Remembering Sedona poet Jack Egan (March 1, 1934 - Oct. 11, 2020)

Jack Egan read poetry at the Sedona Poetry Slam a few times; I was able to capture him on video at the Sedona slam on Dec. 3, 2011. His "Up" poem became legendary.

He wrote me a few letters to the editor and press releases, all about his work with charities and the St. Vincent de Paul Society. When he popped in to drop these off, I always encouraged him to come and slam.

Twice, when interstate lotteries reached record high levels, he came to the Sedona newsroom and told me he bought a ticket, gave me a copy and said he agreed to split it with me should we win the jackpot.

He will be missed.

Jack Egan performs in the first round of the Sedona Poetry Slam on Dec. 3, 2011

Jack Egan performs in the second round of the Sedona Poetry Slam on Dec. 3, 2011

Jack Egan performs "Up" in the third round of the Sedona Poetry Slam, 12-3-2011. Great poem, and with audience participation, too.

Jack Egan

March 1, 1934 - October 11, 2020

John Egan, 86, of Sedona, Arizona, passed away Sunday, October 11. "Jack" to his many friends was born in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago on March 1, 1934.

As a teenager, he worked as a busboy to earn money to pay his tuition to Loyola Academy High School. A bright student and talented runner, he was awarded a scholarship to Loyola University of Chicago where he earned a degree in English while running sprints and relays on the track team. Such was his success as a runner that he was inducted into the Loyola University of Chicago Hall of Fame in 1980.

More importantly, at Loyola he met the love of his life, Mary Kay.

After graduating college, Jack served in the U.S. Navy for four years as a bombardier/navigator spending time on the USS Ranger (CV-61) aircraft carrier and was married. After his service, Jack returned to teach English at Loyola Academy. After a year of teaching, he took a sales job to support his growing family.

Jack was transferred from Chicago to Southern California while working for Avery Label Corporation. He had a very successful career in sales working for several companies. He lived in Whittier, Calif., and then Newport Beach. Along the way, he and Mary Kay had four children.

In 2010, Jack moved to Sedona to enjoy the beautiful Red Rocks and to be close to family. After a long illness, Jack passed away peacefully at home surrounded by his loved ones.

He is survived by his wife of 61 years. He was predeceased by his son Kevin, survived by his daughter Jennifer, his sons Dan and Martin and his three grandchildren.

A celebration of life will be planned for a later date. Consider making a donation to St. Vincent de Paul conference in his honor.

Rage Almighty, Jan. 1, 1983 - Oct. 13, 2019

Rage Almighty, aka Adam Tench

Jan. 1, 1983 - Oct. 13, 2019

Rage Almighty, aka Rage The Poet, was born Adam Tench on the first day of 1983 in Boston, Mass. Rage died Oct. 13, 2019, of a reported cardiac arrest at age 35.

Rage Almighty was a long-time figure in the Dallas and National Poetry Slam scene. He always had a kind word for those of us on the Flagstaff and Sedona National Poetry Slam teams. We mourn his loss.

By age 11, Rage Almighty had begun his acting career having had roles in several school plays. At age 13, in search of better opportunity and a better place for Rage and his sister to grow up, Rage’s family moved to Dallas, Texas, specifically the north side, or the “Nawfside” as the locals call it. It was here that Rage honed his writing skills and, with the influence of his older sister, focused his attention on poetry.


He quickly became know around school for his poetry, and it was around this time he picked up the name “Baby Rage.” The name was given to him by a high school anger management counselor, due to his disdain for and angst toward his surroundings.



“Almighty” was later added to his moniker just as “Baby” was dropped, spawned by his ever-growing confidence and talent as a poet. Rage Almighty eventually came across a fake ID, which allowed him to take his poetry from high school slam poetry events to various clubs and open mic nights across town. In the meantime, he continued to perform in numerous school plays and talent shows.


By the time he was actually old enough to get in many venues with his own ID, Rage Almighty had established his name on the local underground poetry scene. His clever rhyme scheme and versatility were what got him the attention.

From the harsh reality of some of his subject matter to the smooth swagger of his more sensual material, Rage Almighty had something for everyone. From poetry, he expanded into a rapper as well. “Don’t let the poetry fool you,” he’ll say, as his reputation became that of a fierce MC.

With influences including Nas, Outkast, Method Man and The Roots, and an arsenal diverse enough to contain club anthems, conscience lyrics and everything in between, Rage Almighty put himself in a position to be the next star to rise out of Dallas .

His music, the hybrid of rap, soul and spoken word which he has branded as “Cosmic Soul,” is built on his experiences from both Boston and Texas and with his own intelligent perspective, tells stories and interpretations of love, oppression, poverty and everyday life.


Rage Almighty was also a youth advocate and leads workshops focusing on emotional literacy and destigmatizing mental illness in communities of color: In 2016, the organization Louder Than a Bomb named him Teaching Artist of the Year.

Rage Almighty has received numerous honors and awards for his work on the slam circuit, including the 2017 Bayou City Poetry Slam Champion, the 2014 National Poetry Award for Best Spoken Word Album, and the 2014 North Texas Spoken Word Award for Poet of the Year. He was runner-up at the 2016 Individual World Poetry Slam Championships and the 2013 Dallas Grand Slam Champion, and he represented the United States at the World Cup Poetry Slam in Paris.

An opening act for musical artists such as T.I., Dead Prez, Chrisette Michele, and Brand Nubian as well as poets Saul Williams and Nikki Giovanni, he also appeared on season 4 of Lexus' "Verses and Flow."
 

In memory of legendary Jack McCarthy [May 23, 1939 - Jan. 17, 2013]

Seattle Poetry Slam - Ed Mabrey's Tribute to Jack McCarthy 

Jack McCarthy

Poet

May 23, 1939 - January 17, 2013

Jack McCarthy featured at the FlagSlam Semi-Final Slam on April 12, 2005. I remember he was quiet and gracious and delivered poetry in an unassuming, yet profound way.

He died Jan. 17, 2013, in Seattle, at the age of 73.

"He weaves wicker stories that creep slowly down the back stairs of your memory. He talks to you in your own voice." - Jim Dunn

Jack McCarthy's obituary in the Boston Globe

published Jan 27, 2013.

By Bryan Marquard

At some 200 lines, Jack ­McCarthy’s first published ­poem appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe in October 1976. Filling a page, “South Boston Sunday” describes a family stroll through the neighborhood of his youth, where even though the school busing crisis is an uneasy presence:

We will agree

This was the happiest day.

He thought the poem would launch his writing career, but that didn’t happen until another October, in 1993, when Mr. McCarthy took his youngest daughter to a poetry slam at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge. He got up to read and the positive response brought an epiphany: The poet’s voice and the audience’s ears were inseparable.

“For me, the live audience is really the only audience I ever think about,” he said by phone when he knew his death was near. “When I put something down on paper and publish it, my highest hope is that someone somewhere will pick it up and read it to a third party. My sense of audience does not stop with the person who reads the poem. I hope the poem goes on to another life.”

Legendary in Boston’s slam poetry scene, he became nationally known when he was among those filmed for the 1998 documentary “SlamNation.” A decade ago, Mr. McCarthy moved to Seattle, where he died at home Jan. 17 of complications from colon and lung cancer. He was 73.

A consummate storyteller whose métier was verse, he wrote and performed poems that inspired laughter with one line, tears the next.

