Karl Tierney: a sad, young poet revealed

Salvation comes more easily to some than to others and then some of us are sicker than others and may be incapable of honesty while imagining ourselves unique.

— Karl Tierney, “Adam”

Since Aristotle, people have suspected some link between creativity and depression. We understand that poets seem more likely to murder themselves. They call it the Sylvia Plath effect. It is romantic to think that living might be unbearably painful for those gifted with particular insights: Today, Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Anecdotally, it’s not hard to come up with a list of suicidal poets — John Fletcher Gould, for no reason anyone could name, walks into a pond on his property overlooking the Arkansas River and drowns himself; Frank Stanford shoots two bullets into his heart in a house in Fayetteville. Suicide is what poets sometimes do.

Still, no suicide is like any other. Some make a kind of sense. Plath was manic

depressive, and her illness may have been exacerbated by the medication she was taking. Stanford was in trouble; apparently, his wife had just discovered his girlfriend, and the two women were in the house when he killed himself. Gould, we don’t know, they say he was depressed sometimes but not particularly so on the fateful day. Years before in his epigrammatic poem “Hard Sayings” he’d written: “Many more people would commit suicide if they were not afraid that, after all, they might fail in the attempt to die.”

Some suicides are more explicable than others. In 1995, 10 months after Karl Tierney was diagnosed with AIDS, he rode his bicycle to the Golden Gate Bridge. No body was ever recovered but, unlike the case of Weldon Kees, the poet-painter-filmmaker whose car was discovered parked near the bridge after he disappeared 40 years before, no one speculates that Tierney ran off to Mexico.

This was before Magic Johnson had lived with HIV for more than a quarter of a century. Tierney received his diagnosis as a death sentence — he would have been told he could expect to live another 18 months. He would have been aware of his CD-4 T cell count. Five weeks before he disappeared he’d asked his friend Jim Cory to be his literary executor. When his parents came to his apartment they found a note, his wallet and driver’s license on the kitchen table. On his answering machine, his doctor had left a message — turns out he was eligible for that protease inhibitor trial.

AN ACCOMPLISHED POET

Tierney was 39. Had he stayed alive another year, another two years, he might have benefited from the breakthroughs that have made it possible for people to die with the virus rather than from it. But he could not know this.

Tierney was a poet and a gay man. He was born in Massachusetts and grew up in Connecticut, where he became an Eagle Scout. He graduated from Emory University in 1980 and earned his MFA from the University of Arkansas Creative Writing Program in 1983. That same year, he lit out for the territory of San Francisco, to the famous Castro neighborhood at the West End of Market Street.

Though Tierney never published a book during his lifetime, he was not unaccomplished. He was twice a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, a Yaddo Fellow in 1992. He published more than 50 poems in magazines and anthologies before his death.

Now, his literary executor Cory has produced the book Have You Seen This Man?: The Castro Poems of Karl Tierney, published by Little Rock-based Sibling Rivalry Press, one of the most influential publishers of LGBT poetry in the country. The title is taken from a flyer that was circulated after Tierney’s disappearance, and the work inside is a startling work of imagistic reportage. Taken together these 74 poems — arranged chronologically — sketch the trajectory of a young man out and on the prowl in a dangerous time.

Cory, in his introduction, describes the Castro district as a “vibrant ‘out’ enclave, with its own politics, institutions, media and vibe” that even as Tierney arrived was becoming if not self-parodic at least highly self-aware of what it symbolized to the marginalized young men who flocked to it from all over the country and the world.

It was a particularly rich target for a sexually transmitted disease — it devastated the community.

“When Karl arrived,” Cory writes, “AIDS was still a scary sort of rumor, involving friends-of-friends-of-friends. As months and then years swept by, it became the dominant social fact, liable to emerge in any conversation. Those flying in from outside, who thought we had an idea of what was going on, were soon enough disabused.”

Tierney represents as an oft-disappointed libertine, merciless with himself and others. In “Suicide of a Video Head,” he addresses a photographer “sold out” to video who takes his life

With whiskey and pills, and no note, no accusations, no angry Anarchist bombs, you went like a bony horse that plops in the trough after so many years of iron love

and labor and the free world moving ….

TWO INFLUENCES

Cory locates only two influences on Tierney, neither of whom are traditionally connected to the post-beat San Francisco literary scene. The first is Frank O’Hara, to whom Tierney dedicates “Arkansas Landscape: Wish You Were Here,” a rare and gentle departure from the Castro milieu: It’s windy outside, and red-nose boys from the hills walk free from sin-shod shoes through the collegetown

mall. Everywhere there’s hair

blowing

(brown mostly) and the bushes huddle

together….

Here and there the long

skirts fly, and the loud of car radios presses through the blows. It’s Wednesday outside, which is, of course,

wonderful and the secrets of the world are unraveling here.

It’s almost nostalgic, and sweeter voiced than Tierney’s usual sharp-cutting metier, which owes something to Bob Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” mode.

The second overt antecedent Cory (and Tierney) recognize is Gaius Valerius Catullus, who could be presented as one of the first confessional singer-songwriters in that he turned away from Homeric

hero epics to focus on the ordinary life. Catullus, who died in 54 B.C. at age 30, and his ilk are called the Latin Neoterics.; he was highly influenced by the Greek poet Sappho. Cory connects Tierney’s gift for the put-down with Catullus’ habit of wittily obliterating his victims. In “Whore,” the 1987 poem Tierney dedicated to Catullus, Tierney unloads: banal fingers filthy ears and inane eyes overextended credit and the heightened diction

of a salesman you are I believe the kept boy of that fat pig Wharton Tierney’s perpetual snark can be off-putting, but he also displays a remarkable eye for detail and is resistant to sentimentality, operating at times as a candid camera recording streets clogged with

… the usual Leftist litter, sidewalks with shorts, sunglasses, the smell of pomade, sewers with the beady-eyed

scurry of plague. Still what’s left is most

attractive to me, which means I’m horny, which is most dangerous these days, in this era

of No One’s Choosing. Have You Seen This Man? presents and preserves a voice that otherwise would have been lost — drowned in the great sea of uncurated words and thoughts. Cory and Sibling Rivalry have done art and history a service by rescuing this corpus from the gray maw. Anyone curious about the time and locus of the plague will want to read Tierney’s Castro poems.