Gay Poets

"When I was just a little girl in East Bay, California, I noticed that East Bay was pig Latin for “beast.” But I knew I had found my niche when I realized that Alice Faye was pig Latin for "phallus.""

"If you have to do something, write me a funny AIDS play. Sure you can. It's the biggest joke played on us since sex itself - and with the longest punch line."

"Reverend Lawson: You men are homosexual! Bob (correcting the Reverend): Homosexuals."

"For people like us it is necessary to be a bit stronger, more self-critical, more observant than the usual run. Whether we happen to come already enhanced with these qualities, as some have claimed, or whether our situation invests them in us, we have traditionally - and we do have a long and proud tradition - been a little finer, a little firmer, more sensitive and flexible than others... There will be times when only your own spine can support you, moments when only your own wit can inspire you, days when nothing but exacting self-control can raise you from bed, nights when nothing but your word can impel you into society. But of all these disciplines, there is nothing you must hold to more sternly than to be kind and sympathetic. The easiest armor to put on is always cruelty. That armor will, indeed, see you through everything. Vicious condescension toward those without your strength can make you feel momentarily superior. But that easy armor must be forgone. Don't ever curdle that creamy brow with lines of easy disdain, or curl those lips with a popular sneer. Of all the models available, the one of gentleman in our late war is most succinct: Face what you have to face with humor, dignity, and style; protect yourself with knightly grace; have contempt for your own weakness and never encourage it in others; but never, Ralph, never for an instant permit yourself to feel anything other than pity and deepest sympathy for unfortunate comrades who have, after all, fallen in the same battle."

"Reverend Lawson:This entire book is nothing but young men doing homosexual things together. Bill: Well, what else could they do together?"

"Reverend Lawson:You lured those boys in here and made filth of them! Bob: We don't think human bodies is filth until they're corpses, Reverend Lawson! Bill: We loved every inch of those boys. Bob: Every chance we got. Bill: And we sent them away to war, since they had to go, with every surface of them— Bob: Tinglin' with kisses an' love."

"Bob: People came here for religious freedom, and we worshipped those boys."

"Don't bother answering back. Anything said to me at this point might as well be written on a decomposing squash. The brain goes first, you know -- except the portions dedicated to pain, which are apparently immune."

"I want to give [my records] all away before some fool plays disco at my funeral, and then the record gets stuck, and nobody can tell, and the service goes on forever!"

"It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet It's twelve poems, I call it oranges."

"People I read a lot to my son were people like Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton, Frank O’Hara for some reason, Chinese poems, Japanese poems."

"Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey.It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again."

"I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages."

"And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space."

"The beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian heroes, lies in lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions."

"He had meticulous taste, if taste is a form of discernment, and discernment a kind of care and humility toward the world, its material stuff as well as its arbitrary weathers. He was drawn to the local and to the minor, the huge field of forgotten or overlooked or insignificant details of daily life, which he was able to transcribe, without relying on either mirrors or windows, but on the capaciousness of his restless, inquisitive, integrating imagination. He seemed to have an infinite resource of words and a flexible, if sometimes dissonant, syntax into which to put them. His poems are always in the service of making new relations, so that meanings arise without the insistent correlate of understanding but, instead, offer to his readers a new way to find sense in an apprehension or awareness of the variety of this world, and the capacity of language to provide ways of perceiving and, somehow, renovating it."

"Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you?"

"Well, there are certain stock words that I have found myself using a great deal. When I become aware of them, it is an alarm signal meaning I am falling back on something that has served in the past—it is a sign of not thinking at the present moment, not that there is anything intrinsically bad about certain words or phrases."

"In the beginning there are those who don't quite fit in But are somehow okay. And then some morning There are places that suddenly seem wonderful: Weather and water seem wonderful, And the peaceful night sky that arrives In time to protect us, like a sword Cutting the blue cloak of a prince."

"It didn’t pay very much, but it enabled me to get other jobs doing art criticism, which I didn’t want to do very much, but as so often when you exhibit reluctance to do something, people think you must be very good at it. If I had set out to be an art critic, I might never have succeeded."

"When I originally started writing, I expected that probably very few people would read my poetry because in those days people didn’t read poetry much anyway."

"These two guys in the front yard— Are they here to help?"

"There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the ."

"John Ashbery, incontrovertibly a great poet, remains both difficult and underread, even by his readers."

"Did I say that? One says so many things, and the problem is they all get written down."

"Guard, O my soul, against pomp and glory. And if you cannot curb your ambitions, at least pursue them hesitantly, cautiously. And the higher you go, the more searching and careful you need to be."

"If you are one of the truly elect, be careful how you attain your eminence."

"Just to be on the first step should make you happy and proud. To have come this far is no small achievement: what you have done is a glorious thing. Even this first step is a long way above the ordinary world. To stand on this step you must be in your own right a member of the city of ideas. And it is a hard, unusual thing to be enrolled as a citizen of that city. Its councils are full of Legislators no charlatan can fool."

