Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
'The appearance in print of the selected poems of Donald Britton is an affront to cynicism and a triumph over fate. When Donald died, in 1994, it was sadly reasonable to assume that the influence of his poetry would be confined to the few who had preserved a copy of his single book, the slender, deceptively titled Italy, published thirteen years earlier. As the few became fewer it seemed all but certain the audience for his poems would disappear. Donald never taught, so there were no students to mature into positions of critical authority. There was no keeper of the flame to incite publication, no posthumous foundation to subsidize it, not even a martyrology in place to demand it out of sentiment. The survival of his work would have to come about, instead, as a pure instance of “go little booke”—an instance that must now warm the heart of anyone who has ever believed in poetry. It was the poems in Italy themselves, free of professional standing or obligation, that inspired the successive affections of two remarkable editors and the confident publisher of the present selection. Donald, who despite his brilliance was a modest and self-effacing person, would be surprised.
'I met Donald on New Year’s Eve, 1978, at a crowded party hosted by Michael Lally in his loft on Duane Street in the section of Manhattan since called Tribeca. The first thing one noticed about Donald, having registered already at a distance that he was blond (“dirt blond,” he once corrected me), was the beauty of his high forehead. His eyes were blue, or 298U in the Pantome matching system (he informed me of that, as well), familiar today as the color of the Twitter logo and known sometimes as Twitter blue. But the arresting feature was the forehead, a placid expanse that seemed the emblem of intellect and imparted to his face an overall composure that persisted through even the most animated moments. The effect could be misleading. It defeated the initial efforts of painter Larry Stanton, whose portraits of Donald’s friends Brad Gooch, Tim Dlugos, and Dennis Cooper are eerily ideal to anyone who knew them, but whose attempted likeness of Donald, as part of a triple portrait with Tim and Dennis, resembles the demented hitchhiker of your worst nightmare. The forehead has distorted the face, and each fix Larry applied—he even changed the haircut—made the image less satisfactory. A subsequent effort, the double portrait of a noir Dennis and beatific Donald, was dramatically more successful. Larry was so pleased he kept this second painting a secret until its exhibition at a private gallery in the East Village, where Donald would see it for the first time the night of the opening.
'Donald came to New York from Washington, D.C., following the example of Tim, who likewise had followed a trail blazed earlier by Michael Lally. In Washington, Michael was a founder of the Mass Transit reading series that gave Tim and other now prominent poets their early audience. By the time Donald lived in Washington, Mass Transit had been replaced by an equally influential series sponsored by Doug Lang at Folio Books. Here Donald found his own early audience. In those years, whether in Washington or New York, one’s circle of poet friends was fluid, social, and embraced a heady mix of Language-centered writers and latter-day disciples of the New York School. You could meet Bruce Andrews at a party and not fear you had compromised his aesthetic. Donald thus took for granted that there was more than one way to articulate the times, and he respected any poetics that would approach the task seriously. That he himself approached it seriously is apparent from his work of this period: “La plus belle plage,” with its careening nouns that nonetheless verge on narrative, or “Notes on the Articulation of Time,” with its observation that “We need / these narratives, we want them.” One might conclude he had therefore chosen sides, as Kenward Elmslie implied in a blurb for Italy claiming Donald as a “super-Ashbery-of-the-Sunbelt.” But if that was humorous then, it is misleading today. The early "Serenade” (which I hadn’t seen until Philip Clark obtained it from Donald’s correspondence with a friend) is a reminder of a moment in our poetry when it was possible to conceive of uniting Eliot and Hart Crane, under the tutelage of Mallarmé and perhaps the wary eye of Pound, and so make an end run around Ashbery altogether. If Donald came out sometimes at the place Ashbery was to occupy a week later, well, this made the result no less worthy and gave him an insight, meanwhile, into the reproducible strategies of genius.
'Taking up residence in New York put Donald in contact with a wider circle of writers and artists, many of whom still basked in the glow generated by Ashbery and the other poets known originally as the New York School. Dennis Cooper, who was to live in the city from 1983 to 1985, described in a later interview the excitement of being introduced to that circle by his friends. “I’d go to a party with Tim and Donald and Brad,” remarked Dennis, “and there would be slightly older writers like Joe Brainard and Kenward Elmslie and Ron Padgett, and then the established greats like Ashbery and Schuyler and Edwin Denby, and nonpoets too, like Donald Barthelme and Alex Katz and Roy Lichtenstein and just an incredibly multigenerational group of artists, gay and straight, who felt some kind of aesthetic and personal unity.” That unity was more than notional. The figures named (all male, but there were women at those gatherings, too) shared for the most part a faith in chance and daily experience, a faith that whatever came in through the open window would be redemptive and nourishing, or else no worse than a disappointment, which would be nourishing as well. Tim and Eileen Myles adapted this faith to liberating effect; Eileen tagged it accurately as an aesthetic of “exalted mundanity.” But Donald had his doubts. He had acquired a good dose of skepticism from his language-oriented colleagues in D.C., internalized the skepticism of Shakespeare while performing the plays at the University of Texas, and probably learned, long before, the survival skepticism of the wise child who grows up in a provincial town. Tim occasionally wrote parodies of his poet friends and the one he dedicated to Donald, “Qum,” already captured Donald’s growing unease with the poetics of exalted mundanity and Language both: “Wanting people to desire us / we (meaning you and I) wear a bright veil / of language (meaning words) before which pale / the mundane elements of waking life.”
'Considering the dual spell of spectacle and diminishment that had begun to fasten its grip on New York and the rest of the country, a degree of unease was justified. The proposition that chance would always be nourishing appeared less obvious, for instance, as social and economic prospects were being hollowed out. Meanwhile, there was the spectacle. With momentous timing, Donald’s first year in the city had turned out to be the year the band Blondie released their chart-topping single “Heart of Glass.” A New Wave lyric aloft on a disco sound, “Heart of Glass” was regarded by some as a sellout and by others as a vindication of downtown. Donald and his friends favored the downtown clubs, but anywhere one went—bars, restaurants, the drugstore—this was the song most played. Viewed today the video may look quaint, but Debbie Harry never will, and the pulsing 24-track mix as one awaits her perfect lip-sync of the words “pain in the ass” should demonstrate what an overwhelming experience the club scene was. Donald’s preferred moment in the lyrics, by the way, was “mucho mistrust.” It was a diagnostic delight on his part even then; because disco, whether maligned or meant for the young and free, offered a taste of spectacles to come whose design was to stun the individual spirit, not augment it. Personal history might be “annihilated, ground / Into a very fine talc,” to use Donald’s words from the poem he titled, inevitably it seems, “Heart of Glass.” Since his poems possess, as he did, a kind of intimate reserve, they are likely to be read as if they lived on literary allusion alone, without reference to politics or popular culture. But the distant allusion to Rimbaud in Donald’s “Heart of Glass” (especially the “Parade”-like twist at the ending), and a possible allusion to the Herzog film of the same title, only lend depth to the poem as the meditation on spectacle it is. To read it with the clubs in mind is to be present in the strobe lights as inside a Venetian bead, on the dance floor as the little threshing floor of earth, and better prepared for the indulgent but unsettling ending in which the awed hero “elated at the portrayal of things beyond his ken / Shouldered his people’s glorious future.” In a manner consistent with the best work of his maturity, Donald’s “Heart of Glass” has the uncanny effect of having been our history, written ahead of time.
