A few years ago a friend of mine, Chris Gutkind, handed me a big folder of papers relating to the poet Alfred Celestine, who had died in 2009. I knew the work a little bit: Celestine’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1978) has some claim to being the first book of poetry published by a Black gay man living in Britain. His poems are knotty, intense, emotionally cool and suddenly vulnerable. A selected poems appeared in 2017 but didn’t quite click for me, though I wanted to know more. My interest was piqued by the draft of an unpublished novel, These Are Our Nights of Gethsemane, probably completed around 1974. The cover-page includes Celestine’s contact details in Oakland, California, crossed-out and replaced with his address in Hollybush Gardens, East London, where he settled in 1977 after spending time in Berlin and Greece.
The plot of Gethsemane is hard to follow. The prose is brooding and staccato, and the narration is shared between a large cast of characters. It’s clearly influenced by Faulkner, Jean Toomer, the romantic entanglements of Baldwin’s Another Country. There’s a central figure, Reed, but to reach his story we have to know about his parents and grandparents, his lovers, the people he meets at university. The book ends by unravelling quite abruptly in a series of texts-within-texts: diaries, letters and stories exchanged between the protagonists. Any editor would demand extensive changes, but the raw material – poet’s prose, unmistakably – is compelling. The only trouble was that my copy – Chris’s copy, a xerox – was missing the first three pages. Maybe they would solve everything? I imagined a preface, a family tree, a dramatis personae complete with patronymics as if it was a lost Russian classic.
It took some work and good luck to track down Celestine’s papers. Eventually someone put me in touch with Shane, Celestine’s surviving partner, whom I cold-called one day in June. He laughed when I told him what I was looking for. Over the summer I visited him in Brixton to collect two suitcases overflowing with papers and documents, which now reside in the Bishopsgate Institute archives. I found the missing pages – no skeleton key – but at least I have the opening sentences: ‘Months passed. Seasons changed. In a penny arcade on Market Street the city screams. Streets radiate out like starfish.’ Who was Alfred Celestine? I started trying to piece it together.
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Alfred Bernard Celestine Jr was born in Los Angeles on 3 June 1949. He grew up in Ridgecrest, California, where his father worked at the China Lake air and naval base. ‘That’s how it was – / the toy-drum of night, soldiers / who dressed and undressed’, as Celestine later put it in a poem (‘The Martyr’). His mother was originally from Kansas; he had grandparents in Louisiana. He attended Burroughs High School, where he was one of the only Black students in his class. He excelled academically, and in his final year made it to the finals of the National Speech Tournament. The eventual winner in his category, Original Oratory, appears to have been Shelley Long, who went on to play Diane in Cheers. She spoke about sex education; Celestine’s topic is lost to history.
Celestine enrolled at Fresno State in 1967, and took classes in sociology, computing and drama. In 1969 he transferred to the new interdisciplinary Black Studies programme at UC Riverside. He became heavily involved in the Black Student Union (BSU), serving on the executive committee as they attempted to establish academic autonomy for the fledgling department. But in February 1970, after just six months, chancellor Ivan Hinderaker – who in a 1998 interview described Black Studies as ‘You know, why do we have to ride in the back of the bus, that sort of thing’ – unilaterally dissolved the programme in a punitive response to student militancy. The BSU building burned down in mysterious circumstances two years later.
The 1970 UCR yearbook, which gives a generally unsympathetic account of campus unrest, presents Celestine in the throes of a breakdown:
Celestine, an introverted intellectual obsessed by thoughts of death, decided that he was being followed and requested a police escort one night. He formulated elaborate codes, in case Central Committee members should suddenly begin disappearing. Then he dropped out of the picture. ‘I’m just resting’.
In a photo of a BSU press conference, the other five members of the committee are gesturing with cigarettes, swapping smiles and glances. Celestine is looking down, writing something, full of intensity. He would experience psychiatric emergencies throughout his life, and was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. One of the most painful objects in his archive is a set of intake notes from a sectioning in the late 2000s, handwritten because his tongue was swollen.
It was in these volatile circumstances, both personal and political, that Celestine first began to publish his poems. The earliest, as far as I can tell, is ‘Betrayal (for Judas Iscariot)’, which appeared in The Highlander student newspaper on 30 September 1971. It’s a poem of cagey self-inspection, which swings between seriousness and bathos, beauty and disgust. Celestine starts with the objects in front of him before plunging inward: ‘The faded pink carnations explode on the kitchen table; / their pink petals sugar my bowl of cereal / I am lost in myself’. By the second stanza, ‘ruin peels from my fingertips’, and he inspects ‘flecks of epidermis on the floor’, as if he’s abraded his prints during the preparation of a crime.
It becomes clear as the poem goes on that Celestine identifies with Judas:
This is the whole catastrophe then.
The white blood of lightning despoils
what I have plotted.
My blood, bone ash of a mule,
courses through silver capillaries
like dirty coins dropped in a Roman fountain.
