Annabel Lee
By Edgar Allan Poe – 1809-1849

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
  In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
  I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
  Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
  In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
  My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
  And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
  In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
  Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
  In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
  Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
  Of those who were older than we—
  Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in heaven above,
  Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
  In her sepulchre there by the sea,
  In her tomb by the sounding sea.

About the Poem

“Annabel Lee” is the last complete poem composed by Edgar Allan Poe. Like many other of Poe’s poems including “The Raven.” “Ulalume,” and “To One in Paradise,” “Annabel Lee” hauntingly follows the theme of the death of a beautiful woman, which Poe called “the most poetical topic in the world.” In “Annabel Lee,” the narrator fell in love with Annabel Lee when they were young He loves her so strongly that even angels are envious. He continues to love her even after her death. 

Scholars debate who, if anyone, was the inspiration for “Annabel Lee.” Like women in many other works by Poe, she marries young and is struck with illness. Many women have been suggested, but Poe’s wife Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe is one of the more credible candidates. The couple were first cousins and publicly married when Virginia Clemm was 13 and Poe was 27. Biographers disagree as to the nature of the couple’s relationship. Though their marriage was loving, some biographers suggest they viewed one another more like a brother and sister. In January 1842, she contracted tuberculosis, growing worse for five years until she died of the disease at the age of 24 in the family’s cottage, at that time outside New York City.

A local legend in Charleston, South Carolina, tells the story of a sailor who met a woman named Annabel Lee. Her father disapproved of the pairing and the two met privately in a graveyard before the sailor’s time stationed in Charleston was up. While away, he heard of Annabel’s death from yellow fever, but her father would not allow him at the funeral. Because he did not know her exact burial location, he instead kept vigil in the cemetery where they had often secretly met. There is no evidence that Edgar Allan Poe had heard of this legend, but locals insist it was his inspiration, especially considering Poe was briefly stationed in Charleston while in the army in 1827.

The poem focuses on an ideal love that is unusually strong. The narrator’s actions show that he not only loves Annabel Lee, but he worships her, something he can only do after her death. The narrator admits that he and Annabel Lee were children when they fell in love, but his explanation that angels murdered her is in itself childish, suggesting he has failed to mature since then. His repetition of this assertion suggests he is trying to rationalize his excessive feelings of loss. Unlike “The Raven,” in which the narrator believes he will “nevermore” be reunited with his love, “Annabel Lee” says the two will be together again, as not even demons “can ever dissever” their souls.

Poe wrote “Annabel Lee” in 1849. The poem was not published until shortly after Poe’s death that same year.

About the Poet

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States, and American literature. Poe was one of the country’s earliest practitioners of the short story and is considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. Poe is the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

I am not going to go into great detail about Poe’s life. It was a life filled with much sadness as can be seen in many of his poems. However, I will relate one of my favorite stories about Poe. After accruing substantial gambling debt during his freshman year at the University of Virginia, an 18-year-old Poe found himself desperate for financial stability. Like any reasonable teenage poet with massive debt and a gambling addiction, he joined the Army. Poe enlisted as an artilleryman and soon distinguished himself enough to become an artificer, a respected billet for someone with a mechanical mind adept at preparing explosives. Just two years into his five-year enlistment, Poe was promoted to sergeant major, the senior rank for noncommissioned officers. Despite excelling in the Army, Poe felt he had served “as long as suits my ends or my inclination,” and began searching for an early way out. He found an unorthodox solution through an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Poe traveled to West Point and enrolled as a cadet on July 1, 1830. Poe did well academically but was soon undone by continued quarrels with his foster father and money problems. During his first term, he decided to leave West Point but could not resign without the consent of his foster father. When Allen did not consent, Poe set out to get himself court-martialed and dismissed. In his seven months at West Point, he accumulated an impressive record—though not of the sort to which a cadet usually aspired. The Conduct Roll for July–December 1831 lists the number of offenses committed by cadets and their corresponding demerits. Poe’s name appears about midway down the list of top offenders, with 44 offenses and 106 demerits for the term. The roll for January alone shows Poe at the top of the list with 66 offenses for the month. It would appear that Poe was trying very hard to get kicked out of West Point. Legends of his misconduct range from him being constantly drunk to him showing up for formation naked. The story goes that West Point’s regulations for cadets stated that cadets must attend formation in belt, gloves, and boots (or something to that effect). Poe supposedly showed up in a belt, gloves, boots, a smile, and nothing else. However, there is no mention in West Point’s official records of Poe reporting for drills in “a belt, gloves, boots, a smile, and nothing else,” as has often been rumored and given as a reason for his expulsion, but trust me, a lot of things at military academies don’t go in the official record. On February 8, 1831, he was tried for gross neglect of duty and disobedience of orders for refusing to attend formations, classes, or church. He tactically pleaded not guilty to induce dismissal, knowing that he would be found guilty.

