anthonyhowelljournal

The poet of simply describing it as it is. One of my favourite writers.

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WORLD WAR 11

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It was over Target Berlin the flak shot up our plane

just as we were dumping bombs on the already smoking city

on signal from the lead bomber in the squadron.

The plane jumped again and again as the shells burst under us,

sending jagged pieces of steel rattling through our fuselage.

It was pure chance

that none of us got ripped by those fragments.

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Then, being hit, we had to drop out of formation right away,

losing speed and altitude,

and when I figured out our course with trembling hands on the instruments

(I was navigator)

we set out on the long trip home to England

alone, with two of our four engines gone

and gas streaming out of holes in the wing tanks.

That morning at briefing

we had been warned not to go to nearby Poland,

partly liberated then by the Russians,

although later we learned that another crew in trouble

had landed there anyway,

and patching up their plane somehow,

returned gradually to England

roundabout by way of Turkey and North Africa.

But we chose England, and luckily

the Germans had no fighters to send up after us then,

for this was just before they developed their jet.

To lighten our load we threw out

guns and ammunition, my navigation books, all the junk,

and made it over Holland with a few good-bye fireworks from the shore guns.

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Over the North Sea the third engine gave out

And we dropped low over the water.

The gas gauge read empty, but by keeping the nose down

a little gas at the bottom of the tank sloshed forward

and kept our single engine going.

High overhead, the squadrons were flying home in formation

– the raids had gone on for hours after us.

Did they see us down there in our trouble?

We radioed our final position for help to come

but had no idea if anyone

happened to be tuned in and heard us,

and we crouched together on the floor,

knees drawn up and head down

in regulation position for ditching,

listened as the engine stopped, a terrible silence,

and we went down into the sea with a crash,

just like hitting a brick wall,

jarring bones, teeth, eyeballs panicky.

Who would ever think water could be so hard?

You black out, and then come to

with water rushing in like a sinking-ship movie.

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All ten of us started getting out of there fast:

there was a convenient door in the roof to climb out by,

one at a time. We stood in line,

water up to our thighs and rising.

The plane was supposed to float for twenty minutes,

but with all those flak holes

who could say how long it really would?

The two life rafts popped out of the sides into the water,

but one of them only half inflated,

and the other couldn’t hold everyone,

although they all piled into it, except the pilot,

who got into the limp raft that just floated.

The radio operator and I, out last,

(Did that mean we were least aggressive, least likely to survive?)

we stood on the wing watching the two rafts

being swept off by waves in different directions.

We had to swim for it.

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Later they said the cords holding rafts to plane

broke by themselves, but I wouldn’t have blamed them

for cutting them loose, for fear

that by waiting the plane would go down

and drag them with it.

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I headed for the overcrowded good raft

and after a clumsy swim in soaked heavy flying clothes

got there and hung onto the side.

The radio operator went for the half-inflated raft

where the pilot lay with water sloshing over him,

but he couldn’t swim, even with his life vest on.

Being from the Great Plains,

his strong farmer’s body didn’t know

how to wallow through the water properly,

and a wild current seemed to sweep him farther off.

One minute we saw him on top of a swell

and perhaps we glanced away for a minute

but when we looked again he was gone

just as the plane went down sometime around then

when nobody was looking.

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It was midwinter and the waves were mountains

and the water ice water.

You could live in it twenty-five minutes,

the Ditching Survival Manual said.

Since most of the crew were squeezed on my raft

I had to stay in the water hanging on.

My raft? It was their raft—they got there first so they would live.

Twenty-five minutes I had.

Live, live, I said to myself.

You’ve got to live.

There looked like plenty of room on the raft

from where I was and I said so, but they said no.

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When I figured the twenty-five minutes were about up

and I was getting numb,

I said I couldn’t hold on anymore,

and a little rat-faced boy from Alabama, one of the gunners,

got into the icy water in my place,

and I got on the raft in his.