A boneyard of scrap-iron flowers stare.
A trickle of water comes down with the news
of his death, someone else attend
the cacophony of this immense grief.
But it’s not clear whose death this is, what the stakes are. George Jackson had been killed the previous month, and there were reprisals against San Francisco police officers soon after, along with sustained demonstrations on campus. This context squares with the poem’s final lines: ‘Sunken in the bowels of a dead man, vomiting politicians spew lies. / Lie cleaves life, the blastula deceit grows.’ Betrayal here is general, reciprocal, inescapable: this is the whole catastrophe.
Celestine soon became poetry editor of The Highlander, and across its pages we can find evidence of his hesitant coming out. ‘North Beach’ sees the poet entering a bar and ‘cruising down the aisles / like a fox in a henhouse’. An untitled poem is set in the Tenderloin, where the poet shows interest in sex workers and drag queens but eventually declares ‘I want out!’. Parts of Gethsemane suggest he was cruising Sutro Heights Park. By December 1971 – in an issue which also features Susan Griffin’s lesbian feminist classic ‘I Like to Think of Harriet Tubman’ – we find reports of Celestine playing a gay role onstage, in Black Sun by Booker T. Williams. In the photo he holds his white lover’s hand to his cheek.
The circumstances of Celestine’s departure from the US aren’t clear. He graduated with a major in sociology, and came out to his family soon after. As he wrote later: ‘I was schooled in sex: / first women, then men & both / gave out diplomas, / but I tore them up’ (‘The Letters and Numbers of Straw’). He was arrested in LA on a fraud charge in September 1973 and fined $100, but nobody I’ve spoken to knows the context. In 1975 he circulated a small chapbook, Blues to Be Read Someday, which features a version of the opening chapter of his novel. It’s possible that he prepared it to coincide with his appearance at a marathon poetry reading in Berkeley in July of that year. The star on that occasion was the legendary beat poet Bob Kaufman, making one of his first public appearances since taking a vow of silence during the Vietnam War. I don’t know if Celestine ever read again in the United States.
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By September 1975, Celestine was in Greece, but his passport has so many stamps it’s hard to make sense of his travels. He visited Macedonia, spent time in Berlin and seems to have settled in Britain by 1977. He got a job at Joe Allen’s, a fashionable restaurant and bar in Covent Garden, where he worked for several years as a waiter. In 1985 he appeared in a Times feature about the glamorous staff of the Soho Brasserie, wearing ‘a blue nylon coat’ and serving steak tartare.
According to the late John Welch, editor of the poetry imprint The Many Press, the manuscript of Confessions of Nat Turner just showed up one day in 1978. Welch and Celestine printed it together at the National Poetry Centre in Earl’s Court. It’s slim but eye-catching: 24 pages with bright pink wraps. The sequence begins with a series of five-line stanzas, a crisp and spare music: ‘Dark man / Pulls energy / From air like a wireless’. The lines are organised by syllable count, rather than the measures of metrical feet. They extend in a pattern of extension and return, 2/4/6/8/2. The method is condensation, restraint.
The relationship to Nat Turner – leader of the 1831 slave rebellion C.L.R. James called ‘an entirely new form of struggle’ – is oblique. Does Celestine identify with Turner? Mourn him? Hold him at arm’s length? It’s hard to decide. But slowly the poem gathers prophetic energy, drawing on ‘our tortured history’ to ‘shatter the law’. The epilogue stages an extraordinary chorus, quoting the sorrow song ‘Wade in the Water’ and ending with clear visionary power:
The things I heard
When I didn’t have a gun
And in the depths of my heart
Without a shadow, without a name
Without a god, without roots, without hope
I become a medium
And the dead plunge their voices like needles
in my veins and speak through my blood.
A turbulent rainbow arc:
Its black bottom burns
past marrow and mother
past jails, past welfare lines
past fire.
It belongs to the lineage of Robert Hayden’s Middle Passage (1945) and Kamau Brathwaite’s Arrivants trilogy (1973). And although it’s an American poem, it seems to reckon with the gathering forces of reaction in Britain in the late 1970s, the fire on the horizon.
The book was reviewed here and there. Jim Burns, back when Tribune had a poetry section, called it ‘Strange, but memorable in its own way’, about as faint as praise can get. In Welch’s telling, Celestine became suspicious when a piece in Time Out – which I’ve been unable to find – mentioned his race (‘Who told them I was Black?’). Given Nat Turner’s explicit thematic concern with African American history and Black liberation struggles, this is perhaps puzzling. But Celestine was evidently wary of tokenism and being pigeon-holed. In the apparent absence of a Black queer tradition, it’s easy to see how Celestine would fall through the literary cracks: too Black, too gay, too hermetic.
