Early last Friday evening, friends and fans of Allen Ginsberg gathered at the Rubin Museum of Art to celebrate the digital re-release of Ginsberg's four-disc 1994 album Holy Soul Jelly Soul, co-sponsored by the Rubin, The Allen Ginsberg Estate, and Origin Magazine. Following a cocktail hour downstairs at the K2 Lounge, the crowd re-assembled on the sixth floor at the top of the museum's breathtaking spiral staircase to hear poets deliver readings of Ginsberg's extraordinary work, as well as their own poems. Read More
The examined life, in poetry, is sometimes a rant. Not so Dean Kostos’s new collection of poems, Rivering (Spuyten Duyvil...
Today, two fierce poems–about two fierce women–by Stephen Zerance....
Today, a new poem by Chris Emslie....
Poet, critic, and political activist, Clifton Snider has been writing and publishing since the early 70s. Yet, despite good critical reception and the admiration of discerning readers, his work has flown under the radar. World Parade Books’ release of Moonman: New and Selected Poems may at long last bring Snider the wider visibility he deserves. Read More
Today, two poems from Nick Comilla.
Born on a military base turned ghost town in Rome, NY, Comilla grew up in rural Pennsylvania, and has spent the last five years in Montreal, where he graduated from the Creative Writing program at Concordia University. He is now working on his MFA in poetry and fiction at The New School in NYC. Poems are forthcoming in Poetry is Dead and Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry. Read More
"You have to decide how honest you want to be in your writing: if you want to leave it in your diary or put it in a book. Yes, the experiences are intense but you have to allow yourself to go there, to cross that line."
At the heart of Joe Brainard’s I Remember is a counter-intuitive nostalgia for unbelonging. In his long form poem-cum-memoir, Brainard shares glimpses of his childhood and early adulthood that evoke lusty contradictions—the pleasure, pain, and curiosity of growing up different in America. It is a tribute to the self that survived, and the selves lost along the way.
In the same way Shane Allison’s own version of I Remember, published in 2012 by Future Tense Books, also evokes a sense of wonder, frustration, joy and sadness. Read More
I recently attended a taping of Oprah Winfrey’s “Lifeclass” with Deepak Chopra and Perez Hilton—who, swears he’s enlightened now—at Radio...
Christopher Hennessy, who edited the wonderful Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets, is no stranger to modern—or postmodern—poetry....
The Rhyming Dictionary, Leather Porn & Barbara Streisand’s “Evergreen”: My Week with Agha Shahid Ali
"...if we 've never heard Shahid’s name mentioned much in circles of gay literati, it's largely due to the fact that each passing month sees the release of more and more volumes of poetry, and possibly just as many anthologies, more and more of them written and compiled by out gay men. From this perspective, Shahid can get lost in the shuffle. But if you knew Shahid, or if you admire any of the work he left behind, you’ll know he can’t, he won’t be lost..." Read More
