Tram Combs
poetry's ways're/ strewn with the early-derailed
I had never heard of this person—a gay poet born in Alabama in 1924, who moved first to San Francisco and then to the Virgin Islands—before coming to Birmingham. But a local collector of gay books wrote a short essay on him, and more recently a scholar in New York has put together some useful materials, including excerpts of interviews with Combs shortly before his death in 2018. So he’s not utterly unknown, even if still doesn’t have a Wikipedia (get to work, dorks!).
And, for a change, he’s pretty good! Admittedly, he’s well in a vein of modernism that doesn’t in itself much appeal to me—he claims Whitman and Crane as forebears but it’s more post-Poundian, like fellow gay weirdos Jonathan Williams (love his Ear in Bartram’s Tree) and Guy Davenport (love his Archilocus translation, hate his braying falsely erudite essays and pedo-fictions). Not a lineage I much admire, but doing something in it that’s interesting (although keep in mind I’m sparing you the bad stuff!).
Ok, so here’s the first book by him (as far as I know)—he’s already settled in the Virgin Islands, and writing a lot about that scene.
Williams and Rexroth are certainly good names to have attached to your book, although their forwards are pretty condescending (Williams also was a hype-man for Parker Tyler’s gay modernist big poem The Granite Butterfly, which was, unfortunately for the dignity of our people, a disaster).
Lol that these are really more score-settling with various enemies of their own preferred modes of poetry than actually saying nice things about the poems we’re about to read. And indeed, well, these are not his best—there is one fun that’s an homage to Hart Crane, in a tribute to his own poetic vocabulary and themes:
The next book, two years later, has another poem to Crane—I think a bit better, and more emancipated from the voice of the addressee, although not yet the good stuff:
Here’s another that has some Crane vocabulary (“antiphonal”) and also a very un-Crane directness (also uh Crane’s poems that mention black music and black guys are well maybe meant to positive about them? but are not exactly printable…).
I also like this one that echoes Whitman’s “Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” while being again a bit more direct than Whitman—especially in later life—managed to be:
I love! the exclamation! marks! and spaces
Next, a book on Wesleyan University Press from 1965. I don’t know what was going on with them in those years, but they published in the early 60s Richard Howard’s first book (which had some gay content), Alan Ansen’s Disorderly Houses (brilliant, wonderful, read it), a book by Chester Kallman, and Ashbery’s Tennis Court Oath—so many homos, and so many in the circle of Auden! Who was the editor?
There’s a poem addressed to William Beckford, the homosexual author of the delicious eighteenth-century novel Vathek (and he appears as a character in Sontag’s novel The Volcano Lover, which I tried to give a re-evaluation of earlier this year).
I enjoy his odd poems about animals. They feel a bit like haiku in spirit—specifically like Kobayashi Issa’s many wonderful poems about snails, bugs, frogs etc (my favorite I like best in French: Escargot / Tout doux, tout doux, va monte / Le Fuji).
Sometimes animals conceal morals:
And people can also be treated haiku-like:
The erotic poems are quite frank—and open about the poet’s preference for young men whose evanescent beauty is the occasion for some interesting exercises on perennial themes:
Finally, some poems about Jesus—Combs is a man in full (indeed there’s nothing I think remarkable about letting oneself address any of the great themes our tradition gives the poet; they’re all part of the repertory history has put together for this literary persona) who can blend, I think pretty successfully, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Beats:
Finally, a tiny book from 1966: Briefs.
