Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets - Softcover

Hennessy, Christopher Matthew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472068733 ISBN 13: 9780472068739

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2005

Synopsis

"Outside the Lines explores the personal and historical forces that have shaped the work of a dozen gifted poets. The answers given to Hennessy's astute, perfectly tailored questions remind a reader how exciting poetry can be, and how writers create, through language, the world as we have never known it. These adventuresome interviews will stir anyone who cares about the making of art."
---Bernard Cooper, author of Maps to Anywhere

Editor Christopher Hennessy gathers interviews with some of the most significant figures in contemporary American poetry. While each poet is gay, these encompassing, craft-centered interviews reflect the diversity of their respective arts and serve as a testament to the impact gay poets have had and will continue to have on contemporary poetics.

The book includes twelve frank, intense interviews with some of America's best-known and loved poets, who have not only enjoyed wide critical acclaim but who have had lasting impact on both the gay tradition and the contemporary canon writ large, for example, Frank Bidart, the late Thom Gunn, and J. D. McClatchy. Some of the most honored and respected poets, still in the middle of their careers, are also included, for example, Mark Doty, Carl Phillips, and Reginald Shepherd. Each interview explores the poet's complete work to date, often illuminating the poet's technical evolution and emotional growth, probing shifts in theme, and even investigating links between verse and sexuality.

In addition to a selected bibliography of works by established poets, the book also includes a list of works by newer and emerging poets who are well on their way to becoming important voices of the new millennium.

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Hennessy is a freelance writer living in Boston who publishes frequently in national and international gay literary publications. He is associate editor at the Gay and Lesbian Review--Worldwide.

Reviews

Michigan is known for its Poets on Poetry series, which collects the prose statements, interviews and poetry-related ephemera of individual contemporary poets; this anthology of frank interviews fits nicely alongside it. Hennessy, an editor at Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, talks to 12 contemporary poets, from the late Thom Gunn to still-younger poets Reginald Shepherd and Timothy Liu. In between, J.D. McClatchy discusses his "audience pleaser" poem "Penis," Carl Phillips discusses how leaving his marriage cured his writer's block and Mark Doty tells of the relation between his lover's HIV diagnosis and the poems of My Alexandria. (AIDS comes up in nearly every conversation recorded here.) As an interlocutor, Hennessy is something like Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton: deeply informed, with an ability to register the hotter material without comment.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0472068733
• ISBN 13: 9780472068739
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232