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5.0 out of 5 stars
The Poetry Reaches Deep into the Gay Spirit, 20 Jun 1999
By A Customer
"A Day for a Lay" came first to my attention as an "underground" poem by WH Auden. My friend, the Late Cade Ware, a Gay Activist in Washington, DC, brought it to me and we marveled at its wonderful images and sensual awareness. How we longed for more gay poets. Well, there are gay poets of great passion. Not sentimental boy meets boy, or the the bathos of death poets, but poets that give us insight to power of life! Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, a remarkable Gay poet himself, edited "A Day for a Lay -- A Century of Gay Poetry." As clear in his introduction, Dillard wrote that he "...leaned toward intimacy versus politics" in this centennial anthology. He maintained that intimacy "is more authentic, more timeless, and bucks the masculinist agenda." The poets included are Edward Carpenter, Constantine Cavafy, Lord Alfred Douglas, Federico Garcia Lorce, WH Auden, Tennessee Williams, Harold Norse, Allen Ginsberg, Ian Young, Antler, Vytautas Pliura, Jim Corey, Mark Doty, Timothy Liu, and Kirk Read to name just a few of this powerful gathering of great Gay writers. Mutsuo Takahashi's introductin to his "Ode," he says so sacredly: In the name of man, member, and the holy fluid, AMEN. This is the heart of this gathering of Gay poets. To me this is one text I want on my bedside table to read just before going to sleep. The power in these words says that "being a Gay man is a mystic, marvellous being."
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