Celestine published almost nothing in the 1980s, and there was an interim of twenty-five years before the appearance of his second standalone pamphlet, Passing Eliot in the Street (2003). How are we to explain this? All evidence suggests that Celestine was a careful writer, and took time to let his experiences cool and distil into poems. His was an art of redraft and revision. But it’s clear that the nightmare of the 1980s – the AIDS crisis first and foremost – presented terrible obstacles.
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One bibliographic curio – possibly his sole print appearance in the 1980s – is a tourist guide to the museums of London, co-authored by Celestine with his sometime-lover Charles Maude in 1982. Maude, a designer and illustrator, came from the English upper class. His only published sequence, The Thieves of Time (1983) – full of gorgeous intricacy and showy rhyme – is dedicated to Celestine. They remained close, quoting one another’s poems in an ongoing literary exchange. After Maude’s death of AIDS-related illnesses in 1993, Celestine memorialised him and another friend in a poem called ‘Self Definition’:
Charles and Steve have come
alone; all the voluptuous
sweetness of their dead bodies
fills the houses and streets
of my being.
At the end of Nat Turner, Celestine had claimed the role of a medium, giving voice to the dead. Here the mood is more intimate, at once ghostly and sensuous. The present becomes increasingly overlaid with memory; the future seems hazy, hard to imagine.
Celestine’s most vivid poems from this period often involve concrete locations in London. In ‘In the Key of C’ we find him cruising Kennington Park on June 24th 1989, ‘ripe / enough to be eaten / Whole’. A poem named after an Italian restaurant near Victoria Station, L’Arco, presents a tableau of calm grief: ‘The dead proceed in darkness / In order to hold and be held’. And in the closing lines of an untitled poem Celestine announces: ‘When I make marriage / a streetlamp close by lights up: / His name is Brixton.’ This honours his relationship with Shane, whom he’d met in Copa’s, a club in Earl’s Court in 1988. Shane supported Celestine for the next twenty years through thick and thin.
Yet with Celestine it’s always a little complicated. The poem for Shane also announces, obliquely, his marriage to Aga Lesiewicz, a Polish writer he’d met at the Poetry Round workshop, which he attended for years and sometimes convened. In fact several poems, both published and unpublished, take marriage as theme. He borrowed a line from Essex Hemphill (whom he likely saw perform in England in the late 1980s) for the title of the ‘The Absence of Rice and Bridesmaids’, which described daffodils watching on ‘like secret police for evidence, say, / of our real intention’. Elsewhere, Lot’s Wife – turned into a pillar of salt for looking back at Sodom as it was destroyed – appears heavy with unresolved symbolism.
Celestine divorced Aga in the mid-1990s in the midst of a bankruptcy settlement. He had enrolled at the University of North London, studying English and German, and his poems had started to appear in venues like The James White Review and Wasafiri. But a scheme to open a bookshop in the student union went awry, and he lost a considerable amount of money loaned to him by his ex-lover, John Heywood. Around the same time, Celestine began taking the combination therapy for HIV, and struggled to manage his physical and mental health. John remembers a distressing reading where Celestine, clearly falling apart, stripped off.
But there was a third act still to come. After a long stretch of unemployment, Celestine got a job with Transport for London; later, improbably, he worked taking notes for the Home Office prosecution in immigration cases. He began publishing again, and the title poem of Passing Eliot in the Street is one of his signal achievements. It is a feverish masterpiece, which sees Lorca transposed to Belfast, ‘Dead on the Falls Road’, as the poet wakes up in a psychiatric ward. Many people I have spoken to remember Celestine’s readings, his fierce control in delivering dense and complex lines. As late as 2007 he was participating in arts workshops with Positive East, an HIV support group in East London. After his death from heart disease in 2009 there was a memorial reading at the Camden Eye in Kentish Town. On the recording the readers are occasionally interrupted by passing sirens.
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It took me about 45 minutes looking through Celestine’s papers to realize something was wrong with the posthumous Weightless Word: Selected Poems (2017). I had always been confused by the title sequence of that book, some 30 pages or more, which replaces African American history and cruising for completely different landscapes and themes. I found these poems in a blue folder titled ‘Weightless Road’ and no evidence of drafts or revision. Sure enough, it turns out these poems were by Celestine’s friend from the Poetry Round workshop, Vincent de Souza, and had been published in de Souza’s Weightless Road in 2004. I contacted Shearsman Books and they hastily corrected the edition, which – despite its flaws – remains the only readily available starting-point for those interested in Celestine’s poems.
These things happen. But it’s hard not to feel a sting of injustice, even anger, at the fate of so many poets and so much poetry outside the reigning institutional and commercial frameworks. Celestine will, I think, find his readership. ‘I am not sure the old myths / make any mention of me’, Celestine once wrote elegiacally (‘A Quiet Meditation’), and reading his poems he’s always slipping away. But there are dozens and dozens of uncollected and previously unprinted poems of Celestine’s now in the Bishopsgate Institute. Blues to Be Read Someday, like he said.
Read on: Lola Seaton, ‘Good Mistakes’, NLR 146.