Edward Field Interview

There is an interview with a Black Sparrow author, the poet Edward Field, in The Bloomsbury Review's May / June issue, conducted by Christopher Hennessy. As it is not available online, I shall regale you with the opening portion:

"A list of the great poets of the 20th Century includes a healthy share who are gay or lesbian: W.H. Auden, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, and James Merrill. Add to that the living poets such as John Ashbery, Richard Howard, Marilyn Hackard, and Frank Bidart, to name only a few of one generation.
Since the Early Sixties, however, another gay poet has been quietly amassing a corpus of work that chronicles life as a gay man perhaps more openly, intimately, and richly than many of the above contenders. Poet Edward Field writes about Bohemia, his own Jewish heritage, his beloved Greenwich Villiage, classic and quirky American celluloid, and of course being gay."

It is a very complimentary article, as you can probably tell from the opening lines quoted above. Hennessy goes on to call Field "a poet with a sharp wit and unmistakable voice," and I would ad humor. My favorite line is when Field tells Christopher (regarding the era of Ginsberg's popularizing poetry) "I identified with the rabble."