best in mid-century gay poetry, as well as among the best of WWII-genre poetry (Thompson, in spite of his trust fund and apparent fragility, fought with the U.S. Army).

Rupert Brooke, who drove Cambridge boys, and modern reviewers, wild

Thompson’s work compares well with contemporaries like Rupert Brooke and Stephen Spender; and for a niche modern readership, which includes this reviewer, those comparisons alone make this book worth a look. For many others, though, Thompson’s adherence to form and meter and his frequent Classical allusions may at first glance seem old-fashioned or twee. However, his consistent musicality, his clever use of internal rhyme, slant rhyme, enjambment and campy, odd imagery transcend era and convention, making Emily Dickinson an even more apt comparison.

In “This Loneliness for You Is Like the Wound,” Thompson uses eyewitness war imagery to address his lover—ostensibly the girl at home, but more likely the boy on the next cot:

This loneliness for you is like the wound
That keeps the soldier patient in his bed,
Smiling to soothe the general on his round
Of visits to the somehow not yet dead …

The sonnet teems with clever loaded images like “bullet-bearing heart” and “fever chart,” concluding with the heroic couplet “Yet now, when death is not a metaphor, / Who dares to say that love is like the war?” In building a love sonnet around homosocial and homoerotic imagery and ending with an almost postmodern consideration of use of metaphor within the poem itself, Thompson blazed the trail for later New Formalists like Thom Gunn and Randall Mann, whose work is anything but twee.

Like many writers before him and since, Thompson frequently locates his poems in Classical or military settings to allow for an otherwise unconventional emphasis on masculine sexuality. “Tarquin,” for instance, is a vague-ish Roman title, but the poem reads as an au courant lament for a lost trick, or else as an ode to a newfound bad-boy: “The red-haired robber in the ravished bed,” “the sinner who is saint instead,” “bellboy beauty, this flamingo groom.”

Thompson’s work, overflowing with double entendres and winking metaphors, will no doubt provide poetry lovers with the same giddy, titillating awe that film buffs get from watching classic Film Noir (which similarly gained traction during the war years). It’s an awe that comes from seeing artistic work whose innovation, naughtiness, and depth not only survived, but were born of, the conventions and limitations that threatened to censor them.

Powell and Prufer capstone these tantalizing glimpses of Thompson’s oeuvre with wonderful essays by other poets and critics, including Edward Field—himself an early acquaintance of Thompson’s—and Dana Gioia. There is also a middle-of-the-book folio of images—a privilege most often reserved for Hollywood sirens and literary giants.

Edward Field in U.S. Army, where he met Thompson

The schoolboy and soldier snapshots are a delight for the reader who’s already gotten a taste of Thompson’s elegant, ribald sensibility; the photo reproductions of pages from Thompson’s short-lived lit journal Vise Versa will give the reader a further taste of the kind of campy, envelope-pushing poems and reviews Thompson wrote—work that we hope will one day be republished in full, but, were it not for this new and valuable volume, might never have been known about at all.

On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master
Dunstan Thompson
On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master
Edited by D. A. Powell and Kevin Prufer
Pleiades Press
9780964145412, Paperback, 190 pp

And while we're on the subject of hot gay poets—or was that just me?—here are a few more for your viewing pleasure: 

Lord Byron

Charles Jensen

James L. White's "The Salt Ecstasies": the return of an out-of-print classic

(This review first appeared at 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 James L. 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.

THE SALT ECSTASIES
James L. White
Graywolf Press
ISBN: 9781555975616
Paperback, $15.00, 96p

Poets 11 Finale Reading at the SF Main Library this Saturday, plus What's New in LGBT Lit

As many "The Defibrillator" readers know, April was National Poetry Month, and the City of San Francisco, a major contributor to Modern and Postmodern Poetry, was well-represented. Among the many poetry-related events in April were the SF Public Library's branch readings, at which laureates from each of San Francisco's eleven districts, as selected by poet laureate at Beat hero Jack Hirschman, were invited to read their winning contributions to the 2010 Poets 11 anthology, a handsome volume published each year by the Public Library.

This Saturday, May 8, yours truly will be among the laureates invited to read at the Poets 11 Finale in the Koret Auditorium at the Main Library at 1pm. Yes, that's right. I was named a winner for the Sunset District—I love the beach, and am happy to call the Sunset home. I was even happier to call it home when I found out about my Poets 11 honor!

