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 .

Flute Music  How will I open the window, unless I’m crazy? How will I close it, unless I’m holy?      Adélia Prado, “Serenade” His flute bends the garden around the moon, enclosing the light of the new moon in roses. The roses dissolve and when they condense on their stalks they are redder than before. This goes on for a long time. His flute bends time and the moon obeys, falling and rising like water along the curve of its light, grazing the wide lip of the parapet, the intricate balcony, the eaves, and at the top of the note joining moon and music falls on the roses condensing into red. She listens at her window, unable to go or stay. Behind a rosebush I crouch, waxing and waning. * Besides Prado's poem, Debussy's Syrinx and Prélude á l’après-midi d’un faune were also in my head when I was writing this poem. As was Paul Morrison's Little Ashes , the 2008 film about the thwarted love between Federico García Lorca (Javier Beltrán) and Salva...

I finally made my way to the end of The Poet's Work: 29 Masters of 20th Century Poetry on the Origins and Practice of their Art , edited by Reginald Gibbons. Some pieces are fully developed essays, some are collections of working notes or of aphorisms, a few are interviews, and a few more are poems. Most I forgot the moment I finished reading them. Except for Karl Shapiro's polemical piece "What Is Not Poetry?" Americans writing on poetry bore me. Too often they reduce intuitions to theories. Australian A. D. Hope does the same in his systematic exposition of "The Three Faces of Love." The Spanish are much more readable. Lorca on the duende. Antonio Machado on the sparing use of imagery in intense lyrical poetry. Of those writing in English, Seamus Heaney, in his essay "Feelings into Words" comes the closest to evoking the spiritual in poetry. His figures--the digger, the diviner, the Tollund Man--are originally and finally mysterious. He is ever...

Poets writing prose about poetry. Some fundamental contradiction here, and these writings betray their awareness of that fact. They are reluctant, overly insistent, convoluted, self-conscious or polemical. But here and there a sentence or an image arrests the imagination, and they speak like the poets they in fact are. So far I have read Fernando Pessoa, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale, Delmore Schwartz and Karl Shapiro, and the ones that still vibrate in me are Lorca (the Duende in art, in one's blood, the bullfight), Pasternak (poetry a sponge, not a fountain; the voice of life, the real), Montale (music) and Shapiro (the independence and unity of poetry). They speak eloquently of my present obsessions. Pasternak in "Some Statements": No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest ...