This interview was submitted by Craig Gidney.

Philip Clark, a former columnist for The New Gay, will be releasing a book he co-edited with David Groff entitled Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson) later this month. The four-year project collects the work of poets across genders, ethnicities and languages, all of whom succumbed to AIDS, from the first epidemic to present times. A number of promotional events are planned for the book’s release, including a reading at the DC Center on December 10. Clark took time from his hectic schedule to discuss his work on the book with The New Gay, and his future research projects.

The New Gay: What was the inspiration for Persistent Voices?

Philip Clark: In 1996 and 1997, when I was in high school, I sometimes went to SMYAL, D.C.’s gay youth group. At the time, I was a huge reader and writing a lot of poetry, so I gravitated toward SMYAL’s well-stocked bookshelves and especially to the poetry section. I was very excited by the writing of such poets as Walta Borawski, Essex Hemphill, Jim Everhard, and Tim Dlugos, which I found in both their individual books and in anthologies like Ian Young’s Male Muse books. I would take the books home and pore over the poems and really want to find out more about the authors. This was before the Internet was ubiquitous, which made it a difficult task, but looking rather desperately for clues about these writers is a big part of what turned me into a researcher.

Almost without fail, when I uncovered more, I would find out that the poet had died of AIDS. Almost everyone whose work I admired was dead. It really made me think about how impermanent literature can be without an author there to promote it, especially gay written work that has never truly broken into mainstream consciousness. I’ve dedicated myself since then to keeping these writers’ memories alive, and Persistent Voices is a big piece of that. Walta, Essex, Jim, and Tim are all among the book’s contributors, so I’m trying to give back to writers whose words really sustained me during my high school years and beyond.

TNG: What is the significance of the title of the book?

PC: Given the opportunity, the poems by contributors in Persistent Voices can touch and move and inspire a whole new generation of readers, GLBT and straight. My coeditor, David Groff, and I quite literally want to see these writers’ voices persist, and we believe that they can.

TNG: Poetry is a pretty hermetic and self-contained world; how do you plan to reach a wider audience?

PC: To me, Persistent Voices is as much a book about gay culture and community being rocked by the AIDS pandemic as it is a poetry collection. I think there is a built-in audience of concerned, thoughtful people, not all of them frequent poetry readers, who will be curious to encounter these writers and their beautiful, diverse takes on love and death and sex and language and family and faith. If they know the book exists, they will engage with it. I hope they will find poets they love just as much as I do.

On the more practical, nitty-gritty side, David and I are doing our best to let everyone and their brother know that the book is being published. We’re doing as many readings as we possibly can arrange, starting with a release reading at Housing Works Bookstore Café in New York City on December 1st. At the moment, I’ll be reading locally at the University of Maryland on December 8th and at the D.C. Center on December 10th, and more events are in the works. We’ve created a Facebook page for the book that will collect details about all of these readings and performances in one place—everyone should go become a fan of the book and tell all their friends! Every reading will be unique, with a different lineup of poems and/or readers, so come to them all!

TNG: Are all of the poems about AIDS/HIV?

PC: No, only about a quarter of the poems in the book directly address the disease. Like the subtitle says—Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS—the emphasis is on the poet’s passing rather than the subject of their poems. It’s a really mixed bag: Even if a writer did address AIDS in their poems, those aren’t necessarily the poems by them that we chose to include. Other poets, like Paul Monette and Michael Lynch, are represented only by their AIDS work.

TNG: There are only two female poets in the collection; are there more female poets who passed from AIDS?

PC: Undoubtedly there are, but I had the devil’s own time trying to trace them. Persistent Voices cannot and does not claim to be comprehensive, something that would be virtually impossible to do. For a variety of reasons, less than half of the poets whose work I was able to read are included here, and there must be many more poets, male and female, who I never learned about. Our two female contributors, Tory Dent and Cookie Mueller, are a fantastic pair, though: an elegant chronicler of the effects of AIDS on the body and psyche, and an actress from John Waters’ films turned East Village art critic and cultural provocateur. I’m honored to be allowed to reprint both writers.

TNG: What is the most inspiring story you have dealing with the estates? What was the most difficult?

PC: As inspiring as literature has been for me, life beats it every time. I’ve been blessed to work with a set of patient, helpful literary executors for the Persistent Voices poets, a few of whom I now count as personal friends. The example of their dedication in representing their loved ones’ work is an inspiration to me.

