A Day for a Lay: A Century of Gay Poetry

by Gavin Dillard

From Greece's forthright Cavafy to France's renegade Genet; from Oscar Wilde's beloved Lord Alfred Douglas to Ginsberg and the Beats; from senior poets such as Harold Norse to the kids who will be writing poems in the new millennium--Gavin Dillard, one of the world's best-loved contemporary poets, has gathered the best of the 20th Century gay poetry "lest it be lost to us except in the lonely vaults of queer archives."

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

303 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1999

Reviews

[Timothy Juhl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of the poetry in this anthology has a very dated feel to it now, considering everything that has happened since it was first published. In fact, one of the contributors, Kirk Read, I met in 1992 when he was just 19 years old and had published a poem in the gay magazine "Christopher Street". He is now 52 years old. Hardly the twink I lusted after at the OutWrite Gay Writer's Conference in Boston that year.

The other thing I noticed (and I was once guilty of this same thing) was much of the poetry centered on sexual adventures, private lustings, and one-night stands (I have volumes of this stuff from the 1990s). Even the older poems from before Stonewall featured in this collection (while written better) still seem preoccupied with sex. It is our nature when we are young, after all. And this isn't the real problem with those poems, especially that of the contemporary gay poets.

It's the narrative verse they choose, which feels more like they've just written an accounting of a sexual encounter and then split the lines up to make it look like a poem. Often times, there's nothing that feels substantive or self-aware (I'm sure some of my poems from that time period might look the same).

Thankfully, there's a few poems by Mark Doty, Frank O'Hara, and Thom Gunn, to remind me that gay poetry, even when it's erotic or sexual, can still have impact.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some great poems here as well as some mediocre poems, some insightful poems and some vulgar poems. If you like gay poetry, this anthology is definitely worth a look. I did a quick skim through this book but I may order it again from my library's remote borrowing service, MNLink. The Two Harbors, MN, library wouldn't carry a book such as this one, it's being too far "out there" for a small town library.