DOCSLIB.ORG

Queering the City of God: W. H. Auden's Later Poetry and the Ethics

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Queering the City of God: W. H. Auden's Later Poetry and the Ethics Queering the City of God: W. H. Auden’s Later Poetry and the Ethics of Friendship by Olivia F. Bustion A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor John Whittier-Ferguson, Chair Professor David Caron Professor Laurence Goldstein Professor David Halperin © Olivia F. Bustion 2012 DEDICATION For my parents. And for Dave, Libby, and Matt: µείζονα ταύτης ἀγάπην οὑδεὶς ἔχει, ἵνα τις τὴν ψυχὴν ἄυτοῦ θῇ ὑπὲρ τῶν φίλων ἀυτοῦ. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I could not have written this dissertation without the sage and generous guidance of John Whittier-Ferguson, David Halperin, Larry Goldstein, and David Caron. I am thankful, too, for the inspiration of their work. For access to Auden’s papers, many thanks to Stephen Crook and Anne Garner of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library. Thanks to the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the English Department, and the Sweetland Dissertation Institute at the University of Michigan for providing fellowship support that made it possible for me to complete this dissertation. Thanks also to St. Gregory’s Abbey in Three Rivers, Michigan, where I finished writing. My greatest thanks goes to all of my friends, who loved me and cheered me on throughout the writing process: Libby (kindred spirit), Sara (an invaluable interlocutor and a tireless cook), Jim (study buddy extraordinaire), Elizabeth, Lauren, Matt (who shares my enthusiasm for later Auden), the Brent House community at the University of Chicago, and, of course, Dave (who listened to every worry and commented on every draft). iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS v Introduction: Eros, Builder of Churches 1 Chapter One. The Equivocal Ethics of Friendship 31 Chapter Two. Saint Wystan’s Shame 70 Chapter Three. The Erotics of Coterie 120 Chapter Four. Interlude: The Bachelor & the Strange Young Man 159 Chapter Five. Rereading Auden: Toward a Queer Theology of the 167 Responsible Self Conclusion: Wooing Miss God 227 BIBLIOGRAPHY 233 iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Age Auden, The Age of Anxiety, ed. Alan Jacobs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Berg The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Bodleian The Department of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Oxford. CP Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Modern Library, 2007). CP45 Auden, The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945). CSP Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (London: Faber, 1966). DH Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962). DM Auden, The Double Man (New York: Random House, 1941). EA Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927- 1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977). FA Auden, Forewords and Afterwords (New York: Random House, 1973). Nones Auden, Nones (New York: Random House, 1951). Prose ii The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose: Volume II: 1939-1948, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Prose iii The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose: Volume III: 1949-1955, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Prose iv The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose: Volume IV: 1956-1962, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). v Sea Auden, The Sea and the Mirror, ed. Arthur Kirsch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). SP Auden, Selected Poems, expanded edition, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 2007). SW Auden, Secondary Worlds (New York: Random House, 1968) vi INTRODUCTION | EROS, BUILDER OF CHURCHES “I like to think that if I hadn’t been a poet, I might have become an Anglican bishop— politically liberal, I hope; theologically and liturgically conservative, I know.” —W. H. Auden1 Scholars have for the most part kept quiet about the intersection of queerness and Christianity in the poetry of W. H. Auden, a gay British modernist poet who immigrated to America just before the outbreak of World War II and converted to Christianity shortly thereafter. A few have made the case for reading Auden as a queer poet.2 And a few have explored the Christian underpinnings of Auden’s later poetry.3 Rarely, though, do scholars examine Auden’s sexuality alongside his Christianity. Instead, they tend to split his oeuvre into two Audens: the early “firebrand” and the later “conservative.”4 Queering the City of God explodes the scholarly myth of the two Audens, bringing to light the queer commitments of Auden’s Christian poetry. His post- 1 Quoted in Ursula Niebuhr, “Memories of the 1940s,” in W. H. Auden: A Tribute, ed. Stephen Spender (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 116. 