'Donald never discussed at length, at least not with me, the theory behind his poems. For an explicit quotation one has to rely on his published statement in Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms. But with “Heart of Glass” in evidence, I can safely testify that he intended his poetry to enable, rather than disable language, in the belief that poetry so energized was the ideal vehicle to move us beyond “mucho mistrust” to the usable illusion of discourse. The alternative idea that he might divest himself of language and repossess it once it was purged of injustice would have seemed, as the years went by, quixotic if not credulous. How long did one have to wait? The blunt truth was that you articulate the narrative of your time or someone of another party will articulate it for you, and you don’t have all day. One of Donald’s endearing habits in this regard was to mark the temporal narrative of our lives by planning his own birthday celebrations. For his thirty-first birthday he arranged dinner at a Tex-Mex restaurant from which we could walk afterward to the piano bar Marie’s Crisis, where Tim drove us nuts belting out from memory the show tunes he all too clearly loved to sing. For his thirty-third birthday he picked a trendier restaurant, this time more Tex than Mex, on West 55th Street. Frank and I (Frank Polach, my lover and once the law allowed, husband) discovered on arrival that we had to ring the buzzer as if for a private club. Being several years older than Donald and his other friends, we felt fortunate to be included. Upstairs we found Brad and the director Howard Brookner, the most electrically beautiful couple we knew; Chris Cox, writer and photographer, who when we first met him was the lover of Edmund White; Dennis and Rob Dickerson, whose upturned face appears in a photo by Chris on the cover of Dennis’s novella Safe; and Donald and David Cobb Craig, who had been Donald’s partner for about a year and would remain so to the end. Tim wasn’t there. He had dated David first and at the time of this party regarded Donald as a treacherous thief.
'A knowing reader may suspect today that Donald’s plan to let language follow its own initiative was equivalent to the supposedly hopeless search for a safe passage between “parataxis” and “hypotaxis,” that is to say, between the Scylla of nothing but upright nouns and the Charybdis of seductive syntax. I remember it instead as an instinctive behavior that permitted him to proceed as if the dilemma didn’t exist, as it probably doesn’t. Donald intended his poetry to be impersonal, or “non-personalized,” as he put it; but he expected it to issue all the same from personal encounters with friends and life, affairs and betrayals, necessities and emergencies. That was the point of the birthday dinners, my retelling and his planning them in the first place. There wasn’t much talk of prosody at those events. Criticism was communicated by an eye roll, groan, laughter, or shared enthusiasm. And yet it was Donald who insisted with enthusiasm that we read, and better yet get to know, Marjorie Welish; he once planned her birthday dinner, too. Their subsequent friendship, given Marjorie’s observed rigor and his apparent romance, warrants a second look at both. And it was Donald who insisted we attend a lecture at Cooper Union in which Tim analyzed meticulously the art of Larry Stanton, Joe Brainard, Bill Sullivan, and Trevor Winkfield (who did the black-and-white cover art for Italy). By then Donald had his heart set on acquiring a Winkfield of his own and would be thrilled, years later, when he was able to buy Landscape with Interior direct from Trevor's studio. The abstractions he took from such personal encounter were compressed deep in Donald's poems: an homage to Brainard’s I Remember hidden midway in “Italy,” a bow to Marjorie’s recursive disciplines in “Masters of Self-Abuse,” a recovery of Bernard Welt’s prose outcrops in “The Lake Evening.” There was even a gentle dig at my own preoccupations in “Disappearing Mountains.” By no means, however, was there indiscriminate approval. Because he had asked me once if he shouldn’t “do more for his career,” I suggested we make a raid on the 92nd Street Y, the primary venue in New York at that time for poets of grandeur. I must have thought any event would do. The reader that night was Robert Penn Warren, which was grand indeed, and Donald’s dismay as we sat trapped in the auditorium through the interminable reading was palpable. Having made it to the end, we decided to brave the reception, hypocrites on the make. But Donald was soon ready to flee. “Awful,” he told me. “Dismal.” Those were his words. He never asked what to “do for his career” again.'-- Douglas Crase
____
Further
'Donald Britton 1951 - 1994', by Reginald Shepherd
'3:am top 5: colin herd'
Donald Britton: 'DC Writers' Homes'
Contemporary Gay American Poets and Playwrights: Donald Britton
'Winter Garden', by Donald Britton
'Review Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS'
'Donald Britton (Acrostic)', by Sharon Lynn
'Writer Paints Different Picture of Disneyland'
Painting of Tim Dlugos, DC, and Donald Britton by Larry Stanton
Buy 'In The Empire of the Air'
___
Extra
Philip Clark reads a poem by Donald Britton ("Sonnet")
___
Event
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Tibor de Nagy Gallery
724 5th Ave, New York, New York 10019
Friday, May 20 at 6 PM - 8 PM
Come celebrate the life and work of Donald Britton with the release of the new book In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton, edited by Reginald Shepherd and Philip Clark and published by Nightboat Books.
Reception starts at 6 p.m. There will be a toast to Donald and his work at 7 p.m.
Copies of In the Empire of the Air will be available for sale.
Facebook event page
____
Gallery
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Donald at university
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Donald and Terry Galloway
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
1981: (l. to r.) Michael Silverblatt, Bob Flanagan, Tim Dlugos, Donald, DC, Jeff Wright, Amy Gerstler, Ed Smith
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
'Italy' (Little Caesar Press, 1981)
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Donald and his boyfriend David Cobb Craig (1983)
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
DC and Donald, painting by Larry Stanton (1984)
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Donald wearing his cat as a hat (1984)
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Donald and Bernard Welt (1984)
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
'Ladies Party' (1984): (l. to r.) DC, Howard Brookner, Brad Gooch, Rob Dickerson, Donald, Chris Cox
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
DC, Rob Dickerson, and Donald (1984)
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Donald and Douglas Crase (1986)
__
Book
Donald Britton In the Empire of the Air
Nightboat Books
'An evocative and luminous collection of poems from the late Donald Britton
'Described as “dazzling” by Edmund White and as a poet “who has The Gift and delivers The Goods” by Kenward Elmslie, Donald Britton published just one book of poetry, Italy, before his death from AIDS in 1994. In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton reprints Italy alongside previously unpublished and uncollected poems to display the full range of Britton’s fresh, vivid language and subtle humor. It is poetry by turns glamorous, wistful, intellectual, and elegant, the sharp-eyed observations of a penetrating mind lost to the world too soon.'-- Nightboat Books
____
Excerpts
Masters of Self-Abuse
You grow taller. Time stands in a hole, borrowing from sleep. Where you stand is borrowed, the hole of sleep is yours. No time passes. An evening’s government grows old, passing its borrowed stance into a hole, to sleep until the new government stands taller.
I see new prisoners swoop past in borrowed limousines until, late in the evening, is the sleeping government still standing? Old times, newly gowned, resemble the tall prisoners asleep in a hole, where passing limousines govern the swooping from evening to evening.
You borrow your resemblance from a hole in the gown. Evening dilapidates, in time, into several pools. Each is stained to resemble a government limousine holding the sky prisoner: a standing pool of sleep newly dilapidating. You must have passed in a borrowed gown as the sky slept, a gown of islands governed by prisoners of the late evening, and where you stood dilapidated. Lifting their gowns for you to swoop into sight, these evening stains hold late, resembling islands of dilapidating limousines asleep in the old sky.
I wonder what dilapidating prisoners think of the infinity of stains. Each island fits its hold, but where each resemblance? I want to touch the hole, to gown its pool of imprisoned sleep in borrowed, swooping light and lift the stain out of government. A wonderful pool stains the island it touches, a dilapidated light resembling sleep. The sky is a fit government until time borrows several thoughts from the limousine pool, and each gowned prisoner swoops from sight in the sleep of an infinite evening.
You blame the government for the island’s dilapidated sleep (I must have been part of that machine): an infinity of paper limousines standing in a pool of city light that fits in a hole (the sunlit evenings, the sleeping pools, vanishing into the sky) in the sky. Is this future yours, borrowed from a prisoner? (Is the tone to blame for a hole in the sun?) Or are the islands, asleep in paper gowns, stained by some resemblance to the future, holding you to blame? Will cities of the future be prisoners (the prisoners think the tone resembles paper cities out of the past, old limousines performing in their sleep) untouched by light, wondering where the islands grew still? You want to hold the evening on paper, lift the city out of its hole, sleep in a pool resembling the sun. You borrow the sky for a gown, to pass an infinity of dilapidated evenings touching the papers of a sunny future in government. Each time a new thought stains the prisoner, your sleepy resemblance papers the sky. A cool evening, asleep in some hole in the city (swooping and standing still, in the cool mechanical light that holds the city to the island and the sun in the sky’s thoughts), borrowing dilapidated futures from the light. Several futures fit the growing gown, and each is a prisoner, resembling you, and sleeping late. The city, the wonder, the infinite passage of islands in vanishing limousines, holding and lifting to the sky the city and its stains: fit sights to cool the sun.
