Norse Saga: A Poet And His Lovers

norse190Poet Harold Norse (pictured), 92, has died, and his obituary was by far the most interesting thing in this weekend’s New York Times. Money quote: ‘Harold stood outside the Beat tradition, on his own ground, but he found in the Beats and in Bukowski a certain community.”…’In “Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A 50-year Literary and Erotic Odyssey” (1989), Mr. Norse provided a full roll call of friends, lovers and colleagues. It made for an impressive list, with names like Julian Beck and James Baldwin (both friends from his days in Greenwich Village in the 1940s), Tennessee Williams (his roommate in Provincetown when Williams was writing “The Glass Menagerie”), Ned Rorem, James Jones and Anaïs Nin.’ Some young scholar should burrow into such lists and determine: who slept with more postwar artsy A-listers, Norse or Rorem?

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