Now We Have Seal, Too
Incredibly kind words about CONNOR AND SEAL from a historian and queer studies scholar whom I have the honor of calling a friend. Henry Abelove, the author of the groundbreaking study DEEP GOSSIP gives permission to be quoted and attributed.
"I love the concept but still more the wondrous forms it takes in your imagination and writing. Harlem is so rarely allowed to figure America, and America's immigrants are so rarely represented as black in our canonical poetry, even in our canonical gay poetry. See, for instance, Hart Crane: “New integers of Roman, Viking, Celt” -- Italians, Swedes, Irishmen; but now we have Seal, too....
"And your poems beautifully echo (for me anyway) the works and graces of many of your predecessors. I hear Langston Hughes’s rhyming rhythms distinctly in “Arrival New York.” But Elizabeth Bishop is there, too — “Arrival at Santos.” I remember that you told me that you weren’t keen on George Oppen. Yet his cityscape — his sense of its multiple significances — seems to me to revive in your lyrics. And Whitman is never very far away, even though you eschew his long line and complicate his inheritance with your inimitable humor and your candor on the body’s wayward parts and your post-colonial and post-android dread and pleasure."
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Then an email yesterday from André Naffis-Sahely, the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An anthology of exile literature, in which my poem "To a Young Poet" appears. He read the poem near the end (42:00) of a wonderful podcast conversation on BBC Radio 3. On the program "The Verb," Ian McMillan explores the language of leaving, resettling and exile with contributors to the anthology: songwriter Ana Silvera and poets John McAuliffe, Igor Klikovac, Mina Gorji, and André himself.
"I love the concept but still more the wondrous forms it takes in your imagination and writing. Harlem is so rarely allowed to figure America, and America's immigrants are so rarely represented as black in our canonical poetry, even in our canonical gay poetry. See, for instance, Hart Crane: “New integers of Roman, Viking, Celt” -- Italians, Swedes, Irishmen; but now we have Seal, too....
"And your poems beautifully echo (for me anyway) the works and graces of many of your predecessors. I hear Langston Hughes’s rhyming rhythms distinctly in “Arrival New York.” But Elizabeth Bishop is there, too — “Arrival at Santos.” I remember that you told me that you weren’t keen on George Oppen. Yet his cityscape — his sense of its multiple significances — seems to me to revive in your lyrics. And Whitman is never very far away, even though you eschew his long line and complicate his inheritance with your inimitable humor and your candor on the body’s wayward parts and your post-colonial and post-android dread and pleasure."
*
Then an email yesterday from André Naffis-Sahely, the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An anthology of exile literature, in which my poem "To a Young Poet" appears. He read the poem near the end (42:00) of a wonderful podcast conversation on BBC Radio 3. On the program "The Verb," Ian McMillan explores the language of leaving, resettling and exile with contributors to the anthology: songwriter Ana Silvera and poets John McAuliffe, Igor Klikovac, Mina Gorji, and André himself.
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