In “Neponset Circle,” one of his favorites, a driver “can get us anywhere in the world –/as long as he starts from Neponset Circle.” Mr. McCarthy concluded with a couplet celebrating his wife: “Carol, my love,/you’re my Neponset Circle.”

“Drunks” draws chilling images from his alcoholism, his 40 years of sobriety, and the lives of others that ended badly: “we tried and we died and nobody cried.”

With just as sure a hand, he used the austere constraints of haiku to poke fun at aging:

Geezers dress funny;
we can’t dress like all our friends:
all our friends are dead

He collected his poems in books, and more await posthumous publication. Those who never saw Mr. McCarthy’s dramatic performances can still hear him on CDs or watch him on YouTube.

In the video for “Substances,” a recounting and recanting of past abuses, gestures augment every line. And videos for poems such as “I Wouldn’t Want to be Jesus,” linked on Mr. McCarthy’s website, www.standupoet.net, show how swiftly he engaged a crowd, even last May when he needed oxygen tubes to breathe.

“The only ambition he seems to have is to tell the truth as best he can in poems,” the poet Thomas Lux once wrote of Mr. McCarthy. “His work is direct, plainspoken, colloquial, authentic, lucid.”

Another poet, Stephen Dobyns, called him “one of the wonders of contemporary poetry. He writes — and often performs — dazzling narratives full of wit and humor, sadness and hard thinking. He should be cloned.”

The Internet extended Mr. McCarthy’s reach beyond his Boston fame long before he launched his own site. In 2000, several years after writing “Drunks,” he used a search engine for the first time “and the poem was there ahead of me,” he recalled in December. “I found it all over the world on websites.”

The oldest of four children, John Xavier McCarthy was born in South Boston. His family moved to Hingham and a scholarship sent Mr. McCarthy to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

In autumn of his senior year, his mother died in a car accident. The following spring, his father died of a heart attack. The day of his father’s funeral, Mr. McCarthy received a scholarship to Dartmouth College.

While studying there, Mr. McCarthy watched a short film of Dylan Thomas reading a poem.

“I was so moved that I sat there by myself in the theater and tears were rolling down my cheeks, just at the way he used the English language,” he recalled. “And I said: ‘I want to do that.’ ”

Alcohol intervened, however, and he dropped out of school and into the depths of existence. He started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in 1962 and returned to graduate from Dartmouth five years later.

He taught for a few years before working in information technology at banks and insurance companies. Mr. McCarthy married Joan Reynolds of Westwood in 1968 and they had three daughters. After their marriage ended in 1986, he stayed close to his children.

“He was always so full of good advice and reassurance,” said one of his daughters, Kathleen Chardavoyne of Charlestown. “He really struck the right balance between explaining to you why you did or didn’t want to do certain things, and letting you know he’d be there for you if you did screw up. I still remember a lot of the advice he gave me. I just worshipped him.”

Having decided he would not remarry, Mr. McCarthy nevertheless placed a personals ad on a whim in 1989, mentioning that he liked to bodysurf.

Carol Sinder, a former Californian, was intrigued by that detail and answered. They married in 1991 in St. Ann Church in Dorchester, where Mr. McCarthy sang in the folk group.

“Not only did I fall in love with Jack, but also with his poetry,” she wrote in an e-mail. “When I met him he only wrote poetry occasionally. I arranged for him to go to a poetry class with a famous poet, Galway Kinnell.”

Along with becoming a mainstay of the slam poetry scene, Mr. McCarthy took his writing to audiences near and far. His poem “Drunks” earned him an invitation to speak in Spain at an Alcoholics Anonymous convention, and he was a regular guest of students in the Poetry Soup Group at Newburyport High School.

“I think he gave them license to look at what’s behind the feelings they would often laugh off,” said Debbie Szabo, an English and creative writing teacher. “You know, teenagers are sarcastic, cynical, and snide, and Jack was the opposite of those things. He made them want to go out and write.”

The flame of fame bathes poets in a fainter light than other celebrities, but Mr. McCarthy was well-known enough around Boston that once while he was receiving Communion, the priest paused before handing him a wafer.

“When he normally would say, ‘Body of Christ,’ he said, ‘I love your poetry,’ and I said, ‘Thank you,’ ” Mr. McCarthy recalled. “I think very few poets get to have that experience.”

In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. McCarthy leaves two other daughters, Megan McDermott of Madison, Wis., and Ann of South Boston; a stepson, Seth Roback of Seattle; two sisters, Hannah of Amherst, N.H., and Judith Winship of Boxford; and six grandchildren, the youngest born two weeks before he died.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Feb. 9 in Follen Church, a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Lexington.

Untroubled by the approach of death, and comparatively pain-free, Mr. McCarthy opened his poem “Victory” by writing:

What luxury
to know I’m dying
so comfortably

And with a nod to Dylan Thomas, who inspired his poetic aspirations a half-century ago, he added:

So forgive me, Dylan.
I will go gentle into that good night —
or afternoon, as the case may be.
There’s no rage in me, not any more
The years have been too kind;
allow the light the right to die.

“We’ve had 23 years, and this time was the most amazing journey,” Mr. McCarthy’s wife said a few weeks before he died. “Jack said, ‘If I believed in reincarnation I wouldn’t want to come back, because I’ve had such a good life.’ Now how many people say that?”

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bmarquard@globe.com.

Poet Jack McCarthy, May 23, 1939 - Jan. 17, 2013

Jack McCarthy

Poet

May 23, 1939 - January 17, 2013

Jack McCarthy featured at the FlagSlam Semi-Final Slam on April 12, 2005. I remember he was quiet and gracious and delivered poetry in an unassuming, yet profound way.

He died Jan. 17, 2013, at the age of 73.

"He weaves wicker stories that creep slowly down the back stairs of your memory. He talks to you in your own voice." - Jim Dunn

This is still my favorite of McCarthy's poems, which can probably be said by slam poets around the country.

Careful What You Ask For

From "Actual Grace Notes," poems from 1996 to 2000

I was just old enough
to be out on the sidewalk by myself,
and every day I would come home crying,
beaten up by the same little girl.

I was Jackie, the firstborn,
the apple of every eye,
gratuitous meanness bewildered me,
and as soon as she'd hit me,
I'd bawl like a baby.

I knew that boys were not supposed to cry,
but they weren't supposed to hit girls either,
and I was shocked when my father said,
"Hit her back."

I thought it sounded like a great idea,
but the only thing I remember
about that girl today
is the look that came over her face
after I did hit her back.

She didn't cry; instead
her eyes got narrow and I thought,
"Jackie, you just made a terrible mistake,"
and she really beat the crap out of me.
It was years before I trusted my father's advice again.

I eventually learned to fight--
enough to protect myself--
from girls--
but the real issue was the crying,
and that hasn't gone away.

Oh, I don't cry any more, I don't sob, I don't make
noise, I just have hairtrigger tearducts, and always
at all the wrong things: Tom Bodett saying, "We'll leave
the light on for ya;" I cry at the last scene of
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

In movies I despise the easy manipulation
that never even bothers to engage my feelings,
it just comes straight for my eyes,
but there's not a damn thing I can do about it,
and I hate myself for it.

The surreptitious noseblow a discreet
four minutes after the operative scene;
my daughters are on to me, my wife;
they all know exactly when to give me that quick,
sidelong glance. What must they think of me?