2 Most notably, Robert L. Caserio, “Auden’s New Citizenship,” Raritan 17. 2 (Fall 1997): 90-103; Richard Bozorth, Auden’s Games of Knowledge: Poetry and the Meanings of Homosexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); and Aidan Wasley, The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). In Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), Susannah Gottlieb also touches on some of the queer themes in Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety (1947). 3 Alan Jacobs, What Became of Wystan: Change and Continuity in Auden’s Poetry (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998); Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999); Arthur Kirsch, Auden and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 4 Wasley, 164. 1 conversion oeuvre, which spans the early 1940s to the early 1970s, unfolded in the midst of two international crises: World War II and the Cold War. Fittingly, questions like, “What would a just society really look like?” and, “What role should art play in resisting a destructive political regime?” dominate his later work. He gives decidedly queer theo- ethical answers, reading his own participation in queer networks through the lens of the Christian faith to construct gay subjectivity as an anti-imperialist prophetic vocation. The queer networks that Auden participated in after he left England include (1) a group of gay artists—among them Benjamin Britten, with whom Auden collaborated on films, song cycles, poetic dramas, and the operetta Paul Bunyan (1941)—who met in the Long Island home of Elizabeth Mayer, a German refugee, from 1939-1941; (2) the riotous “February House” in Brooklyn Heights that Auden shared with several other artists (Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Jane and Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Golo Mann, Oliver Smith, and Gypsy Rose Lee) from October 1940-September 1941;5 (3) the Ann Arbor home in Burns Park that Auden and Kallman shared in 1942, a center of gay life at the University of Michigan;6 (4) Fire Island—a barrier island that runs parallel to Long Island and that features a lively gay scene in the summer—where Auden owned a cabin in the mid-1940s;7 (5) the village of Forio on the island of Ischia—like Fire Island, a favorite vacation spot for gay men—where Auden summered from 1947-1958 (and 5 So nicknamed after the common birth-month of its residents. For an entertaining biography of the salon, see Sherill Tippins, February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof in Brooklyn (New York: Mariner Books, 2006). 6 Much to the chagrin of their neighbors as well as the campus authorities, Auden and Kallman hosted regular “At Homes.” Unfortunately, Auden’s only literary record of the group, a masque that Auden wrote for his guests to perform at one of the “At Homes,” no longer exists: “The Queen’s Masque, by Bojo the Homo, played by Kallman’s Klever Kompanions.” Auden described it as “really obscene,” and reacted to the disappearance of the manuscript by saying, “I do hope the F.B.I hasn’t been prying up here.” See Humphrey Carpenter, W.H. Auden: A Biography (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 321-322. 7 For a wonderful reading of “Pleasure Island” (1948), Auden’s poetic account of Fire Island, a culture of “naked power relations and humiliation” quite different from the queer networks that make the subject of the main part of my study, see Bozorth, Auden’s Games of Knowledge, 239-243. 