Have (Thom) Gunn, Will Travel...

It's been quite a while since our group went through its Thom Gunn groupie phase, reading Boss Cupid in 2008 and The Man with Night Sweats the following year. (We've also encountered several of his poems in various collections over the years.) But a recent New Republic essay by Jeremy Lybarger, "Thom Gunn's Anti-Confessional Poetry," has renewed my interest in Gunn's work. If you're not yet familiar with the poet, do yourself a favor and read this crisp overview of his life and work--and then order one of his collections. Even if you are already a fan, I predict you'll find new nuggets to savor in Lybarger's sympathetic yet probing portrait of a complex artist.

Advice on consent

During last Wednesday's very well-attended (14 guys!) Zoom discussion of Puerilities, Daryl Hine's translation of poems from the notorious 12th Book of the Greek Anthology, Mike Mazza shared a couple of items in the chat box regarding consent that I wanted to memorialize here. The first is Taking Liberties: Gay Men's Essays on Politics, Culture and Sex (1996), edited by Michael Bronski; the second is a 2010 BBC report on "The sexually abused dancing boys of Afghanistan" by Rustam Qobil. I'd add that Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel, The Kite Runner, also features that fraught topic as a major element. (A movie based on the novel was released in 2007, and a theatrical adaptation just debuted on Broadway.) 

The origin story of "Puerilities"

Patrick Flynn, who nominated and will lead our upcoming discussion of Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of the Greek Anthology, translated by Daryl Hine, was kind enough to share the following info, excerpted from Wikipedia:

"In 1606 or 1607 Claudius Salmasius discovered, in the library of the Counts Palatine in Heidelberg, the only surviving copy of [Constantine] Cephalas' early [ca. 950 CE] unexpurgated copy of the Greek Anthology. This included the 258-poem anthology of homoerotic verse by Straton of Sardis [early 2nd century CE] that would eventually become known as the notorious Book 12 of that collection. It was copied and circulated by hand and first published in 1776. Some 225 more years would pass before a full Greek-to-English translation was issued."

 

A "Specimen Days" spoiler alert...

A tip of the hat to Jeremy Coats, who alerted me to the following tidbit in a 2005 eAudio interview with Specimen Days author Michael Cunningham: The bowl is a book (he didn't want to be too literal (!). 

Specimen Days, the O.G.

As I sheepishly confessed at the end of our excellent July 6 discussion of Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days, I had no idea that the novelist had borrowed his title from none other than Walt Whitman himself. Whitman's Specimen Days & Collect is a sort of commonplace book consisting of short vignettes and poems, notes on his travels, diary entries and other memoranda of moments in the poet's life, collected over several decades and published in 1882. The poet (never burdened with crippling amounts of modesty) described it as "the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever penned."

Using Frank to get to Peter?

When I first posted the item immediately below this one, I had not yet read actual reviews, and so took it for granted that Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father and Me was primarily about the titular poet. That's certainly the way the New York Times' June 14 review approaches Ada Calhoun's book. But the June 17 review in the Washington Post suggests rather pointedly that the author's rage at her father's lifelong neglect, bordering on abuse, is her real subject: "My father never bought me Christmas presents. He did not know my teachers, my friends or my shoe size. ... I can't remember him once asking about my day, making me a snack or helping me with my homework." (Yikes!) That being the case, I'm rethinking my interest in nominating Also a Poet for our next reading list. But see what you think...