Prancing Across the Page

James challenges Aaron to a game of Linda, Linda, Lynda, and we revisit Mark Doty's poem "Homo Will Not Inherit," and we delve into the poetry-world homophobia that Doty's poem critiques.

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Linda Gregg
Linda Gregg was born on Sept. 9, 1942 (Virgo); she died on March 20, 2019.  Her books includeAll of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (2008); In the Middle Distance (2006); Things and Flesh (1999), finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Chosen by the Lion (1995); Sacraments of Desire (1992); Alma (1985); and Too Bright to See (1981).

Read "The Lamb" here.

Linda Gregerson was born August 5, 1950 (Leo). She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2014, The Selvage (2012), Waterborne (2002), and The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (1996). As well as a writer, Gregerson is a Renaissance scholar, a classically trained actor, and a devotee of the sciences.

You can read the poem James references here.

Lynda Hull was born on Dec. 5, 1954 (Sagittarius). Her collections include Ghost Money (1986),  Star Ledger (1991), and The Only World: Poems, published posthumously in 1995 and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. In 2006, Graywolf Press published her Collected Poems, edited by David Wojahn.

You can read the poem in the game here.


Read "Homo Will Not Inherit" from Mark Doty's book Atlantis (1995) here.

In a review of Mark Doty's Source, Logan writes:
"[Mark Doty is] a poet with a gift for description, a taste for winsome subjects, an addiction to images of light (less now than in earlier books), and a narcissism all his own.
[...]
If you hug every tree on the lot, if you love everything you see (Doty could make a garbage can a thing of beauty), isn't it hard to tell one thing from another? You're just the sum of your gincrack, greeting-card sentimentality.
[...]
Doty's so busy preening, he falls victim to hilarious verbal blunders.
[...]
If you hired [Doty] to design your house, it would end up looking like Versailles on a quarter acre, with gushing baroque fountains (concrete, not marble) and interiors by Liberace. Such cheap profusion, such indulgent excess, is no better than cloying conceit. You get a hint of Doty's deeper wounds, of compromised fragility and sad vulnerability, then he lights up his lines like Vegas and tries to sell you tickets to the floor show."
--the text of the review was published in the New Criterion in December 2002, and then reprinted in a chapter titled "Verse Chronicle: The Real Language of Men" in Logan's book The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin (Columbia University Press, 2005).