Gay Poets (Part 3)

Part 1: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=303589
Part 2: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=307424

And now our final look at the series.

Alice Dunbar Nelson was born in the New Orleans of 1875. Part black, part white, part Creole, she was one of the 1% of Americans who went to college during the late 1800s. At 20 years old, she moved to New York and co-founded the White Rose Home for Girls, and started teaching there. That year Alice had already written a collection of short stories and poems, Violets and Other Tales. Now a great figure in the Harlem Renaissance, her journal is one of only two 19th century African American women that provide useful insight to the lives of black women in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

There is tropical warmth and languorous life
Where the roses lie
In a tempting drift
Of pink and red and golden light
Untouched as yet by the pruning knife.
And the still, warm life of the roses fair
That whisper "Come,"
With promises
Of sweet caresses, close and pure
Has a thorny whiff in the perfumed air.
There are thorns and love in the roses' bed,
And Satan too
Must linger there;
So Satan's wiles and the conscience stings,
Must now abide—the roses are dead.

She soon began to send letters to the poet and journalist Paul Dunbar, and eventually moved to Washington DC where the two would be married in 1898. Their marriage was cut short, when, 4 years later, they separated without divorce. Paul was reported to have been disturbed by her "lesbian affairs". He died 4 years later. Alice then moved to Delaware and spent the next ten years teaching high school. She and the female principal of the school, Edwina Kruse, started a long-lasting romantic relationship. She re-married in 1910, but the marriage ended only a couple years later in divorce.

She published Violets in 1917, a work that exemplifies the polish and lucidity of her poetry, especially her sonnets. Just a year prior, she married the poet and civil rights activist Robert Nelson. With Robert, she became more and more active in politics. She started co editing a progressive black newspaper, and published a literary anthology for a black audience. She became the organizer for the Middle Atlantic states' woman's suffrage movement, and was field representative for the Woman's Committee of the Council of Defense.

In 1924 she campaigned for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill but was defeated. During the following years she committed herself to journalism and public speaking. Working in a male dominated field, she wrote in her diary about the "Damn bad luck I have with my pen. Some fate has decreed I shall never make money by it". She was often denied credit for her work and pay for her writings.

Her diary tells of other love affairs with Fay Jackson Robinson, a Los Angeles journalist, and Helene Ricks London, a Bermuda artist. She wrote poetry for these women, most of which does not survive except in diary fragments. She moved to Philadelphia in 1932 when her husband joined the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission.

Her health was in general decline from a heart condition, and Alice Dunbar Nelson died at the age of 60 in 1935.

Xavier Villaurrutia was one of the more important of Mexican literary figures during the 1900s. He was born in Mexico city in 1903 and went to Escuela Preparatoria Nacional, where he met other poets and writers such as Salvador Novo. He initially sought to become a lawyer, but left part-way through school to write full-time. With the help of Jaime Bodet and Bernardo de Montellano he founded the journal La Falange in 1922. After the journal was ended, Xavier and Novo founded Ulises in 1927 which was also short lived. Contemporaneos (Villaurrutia's circle of friends) followed it, and set the tone for the new wave of Mexican avant-garde for decades to come. The great painter Diego Rivera depicted the Contemporaneos as traitors to their people.

Xavier had already written his own collection of poetry but wanted to delve into the world of drama and play writing. The more he learned, the more successful he was: in 1935 he attended Yale University on a Rockefeller scholarship, returning to Mexico he took on a teaching position at the University of Mexico and involved himself with the Insituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. From there he helped to bring about a revolution in the Mexican theatre, founding the first Experimental Theatre of Mexico.

Love is an anguish, a question,
a luminous doubt suspended;
it is a desire to know the whole of you
and a fear of finally knowing it.
To love is to reconstruct, when you are away,
your steps, your silences, your words,
and to pretend to follow your thoughts
when unmoving at last by me side, you fall silent.

Love is a secret rage,
an icy and diabolic pride.

To love is not to sleep when in my bed
you dream between my circling arms,
and to hate the dream in which, beneath your brow,
you abandon yourself, perhaps in other arms.

To love is to listen at your breast,
until my greedy ear is glutted,
to the noise of your blood and the tide
of your measured breath.