The San Francisco Library system has been keeping busy with events for readers of all stripes, and among its recent events was a celebration of the latest batch of Lambda Literary Awards nominees, hosted by Christopher Rice, scion of Anne Rice, as well as lesbian mystery writer and editor extroardinaire Katherine V. Forrest.

Tony Valenzuela and Katherine V. Forrest. Photo by Rink

Also in attendance were Lambda's new, handsome E.D. (that's Executive Director, boys) Valenzuela, and many of the Bay Area finalists who are currently under consideration for this year's Lammies, to be held Thursday, May 24 in New York City: Tommi AvicoLli-Mecca, Patrick Latellier, Randall Mann, Minal Hajratawa (who has a poetry project about unicorns in the works!), charismatic Portland artist and zine grrrl Dexter Flowers, the always urbane Kevin Killian ("purring like a cat or a vibrator" stood out from his reading) and many more!

Lambda has been good to me—I've won two fellowships to study with great teachers like Dorothy Allison, D.A. Powell, and Eloise Klein Healy at Lambda's annual Writer's Retreat in L.A. In fact, for over 23 years, Lambda has been good to a lot of LGBT writers, awarding the established literati and nurturing the careers of emerging talents. Support Lambda by visiting their website, donating to the Writer's Retreat, or becoming a member!

Legacies of Love: A Heritage of Queer Bonding

I reviewed Winston Wilde's fascinating nonfiction book about the rich historical tapestry of LGBT relationships for the Lambda Literary Review back in 2008. Lambda has recently launched its own website, where my past and future reviews of my favorite LGBT authors are finding a new life. Hope you check out that site, as well as this great book ... and I promise to write something new for you soon! 

Legacies of Love: A Heritage of Queer Bonding

Winston Wilde

Reviewed by Brent Calderwood

It has often been stated that the blessing and curse of queer relationships is that we must create our own rules and models. Since most of us come from heterosexual families and heteronormative cultures, we often feel that we are reinventing the wheel—or, more accurately, inventing the wheel—when we attempt our own queer romances. This can feel like freedom or chaos, and sometimes a little of both at the same time. 

Several seminal books about LGBT relationships have come down the pike over the years since the late 1970s, notably The Male Couple by David P. McWhirter and The Intimacy Dance by Betty Berzon. John DeCecco’s Gay Relationships offered a more scholarly approach, full of fascinating statistics and charts regarding monogamy, age disparity, and much more. However, like many LGBT self-help, social science and academic works, these tomes have become dated to varying degrees. As LGBT relationships become more mainstream, and as marriage for gays, lesbians, and trans people becomes legal and acceptable in more and more parts of the world (including the United States), a book is needed that bridges historical and cultural limitations. 

As if on cue, Winston Wilde’s Legacies of Love: A Heritage of Queer Bonding has been released from Haworth Press to fulfill this timely but timeless need. The author, a sexologist and psychotherapist, devoted fourteen years to this labor of love, and the time and research shows.  Wilde’s attention to historical documentation, coupled with generous illustrations and juicy, little-known details about the romances of many queer legends, makes this a book worth returning to again and again. It turns out that we do have models after all, and Wilde elucidates this heritage with taxonomic specificity, but also with the light touch of a neighbor relating news over the backyard fence. 

Divided into seven chapters, Wilde enumerates various patterns. These patterns are fascinating because of what they reveal about history, and about the changing values in the dominant culture as well as within queer culture. Predictably, most well-known examples of Intergerational Love, for example, are from previous decades and centuries, dating back to Socrates and his young pupil and lover Alcibiades in the 5^th century B.C.E. The author fascinates with lesser known couplings, like 13^th-Century Persian mystic poet Rumi and his older, married lover Shams al-Din, who was murdered by one of Rumi’s jealous pupils. Other relationships went more smoothly, thankfully, including the thirty-three year romance of author Christopher Isherwood and the artist Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior. 

Revelations, at least to this reviewer, were the intergenerational relationships between 20^th-Century writers Sara Teasdale and Margaret Conklin, as well as the passionate but short-lived romance between Martina Navratilova and Rita Mae Brown. Bringing the Pattern of Intergenerational Love to the present time, Wilde profiles the partnership of authors Malcolm Boyd and Mark Thompson. As Boyd writes to the younger Thompson, “I realize how thankful I am for your life, how precious our time together is, and what an extraordinary adventure we have embarked upon.”

