Celebrate National Poetry Month With Great Gay Poets!
A wonderful reader, Julia Garbowski, contacted me via Twitter to tell me that April is National Poetry Month. She wanted to know how I would be celebrating, and, after several tweets and email messages, I am happy to share with you that Julia will be guest blogging here each Friday this month.
Regular readers of this blog will remember the survey so many of you completed for me back in January. One of the overwhelming responses asked for more LGBTQ culture to be added to the blog. Julia’s work will fill that niche quite well! I hope you’ll let us know what you think.
Julia will be sharing some of her own thoughts and some of her favorite poetry from LGBTQ poets, including this, her first piece here at The New Civil Rights Movement.
April is National Poetry Month
In celebration, I looked for a gay poet or two to read and discovered that I could choose the most well known writer in English Literature (William Shakespeare), or the Father of American poetry (Walt Whitman), or the great beat poet Allen Ginsberg, or the Poet Laureate of the U.S. Kay Ryan, or Hans Christian Anderson, Lord Byron, W.H. Auden, A.E. Housman, Tennessee Williams, Gertrude Stein, etc., and they would all, among their many gifts, be identifiable as LGBT persons. Choosing a different poet for each day of the month would not reveal a pinhead in the-great-stick-pillow-of-the-world of excellent, influential, proud, out, closeted, imprisoned, chaste, revered or reviled poetic geniuses from the past or in the present.
Whether it is even useful to identify poets as gay is a whole other question of what the purposes and consequences of labeling are. But, I am reminded of the Emily Dickinson poem:
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind
And so I plan to think about but not be hindered by the labeling issue, and to celebrate the rest of National Poetry Month reading and sharing on Twitter and talking to my friends about some poems by LGBT poets. I hope others will do the same.
Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892) from Leaves of GrassCalamus 11
When I heard at the close of the day how I had
been praised in the Capitol, still it was not
a happy night for me that followed,
and else when I caroused – nor when my favorite plans were
accomplished – was I really happy,
but the day when I arose at dawn from the perfect
health, electric, inhaling sweet breath
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and
disappear in the morning light,
When I wandered alone over the beach, and undressing, bathed,
laughing with the waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my friend, my lover, was on
his way coming, then O I was happy,
Each breath tasted sweeter – and all that day my food
Nourished me more – and the beautiful day passed well,
And next came with equal joy – and with the next,
At evening, came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll
Slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands, as directed
To me, whispering to congratulate me,
For my friend I love lay sleeping by my side,
In the stillness his face was inclined toward me, while the
Moon’s clear beams shone
And his arm lay lightly over my breast – and that night I was happy.
Written at a time when the word Homosexual did not even exist, Whitman used the term adhesiveness to describe his relationships with men. His poetry, letters, private journals, letters written by others including Oscar Wilde (Wilde was imprisoned in 1895 for homosexuality on a charge of “indecency†in England) and also writings by Whitman’s companion Horace Traubel all confirm that he passionately loved men and believed that same sex love and attraction was innately human. For more see: “Walt Whitman: A Gay Life†by Gary Schmidgall (1997, E.P. Dutton.)
Julia Garbowski lives in Royal Oak, MI and has returned to writing after 25 years of running a farm and market in Door County WI. She grew up in Sag Harbor, NY. Her B.A. in Communications is from the University of Wisconsin. She belongs to the Michigan Literary Network and her twitter name is @driftnotes.
(Images: Top: Emily Dickinson, Bottom: Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle)
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President Donald Trump thrilled his supporters in New York on Friday as he shared how he came up with his latest nickname for Democrats — his explanation included a spelling lesson.
“Blue means Dumocrat,” the president said. “That’s a new name I came up with.”
“I was, I was thinking about this character we have in the House. His name is Hakeem Jeffries,” Trump said to boos from the audience.
“And he’s a low IQ person, very low IQ.”
“And I watched what he was saying, and what the horrible things he was saying, and I said, ‘He’s a dumb guy.’ I said, Wait a minute, he’s a Dumocrat. That’s how I got the name,” Trump excitedly said.
“You take the ‘e’ out, you don’t use the ‘b’. A lot of people don’t know ‘dumb’ has a ‘b’ in it, actually. You don’t need it. You discard the ‘b.’
“But you take the ‘e’ out, and you replace it with a ‘u.'”
“They are Dumocrats. You know why? ‘Cause their policies are dumb. Their policies are very dumb. All of their policies.”
