Kirjahaku

After his graduation from Black Mountain College, Michael Rumaker made his way to the post-Howl, pre-Stonewall gay literary milieu of San Francisco, where he entered the circle of Robert Duncan. Contrasting Duncan's daringly frank homosexuality with Rumaker's own then-closeted life, Robert Duncan in San Francisco conjures up with harrowing detail an era of police prosecution of a clandestine gay community struggling to survive in the otherwise "open city" of San Francisco. This expanded edition includes a selection of previously unpublished letters between Rumaker and Duncan, and an interview conducted for this edition, in which Rumaker provides further reflections on the poet and the period. "This is a wonderfully revealing account of a series of lifechanging collisions between a young writer (Rumaker), an older writer (Duncan), a still older mentor for both (Charles Olson), a city (San Francisco), and an important era in American literature (the 1950s), when it was being turned upside down by these individuals and their friends. It's also a tender and intelligent account of a young man's coming to grips with being gay in the midst of this upheaval. Much more than memoir; it's history." --Russell Banks, author of Cloudsplitter Robert Duncan in San Francisco offers a surprising portrait of a mentor in all his witty, wicked, luminous, and vulnerable complexity. Straddling the lines of memoir and cultural history, Michael Rumaker gives a rare and delightful view of Duncan at home in the gay community while also documenting the struggles of that community in 1950s America." --Lisa Jarnot, author of Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus "In this fine memoir of this 16 months in San Francisco, Rumaker learns many lessons about being at home with who he is, in what he calls 'Robert's city.'" --Joanne Kyger, About Now: Collected Poems Michael Rumaker has written several novels and short story collections, as well as the memoir Black Mountain Days. He was born in Philadelphia and is a graduate of Black Mountain College -- where Duncan served as his outside thesis advisor--and Columbia University. He taught at City University of New York and the New School for Social Research. Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was an American poet and well-known as a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. City Lights published a book of his poetry titled Selected Poems.

The dates are important to mention in order to put the open sensuality in the novel in perspective., that is, pre-AIDS, when male-male sexuality was being liberated from its centuries-long subterranean hiddenness into a visibility if only, in this instance, of the twilit and claustrophobic "freedom" of a bath house. (M.R. from the intro)

Mickey seems to see and hear everything, revealing as he does, Michael Rumaker's amazing abilities as a novelist. Rumaker has a wonderful eye for realistic detail and an exceptional ear for dialogue. His ability to create realistic American characters living in 20th century America rivals any American novelist I have ever read. Pagan Days is one of the best novels I've read in a lifetime of reading. Michael Rumaker is a working-class Marcel Proust, a great novelist, inspired by memory to write this truly memorable novel. Anne Geismar Mickey's days as a "pagan" open his eyes to an almost mystical, but certainly aesthetic, view of the world where each experience, no matter how difficult or painful, offers him a vision that will carry him through life. Pagan Days enriches our literature, and reinforces that the avant-garde need not be unintelligible to communicate the complexity of being human. Rumaker's characters breathe like Rodin's figures-they are alive, real, sinewy, torn, ecstatic, and transformative. Jeffery Beam

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Poetry History & Criticism. "An increasingly articulate record of 'those happy few' who were its persons in the closing years of the college. The poet and rector Charles Olson makes an ample and defining pivot for the meld of stories here told of persons in displacing crisis, of elders confounded with responsibility and poverty, of the all too indifferent world surrounding this fragile company in perhaps the most decisive experiment ever to be attempted in the history of American educational enterprise." Robert Creeley