Barnes & Noble, 1999
By Jesús I. Valles

I was a boy in a bookstore, “a bathhouse,” I’ll joke
when I am older. But then, I wasn’t. I was in a gallery
of things to be cracked open; all their spines & mine.
I tell you, I was a hungry pickpocket, plucking
what language I could from books & men who stood hard
before me. This is what it means to be astonishing;
to thieve speech and sense from the undeserving.
I tell you, I was a boy and they were men, so all
the words I know for this I made into small razors,
some tucked between my teeth, under my tongue,
and when they said what a good mouth I had,
I smiled, the silver glint of sharp things in me
singing, “I’ll outlive you. I’ll outlive all of you.”

About the Poem

“During a writing workshop, I was asked to write an ode to my younger self. I quickly became envious of that past-me, of the haphazard bravado and willfulness that allowed me to explore my queerness in the aisles and shelves (and bathrooms) of that bookstore where words broke me open, where worlds broke open. In revisiting this site and self, I also found a lasting resentment and latent pity for the adult men who were willing to usher me in this way, for their aging bodies, for that bookstore (which is now a Ross Dress-For-Less), for all our lost selves.”—Jesús I. Valles

Back in 1999, I was in college in Alabama. There wasn’t much of a gay scene, and I was still trying to understand and coming to terms with my sexuality. The only place I knew where gay men regularly congregated, besides the newspaper office at my college, was the local Barnes & Noble. I could peruse the books and the men. I bought my first gay book (Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin) at that bookstore. I never talked to any of the gay men at the bookstore; I was far too scared and shy to do anything like that. This poem really speaks to me in so many ways. The poem begins with “I was a boy in a bookstore, ‘a bathhouse,’ I’ll joke when I am older.” I’ve also always loved books, so Barnes & Noble combined my love of books with my first baby steps towards understanding my sexuality.

By the way, the other book that I clandestinely purchased at that Barnes and Noble was Finding the Boyfriend Within: A Practical Guide for Tapping into Your Own Source of Love, Happiness, and Respect by Brad Gooch. This book was billed as a guide for gay men searching for greater self-acceptance. Gooch advised his readers to live every day as if they were expecting to entertain a dream lover for tea or dinner. I learned a lot about accepting myself for who I was first. I had to learn to love myself and come out to myself before I could venture into the real world of gay men perusing bookstores.

It might not sound like much, but that local Barnes & Noble helped to change my life and to allow me to accept who I am.

 About the Poet

Jesús I. Valles is a queer, Mexican immigrant writer-performer from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and El Paso, Texas. The recipient of fellowships and support from CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Idyllwild, Undocupoets, and Tin House, they live on stolen Pequot, Nipmuc, Niantic, Narragansett, and Wampanoag land.

The Road Not Taken
By Robert Frost – 1874-1963

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I realize that I have posted Robert Frost poems three weeks in a row, but Autumn seems like the perfect time to read some Frost. I was not going to post another one this week. However, on Saturday, I was out walking and taking some pictures of the fall foliage in Vermont, and I took this picture because the scene reminded me of this poem.

About the Poem

Everyone can quote those final two lines. David Orr writes in his book The Road Not Taken that everyone gets the meaning wrong. The usual interpretation is that the poem is praised as an ode of individuality, to not follow the pack even though the path may be more difficult. Except Frost notes early in the poem that the two roads were “worn . . . really about the same.” There is no difference. It’s only later, when the narrator recounts this moment, that he says he took the road less traveled.

“This is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us, or allotted to us by chance),” Orr writes. “The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism,” he continues. “It’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.”

Wrongly referred to by many as “The Road Less Traveled,” the poem’s true title, “The Road Not Taken,” references regret rather than pride. That’s by design. Frost wrote it as somewhat of a joke to a friend, English poet Edward Thomas. In 1912, Frost was nearly 40 and frustrated by his lack of success in the United States. After Thomas praised his work in London, the two became friends, and Frost visited him in Gloucestershire. They often took walks in the woods, and Frost was amused that Thomas always said another path might have been better. “Frost equated [it] with the romantic predisposition for ‘crying over what might have been,’” Orr writes, quoting Frost biographer Lawrance Thompson.