Critics mocked the president.
“His uncle taught at MIT, but Trump just recently learned there is a b in dumb,” wrote political strategist Jeff Timmer.
“Dumbo @realDonaldTrump here is the only one who doesn’t know there’s a b in DUMB,” said former GOP Congresswoman Barbara Comstock.
“It’s impossible to overstate how f— — stupid Trump looks on the world stage,” wrote another online commenter.
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s controversial Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is resigning.
“Unfortunately, I must submit my resignation, effective June 30, 2026,” DNI Gabbard wrote to President Trump, Fox News reports. “My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer.”
“During pivotal moments,” NBC News reports, “as Trump deliberated over possible military action or watched live video feeds of operations in Iran or Venezuela, Gabbard was often not in the room, underscoring her outsider status.”
“Gabbard has had a tough tenure being sidelined on Venezuela and Iran. Last month, Trump floated replacing her with Pam Bondi, but some advisers saved her,” reported WIRED’s Hugo Lowell.
President Trump wrote that Gabbard had done an “incredible job,” and “we will miss her,” while Reuters reports that the White House ”forced” Gabbard “to resign from her post, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Dave Brown called Gabbard’s tenure “tumultuous.”
Critics were quick to respond.
“Good riddance. The Iran war has been the biggest display of intelligence incompetence in decades,” wrote U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI).
“Tulsi Gabbard leaves this administration in disgrace after helping Trump drag the country into yet another forever war in the Middle East,” wrote political strategist Mike Nellis. “She built her entire image on opposing these wars, then abandoned that principle the second it became politically inconvenient. That’s her legacy: a complete fraud, completely full of s— — about the one thing people thought she genuinely believed in. Good f— — riddance.”
“Also, is anybody in Congress or the media going to get to the bottom of the whistleblower’s story about Tulsi Gabbard withholding classified intercepted intel for political reasons?” Nellis continued. “What the hell happened there, or are we just going to pretend that didn’t happen?”
“Are we ever going to found out if Tulsi Gabbard broke how many different national security laws by allegedly refusing to hand over investigative documents, or is that just going away now?” asked writer Charlotte Clymer.
Professor and policy analyst Adam Cochran called Gabbard’s resignation “shocking,” and added: “Can’t imagine what they would ask to do that is too out of line for her…”
Associate Professor of Political Science Christopher Clary said Gabbard “will go down as perhaps the most ineffective and incompetent DNI in the short history of that position.”
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump managed to effectively raise taxes on the majority of Americans through his tax policies, while handing the richest five percent a tax cut. Now, many Americans want to see the rich pay their fair share — and that could mean increasing their taxes.
The former chief economist of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Professor Zachary Liscow, argues there’s a “slow, boring” yet “easy” way to do so.
“The United States is seeing an increasing concentration of wealth at the very top and a worsening national debt,” Liscow writes in an op-ed at The New York Times. “For many Americans, taxing the rich more is an obvious move.”
He details some of the “novel proposals to curb the many intricate ways the rich make and hide their money,” including a wealth tax, a tax on unrealized gains, and a tax on “loans that billionaires take against their stock.”
But, Liscow warns, while novel, these methods would not raise the substantial amount of money the U.S. needs.
“The boring truth is that Congress can accomplish a lot simply by raising the rates of the taxes already on the books,” Liscow explains.
He examines U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) proposal to tax “fortunes above $50 million,” and says there are “serious constitutional and policy arguments for this idea, but the Supreme Court’s current members would probably strike it down.”
There is a billionaire’s tax proposal by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) that would tax unrealized capital gains, “the appreciation in the paper value of assets such as stocks.” That would likely find a Supreme Court challenge.
There are other tax vehicles, like fixing the “buy, borrow, die” loophole, which would tax loans taken against stock portfolios, but that would likely not raise sufficient funds: “It’s just not where the money is.”
He finds that “the most powerful lever is also the simplest one,” and concludes that “Congress has a simpler, tried-and-true tax policy to choose from: raising the rates.”
Liscow is advocating to restore the “top marginal ordinary income tax rate to its pre-2017 level of 39.6 percent” — where it was before Trump’s first term in office.
“In addition, raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent toward the 35 percent it had been set at historically would add hundreds of billions in revenue for the government,” he says.
“Raising the rates,” Liscow concludes, “the simple, boring answer — is where the real money lies.”
Image: Christopher Penler / Shutterstock.com
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