Edward Field, "one of the most accomplished American poets of the postwar era, whose award-winning work--characterized by everyday language and an openly gay landscape--was forged by nearly a century of living in bohemian New York," died September 6, the New York Times reported. He was 102.
Field's connection to poetry was sparked when, as a newly enlisted 18-year-old soldier boarding a troop train during World War II, a Red Cross worker gave him a bag that contained a toothbrush, a comb, a candy bar, and a poetry anthology. "I was on that train for three days. I read it over and over. I knew immediately that I was going to be a poet," he said in a 2022 interview.
Field wrote 12 books of poetry and edited two anthologies, A Geography of Poets (1979) and A New Geography of Poets (1992). His many honors included the Prix de Rome, the Lambda Literary Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the W.H. Auden Prize.
In 2011, British editor and writer Diana Athill published Letters to a Friend, an epistolary chronicle of her 30-year friendship with Field. "The whole point of poetry for me is subject matter," he told her. "Saying what I have to say, saying what has never been said before, what's not polite to say."
During the war, Field met Coman Leavenworth, the first published poet he had ever encountered. Leavenworth "introduced him to the work of contemporary poets who were writing about same-sex desire at a time when homosexuality was illegal on both sides of the Atlantic and most gay writing was coded or underground," the Times wrote. By the time Field published his debut collection, Stand Up, Friend, with Me (1963), he was a writer open about his own sexuality.
After the war, he returned to New York University on the G.I. Bill and met other young writers, including Susan Sontag and Cynthia Ozick, as well as Alfred Chester, a literary critic and novelist who died under mysterious circumstances in 1971. Field became the keeper of his legacy, successfully lobbying publishers to reprint Chester's work. He also paid homage to Chester in his memoir, The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag and Other Intimate Portraits of the Bohemian Era (2005).
Field moved to Paris in 1948 for two years, meeting other expatriate American writers like James Baldwin and Robert Friend, and publishing work regularly in literary magazines. He returned to New York in 1950 and by the mid-1950s had met poet Frank O'Hara, with whom he had a brief love affair.
"Frank O'Hara showed me the way," Field wrote for outhistory.org. The Times noted that O'Hara's "ability to write easily and unselfconsciously as a gay man gave Field the courage to follow his instincts and loosen up with his own writing. The result was a breakthrough in his poetry."
Stand Up, Friend, with Me received the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. By the early 1970s, Field had become a successful poet, able to support himself through public readings and freelance writing.
The love of Field's life was Neil Derrick, a novelist "who published bodice-rippers such as Sticky Fingers (1970) under the pseudonyms Eleanor Bartlett and Bruce Elliot. They met in 1959, while they were both working in a typing pool at an advertising agency," the Times noted. In 1971, Derrick was diagnosed with a brain tumor and Field became his caregiver. They collaborated on several Bruce Elliot novels, including The Potency Clinic (1978) and Village (1982, republished as The Villagers in 1999), which became an unexpected bestseller.
A longtime resident of Westbeth Artists Housing, a community for artists and arts organizations in the West Village, Field continued to write and publish through his 80s.