Frost thought his friend “would take the poem as a gentle joke and protest, ‘Stop teasing me,’” Thompson writes. He didn’t. Like readers today, Thomas was confused by it and maybe even thought he was being lampooned. Matthew Hollis, Edward Thomas’ biographer, suggested that “The Road Not Taken” goaded the British poet, who was indecisive about joining the army. “It pricked at his confidence . . . the one man who understood his indecisiveness most acutely — in particular, toward the war — appeared to be mocking him for it,” writes Hollis. Thomas enlisted in World War I and was killed two years later.

Orr writes that “The Road Not Taken” is “a thoroughly American poem. The ideas that [it] holds in tension — the notion of choice, the possibility of self-deception — are concepts that define . . . the United States.” It is also, as critic Frank Lentricchia writes, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

I have always equated this poem with what Jesus says during the Sermon on the Mount about the narrow gate. In Matthew 7:13-14, Jesus says “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” Frost’s religious beliefs have long been speculated upon. Raised by a mother who was a follower of Swedenborgianism, a Swedish mystical belief, many of Frost’s biographers have noted his apparent atheism or agnosticism. But he was deeply interested in Christianity.

Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College and a prominent Frost scholar Jay Parini said that “Robert Frost called himself an ‘Old Testament Christian. Which meant he was really more focused on the Torah and the old Biblical stories. Things like the Book of Job, the first five books of Moses, the Book of Proverbs and the Psalms were hugely important to Frost as a poet, a man and a thinker.”

No matter how you interpret “The Road Not Taken,” it is still one of the most famous American poems.

October
By Robert Frost – 1874-1963

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
To-morrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
To-morrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow,
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know;
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away;
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

In “October,” Robert Frost urges nature to slow down—before the leaves fall and the chilly weather begins. Frost has been hailed, and quite correctly in my opinion, as the “the poet of New England.” Like in many of his nature poems, Frost was inspired by New England’s beautiful scenery.

As with many of Frost’s poems, it is a simple and elegant poem which in this case describes a beautiful crisp October morning. With his usual graceful prose, Frost sets the scene of a quiet morning in early October, much like this morning was (though it was chilly at 27 degrees here). The air is silent but for the distant sound of crows. He speaks of the ripened leaves of fall with their multitude of colors-green, red, gold, and brown. It is a simple scene rendered instantly familiar to anyone whose experienced New England in the fall. You don’t have to look any further than that, but like all of Frost’s poems, it is more complex than simply setting a scene.

In truth, October is a grimly solemn poem, dealing with topics far heavier than a mere fall morning. Simply put, October is about death, a fact that becomes uneasily apparent upon closer inspection. Frost offers us the first hint of this within the first few lines when he references the crows that may “form and go” tomorrow. This works in two different ways. First and foremost, it must be noted that the crows are specifically brought up in order to point out their oncoming departure. However, just as significant is the fact that Frost particularly noted that they were crows, birds that are associated with death.

This said, Frost primarily relies on the oncoming winter to represent death, something he then contrasts with day, which serves to represent life. Rather than setting the two as enemies, he is content to ask only that the morning “Begin the hours of this day slow” allowing him as much time as possible before the cold finality of winter sets in.

The Native American poet Evalyn Callahan Shaw wrote a poem with the same title. It’s a popular name for poems. There is one by the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar; another by Massachusetts native Helen Hunt Jackson who wrote a poem for each month; and Louise Glück, Poet Laureate of the United States from 2003-2004 also wrote a poem titled “October.” I am not going to use the ones by Dunbar, Jackson, or Glück, but I do want to include the one by Shaw. Evalyn (sometimes listed as Eva, Evelyn, or Jane Evylin) Callahan Shaw was born around 1861 and lived in Wagoner, Indian Territory. She was the daughter of Samuel Benton Callahan of the Creek Nation.

October
By Evalyn Callahan Shaw

October is the month that seems
All woven with midsummer dreams;
She brings for us the golden days
That fill the air with smoky haze,
She brings for us the lisping breeze
And wakes the gossips in the trees,
Who whisper near the vacant nest
Forsaken by its feathered guest.
Now half the birds forget to sing,
And half of them have taken wing,
Before their pathway shall be lost
Beneath the gossamer of frost.
Zigzag across the yellow sky,
They rustle here and flutter there,
Until the boughs hang chill and bare,
What joy for us—what happiness
Shall cheer the day the night shall bless?
‘Tis hallowe’en, the very last
Shall keep for us remembrance fast,
When every child shall duck the head
To find the precious pippin red.

