The title of my second collection of poetry, Other Fugitives and Other Strangers, comes from a line in the final stanza of the poem “Reasons” by the late Thomas James:
I am aware of your body and its dangers.
I spread my cloak for you in leafy weather
Where other fugitives and other strangers
Will put their mouths together.
Sandra McPherson, my former poetry teacher, had mentioned him to a fellow grad student in passing, and my ears perked up when she referred to James as “Mr. Plath.” Since I was a huge Plath devotee at the time, I just had to find out for myself. The search was a lengthy one.
Perhaps it was the fact that in 1993, email wasn’t the everyday tool that it is now, or that search engines in general, like Google, were not even around, so I researched James the old-fashioned way: the library stacks.
At UC Davis, where I was enrolled in the MA program in creative writing, the shelves were well stocked with old literary journals, and though James’ only poetry book Letters to a Stranger (published by Houghton Mifflin in 1974) was not available, I did find individual pieces (like the poem “Reasons”) in dusty copies of Poetry from 1970-71.
It was the poem “Reasons” that did it for me. It was a gay cruising poem. I was sure of it. This strengthened my resolve to find a copy of that book since I did not find any other information on James, other than the discovery that he had killed himself a year after the publication of his book. “Mr. Plath,” indeed. Though, Plath-like, his poetics roam the darker halls of humanity. From “No Music”:
It is impossible to move in all that white.
Your face is a blossom thickening to anonymity,
Erasing its features in a surge of drowsiness.
One dark hand buds and loses its distinction.
The light bruises and steps out of the room.
A few years later, while I was a graduate student at Arizona State University I struck gold: I found a copy of Letters to a Stranger. I read it, reread it, Xeroxed the entire book since it was long out of print, and kept it close to my private stack of cherished verse. But Thomas James the poet and his fate became even more of a mystery to me. I gathered the following from the text:
James dedicated the book to his parents, who died the same year: 1972. It only added to the startling timeline of the final years of his life.
The poem “Hunting for Blueberries” on page 7, is a bizarre account of a speaker’s molestation of a younger cousin. I tried to force myself away from this reading, but the lines always guide me back to this unsettling one. What burdens plagued thee, Mr. James?
The bio throws out another mystery: it says he is the author of the novel Picture Me Asleep, which was “dramatized by an experimental theater in the Chicago area.” I have found no other evidence of such novel’s existence.
Rereading “Reasons,” I am still convinced it’s a cruising poem, though I have not confirmed if James was gay. The jacket photo of James shows him in a provocative stare, his mane combed over to the side. His dress too is ambiguous. But through today’s lens it’s always difficult to assign a specific sexuality to the late 60s/ early 70s look.
Maybe I’m misreading all of it, for the sake of my own desire—the need to find yet another gay poet role model in Thomas James, whose book I love. Readers will have a chance to judge for themselves. I recently found out that Graywolf Press will be reissuing Letters to a Stranger through their recovery series. And though I did manage to locate a 1974 copy via a rare publications dealer online, I’m relieved I will have to stop protecting my book whenever other poets ask to borrow it. Get your own!
Yes, it’s a good book. I recommend the poem in the voice of an ancient Egyptian mummy, a poem Lucie Brock-Broido used to give out to her students (she may still do).
Just to note that a reperint of James’s legendary book is indeed forthcoming at last,
as the second volume in Graywolf’s Poetry Re/View Series. (The first, The Collected Poems of Lynda Hull, was published in 2006.) The new edition of LETTERS TO A STRANGER includes a brilliant introduction by Lucie Brock-Broido, and several previously uncollected poems by Thomas James. It will be out in spring 2008.
I am just finding these blogs on Thomas James. I knew him as Tom Bojeski. We went to high school together and were part of a group of six students, all in the same graduating class, who were part of a drama and debate group. Tom edited our class literary magazine — I still have my copy — and drew the cover design for it. Our mutual friend, Ron Thelo, kept me in touch with what Tom was doing until Tom committed suicide. Ron died a couple of years later. I have been looking for Tom’s book for 30 years since hearing about it from Ron. I’m so happy to find these discussions of his work and to find that the book has been re-published.
It’s strange and wonderful to have found Tom’s reprinted book on a bookstore shelf–I’d been hoarding my copies for years, thinking I had the only ones in the universe. My wife Mary Lynn and I went to school with Tom at JTHS and JJC (hi, Margaret–nice to have seen your Oct. 145posting). Lucie Brock-Broido’s devotion to Tom’s work is much admired, but I’d argue several adjustment to what is likely to become the received opinion of his work now. To insistently couple his name with that of Sylvia Plath in any subservient way is a distortion–Tom was writing poems as accomplished as those allegedly under her influence while he was in high school and junior college. The manuscript he carried in 1966 contained 70 or 80 poems (by my recollection) that deserve print as much as those in Letters to a Stranger. Further, to mark or market him as a “gay” poet is ghettoizing. Tom had male as well as female friendships that were not predicated on sexuality–or perhaps the status of that sexuality in the mid-Sixties, in a steel-mill city outlying Chicago, needs to be better understood as he negotiated his young manhood. It was not his primary operating system. He was a flamboyant & theatrical, as well as reclusive and a loner. Those he let close to him did not pass through sexual or political filters. His only devotion was to his poetry–and in this he was ravenous and supreme.
I have been waiting for 30+ years for the re-emergence of this fine poet. Thank you Robert Bensen and Margaret Leinen for your recollections. I too was a fellow student at JTHS with Tom. We shared many classes together, especially art class. I remember Tom’s early heroine was Edna St. Vincent Millay. Much of his earlier writing reflects her influence: especially lyrical and sonnet forms. During our years together, he shared his “leaves of grass” type collection of poems with many of us—he allowed us to write our critical and and personal responses in the manuscript itself. It was a very thick book of typewritten pages. I agree with you Robert, on your assessment of his writing. There is so much more of Tom’s lyrical record than “Letters to a Stranger.” I do hope Lynn, or someone, still has the manuscripts.. I remember a perfectly wrenching poem entitled “Take This Heart.” I can only remember a few lines, but it went something like: “Take this heart/do what you will with it/Trample it/Lay it upon the wind/Throw it agains t the moon and watch it shatter/Gather it up, piece by piece/Hold it in your hands and wait/Love will not trickle through your fingers! I remember there was much more to the poem, but it escapes me. I wish I would have memorized all–I just remember being taken by it. Tom also wrote what was to me a captivating collection of 14 stanza Elizabethan Sonnets. I typed them all into a separate collection for him–I hope it too has survived somewhere. Tom Bojeski helped me to complete the only poem I ever wrote, which was published in our senior year literary magazine. I was having trouble with a line, and he finished the line, giving coherence to the poem. I designed the cover for that final magazine, and illustrated one of Tom’s short stories. I always signed my work “rdc.” If anyone has a copy of the book, I would be pleased to receive a xerox (for my copy was lost in a flood). Tom Bojeski (Thomas James) was a wonderful poet and artist. I miss him. That voice will always be missed.