Edward Field (poet)

Personal life

Field was born in Brooklyn, New York City, United States, to a family of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. He grew up in Lynbrook, New York, and, being Jewish,^[1][2] he and his family faced antisemitism and discrimination. He played cello in the "Field Family Trio", which had a weekly radio program on WGBB in Freeport.

Field served in World War II with the Eighth Air Force in England and France as a navigator in heavy bombers, flying 25 missions over Germany. In February 1945, he took part in a raid on Berlin. His B-17 was crippled by flak and crash-landed in the North Sea. All ten crew members reached the life rafts, but only seven survived until rescued by a British air-sea vessel hours later.

In 1959, Field met Neil Derrick. As Field later recalled: "I was working in the typing pool of an advertising agency, and the supervisor assigned the typewriter next to me to a new temp, a terrific-looking young man from California named Neil Derrick. It was a case of immediate attraction between WASP and Jew."^[3] In 1972, the couple moved to the nonprofit artists' housing Westbeth Artists Community in New York City's West Village.^[4] Derrick died on January 5, 2018. Field continued to reside at Westbeth and was regarded as one of the complex's notable residents.^[5]

Career

Field began writing poetry during World War II, after a Red Cross worker gave him an anthology of poetry. His 1963 debut, Stand Up, Friend, With Me, won the Lamont Poetry Prize and was published by Grove Press. William Carlos Williams called it "clean, straight writing that knows what a poem could be made of", and judge Mark Van Doren praised it as "one of the best I have read in years". In 1964, Field received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 1966, a film for which Field wrote the narration, To Be Alive!, won an Academy Award in that category.

In 1978, Field and his partner Neil Derrick (1931–2018),^[6] began publishing novels under the pseudonym "Bruce Elliot". Their first was The Potency Clinic. Their historical novel Village, set in 1845 Greenwich Village, became a bestseller and included cameo appearances by Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mabel Dodge, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others. It was later revised and reissued as The Villagers.

In 1979, Field edited the anthology A Geography of Poets. He later co-edited A New Geography of Poets (1992) with Gerald Locklin and Charles Stetler.

In 1992, Field received a Lambda Literary Award for Counting Myself Lucky: Selected Poems 1963–1992.^[7]

In 2003, editor Harvey Shapiro included Field's poem "World War II" in the Poets of World War II anthology (Library of America).

In 2005, Field received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle. That same year, the University of Wisconsin Press published his memoir The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag and Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era, referring to the writer Alfred Chester.^[8] Publishers Weekly described the book as "very charming" and "of serious interest to anyone intrigued by New York literary life of the 1950s and '60s."^[9]

Field'’s next collection, After the Fall: Poems Old and New (2007, University of Pittsburgh Press), was praised by Publishers Weekly as "direct, likable, modest, charming, a storyteller."^[10] The Brooklyn Rail called it "accessible and urgent", while Booklist wrote that Field's new poems, written after 9/11, may be "the best 9/11 protest poems yet".

In 2011, British editor Diana Athill published Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend (Granta Books), a collection of her correspondence with Field spanning more than thirty years.^[11][12]

In 2019, Field's niece Diane Weis produced the animated short Minor Accident of War, inspired by his wartime experiences. The film, designed by Piotr Kabat, features Field narrating his poem "World War II".^[13]

Throughout his career, Field gave readings at the Library of Congress and the 92NY's Unterberg Poetry Center, and taught workshops there as well as at Sarah Lawrence College and Hofstra University. His honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Prix de Rome (American Academy of Arts and Letters), and the Lamont and Lambda prizes. He also edited The Alfred Chester Society Newsletter.

Field turned 100 on June 7, 2024.^[14] Publishers Weekly has called him "irreplaceable in the history of gay American writing".^[10]

Poetry

• Stand Up, Friend, With Me (Grove Press, 1963)
• Variety Photoplays (Grove Press, 1967)
• A Full Heart (Sheep Meadow Press, 1977)
• Stars in My Eyes (Sheep Meadow Press, 1978)
• New and Selected Poems: From the Book of My Life (Sheep Meadow Press, 1987)
• Counting Myself Lucky, Selected Poems 1963–1992 (Black Sparrow Press, 1992)
• A Frieze for a Temple of Love (Black Sparrow Press, 1998)
• After The Fall: Poems Old and New (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007)

Chapbooks

• Icarus (1963)
• The Lost, Dancing (Watershed Tapes, 1984)
• A Journey (illustrated by Jan Jutte) (Jack's Brook, 2007)

Fiction (written with Neil Derrick under the pseudonym Bruce Elliot)

• The Potency Clinic (Bleecker Street Press, 1978)
• Die PotenzKlinik (Berlin: Albino Verlag, 1982)
• Village (Avon Books, 1982)
• The Office (Ballantine Books, 1987)
• The Villagers (Painted Leaf Press, 2000) (*A revised edition of Village)

Nonfiction

• The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, and Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006, paperback edition, 2007)
• Kabuli Days: Travels in Old Afghanistan (World Parade Books, 2008)

As Editor

• A Geography of Poets (editor) (Bantam Books, 1979)
• Head of a Sad Angel, Stories by Alfred Chester (editor) (Black Sparrow Press, 1990). Introduction by Gore Vidal.
• Looking For Genet, Essays by Alfred Chester (editor) (Black Sparrow Press, 1992)
• A New Geography of Poets (editor, with Gerald Locklin and Charles Stetler) (University of Arkansas Press, 1992)
• Dancing with a Tiger: Selected Poems by Robert Friend (editor) (Spuyten Duyvil, 2003)
• Voyage to Destruction: The Moroccan Letters of Alfred Chester (editor) (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022)

Young Readers

• Eskimo Songs and Stories (Delacorte Press, 1973)
• Magic Words (Harcourt Brace, 1998)