In Shaw’s “October,” she presents the month of October as “woven with midsummer dreams.” She says the month brings us “golden days,” “smoky haze,” the “lisping breeze,” and “gossips in the trees.” Shaw talks about how half of the birds have left while the other half forget to sing. For Shaw, October also represents the coming death of the year. The golden days of October give way to the boughs that “hang chill and bare.” But instead of ending with the death of the year, she speaks of the joy of Halloween with children bobbing for apples (the precious pippin red). For me, Shaw’s October is as beautifully written as Frost’s, but where Frost ends with him asking nature to slow down its march to the death of the year, Shaw ends with the joyous festivities of Halloween and children playing. Personally, I like them both. I love a melodic poem that rhymes, and both of these do that, but Shaw’s seem a bit more optimistic in its ending.

Nothing Gold Can Stay
By Robert Frost – 1874-1963

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

About the Poem

“Nothing Gold Can Stay” is one of Robert Frost’s very simple seeming poems, but holds much greater depth than you might think at first glance. However, it’s a beautiful poem for fall, especially as the leaves are beginning to turn to those beautiful autumn colors that the state is known for.

When it comes to understanding this poem, there can be a lot of pretentiousness in the analysis. Take for example these excerpts of reviews that are included on Wikipedia:

Alfred R. Ferguson wrote of the poem, “Perhaps no single poem more fully embodies the ambiguous balance between paradisiac good and the paradoxically more fruitful human good than ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay,’ a poem in which the metaphors of Eden and the Fall cohere with the idea of felix culpa.”

John A. Rea wrote about the poem’s “alliterative symmetry”, citing as examples the second line’s “hardest – hue – hold” and the seventh’s “dawn – down – day”; he also points out how the “stressed vowel nuclei also contribute strongly to the structure of the poem” since the back round diphthongs bind the lines of the poem’s first quatrain together while the front rising diphthongs do the same for the last four lines.

In 1984, William H. Pritchard called the poem’s “perfectly limpid, toneless assertion” an example of Frost demonstrating how “his excellence extended also to the shortest of figures”, and fitting Frost’s “later definition of poetry as a momentary stay against confusion.“

In 1993, George F. Bagby wrote the poem “projects a fairly comprehensive vision of experience” in a typical but “extraordinarily compressed” example of synecdoche that “moves from a detail of vegetable growth to the history of human failure and suffering.”

I have almost always found literary analysis to be mostly pretentious with the experts using “big words” to say something (such as paradisiac) that could have been said in simpler language. It’s a fault with most academics. If they can use $100 words and sound smart, they can fool people into believing that they really are smart. While a lot of them are, it’s still a whole lot of pretension. I had a literature professor once tell our class that William Faulkner stopped a sentence in one paragraph of the book we were reading and picked up the sentence a hundred pages into the book. How he knew this, he could never explain, nor could he actually make the two sentence “fragments” actually make sense together.

I’ve always believed it was much better to say things in plain language so that more people could understand. Education and academic pursuits are not meant to see how smart you can sound while trying to show your audience just how dumb you think they are. If you’re ever in an art museum in which a group of art historians are in front of you (this actually happened to me at the MFA in Boston) each trying to show the others that they know more than the next. It was a constant game of one-upmanship in which they all just came off as pompous asses.

With that rant being given about pretentious academics, I will say that “Nothing Gold Can Stay” is one of my favorite Frost poems. As the leaves turn a myriad of autumn shades in the next couple of weeks, they’ll soon fall to the ground and turn brown before being covered in snow a few weeks later. Autumn is beautiful in New England, especially Vermont, but it doesn’t last very long. One good rainstorm at the peak of the season can end the season in a matter of hours, not days or weeks. Back in Alabama, the leaves won’t begin to turn for many more weeks, but even then, there is not the rich variety of collars found in Vermont.

Fire and Ice
By Robert Frost – 1874-1963

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

About the Poem

“Fire and Ice” was written by Robert Frost and published in 1920, shortly after WWI, and weighs up the probability of two differing apocalyptic scenarios represented by the elements of the poem’s title. The speaker believes fire to be the more likely world-ender of the two and links it directly with what he has “tasted” of “desire.” In an ironically conversational tone, the speaker adds that ice—which represents hate and indifference—would “also” be “great” as a way of bringing about the end of the world. There are two reported inspirations for the poem: the first of these is Dante’s Inferno, which is a poetic and literary journey into Hell written in the 14th century. The other is a reported conversation Frost had with astronomer Harlow Shapley in which they talked about the sun exploding or extinguishing—fire or ice.