2 where he met the gay German composer Hans Werner Henze, who collaborated on two operas with Auden and Chester Kallman, Auden’s sometime lover and lifelong companion); (6) the farmhouse in Kirschstetten that, from 1958 on, Auden shared with Kallman; and (7) the transhistorical spiritual communion that Auden self-consciously created in his poetry with deceased literary predecessors like Henry James. In addition to making an intervention in Auden studies, my rereading of the later Auden makes an intervention in queer studies. As we will see in the following chapters, looking at how gay desire inflects the theological ethics of Auden’s post-conversion poetry gives us purchase on several current issues in queer theory. (1) The pre-Stonewall perspective of Auden’s oeuvre provides a resource for thinking politically and ethically outside the strictures of gay pride. (2) Since Auden’s relationship with psychoanalysis cooled after he converted, his later poetry provides a resource for talking about gay subjectivity without using the pathologizing concepts of psychology.8 (3) And Auden’s later poetry, the labor of a gay Christian polymath, has much to offer current debates in academic theology about nature, grace, religious epistemology, and how to do ethics.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • V. L. 0. Chittick ANGRY YOUNG POET of the THIRTIES
    V. L. 0. Chittick ANGRY YOUNG POET OF THE THIRTIES THE coMPLETION OF JoHN LEHMANN's autobiography with I Am My Brother (1960), begun with The Whispering Gallery (1955), brings back to mind, among a score of other largely forgotten matters, the fact that there were angry young poets in England long before those of last year-or was it year before last? The most outspoken of the much earlier dissident young verse writers were probably the three who made up the so-called "Oxford group", W. ·H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis. (Properly speaking they were never a group in col­ lege, though they knew one ariother as undergraduates and were interested in one another's work.) Whether taken together or singly, .they differed markedly from the young poets who have recently been given the label "angry". What these latter day "angries" are angry about is difficult to determine, unless indeed it is merely for the sake of being angry. Moreover, they seem to have nothing con­ structive to suggest in cure of whatever it is that disturbs them. In sharp contrast, those whom they have displaced (briefly) were angry about various conditions and situations that they were ready and eager to name specifically. And, as we shall see in a moment, they were prepared to do something about them. What the angry young poets of Lehmann's generation were angry about was the heritage of the first World War: the economic crisis, industrial collapse, chronic unemployment, and the increasing tP,reat of a second World War.
    [Show full text]
  • When Is an Agrarian Not an Agrarian? a Reading of Robert Penn Warren’S “The Rb Iar Patch” Clare Byrne
    Robert Penn Warren Studies Volume 10 Robert Penn Warren Studies Article 2 2016 When Is an Agrarian Not an Agrarian? A Reading of Robert Penn Warren’s “The rB iar Patch” Clare Byrne Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/rpwstudies Part of the American Literature Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Byrne, Clare (2016) "When Is an Agrarian Not an Agrarian? A Reading of Robert Penn Warren’s “The rB iar Patch”," Robert Penn Warren Studies: Vol. 10 , Article 2. Available at: https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/rpwstudies/vol10/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in Robert Penn Warren Studies by an authorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact [email protected]. When Is an Agrarian Not an Agrarian? A Reading of Robert Penn Warren’s “The Briar Patch” Clare Byrne King’s College, London Critics have tended to fall into one of two camps on the matter of Robert Penn Warren’s participation in the Southern Agrarian movement. They have either agreed with Hugh Ruppersburg that “Agrarianism is…the essential premise on which [Warren’s] American explorations have rested” (30), or with Paul Conkin that “never” did Warren “ever write a single essay in which he committed himself, philosophically, to any version of Agrarian ideology” (105). As a result, his literary output has often either been read as a direct expression of Southern Agrarianism, or exonerated from any connection to it. I propose that Warren’s relationship to Agrarianism was much more complex and conflicted than either of these positions allows, and that this is evident even in the essays he explicitly contributed to the movement.