As for stories of difficulties with the estates—you’re trying to get me in trouble, Craig! Of course, it hasn’t been all roses. The research process for a book like Persistent Voices can be arduous, searching for minute details that can lead you to a literary executor. I have no idea how people managed to create this kind of book before e-mail and the existence of the Internet.

One example of a specific challenge would be when an estate expressed skepticism about the book as a whole, thinking the connecting thread among the poets too flimsy or irrelevant to hold an anthology together. When I explained our desire to show the effects of AIDS on artistic communities and to keep the poets’ work alive and in front of audiences, though, that objection melted away and the estate came on board wholeheartedly. The difficulties have been minimal compared to the kindnesses we’ve been shown in creating this book.

TNG: What criteria did you use to pick poets and their poems?

PC: I gathered and read as much work by each potential contributor as I could, sometimes every poem they published, in order to get a sense of their overall style and themes. I always asked myself whether the poems were well-written, but I’d be lying to claim that was the only criteria. I did try to choose poems that were in some way representative of their author’s body of poetry, but I was also balancing other considerations: how many AIDS-specific poems are being included? Do we have enough doses of humor, to keep the anthology from being too somber? Is there a cross-section of poetic styles and poets from different communities and corners of the GLBT world? Are the poems interesting and worth reading more than once?

One major thought in my mind while compiling Persistent Voices was that there would be a lot of non-poets reading the book. Poets who read Persistent Voices will find challenging material, but I also wanted the anthology to be enjoyable for folks who don’t always read poetry, who are picking it up because they’re curious about the authors or the subject matter. In short, I wanted the book to be accessible. “Accessible” is a dirty word in the poetry community because its connotations, for many poets, are too poorly crafted or sentimental poetry, kind of like Hallmark verse. But if poets really want to reach an audience and not just be a bunch of academics chattering to each other in a corner, they have to find a way to take big ideas and difficult emotions and turn them into intelligent but understandable poetry. I think the poets in Persistent Voices did that, and I tried to choose poems that reflect that notion.

TNG: How did you get involved with the project?

PC: Because I have poor social skills. I was at a gay literary party in New York City in 2005; the guest of honor was Tab Hunter, the teen idol of the 1950s who had recently released a memoir in which he came out officially. I’m absolutely awkward at cocktail parties or anyplace where there are large groups of people I don’t know. My friends were talking to other writers and I was scanning the crowd in quiet desperation for any face I could recognize. Well, I totally blew it, mistaking Jayms Blonde cartoonist Robert Cabell for a poet with whom I was corresponding, but Mr. Cabell was very kind and chatted with this obviously uncomfortable, potentially crazy kid who had approached him.

He discovered that I liked poetry and took me by the elbow across the room to meet Craig Hickman, a tall, elegant poet with a topknot of dreadlocks. I had read Craig’s book, and he very enthusiastically introduced me to other poets in the room, along with cluing me in that I had had a minor celebrity encounter when, amidst the crowded room, I inadvertently bumped elbows with Joyce DeWitt of Three’s Company.

One of the poets I met was David Groff. It came up in conversation that David was an executor for Paul Monette, who had written extensively about the effects of AIDS in both poetry and prose. We wound up talking about an idea we’d had independently, to create an anthology that would memorialize poets taken from us by AIDS. Four and a half years later, Persistent Voices has finally come together.

TNG: There is a selection of African-American poets included in the anthology, including those with a strong DC connection. Was that intentional?

PC: We intentionally aimed for diversity in Persistent Voices—African-American poets, Latino/Chicano poets, international poets—but even if we hadn’t, it would have been impossible to claim we were creating a decent anthology without contributions from Essex Hemphill, Melvin Dixon, Assotto Saint, and several other African-American writers. It was actually quite difficult, in several instances, to find enough work to consider by certain African-American poets. There are complex factors related to socioeconomic status, racism, and homophobia that contribute to that situation. I may eventually try to write an article about some of them.

TNG: Were there poets that you couldn’t include?

PC: Many, many poets. I’ve not counted, but I sense that we’re including maybe half of the poets whose work I was able to track down. This is owing to space constraints, to not being able to find enough poems, to being unable to make contact with executors—a variety of reasons.

TNG: Both you and I knew Reginald Shepherd (albeit through different circumstances). You were working with him on a project before he died. Can you tell us about that project and its current status?

