Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I have a poem, "Gaudy Boy," written after Singapore's late poet Arthur Yap, in this anthology commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of Walt Whitman and the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Besides Whitman, many poetic forebears, including Cavafy, Rimbaud, Thom Gunn, Justin Chin, James Baldwin, Garcia Lorca, Tim Dlugos, Allen Ginsberg, and Yukio Mishama, are celebrated by a good range of contemporary gay male poets. Big thanks to editor Raymond Luczak for including my poem and for putting together this celebration of the vitality of the gay male poetic tradition. You can get hold of the anthology here .

I was curious to read this book of poems, a 2009 Lambda finalist. Thom Gunn is in the title. I have run into  Randall Mann's name on the Internet many times but had not read his poetry. I like to know what other gay poets are writing, especially writers near my age (Mann was born in 1972). My exact contemporaries lived lives different from mine, but could have been mine. In Mann's case, I don't know when he moved from Florida to San Francisco, but he moved from a world to a world, like I did. Unlike me, he lived through the AIDS epidemic at what was arguably its North American epicenter. The book begins with exhaustion. At a time when "desire is a dirty word," the speaker finds himself "wanting,// again, a man I do not want" ("Early Morning on Market Street"). In "Election Day," he is "Tired// of the age of irony,/ everything a gesture, tired of the word gesture ." The tiredness shows in the language. In the same poem, ...

This book of gay poetry criticism is divided into two sections: Themes and Variations. Under the rubric of Themes, Woods examines The Male Body, Men of War, and Childless Fathers. In the first, he describes from the literature of men who desire men the specific attractions associated with each year of adolescence. After that fascinating chronology, he explores the three ideal male physiques in Western art, and their correspondence to mythical and historical figures that recur in gay male poetry. The discussion of Orpheus is of great interest. Woods writes: Intact, torn and scattered: such are the three conditions of the body of Orpheus. The first, being the condition, also, of Apollo already dismissed, is negligible. But the second and third bear some relation to the nature of sexual appraisal and activity, insofar as looking at and making love to a person may be deeds of dismemberment. 'The true body is a body broken.' So says Norman O. Brown, before quoting Yeats: 'Noth...

The Poetry Society of America, together with Poets House and The New School Graduate Writing Program, presented last evening's reading, in conjunction with the publication of At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn . The editor Joshua Weiner introduced the evening with a rather formal though heartfelt speech on Gunn's work. He read Gunn's "My Sad Captains" and saluted Gunn as one too. He provided xerox copies of Gunn's revisions of that poem; what will survive of us is our handwriting. Before a mixed audience, Weiner was completely unapologetic about Gunn's homosexuality, and talked about the connection Gunn refused to deny between his head, heart and cock. Of the seven readers, I liked Robert Pinsky's reading of Gunn best. EN said Pinsky felt the weight of the words in his mouth, and I agree. He read "Tamer and Hawk" with the rolling rhythm the lines and imagery of the poem demand. "The Gas Poker," in his mouth, was perfectly...

Nine more days before the start of my New York Writers Workshop class, and I have four sign-ups. The class needs six to run, so I'm casting around for ways to make the numbers. I've sent out pest emails, posted on craigslist, blanketed Cornelia Street Cafe with homemade flyers for three Fridays, recruited friends to spread the word, and left a flyer with the neighborhood falafel shop. Preparing for the first class on sonnets, I remembered Molly Peacock's lovely poem about the shoulders of women, a sonnet as it turned out. I read it first in Raw Heaven , and liked it still more when I read it again in her Cornucopia: New and selected poems. The Shoulders of Women The shoulders of women are shallow, narrow, and thin compared to the shoulders of men, surprisingly thin, like the young pharaohs whose shoulders in stick figures are written on stones, or bony as the short gold wings of cranes on oriental screens. Lord, how surprising to embrace the shortened stirrings of many bone...

From Clive Wilmer's Commentary "The self you chooose" on Thom Gunn: Born August 29, 1929, the elder son of Herbert Smith Gunn, journalist, and his wife Annie Charlotte (nee Thomson), also a journalist, is there recorded as William Guinneach Gunn. There is no mention of "Thom". According to his younger brother, the photographer Ander Gunn, he was always known as Tom, though when or why that started no one seems to know. . . . Thom's earliest extant poem, published in a school magazine, is by T. W. Gunn - before he became Tommy. . . . in 1949, just before he left the Royal Army Educational Corps, Sergeant William Guinneach Gunn changed his name by deedpoll to Thomson William Gunn. Why would a young man just coming of age seek legal sanction to confirm an established nickname? The answer lies, I beleive, in his relations with his parents, both of them of Scottish origin. Guinneach is the Gaelic form of Gunn and must have represented, on the part of his father, ...