Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 On Sunday, we had friends over for a holiday brunch. It went on into the evening when our neighbor Judy joined us, and Guy and she immersed themselves in talk about the management of the building.  Yesterday, I read Monica Youn's From From. Still trying to figure out what to say about it in a review for Poetry School. Met Henry for dinner at Pisticci and had a good time as always. Hart Crane as Whitman's heir. The Communist Auden and the Christian Auden. That racism in the US cannot be explained wholly by white supremacy. Our sisters, and their attitudes to our being gay. Came home, and watched another episode of Blacklist , and then finished the first episode of The Recruit , starring a beefy Noah Centineo as a CIA lawyer and a magnetic Laura Haddock as a former CIA asset who is threatening to expose her relationship with the agency.

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 s...

After years of refurbishment, the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum opens its doors to the public, but its garden is still a churn of red soil. No lilacs bloom in the ever-returning spring for Abe’s black pall

I very much enjoyed reading last night for R. Nemo Hill and John Marcus Powell's series Reading Queerly!?. The Pink Pony was a wonderfully eclectic venue, though the music from the bar was a little loud. Met Ivan Steiger Galietti, who read two poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini in both Italian and English, one the supplication to his mother, the other a more political piece. Ivan said that he fell in love with Pasolini's poetry at the age of sixteen and met the great man himself in Rome. Lorenzo Pozzan read the beginning of Whitman's "Song of Myself" with much feeling. He is a very good-looking young actor. The open-mic was short but good, anchored by Nemo, John Marcus and Eric Norris. I sold two copies of Seven Studies and one copy of The Pillow Book .  Thank you, my friends, for coming to the reading--EN, TH, AH, R and AS. This is a reading series to which I will return, for its atmosphere of appreciative comaraderie.

TNY May 8, 2009 from "Back to Basics" by Adam Kirsch on Gerard Manley Hopkins: Kirsch criticizes Paul Mariani's new Hopkins biography for not acknowledging that what made Hopkins unhappy (as well as happy) was "his religion--or, more precisely, the self-tormenting spirit in which he approached his religion." "Self-tormenting" is both more precise and more obfuscating. Yes, in damning his own poetic ambitions and achievements, Hopkins was extreme. But he did not torment himself by having homosexual desire. His religion, the homophobic form of Catholicism he believed in, tormented him.  And Kirsch refuses to make the smallest reference to the poet's homosexuality, though he alludes to it, perhaps, by comparing Hopkins and Whitman. Quoted by Kirsch, Hopkins' letter to Robert Bridges is sad for its internalized homophobia. Bridges had commented that Hopkins' poem "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo" reminded him of Whitman. Hopkins r...

TLS August 22 & 29 2008 from Clive James's review of Joseph Horowitz's Artists in Exile: How refugees from twentieth century war and revolution transformed the American performing ar ts : Not even the basket cases could honestly say that they had fallen among Philistines. They had fallen into a larger competitive market than the one that they had been driven out of, and even if they failed in it they would have liked to succeed. * Some of them felt limited by the indifference of the audience to anything labelled as art, but there was always a minority audience for that. There was a minority audience even for Schoenberg. On a world scale, Schoenberg's audience . . . is still a minority today, but most of the minority is in America, where minorities are larger. * European and American culture have always been a two-way interchange and to talk about either of them exclusively is like trying to cut water with a knife. Joseph Horowitz says that Stokowski's dream of a dem...

Just did two readings this last week. The first, on June 26, at Cornelia Street Cafe, was hosted by Miriam Stanley who edits the Rogue Scholars. I read the new stuff written in response to Eavan Boland. Quite raw, but I wanted to give them an airing so as to get ideas for revision. Jean Lehrman read, accompanied by Dan the bartender/musician on vibraphone. I liked a prose piece she read, about a relationship that developed between a case worker and a client. It has something of sweet despair in it, with no cloying sentimentality. I've heard James Maynard read a couple of times at the Pink Pony open-mic, and always enjoyed his poems. His pastoral and love poems are dreamy as waters, with a strong current of feeling. His poem on leaving White Cap Creek, a river in Colorado where he helped build a bridge, is the best kind of nature poem: passionate affiliation. Last night, at The Stone, Nemo's Active Ingredients hosted We Sing the Body Electric: Whitman and His Children . Thomas F...

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 his VQR essay "Form, Eros, and the Unspeakable: Whitman's Stanzas": [On the third form of the unspeakable, that which is wordless, undefined]...It is the most difficult form of silence to talk about, since once a word exists for something, it does, and the quality of being nameless, outside the realm of speech, becomes irrecoverable. Samuel Delaney tells an instructive story about this problem in one of his essays; he describes meeting a man in a Times Square porn theater, a shoe fetishist who’s passionately turned on, in several wordless encounters, by the writer’s sneakers. When Delaney needs to buy a new pair, he figures he might as well make the guy happy, and so he breaks their silence and asks him what kind of new sneakers he’d most enjoy. The questioned man is speechless, stricken; he flees; later he returns and manages to choke out only the words, “light blue.” But though the desired shoes are purchased, the sexual relationship is never the same. Delaney sp...

I read Carson's long poem "The Glass Essay" again yesterday, and enjoyed it immensely for its narrative maneuvers and literary musings, although Guy Davenport, in his introduction, exaggerates when he says that it is a poem "richer than most novels nowadays." His comment either means something, in which case it is patently false since Carson's poem does not aim at novelistic detail, or it means nothing, playing it safe with that qualifier "most." "The Glass Essay" tells two intertwined stories: the abandonment by a lover, and the suffering of a father from Alzheimer's. Presiding over the stories is the tutelary spirit of Emily Bronte, loveless, unloved. The language of the poem is deliberately unlyrical; some may even call it prosy. Here's the opening of the section titled "Three": Three silent women at the kitchen table. My mother's kitchen is dark and small but out the window there is the moor, paralyzed wi...