Written by Jane Brinkley, Festival Development Intern
Sappho and Adrienne Rich
Though one was born in Lesbos and the other in Baltimore, both boast a generational re-innovation of what it means to be a gay woman– Sappho with her love poems, Adrienne with her introduction of the term “compulsory heterosexuality.” To fall in love with another woman– to fall in love with letters and poems –maybe these things would make them good community members. But if not, they could at least commune with each other, critiquing work over a couple of drinks and commiserating over what it means to be a queer writer in this– and any– time.
Lord Byron and T.S. Eliot
Known for their adaptation of modern themes in surprising ways and dying of diseases of the lung, these two men separated by time and an ocean offered similar lyrics of being and love befitting their personal experiences. Maybe they wandered similar streets looking agape at the night sky, maybe they sat on similar benches as they composed similar poems. Both often assigned as long-form writers to new students learning to annotate and analyze, they might share a laugh or build a friendship imagining the worlds their poems have built in the hearts of poets new and old.
Emerson and Mary Oliver
This one is fairly obvious– nature bends toward the page when it comes to both authors. Though Oliver writes a hundred years or so after Emerson, the two likely wandered in the early morning dew and thought of flowers and mountains and what it means to be free, even if they belonged to different schools of poetry. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to belong to the world? Who knows– yet Walt and Mary might, writing on behalf of any and everyone who wanders.
Baudelaire and Allen Ginsberg
If the heartbeat of the metropolis were a genre, both of these poets would be in the business of capturing it– though they dealt with different moments, one in Paris and one in New York, their long-form poems of radical change, of fervor and the death of culture, work well in concert. Though Ginsberg’s disciples wouldn’t likely read too much Baudelaire, there is no doubt that they would have been friends if given the chance.
Ocean Vuong and Langston Hughes
As gay writers in the city writing of diaspora, belonging, and change, these men would have much to talk about. Reviews call them pariahs and voices of a generation, they’re headers on recommended reading lists for social justice and change, but most importantly their prose and poetry sings with an understated quality of the quotidian, little moments that build up into a resolute and alchemical change in feeling across neighborhoods and then worlds of meaning.
Maggie Nelson and Anne Sexton
Nelson wrote her thesis at Wesleyan on Sexton, but that isn’t the only reason we see these two women as being part of the same poetic family. Nelson’s brash and prosaic language and Sexton’s feminist confessionalism belong on the same bookshelf, and not only for their literary similarities– they share a certain feminine yet brutal verve that transcends the particularities of their personal oeuvres. Besides, what makes better Sunday brunch conversation than the inherent carnality of womanhood and its attending frustrations? At the very least, this is a meet-up I would like to attend.