Never By Itself Alone: Queer Poetry, Queer Communities in Boston and the Bay Area, 1944―Present

Cover
Never By Itself Alone
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: ‘Never by itself alone’
Prelude
Chapter Summaries
Why Boston and the Bay?
Methodology and Focus
Questions of Publication
From Homosexual Tradition to Queer Lineage
‘meet their end upon the ground’
Part I Beginnings (1944–​1969)
	1. ‘Homosexuals in Society’: Poetry and Gay Community in the 1940s
		Introduction
		‘The Homosexual in Society’: Gay Identity and the Future of America
			The Young and Evil
		‘The mind’s /​ natural jungle’: Race, Sexuality, and Identity
			‘One day we’ll see how a black man really feels’
		‘Creating New Worlds’: The Berkeley Renaissance
			The King’s Two Cities
		From the Renaissance to the Household
		Coda: ‘Being so far abroad from what he once was’
	2. Identity and Community in the Work of Jack Spicer
		Introduction
		‘What have I lost?’: The Berkeley Renaissance and the Mattachine
		Spicer in Boston
			‘Five Boston cats blowing their poetry REAL hard’
			‘Poetry is public property’: the Boston Newsletter
			‘No place to turn’: The Oliver Charming Notebooks
			Sex and the Single Poem
		The Heads of the Town up to the Aether: Spicer’s Coming Community
			Return to San Francisco and the Spicer Circle
			‘the figure of a person at once lost and unlikely’
			‘the city we create’
		Open Spaces: The Magazines of the Spicer Circle
			‘An Apparition of the Late J’
			Love Poems and Protestant Letters: Open Space
		Community and Negativity in Spicer’s Final Work
			‘Alone we are dangerous’: Community/​Revolution
			The Pacific Nation
			‘People are starving’: Book of Magazine Verse
		Messages from Actual Conditions: Spicer’s Afterlives
	3. The Occult School of Boston (i): ‘Levels above and below’  (Ed Marshall and Stephen Jonas)
		‘An occult school, unknown’
		‘A diabolical devout’: The Case of Ed Marshall
			‘Leave the word alone it is dangerous’
			‘A covering and an unloading’: Hellan, Hellan
		‘Dialogue against Dialogue’: Stephen Jonas
			‘another excursion into fantasy’: Jonas’ ‘anti-​biographies’
			‘Remember me kindly’: Love, The Poem, The Sea
			‘From one Martian to another’: Jonas and Jack Spicer
			‘Boston Lingo’ and the American Idiom
			‘one completed poem’: Poetry and Love
			‘in hell /​ already’: Jonas’ later work
	4. The Occult School of Boston (ii): ‘Queer Shoulders at the Wheel’ (John Wieners and Gerrit Lansing)
		‘never forget where we come from’: John Wieners
			Early Poems: Wieners in the Boston Newsletter
			‘a show of junkies, cocksuckers, THIEVES’: Wieners and Measure
			‘It is my life you save’: San Francisco and The Hotel Wentley Poems
		Gerrit Lansing’s Gay Age of Aquarius
			‘Exuberant and restless disorder’: Gerrit Lansing in New York
			‘The Burden of SET’
			‘Naming is gaming’
		Coda: ‘Rise, Shining Martyrs’
Part II Gay Liberation in Boston (1969–​1983)
	5. ‘A Gay Presence’: John Wieners, Charley Shively, and Fag Rag
		‘The most loathsome publication in the English language’
		‘acts of revolution’: Charley Shively
		‘New love, encountered between strangers’
		‘Hacking, stuffing and reshelving’
		‘There’s a certain kind of men’
		‘The Problem of Madness’
	6. ‘My Real Name’: Racial Framings, Queer Imaginings
		‘no cosmic ribbon’
		‘loving he and him’: Prince-​Eusi Ndugu
		Black and Queer: Adrian Stanford
		Stephania Byrd: ‘violence not new /​ but old’
		‘to strike the spirit of my history’: Maurice Kenny’s Queered Spaces
			Gay Appropriations
	7. ‘We cannot live without our lives’: From the Combahee River Collective to This Bridge Called My Back
		Introduction
		Conditions: The Combahee River Collective
		1979
			‘Why Did They Die?’
			‘A Chorale for Black Woman Voices’: Audre Lorde’s ‘Need’
		From Metaphor to Movement: This Bridge Called My Back
			This Bridge and Kitchen Table Press
			‘Making some sense of the trip’
			‘The Bridge Poem’: Kate Rushin
		Conclusion: Bridges to the Future, Survivals of the Past
Part III Bay Area Communities: Lesbian Feminism to the AIDS Era (1969–​present)
	8. ‘She Who’: Judy Grahn and Bay Area Gay Women’s Liberation
		‘A very dangerous box to fall out of’
		Edward the Dyke as Gender Outlaw
		‘On the Development of a Purple Fist’
		The Common Woman and a Common Poetics
		A Woman is Talking to Death
		‘all the sides of it’
	9. ‘The first everything’: Pat Parker
		‘& a woman was born’: Parker’s Early Years
		Coming Out and Coming to Poetry
		Movements in Black
		‘I have gained many sisters’: ‘Womanslaughter’
		‘Where do you go to become a non-​citizen?’
		Conclusion: On Simplicity, Class, and Literary Judgement
	10. ‘blasting the true story into breath’: Writing, Work, and Socialist Feminism
		The Third World Student Strike, the WWU, and Asian-​American Lesbian Writing
		‘we are the clatter of type /​ in your dreams’: Poetry and Work
			‘Sitting at the Machine, Thinking’
			‘Do You Read What You’re Typing?’
			‘Polymorphously Perverse’
		‘No One Immune’
	11. New Narrative, New Communities from Left Write to AIDS
		New Narrative and the Possibility of a Gay Left
			‘Gay Sunrise’
			‘A Community of the Future’: Century of Clouds
			Organizing for Unity: Left Write
		‘A village common producing images’: New Narrative After Left Write
		New Narrative in the Era of AIDS
			Enola Gay
			The Bathhouse in the Era of AIDS
			Of AIDS and the Undead: Real and The Letters of Mina Harker
			‘I saw something I can’t remember’: Kevin Killian’s Argento Series
	Coda: ‘When politics show’
		‘Inaudible substance of catastrophe’
		The End of Gender, Coast to Coast
		‘To tell you stories’
Notes
Works Cited
Index