    [Show full text]
  • An Index to Alan Ansen's the Table Talk of W. H. Auden Edited By
    An Index to Alan Ansen’s The Table Talk of W. H. Auden Edited by Nicholas Jenkins Index Compiled by Jacek Niecko A Supplement to The W. H. Auden Society Newsletter Number 20 • June 2000 Jacek Niecko is at work on a volume of conversations and interviews with W. H. Auden. Adams, Donald James 68, 115 Christmas Day 1941 letter to Aeschylus Chester Kallman 105 Oresteia 74 Collected Poems (1976) 103, 105, Akenside, Mark 53 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, Amiel, Henri-Frédéric 25 114, 116, 118 Andrewes, Lancelot 75 Collected Poetry 108 Meditations 75 Dark Valley, The 104 Sermons 75 Dog Beneath the Skin, The 51, 112 Aneirin Dyer’s Hand, The xiii, 100, 109, 111 Y Gododdin 108 “Easily, my dear, you move, easily Ann Arbor, Michigan 20, 107 your head” 106 Ansen, Alan ix-xiv, 103, 105, 112, 115, Enemies of a Bishop, The 22, 107 117 English Auden, The 103, 106, 108, Aquinas, Saint Thomas 33, 36 110, 112, 115, 118 Argo 54 Forewords and Afterwords 116 Aristophanes For the Time Being 3, 104 Birds, The 74 Fronny, The 51, 112 Clouds, The 74 “Greeks and Us, The” 116 Frogs, The 74 “Guilty Vicarage, The” 111 Aristotle 33, 75, 84 “Hammerfest” 106 Metaphysics 74 “Happy New Year, A” 118 Physics 74 “I Like It Cold” 115 Arnason Jon “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” xv, 70 Icelandic Legends 1 “In Search of Dracula” 106 Arnold, Matthew xv, 20, 107 “In Sickness and In Health” 106 Asquith, Herbert Henry 108 “In the Year of My Youth” 112 Athens, Greece 100 “Ironic Hero, The” 118 Atlantic 95 Journey to a War 105 Auden, Constance Rosalie Bicknell “Law Like Love” 70, 115 (Auden’s mother) 3, 104 Letter to Lord Byron 55, 103, 106, Auden, Wystan Hugh ix-xv, 19, 51, 99, 112 100, 103-119 “Malverns, The” 52, 112 “A.E.
    [Show full text]
  • HARLEM in SHAKESPEARE and SHAKESPEARE in HARLEM: the SONNETS of CLAUDE MCKAY, COUNTEE CULLEN, LANGSTON HUGHES, and GWENDOLYN BROOKS David J
    Southern Illinois University Carbondale OpenSIUC Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 5-1-2015 HARLEM IN SHAKESPEARE AND SHAKESPEARE IN HARLEM: THE SONNETS OF CLAUDE MCKAY, COUNTEE CULLEN, LANGSTON HUGHES, AND GWENDOLYN BROOKS David J. Leitner Southern Illinois University Carbondale, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations Recommended Citation Leitner, David J., "HARLEM IN SHAKESPEARE AND SHAKESPEARE IN HARLEM: THE SONNETS OF CLAUDE MCKAY, COUNTEE CULLEN, LANGSTON HUGHES, AND GWENDOLYN BROOKS" (2015). Dissertations. Paper 1012. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at OpenSIUC. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of OpenSIUC. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HARLEM IN SHAKESPEARE AND SHAKESPEARE IN HARLEM: THE SONNETS OF CLAUDE MCKAY, COUNTEE CULLEN, LANGSTON HUGHES, AND GWENDOLYN BROOKS by David Leitner B.A., University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, 1999 M.A., Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 2005 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Department of English in the Graduate School Southern Illinois University Carbondale May 2015 DISSERTATION APPROVAL HARLEM IN SHAKESPEARE AND SHAKESPEARE IN HARLEM: THE SONNETS OF CLAUDE MCKAY, COUNTEE CULLEN, LANGSTON HUGHES, AND GWENDOLYN BROOKS By David Leitner A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of English Approved by: Edward Brunner, Chair Robert Fox Mary Ellen Lamb Novotny Lawrence Ryan Netzley Graduate School Southern Illinois University Carbondale April 10, 2015 AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF DAVID LEITNER, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in ENGLISH, presented on April 10, 2015, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    Notes Introduction 1. For more on the Romanticism and Classicism debate in the maga- zines, see David Goldie’s Critical Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1918–1929 (69– 127). Harding’s discussion in his book on Eliot’s Criterion of the same debate is also worth reviewing, especially his chapter on Murry’s The Adelphi; see 25–43. 2. Esty suggests that the “relativization of England as one culture among many in the face of imperial contraction seems to have entailed a relativization of literature as one aspect of culture . [as] the late modernist generation absorbed the potential energy of a contracting British state and converted it into the language not of aesthetic decline but of cultural revival” (8). In a similar fashion, despite Jason Harding’s claim that Eliot’s periodical had a “self-appointed role as a guardian of European civilization,” his extensive study of the magazine, The “Criterion”: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain, as the title indicates, takes Criterion’s “networks” to exist exclusively within Britain (6). 3. See Suzanne W. Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry; Eric White, Transat- lantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism; Adam McKible, The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York; Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audience, and Reception, 1905–1920; Faith Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, and the Avant-Garde: Reading “Rhythm,” 1910–1914. 4. Thompson writes, “Making, because it is a study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning.
