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In addition to his pivotal roles in the Gay Liberation Movement, revolutionary anarchism, queer publishing, and the early development of gay studies and sexuality education, Charles Shively was a lifelong poet. He published his first poem in high school and continued writing daily throughout his life. I Have a Poem for You, brings together three of his major manuscripts-Stonelicks Beyond Ohio, Cuauhtemoc Waiting, and Time Broken Hands-alongside a selection of uncollected poems, including his evocative Tarot series San Lazaro Street Scene Vendors. As Jim Dunn notes in his introduction, Shively's poetry is "sparse, surreal and mystical, a rush of images in lean language... His poems at first seem like hallucinogenic and surreal streams of consciousness, sometimes referred to as 'Emily Dickinson poems on LSD.' But there are deeper and more urgent flashes of brilliance fused throughout his work when read closely that charge them with a vibrancy and rhythm."
Charles Shively was born in Gobbler's Knob, Ohio in 1937. He enrolled in Harvard in 1955, received his Masters degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1959 and received his PhD from Harvard in 1969. Throughout his teaching career at Boston State College and UMASS Boston, Charley was awarded three Fulbright Research and Teaching Grants sending him to Mexico, Ecuador and Vietnam. In 1971, Charley, Michael Bronski, John Mitzel and Larry Martin formed a radical gay anarchist collective and began publishing the Boston Gay Newspaper: Fag Rag, which ran until the early 1980's publishing 12 of Charleys infamous radical essays. He was a founding member the Good Gay Poets Collective publishing several seminal books of poetry by queer poets outside the mainstream poetry establishment such as Freddie Greenfield's Were You Always a Criminal? ruth weiss's Desert Journals, Aaron Shurin's broadside Exorcism of the straight/man/demon and John Wiener's magnum opus, Behind the State Capitol. Shively also published Adrian Stanford's groundbreaking Black and Queer, the first book of poetry written by a queer African American poet. Charley also published the Collected Works of Lysander Spooner (1971), A History of the Conception of Death in America, 1650-1860, his doctoral dissertation (1988), Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working Class Camerados (1987) and Drum Beats: Walt Whitman's Civil War Boy Lovers (1989). Charley's only published collection of poems was in Nuestra Senora de los Dolores: the San Francisco Experience (1975).