In Ballet, You are Always a “Boy”
In ballet, you are always a “boy,”
Growing up into unmade suits
Whose sleeves will deny
Any knowledge of you. For the day
Is wide, yet fixed, a stream
Eddying into smudge mist,
Seemingly penciled in
Beneath this sky’s magnesium flash,
Though more real than grief
And what you cannot yet have remembered—
Whistled or hummed. Later,
When we have less time, we may know
What we know now in an altered light
That bleeds from below, stairs
Burning above, passing a wintry dusk
In the ordinary way,
And feel reappear in a breeze
Floating about a column
The close, the familiar moisture,
The unheeding fluidity
Of the old days and years.
Santa
Santa is the incomplete
Embodiment of our charity. Poor Santa,
His many bodies minted
Of human waste, his voice the choir
Of his own need. I feel so empty,
By myself, whispering my lists
In Santa’s spiral ear, while he lists
Slightly to one side like skeet
Propelled into the air by a device
No human hand has touched, so obsolete
Is effort when a dime skims ice.
Emit a cry for every useless thing:
Abundant padding so contrived
No one of us shall feel deprived.
In the Empire of the Air
Scourging the sea with rods
To punish it for what it has engulfed,
Or running naked with your bronzed friend
Through yellow broom sage:
You can’t be sure which remedy will be
Fatal, or whether the density of the side-effects
Will prevent you from moving backwards
Across the threshold, to read
What the instructions might have said
If anyone had taken time to write them down,
So we could torture the words, make them
Confess their dirty little secret. It’s tiered,
As earth is, with faults perfectly expressing
A gravitational will that we should stumble
Over them. And all the hints
Get sponged up at night. Above the land fill—
Stars, glowing zircon strands of dump truck highbeams
Lined up, liquid and radiant, past the last
Open-all-night erotica boutique
Just over the state line of the last state.
Maybe they’re sparks we ignite
Rubbing each other the wrong way, fiery notes
Unwary rhapsodists pluck from the strings
Of incendiary violins. Is that what you think, too?
In truth, I prefer your mistaken identity,
The upside down one I can see at the back of my eyes
Before they flip you into focus, projecting you
Across a space at once so vast and so small
As not to excite even scientific curiosity.
But the light you throw off, out there,
Is not enough to see you by. The tapered crimps
And ridges, scraped into the wall of the well,
Could be any number of people. Try
To communicate with the dying sometime
And you’ll know what I mean. Each one is perfect,
Of its kind. Also, all are alike. Not even they
Can tell you, though, where the similarities end,
Whether it will be any different
For you. All I know is that what you are
To the waxed, limpid air of freak May in December
Or to this room, piled high
With genial household archetypes,
Is a formal relationship only, as the shape
Of an airplane-shaped shrub is
To the living plant it’s made of. But to me,
And all I said and did, and all the time
It took me to get here, so much I forgot
The purpose of my visit, but kept on anyway; to me,
As I hold you, and the messy edges
Of our privacy overlap and then withdraw—
Think of me as three persons, and as one,
But always who I am, ever changing
And complete, in the empire of the air
Or on the street, or with white sails
Stiff against the wind,
Whistling far out over the water.
Disappearing Mountains
Silent trains surge all night
Through disappearing mountains.
Some are surprised
At having forever already arrived.
But nature horrifies and instructs,
As you see only what is missing,
Wearing your body outside your clothes.
The sound of everything
Breaking would explain perspective
If you backed away. How different
These now are: shining like spurting moss
At the core of a cube of ice,
Then angling off in speeded-up slow motion,
Though perhaps this map
Is wrong, is the shape of our breath
In the fan’s mouth,
A national dream in some countries.
We stand here, offhandedly,
In this meanwhile, while the distance
Slots us into itineraries
Or makes a clean break, accurate
Yet superficial: a decay.
Or like an anxious diner glimpsed
Through restaurant windows,
Who, had he lived in a previous century,
Would now be dead, you approach
“The Cat Ferris Wheel,” through revolving
Doors, neither in nor out, perpetually
Making up your mind. (Your other brain
Told you all about us, the foothills
Pledging vegetable remorse,
Floodlit, and another decent fellow arriving,
America, on the screened-in porch.)
As the aspirin to the headache,
So he to you: he cures you,
America, from whose agitated peaks
Only empty funicular cars return…
Something out of The Crawling Eye
Has consumed the lodge! We see you, still,
By looking away, more you
In afterthought, less us when the topic
Turns round again to you like wind
And sun that flap the bedsheets dry
And are glamour to outsiders alone,
And you know who you are, distributed
Like dust after a sneeze,
In unnumbered arrondissements, our minutes kept
Re-remembering you.
*
p.s. Hey. Donald Britton is a truly amazing poet, one of the very best of my generation, in my opinion, and he was one of my closest friends. I was very lucky to publish his only book of poetry, 'Italy', through my Little Caesar Press. His work has been almost completely lost for a long time, but this new book, which collects basically all of his poetry, both previously published and otherwise, has the potential to alter that neglect at long last. Needless to say, I so strongly encourage you to read the post attentively and to buy the book if that's within your means. And if you're in or around NYC, do try to attend the memorial reading and book launch event on May 20th. Information about the event is the post. Thank you! ** Jamie McMorrow, Sunshine-y hello, Jamie! Cool, yeah, those early and even mid-later era raves were like nothing I had ever seen. And they were so ambitious, like entire fully-fleshed out worlds, such thorough spectacles. At the time, I felt that they were the potential-reaching blood relatives of the disorientation-oriented psychedelic events I'd gone to as a young teen. As great as psychedelic concerts and events could be, their tech was so limited, and raves made them seem like, I don't know, black and white television sets or something. It doesn't seem like there are music/dance events on that scale anymore, or maybe so but they're rare. I think I will somehow manage to survive this work week, thank you. 'The Visitors' is a great song, yeah. Excited to hear that your new songs are nearly demos! Nah, I can't do anything serious on planes, it's weird. I just turn on the first blockbuster crap film I find and then move on to the next one until either they or the flight run out. I just worked and had meetings about work yesterday. A couple of emails. Trying to line up a screening of 'LCTG' in London, and maybe made some progress on that. Were your Tuesday and Wednesday a magic wand-like one two punch? ** David Ehrenstein, You remember it? If I ever saw it, I think, I was too little for it register. Yes, indeed. That is a very good interview with Ashbery, isn't it? ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Oh, you know, we just underestimated the work left to be done. I'm in resigned mode now. Just hitting the target and trying not to think about what it's taking to hit it. I can be a very practical and logical sort of person when I need to be. Hooray about your exam! I remember the last time you did an exam, or mentioned doing one, you were far less confident about its outcome, so yay again! A really good rave was like being in a UFO or something. I suppose being on Ecstasy back then when Ecstasy was was pure and the real deal helped a lot. Thanks about the work. I'll sort it. Are you freer post-exam to spend you days how you want to? ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. I'm, of course, excited to read the interview. And I think it's very cool that you're writing for L.A. Review of Books. I really like that site. Let me second your Grandieux recommendation. Everyone, If you happen to be reading this from Chicago or its environs, Steevee and I both recommend that you take the relatively rare opportunity to see one or more of three films by the great French director Philippe Grandieux on this coming Friday and Saturday. And the three films they're showing are among his very best: 'Malgre la nuit' (2015), 'Un Lac' (2008), and 'White Epilepsy' (2012). And Grandieux will be there to talk about them. Here's some info. ** Bear, Hi, Bear. I really did like it. A lot. My alley was filled. Shadow puppets, interesting. Are you using them in a traditional way or how? I will for sure alert you when the 'TVC' dates are firm. I think beginning of next year, so a ways off. Thank you about my full plate. You know how it is. And it's all for the good. Have a fine one! ** _Black_Acrylic, Thank you, Ben. Oh, jeez, okay, that Andrew is one predictable dude. I'm just looking forward to when your project is wrenched free of all of that. Wow, that is big and heartening news about Rachel MacClean! Go Scotland! ** Okay. As stated at the p.s.'s entrance, I hope you will enjoy the spotlight on Donald's book and then the book itself. See you tomorrow.