New models of poetry community, Prof Peter Middleton
by Laurence Georgin
Poets have always tended to form communities, and since the early twentieth-century this has become the norm. The absence of market value for this art-form means that poets can often only survive through the mutual support of each other as readers, editors and publishers. Between the mid-1940s and the 1970s, two largely independent groups of mostly gay male poets in New York and San Francisco began to develop a poetics based around their experience of community. Their subject matter and their poetic forms were shaped by intense self-questioning about what it meant to be part of a community based around experiences of dissident sexual identity. Read more…
Categories: English. Tags: Gay, Gay literature and Male homosexuality.