David Grundy, Never by Itself Alone: Queer Poetry, Queer Communities in Boston and
the Bay Area, 1944–Present (OUP) $120

Reviewing Stephen Coote’s The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (TLS, 22-28 April 1983), Alan Hollinghurst, of all people, roundly declared that ‘the increasing self-segregation of gays has had an enfeebling effect on their art’. This was a commonplace critical stance at the time, though less so coming from a gay critic. Hollinghurst’s main objection was to the new directness, where oblique coding had once been the norm. There was also the implication, inherited via the strictures of the New Criticism, that each poem should be able to stand on its own (actually a fair requirement for anthology pieces), but that many of these could not. The poem Hollinghurst especially objected to, all the more so because of its prominent position as the last item in the book, was Michael Rumaker’s ‘The Fairies Are Dancing All Over the World’. You can tell from the title alone why he shrank from its effusiveness.

Several years later, Peter Parker began a positive review of my own book Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry: ‘The lamentable final quarter of The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (1983) demonstrated the dangers inherent in labels, and in anthologies where subject-matter rather than skill becomes a guiding principle’ (TLS, 15–21 July 1988). My book met his approval even though it did not ignore ‘the outpourings of Harold Norse, E.A. Lacey, Mutsuo Takahashi and others’ who had been anthologised by Coote. Well, that ‘lamentable’ fourth quarter includes fine ‘outpourings’ by Luis Cernuda, Stephen Spender, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Thom Gunn, Maureen Duffy, Lee Harwood... More to the present point, it contains gay and lesbian American poets, much of whose work was influential when first published and has since stood the test of time – as being worth re-reading – and whose context has entered into history. It was easy to get the impression that some of the British critics of the Penguin anthology were objecting to American free verse itself as much as to explicitly gay work. For all its faults, Coote’s anthology did at least have its finger on the pulse of what had been happening in the USA for several decades: Robert Duncan, James Mitchell, Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg (if not at his best), Harold Norse, Frank O’Hara, Stephen Jonas, Adrienne Rich (three of the ‘Twenty-One Love Poems’), Paul Mariah, Judy Grahn, Olga Broumas, Chuck Ortleb, Michael Rumaker...

David Grundy’s Never by Itself Alone is a welcome reappraisal of its field, taking seriously the intersection between avant-garde poetics and the politics of gay liberation. Grundy gets the point of both the strengths and weaknesses of poetry that broke social taboos as well as personal inhibitions to develop a new aesthetics of sexual dissidence, yet did so in the recognisable American grain. In giving a fair number of these writers (and publishers) the respect they deserve, his book seems designed specifically to counter the stand-on-its-own evaluation of poetry. Grundy’s title comes from Jack Spicer: ‘A poem is never by itself alone’. Poems are published in clusters and sheaves. Their poets and readers operate in groups and among interest groups. I’m reminded of the old joke, ‘What is a gay poem?’
‘A poem that loves other poems’. Poets collaborate; they imitate or differentiate themselves from each other. (This is not news: we could glean it from Shakespeare’s sonnets, fifteen of which are in Coote’s anthology.) Robert Duncan, one of Grundy’s key figures, famously thought in terms of ‘rimes’ or correspondences connecting individual poems, all in intercourse with each other both within a collection and beyond it. The ‘compositional fields’ of poetry were developmental not
static, their acts of creation never definitive, never
complete.

So Grundy’s poets operated as members of society, in groups and ‘schools’ or in association with magazines and publishing houses, as well as in what tended to be negatively characterised by others as ‘coteries’. While the more commonly lauded New York School was cosmopolitan and internationalist, the gay poetry movements of Boston and the west-coast Bay Area were self-consciously regionalist, resisting the assumptions that gave New York primacy as representing the whole nation to itself and others. Poetics and politics were intimately linked, if awkwardly at times. Even though Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser had founded the Berkeley Renaissance on the model of Stefan George’s extravagantly elitist George Kreis, some of the group’s incompatibly anarchistic tendencies created tensions within it. In contrast, the Boston Occult School, based around a predominantly working-class in-group of out gay men (Spicer, Blaser, John Wieners, Joe Dunn, Ed Marshall, Stephen Jonas, Gerrit Lansing), managed more comfortably the trick of being experimental without becoming elitist.

Grundy rightly mentions that Jack Spicer constructed a poetics around homosexuality even while questioning homosexuality as a basis for identity. The same might be said for many other writers, especially once the sliding scale of bisexuality was taken into account. To the extent that gayness questions the stability of straightness, it inevitably brings itself into doubt. Trans identities, of course, complicate the matter even further.

As its name suggests, the Boston newspaper Fag Rag (1971–87) defined itself against what it regarded as the merely reformist agenda of the gay rights movement. Its leading light Charley Shively said, ‘You can’t just be a queer poet, you must destroy the existing profession of poetry’. Addressing aspiring contributors, he wrote: ‘If you are published here Little-Brown or Random House will definitely not be knocking at your door. Harvard freshmen will not be impressed. You will only be helping forge a gay consciousness – a weapon to destroy the universities and publishers’. While seeking radically experimental work, Shively still valued and expected clarity in the poems he published. What he didn’t seek was the well-made lyric. In 1972, Fag Rag and Shively launched the publishing house Good Gay Poets. It was they who, in 1977, published Adrian Stanford’s collection Black and Queer, which openly paired those two identities for the first time.

