An Appreciation of His Literary Work

FEATURED AUTHOR—JEFF MANN An Appreciation of His Literary Work Michael Shannon Friedman Jeff Mann's success as a poet is made especially interesting since he identifies himself as both southern/Appalachian and openly (very openly) gay. In both his poetry and prose, the tension between Mann the genteel, erudite southern gentleman scholar and Mann the leatherloving gay satyr makes for an entertaining, richly descriptive and ultimately soulful meditation on what it means to be alive, to inhabit a body, to experience and understand pain, loss, love and beauty. Mann came of age in Hinton, not exactly a beacon of tolerance. The provocative title of one of his best essays, "Raised by Lesbians: Early Education of the Hinton Heathcliff," explains how Mann survived his ordeal. He discovered sympathy and empathy in a small but intense lesbian community, and learned to cultivate his own intellect, modeling himself in part on Emily Bronte's brooding romantic hero. Mann was also blessed with a particularly well-educated and openminded father, who encouraged non-conformity by having young Jeff read Emerson and Thoreau. Mann's early encounter with these idiosyncratic, staunchly individualist American writers and thinkers fostered both his intense love ofnature—he studied forestry in addition to English at WVU—and his ability to embrace the full spectrum of his humanity: "Beneath an unremarkable exterior, I am a gay poet, into leather, vampires, paganism, and very thankful not to be normal, not to be average." As he grew into adulthood, Mann's quest to understand his identity was complicated by his increasing awareness of his gentle southern roots and how seemingly incompatible they are with his lust for male flesh. He describes his contradictions both in sweeping rhetorical gestures—"how could I be a Southerner and a gay man at the same time?"—and, more interestingly, in pithy observations during his many travels both in the U.S. and Europe: "We admire our room as we unpack. A four-poster bed, which appeals both to my passion for elegance and history and my rather specific leather perversions. " Mann's prose, most readily available in Edge and the recently released prose and poetry compendium Loving Mountains, Loving Men, covers a wide range of human experiences, some of which are 28 commonplace in gay writing—the confusions of adolescence, the devastating experience of losing a lover (in Mann's case, a brief but intense fling) to AIDS. And some of which are simply fascinating on any level. For instance, how Mann manages to be open and frank about his sexuality while also being a responsible educator (he teaches at Virginia Tech) makes for compelling, psychologically challenging reading. But Mann's great strength as a prose writer is to always anchor his general impressions of life in his own intensely personal perspective. True to the Transcendentalist spirit, he refuses to back away from the gritty, sweaty, salty facts of the flesh and the natural world, yet at the same time he delivers the kind of pungent, now-I-see aphorisms we crave and require from great writers. "Every passion feeds on tension and every lust on variety," he says, in an aside that could come from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Perhaps because of his sexuality, maybe because he is extremely bright, probably due to both, Jeff Mann gives the impression of having lived a bit more intensely and having thought more than a bit more deeply than your average human being. His ultimate advice for us is to embrace ourselves, chase our passions, love our hunger. We trust him because we have witnessed his Inferno and know he has emerged burned but so much more alive for the experience: "Watching the carpenter sip his beer, I suspected J would never escape the flames entirely, and that was good to know. Beauty has been the only religion I've ever believed, and it has been more than enough. Let hunger's gifts be the last to leave." Like his prose, Mann's verse is extremely candid toward his sexuality, and his occasional fussiness ("On the plane I wanted to murder/a baby. Instead I sipped two Drambuies.../I worked in earplugs...I stared at Brad Pitt's...