Behind the palest, least legible book cover of 2017 lies the year's most important release of writing by a gay man. "Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) adds a section of new verse by Frank Bidart to published collections that date back to the beginning of his career.
In these 600 pages, a constantly evolving Bidart emerges as Walt Whitman's other half. Where Whitman sings, Bidart laments. For all his rough maleness and celebration of it, Whitman remains the Mother of Us All. Bidart is closer to the troubled brother whom you love despite his being a little scary. It's a kind of bravery different from Walt's, more inward and ambivalent in its celebrations, if comparably candid. Bidart is also rawer and more immediate, personal with boundaries you come to trust he will manage, with refinement.
One of the things I treasure about the B.A.R. is that many of us have been with it from the beginning (1971). I don't know if it reached Bidart, now 78, in Bakersfield, but he may jolt early readers of the paper with reminders of the conundrums of being gay and conscious (not the same as "out," but "out" wasn't "out" yet) in the period after WWII.
A later Bidart speaks to the not-unguilty survivors of the AIDS epidemic in its wantonly man-slaying years, we of the baffled crowd to whom Bidart gives this voice: "Nothing that they did in bed that you didn't." His "The First Hour of the Night" series, begun in 1990, has since led to the Second, Third and Fourth "Hours," among the greatest and most complex testaments of the AIDS years, not that we or he consider them over.
You're not far in before you've braced for blows from lines of the most eloquent simplicity. To his father in "Golden State" (1973): "you finally/ forgave me for being your son, and in the nasty/ shambles of your life, in which you had less and less/ occasion for pride, you were proud/ of me."
Just-out-of-reach gay romantic love is there early on, too. "In the Western Night" (1990) reads: "Our not-love is like a man running down/ a mountain, who, if he dares to stop,/ falls over -/ my hands wanted to touch your hands/ because we had hands." We immediately know where we are. There's a less innocent echo in "By These Waters": "The boys who lie back, or stand up,/ allowing their flies to be unzipped/ however much they charge/ however much they charge/ give more than they get."
What's striking in the early works and a regular feature thereafter is Bidart's imagining himself into historical people, beckoned at time by muses including Marilyn Monroe and Maria Callas. In the longish "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky" (1983), the great dancer speaks, as do his wife (in prose) and the inescapable Diaghilev (in interjections, usually performance demands). As Bidart walks us through Nijinsky's madness, the poet speaks of art from the dancer's mouth: "I have invented a far more/ accurate and specific notation for dance;/ it has taken me two months/ to write down the movement in my ten-minute/ ballet, 'L'Apres-midi d'un Faune.'"
The poems are at their most graphic - italics, lines in ALL CAPS, flush left, flush right, centered, commanding the page - in "The First Hour of the Night," a personal if also mythical history in which the pain of the dying and otherwise departing nearly takes over. Excavating for meaning, Bidart packs experience in history, the world's and his own, intertwined.
He salutes the poets of yore and waves at his teachers and contemporaries (a fond mention of John Ashbery had to have been written before the poet's death on Sept. 3). Much of Bidart's work is plainly incantatory, to use an oxymoron to recognize its embrace of ambiguity and mystery.
Both reviews of the collection I've read have quoted prominently from a 2013 poem from the collection "Metaphysical Dog," called "Queer." It loops back to Bidart's beginning, and brings my review to its rightful end: "For each gay kid whose adolescence/ was America in the forties or fifties/ the primary, the crucial/ scenario/ forever is coming out -/ or not. Or not. Or not. Or not." ... "If I had managed to come out to my/ mother, she would have blamed not/ me, but herself./ The door through which you were shoved out/ into the night/ was self-loathing and terror. ... Thank you, terror!/ You learned early that adults' genteel/ fantasies about human life/ were not, for you, life. You think sex/ is a knife/ driven into you to teach you that."
The poem begins, in italics, "Lie to yourself about this and you will/ forever lie about everything."
Poet Frank Bidart. Photo: James Franco