Both the erotics and the politics of sexuality were to be engaged with directly, rather than contemplated wistfully from afar. With this in mind, John Wieners used poetry as a way of expressing what gay politics had not yet been able to: the poems were developmental contributions to an emergent liberatory discourse. Jack Spicer dedicated his translation of Lorca’s ‘Oda a Walt Whitman’ to Stephen Jonas, who had taught him ‘how to use anger’ in a poem. For women, the radical politicising of poetry could seem even more urgent. Pat Parker was determined not to write, as women were expected to, poems about birds and flowers when men were writing about the war in Vietnam. Judy Grahn had attended Paul Mariah’s Gay Men’s Poetry Group, from which emerged Manroot magazine and its associated press. Grahn said poetry was the voice not of the individual but of the movement. When it came to the lesbian anthology Woman to Woman (1971), anonymously co-edited by Grahn and her partner Wendy Cadden, it was the broader community of women that chose the work, and the poets’ names, known and unknown alike, appeared only at the end of the book. At the first Outwrite conference, in San Francisco in 1990, Grahn called poetry ‘the mapmaking of our movement’ which ‘tells us where we are going next’. As Grundy demonstrates, it also tells us, vividly and definitively, where we have been.

In 1944, when turning down his submission of the poem ‘Toward an African Elegy’ to Kenyon Review, John Crowe Ransom (Grand Poobah of the New Criticism) had told Robert Duncan that homosexual writers should ‘sublimate their problem’. The Fag Rag generation begged to differ, even while still engaging with old debates: the magazine reprinted Duncan’s 1944 essay ‘The Homosexual in Society’, in which he had distanced himself from the separatist tendencies he associated with camp subcultures. When John Wieners was planning to launch another magazine, Duncan asked him, sceptically, if it would merely cater to ‘a coterie (queer)’. Even much later, coterie-aversion still operated. One peer reviewer of Kevin Killian and Lewis Ellingham’s biography Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (1998) dismissed Spicer as a ‘coterie poet’ who would only interest a ‘handful of California homosexuals’. Such ‘coteries’ (the word is often used with a homophobic sneer) are open to attack for their mutual admiration and support; but isn’t that what poets do, gay or straight, when striking out in new directions? Their mutual congratulations are no less important than their productively explosive feuds.

Some of the work under scrutiny here may have been ‘lamentable’, but much was laudable. Eccentricities overlapped with serious experiments, some merely whimsical, others more convincingly innovative. Among many slight but still interesting achievements were greater ones: Ed Marshall’s ‘Leave the Word Alone’ (1955), which Donald Allen included as the longest poem in his influential anthology The New American Poetry (1961), and which John Wieners, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Olson all admired as one of the best poems of the 1950s; Stephen Jonas’s ‘Love. The Poem. The Sea’ (1956), which Charley Shively later called ‘one of the finest love poems in any language’; John Weiners’s The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958), which Ginsberg spoke of as ‘major American poetry’ which would ‘be in anthologies in 100 years’; Robert Duncan’s The Opening of the Field (1969), which, looking back from the late 1980s, Thom Gunn called ‘one of the essential books for understanding the history of poetry in English over the last half-century’; and much else besides.

Grundy’s project is valuable for its restorative attention to a neglected field. Of course, some of its key individuals have already been canonised (I’m thinking of the University of California Press’s four-volume, 3,000-page edition of the Collected Writings of Robert Duncan, for example) and other, lesser achievements are being rescued from oblivion: for instance the short-lived Hoddypoll Press, which has been reborn in an anthology put together by its original editor, the poet James Mitchell: Gay Sunrise: Writing Gay Liberation in San Francisco 1968–1972 (San Francisco: Ithuriel’s Spear, 2019). Grundy takes a significant step further in the validatory mapping of a literary movement by no means enfeebled by its ‘self-segregation’, to reuse Hollinghurst’s term. That said, he should have given himself a cut-off date
(I would have suggested the turn of the century), without which his book peters out messily. He is even reduced to listing poets he has not had ‘space’ to discuss. Kitty Tsui appears in such a list but not the index, James Broughton goes unmentioned anywhere, and, although Aaron Shurin is named as an important link between Robert Duncan’s generation and younger poets, his poetry is completely ignored. Among many other passing references, I would have liked to learn more about Steve Abbott’s magazine Soup (only four issues, from 1980) and Bryan Monte’s No Apologies:
A Magazine of Gay Writing (1983).

Understandably, the peripatetic, internationalist Allen Ginsberg becomes a marginal figure in this narrative. As Weiners said, ‘There are other queer shoulders at the wheel’. But in truth, the reasons for Grundy’s inclusions and exclusions are often obscure. Coverage is patchy. He includes the prose writers of the New Narrative movement (Robert Glück, Kevin Killian, Gary Indiana...) without clear justification. Yet it is baffling that he pays so little attention to the San Francisco-based editor Winston Leyland, who gets only a few paltry mentions. As a reader in the UK, I relied on Leyland’s cultural magazine Gay Sunshine, which I could occasionally pick up from Compendium Books in Camden Town or by mail order from Gay News. The Gay Sunshine Press published two major anthologies of gay poets, Angels of the Lyre (1975) and Orgasms of Light (1977), as well as collections of Japanese, Latin American and Russian writing. The pioneering Gay Sunshine interviews, modelled on those of the Paris Review, were later gathered together in two collections (1978, 1982). Mind you, Grundy doesn’t even mention Ferlinghetti’s operation at City Lights, so what can one say?

Winston Leyland once turned down a poem of mine for Gay Sunshine, calling it ‘rather Cavafyesque’ but neglecting to say whether this was a consolatory compliment or the very reason for the rejection. He did later provisionally accept one poem (something called ‘Dressage’, of which I have no memory), but in the end it didn’t make the cut. The collected rejection slips of Gregory Woods also include a charming note from Paul Mariah at Manroot. Charley Shively at Fag Rag would season his rejections with cheerful innuendo. He did dedicate one of his own late poems to me, but in thanks for my critical work rather than my poetry. We must each take turns at being found, if not lamentable, at least lacking, in our own individual ways.