To love is to absorb you young sap
and join our mouths in one river-bed
until the breeze of your breath
impregnates my entrails forever.

Love is a mute, green envy,
a subtle and shining greed.

To love is to provoke the sweet moment
in which your skin seekd my awakened skin,
to gratify the nocturnal appetite
and to die once more the same death—
provisional, heart-rending, dark.

Love is a thirst, like that of a wound
that burns without being consumed or healing,
and the hunger of a tormented mouth
that begs for more and more and is not sated.

Love is an unaccustomed luxury
and a voracious gluttony, always empty.

But to love is also to close our eyes,
to let sleep invade our bodies
like a river of darkness and oblivion,
and to sail without a course, drifting;
because love, in the end, is indolence

At some point he became romantically involved with the painter and writer Agustin Lazo, with whom he would write La Mulata de Cordoba in 1939. The late 1930s and 1940s saw the writing and production of numerous plays by Villaurrutia, including Invitation to Death and the critically acclaimed Autos Profanos. In 1943, he formed another magazine, El Hijo Pródigo, with Octavio Barreda, and during the later part of the decade wrote a string of successful plays.

Villaurrutia died in 1950, and after his death a Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for literary excellence was established.

Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. She was an only child and her father died when she was eight months old. Her mother was sent to an asylum in 1916 after becoming mentally ill, so Elizabeth had to move to her grandparents' farm in Nova Scotia. While there she developed into a first-class fisherwoman. During her time in Nova Scotia she developed chronic asthma, which would follow her for the rest of her life. Her father's family gained custody, and she moved back to Worcester.

In 1929 Elizabeth went to Vassar college to study music and planned to be a composer, though she switched to English from a fear of performing. She already had some of her poems published by a friend in the school paper, and published some work in The Magazine based in California. In 1933 she and fellow writers founded Con Spirito, a literary magazine.

The following year Elizabeth met Marianne Moore through the school's librarian. Moore took an interest in Elizabeth and even talked her out of going to Cornell Medical School when she graduated from Vassar. The two became close friends, Moore being called "dear Marianne" by Elizabeth. Her poem "at the Fishhouses" alludes to one of Moore's poems. In 1946, Marianne Moore suggested Bishop for the Houghton Mifflin Prize for poetry, which Bishop won.

Young Elizabeth

When her father died, Elizabeth had been given an inheritance that let her live quite well without having to work. With the money she was able to travel around the world: she spent time living with a female friend in France and the two bought a house in Key west Florida. From 1949 to 1950 she became the Consultant in Poetry for the library of congress.

Bryn Mawr college sent Elizabeth a travelling fellowship, and in 1951 she sailed around South America, landing in Santos Brazil. She expected to stay only two weeks, but ended up staying for 15 years. While there, in 1956 Bishop received the Pulitzer Prize for a collection of poetry, Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring, which combined her first two books. She lived in Pétropolis with architect Lota de Macedo Soares, descended from a prominent and notable political family. However, in its later years, the relationship deteriorated, becoming volatile and tempestuous, marked by bouts of depression, tantrums and alcoholism. After Soares took her own life in 1967 Bishop spent more time in the US.

One can use one's life as material [for poems]--one does anyway—but these letters—aren't you violating a trust?
IF you were given permission—IF you hadn't changed them. . .etc.
But art just isn't worth that much.

In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, Elizabeth won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as two Guggenheim Fellowships and an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. As her inheritance was starting to run out Elizabeth started teaching at the University of Washington before teaching at Harvard University for seven years. She would often spend her summers in her home in the island community of North Haven, Maine. She taught at New York University, before finishing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With her experience in teaching, strangely she commented:

I don’t think I believe in writing courses at all…
It’s true, children sometimes write wonderful things, paint wonderful pictures,
but I think they should be discouraged.

Just a year before Marianne Moore died, in 1972, Bishop began a relationship with Alice Methfessel. She did not see herself as a "lesbian poet" or as a "female poet." Although she still considered herself to be "a strong feminist," she only wanted to be judged based on the quality of her writing and not on her gender or sexual orientation. In her later years she lamented the few projects she had finished in her lifetime.

