Editor’s note:
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 Grass
Calamus 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)