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Howard Moss (January 22, 1922 – September 16, 1987)
Howard Moss (January 22, 1922–September 16, 1987) was an American poet, dramatist and critic, who was poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine from 1948 until his death.Moss was born in New York City. He attended the University of Michigan, where he won a Hopwood Award. He is credited with discovering a number of major American poets, including Anne Sexton and Amy Clampitt. He was a closeted homosexual.
W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman co-wrote a famously concise clerihew in his honor:
TO THE POETRY EDITOR OF THE NEW YORKERHis books are The Wound and the Weather (1946), The Toy Fair (1954), A Swimmer in the Air (1957), A Winter Come, A Summer Gone: Poems, 1946-1960 (1960), Finding Them Lost and Other Poems (1965), Second Nature (1968), and Selected Poems (1971), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Is Robert Lowell
Better than Noel
Coward,
Howard?
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Moss
Through Richard I met Howard Moss, the poetry editor of the New Yorker, who had a dry sense of humor and looked like Mr. Magoo, the nearsighted cartoon character with poached eyes and folds in his face. Howard lived on Tenth Street off Fifth Avenue in an apartment in a brownstone with a bright red door. He said he was “allergic” to cigarettes. In fact, he probably just didn’t like the smell of smoke, but in those days the smoker had such unquestioned rights that people who objected had to invent a medical excuse. Howard had stopped smoking two years earlier but still sucked a plastic cigarette all the time, a sort of pacifier. I, who smoked three packs a day, would become so desperate that I’d have to lean out his window – and pull the guillotine-style sash down to my knees, so that no smoke would leak back in his room. Even on freezing nights at midnight I’d be hanging out his window; now smokers would have to go down to the street.( Further Readings )
Howard was a New Yorker born and bred and seemed a holdover from the 1950s. I never saw him out of a coat and tie, but not the sumptuous Italian suits men wear now. No, he always had on those pinched, buttoned-up, pin-striped Brooks Brothers “sack suits” writers and profs wore in the fifties with the skinny rep ties. He had a creased, unhappy face with a crooked smile on his lips and a little baritone, muted chuckle. He’d say something funny and despairing and chuckle and pull a long face. He had the famous New York humor that someone once defined as mordant Jewish wit strained through a martini. He was a Jew but never mentioned that. Howard actually drank martinis, which had largely been replaced by white wine by the time I came along. They didn’t seem to affect him any more than a glass of water would affect me.
(…)
It was always evening in Howard’s mind, but in the midst of these lengthening shadows ran his jaunty humor, which really was adorable and improbable as a puppy, a golden retriever, say. He was an addict of the wisecrack, an aficionado of the parting shot. No matter how sad his creased face might look, he could always, at some unexpected moment, wedge it open with a little smile. Or more often his eyes would become the crudest of stars (one horizontal line and one vertical), and he’d avert his gaze, turn his mouth down in a circumflex, nurse his invisible prop cigarette, then laugh at his own expense. –Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
I asked to all the authors joining the GayRomLit convention in Atlanta in October (
The book is a sequel of Bite Club, but it can be a standalone, the main characters from the previous one, ancient vampire Christopher Driscoll, his new lover Troy, and coroner Becky O’Brien, are again together in an investigation, but now it’s not more about vampires, but werewolves… yes, since, after the discovery that vampires exist in Bite Club, gay population of West Hollywood is now threatened by werewolves. And of course there will be a new couple, werewolf Louis and drag queen Carlos/Shanda, so nice and cute as a couple that is a pity they are introduced more or less only half into the story.