In real life I don't cry any more
when things hurt. Never a tear at seventeen
when my mother died, my father.
I never cried for my first marriage.

But today I often cry when things turn out well:
an unexpected act of simple human decency;
new evidence, against all odds,
of how much someone loves me.

I think all this is why I never wanted a son.
I always supposed my son would be like me,
and that when he'd cry it would bring back
every indelible humiliation of my own life,

and in some word or gesture
I'd betray what I was feeling,
and he'd mistake, and think I was ashamed of him.
He'd carry that the rest of his life.

Daughters are easy: you pick them up,
you hug them, you say, "There there.
Everything is going to be all right."
And for that moment you really believe
that you can make enough of it right

enough. The unskilled labor of love.
And if you cry a little with them for all
the inevitable gratuitous meannesses of life,
that crying is not to be ashamed of.

But for years my great fear was the moment
I might have to deal with a crying son.
But I don't have one.
We came close once, between Megan and Kathleen;
the doctors warned us there was something wrong,

and when Joan went into labor they said
the baby would be born dead.
But he wasn't: very briefly,
before he died, I heard him cry.

Copyright © Jack McCarthy

Christopher Lane (Aug. 5, 1972-Aug. 19, 2012)

Christopher Lane

Aug. 5, 1972 — Aug. 19, 2012

Christopher Lane, 40, of Sedona, died unexpectedly at home Sunday, Aug. 19.

Lane is survived by his wife Akasha, sons Oren, 8, and Zephryn, 3.

Founder of NORAZ, Lane joyfully worked with local high schoolers and Alzheimer’s patients spreading the healing power of poetry.

A memorial is Saturday, Aug. 25, at 5 p.m. at Indian Gardens Park. Carpooling is mandatory.

Sending David Blair to Burning Man

While I normally find burning poetry a sacrilege, I am sending a copy of “Detroit (while I was away)” by David Blair with Azami for her to burn at the Temple of Juno when she leaves for Burning Man in about an hour.

Fly high above Black Rock City, Blair. May the ashes reach Detroit, your beloved city.

Fa una canzone senza note nere
se mai bramasti la mia grazia havere.
Falla d'un tuonó ch'invita al dormire,
dolcemente, dolcemente facendo la finire


Blair performs "Detroit"
Producer: Connie Mangilin, Philip Lauri
Camera: Sean Redenz
Editor: Steven Oliver

David Blair
Photo by David Lewinski Photography

“Detroit (while I was away)”
By David Blair

Even though I know the air hangs
like a dead dog’s ass over River Rouge,
I still miss you. Your fenced in gardens
filled with sustenance and Saturday

evening draped over a back alley porch.
The September stench that creeps
slow as a Woodward bus on Sunday.
Black tires crawling in summer heat.

Your acoustic guitars and amplified hair.
Your rows of long thin buildings,
arranged on a young man’s head.
Last time I saw you, a woman stood

on a corner conducting traffic.
Her own sunken opera.
A crack pipe baton. Car horns joined
in like a bad man cruising a dream.
She stood on the stage of Cass and Mack

dying to reach Joy Rd. The moon left
its spotlight on a backdrop of burnt buildings.
Yellow police tape posed like velvet rope.
Do Not Cross.

A picket line of teens careened down Cass
past broken glass that spread
like urban sprawl, a Diego Rivera mural
painted across the DIA wall.

Another time I saw you,
steam barreled out of your manhole covers
like you were about to explode. A soul imbibed
forty ounces of courage so it could head back to the axle plant

on Lynch Road, Jefferson or some other
conveyor belt street that gets everyone moving
in step like a Temptation line dance.
22 ounces of sweat and iron hidden in a bathroom stall.

Away from the plant tours and fat cats,
shop stewards and snitches. I remember you
old friend. I’m in another city now.
But Martin Luther King St. always looks the same.

It just doesn’t intersect with Rosa Parks,
12th Street where ‘67 fires started,
named for a woman who chose you beyond
a boycott in Montgomery, then rode

the front of that big old dog
straight home to you Detroit, I love you...

from your basketball sun, that hangs in the sky
then falls, only to bounce back up tomorrow. Down
to your alligator shoes. I’ll kiss you on the river.
Meet you in the middle of a suitcase and wonder

do you think of me this way...?
Do you even know I’ve gone? Say my name, Detroit.
I pray you claim me. A small town boy.
Born in New Jersey, but made in Detroit.
My heart beats like tool and die for you.
like horse power and pistons for you,
while mechanized, lumpenized robot
zombies haunt Mack Avenue.

Here they come, a gang of buildings in tank tops,
Mack Trucks in do rags, marching
down to Hastings Street.
Though I never knew you back when
you wore your onyx necklace
like a tire around your neck, I witness

the aftermath. Dipping your blue black hands
in electric currents of music and art. The circumference
of Outer Drive. Moross and Joy.
Paris of the Midwest they called you.

And every time ‘67 fires or Halloween came around,
you lived up to it. The year I was born, you blew up.
I heard it. I came when I could. I’ve never left.
I stay, even when I go. Chosen heart.
Adopted town. From Belle Isle to Eight Mile.

Chocolate city where the mothership landed.
Late night downtown and the peacocks are out
on Fourth Street, calling to billboards
that hover over highways, telling stories to streetlamps.
The moon is a plate full of soul food, Mexican food.
Pierogies and paczkis. Kafta and curry
We mix and separate, mix and separate.

Each Prentis stoop is a garage rock chord
strummed and banged, like a car mechanics sledge.
A man screams beneath the Ambassador bridge.
Another drums on plastic tubs for tourists.
“Will work for food” is a piece of poetry
scribbled on an art house wall.

Festival wizards, Saunderson, Atkins and May.
The Big Three. De trois, of three.
Black panthers, white panthers and Lions, oh my.
Tight boys in rock pants, the hustlers in Palmer Park.
Lovers, thugs and blues men with axes
sharp enough to cut down another forced overtime shift.
The sun dresses flowing like the Detroit River. Supremely
turning, bending with the weight of the city. Detroit,

your beautiful hair woven women, putting on gloves
and grabbing tools next to me on the assembly line,
teaching me what perseverance and being a brother is
all about. Overtime fists clocking. These are the hands
that braid hair and lock dread, cook meat that falls
right off the bone into fat, black pots of collards working harder
and harder...
and harder still...

...so step on, Detroit,
dribble and shoot,
pass and play,
struggle and fight,
darken and light,
drive and impel,
riot and quell, pick the steel burrs
off the cross members at the front of the Jeep Cherokee.
Look what we have made you. Steam and steel.
Still, that’s how hard I love you.

David Blair
Sept. 19, 1967 -- July 23, 2011

David Alan Blair “Blair”, age 43, born Sept. 19, 1967, passed away Saturday, July 23, 2011. David grew up in Newton, N.J., but came to call Detroit his adopted home. He is the son of Hildegard Blair and Herbert Blair.

Blair was an award-winning, multi-faceted artist: poet, singer-songwriter, writer, performer, musician, community activist and teacher. In the words of Metro Times journalist Melissa Giannini, “Blair focused his work on the hope that rises from the ashes of despair.”

A 2010 Callaloo Fellow and a National Poetry Slam Champion, his first book of poetry, Moonwalking, was recently released by Penmanship Books. Blair, as a solo artist, and with The Urban Folk Collective, self-released more than seven records in the last ten years. His most recent album, The Line, with his band The Boyfriends, was released in 2010 on Repeatable Silence Records.

