Frank Hecker

The poets I’ve featured in this series are mainly those whom I encountered in the 1980s and 1990s, so even those who were alive at the time I first read them are now either dead or in their dotage. (Elizabeth Alexander is the youngest, at 61.)

I thought that for this next-to-last Sunday night poetry post I should feature some younger poets, ones new to me. After doing some Internet queries and sampling a selection of poems, I found the two poets I’m featuring tonight, Natalie Diaz and Danez Smith.

The poems of Diaz I found most compelling were those written about her brother; I chose this one, “My Brother My Wound,” for its surrealistic imagery (CW: violence):

This Sunday night I again feature Walt Whitman, this time the Whitman who eventually became a queer icon, based both on his poems about the “love of comrades” (including the “Calamus” sequence) and on his relationships with several younger working-class men, including Peter Doyle, pictured left above.

But to talk of “queerness” in this context is both anachronistic and reductive: Anachronistic because gender and orientation being in large part socially constructed means that we can’t simply apply 21st terms and concepts to 19th century lives. Peter Doyle’s sister may have called her brother a “homosexual,” but in private correspondence Whitman himself denied that his relations with men were of a character that others might see as improper.

And reductive because the “Calamus” poems in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass are about more than the love of one man for another: in the last years before the US Civil War, Whitman had a wild vision of the ills of America healed, and the nation brought together, by bonds of manly affections and “adhesiveness” between “comrades.”

Here’s the first poem in the “Calamus” sequence: