Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets

Michigan is known for its Poets on Poetry series, which collects the prose statements, interviews and poetry-related ephemera of individual contemporary poets; this anthology of frank interviews fits nicely alongside it. Hennessy, an editor at Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, talks to 12 contemporary poets, from the late Thom Gunn to still-younger poets Reginald Shepherd and Timothy Liu. In between, J.D. McClatchy discusses his ""audience pleaser"" poem ""Penis,"" Carl Phillips discusses how leaving his marriage cured his writer's block and Mark Doty tells of the relation between his lover's HIV diagnosis and the poems of My Alexandria. (AIDS comes up in nearly every conversation recorded here.) As an interlocutor, Hennessy is something like Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton: deeply informed, with an ability to register the hotter material without comment.