Throughout his life, Blair performed at venues, large and small, across the nation and around the world. He was nominated for seven Detroit Music Awards, including a 2007 nod for Outstanding Acoustic Artist. He was named Real Detroit Weekly Readers Poll’s Best Solo Artist and The Metro Times Best Urban Folk Poet. In 2007, he won the Seattle-based BENT Writing Institute Mentor Award.

As well as being the recipient of numerous awards, he taught classes and lectured on poetry and music in Detroit Public Schools, The Ruth Ellis Center, Hannan House Senior Center, the YMCA of Detroit, and at various universities, colleges and high schools across the country.

Blair has friends and fans on almost every continent. He will be greatly missed by the loved ones he left all too early. He is preceded in death by his father, Herbert Blair. He is survived by his mother, Hildegard (Smith), siblings Herbert Blair (who resides in Pennsylvania), Tony Blair (New Jersey), Walter Blair (Florida), Joy Blair Swinson (New Hampshire) and many nieces, nephews, cousins, aunts and uncles.

And every raindrop falling from the sky

is like a tribute to the blue skies following behind,

And every raindrop falling to the sea

is like a testament to a new life that will come to be.

~Blair

poets mourn the loss of beautiful David Alan Blair

Blair performs "Behind the Garage" at TEDxDetroit

David Blair
Sept. 19, 1967 -- July 23, 2011

David Alan Blair “Blair”, age 43, born Sept. 19, 1967, passed away Saturday, July 23. David grew up in Newton, N.J., but came to call Detroit his adopted home. He is the son of Hildegard Blair and Herbert Blair.

Blair was an award-winning, multi-faceted artist: poet, singer-songwriter, writer, performer, musician, community activist and teacher. In the words of Metro Times journalist Melissa Giannini, “Blair focused his work on the hope that rises from the ashes of despair.”

A 2010 Callaloo Fellow and a National Poetry Slam Champion, his first book of poetry, Moonwalking, was recently released by Penmanship Books. Blair, as a solo artist, and with The Urban Folk Collective, self-released more than seven records in the last ten years. His most recent album, The Line, with his band The Boyfriends, was released in 2010 on Repeatable Silence Records.

Throughout his life, Blair performed at venues, large and small, across the nation and around the world. He was nominated for seven Detroit Music Awards, including a 2007 nod for Outstanding Acoustic Artist. He was named Real Detroit Weekly Readers Poll’s Best Solo Artist and The Metro Times Best Urban Folk Poet. In 2007, he won the Seattle-based BENT Writing Institute Mentor Award.

Blair performing "Little Richard Penniman Tells It Like It T-I-S" on the steps of the Motown Museum - Detroit Shot By Matt Wisotsky Edited By Jeff Cenkner

As well as being the recipient of numerous awards, he taught classes and lectured on poetry and music in Detroit Public Schools, The Ruth Ellis Center, Hannan House Senior Center, the YMCA of Detroit, and at various universities, colleges and high schools across the country.

Blair has friends and fans on almost every continent. He will be greatly missed by the loved ones he left all too early. He is preceded in death by his father, Herbert Blair. He is survived by his mother, Hildegard (Smith), siblings Herbert Blair (who resides in Pennsylvania), Tony Blair (New Jersey), Walter Blair (Florida), Joy Blair Swinson (New Hampshire) and many nieces, nephews, cousins, aunts and uncles.

And every raindrop falling from the sky

is like a tribute to the blue skies following behind,

And every raindrop falling to the sea

is like a testament to a new life that will come to be.

~Blair

(from the song “Every Raindrop”)

The David Blair Memorial Fund has been set up to help defray the costs of his memorial service. Donate here. Any funds raised beyond these immediate expenses will be used to create a fund in his honor for Detroit artists in need of healthcare. More information on David Blair’s memorial can be found at www.dblair.org.

Blair performs "My name is Karl" at Seattle Poetry Slam

I met Blair in Detroit when I, Josh Fleming, david f. escobedo, and Keith Bruecker were on the Save the Male Tour in 2001. He was awesome host, a sweetheart, and an all-around good man. To me, Detroit has always felt like a warm city due to Blair and his crew.

I returned his hospitality a few years later when Blair and his band, Blair and the Boyfriends, came through Flagstaff and Sedona in 2009, performing at FlagSlam at The Mad Italian. I can still remember him across the table with me and his band eating pizza at The Hideaway in Sedona. He had a great laugh and such positivity in the air around him.


Blair performs "Detroit"

Do him one last honor and watch him perform one his poems.

He will be missed.

Fa Una Canzone
Fa una canzone senza note nere
se mai bramasti la mia grazia havere.
Falla d'un tuonó ch'invita al dormire,
dolcemente, dolcemente facendo la finire.

(Sing me a Song

Write a song with no black notes

if you ever wanted my favor.

Write it so that it will bring me to sleep,

make it end sweetly, sweetly.)

Miami poet Will “Da Real One” Bell shot and killed

Close friends said Will ‘Da Real One’ Bell was struggling to keep his poetry cafe open.

BY NADEGE GREEN AND JULIE K. BROWN

jbrown@MiamiHerald.com

The family of a talented North Miami poet who was gunned down in an apparent hit early Sunday is bewildered over why anyone would want to kill someone who spent the better part of his life using his art to inspire others.

Will “Da Real One” Bell’s path took him from a life of crime to national fame as a poet who performed on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, on celebrity albums and at countless other venues, both locally and nationally.

A gunman leapt out of a car and shot Bell, 47, multiple times outside his business, The Literary Cafe and Poetry Lounge, 933 NE 125th St., about 12:40 a.m. Sunday, May 29.

Police detectives said Tuesday that they do not believe Bell was involved in anything that caused his death, but that he had recently fallen into debt. The shooting, police sources said, appeared to be an assassination. One witness told police that after the shooting, the gunman coolly walked away.

Bell’s brother, Curtis Fullwood, said Bell survived too much hardship to die such a cruel death.

“He came too far in life to go like that, shot down in a parking lot. It’s not right,” Fullwood said.

Bell grew up in the Edison Court Projects at Northwest Third Avenue and 62nd Street in Miami. In 1989, Bell was arrested for cocaine trafficking and spent 14 months in prison. Those who knew him said he stopped dealing in the street life when he discovered his talent for poetry while incarcerated.

“It was rough growing up in the Edison projects. It was dope-infested. Anything bad that could happen was there. It wasn’t the best environment one could be brought up in, but he didn’t let that keep him down for long. He was brilliant,” Fullwood said.

On Tuesday, friends, fans and family began planning celebrations of his life and fundraisers to help his family pay for his funeral. Those closest to him spoke about his selflessness, how he devoted endless hours to his poetry and to helping mentor others in spite of his own struggles with his business.

Yongsta, 25, a poet who goes by a singular name, said he met the imposing six-foot-five artist eight years ago when Bell visited North Miami Senior High. His words and his dynamic presence changed Yongsta’s life. He made “freeing minds” his mission, with pieces that illustrated the plight of urban poverty like Black Heroes and When I Grow Up and Run.

Yongsta said Bell treated him like a son.

“The poetry kept me looking for something else instead of doing something wrong,’’ he said.

But he admitted that Bell was under a lot of pressure financially.

“It was a constant burden keeping it open,’’ Yongsta said of Bell’s business. “You have your good nights and your bad nights. But he dealt with his problems and he didn’t worry people.’’