PC: Before I answer the question, I just have to say that Reginald’s loss is tremendously sad for the gay and poetry communities, and I was heartsick when I heard he had died. In my dealings with him, he was such a generous man, and really an artistic beacon in his writing and editing.

“Working with him” might be overstating my involvement in one of his final projects, though. Reginald heard about Persistent Voices, I believe from the gay poet Mark Doty, and got in touch with me. He was interested in the project as a whole, but was particularly curious to know if we were including Donald Britton, a poet whose work Reginald revered. Reginald was hoping to compile and introduce a “selected poems” by Britton, from both his book Italy (Little Caesar Press, 1981) and from an unpublished manuscript called “In the Empire of the Air.” As it turned out, I was in touch with David Cobb Craig, Donald Britton’s lovely and very enthusiastic partner and literary executor, and through David, had been able to read many more unpublished poems. I put Reginald in touch with David, and he was able to fold a group of these unpublished works into the “selected poems” manuscript. I helped by line-editing each poem against my copies, and Reginald set off to interest a publisher in the book.

Tragically, Reginald died before he could find one. The official cause of death was cancer, but Reginald was HIV positive, which likely contributed to the cancer’s aggressiveness. Both Donald and Reginald are now included in Persistent Voices. I intend to get in touch with Reginald’s executor to find out if he’d be interested in seeing Reginald’s vision for a Donald Britton book come to fruition. Reginald was something of a force of nature, and I think he’d be pleased to see his work on behalf of Donald Britton completed.

TNG: As you know, the Washington Blade suddenly folded. What are your insights into the future of gay publishing?

PC: It’s a tough field, and I certainly wouldn’t enter it expecting to be able to make significant money. Every GLBT writer I know personally has some sort of day job; I’m a high school librarian. I think the future will, in many cases, be made by going back to gay publishing’s roots: small, niche presses run by dedicated men and women who care deeply about what they are printing and the community they are reaching. Don’t expect mainstream publishers to ride to GLBT writing’s rescue. It will never happen because most GLBT books do not make money, at least not enough to interest commercial publishers.

You can either find this state of affairs depressing or you can find it invigorating. In reality, it’s both of those. But I find it invigorating. Many of the poets in Persistent Voices published their work in little magazines, in chapbooks, and through gay-specific small presses throughout the 1970s and 1980s. They did not, as far as I am able to tell, sit and moan about the state of gay publishing. They got to work creating gay writing, and with the help of collectives, like The Good Gay Poets and Other Countries, and individual editors like Ian Young, Andrew Bifrost, Chuck Ortleb, Patrick Merla, Winston Leyland, Dennis Cooper, and Paul Mariah, among many others, they published that gay writing and tapped into an audience for it. It’s a deeply inspiring story, one too little discussed and lauded, but hinted at in Persistent Voices. It’s where gay writing and publishing now has to go.

TNG: You are currently working on a biography of DC-based pornographer H. Lynn Womack, and an excerpt of your research appears in the book The Golden Age of Gay Fiction. Can you share the story of Mr. Womack for The New Gay?

PC: It’s 1958, and you’re a 300-pound, gay, albino philosophy Ph.D. with two failed marriages and a blown attempt at running a boys’ school behind you. What do you do if you have an entrepreneurial spirit and are at loose ends? Womack decided to take over the publication of some physique magazines aiming at a gay audience, set up shop on Capitol Hill, and proceeded to fight running battles with the police, the FBI, and the courts for over a decade. He’s criminally little-referenced in gay history books, considering how utterly fascinating he is. My research likely won’t result in a standard biography, but there’s a book there, and I’m going to write it.

TNG: Who are the poets and writers that you are following now?

PC: I have been reading almost exclusively nonfiction recently. Most of this has been mid-century gay history, as background research for my book on Womack. But among poets currently working, I have always been impressed by Edward Field and by Minnie Bruce Pratt. Dan Bellm is another wonderful poet who should be even better known. I published him in the William & Mary Review in 2001 and 2002; his new collection, Practice (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2008), includes those poems and is a lovely, intimate book. Among novelists, I take great pleasure in everything Christopher Bram, Paul Russell, and Neil Bartlett write. Even just among living writers, there is so much to read and take in.

TNG: Thank you for taking the time to speak to The New Gay!

Links

Persistent Voices Facebook Page

The Housing Works event page on Facebook

The Housing Works event page

The D.C. Center/OutWrite reading Facebook page

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