He insisted on taking off his flying clothes,

which was a fatal mistake because even wet clothes are protection,

and then worked hard, kicking with his legs, and we all paddled,

to get to the other raft,

and we tied them together.

The gunner got in the raft with the pilot

and lay in the wet.

Shortly after, the pilot started gurgling green foam from his mouth-

maybe he was injured in the crash against the instruments—

and by the time we were rescued, he and the little gunner were both dead.

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That boy who took my place in the water,

who died instead of me,

I don’t remember his name even.

It was like those who survived the death camps

by letting others go into the ovens in their place.

It was him or me, and I made up my mind to live.

I’m a good swimmer,

but I didn’t swim off in that scary sea

looking for the radio operator when he was washed away.

I suppose, then, once and for all,

I chose to live rather than be a hero, as I still do today,

although at that time I believed in being heroic, in saving the world,

even if, when opportunity knocked,

I instinctively chose survival.

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As evening fell the waves calmed down

and we spotted a boat, far off, and signaled with a flare gun,

hoping it was English not German.

The only two who cried on being found

were me and a gunner, the other gay member of the crew.

The rest kept straight faces.

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It was a British air-sea rescue boat:

they hoisted us up on deck,

dried off the living and gave us whiskey and put us to bed,

and rolled the dead up in blankets,

arid delivered us all to a hospital on shore

for treatment or disposal.

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This was a minor accident of war:

two weeks in a rest camp at Southport on the Irish Sea

and we were back at Grafton-Underwood, our base,

ready for combat again,

the dead crewmen replaced by living ones,

and went on hauling bombs over the continent of Europe,

destroying the Germans and their cities.

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Edward Field, from AFTER THE FALL, poems old and new, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007

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CELEBRATING HIS ASS

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they try to block your dick

with their little pills

for blood pressure, prostate, heart

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they figure you’re an old guy

so what’s the difference

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and just to stay alive

you go along with it, take the goddam pills

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but how lucky I am

to live with an antidote to their poison

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whatever the depredations of age

he still has one goddam beautiful ass

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and just looking at it

I can’t stop pulling on my dick 

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I follow him around like a dog

drooling over the ballet of his movements

and can’t stop pulling on my dick 

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actually, anything he does

goes to my dick

and he’s walking around naked all the time

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I get to watch him putting on his clothes

watch the way he fills his underwear

and even better when he takes it off

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and when he does the dishes naked

each cheek as he moves

here and there at the sink

altering its shape, its roundness

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and I can’t stop pulling on my dick

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and when he bends over

I ‘m riveted by the beautiful

crack of his ass,  and can’t stop

pulling on my dick

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and when he does his daily exercises

I’m breathless, I’m breathing hard

I’m sipping the nectar of the gods

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oh lord, let me die looking at that ass

with my hand still pulling on my dick

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****

Field was born in Brooklyn, New York City, United States, to a family of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. He grew up in Lynbrook, New York, and, being Jewish, he and his family faced antisemitism and discrimination. He played cello in the “Field Family Trio”, which had a weekly radio program on WGBB in Freeport.

Field served in World War II with the Eighth Air Force in England and France as a navigator in heavy bombers, flying 25 missions over Germany. In February 1945, he took part in a raid on Berlin. His B-17 was crippled by flak and crash-landed in the North Sea. All ten crew members reached the life rafts, but only seven survived until rescued by a British air-sea vessel hours later.

In 1959, Field met Neil Derrick. As Field later recalled: “I was working in the typing pool of an advertising agency, and the supervisor assigned the typewriter next to me to a new temp, a terrific-looking young man from California named Neil Derrick. It was a case of immediate attraction between WASP and Jew.” In 1972, the couple moved to the nonprofit artists’ housing Westbeth Artists Community in New York City’s West Village. Derrick died on January 5, 2018. Field continued to reside at Westbeth and was regarded as one of the complex’s notable residents. Field died on September 6, 2026, at the age of 102.