Elizabeth died in 1979 due to a cerebral aneurysm in her apartment in Boston. She is currently buried in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Brendan left, Jackie Gleason right

Brendan Behan was born in the Dublin of 1923. He grew up in an educated, working class inner city family. His father had been a combatant in the Irish war of independence and took up house painting as the only source of income for the family. Brendan was fortunate enough to have been read classics like Zola, Galsworthy, and Maupassant by his father before bedtime. His mother took the kids on literary tours of the city. His uncle was a song writer and author of the Irish national anthem.

A biographer Ulick O'Connor, recounts that one day, at the age of eight, Brendan was returning home with his granny and a crony from a drinking session. A passer-by remarked, "Oh, my! Isn't it terrible ma'am to see such a beautiful child deformed?" "How dare you", said his granny. "He's not deformed, he's just drunk!". Five years later, at the age of 13, Brendan left school to follow in his father's footsteps as a house painter.

In 1937 Brendan joined the youth movement of the IRA. His first poems were published in the movement's magazine. Meanwhile he became the youngest contributor to be published in the Irish Press with his poem "Reply of Young Boy to Pro-English verses". At the age of 16, he joined the IRA and sent himself on an unauthorized mission to blow up the docks in Liverpool. He was arrested and sent to a youth prison in England. In 1942 Brendan was tried for the attempted murder of two Detectives and sentenced to 14 years in prison. Luckily just four years later there was a general amnesty for IRA prisoners, and he was free to go. After 1946 he effectively left the IRA.

In the early 1950s he left Ireland to live in Paris, where he continued his drinking and supposedly started writing pornography. In Paris his inner artist was let free, but he also knew that discipline would be key to his literary success. Throughout the rest of his writing career, he would rise at seven in the morning and work until noon—when the pubs opened.

In 1956, The Quare Fellow (a colloquial Irish English spelling for queer) opened in the Theatre Royal Stratford East. Brendan generated immense publicity for The Quare Fellow as a result of a drunken appearance on the Malcolm Muggeridge TV show. The English, relatively unaccustomed to public drunkenness in authors, took him to their hearts. A fellow guest on the show, the American actor Jackie Gleason, reportedly said about the incident: “It wasn’t an act of God but an act of Guinness!”. Brendan and Gleason went on to forge a friendship.

clip from the CBC

He had long been a heavy drinker (describing himself, on one occasion, as "a drinker with a writing problem" and claiming "I only drink on two occasions—when I'm thirsty and when I'm not") and developed diabetes in the early 1960s. As his fame grew, so too did his alcohol consumption. This combination resulted in a series of famously drunken public appearances, on both stage and television.

The public loved his witty iconoclasm, but Brendan's luck ran dry. He started having diabetic comas and seizures. His fears from inside had started to materialize. His latest two books were largely flops. They were littered with pretentiousness and sycophancy, neither of which he would have tolerated earlier. Both works were also tape-recorded, which Brendan hated. He preferred to write longhand or to type.

In march of 1964 he collapsed at the Harbour Lights Bar and from there he was transferred to the hospital. He died at age 41, that year, never leaving the hospital.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix...

Allen Ginsberg was a leading figure of the beat generation of poets. He was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1926. As a young teenager Allen started writing to The New York Times about political issues such as World War 2 and workers' rights. While in high school he started reading Walt Whitman's poetry, which would influence him greatly. Early on in his life he discovered within himself "mountains of homosexuality" which he expressed openly and graphically in his poetry. He was lucky to have a poet for a father, but his mother was affected by a rare psychological illness that was never properly diagnosed. She would have paranoid delusions that the president implanted listening devices in their home and her mother in law was trying to kill her. These thoughts caused her to draw closer to Allen. After attempting suicide she was sent to a mental hospital. In 1945 he joined the Merchant Marine to earn money so he could continue his education at Columbia.

A young Allen Ginsberg

In Allen's first year at Columbia he met Lucien Carr, who introduced him to Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes. The group started bonding as they saw potential in the American youth that was growing after the harsh days of the McCarthy-era. Allen and Lucien talked excitedly about a "New Vision" (a phrase adapted from Arthur Rimbaud) for literature and America. Lucien also introduced Allen to Neal Cassady, with whom him was very much infatuated. Kerouac later wrote about the two in his On The Road, describing Allen as the dark, and Neal as the light side of the New Wave.