    [Show full text]
  • MA Issues in Modern Culture Reading List 20-21.Pdf
    M.A. Issues in Modern Culture Reading List 2020–21 AUTHORS AUTUMN TERM 1. Gustave Flaubert Dr Scarlett Baron Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary [1857], trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Gustave Flaubert, ‘A Simple Heart’, in Three Tales [1877], trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas [1913], in Bouvard and Pécuchet, with the Dictionary of Received Ideas, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). Further Reading: Gustave Flaubert, Selected Letters, trans. Geoffrey Wall (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997). Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984) Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (London: Paul Elek, 1974). Stephen Heath, Flaubert: Madame Bovary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour [1972] (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1996). Geoffrey Wall, Flaubert: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). Tim Unwin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Jennifer Yee, The Colonial Comedy: Imperialism in the French Realist Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 2. Henry James Professor Philip Horne Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1904), ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Penguin Classics, 2009) This contains the ‘Preface’ to the (only very slightly different) New York Edition version of the novel (1909); the other Prefaces (collected in The Art of the Novel, ed. R.P. Blackmur, 1934; now U. of Chicago Press) Henry James, ‘The Lesson of Balzac’ (1905) Available at: https://archive.org/details/questionourspee01jamegoog/page/n9/mode/2up Secondary Reading: Nicola Bradbury, Henry James: The Later Novels (Oxford University Press, 1979).
    [Show full text]
  • Lorine Niedecker's Personal Library of Books: A
    LORINE NIEDECKER’S PERSONAL LIBRARY OF BOOKS: A BIBLIOGRAPHY Margot Peters Adams, Brooks. The Law of Civilization and Decay. New York: Vintage Books, 1955. Adéma, Marcel. Apollinaire, trans, Denise Folliot. London: Heineman, 1954. Aldington, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). Heliodora and Other Poems. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1924. Aldington, Richard, ed. The Religion of Beauty: Selections from the Aesthetes. London: Heineman, 1950. Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. New York: Random House, 1950. Allen, Donald M., ed. The New American Poetry: 1945-1960. New York: Grove Press, 1960. Allen, Glover Morrill. Birds and Their Attributes. New York: Dover, 1962. Alvarez, A. The School of Donne. New York: Mentor, 1967. Anderson, Charles R. Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Stairway of Surprise. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960. Anderson, Sherwood. Six Mid-American Chants. Photos by Art Sinsabaugh. Highlands, N.C.: Jargon Press, 1964. Arnett, Willard E. Santayana and the Sense of Beauty. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1957. Arnold, Matthew. Passages from the Prose Writings of Matthew Arnold, ed. William E. Buckler, New York: New York University Press, 1963. Saint Augustine. The Confessions. New York: Pocket Books, n.d. Aurelius, Marcus (Marcus Aelius Aurelius Antoninus). Meditations. London: Dent, 1948. Bacon, Francis. Essays and the New Atlantis, ed. Gordon S. Haight. New York: Van Nostrand, 1942. Basho. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa. Baltimore: Penguin, 1966. 1 Baudelaire, Charles. Flowers of Evil. New York: New Directions, 1958. Beard, Charles A. & Mary R. Beard. The Rise of American Civilization. New York: Macmillan, 1939. Bell, Margaret. Margaret Fuller: A Biography.