The poet Edward Field in 2014. William Carlos Williams said of him: “I’m certain you’ve got the stuff: clean, straight writing that knows (or you know) what a poem could be made of. I am impressed.”Credit…Roger Netzer

NEW YORK TIMES had this to say in an obituary by Rebecca Chace:

“William Carlos Williams said of him: “I’m certain you’ve got the stuff: clean, straight writing that knows (or you know) what a poem could be made of. I am impressed.”

Edward Field, one of the most accomplished American poets of the postwar era, whose award-winning work — characterized by everyday language and an openly gay landscape — was forged by nearly a century of living in bohemian New York, died on Sunday at his home in the West Village section of Manhattan. He was 102.

The death was confirmed by Roger Netzer, his close friend for several decades.

Mr. Field found his calling by happenstance. As a newly enlisted soldier boarding a troop train during World War II, he was handed a bag by a Red Cross worker. It contained a toothbrush, a comb, a candy bar and an anthology of poetry.

“I was on that train for three days,” he said in a 2022 interview for this obituary. “I read it over and over. I knew immediately that I was going to be a poet.”

He was just 18 and had never read a book of poetry or written a line. But he would go on to write 12 books of poetry and edit two anthologies, “A Geography of Poets” (1979) and “A New Geography of Poets” (1992), and receive, among other honors, the Prix de Rome, the Lambda Literary Award, the Shelley Memorial Award and the W.H. Auden Prize.

Diana Athill, the renowned British editor and writer, published “Letters to a Friend,” an epistolary chronicle of her 30-year friendship with Mr. Field, in 2011.

“The whole point of poetry for me is subject matter,” he told Ms. Athill. “Saying what I have to say, saying what has never been said before, what’s not polite to say.”

During the war, as an Army Air Corps navigator at the Grafton Underwood base in the English Midlands, Mr. Field met Coman Leavenworth, the first published poet he had encountered. Mr. Leavenworth introduced him to the work of contemporary poets who were writing about same-sex desire at a time when homosexuality was illegal on both sides of the Atlantic and most gay writing was coded or underground. Mr. Field, who had concealed his own homosexuality from his family and in his own writing, was shocked and thrilled.

By the time he published his debut collection, “Stand Up, Friend, With Me” (1963), he was a writer openly embracing his own sexuality.

In the poem Unwanted, he wrote:

It is perfectly obvious that he was not popular at school

No good at baseball, and wet his bed.

His aliases tell his history: Dumbbell, Good-for-nothing,

Jewboy, Fieldinsky, Skinny, Fierce Face, Greaseball, Sissy.

Warning: This man is not dangerous, answers to any name,

Responds to love, don’t call him or he will come.

Edward Field was born in Brooklyn on June 7, 1924, one of six children of Eastern European Jewish parents who were among a wave of immigrants in the early 20th century. After five years in the Bensonhurst neighborhood, Edward moved with his family to the Long Island town of Lynbrook in Nassau County, then a center for the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, a political organization for Americans of German descent that supported the rise of Hitler in the mid-1930s.

“I was beaten up every day after school,” Mr. Field said in 2022. His father, Louis Felscher, changed the family name to Field in an attempt to avoid antisemitism.

Home life was not easy either. Mr. Field described Louis, a commercial artist who designed movie posters for MGM, as tyrannical. But Mr. Field’s mother, Hilda (Taubman) Field, was musical with a streak of nonconformism, believing in the health benefits of nudism and eurhythmic dancing exercise.

All the children took music lessons. Edward, who played the cello, performed regularly with two of his siblings on a local radio show called “The Field Family Trio and Their Romantic Melodies.” The first in his family to go to college, Edward studied marketing at New York University at his father’s insistence but left in 1943 to enlist in the Army.

He was a decorated first lieutenant who navigated B-17 bombers, the aircraft known as the Flying Fortress, in 27 raids over Germany. He nearly died in February 1945, when his plane was hit by enemy fire and crash landed into the North Sea.

