Notes on Article

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By BB Smith (Ossining, NY). I work at Pace University driving coach buses and vans. Pace has numerous campuses; I truck the kids around from White Plains to Pleasantville and Briarcliff. I also have a Master’s degree in Teaching and a Certificate from Cambridge University (UK) to teach English as a second language. I received that by living for a summer in Halifax, NS. But I prefer to ignore the politics of education. I began wandering—called running -away-from- home—when I was a curious four-year old, and I met all kinds of interesting people from the farmer's wife next door who fed me toasted cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s Tomato Soup, cooking it over her wood stove every day, to complete and total strangers when I would wander off from the family compound in the Catskills and lose my way in town. Bumming around can take on deep and important significance. I wasn't particular. I wanted to experience the whole world. Lived in Mexico with the Zapotec Indians for a number of years, for one, and studied in Universities in Northern and Southern France for another. My diaries go back to my 8th birthday....And you see the hypocrisy in others who haven't arrived at their own solutions, but are always willing to collapse and agree with the crowd. Obviously I was no part of the crowd. In fact, I was a loner. Even as a small child. I had three sisters but was the youngest and had to entertain myself. It was always three against one. (In fact, I began reading books from my father's library by age three and taught my five year old sister how to read.) Because I felt so strongly about what I discovered and believed in, I obviously didn't do too well in school at subjects that required teacher approval, unless it was a teacher who valued individual thinkers. But I could always save myself from complete failure by writing reports, at which I did a pretty good job. The fairy tale "The Three Feathers" has particular significance for me.

On “Gilgamesh” and Gilgamesh o the Editors of Poetry magazine RE Spencer Reece’s “Gilgamesh” (Poetry

April 2010): Mr. Reece seems to think the matter of his love-life as a gay

man in 2010 is comparable in scope to the epic poem Gilgamesh, written four

thousand years ago. For in his explanatory notes with your magazine he claims

“it was high time the story be brought back”. I’m aghast! That’s quite some

statement ... It shows a gigantic lack of understanding, if not hubris.

Apparently Mr. Reece just doesn’t get it, so infatuated is he with thinking the

events of his life and that of the king of Ur are somehow similar and match

each other.

But there is absolutely no comparison. To begin with Gilgamesh is a

fragment, not by fanciful design but by the genuine passing of thousands of

years buried in the desert. And it’s an epic of roiling passions. Where’s the

passion in Spencer Reece? Apparently it’s found in lines like these: “We met at

the gay community center…/where they sponsored The Coming Out

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Group…/We played Scrabble:/ I arranged the tiles and you kept score…/We

went about our days unseen and we loved that….”

he character of the king of Ur is larger than life, and larger than life is his

suffering according to the translation by Stephen Mitchell. He is a giant on

the arid landscape of the Middle East, vulnerable and human. He’s tortured

and in grief for Enkidu, his ‘boy’ ‘friend’, a primitive, unsocialized, peasant full

of natural energy, and after Enkidu dies he knows he’s going to die, too, and

he’s in grief for himself! The horrid mystery and tragedy of death and dying

does not even exist in Reece’s poem, much less does he struggle with it.

My understanding is, Gilgamesh’s energetic love for Enkidu, if it is

homosexual, is nothing like the safe and secure tempest in a teapot of Spencer

and Paul in Florida, circa two-thousand AD. Life in 1800 BC can’t be imagined,

or measured, or repeated, because we simply don’t live that way. You can rest

assured the passions of our lives are watered-down by all our modern

conveniences (and all that Starbucks coffee we drink.).The worst we fear is the

political-correctness police.

The king of Ur was a man; he wasn’t a gay guy.

Gilgamesh the epic is not simply the story of two men who love each other.

It seems to me they went beyond the infatuation of being “in love” to a

profound male-bonding, a fact which is often found with men’s friendships on

the battlefield, which would make sense here. And Enkidu didn’t walk away

because he wanted a younger boy-toy as did Reece’s lover. Enkidu mysteriously

fades and dies.

Come to think about it, where is Spencer’s battles with the goddess Ishtar,

the Great Goddess of Creation who influenced men’s lives by seducing—then

killing—them? When she came calling, a man was obligated to have sex with

her before he was slain. (Gilgamesh cleverly managed to get around that issue).

Gay men aren’t shopping for romantic involvements with women so women

don’t impose their courtship tensions, issues, and threats. The only woman in

his poem is “Aunt Annie in a nursing home.”

I hear no clashing of swords in Spencer’s poem, no stepping over mountains

on the long hot journey, no cries in the darkness, no thundering of Humbaba’s

feet doing battle in the forest. Only: “we had begun to see announcements in

The New York Times/so we knew it was possible to print:/Paul O’ Shaughnessy

and Spencer Reece were joined on a celery/green love-seat…”

“What I am resonating with now is the love that was there in a relationship”,

declares Reece, obviously thrilled to be announcing his affections to the world

with the publication of this poem. But in fact, his self-revelations appear giddy

and immature, hence uncomfortably embarrassing to witness.

I’ll spare the Cleanth Brooks New Criticism, although I think it should be

mentioned here. The New Criticism was a practice of the study of literature,

especially poetry that dominated college campuses in the mid-20 th

century. It

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stressed the writing not the writer. Poetry students focused on studying a text

closely, passage by passage, examining all its attributes such as rhyme, meter,

setting, characterization, plot, coupled with the techniques of tension, paradox,

irony, and ambiguity. In other words, craft. In their analysis, they were to

exclude reader response, and author’s intention, ignore historical and cultural

influences, and avoid moralistic bias at all cost—because these things tend to

bring into play other elements which aren’t relevant to the work.

It was a great way to appreciate the craft of great writers.

ince we don’t study poetry in such disciplined depth today, it appears

literature is witnessing a real break-down in quality and a lack of

understanding of the poet’s art, preferring poets who simply “resonate”

emotionally, declaring that if the poet says he feels it, everyone else will feel

it, too. (In that case, what’s the difference between the work of such a poet

and that of the high school student mooning in verses over his lost love?)

Reece’s “bringing the story back” is hardly the same Gilgamesh. And 90,000

submissions missed a chance at publication in Poetry for this piece.

S

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