For this online seminar, I’ll be presenting research from my current project, Never By Itself Alone: Queer Poetry in Boston and the Bay Area, 1944-present. This study moves from the publication of Robert Duncan’s ‘The Homosexual in Society’ in 1944—by all accounts, the first out gay essay to be published in the United States—through to the present day, tracing a hitherto unexplored series of groups of queer poets living, writing and working in Boston and San Francisco and environs during the era of the Lavender Scare, Stonewall, AIDS and the present conjuncture of homo-nationalism and a resurgent Far Right. This is a project of recovery which thinks about the past as something that might be activated in the present. A principal focus is on the ephemeral and defiant publications produced by these poets, outside the zone of the literary mainstream and its circulation of normative forms and ideas: the Boston Newsletter, Capitalist Bloodsucker-N, Open Space, Fag Rag, Measure, Mirage, Off Our Backs, Set, Soup. In pamphlets, books, newsletters placed in gay bars, nationally distributed Gay Liberation newspapers, literary journals, broadsides, photocopy, mimeograph production or scrawled by hand, these poets worked out a new queer poetics that remains vibrant and vital. Some—by no means all—of these poets are: Jack Spicer, John Wieners, Stephen Jonas, Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Adrian Stanford, Stephania Byrd, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy and Eileen Myles. This talk will introduce the project and furnish some further details.

David Grundy is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Warwick His first critical book, A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets, appeared from Bloomsbury in 2019.