Gay poets at the start of the 80s seem to be increasingly conscious of themselves as working within a tradition, or rather within a set of related traditions, as having fathers and potentially of having sons. Of course for a while already gay poets had like Ginsberg and Howard had been addressing Whitman (“Supermarket in California” is 1956) and Crane (“Decades [For Hart Crane]” is 1974), but those had been long dead ancestors—now gay poets are addressing, imitating, seeking the patronage of the living Ginsberg and Howard, along with others. Fathers and Sons and Lovers.
To start, here’s a son of Ginsberg, “Antler,” who is still alive today and was for some time the poet laureate of Milwaukee (Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!):
It’s easy to see why Ginsberg loved the poem—it’s almost identical to “Howl”!
I hated it at first, as I hate most Ginsberg (if I want to be yelled at by a bearded madman, it’s summer, there are homeless outside). But there are some fun passages, as too with Ginsberg (whom I do want to dislike, but then he is sometimes really charming when he’s not being a hurricane of bardic excess and even at moments when he is):
I’m sorry, what can I say, this rocks.
Paul Monette, poet-novelist, had only recently started being professionally gay. I sort of like some of the poems in his first, pre-gay, collection, The Carpenter at the Asylum, like this retelling of Hansel and Gretel. In this 1981 book of poems, Monette starts imitating Richard Howard (b. 1930; Monette was 1945), writing longish poems about or in the voice of historical characters like Thoreau, Livingstone, Noel Coward, and including one poem (about various other men’s shirts that had come into his possession) originally published in Christopher Street. Unfortunately none of them, including this poem addressed to Howard, are good:
(You should have burned it!)
Even today, over 40 years later, bad gay poets are still speaking to Howard.
Robert Duncan too kept fathering. Besides Richard Tagett of Manroot—and Ronald Johnson whom I’ll post something from next time—he inspired and patroned Aaron Shurin, whose book he gave an insufferable preface:
Ugggggh. Much of Shurin’s work here is as bad as Duncan, praising it, makes it sound:
And yet there’s something funny, playful, camp at work, as in this celebration of ball-tanning before it got right-wing-coded:
The sun shoots cocks to earth which our cocks absorb, and I’m here for it.
If the ode to the sun weren’t already a hint, this one practically screams O’Hara:
Some eldergays were on their own unfiliating journeys. Charles Henri Ford, who way back in the day wrote The Young and the Evil with Parker Tyler, was becoming in his dotage some kind of Hari Krishna poet:
This is almost as embarrassing as Boy George’s Hari Krishna era.
Finally, a bit separate from these other poets, Dennis Cooper, whose 1981 book Missing Men I hate to say I mostly liked (just like I like Idols from 1978):
Idk why he thought his face was the selling point, but he doubles down on being ‘hot’:
This is pretty annoying (I’m hot! I fuck! I’m (in) trouble! Fuck (you,) Dad!) and, jeez, “it means tons to me,” (I am soooo tired of empty burned out dumb narrators—which were not interesting when Cooper and Brett Easton Ellis were doing them before I was born and are not interesting in neo-alt-lit internet fiction now. WAKE THE FUCK UP, NARRATORS! Pick up some coffee and a thesaurus) but I like the softness of the ending if in a man’s arms moving/ slowly to the quietest music.
And here if Ashbery isn’t exactly a father to Cooper, the latter is definitely, with brother Dlugos, having some Ashberian fun and claiming, with whatever irony, the principle of parenting:
There is though in my mind no one, parent or sibling, like Cooper in this era for sexually exact but sensitive, wistful, funny poems:
I love the “rise of rimming,” the jokey historicism and tone of lecturing (very Ashberian!) and the “we” of sexual community. It doesn’t feel anhedonic and constrained as some of Cooper’s poems and so much of the later prose does. It’s silly-serious, documentary-absurdist, intimate-gross-goofy.
But of course things take a turn for the worse…
Getting a ‘cheese-pizza’ vibe…
I’m calling the FBI now…
I am backing slowly away! Fathers and Sons and Lovers and Edgelords.
On to 1982…