Bell, a charismatic poet who is credited for putting South Florida’s poetry scene in the spotlight, for the most part kept his financial problems secret.

Joseph Coach, the in-house DJ who goes by “DJ Make It Do What It Do,” said there were times Bell pawned personal items to make the monthly rent for his North Miami poetry lounge.

“Will wasn’t the kind of person who would ask for a handout. Times were hard. He was stressed out sometimes trying to keep the doors open to make sure poets had a place to go,” Coach said.

After heavy promotion on social media, some nights, the club saw about a dozen patrons.

Miami Herald staff writer David Ovalle contributed to this report.

Services for Bell

A viewing will be from noon to 9 p.m. Friday at Wright & Young Funeral Home, 15332 NW Seventh Ave., near North Miami.

The funeral will be at 1 p.m. Saturday at Cooper Temple, 3800 NW 199th St., Miami Gardens.

Several poetry benefits are planned in memory of Will Bell and to help assist the family with expenses:

Wednesday, 1 p.m., at The Bohemia Room, 3215 NE Second Ave., Miami.

Thursday, 8 p.m., at Verbal Calligraphy, 2029 Harrison St. Hollywood.

For more information on other upcoming events, see Facebook, keywords: Will “Da Real One” Bell, or contact Ingrid B. bsidentertainment@gmail.com. 305-519-1369.

Banned Books Week: "The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name" by James Kirkup

The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name By James Kirkup

(The gay poem that broke blasphemy laws and led to Whitehouse v. Lemon, a 1976 court case involving the blasphemy law in the United Kingdom.)


As they took him from the cross
I, the centurion, took him in my arms-
the tough lean body
of a man no longer young,
beardless, breathless,
but well hung.

He was still warm.
While they prepared the tomb
I kept guard over him.
His mother and the Magdalen
had gone to fetch clean linen
to shroud his nakedness.

I was alone with him.
For the last time
I kissed his mouth. My tongue
found his, bitter with death.
I licked his wound-
the blood was harsh

For the last time
I laid my lips around the tip
of that great cock, the instrument
of our salvation, our eternal joy.
The shaft, still throbbed, anointed
with death's final ejaculation.

I knew he'd had it off with other men-
with Herod's guards, with Pontius Pilate,
With John the Baptist, with Paul of Tarsus
with foxy Judas, a great kisser, with
the rest of the Twelve, together and apart.
He loved all men, body, soul and spirit - even me.

So now I took off my uniform, and, naked,
lay together with him in his desolation,
caressing every shadow of his cooling flesh,
hugging him and trying to warm him back to life.
Slowly the fire in his thighs went out,
while I grew hotter with unearthly love.

It was the only way I knew to speak our love's proud name,
to tell him of my long devotion, my desire, my dread-
something we had never talked about. My spear, wet with blood,
his dear, broken body all open wounds,
and in each wound his side, his back,
his mouth - I came and came and came

as if each coming was my last.
And then the miracle possessed us.
I felt him enter into me, and fiercely spend
his spirit's final seed within my hole, my soul,
pulse upon pulse, unto the ends of the earth-
he crucified me with him into kingdom come.

This is the passionate and blissful crucifixion
same-sex lovers suffer, patiently and gladly.
They inflict these loving injuries of joy and grace
one upon the other, till they die of lust and pain
within the horny paradise of one another's limbs,
with one voice cry to heaven in a last divine release.

Then lie long together, peacefully entwined, with hope
of resurrection, as we did, on that green hill far away.
But before we rose again, they came and took him from me.
They knew what we had done, but felt
no shame or anger. Rather they were glad for us,
and blessed us, as would he, who loved all men.

And after three long, lonely days, like years,
in which I roamed the gardens of my grief
seeking for him, my one friend who had gone from me,
he rose from sleep, at dawn, and showed himself to me before
all others. And took me to him with the love that now forever dares to speak
its name.


Gay paper guilty of blasphemy (Published 11 July 1977)

The Gay News and its editor Denis Lemon have been found guilty of blasphemous libel in the first case of its kind for more than 50 years.

The case was brought as a private prosecution by the secretary of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, Mary Whitehouse.

She objected to a poem and illustration published in the fortnightly paper last year about a homosexual centurion's love for Christ at the Crucifixion.

After the jury gave their 10-2 guilty verdict at the Old Bailey Whitehouse said: "I'm rejoicing because I saw the possibility of Our Lord being vilified. Now it's been shown that it won't be."

The poem, "The Love that Dares to Speak its Name", by Professor James Kirkup, 54, was distributed to the jury and reporters. However, the judge, Alan King-Hamilton, ordered that it could not be published.

Prosecuting Counsel John Smyth told the court: "it may be said that this is a love poem - it is not, it is a poem about buggery."

The defense argued that far from being "vile" and "perverted" the poem glorified Christ by illustrating that all of mankind could love him.

During the six-day trial columnist and TV personality Bernard Levin and novelist Margaret Drabble testified that the Gay News was a responsible paper that did not encourage illegal sexual practices.

Blasphemous libel is akin to the ecclesiastical charge of heresy - once punishable by death - and in the UK is an offense under common law and the 1697 Blasphemy Act.

The last time a case was brought in the UK was in 1921 when a Mr Gott was sentenced to nine months in prison for publishing a pamphlet that suggested that Christ looked like a clown as he entered Jerusalem.

Represented by playwright and novelist John Mortimer, QC, Mr Lemon, 32, sat silently in the dock as the verdict was given.

The gay poem that broke [1697] blasphemy laws
By Staff Writer, PinkNews.co.uk

The announcement that the government may support moves to strike down blasphemy laws comes 30 years after Denis Lemon was found guilty of committing libel against Christianity, the last prosecution for blasphemy.

He was the editor of the now defunct but iconic UK newspaper Gay News.

Mary Whitehouse, founder of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, (NVLA) announced her intention to sue in December 1976 after she read the poem entitled "The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name" by James Kirkup, published in Gay News.

Denis Lemon was sentenced to nine months suspended imprisonment and fined £500.

Publisher Gay News Limited was fined £1,000.

They were represented by creator of Rumpole of the Bailey and defence counsel at the Oz "conspiracy" trial in 1971, John Mortimer QC, at the Old Bailey.

An appeal against the conviction was rejected by the House of Lords.

It still 'illegal' to publish the poem in the UK.

However, it was published again in two socialist newspapers few days after the original trial the offending poem as a protest against censorship.

It expresses the fictional love of a Roman Centurion for Jesus and describes him having sex with the Christ's crucified body and is reproduced below.

Her indictment submitted in December 1976 against Gay News stated:

"A blasphemous libel concerning the Christian religion, namely an obscene poem and illustration vilifying Christ in his life and in his crucifixion."

Mrs Whitehouse was appointed a CBE in 1980.

The NVLA, now known as mediawatch, still regards their founder as the 'late, great Mary Whitehouse.'

They maintain their objective that the organisation has kept pressure on broadcasting authorities (they no longer monitor the press) to explain standards of 'taste and decency' and that this objective is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s.

John Beyer, director of mediawatch told PinkNews.co.uk last year:

"I think that the prosecution was justified because it was upheld and the appeal was rejected."

He says that with regard to 'that poem.' "The standards for decency still stand."

The fact that the ban rankles sections of society which support gay rights and are against censorship, he says is "irrelevant."

