Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

Foreword: The Company of Poets

ix Foreword The Company of Poets ChristopherBram I’ve never understood why more people don’t love poetry. The best poetry is short, succinct, highly quotable, and very portable. It can take five minutes to read a poem that you will ponder for the rest of your life. Poetry should be as popular as song lyrics or stand-up comedy. Nevertheless, I often hear otherwise wellread people say, without embarrassment, “I don’t read poetry. It’s too difficult—” or strange or obscure or elusive. They will slog through hundreds of pages of so-so prose about a computer geek in Sweden or a made-up medieval land populated with princes and dwarves but freeze like a frightened deer when confronted by a simple sonnet. Neither Christopher Hennessy nor any of his eight genial, highly articulate guests express the slightest embarrassment over their love of poetry. These interviews are more than shop talk, but a glimpse into a world where poetry matters as much as movies or music. Poems here are not just a matter of words and metaphors, verse and meter; they are phenomena that connect with the rest of life: with work, love, friendship, religion, philosophy, and sex. (There’s a lot about sex in these conversations, but sex too connects with everything else. Sex is a special poetry of the body.) There’s not much I can say to introduce this excellent book except point out in advance some of its pleasures. These are eight very different men with very different points of view. This book makes clear that the phrase “gay poet” is far from being reductive. It doesn’t explain or pigeonhole anyone. It’s only the beginning, a x Fo re word first description of varied individuals with unique vocabularies of language, emotion, and idea. The world shines through each man’s work and life as if through a different stained glass window. Edward Field is the oldest of the bunch, but he’s young in speech and energy, wonderfully frank, friendly, and playful. He is equally articulate on Cavafy, gay politics, and life in Greenwich Village, where he’s lived for the past fifty-plus years. He offers a fearless defense of the sentimental in poetry. He loves old movies. John Ashbery in conversation was a revelation for me. I confess I find his poetry difficult. I enjoy him line by line but become confused and irritated when I add the lines together. (I feel something similar when I read Wittgenstein.) Yet Ashbery in conversation is as clear and lively as running water. I believe him when he laughingly says he’s not trying to be obscure in his poems but only writing down how he thinks and sees. His warm, humorous presence makes his poetry more accessible. Richard Howard offers the most Jamesian of the interviews, courteous, allusive, and elusive. Until he and Hennessy mention it, I’d never thought of him as Victorian, despite his frequent use of first-person voices in the style of Robert Browning. But more recently this intensely well-read, erudite man has been writing poems in the voice of a fifth grader. Aaron Shurin was new to me, but his interview immediately sent me to the library. (Hennessy is a gifted quoter of both poems and critics, making the reader want to read more.) Shurin describes himself as “a bastard son of Robert Duncan and Frank O’Hara.” He writes “an incanted poetry” that doesn’t rely on fixed meanings. You feel the order in his words even if you don’t rationally understand it. I experience a lovely, slightly woozy inebriation reading such poems as “City of Men” and “John Said.” Dennis Cooper is here as a poet rather than a novelist. Pressing sixty, he’s the most youthful of the group, a tough, wary adolescent. He makes a fascinating contrast with the others. Yet there’s the xi Fore wo rd nice surprise of discovering that the chilly author of Frisk can cry over an elegy by James Schuyler. Cyrus Cassells was a poet I knew only as a name, but this was another interview that sent me back to the library. He is the most political writer in the book, a black gay poet obsessed with history. He uses other voices to explore the horror and beauty of subjects that range from slavery to the Holocaust to AIDS. Yet he can...