A Litter of Lists by Alex Gildzen is a wide-ranging collection of list-based poems and prose pieces spanning over five decades of the author's life and work. Drawing from journals, postcards, travel notes, correspondence, and unpublished manuscripts, Gildzen assembles an unconventional memoir composed entirely of lists-of people, places, meals, performances, cultural icons, and personal encounters.
Rooted in the poet's life as a curator, archivist, and participant in late 20th-century queer artistic circles, the collection documents a rich network of relationships and cultural history. Figures such as John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Judy Garland, and David Hockney appear alongside intimate personal details, reflecting Gildzen's belief that "any group of seemingly unrelated items...can make art as well as careful history."
Both formally inventive and deeply autobiographical, A Litter of Lists explores memory, preservation, and the poetic potential of accumulation. The result is a singular body of work that blurs the boundaries between poetry, archive, and lived experience.
Alex Gildzen has been an active participant in the gay artistic community of the last half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. He danced at Stonewall with Jean-Claude van Itallie and slept with one of the original "Boys in the Band." He was drawn fully clothed by David Hockney and photographed without clothes for "Chaos in Austin." His name appears in the diaries of Ned Rorem and the prose of Jonathan Williams. He smoked pot with Allen Ginsberg and shared a hash brownie with John Ashbery. He is the dedicatee of a small chapbook by Jonathan Williams and subject of a prose poem by Bryan Borland. He sat on James Broughton's lap in an independent film and appears in the documentary "Big Joy." His poem about Jim Provenzano was translated into Greek by Dinos Christianopoulos. His collection Disco Naps & Odd Nods: the politix of sex was one of a series of protest books sent by the publisher to the White House of President 45. He has read his work at Bowery Poetry Club, Fort Mason Center, Bisbee Poetry Festival, Palm Springs Art Museum, and Antebellum Gallery in Hollywood. His poems have been published in Mouth of the Dragon, After Dark, In Touch for Men, RFD, & Change, and My Gay Eye. His work is in the collections of Stonewall National Museum, ONE Archives, and the Tretter Collection on GLBT Studies. Major collections of his writing are in Archive for New Poetry (UC San Diego), The Poetry Collection (SUNY Buffalo), Poetry Center (University of Arizona at Tucson) as well as in the libraries of Princeton, Northwestern, the University of Toronto, Indiana University, Brown University, and Bowdoin College. And his papers are housed at Kent State University Libraries.