"It has nothing to do with 'rights,' the judicial process was followed and it was found to be a breach of the law. The fact remains that the law has not been repealed – the attitudes may have changed.

"Freedom comes with responsibility otherwise we end up with anarchy. The law of the land applies to everybody."

He refused to express a more personal view on the matter.

"That is irrelevant."

"It is a weakness in the judicial system that the same law cannot be upheld when the poem is re-published in other sections of the media."

The poem can easily be found on the Internet.

The poet, James Kirkup, 89, now lives in Andorra. He continues to work and frequently contributes obituaries to newspapers. [He died May 2009].

Lemon fell ill with an AIDS-related illness and sold Gay News in 1982.

It closed down in 1983. Lemon died in July 1994.

Banned Books Week: "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg

Howl
By Allen Ginsberg

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blur floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

San Francisco, 1955—1956


Banned Books Week: Obscene Odes
Posted by Jenna Krajeski

Out of all banned poetry, perhaps the most notorious, in America at least, is Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and for good reason. The work attracted controversy almost immediately, which culminated in an obscenity trial brought against its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and that history is virtually inseparable from the poem, and the poet. This is not to belittle Ginsberg’s artistry. As David Gates wrote in his contribution to “The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later,” from 2006:

Banned literary mandarins such as Joyce and Nabokov may simply have wanted to go about their hermetic work unmolested, but Ginsberg was a public poet and a provocateur. “Howl,” for all its affirmations, is a profoundly oppositional poem, and it counts on being opposed.…It’s a radically offensive poem, or used to be—offensive even to received notions of what poetry is, and it needs offended readers whose fear and outrage bring it most fully to life.

Since its publication, “Howl” has hardly left our literary consciousness. Now Gus Van Sant is set to produce a star-studded movie about the trial. But where does this leave the poem itself? Even in 2008, it’s hard to imagine that small black-and-white book being part of an established American curriculum, and not just the occasional revelatory tool of a rebellious teacher. Had it not been for one of the latter, who in high school nudged me toward an anthology of Beat literature, I would not have discovered “Howl” until college.

In 200, on the 50th anniversary of the obscenity trial, a radio broadcast of the poem was halted because of FCC laws. Never mind that the judge ruled, in 1957, that “Howl” was not obscene. It’s depressing that our national discourse moves in baby steps. But perhaps the banning of books is a useful barometer of prejudice. And it’s a sign of our particular time that, barred from the airwaves, the poem found another home, in the most egalitarian place of all: as a podcast on the Internet.

Banned Books Week: "Lethe" by Charles Baudelaire

"Lethe"
By Charles Baudelaire
Translated by Geoffrey Wagner, "Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire"

Come on my heart, cruel and insensible soul,
My darling tiger, beast with indolent airs;
I want to plunge for hours my trembling fingers
In your thick and heavy mane;

In your petticoats filled with your perfume
To bury my aching head,
And breathe, like a faded flower,
The sweet taste of my dead love.

I want to sleep, to sleep and not to live,
In a sleep as soft as death,
I shall cover with remorseless kisses
Your body beautifully polished as copper.

To swallow my appeased sobbing
I need only the abyss of your bed;
A powerful oblivion lives on your lips,
And all Lethe flows in your kisses.

I shall obey, as though predestined,
My destiny, that is now my delight;
Submissive martyr, innocent damned one,
My ardor inflames my torture,

And I shall suck, to drown my bitterness
The nepenthe and the good hemlock,
On the lovely tips of those jutting breasts
Which have never imprisoned love.

The original French:

Le Léthé
By Charles Baudelaire

Viens sur mon coeur, âme cruelle et sourde,
Tigre adoré, monstre aux airs indolents;
Je veux longtemps plonger mes doigts tremblants
Dans l'épaisseur de ta crinière lourde;

Dans tes jupons remplis de ton parfum
Ensevelir ma tête endolorie,
Et respirer, comme une fleur flétrie,
Le doux relent de mon amour défunt.

Je veux dormir! dormir plutôt que vivre!
Dans un sommeil aussi doux que la mort,
J'étalerai mes baisers sans remords
Sur ton beau corps poli comme le cuivre.

Pour engloutir mes sanglots apaisés
Rien ne me vaut l'abîme de ta couche;
L'oubli puissant habite sur ta bouche,
Et le Léthé coule dans tes baisers.

À mon destin, désormais mon délice,
J'obéirai comme un prédestiné;
Martyr docile, innocent condamné,
Dont la ferveur attise le supplice,

Je sucerai, pour noyer ma rancoeur,
Le népenthès et la bonne ciguë
Aux bouts charmants de cette gorge aiguë
Qui n'a jamais emprisonné de coeur.

This poem was banned from "Les Fleurs du Mal" because of its corrupting content. This poem which was most likely inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s mistress Jeanne Duvall, also known as his "Black Venus."


The son of Joseph-Francois Baudelaire and Caroline Archimbaut Dufays, Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821. Baudelaire's father, who was 30 years older than his mother, died when the poet was 6.

Baudelaire was very close with his mother (much of what is known of his later life comes from the letters he wrote her), but was deeply distressed when she married Major Jacques Aupick.

In 1833, the family moved to Lyons where Baudelaire attended a military boarding school. Shortly before graduation, he was kicked out for refusing to give up a note passed to him by a classmate. Baudelaire spent the next two years in Paris' Latin Quarter pursuing a career as a writer and accumulating debt. It is also believed that he contracted syphilis around this time.

In 1841 his parents sent him on ship to India, hoping the experience would help reform his bohemian urges. He left the ship, however, and returned to Paris in 1842. Upon his return, he received a large inheritance, which allowed him to live the life of a Parisian dandy. He developed a love for clothing and spent his days in the art galleries and cafes of Paris. He experimented with drugs such as hashish and opium. He fell in love with Jeanne Duval, who inspired the "Black Venus" section of Les Fleurs du mal. By 1844, he had spent nearly half of his inheritance. His family won a court order that appointed a lawyer to manage Baudelaire's fortune and pay him a small "allowance" for the rest of his life.

To supplement his income, Baudelaire wrote art criticism, essays, and reviews for various journals. His early criticism of contemporary French painters such as Eugene Delacroix and Gustave Courbet earned him a reputation as a discriminating if idiosyncratic critic. In 1847, he published the autobiographical novella La Fanfarlo. His first publications of poetry also began to appear in journals in the mid-1840s. In 1854 and 1855, he published translations of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he called a "twin soul." His translations were widely acclaimed.

In 1857, Auguste Poulet-Malassis published the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Baudelaire was so concerned with the quality of the printing that he took a room near the press to help supervise the book's production. Six of the poems, which described lesbian love and vampires, were condemned as obscene by the Public Safety section of the Ministry of the Interior. The ban on these poems was not lifted in France until 1949. In 1861, Baudelaire added thirty-five new poems to the collection. Les Fleurs du mal afforded Baudelaire a degree of notoriety; writers such as Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo wrote in praise of the poems. Flaubert wrote to Baudelaire claiming, "You have found a way to inject new life into Romanticism. You are unlike anyone else [which is the most important quality]." Unlike earlier Romantics, Baudelaire looked to the urban life of Paris for inspiration. He argued that art must create beauty from even the most depraved or "non-poetic" situations.

Les Fleurs du mal, with its explicit sexual content and juxtapositions of urban beauty and decay, only added to Baudelaire's reputation as a poéte maudit (cursed poet). Baudelaire enhanced this reputation by flaunting his eccentricities; for instance, he once asked a friend in the middle of a conversation "Wouldn't it be agreeable to take a bath with me?" Because of the abundance of stories about the poet, it is difficult to sort fact from fiction.

In the 1860s Baudelaire continued to write articles and essays on a wide range of subjects and figures. He was also publishing prose poems, which were posthumously collected in 1869 as Petits poémes en prose (Little Poems in Prose). By calling these non-metrical compositions poems, Baudelaire was the first poet to make a radical break with the form of verse.

In 1862, Baudelaire began to suffer nightmares and increasingly bad health. He left Paris for Brussels in 1863 to give a series of lectures, but suffered from several strokes that resulted in partial paralysis.

On August 31, 1867, at the age of 46, Charles Baudelaire died in Paris. Although doctors at the time didn't mention it, it is likely that syphilis caused his final illness. His reputation as poet at that time was secure; writers such as Stephane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud claimed him as a predecessor. In the 20th century, thinkers and artists as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney have celebrated his work.

Waiting for the Barbarians

Waiting for the Barbarians
By Constantine Petrou Photiades Cavafy

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

C.P. Cavafy, "Collected Poems." Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992.
The original Greek:

Περιμένοντας τους Bαρβάρους
Kωστής Πέτρου Φωτιάδης Kαβάφης

— Τι περιμένουμε στην αγορά συναθροισμένοι;

Είναι οι βάρβαροι να φθάσουν σήμερα.

— Γιατί μέσα στην Σύγκλητο μια τέτοια απραξία;
Τι κάθοντ' οι Συγκλητικοί και δεν νομοθετούνε;

Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα.
Τι νόμους πια θα κάμουν οι Συγκλητικοί;
Οι βάρβαροι σαν έλθουν θα νομοθετήσουν.

—Γιατί ο αυτοκράτωρ μας τόσο πρωί σηκώθη,
και κάθεται στης πόλεως την πιο μεγάλη πύλη
στον θρόνο επάνω, επίσημος, φορώντας την κορώνα;

Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα.
Κι ο αυτοκράτωρ περιμένει να δεχθεί
τον αρχηγό τους. Μάλιστα ετοίμασε
για να τον δώσει μια περγαμηνή. Εκεί
τον έγραψε τίτλους πολλούς κι ονόματα.

— Γιατί οι δυο μας ύπατοι κ' οι πραίτορες εβγήκαν
σήμερα με τες κόκκινες, τες κεντημένες τόγες·
γιατί βραχιόλια φόρεσαν με τόσους αμεθύστους,
και δαχτυλίδια με λαμπρά, γυαλιστερά σμαράγδια·
γιατί να πιάσουν σήμερα πολύτιμα μπαστούνια
μ' ασήμια και μαλάματα έκτακτα σκαλιγμένα;

Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα·
και τέτοια πράγματα θαμπώνουν τους βαρβάρους.

—Γιατί κ' οι άξιοι ρήτορες δεν έρχονται σαν πάντα
να βγάλουνε τους λόγους τους, να πούνε τα δικά τους;

Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα·
κι αυτοί βαρυούντ' ευφράδειες και δημηγορίες.

— Γιατί ν' αρχίσει μονομιάς αυτή η ανησυχία
κ' η σύγχυσις. (Τα πρόσωπα τι σοβαρά που εγίναν).
Γιατί αδειάζουν γρήγορα οι δρόμοι κ' η πλατέες,
κι όλοι γυρνούν στα σπίτια τους πολύ συλλογισμένοι;

Γιατί ενύχτωσε κ' οι βάρβαροι δεν ήλθαν.
Και μερικοί έφθασαν απ' τα σύνορα,
και είπανε πως βάρβαροι πια δεν υπάρχουν.

Και τώρα τι θα γένουμε χωρίς βαρβάρους.
Οι άνθρωποι αυτοί ήσαν μια κάποια λύσις.