    [Show full text]
  • Dana Young Archive Featuring Brion Gysin, Charles Henri Ford, Ira Cohen, Ray Johnson, David Rattray, Harold Norse, and the Bardo Matrix
    Dana Young Archive Featuring Brion Gysin, Charles Henri Ford, Ira Cohen, Ray Johnson, David Rattray, Harold Norse, and the Bardo Matrix. [top] A portrait of Dana Young in front of an altar of candles, Kathmandu (date and photographer unknown). [bottom] Detail of Dana Young cover for Ira Cohen’s Poem for La Malinche (Bardo Matrix, ca. 1974) and [right] Dana Young print of Ira Cohen, “The Master & the Owl,” (date unknown). Dana Young (ca. 1948–1979) Dana Young was an essential member of the Kathmandu psychedelic expatriate community of poets, musicians, artists, and spiritual seekers in the 1970s. His poetry and shamanic art blended Eastern spiritual imagery with American pop and consumer culture. He was an active member of the Bardo Matrix collective and is best known for his book Opium Elementals (Bardo Matrix, 1976) that features his beautiful woodblock prints along with two poems by Ira Cohen. He contributed to several other Bardo Matrix publications including Cohen’s Blue Oracle broadside (1975), the frontispiece to Paul Bowles’ Next to Nothing (1976), and Ira Cohen and Roberto Francisco Valenza’s Spirit Catcher! broadside (1976). His artwork also appears in publications such as Montana Gothic (1974) and Ins and Outs (1978). Dana designed the logo (included in the archive) for John Chick’s Rose Mushroom club located at the end of Jhochhen Tole, known as “Freak Street,” in Kathmandu. Most recently, one of Dana Young’s wood block prints was featured on the album cover of the recent release of Angus MacLise's Dreamweapon II. Materials in the present collection comprise the archive of Dana Young supplemented with letters, photographs, and assorted items from the Ira Cohen archive via Richard Aaron, Am Here Books.
    [Show full text]
  • NY ACKER Awards Is Taken from an Archaic Dutch Word Meaning a Noticeable Movement in a Stream
    1 THE NYC ACKER AWARDS CREATOR & PRODUCER CLAYTON PATTERSON This is our 6th successful year of the ACKER Awards. The meaning of ACKER in the NY ACKER Awards is taken from an archaic Dutch word meaning a noticeable movement in a stream. The stream is the mainstream and the noticeable movement is the avant grade. By documenting my community, on an almost daily base, I have come to understand that gentrification is much more than the changing face of real estate and forced population migrations. The influence of gen- trification can be seen in where we live and work, how we shop, bank, communicate, travel, law enforcement, doctor visits, etc. We will look back and realize that the impact of gentrification on our society is as powerful a force as the industrial revolution was. I witness the demise and obliteration of just about all of the recogniz- able parts of my community, including so much of our history. I be- lieve if we do not save our own history, then who will. The NY ACKERS are one part of a much larger vision and ambition. A vision and ambition that is not about me but it is about community. Our community. Our history. The history of the Individuals, the Outsid- ers, the Outlaws, the Misfits, the Radicals, the Visionaries, the Dream- ers, the contributors, those who provided spaces and venues which allowed creativity to flourish, wrote about, talked about, inspired, mentored the creative spirit, and those who gave much, but have not been, for whatever reason, recognized by the mainstream.
    [Show full text]
  • Queer Alchemy: Fabulousness in Gay Male Literature and Film
    QUEER ALCHEMY QUEER ALCHEMY: FABULOUSNESS IN GAY MALE LITERATURE AND FILM By ANDREW JOHN BUZNY, B.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts McMaster University © Copyright by Andrew John Buzny, August 2010 MASTER OF ARTS (2010) McMaster University' (English) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: Queer Alchemy: Fabulousness in Gay Male Literature and Film AUTHOR: Andrew John Buzny, B.A. (McMaster University) SUPERVISOR: Professor Lorraine York NUMBER OF PAGES: v, 124pp. 11 ABSTRACT This thesis prioritizes the role of the Fabulous, an underdeveloped critical concept, in the construction of gay male literature and film. Building on Heather Love's observation that queer communities possess a seemingly magical ability to transform shame into pride - queer alchemy - I argue that gay males have created a genre of fiction that draws on this alchemical power through their uses of the Fabulous: fabulous realism. To highlight the multifarious nature of the Fabulous, I examine Thomas Gustafson's film Were the World Mine, Tomson Highway's novel Kiss ofthe Fur Queen, and Quentin Crisp's memoir The Naked Civil Servant. 111 ACKNO~EDGEMENTS This thesis would not have reached completion without the continuing aid and encouragement of a number of fabulous people. I am extremely thankful to have been blessed with such a rigorous, encouraging, compassionate supervisor, Dr. Lorraine York, who despite my constant erratic behaviour, and disloyalty to my original proposal has remained a strong supporter of this project: THANK YOU! I would also like to thank my first reader, Dr. Sarah Brophy for providing me with multiple opportunities to grow in~ellectually throughout the past year, and during my entire tenure at McMaster University.
