Harold Norse

A. Robert Lee retired as Professor in the English department at Nihon University, Tokyo, in 2011, having previously taught for three decades at the University of Kent, UK. He has held Visiting Professorships at Northwestern University, the University of Colorado, the University of New Mexico, and Berkeley. His more than 40 book publications include Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the American Book Award in 2004, and The Beats: Authorships, Legacies (2019). Douglas Field is senior lecturer in twentieth century American Literature at the University of Manchester. He is the author of two books on James Baldwin and the editor of two books by Jeff Nuttall. He is the co-founding editor of James Baldwin Review. His work has been published, amongst other places, in African American Review, English Literary History, and the Times Literary Supplement, where he is a regular contributor. He is writing a book on failure and the 1960s.

• AcknowledgmentsPrologue: The Case for Harold NorseJan Herman IntroductionA. Robert Lee and Douglas Field 1 Harold Norse and the Perils of Literary Obscurity Erik Mortenson2 The Business of Poetry: Seeing and Hearing Harold NorseA. Robert Lee3 Seen from A Distance: The Individual Talent of Harold NorseFiona Paton4 Harold Norse’s FriendsDaniel Kane5 Finding Hermes in the Old Stain: Norse’s Early WorkSteven Belletto6 The Memory of the Bastard Angel: Autobiographical Writing in Harold NorseEstíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo 7 Harold Norse Under the Sign of William Carlos WilliamsRonna C. Johnson8 Hidden History: Norse and BukowskiKurt Hemmer9 Turning the Blue Key: Harold Norse, William Burroughs, and the Infinite Early Cut-up Chad Weidner 10 Chance in the Void: Cutting up Harold Norse’s Beat HotelBenjamin J. Heal 11 Cut-ups and Comosgraphs: Harold Norse at Work in the Beat Hotel Tate Swindell 12 Due Norse: On Forgetting and Remembering Harold Norse, and His Place in the Queer Canon Andrew McMillan 13 Running with the Underdog: Harold Norse and the Mimeo RevolutionDouglas Field and Jay Jeff Jones 14 From Bastard to Angel: Harold Norse as Mentor and Publisher in 1970s San FranciscoTodd Swindell Harold Norse: TimelineTodd SwindellAfterword James GrauerholzList of ContributorsIndex

‘Harold Norse occupies a distinctive crossroads among American gay poets. The subtitle of this collection of fourteen essays states the situation clearly: Norse’s position in the history of poetry is a different thing than his position in the history of gay social and literary space... we can thank the editors for assembling this collection of Norse's writings as a way to assess his contribution to gay poetry.’ Alan Contreras, The Gay and Lesbian Review