Standing Up for a Century

Poet Edward Field Turns 100

By D. Silverman

The venerable Edward Field casts a long shadow across the streets of the Village, both “literarily” and “literally” — during daily walks upon the cobbled slopes — and, in June, his upright figure crosses the centennial riband.

Edward was born in Brooklyn in 1924, grew up on Long Island, served a notable stint in the military during WWII, and after several extended sojourns abroad, eventually made Greenwich Village his home with his life-partner for more than half a century, Neil Derrick.

That path is now paved with a lifetime of poetry, books, novels, articles and awards.

Ed’s family moved to Lynbrook, L.I., when he was five. He found it an oppressive childhood setting. It’s oft forgotten that in the 1920s and 30s Long Island was a bastion of the KKK and the pro-Nazi Friends of New Germany/German American Bund (with well-groomed streets named for their leaders).

Anti-Black prejudice was strong — but in the island’s bucolic hamlets, white neighbors were focusing much of their fury on immigrant interlopers: Catholics and Jews. By 1934, about 1,000 Jews were living in Lynbrook, including the secular Field family.

Getty Images has a photo, taken there in July 1930, of a contingent of women standing up in a grassy field preparing to march in a town parade. Wearing white stockings and cotton uniforms with a sash across the breast, they could almost pass for a unit of nurses or nuns — until you read their banner: “Women of the KKK. Freeport, N.Y.”

Ed recalls being taunted and harassed as a youth; swastikas were common, and the Bund staged events in the high school auditorium. The war and Army presented an escape.

As a navigator in the Army Air Force, based in England during 1945, Ed flew 27 bombing missions over Germany. During his third flight the plane was damaged and crashed into the North Sea. The crew of ten scrambled into the two life rafts, only one of which fully inflated. Not everyone survived.

Twenty-some years later, Ed would memorialize those events in his epic poem World War II. In 2019, his niece, Diane Weis, produced an award-winning short film of the poem, animated by Piotr Kabat. Minor Accident of War is on YouTube.

After a decade of publishing individual poems in magazines and respected periodicals, Ed yearned for a hardbound volume of his own, but his manuscript was rejected two dozen times. Publishers were disinclined to put out a first book until after the poetry had already won an award.

Ed’s friend and supporter, the poet May Swenson, was then working at New Directions Press and she submitted a selection of his poems for the prestigious Lamont Poetry Prize (now the Laughlin Award). It didn’t win—but the following year Grove Press submitted his poems again, successfully this time, resulting in his 1963 debut collection Stand Up, Friend, With Me. With that award, it became possible to make a living, albeit modest, as a poet/writer.

In 1967, Ed’s second collection, Variety Photoplays, was also published by Grove Press. It concludes with the poem The Tailspin—which inspired Sister Mary Corita, the socially progressive artist and nun, to incorporate his text into her 1967 print titled feelin’ groovy.

A few years later Ed and Neil created Bleecker Street Press as a vehicle for their close friend Alma Routsong (writing as ‘Isabel Miller’) to self-publish her groundbreaking lesbian period-romance A Place for Us. (Soon reissued as Patience and Sarah.) They also released a few of their own books, including a version of their historic-fiction novel The Villagers (also published as Village using the pseudonym Bruce Elliot), a century-spanning drama set in Greenwich Village.

Ed and Neil had met as office co-workers in 1959. Soon they were shacking-up and bounced through a string of residences over a decade. However, perhaps a casualty of the turbulent Gay Liberation period, around 1970 they briefly separated, each traveling and going his own way. In 1972, Ed moved into the recently established Westbeth Artists Housing at West Street and Bethune.

During their few years apart, Neil began suffering from what turned out to be a brain tumor—which was successfully removed, but resulted in his losing most of his vision at the age of 40. This proved the catalyst to reunite, with Neil leaving a hospital stay to move in with Ed at Westbeth. They would remain together, caring for each other, traveling and writing collaboratively, until Neil’s passing in 2018. Since then, Ed has a nightly phone call with Neil’s younger sister, Dinny.

You may well see Ed out on his constitutional mile-long stroll through the neighborhood—often wheeling a shopping cart towards Westside Market (lured on by the pick-me-up call of tiramisù). Though walking slower these days, Ed still maintains the upright carriage of an Air Force officer. In his own words (to quote a poem): “Someone / who / has published / a book / called / Stand Up, Friend, With Me / had better / not / go / around / slumping.”

Fittingly, Ed will have the last word, from the final verse of LIVING WILL (A Frieze for a Temple of Love, Black Sparrow Press, 1998):

But I can’t say my farewells just yet,
my memoirs still need a lot of work,
and I’ve got to finish
my new manuscript of poetry.
May death take me
only as I put down
the last word.

---

Tailspin 

Going into a tailspin
in those days meant curtains.
No matter how hard you pulled back on the stick
the nose of the plane wouldn’t come up.

Spinning round, headed for a target of earth,
the whine of death in the wing struts,
instinct made you try to pull out of it that way, by force,
and for years aviators spiraled down and crashed.

Who could have dreamed that the solution
to this dreaded aeronautical problem was so simple?
Every student flier learns this nowadays:
you move the joystick in the direction of the spin,
and like a miracle the plane stops turning
and you are in control again
to pull the nose up out of the dive.

In panic we want to push the stick away from the spin,
wrestle the plane out of it,
but the trick is, as in everything,
to go with the turning willingly,
rather than fight—give in, go with it,
and that way come out of your tailspin whole.

Published in After the Fall (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Variety Photoplay (Grove Press).