"And in Spain Galba secretly musters and drills his army — Galba, the old man in his seventy-third year."

"The people going by would gaze at him, and one would ask the other if he knew him, if he was a Greek from Syria, or a stranger. But some who looked more carefully would understand and step aside; and as he disappeared under the arcades, among the shadows and the evening lights, going toward the quarter that lives only at night, with orgies and debauchery, with every kind of intoxication and desire, they would wonder which of Them it could be, and for what suspicious pleasure he had come down into the streets of Selefkia from the August Celestial Mansions."

"Honor to those who in the life they lead define and guard a Thermopylae. Never betraying what is right, consistent and just in all they do but showing pity also, and compassion; generous when they are rich, and when they are poor, still generous in small ways, still helping as much as they can; always speaking the truth, yet without hating those who lie."

"The empire is delivered at last. The vile, the appalling Julian reigns no longer."

"Roses by the head, jasmine at the feet — so appear the longings that have passed without being satisfied, not one of them granted a night of sensual pleasure, or one of its radiant mornings."

"A month passes by and brings another month. Easy to guess what lies ahead: all of yesterday’s boredom. And tomorrow ends up no longer like tomorrow."

"He who hopes to grow in spirit will have to transcend obedience and respect. He'll hold to some laws but he'll mostly violate both law and custom, and go beyond the established, inadequate norm. Sensual pleasures will have much to teach him. He won't be afraid of the destructive act: half the house will have to come down. This way he'll grow virtuously into wisdom."

"He knows he’s aged a lot: he sees it, feels it. Yet it seems he was young just yesterday. So brief an interval, so very brief. And he thinks of Prudence, how it fooled him, how he always believed — what madness — that cheat who said: “Tomorrow. You have plenty of time.”"

"One candle is enough. Its gentle light will be more suitable, will be more gracious when the Shades arrive, the Shades of Love."

"That we’ve broken their statues, that we’ve driven them out of their temples, doesn’t mean at all that the gods are dead. O land of Ionia, they’re still in love with you, their souls still keep your memory."

"The holy Cross goes forward; it brings joy and consolation to every quarter where Christians live; and these God-fearing people, elated, stand in their doorways and greet it reverently, the strength, the salvation of the universe, the Cross."

"Nero wasn’t worried at all when he heard the utterance of the Delphic Oracle: “Beware the age of seventy-three.” Plenty of time to enjoy himself still. He’s thirty. The deadline the god has given him is quite enough to cope with future dangers."

"Immoral to a degree — and probably more than a degree — they certainly were. But they had the satisfaction that their life was the notorious life of Antioch, delectably sensual, in absolute good taste. To give up all this, indeed, for what? His hot air about the false gods, his boring self-advertisement, his childish fear of the theatre, his graceless prudery, his ridiculous beard."

"Things impolitic and dangerous: praise for Greek ideals, supernatural magic, visits to pagan temples. Enthusiasm for the ancient gods"

"Whatever job they give me, I'll try to be useful to the country. That's what I intend. But if they frustrate me with their manoeuvres — we know them, those smart operators: no need to say more here — if they frustrate me, it's not my fault."

"One of the three will want me anyway. And my conscience is quiet about my not caring which one I choose: the three of them are equally bad for Syria. But, a ruined man, it's not my fault. I'm only trying, poor devil, to make ends meet. The almighty gods ought to have taken the trouble to create a fourth, a decent man. I would gladly have gone along with him."

"He was a man who starts at a certain age with all signs showing that he's unable to produce anything of importance. And then, by refusing and refusing things which are offered him, in the end he finds, he sees, as they say; he becomes certain that he's found his own expression. It's a splendid example of a man who, through his refusals, finds his way."

"The focal point of Greek-American cultural interest has definitely shifted in recent decades. Where formerly there was a somewhat affected and strained focus on classical Hellas, the contemporary awareness is much more in tune with the literature of modern Greece. This shift has almost been entirely due to the increasing availability of English translations of modern Greek writings, for not many American-born Greeks comfortably read novels or poetry in the original Greek. The beginnings of the new mood can be traced to the translations of the novels of Nikos Kazantzakis in the 1950s. These also stimulated interest in other Greek writers, notably the poets Constantine P. Cavafy, a product of the Greek diaspora in Alexandria, Egypt, and George Seferis, who won the Nobel literature prize in 1963."

"When they saw Patroklos dead — so brave and strong, so young — the horses of Achilles began to weep; their immortal nature was upset deeply by this work of death they had to look at."

"I'm practically broke and homeless. This fatal city, Antioch, has devoured all my money: this fatal city with its extravagant life."

"The matter, says Mardonios, has gone too far, the talk it has aroused must be stopped at all cost. — So Julian goes to the church at Nicomedia, a lector again, and there with deep reverence he reads out loud passages from the Holy Scriptures, and everyone marvels at his Christian piety."

"Cavafy is intrigued by the comic possibilities created by the indirect relation of poets to the world. While the man of action requires the presence of others here and now, for without the public he cannot act, the poet fabricates his poem in solitude."