    [Show full text]
  • W. H. Auden and His Quest for Love Poems of 1930S a Thesis
    W. H. Auden and His Quest for Love Poems of 1930s A Thesis Presented to The Graduate School of Language and Culture Hiroshima Jogakuin Unxversity In Partial Fulfillment of The Requirements for the Degree Master of Artぷ by Hiromi Ito January 1998 CONTENTS Intro du ction "1929" II "The Wanderer" 23 Ill "A Summer Night {To Geoffrey Hoyland)〟 from Look, Stranger! 30 IV "0 what Is That Sound〝 from Look, Stranger! 42 "On This Island〝 from Look, Stranger! SB VI " Lullaby" 55 Conclusion . 61 Notes 63 Biblio grap hy 64 Intro duc tio n First of all, the writer would like to introduce a brief survey of W. H. Auden's biography. WysLern Hugh Auden was born on the t∬enty-first of February, 1907. in the city of York in the northern part of England. He is the third and last child of George Augustus Auden and Constance Rosalie Brickenell. They two are devout Chrxstians of the Church of England. Wystern was the youngest of three boys. In 1915, he entered St. Edmund School, where he first met Chrxstopher Isherwood. a colleague of his in his later years. Isherwood was three years ahead of Auden in school. Then he want on to Gresham′s school in Holt, Norfolk. He majored in biology, aiming to be a technical expert. He started to write poems in 1922 when his friend, Robert Medley asked him "Do you want to write a poem?" In 1925. he graduated from Gresham′s school, and then entered Christ Church College, Oxford University. He was an honor student majoring in natural sciences, and later he switched off Lo English literature.
    [Show full text]
  • Sidney Keyes: the War-Poet Who 'Groped for Death'
    PINAKI ROY Sidney Keyes: The War-Poet Who ‘Groped For Death’ f the Second World War (1939-45) was marked by the unforeseen annihilation of human beings—with approximately 60 million military and civilian deaths (Mercatante 3)—the second global belligerence was also marked by an Iunforeseen scarcity in literary commemoration of the all-destructive belligerence. Unlike the First World War (1914-18) memories of which were recorded mellifluously by numerous efficient poets from both the sides of the Triple Entente and Central Powers, the period of the Second World War witnessed so limited a publication of war-writing in its early stages that the Anglo-Irish litterateur Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-72), then working as a publications-editor at the English Ministry of Information, was galvanised into publishing “Where are the War Poets?” in Penguin New Writing of February 1941, exasperatedly writing: ‘They who in folly or mere greed / Enslaved religion, markets, laws, / Borrow our language now and bid / Us to speak up in freedom’s cause. / It is the logic of our times, / No subject for immortal verse—/ That we who lived by honest dreams / Defend the bad against the worse’. Significantly, while millions of Europeans and Americans enthusiastically enlisted themselves to serve in the Great War and its leaders were principally motivated by the ideas of patriotism, courage, and ancient chivalric codes of conduct, the 1939-45 combat occurred amidst the selfishness of politicians, confusing international politics, and, as William Shirer notes, by unsubstantiated feelings of defeatism among world powers like England and France, who could have deterred the offensive Nazis at the very onset of hostilities (795-813).
    [Show full text]