Gender and Sexuality
Gender and Sexuality in the New York School
Tim Dlugos, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, and Bernadette Mayer all sought to identify societal oppression through their works and generate public movement to bring about change. By employing the themes of gender, sex, and sexual orientation in their pieces, these artists created detailed accounts of their individual experiences and framed arguments against oppressive cultural structures that limited their abilities to exist and flourish in society. Through these representations of gender and sexuality, our poets' publications shed light on political issues such as governmental tension and economic disparity, and gave powerful examples of how to overcome stereotypes regarding the LGBTQ+ and feminist movements.
Tim Dlugos (1950-1990) was a gay, Catholic poet part of the New York School. His earlier poems celebrated his fast and openly gay lifestyle, complete with parties, relationships, and popular culture. After sobering up and getting diagnosed with HIV/AIDS later in life, his poetry shifted to juxtapose his sexuality with themes of religion and mortality as a reflection of these experiences and stigmas.1
“Dlugos’s poems assiduously chronicle the everyday life of a young poet - what he eats, reads and wears; the friends he makes; the drugs he takes; the boys he kisses; the lovers he enjoys...”2
-BOMB magazine
Photograph of Tim Dlugos. Courtesy of Poetry Foundation.
Youthful photograph of Eileen Myles. Picture taken by Tim Milk in 1983.
Eileen Myles (1949 - ) was born in 1949, and moved to New York from Boston in 1974 to become a part of the poetry project at St. Mark's Church. Through a strikingly direct tone and vivid emotional language, she used her work as a platform for community modification in the acceptance of lesbian sexuality and acknowledgement of major societal problems in the 20th century.3
“I am always hungry and wanting to have sex. This is a fact.”4
-Eileen Myles
Alice Notley (1945 - ) was raised in Needles, California, moving to Chicago and New York to pursue her work as a poet.5 She sets herself apart from other Second Generation New York School poets with a focus on motherhood as in Song for the Unborn Second Baby and by challenging the male-driven lense of poetry in her “epic” The Descent of Alette and essays Women in Poetry and Feminine Epic.
“Of course I’m not being objective it was my life As a matter of fact I feel positively defiant about”6
-Alice Notley
“Alice Notley 1981” Courtesy of LaVerne Harrell Clark Photographic Collection
Ed Sanders wearing his ‘Talking Tie’ an instrument he created which has keys that lead to a synthesizer. Photo courtesy of granarybooks.com.
Ed Sanders (1939 - ) was born in Kansas, Missouri in 1939. In an interview with Tandy Sturgeon he said “I was raised like a regular American.” He discovered poetry at the age of 15 encouraged by and English teacher. He started studying physics at the University of Missouri (UM), but hitchhiked to New York City (NYC) in the summer of 1958 because he was unhappy with the literary scene at UM. After visiting NYC he fell in love with the city and decided to enroll at New York University with a major in Greek.7
He dropped out to go on a peace walk around America. He then got arrested for trying to board a submarine in New London, Connecticut, and that is where his artistic career really started to gain traction. Poem from Jail, a poem he wrote on toilet paper while incarcerated, was his first publication. From there he would eventually go on to form Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, open The Peace Eye bookstore, and form the band The Fugs.
“A modern-day American Bacchus” 8
- Ed Sanders on himself
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1945, Bernadette Mayer (1945 - ) spent the majority of her life in New York City. She attended the New School for Social Research where she earned a bachelor’s degree. She has edited United Artists Press with her husband Lewis Warsh, led writing workshops at The Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church and been the director of the Project, and edited the magazine 0 to 9 with Vito Acconci. Currently she lives in East Nassau, New York.9
“It seems insane that we’ve been historically cheated out of this pleasure. Not only to have women as writers but also having mothers as writers.”10
-Bernadette Mayer
Photo of Bernadette Mayer. Image courtesy of bernadettemayer.com
Works Cited
1Cole, Henri. “Tim Dlugos.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 18 June 2007, https://www.poetry foundation.org/poets/tim-dlugos.
2Krute, Clinton, et al. “[Editor's Choice].” BOMB, no. 116, 2011, pp. 12–20. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23037791.
3Hunt, Emily. “Publishing Into That Mystery: An Interview with Eileen Myles.” Poetry Society of America, New York Art Council, 16 Jan. 2019, https://poetrysociety.org/feature/interview-publishing-into-that-mystery-an-interview-with-eileen-myles/.
4Myles, Eileen. “Not Me.” The MIT Press, Visual Odyssey Collaborations, 24 Oct. 1991, https://mitpress.edu/books/not-me.
5 “Alice Notley.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alice-notley.
6“Alice Notley Quotes (Author of The Descent of Alette).” Goodreads, Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/144406.Alice_Notley.
7”Sturgeon, Tandy and Sanders, Ed. “An Interview with Edward Sanders”. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 263-280, University of Wisconsin Press.
9“About Bernadette Mayer.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, poets.org/poet/bernadette-mayer.
10 Howe, Susan, and Bernadette Mayer. “Pacifica Radio with Susan Howe.” PennSound: Bernadette Mayer, University of Pennsylvania, 22 Apr. 1979, writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Mayer.php. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019.
Header Images courtesy of the Reality Studio Archive, Emory Rose Library, and UC San Diego