The library is open (for me) and I’m reporting my findings from the gay poetry archive. First up, Mouth of the Dragon, which ran from 1974 to 1977, edited by Andrew Bifrost. Most of the contributors are people I’ve never heard of, and nearly all of the poems are terrible! But terrible poetry has a history, too, and comes in some particular styles.
There are little dirty riffs on Orientalist/Imagist Poundian thing—apparition of these baskets on the metro, imprint of a big fat cock:
and like, ok, work.
There are also, in a sort of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton mode, poems that are MAD AT DAD (literal or godly father):
(I was much further out all my life and not waving but drowning in boypussy)
Now being mad at God of course is all normal and good (I think indeed God wants us to be mad at him—it’s part of healthy communication) but the idea of having this scene at gay-ass Anglo-Catholic Mary the Virgin in New York (smoky Mary’s, socalled, because of all the incense) is too much—it might as well be at Hamburger Mary’s.
There are also a couple of uh lunch poems:
And of course ‘political’ fare, our own equivalent of AmeriKKKa/littleboxes/realeyesrealizereallies nonsense:
But also this gem!
But who’s Frank Salamone? There’s an anthropologist and a (dead) blues guitarist of that name, but both seem to be or have been straight (Wikipedia has a wife for one, the obituary a female partner for the other). Not that straight guys can’t do the work if they want to—a straight man after all wrote, and another directed, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a gay fact that ought to silence forever the very idea of ‘cultural appropriation.’ Well, Frank Salamone, whoever you are, thanks for putting your queer or straight shoulder to the wheel!