Constantine Petrou Photiades Cavafy (as he wanted the family name to be spelled in English), son of Peter-John Ioannou Cavafy and Charicleia Georgaki Photiades, was born in Alexandria on 29 April 1863. Both his parents were natives of Constantinople, and Constantine was proud of his heritage and his illustrious ancestors. His Phanariote great-grandfather Peter Cavafy (1740-1804) was Secretary of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, while his Phanariote great-great-grandfather John Cavafy (1701-1762) was Governor of Jassium, as was his great-grandfather Michael Scarlato Pantzo (brother of Meletius, Patriarch of Alexandria), while his great-great-great-grandfather Theodosius Photiades (brother of Cyril, Bishop of Caesarea Philippi) was an Official of the Ottoman Government.
Cavafy was a cosmopolitan by birth, his family roots extending from Constantinople to London (via Alexandria, Trebizond, Chios, Trieste, Venice and Vienna), and was the youngest of seven brothers (two more elder siblings, a boy and the sole girl, died in infancy).
His father, Peter-John, the fourth child of five, proved to be an astute merchant (his own father had also been a merchant and a landowner). Holding dual citizenship (Greek and British), he set up offices in Constantinople, London and Liverpool, before establishing firm and family in Alexandria, where he was one of the founders of the Greek Community. The Cavafy family flourished there both financially and socially, but Peter-John's death in 1870 forced the surviving members of the family to move to England in 1872, when Constantine was nine years old.
His mother, Charicleia, the eldest child of eight, was a practical person. Her father was a gem merchant, and married off Charicleia to Peter-John when she was about fourteen years old. As her husband was mostly away on business, she spent the first couple of years of marriage at her in-law's and later set up house in England, where Peter-John hired tutors for her education. After his death, Charicleia returned to England in order to be close to the family of her brother-in-law George Cavafy, who was running the Cavafy firm.
As family fortunes declined, Charicleia lived in Liverpool for almost two years, then moved to London for roughly the same amount of time, then back to Liverpool for less than a year. The firm «Cavafy & Co.» dissolved in 1876, and in 1877 Charicleia and her younger children returned to Alexandria, settling in an apartment instead of the townhouse of old.
Not much is known about the five years that Constantine spent in England, save that he attended school there and that he spent some summer vacations in Dover. We do know that in Alexandria he attended the «Hermes» school, where he made his first close friends in the persons of Mike Ralli, John Rhodokanaki and Stephan Skylizzi, that he was borrowing books from public libraries and that he had started drafting his own Historical Dictionary at age eighteen.
Cavafy's second Alexandrian period was cut short in less than five years by local unrest. Charicleia, sensing that an invasion was imminent, packed her family once again and sailed to her father's home in Constantinople, just two weeks before the British fleet bombarded Alexandria. The Cavafy home was destroyed in the ensuing fire, and with it all of Constantine's books and papers. Thus the first surviving manuscript we have of Cavafy is the journal he kept on the journey to Constantinople, and the first surviving poem in manuscript is «Leaving Therapia», written in English and dated at 2:30 p.m. on 16 July 1882.
In Constantinople, the nineteen-year old Cavafy met his numerous relatives and became acquainted with the legendary Queen City of the Greeks, the seat and capital of Greekness. It was there and then that he started researching his ancestry, trying to define himself as a young man in the wider Hellenic context, preparing for a career in politics or journalism. It was also there and then, according to one source, that he had his first homosexual experience. «Themes of my poetry were fashioned, and the area of my art was mapped out, in the wanton days of my youth», he was to write many years later.
Most of his brothers had returned to Alexandria in the meantime, in order to work and sustain the family. Charicleia and Constantine (who had already started writing poems and articles) remained in Constantinople, awaiting payment of the insurance indemnity for their destroyed house. As much as Constantine enjoyed living in Constantinople, he was eager to return home. The indemnity was paid in September 1885, and the Cavafys sailed to Alexandria one month later, where Constantine faced the ruins of his former house. During the same month, joint British and Ottoman rule was imposed in Egypt, and young Constantine renounced his British citizenship.
This political act was not inconsequential in the British-run Protectorate of Egypt: when Constantine was finally able to gain employment in 1892 in the Third Circle of Irrigation at the Ministry of Public Works of Egypt, he was hired as a temporary clerk, since his Greek citizenship excluded him from any permanent position. Being an assiduous and conscientious worker, Cavafy managed to hold this temporary position (renewed annually) for thirty years. He was always mindful of his finances, both out of necessity and out of vanity: he recalled the affluent days of his childhood and strove to halt the family's declining fortunes. He started working at the Alexandrian Stock Exchanges early on, and was a registered broker from 1894 to 1902. He was also gambling systematically, entering his gains and losses in a «Gambling Notebook» which he kept until 1909. This parallel source of income, along with some shrewd investments, enabled him to live in relative comfort for the rest of his life.
Cavafy started publishing poems and articles in Greek following his second return to Alexandria. His first published text was an article entitled «Coral, from a Mythological Viewpoint» in the newspaper Constantinople on 3 January 1886. Three months later, on 27 March, he published his first poem, entitled «Bacchial», in the Leipzig periodical Hesperus. Around that time came the first in a series of deaths that would leave their mark on him: in April 1886 his friend Stephan Skylizzi died, then in 1889 his friend Mike Ralli, in 1891 his brother Peter-John and his uncle George Cavafy, in 1896 his grandfather George Photiades, in 1899 his mother, in 1900 his brother George, in 1902 his brother Aristeides and in 1905 his brother Alexander.
Cavafy rarely left Alexandria: he took some day trips and excursions in Egypt (especially to Cairo in the winter, as had been his father's custom) but after 1885 he traveled abroad only five times: in 1897 he visited Paris and London (with his brother John-Constantine), in 1901 and 1903 he visited Athens (with his brother Alexander), and in 1905 he travelled again to Athens to be with the dying Alexander. His next (and ultimate) trip abroad came twenty-seven years later, once again to Athens (with Aleko and Rika Singhopoulo), for reasons of his own health.
In Alexandria, Cavafy lived with his mother and his brothers Paul and John-Constantine, who were the closest to him, not only in age: Paul was known in Alexandria as «the homosexual Cavafy», while John-Constantine was known as «the poet Cavafy» (he was an accomplished poet in English). After Charicleia's death in 1899, Constantine lived with the two brothers until 1904, when John-Constantine moved to Cairo. Cavafy continued living with Paul, and in 1907 they moved to an apartment on rue Lepsius. In 1908 Paul traveled abroad, never to return, and Cavafy started living on his own at the age of 45. Soon his life took a marked turn: he severely limited his social life and devoted himself to poetry. He had by now discovered his own poetic voice, and he was confident of its worth.
Cavafy was fond of his two nieces, Charicleia Cavafy (daughter of Aristeides) and Helen-Anghelica-Lucia Cavafy (daughter of Alexander), but was especially tender towards Aleko Singhopoulo, the son of the Greek seamstress Helen Singhopoulo, who was employed by Cavafy's mother. His unusual concern for Aleko (later his designated heir), coupled with their facial resemblance, led some people to speculate that Singhopoulo was Cavafy's illegitimate son. This hypothesis is certainly valid, especially since Rika Singhopoulo (Aleko's first wife) notes that Cavafy was bisexual into his thirties. Another, equally plausible, hypothesis has Aleko as the illegitimate offspring of one of Cavafy's brothers, which would explain the reluctance of both men to specify the exact nature of their relationship.
Cavafy made a clear distinction between his public persona and his personal life, which became a cause celebre as soon as his poetry became popular. He was, above all, a poet (in his last passport, issued in 1932, under «Occupation» he declared «Poet») and wished to be remembered solely as a poet, with no modifiers (with the possible exception of «Hellenic»). He lived a rather unremarkable public life, offering no cause for scandal to the Alexandrian community or the Athenian establishment, where he was under close scrutiny as the potential diasporic alternative to the native poet Kostis Palamas. The followers of Cavafy and Palamas first clashed in 1918, but all-out literary war was declared in Athens in 1924, only to end when Palamas published a brief and sober appreciation of Cavafy's work. In 1926, during the Pangalos dictatorship, the Greek state honoured Cavafy for his contribution to Greek Letters by awarding him the Silver medal of the Order of Phoenix.
In his mature years, Cavafy's interests were many and diverse, as evidenced by his personal papers, and by his unsigned comments published in the periodical Alexandrian Art (he had founded this magazine and was essentially running with the help of Aleko and Rika Singhopoulo). In 1932 Cavafy (who was a life-long smoker) first noticed an irritation in his throat, and in June of the same year his doctors in Alexandria diagnosed cancer of the larynx. He traveled to Athens for advanced treatment, which proved ineffectual. He was subjected to a tracheotomy depriving him of the power of speech, and resorted to communicating through a series of written "hospital notes". He returned to Alexandria, where he died a few months later in the Greek Hospital which was close to his home (when he had moved to this apartment he had said, somewhat prophetically, «Where could I live better? Under me is a house of ill repute, which caters to the needs of the flesh. Over there is the church, where sins are forgiven. And beyond is the hospital, where we die»).
Cavafy developed a unique method for publishing his poems. He never published a collection in book form, and refused at least two such offers (one for a Greek edition and one for an English). He opted to publish his poems in newspapers, periodicals and annuals, then printing them privately in broadsheets, which he would collate in makeshift collections for any interested party. The first volume of the 154 poems which comprise his poetic Canon (he had repudiated 27 early poems) was published posthumously in Alexandria, edited by Rika Singhopoulo. This same collection was first published in Greece in 1948 by Ikaros Publishing, and was issued again by the same publisher in 1963, edited and annotated by G.P. Savidis, who first adopted the thematic sequence advocated by Cavafy. Savidis acquired the Cavafy Archive in 1969, after the death of Aleko Singhopoulo. He had already edited Cavafy's Unpublished (or Hidden) poems in 1968, and invited scholars to study the other material resting in the Cavafy Archive, resulting in a variety of publications, most notably Cavafy's Unfinished poems in 1994 (edited by Renata Lavagnini), Cavafy's Prose in 2003 (edited by Michalis Pieris) and Cavafy's Comments on his poetry (forthcoming, edited by Diana Haas).
Cavafy was introduced to the English-speaking public in 1919 by his friend E.M Forster, who used translations of selected poems by George Valassopoulo. There have been numerous translations of the Canon over the years, most notably by John Mavrogordato in 1951 (with an introduction by Rex Warner), Rae Dalven in 1961 (with an introduction by W.H. Auden), Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard in 1975 (edited by G.P. Savidis) and Stratis Haviaras in 2004 (with a foreword by Seamus Heaney). The international appeal of Cavafy's poetry, as attested by the multiplicity of its translations, would not come as a surprise to the poet.