Nols meets a Willie Leo Coakley, legend of New York Queer Poetry at the Open Mic!
Eighty-eight years is a long time to keep faith with a line of verse. William Leo Coakley has managed it. Poet writer and peace activist. Lover of men.
Nols sits down with him to ask the one question worth asking a man who has done a thing that long: how. How do you keep the appetite?
Coakley had an enemy a good one. Allen Ginsberg: the great howler, the Beat saint with his harmonium and his drug fuelled congregation, Coakley's poetry set its face against it. Coakley kept the old European hush, the rhyme, the measure. They shared a city and a century and could not abide one another. Coakley, quietly, is the one still here to tell the story.
He is also the man who once put Thom Gunn into print on Helikon Press, the queer press he ran with his lover of 48 years.
Thom Gunn, that other queer formalist who crossed from England to America and turned leather and grief and plague into stanzas built to hold. To have published Gunn and outlasted Ginsberg is a whole education in what poetry is actually for, and Coakley hands it over here.
This is an hour with a living archive who flatly refuses to behave like one.
The guest. William Leo Coakley New York poet, formalist, translator. His poems have appeared since 1958 in the Paris Review, the Nation, the London Magazine, Christopher Street and elsewhere across America, England, Ireland and Mexico, and he was chosen for the Discovery series at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center. His poem "Horses Burning" took a prize in the Sotheby's International Poetry Competition, and his translation of Cavafy won the Der-Hovanessian Prize from the New England Poetry Club. He has recited Yeats at the Irish Repertory Theatre, Dickinson at the Botanical Garden, and his own poems at the Leslie-Lohman Museum. Publisher of Thom Gunn. Adversary, at a distance, of Allen Ginsberg.