According to one of Frost’s biographers, “Fire and Ice” was inspired by a passage in Canto 32 of Dante’s Inferno, in which the worst offenders of hell (the traitors) are submerged up to their necks in ice while in a fiery hell: “a lake so bound with ice, / It did not look like water, but like a glass…right clear / I saw, where sinners are preserved in ice.” In a 1999 article, John N. Serio claims that the poem is a compression of Dante’s Inferno. He draws a parallel between the nine lines of the poem with the nine rings of Hell and notes that, like the downward funnel of the rings of Hell, the poem narrows considerably in the last two lines. Frost’s diction further highlights the parallels between Frost’s discussion of desire and hate with Dante’s outlook on sins of passion and reason with sensuous and physical verbs describing desire and loosely recalling the characters Dante met in the upper rings of Hell: “taste” (recalling the Glutton), “hold” (recalling the adulterous lovers), and “favor” (recalling the hoarders). In contrast, hate is discussed with verbs of reason and thought (“I think I know…/To say…”).

In an anecdote, he recounted in 1960 in a “Science and the Arts” presentation, the prominent astronomer Harlow Shapley claims to have inspired “Fire and Ice.” Shapley describes an encounter he had with Frost a year before the poem was published in which Frost, noting that Shapley was the astronomer of his day, asked him how the world would end. Shapley responded that either the sun will explode and incinerate the Earth, or the Earth will somehow escape this fate only to end up slowly freezing in deep space. Shapley was surprised at seeing “Fire and Ice” in print a year later and referred to it as an example of how science can influence the creation of art or clarify its meaning.

About the Poet

Robert Frost most likely needs no introduction, but in case you don’t know, he is one of the most celebrated figures in American poetry. Frost was the author of numerous poetry collections, including New Hampshire (Henry Holt and Company, 1923). Born in San Francisco in 1874, he lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont. Frost is one of my favorite poets. The simplicity of his poems often hides a much deeper meaning. He wrote some of America’s best-loved poems: “The Road Not Taken,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Birches,” and one of my personal favorites, “Mending Wall.”

Frequently honored during his lifetime, Frost is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one of America’s rare “public literary figures, almost an artistic institution”. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named poet laureate of Vermont. Frost died in Boston in 1963.

In Summer Twilight
By Joshua Henry Jones, Jr.

Just a dash of lambent carmine
  Shading into sky of gold;
Just a twitter of a song-bird
  the wings its head enfold;
Just a rustling sigh of parting
  From the moon-kissed hill to breeze;
And a cheerful gentle, nodding
  Adieu waving from the trees;
Just a friendly sunbeam’s flutter
  Wishing all a night’s repose,
Ere the stars swing back the curtain
  Bringing twilight’s dewy close.

About the Poet

Joshua Henry Jones, Jr. was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina. He published both prose and poetry, including Poems of the Four Seas (The Cornhill Company, 1921); The Heart of the World (Stratford Co., 1919); and By Sanction of Law (McGrath Publishing Company, 1924). Jones died on December 14, 1955, in Boston.

in & out of jean shorts (the reel catches)
By Chris Campanioni

Picture a flower dreaming
of its own future
folded inward, enclosed within its seed
& its surroundings
my nascent
homosexuality is that
I love every body even

as if it were my own
which is to say
I love every body as if
I were myself
tasked with becoming both
object & the offer
of adoration begged

by it Is it
wrong to think
If I weren’t sitting
on a bench overlooking the Vieux Port
not considering each vessel
approaching the Canebiére but
where each one has been only

recently this would read
otherwise or not at all
which is to say I am indebted to so many
forms & what can
only be gifted by our
swift encounters I bow before
velocity & haphazard excess, the latent succulence

contained or carried by
words, a generous
invitation to plunge or plummet
or to be the hole itself
out of which something always
something blossoms (count the number
of times naugahyde appears in the text)

