Comments on: The Return of Thomas James

By: Ray Clark (rdc)

Ray Clark (rdc) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 23:49:32 +0000

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.

By: Robert Bensen

Robert Bensen — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 18:18:23 +0000

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.

By: Margaret Leinen

Margaret Leinen — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:24:05 +0000

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.

By: Mark Doty

Mark Doty — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 15:40:45 +0000

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.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 15:41:03 +0000

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).