Works by
Edward Field
(Poet, Writer)
[June 7, 1924 - ]

As Editor

• Robert Friend. Dancing with a Tiger -- Poems, 1941-1998 (2004, Digital Download)

• Looking for Genet, Essays and Reviews (1992) by Alfred Chester

• Head of a Sad Angel: Stories -- 1953 - 1966 (1990) by Alfred Chester

• A New Geography of Poets (1992) by Edward Field and Gerald Locklin; Charles Stetler, ed.

• Geography of Poets  (1981) by Edward Field and Gerald Locklin; Charles Stetler, ed.

Fiction

• The Office (1987) with Neil Derrick

• The Villagers: A Novel of Greenwich Village (1982, 2000) with Neil Derrick
  This saga of one hundred thirty years of Greenwich Village, the artistic and gay heart of New York, as lived through by four generations of an extraordinary family is an irresistibly compelling story.

• The Potency Clinic (1978) with Neil Derrick

Non-fiction

• The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, and Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era (2006)
  Long before Stonewall, young Air Force veteran Edward Field, fresh from combat in WWII, threw himself into New York’s literary bohemia, searching for fulfillment as a gay man and poet. In this vivid account of his avant-garde years in Greenwich Village and the bohemian outposts of Paris’s Left Bank and Tangier—where you could write poetry, be radical, and be openly gay—Field’s intimate portraits of literary contemporaries such as Alfred Chester, Frank O’Hara, May Swenson, and Susan Sontag, and  bring back the sadness, bawdiness, humor, and romanticism of the nigh-forgotten postwar bohemian subculture.

Poetry

• After the Fall: Poems Old and New (2007)
  After the Fall refers to the twin towers, and is Field’s ode to the events that transpired thereafter--the war in Iraq andthe attack on civil rights in America--as well as his own personal struggles over the indignities of aging.

• The Journey (2007)

• A Frieze for a Temple of Love (1998)
  Coming on the heels of the very well received Counting Myself Lucky: Selected Poems 1963-1992, this new book of poems confirms Edward Field's reputation of one of our finest poets in the discursive narrative tradition. Field, a native New Yorker and longtime gay activist, writes poetry that is literate, immediate, funny and completely personal. These unforgettable poems are small essays on the human condition spoken by a trusted friend.
  
  Among the surprise pleasures of Field's Frieze is "The Poetry File," a long sequence of prose ruminations on the American poetry scene in our time. At once gossipy, dishy, knowlegeable, witty, eloquent, this "insider" account names names without batting an eye: "Of course, poetry really has an inner elite. There is no democracy of standards in poetry . . . . To be a successful poet today you have to be very sophisticated, smooth, unassailable . . . self-referential."
  
  Ed Field's poetry remains always referential to a world rather than to himself. And that world is a very real one.
  
  "When I started writing," he recalled, "I wanted my poetry to save the world . . . . It has to do with poetry as magic, the magic of words.
  
  "I still believe it's a kind of magic."

• Magic Words (1998) with Stefano Vitale, Illustrator
  A collection of poems based on songs and stories gathered by Knud Rasmussen on the Fifth Thule Expedition, which recorded Inuit legends about the universe and its creation.  Ages 4-8.

• Counting Myself Lucky: Selected Poems 1963-1992
   -- Winner, 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Poetry

• New and Selected Poems (1987)
  Poems 1963-87, "from the Book of My Life".

• The Lost, Dancing (1984)

• Stars in My Eyes (1978)

• A Full Heart (1977)

• Eskimo Songs and Stories (1973)

• Variety Photoplays (1967)

• Stand Up Friend With Me (1963)

• Icarus (1950)