(count the number of times hypnotic & ass mingle
in my mind) Reading Puig from memory
I can place myself
back
at the beach &
every time or so it seems
I wish for sex out

in the open, to have
some strange body
glide over mine, to collide
as if to butterfly
underwater required not one
but two sets of salty
chests & jutting

calves (last
night’s intermittent dream
where my penis appears
in public, veering in & out
of jean shorts almost violently)
& Puig’s wish (how could I
forget this?) to grow up & not

to become movie star
but movie, which means
assemblage, network, motoric
scrapbook, the discontinuity of the act
of filming—set pieces
rushing across the set & the set
itself but also the future

of the subjects within the frame—
not just the act of filming but its unknowable
points of view, simultaneous & multiple
months or only moments later & always
to return & to beg reception
draped in dark or the privacy
of some well-lit home, alone

or in the company of people
one has only ever seen in passing
reimagined through this allowance
for difference, which is my own
inability to say where Puig’s wish
comes from (other
than Puig himself, speaking

as if he were still a child, unless
Puig, at 43 or 44 or more, awaited a life
of substitution & self-adaptation
unless Puig, ever exuberant
is still awaiting to be, the way in place
of source or reference I find only my own origin: my
meticulous way of copying out

everything that comes even everything
that evades me)—is it me
is it Puig is there any difference?
The opposite of authorship
is feverish attribution, my tendency
to assume all thoughts
I have belong to everyone

& doesn’t
a changeover
imply the endeavor to move
by rapidly opening
& shutting one’s eyes? The real catches
only if I deny myself
its recognition

From: Catapult Magazine

Chris Campanioni was born in New York City in 1985 and grew up in a very nineties New Jersey. The son of exiles from Cuba and Poland, Chris is a writer, multimedia artist, and instructor. His debut novel, Going Down, was selected as Best First Book at the International Latino Book Awards in 2014. His poem “Transport (after ‘When Ecstasy is Inconvenient’)” received the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize in 2015, and a selection from his cross-genre Death of Art was awarded a Pushcart Prize in 2016. Earlier, he was awarded the 2013 Academy of American Poets College Prize. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including a 2019 CHCI-Mellon Global Humanities Institute fellowship to join the Transnational Joint Research Center for Migration, Logistics, and Cultural Intervention; in 2021, he became a member of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean, where he continues to broach the multiple, intersecting, and extant repercussions of the Cold War. From 2016 until 2022 he edited PANK and PANK Books, launching PANK’s Folio series in 2019 and its translation imprint, Transmission, in 2021. 

His essays, poetry, and fiction have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, appearing in BOMB, Diacritics, Life Writing, Catapult, Social Text, Los Angeles Review of Books, American Poetry Review, Fence, Ambit, Nat. Brut, Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Tupelo Press Quarterly, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 3:AM Magazine, DIAGRAM, Poetry International {this list is long … & I’m still loading}, M/C: Media & Culture, Prelude, RHINO, Gorse, and several other journals, anthologies, and edited volumes, including Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge, 2019), Manticore: Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities (Sundress, 2019), Open House: Conversations with Writers About Community (Tupelo Press, 2023) Migration, Dislocation and Movement on Screen(Berghahn Books, 2023), and Transmedia Selves: Identity and Persona Creation in the Age of Mobile and Multiplatform Media(Routledge, 2023). His translations have been published in Beginnings of the Prose Poem: All Over The Place (Commonwealth Books, 2021), his multimedia work has been exhibited at the New York Academy of Art, and the film adaptation of his poem This body’s long (& I’m still loading) was in the official selection at the Canadian International Film Festival.

Chris’s research on queer migration, surveillance, and the personal text has been presented internationally and he has served as a visiting author and writer in residence at universities and MFA programs across the United States. Outside the academy, he has performed at public symposiums including TED Talks, the Transatlantic Poetry Series, and the &Now Festival of Innovative Writing.  From 2016-2022 he served as a MAGNET Mentor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, with the primary goal of getting more students of color into graduate programs in the humanities. He has taught Latinx literature, creative writing, media studies, and journalism at Pace University and Baruch College, where he’s been awarded the Diana Colbert Prize for Innovative Teaching, the Presidential Excellence Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Department of English Excellence in Teaching Award. Today he is a Visiting Lecturer in the English department at Baruch College.

A Few Notes:

Some of you may recognize Chris from his modeling. He was a model for C-IN2, and he has done other modeling as well. However, he is also a prolific writer and intellectual.

Also, and this may show my ignorance, but I had to look up who “Puig” was that he mentions in the poem above. Manuel Puig was an Argentine author. Among his best-known novels are La traición de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, 1968), Boquitas pintadas (Heartbreak Tango, 1969), and El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1976) which was adapted into the film released in 1985, directed by the Argentine-Brazilian director Héctor Babenco; and a Broadway musical in 1993.