His poem about his survival, “World War II,” was made into an award-winning short animated film, “Minor Accident of War,” in 2019, by Mr. Field’s niece, Diane Weis, and Piotr Kabat, with Mr. Field narrating the text.

After the war, he returned to New York University on the G.I. Bill and met other ambitious young writers including Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, and Alfred Chester, a literary critic and novelist whose meteoric rise and tragic end had a profound effect on Mr. Field’s own life and work. Mr. Chester had struggled with depression, leading to drug-fueled psychotic breaks after he moved to Morocco to join the writer and composer Paul Bowles. After Mr. Chester died under mysterious circumstances in 1971, Mr. Field became the keeper of his legacy.

Mr. Field successfully lobbied publishers to reprint Mr. Chester’s work. He edited a collection of his short fiction called “Head of a Sad Angel: Stories 1953-1966” (1990) as well as a collection of his Moroccan letters, “Voyage to Destruction” (2021). He also paid homage to Mr. Chester in his own memoir of life in literary Greenwich Village, “The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag and Other Intimate Portraits of the Bohemian Era” (2005); the title story about a would-be Sontag spouse referred to Mr. Chester.

Mr. Field left N.Y.U. before graduating, and headed for Paris in 1948. There, he met other expatriate American writers, including James Baldwin and Robert Friend, and published work regularly in literary magazines. He eventually worked his way back to New York in 1950 as a deckhand on a freighter.

But America then was a chilly place for a young gay poet. The House Un-American Activities Committee swept up a broad swath of artists, many of them Jews and gay people.

Then, in the mid-1950s, Mr. Field met the poet Frank O’Hara. Their brief love affair altered the course of Mr. Field’s life and work. “Frank O’Hara showed me the way,” Mr. Field wrote for outhistory.org. Mr. O’Hara’s ability to write easily and unselfconsciously as a gay man gave Mr. Field the courage to follow his instincts and loosen up with his own writing. The result was a breakthrough in his poetry.

“Stand Up, Friend, With Me” (1963) received the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, though the book had been turned down by 24 publishers. Mr. Field’s colloquial language, emotionality and openly gay topics brought him widespread praise and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.

As Mr. Field burst on the scene, the poet William Carlos Williams wrote: “I don’t know how the hell old you are or anything about you but I’m certain you’ve got the stuff: clean, straight writing that knows (or you know) what a poem could be made of. I am impressed.”

Mr. Field was hired by Johnson and Johnson, the pharmaceutical giant, to write the narration for a film at the company’s pavilion at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. The film won an Academy Award for best documentary short in 1966.

By the early 1970s, Mr. Field became that rare creature: a successful poet, able to support himself through public readings and freelance writing.

The love of his life was Neil Derrick, a novelist who published bodice-rippers such as “Sticky Fingers” (1970) under the pseudonyms Eleanor Bartlett and Bruce Elliot. They met in 1959, while they were both working in a typing pool at an advertising agency. “We started a nonstop conversation that led the supervisor to switch him to another typewriter, rows away from me,” Mr. Field recalled.

But in 1971, Mr. Derrick was diagnosed with a brain tumor, which left him blind. Mr. Field became his caregiver.

They continued to travel to Europe and collaborated on several Bruce Elliot novels, including “The Potency Clinic” (1978) and “Village” (published in 1982 and republished as “The Villagers” in 1999), which became an unexpected best seller.

The two were married in 2017. Mr. Derrick died the following year. Mr. Field leaves no immediate survivors. A longtime resident of Westbeth Artists Housing, a community for artists and arts organizations in Greenwich Village, Mr. Field continued to write and publish throughout his ninth decade. An anachronistic bohemian to the end, he shared an excerpt from one of his poems on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” in 2006:

I am of another era, like the grizzled poet

who slept in Village doorways

and shows up at the Poetry Society

with his life work in a shopping bag

and read his poem, ‘Crows’:

Caw-caw, he cried as he jumped

off a table, flapping his arms.