In 1948, in an apartment in Harlem, Allen had an auditory hallucination in which he thought he heard the voice of God speaking to him. He later said it was really the voice of William Blake, as he was reading one of his poems. Nevertheless Allen believed that he had witnessed the interconnectedness of the universe. He looked at lattice-work on the fire escape and realized some hand had crafted that; he then looked at the sky and intuited that some hand had crafted that also, or rather, that the sky was the hand that crafted itself. He explained that this hallucination was not inspired by drug use, but said he sought to recapture that feeling later with various drugs.

Allen at 28

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Allen met Gregory Corso in New York that year. He grew attracted to Corso at first sight because of his comfortability with homosexuality. Allen found him to be gifted poetically and spiritually, and introduced him to his inner circle of friends. One day Corso showed Allen one of his poems about a woman he saw across the street who sunbathes nude in her room. Allen was amazed to find this was the same woman with whom he'd had one of his heterosexual explorations.

Corso and Ginsberg

In 1954, while in San Francisco, Allen met Peter Orlovsky. The two became lovers and remained so for the rest of their lives. He struck a note for gay marriage by listing Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong companion, as his spouse in his Who's Who entry. Subsequent gay writers saw his frank talk about homosexuality as an opening to speak more openly and honestly about something often before only hinted at or spoken of in metaphor.

I should note that prior to 1962 engaging in an act of homosexuality was considered a felony, punished by imprisonment or hard labour. It was only in 2003 that the whole country was free from sodomy laws, when the supreme court struck down the law in Texas.

Allen and Peter

In 1955 Allen was approached by Wally Hedrick, a painter and co-founder of the Six Gallery, and was asked if he would organize a poetry reading there. The reading became the most important event in the Beat generation, as it brought together the Beat poets from across the country. It was also the first night Allen's Howl was read. An account of that night can be found in Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums, describing how change was collected from audience members to buy jugs of wine, and Ginsberg reading passionately, drunken, with arms outstretched.

The poem Howl was greatly influenced by his experiences with his mother and her mental illness. He also drew inspiration from his friend Carl Soloman, who was a fellow poet and personal friend.

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally fucked, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—

Just after its publication, Howl was banned by San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore for obscenity. Fighting the ban soon became a popular cause among defenders of the First Amendment, and was later lifted. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, adding, "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?"

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

In 1957 Allen and Peter left San Francisco to make a short trip in Morocco, followed by their joining Gregory Corso in Paris. Corso set them up at a lodging house above a bar that would become known as the Beat hotel. They were soon joined by Burroughs among others. Allen finished his poem Kaddish, Corso composed Bomb and Marriage, and Burroughs put together Naked Lunch.

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,

During 1962 to 1963 Allen and Peter traveled across India and formed friendships with prominent Bengali poets. They lived with the current President of India Pratibha Patil in 1962.

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium

His relationship with friendly communist countries was shaky, as in 1965 Allen was deported from Cuba for publicly protesting persecution of homosexuals. He was labelled an "immoral menace" by the Czechoslovak government because of his free expression of radical ideas, and was then deported on May 7, 1965. Václav Havel points to Ginsberg as an important inspiration in striving for freedom.

Red cheeked boyfriends tenderly kiss me sweet mouthed
under Boulder coverlets winter springtime
hug me naked laughing & telling girl friends
gossip til autumn

In the 1970s Allen suffered two minor strokes which were first diagnosed as Bell's Palsy, which gave him significant paralysis, and stroke-like drooping of the muscles in one side of his face. When the drooping (apparent in later television interviews) did not disappear, Allen was diagnosed with Reynaud's disease. Later in life, he also suffered constant minor ailments such as high blood pressure. Many of these symptoms were related to stress, but with gaining fame and plans, he never slowed his schedule.

For the rest of his life Allen continued to give poetry readings. Nearing the age of 70 he continued writing through his illnesses, publishing his last poem Things I'll Not Do (Nostalgias). Allen Ginsberg died in 1997, due to liver cancer via complications from hepatitis.

One of the great things about the more recent poets is you can hear them reading the poems themselves.

