Daniel Diamond Biographical Note
by Philip Clark
Although he was born in Michigan and wrote movingly of a return visit home in Dec. 4-8 (1979), one of his most representative poetic sequences, Daniel Diamond was resolutely a poet of New York City. New York City was his home from 1972 until his death from AIDS in 1996, and it was there that he joined the burgeoning ranks of urban-identified gay liberation-era poets.
The sites and settings of Diamond’s poems reflect his connection with New York. Whether he is cruising an 8th Avenue bar, taking a jog through Riverside Park with an imagined version of Jesse Owens, watching parents guide their children on a costumed Halloweeen jaunt through The Rambles, or seeing a friend, suffering from AIDS, carted away from Avenue B in an ambulance, Diamond charts the streets, clubs, parks, and apartments of his chosen home. In the process, he creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of gay life in New York City over parts of three decades.
Beyond this incidental focus, though, Diamond’s is a poetry of emotion, often understated. As in his sequence of tribute poems to Isadora Duncan, “True Gesture,” humor is delivered with a deadpan calm. The elegies of Applaud the Sunset (1993) are suffused by quiet wonder. The poems sometimes feel like simple descriptions because Diamond relies on his readers to understand and supply the emotion behind the scene.
This remarkable trust in readers’ sensitivity is nowhere more evident than in his sexual poems. Even in the more explicit poems from Male Rain (1982) and the odes to S&M in Maestro (1984), Diamond aims at the emotion behind the descriptions of body parts and physical acts. The evocation of light in his sexual maestro’s beard, or the description of a boy’s face, “as frenzied as a strangler’s” following a blow job, points toward concerns deeper than any surface action. Diamond’s poems then become a true and unique collaboration between poet and reader.
Perhaps this is spurred by the unique “delivery system” Diamond devised for his poetry. As his executor, Jerry Rosco, notes in the introduction to Diamond’s Selected Poems (1977-1993) (1996), “Dan would write poems in a cluster, based on one theme or story, and then make up a small-edition fancy chapbook for his friends and other writers. Because he was also an artist [author’s note: Diamond was an accomplished painter], he put a lot of thought into the design of each chapbook.” As he rarely submitted work to magazines and instead privileged those he knew with his poetry, Diamond may have subconsciously developed a style that recognized sympathetic friends as his primary and understanding audience. Even those poems with a detached, descriptive viewpoint are remarkably intimate.
This intimacy is now on display in a gorgeous memoir. Canada’s Sykes Press has released Diamond’s Delicious: A Memoir of Glenway Wescott (2008), in which he discusses his time serving as a kind of secretary for the famous gay novelist, author of such classic works as The Pilgrim Hawk and The Grandmothers. Diamond tells stories of helping Wescott box and catalog his papers, driving Wescott through New York City in a “demon Volvo,” and together attending a Charles Henri Ford poetry reading. The memoir’s genius is that it does not appear to be going anywhere with its anecdotes until suddenly, beautifully, it has arrived. By the point when Diamond is discussing Wescott’s longtime relationship with famed curator Monroe Wheeler, selecting the perfect details to describe a snowy morning at their country house, he has written a sensitive portrait of his own friendship with Wescott, two artistic gay men reaching across a gap in generations and life experiences to achieve a deep affection. Delicious may be a memoir of Glenway Wescott, but it is equally a memoir of Daniel Diamond, the masterful self-portrait of a writer lost too soon.
Thanks to Jerry Rosco for permission to reprint poems by Daniel Diamond. Thanks to Ian Young for providing copies of poems I would not otherwise have seen. Many thanks to both Jerry and Ian for sharing their memories of Mr. Diamond.
Audience Participation
A kid of eighteen, he had a prize-winning dick.
It glowed in the spotlight as he knelt to take
his partner in his mouth. Patiently, he endured
the other’s sucking, it was part of the show,
but as they switched places, it was obvious the kid
preferred to do the sucking himself.
I stood close to the platform stage. A miniscule
mirrored ball and a glitzy curtain hung behind
the performing pair. The kid eyed me over the blowjob
and past the glare. Suddenly, he reached out, pulled me
up on the platform and down on my knees beside him.
We licked, we sucked, lubricating each other’s mouths
as we ran our tongues along his partner’s erect,
illuminated shaft.
When the other came, reaching down and clutching
the kid’s shoulder, the boy threw his head back.
Chin glistening with cum, the kid’s face, transformed
by ecstasy and lust, was as frenzied as a strangler’s.
Maestro
Under the covers late at night,
my hand cradled my scrotum of suede
and half-hard in safe-sleep cock,
shaved smooth as before puberty.
The fingers of my other hand pressed
the mark of your mouth on my throat.
I pulled the quilt higher, rolling
onto my back, trapping the ghost
of your hand against the pale bruise
it left on my ass.
I slept soon, dreaming of handcuffs
resting on your piano bench and one sunray,
slanted by a pier’s lurching girders,
glistening the copper in your blonde beard.
Bridle Sore
Alone in my bath, with you.
Hard cock pulsed in hot water.
(Your hand held to catch my cum,
your dick raping my enslaved ass.)
My cock throbbed, I grasped it.
(Your hand smearing my own cream
over my face, teaching me to taste
it eagerly.)
My cock quaked, I caressed it, streaming
bathwater suddenly stung the slight
ropeburn at the juncture between
my prick and balls.
(Opening me, a few fingers at first
and then almost your entire hand
probing into my relaxing asshole.)
My cock tensed, swelled and spurted
ivory rivulets. They drifted, spun,
coalesced within the liquid
like splashes of melted wax.
Obscure Lodgings Nearby
So California in his white clothes, sun-bleached hair
and moderate tan. So different from the other men
cruising the aisles of the ADONIS.
Their eyes all looking inward. Wearing dark clothes,
they merged with the shadows. His eyes were wide,
I could see he was nervous when I stopped not far
from him.
He inched toward me along the short back wall behind
the seats. We smiled and quietly exchanged names.
He invited me to the Ramada Inn, two blocks down
Eighth Avenue.
Outside, the January air penetrated my leather jacket,
but he let his thin parka flap open in the wind.
His large room was orange and chocolate brown
instead of the expected orange and aqua.
He had almost as much light hair all over his body
as a lion-boy in a circus. His cock was as smooth
and curved as a tusk.
He cried like a child after he spent all over my chest,
his tears mixing with his semen.
He began to talk. I could see he needed to and I
let him. He was from San Diego. He worked in a bank.
He’d recently been married. He’d really loved his wife
at first….
© Daniel Diamond
