Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Read on October 19 with Eduardo Martinez and Adam Fitzgerald at an event organized by Eduardo Corral under the auspices of the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division. The Bureau has relocated to the LGBT Community Center. It still has a wonderful selection of books and prints. Greg and Donny were such genial hosts. Eduardo asked me two good questions about some remarks that I made in interviews. One remark was about trying to find an English word that means "soul-body." Asked if I have discovered a poet who comes closest, I mentioned Cyril Wong and described his poetry of meditation. What did I mean when I said that I was a lyric poet living in an anti-lyric age? I meant that our age is justifiably suspicious of the unified and universal lyric self, but as a lyric poet, I yearn to be unified and universal, or, to put it another way, I am suspicious of the suspicions against the lyric. Thanks very much, Eduardo, for putting together this lovely reading. It was very kind of ...

My friend Helen Dano organized a very interesting evening of poetry and discussion at City College--CUNY last night. She invited Rowan Ricardo Philips, Adam Fitzgerald and Bejan Matur not only to read, but to intersperse their reading with responses to questions from the moderator David Groff and City College MFA students. The three poets were very different in their styles and approaches to poetry. Philips was logically rigorous; his poetry showed a feeling for argument and form, and his answers a penchant for accuracy. Fitzgerald wrote much more associative verse, and his answers were more casual and personal. Bejan Matur was the most interesting of the three. The Turkish poet was genuinely and thoroughly mystical in her writing and poetics. There was no irony in her poetry, unless it was the deep irony of being alive in a deadly world. I had not realized that City College-CUNY had such beautiful stone buildings, an actual campus. After the reading, KM and I went to an Italian rest...