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MAY 1976

REVIEW:POETRY FROM THE GAY EXPERIENCE

(The Male Muse: A Gay Anthology, ed. Ian Young. Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1973.

Angels of the Lyre: A Gay Poetry Anthology, ed. Winston Leyland. San Francisco: Panjandrum Press and Gay Sunshine Press, 1975.)

by Mitchell Menegu

The two anthologies of gay verse considered in this review testify to the vitality of poetry as a vehicle of expressing the diversity of the gay experience. That Winston Leyland, editor of Gay Sunshine should find it useful to edit the second anthology only two years after lan Young had offered his collection particularly speaks for the extent of activity among gay poets.

Both anthologies offer useul introductions tracing the history of gay poetry and suggesting further reading. Young, noting that his anthology (like Leyland's) is restricted to male relationships, says that "A similar female anthology could and should be better edited by a woman." Angels of the Lyre, which was partially funded by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to Panjandrum Press, has editor Leyland confronting a key question about such collections as these.

In commenting on the two or three poets invited who declined to have their work included on the grounds that there is "no. such thing as Gay Poetry" and that "they didn't want to be categorized," Leyland argued, "My intention was not to divide poets into Gay and straight. Yet, there is such a thing as Gay Sensibility ... more refined in

What is more beautiful than night

and someone in your arms that's what we love about art it seems to prefer us and stays

Still, there are poems that have special appeal or interest to gays. Leyland might have been more accurate in

identifying a spectrum of feelings within the broader term "Gay Sensibility." Within the works of the forty poets in The Male Muse and the fifty-seven in Angels of the Lyre (Seventeen appear in both), almost conceivable variety of gay experience is treated. What will be most valuable to any given. reader will depend on what experiences he brings to the volumes so that the poems touch him with that "shock of recognition" that affirms the truth of the poet's vision and crystallizes the reader's experience. For instance, Joe Brainard, though not quiet my contemporary, reawakened old feelings for me with selections from his "I Remember". Ed Cox's "Waiting," I'm sure, captures the bar experiences for others as fully as it does for me. Perry Brass portrays the selfconsciousness of the unliberated gay in all of his poems in the books.

Some of the poems will seem to be perverse to some readers or at least to deal with areas of experience yet unexplored. Kirby Congdon's "Jagannath" is a fascinating prose poems combining in a fantasia elements of auto-eroticism, masochism and necrophilia. James Mitchell writes with sexual explicitness that makes difficult deciding whether "The Orgy" is a brilliant twenty-one line satire of every gay sex novel or an overblown job about blow

others. certain poets than in jobs. Both volumes include

Leyland is right in both respects. Good poetry, especially love poetry, transcends distinctions of sex.. Speculation about Shakespeare's "Mr. W.H." is fascinating but only secondary to the value of what the sonnets tell us about love. This is true too of the oriental elegance of the poems Jim Chapson such as "In Oregon" (in MM) in which he speaks of walks through gardens "wearing a decorous mask over feelings too pure/ to admit the compromise of broad display." We find this universal quality too in the well-known late Frank O'Hara's "To You (in AL):

Mitchell's "I Want To Sleep With Toshiro Mifune," in which the speaker as "an unemployed samurai" addresses the Japanese film star and wished to "tremble at the thrust of his muscled cock bursting/ up my

ass."

Both volumes contain selections of arguable poetic merit, but they offer enough solid poetry to make them valuable as documents of the growth of gay awareness. They will prove their value further if, as I suspect they will, they provide their readers impetus for expressing in poetry their own feelings about gay experiences.

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