Our Deep Gossip

Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

Christopher Hennessy

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9780299295639
• Print ISBN:
  9780299295646
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies

From Walt Whitman forward, a century and a half of radical experimentation and bold speech by gay and lesbian poets has deeply influenced the American poetic voice. In Our Deep Gossip, Christopher Hennessy interviews eight gay men who are celebrated American poets and writers: Edward Field, John Ashbery, Richard Howard, Aaron Shurin, Dennis Cooper, Cyrus Cassells, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Kazim Ali. The interviews showcase the complex ways art and life intertwine, as the poets speak about their early lives, the friends and communities that shaped their work, the histories of gay writers before them, how sex and desire connect with artistic production, what coming out means to a writer, and much more.

            While the conversations here cover almost every conceivable topic of interest to readers of poetry and poets themselves, the book is an especially important, poignant, far-reaching, and enduring document of what it means to be a gay artist in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword: The Company of Poets, by Christopher Bram
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• An Interview with Edward Field
• An Interview with John Ashbery
• An Interview with Richard Howard
• An Interview with Aaron Shurin
• An Interview with Dennis Cooper
• An Interview with Cyrus Cassells
• An Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum
• An Interview with Kazim Ali
• A Selected Bibliography of the Poets' Work
• A Generation of Diversity, Excellence, and Redefinition: Recommended Reading
• Anthologies and Journals: A Resource