Also, I had to include the second picture of Chris because it is of him speaking at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, which recently announced it would no longer be holding classes/residency in Vermont anymore. I am familiar with VCFA for several reasons, not least because for a brief while, I dated a guy who was attending VCFA, but it never really went anywhere.

Summer Heat
by Edward Carpenter

Sun burning down on back and loins, penetrating the skin, bathing their flanks in sweat,
Where they lie naked on the warm ground, and the ferns arch over them,
Out in the woods, and the sweet scent of fir-needles
Blends with the fragrant nearness of their bodies;

In-armed together, murmuring, talking,
Drunk with wine of Eros’ lips,
Hourlong, while the great wind rushes in the branches,
And the blue above lies deep beyond the fern-fronds and fir-tips;

Till, with the midday sun, fierce scorching, smiting,
Up from their woodland lair they leap, and smite,
And strike with wands, and wrestle, and bruise each other,
In savage play and amorous despite.

Love’s Vision
by Edward Carpenter

At night in each other’s arms,
Content, overjoyed, resting deep deep down in the darkness,
Lo! the heavens opened and He appeared–
Whom no mortal eye may see,
Whom no eye clouded with Care,
Whom none who seeks after this or that, whom none who has not escaped from self.

There–in the region of Equality, in the world of Freedom no longer limited,
Standing as a lofty peak in heaven above the clouds,
From below hidden, yet to all who pass into that region most clearly visible–
He the Eternal appeared.

To a Stranger
by Edward Carpenter

O faithful eyes, day after day as I see and know
you—unswerving faithful and beautiful—going about
your ordinary work unnoticed,
I have noticed—I do not forget you.
I know the truth the tenderness the courage, I know
the longings hidden quiet there.
Go right on. Have good faith yet—keep that your
unseen treasure untainted.
Many shall bless you. To many yet, though no word
be spoken, your face shall shine as a lamp.
It shall be remembered, and that which you have
desired—in silence—shall come abundantly to you.

Through the Long Night
by Edward Carpenter

You, proud curve-lipped youth, with brown sensitive face,
Why, suddenly, as you sat there on the grass, did you
turn full upon me those twin black eyes of yours,
With gaze so absorbing so intense, I a strong man
trembled and was faint?
Why in a moment between me and you in the full
summer afternoon did Love sweep-leading after it in procession across the lawn and the flowers and under the waving
trees huge dusky shadows of Death and the other world?

I know not.
Solemn and dewy-passionate, yet burning clear and sted-fast at the last,
Through the long night those eyes of yours, dear,
remain to me—
And I remain gazing into them.

You, proud curve-lipped youth, with brown sensitive face,
Why, suddenly, as you sat there on the grass, did you turn full upon me those twin black eyes of yours,
With gaze so absorbing so intense, I a strong man trembled and was faint?
Why in a moment between me and you in the full summer afternoon did Love sweep—leading after it in procession across the lawn and the flowers and under the waving trees huge dusky shadows of Death and the other world?
I know not.
Solemn and dewy-passionate, yet burning clear and steadfast at the last,
Through the long night those eyes of yours, dear, remain to me—
And I remain gazing into them.

About the Poet

The Mount Cemetery of Guildford, an English town about 32 miles southwest of London, contains the graves of two gay lovers: Edward Carpenter, a man called the “gay godfather of the British left” and his longtime partner George Merrill. While this may not seem too surprising these days, and you may not recognize them by name, both men bucked the homophobia of the late 18th and early 19th centuries by living together in an out gay relationship, providing romantic inspiration for two books written by well-known gay authors in the process. Their final resting place has recently been designated as an LGBTQ historic site by Historic England, an organization that helps people care for, enjoy and celebrate England’s spectacular historic environment.

Born in 1844, Edward Carpenter knew he was gay from an early age. In his diary, he wrote, “At the age of eight or nine, and long before distinct sexual feelings declared themselves, I felt a friendly attraction toward my own sex, and this developed after the age of puberty into a passionate sense of love.” He studied at the prestigious Trinity Hall college at the University of Cambridge. There, he developed romantic feelings toward his friend Edward Anthony Beck, who also served as Trinity Hall’s master. Beck eventually ended their friendship, leaving Carpenter heartbroken.

Carpenter said the work of gay American poet Walt Whitman caused “a profound change” in him, as Whitman urged people to find divinity in nature and within themselves rather than in religious society. Though Carpenter served in the Anglican ministry until age 30, he gradually grew dissatisfied with church and university life. He left both to begin publicly lecturing on astronomy, historic Greek women, and music. When he moved to the town of Sheffield at age 31, he encountered many manual workers. Historians note that his poetry around this time expressed attraction to these workers, to “the grimy and oil-besmeared figure of a stoker” and “the thick-thighed hot coarse-fleshed young bricklayer with a strap around his waist.”

