Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your work.

I grew up in Manhattan and on the North Shore of Long Island. I was dispatched to boarding school at age 11. Shortly thereafter, my grandiose childhood dream of being a senator was dashed when I realized that I was gay. My sophomore year at Harvard was interrupted when I was hospitalized with severe depression. Upon returning to school I read Ariel by Sylvia Plath in one sitting, immediately after which I was inspired to write several passable poems. It suddenly became clear that my vocation was to be a poet. I have begun to write prose only recently.

How did you choose your book’s genre?

Portraits From Life is something of a generic hybrid. It is part memoir and part critical study of a number of artists I came to know personally and whose lives and works I find both exemplary and admirable. Its first section consists of portraits of the eminent poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, with whom I studied at Harvard; the editor and novelist William Maxwell; the choreographer Erick Hawkins; and the poet Marie Ponsot, whose poetry workshop I found revelatory and that I attended twice in my 50s. I delve into my identification as a gay man in discussing Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf, a superb gay coming-of-age novel that I have always found deeply moving. And I explore my sense of kinship with Hawkins, who was bisexual, and whose dances, which I likewise found moving, I attended on yearly pilgrimages to the Joyce Theater in New York.

The second section of Portraits deals with my changing attitude over time to the work of Robert Lowell. As a young man and aspiring poet, I felt antipathy toward his work. I had little sympathy with the confessional mode and was put off by what seemed to me a strain of reptilian cruelty in a number of his poems about his family. The last chapter of Portraits, informed by my own ongoing struggles with mental illness, attempts a more mature reappraisal of Lowell’s work and reflects an appreciation of the stamina and courage that must have been required to produce it.

Was your work influenced by any other queer texts?

Among the queer writers I admire the most are the usual suspects—Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, H.D., Djuna Barnes, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. Slightly less well known is the astonishingly brilliant work of the novelist and social chronicler James McCourt.

Who is your primary audience?

As a poet, I don’t identify with any particular school or espouse any prescriptive poetics. Nor do I have a target audience in mind. More recently, as a writer of prose, I simply feel an obligation to write as lucidly and gracefully as possible. I recently heard from a friend that his 97-year-old mother had just read and enjoyed Portraits. I would like to nominate her as my ideal reader!

What are you working on now?

I am putting the finishing touches on Lamentations, my book of poems that is scheduled to be published by Ristretto Books in about a year. Its centerpiece is a 40-page poem in the voice of Orpheus, whom I envisage—picking up on Ovid’s version of his myth—as being gay.

Portions of this Q&A have been edited for clarity.