Underground Love: The Poetry of Harold Norse, Erotic and Not
Norse has always delighted as much in dishing dirt as in dactyls and spondees. Auden not only gave piss-poor blow jobs, Norse gleefully told the San Francisco Weekly a few years ago, he had a small penis and stole Norse’s boyfriend. His 1989 autobiography, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, is packed with similarly salacious tidbits. Marlon Brando hit on him at a party. A railroad heir traded him a Picasso for a roll in the hay. A drunken 19-year-old reciting Rimbaud on the subway, who ended up in Norse’s bed, turned out to be Allen Ginsberg. As Lawrence Ferlinghetti joked about Norse–a beat compatriot in Europe–“Don’t forget his horizontal history. Line up all the men end to end, and they’ll circle the earth.”
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Ultimately that gush flows at too uniform a pace, however. After the tenth coupling with a perfect, hairless teenager it’s easy to feel that you’ve tricked one too many times with the same guy. Only occasionally does the piece veer into surprising territory; the lengthy “Gone With the Wind” begins with frank portraits of racist Alabama but ends with furtive hand jobs in a boardinghouse. Repetitive sexual encounters rarely reveal anything new about erotic life; Zak could have accomplished everything of this nature in an hour instead of almost two.