As such, it’s hardly surprising that at age 47, he met and fell in love with George Merrill, a working-class man who (unlike Carpenter) grew up in the slums and had no formal education. The couple met on a train after Carpenter returned from travels in India. Merrill worked numerous blue-collar jobs at a newspaper office, a hotel, and an ironworks. Seven years after meeting, the two men moved in together into Carpenter’s small farm home in Millthorpe, Derbyshire.

There, Merrill officially served as Carpenter’s servant, cooking, cleaning, and decorating their home in fresh flowers. Carpenter liked Merrill’s baritone voice and enjoyment in singing comical songs. Carpenter once wrote of him, “George in fact was accepted and one may say beloved by both my manual worker friends and my more aristocratic friends.” Their living openly as a gay couple was especially notable considering that, at the time, the United Kingdom had laws punishing “buggery” with prison time. Oscar Wilde was convicted and sent to prison for homosexuality in 1895 and shunned by society — countless other men had their lives ruined under similar offenses.

But despite this, Carpenter openly defended same-sex relationships in his 1895 book Homogenic Love, his 1896 work Love’s Coming of Age, and 1908 creation The Intermediate Sex, calling same-sex couples “not only natural but “inevitable.” The books generated controversy, even leading one of Carpenter’s neighbors to report him to the Derbyshire Police. The police pledged to keep a “discreet watch” on him and his activities.

Carpenter became friends with Whitman and other influential writers like Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore and the English authors D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forester. Carpenter’s relationship with Merrill reportedly inspired the gay romance in Forster’s posthumously published novel Maurice and the straight romance in Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, both of which involved people in romantic relationships with men from lower social classes. Beyond the couple’s notoriety, Carpenter himself is also celebrated for being a socialist whose early works opposed environmental pollution, cruelty to animals, worker exploitation, and other positions which have since become mainstays of different social justice movements.

Merrill died in 1928. In May of the same year, Carpenter had a paralytic stroke. After 13 months, Carpenter too died. The men’s gravestone reads, “Do not think too much of the dead husk of your friend, or mourn too much over it, but send your thoughts out towards the real soul or self which has escaped-to reach it. For so, surely you will cast a light of gladness upon his onward journey, and contribute your part towards the building of that kingdom of love which links our earth to heaven.”

Cape Cod
By George Santayana – 1863-1952

The low sandy beach and the thin scrub pine,
The wide reach of bay and the long sky line,—
    O, I am far from home!

The salt, salt smell of the thick sea air,
And the smooth round stones that the ebbtides wear,—
    When will the good ship come?

The wretched stumps all charred and burned,
And the deep soft rut where the cartwheel turned,—
    Why is the world so old?

The lapping wave, and the broad gray sky
Where the cawing crows and the slow gulls fly,—
    Where are the dead untold?

The thin, slant willows by the flooded bog,
The huge stranded hulk and the floating log,—
    Sorrow with life began!

And among the dark pines, and along the flat shore,
O the wind, and the wind, for evermore!
    What will become of man?

About This Poem

“Cape Cod” first appeared in Santayana’s Sonnets and Other Verses (Stone & Kimball, 1894). As Santayana recounts in Persons and Places: The Middle Span (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945), the poem originated in a fishing trip with friends to Cape Cod, during which he “never held a rod in [his] hand, and never meant to.” He explains, “I wrote some lines on Cape Cod, of which the poet William Vaughn Moody said that there for once I had been inspired. But that inspiration came only by the way, as on returning we skirted a beach in the gathering twilight. Cape Cod in general has the most cheerful associations in my mind.” The scholar Newton Phelps Stallknecht later wrote about the poem in George Santayana (University of Minnesota Press, 1971) that “language, rhythm, and imagery yield fully to the sense of forlorn exile that is throughout. The scene becomes a haunting symbol of loneliness, an end of the world, whose beauty lives in its very desolation.”

About This Poet

George Santayana was a philosopher, critic, essayist, novelist, and poet. born Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás on December 16, 1863, in Madrid, was a philosopher, critic, poet, and novelist. He was the author of many books, including The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896) and Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante And Goethe (Harvard University, 1910).

He received his PhD from Harvard, where he taught Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. In 1912, Santayana moved to Europe and never returned to the United States. He died on September 26, 1952.