Legacies of Love is chock-full of touching and revealing quotes and declarations of love, culled from love letters, poems, and historical documents. Many of these are timeless and prescient. Margaret Mead, who had a brief relationship with her professor Ruth Benedict, said, in the middle of the last century, “What is new is not bisexuality but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love.” In addition to what queer readers can learn from these relationships, the book reminds the reader again and again what queer relationships have taught their participants; in the case of Margaret Mead and others, those personal lessons have been translated into intellectual, political, philosophical, spiritual, and artistic contributions. And of course, relationships teach us much about ourselves as well. In chapter 7, Pattern of Peer Love, Wilde quotes Paul Monette, who wrote of his late partner Roger Horwitz in 1988: “When we came together as lovers we knew precisely how happy we were. I only realized then that I’d never had someone to play with before.” 

In addition to its more thoughtful and poignant moments, Legacies of Love dishes the dirt on several Hollywood affairs and romances, including those of actors Cary Grant and Randolph Scott (pictured in the book washing dishes in the kitchen they shared while donning matching aprons), Marlene Dietrich and Claudette Colbert, and Laurence Olivier and Danny Kaye. 

Finally, Wilde explores several relationships of the Victorian and Modern eras to remind us, lest we forget, just how queer heterosexual relationships can be. In Pattern of Heterogender Love, Wilde gives equal time to the open and ahead-of-their time pairings of Calamity Jane and Wild Bill, Jane and Paul Bowles, and even the three-way relationship of Rudolph Valentino, Natacha Rambova and Alla Nazimova. Much can be gleaned from the courage and queerness these lovers exhibited in their own time and place. As Virginia Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West wrote to her gay husband Harold Nicolson, “We are sure of each other, in this odd, strange, detached, intimate, mystical relationship which we could never explain to any outside person.” Luckily for us, Wilde has taken it upon himself to explain their relationship, and scores of others, in ways that inform our understanding not only of our queer past, but also of the loves, partnerships, and marriages we embark upon in our present lives.

Boy With Flowers: Transformative poetry by Eli Shipley

Review by Brent Calderwood for Lambda Book Report:

Boy with Flowers, selected by Carl Phillips for the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, is one of the most assured collections by a first-time author to appear in recent years. Touching, lovely, and at times harrowing, Ely Shipley thrills the reader with snapshots of childhood, family, relationship, the inner life of the outsider. Often Shipley acts as ace war reporter, focusing his lens on the skirmishes waged at the borders of gender and sexual idenitity, using his precise craft to measure the toll exacted on those who cross those borders. 

Section 1 looks acutely at childhood, and its closing poem, “Magnolia,” offers up pungent proof of Shipley’s skill. Shipley conveys the magical realism of childhood, but from the outset, the idyllic scenes are suffused with tension:

In the cul-de-sac shaded

by trees, Marissa and I

played all summer where magnolias

hung, hands withering over us

“Magnolia”’s lilting language and neat four- and five-line stanzas belie the chaos just under its surface, a surface that’s finally broken. When the stepfather comes home early one day, liquor on his breath, “each syllable a balled-up / fist,” Marissa asks the speaker not to return to the house. She offers the speaker a parting gift, a magnolia blossom, its petals “darkening everywhere / they’d been touched.”

Throughout the collection, flowers are used to great effect, as in the title poem, in which the speaker is cajoled into wearing a dress for an aunt’s wedding. Asked to be the flower girl, the speaker replies “I’m not / a girl” but agrees to “throw rose petals // onto the aisle,” in exchange for the right to “wear anything / I wanted after: army pants, a sheriff / badge, cowboy hat, and pistols.” Avoiding facile happy endings, Shipley brings the reader to a present in which the past lingers:

            --  my lover is tracing fingertips

around two long incisions in my chest. Each sewn tight

with stitches, each a naked stem, flaring with thorns.

The final poem in Boy with Flowers, “Etymology,” investigates the beginnings of things.

Strange that you’d let me

give birth

to my own body

even though I’ve always been

a boy, moving

toward what? Manhood?

  --a thick needle 

filled with your fluid, thrust every

two weeks the rest of my life

into my thigh.

With “Etymology,” Shipley not only shines light on the shadows of masculinity–what it means to be a man, what is essential, what gets performed–he also gamely employs line breaks such that, for instance, “two weeks the rest of my life” conveys the tension between the ephemeral and the eternal, weaving in and out of the liminal spaces in time and gender.

As transporting as Boy with Flowers is, it adroitly brings the reader full circle. The speaker recalls being an “eight-year-old boy,” picking a flower and putting it in his dictionary, a gift from his father. When he removes it after it has dried, there is a stain left on the page, “the handprint of / a child / quieting the words.”