The Return of Thomas James

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!