+ Show Spoiler +

Frank O'Hara was a passionate, warm, man of the arts. He was born in 1926 in Baltimore, Maryland. Due to his birth being out of wedlock, he was led to believe his birthday was in June, not March. He grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts and went to St. John's High School in Worcester. He studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston and served in the South Pacific and Japan. With the funding given to veterans he went to Harvard, where Edward Gorey was his roommate. His habits there were sporadic: he wrote impulsively in his spare time and his attendance for his major, music, was irregular. Though he did take classes in philosophy and theology and made a commitment to their attendance.

So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping
our mouths shut? as if we'd been pierced by a glance!

The song of an old cow is not more full of judgment
than the vapors which escape one's soul when one is sick;

so I pull the shadows around me like a puff
and crinkle my eyes as if at the most exquisite moment

of a very long opera, and then we are off!
without reproach and without hope that our delicate feet

will touch the earth again, let alone "very soon."
It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate.

I start like ice, my finger to my ear, my ear
to my heart, that proud cur at the garbage can

in the rain. It's wonderful to admire oneself
with complete candor, tallying up the merits of each

of the latrines. 14th Street is drunken and credulous,
53 rd tries to tremble but is too at rest. The good

love a park and the inept a railway station,
and there are the divine ones who drag themselves up

and down the lengthening shadow of an Abyssinian head
in the dust, trailing their long elegant heels of hot air

crying to confuse the brave "It's a summer day,
and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world."

While at Harvard, Frank met John Ashbery. He started publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate, and changed his major to English, graduating in 1950. He received his M.A. in English literature in 1951 from University of Michigan. That year Frank moved into an apartment in New York City with Joe LeSueur, who would be his roommate and romantic partner for the next 11 years. He also began teaching at The New School.

Frank supposedly had hundreds of friends and lovers throughout his life. Among his friends included the artists Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers and Joan Mitchell. His favourite poets included Arthur Rimbaud, who greatly influenced his poetry. Ashberry recalls: “The poetry that meant the most to him when he began writing was either French – Rimbaud, Mallarmé, the Surrealists: poets who speak the language of every day into the reader’s dream – or Russian – Pasternak and especially Mayakovsky, for whom he picked up what James Schuyler has called the ‘intimate yell.'"

In the early morning hours of July 24, 1966, Frank was hit by a dune buggy on the Fire Island beach. he died the next day of a ruptured liver. He's currently buried at Green River Cemetery on Long Island.

Carol Ann Duffy is one of the poets on my list that are still alive. She was born in 1955 to a Roman Catholic family in the Gorbals, a very poor part of Glasgow. When Carol was six her parents had another 4 children, all boys, and moved to Stafford, England. Her father worked for English Electric and tried to hold office as a member of the Labour Party, but ended up managing a football club in his spare time.

Carol went to St. Joseph's Convent School and Stafford Girls' High School, where her passion for writing would be catalyzed by two English teachers. She always wanted to be a writer and she started writing poems at age 11. When one of her English teachers died, she wrote: "You sat on your desk, swinging your legs, reading a poem by Yeats to the bored girls, except my heart stumbled and blushed as it fell in love with the words and I saw the tree in the scratched old desk under my hands, heard the bird in the oak outside scribble itself on the air."

At age 15, her other English teacher sent Carol's poems to a publisher and had them published. When she was 16 she met Adrian Henri, an English poet, and decided she wanted to be with him. "He gave me confidence," she said, "he was great. It was all poetry, very heady, and he was never faithful. He thought poets had a duty to be unfaithful". She went to the University of Liverpool in 1974 and took philosophy. She wrote two plays, and a pamphlet, and completed her honours degree in 1977. From 1988 to 89 she worked for The Guardian as a poetry critic, and edited the poetry magazine, Ambit. In 1996 she was appointed to lecture poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and later became creative director of its writing school.

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

After the death of Ted Hughes, Carol was almost appointed Poet Laureate of the U.K., in 1999, but lost to Andrew Motion. She said she wouldn't have accepted the position because she was in a relationship with Scottish poet Jackie Kay, had a young daughter, and didn't want the public attention. In 2009 she was finally appointed as Poet Laureate, the first Scot as well as the first openly gay person to hold the position.

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.

Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

Her poems are currently studied in British schools at GCSE, A-level, and Higher levels. In 2008, her poem Education for Leisure was removed from the curriculum following a complaint about its references to knife crime and the goldfish being flushed down a toilet. Schools were urged to destroy copies of the unedited anthology. Duffy called the decision ridiculous. "It's an anti-violence poem," she said. "It is a plea for education rather than violence."

Carol Ann Duffy currently resides in Manchester, England.

Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
I have had enough of being ignored and today
I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets.
I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.
We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in
another language and now the fly is in another language.
I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.
I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half
the chance. But today I am going to change the world.
Something’s world. The cat avoids me. The cat
knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.
I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.
I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.
Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town
for signing on. They don’t appreciate my autograph.
There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio
and tell the man he’s talking to a superstar.
He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.

Mary Oliver is another poet still alive, born in 1935. Growing up in Maple Heights, Ohio, she began writing poetry at the age of 14. At 17 she visited the home of Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Vincent Millay and the two became friends. Through her teenage years she would more or less live there, "running around the 800 acres like a child, helping Norma(her sister), or at least being company to her” and assisting with organizing the late poet's papers. Oliver went to Vassar College as well as Ohio State University , but never completed a degree from either school. Oliver would meet her long-time partner Molly Malone Cook in the late 1950s.

You strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do,
determined to save
the only life you could save.

The couple moved to Massachusetts, which proved ample inspiration for Oliver's poetry. She recalls "I too fell in love with the town, that marvelous convergence of land and water; Mediterranean light; fishermen who made their living by hard and difficult work from frighteningly small boats; and, both residents and sometime visitors, the many artists and writers.M. and I decided to stay.” She was also influenced by Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, with their clear and poignant observances of the natural world.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

The world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

In 1984 Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection of poetry, American Primitive. In 1986 she wrote Dream Work, which was a continuing of her Romantic nature style. Mary Oliver remains in Provincetown Massachusetts, writing poetry to this day.

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Sappho was born sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and is one of the more historically important of lesbian poets. It is from her the word Sapphic is derived, referring to the love between homosexual women. She was born on the isle of Lesbos (which gave us the word Lesbian). Unfortunately her life was only known through her own poetry, of which much was destroyed or lost. Once the major academies of the Byzantine Empire dropped her works from their standard curricula, very few copies of her works were made by scribes, and the 12th century Byzantine scholar Tzetzes speaks of her works as lost. What is known is that she was held in high esteem in her own time.

Sometime around 604 BC she was exiled to Sicily, but spent the rest of her life back in Lesbos. She died sometime around 570 BC.

He appears to me, that one, equal to the gods,
the man who, facing you,
is seated and, up close, that sweet voice of yours
he listens to

And how you laugh your charming laugh. Why it
makes my heart flutter within my breast,
because the moment I look at you, right then, for me,
to make any sound at all won’t work any more.

My tongue has a breakdown and a delicate
— all of a sudden — fire rushes under my skin.
With my eyes I see not a thing, and there is a roar
that my ears make.

Sweat pours down me and a trembling
seizes all of me; paler than grass
am I, and a little short of death
do I appear to me.

Sappho and Homer

***

Throughout this anthology I was hoping to find people who were down and out and had the worst combination of luck: being a poet has never been a well esteemed or respected life, and most of history is rife with bigotry against gays. What I found is an incredibly diverse collection of poets that shows one's sexuality is not so much a restricting factor, but a source of inspiration. Among those were a black woman among the first generation to be born free in the south, a Jewish man from New York, Upper Class white Londoners, a civil war vagabond, French psychedelic-romantics, an Irish Republican army rebel, and an ancient Greek islander.

As I noted before, much of their lives has been lost to the winds of history. What we do know is that they each had in common a pure love that was hated by others, and their bravery paved the way for us to be free. I hope my writing gave enough information, while creating your own interest in going out and learning the remaining parts of their lives. I also hope you generally enjoyed reading the series and learning about these people. Thanks for reading!

And through all the troubles
of my life,
I sought for you.

all the strife
and the pains
were worth one view.

if only I had said
just how much
I loved you.

Fin

***

Gay Poets (Part 3)

Completed

Ongoing

Upcoming