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Thank you for your kind words.

I had to listen to you speaking again, and the emotion conveyed had me weeping. Thank you so much - most people tend to read this poem in a straightforward way without the emphasis on the anger of such grief that she was like experiencing when composing .

You've made my day. Thank you!

@@gilcole528 I meant every word of it. You convey such feeling. X

Thank you! I’m grateful for your kind comment.

Thank you for your kind words!

Thank you!

Thank you. I’m so glad you enjoyed them.

Thank you! I agree- it is a great poem.

Thank you for your kind words.

Me too. Thanks for writing!

Dear Jeffrey, I'm so grateful to you for your kind words, and that you watched. I think you understand well just what it means to learn that something helps, that someone finds it necessary. It means the world to me. I send fond regards to you. The occasion of our paths crossing will always be a happy memory. G.

Thank you! I hope to be able to perform it again. Your words encourage me a lot.

Dear Heart, Thank you for this message, and for taking the time to watch. I hope you know how often you are in my thoughts, and how important it is to me to know you've taken a look at what I'm working on these days. I hope you all are thriving, and finding enough of the good stuff. sending love, as always, g

Hello, and thank you for watching and writing to me. I did see "The Inheritance" here in New York. It was a complicated experience for me. My video is from a much larger work- a memoir- that I've been toiling at for 20 years, so it predated Lopez's play by a long shot. I think I resisted the theatricality of Lopez's play because aestheticizing experiences that were the facts of my life was, well, unpleasant. Still, I am glad that the play had a large audience. In the intermission of Part 2 I asked the young man sitting next to me if he and his generation really were hesitant to ask us older men about our lives in the 1980's and 90's, and he said that they were. I asked why. He said that he thought they were afraid that talking about our experiences would upset us. I assured him that this was far from the truth. I strongly feel that it is more accurate that Gay culture is more youth oriented than ever, and that those of us in our 60's and 70's are simply invisible to younger men. Daddies, 40 and 50 year olds in the zenith of their desirability, are the exception, and are part of a generation that came of age after AIDS was part of our lives. My generation experienced the party before it was over. Hence dinosaurs. I am grateful to you for paying attention to this old dinosaur.

@@gilcole528 Thank you so much for your reply Gil. I can fully understand your reaction to The Inheritance at a personal level. I wonder whether First World War veterans felt the same way about All Quiet on the Western Front. For all I know, maybe veterans of the Trojan Wars even shuddered at recitals of the Iliad. I do think though that one of the jobs of art is to do precisely the thing that you reacted against - namely to aestheticize horror, in the hope of extracting some kind of meaning from it, and along with most of the audience at both performances I attended, I found the coup de theatre at the end of Part 1 deeply moving (the big reveal in Part 2, not so much). I also hear what you say about invisibility. I’m in my early 50s myself, though hardly in the zenith of daddy desirability, and my husband and I have basically stopped going to gay spaces in London because no-one wants to talk to us and most of them have closed down anyway. I do miss the old queens in the corners of pubs, swathed in cashmere and eager to tell stories, impart wisdom, and tell broken hearted twinks that getting dumped for the first time won’t kill them. I thought that would probably be us one day, but instead we’re sitting at home watching Netflix and everybody else is swiping right on the apps. I’m so sorry that the party ended badly for your generation. I’m just too young to have been directly affected by the plague (Helmut Kohl, born in 1930, described his generation’s dodging of Nazism as “the blessing of having been born that little bit too late”, but I remember seeing obviously ill people around town when I first came out in the late 1980s and early 1990s (I bumped into Derek Jarman once, or to put it more accurately, he walked straight into me because he’d pretty much gone blind). But then the combination therapy came and everybody got miraculously better and nobody talked about it for two decades, aside from lately announcing to the world that they were neg on PrEP. Please continue with this project, I’d love to hear more. All best wishes, Mark

Thanks for this. I agree with you completely, and am grateful to you for sharing your experience. And your supportive words help more than I can say. I am continuing with this. A new video will appear eventually…. I send warm good wishes. Gil

Thank you for your kind words. It means a great deal to me that you took the time to watch, and especially to respond. You've energized me. Warmly, Gil

You're so sweet to give it a look and listen. I send my best, as always....

Thank you for your kind words. It means a lot to me. Sending good wishes, Gil

🙏🙏

Thank you! I hope you enjoy other poems I’ve posted on my channel, too. I appreciate your kind assessment.

Glad you think so! Thanks for taking a moment to comment.

Thank you for your kind words. I’m so glad you like the reading. I love this poem. I send good wishes.

Thank you for your encouragement. It means a lot!

Thank you for your kind words. I am working on a solo theater piece comprising many of the poems of Whitman and Gunn that are on the channel, and some that are not. I hope to post more, in time. Meanwhile, the effect of your message is inspiring me to press on. I hope the challenges of these times are ones you can meet with aplomb. And thanks for writing.

Thank you for this. Your kind words mean so much. Isn't this one of the marvelous things about a great text? That its meaning(s) can be contingent, deeply resonantly apt for one's youth, and for one's, what- maturity? slow, gentle (if one is so lucky) approach to the end? Anyway, thank you for your message and for taking the time to watch my videos. I send warm good wishes.

Thank you for your kind words. It means a great deal to me that the poem,and the reading, touched you. And thank you for your service.

I'm delighted to have been of some help. Thanks for stopping by.

So sorry I never responded. It was kind of you to take a moment to respond, and I appreciate it. Good wishes....

I can’t thank you enough for your kind words. I love this poem. The implant is a cardiac converter/defibrillator, implanted after a heart attack and double bypass surgery 5 years ago. I will look at the MacNeice poem. I’m grateful for your interest. Gil

@@gilcole528 Gil Thank you for your honest reply to my impertinent question. I think the reason why I find your Gunn readings in particular so intensely moving is that you instantiate in your own body the tension that exists in the poems between toughness and fragility, or put another way between permanence and evanescence. I’ve rarely encountered such a small gap between the speaker and the spoken. Maybe you’re a very good actor, but I’d assume it must be a very deep self knowledge that enables you to inhabit these poems so completely. All best wishes, Mark

Thanks for your kind words!

It’s beautiful, isn’t it?

@@gilcole528 Yes, probably my favourite

Thank you for your kind words, and for your suggestions. I deeply appreciate them.

Thanks! I appreciate your kind words.

Thank you so much for your generous comment.