Vanity, thy name is autobiography

The true history of a life never resides in its factual details but in the individual's inner reality, which no document can fully reveal. Though scholars and fans may comb literary work in search of elusive details about the author's life, writing is not a mirror of the author's soul but a Chinese puzzle which she has crafted, and filled with truths which she has manipulated to best effect.

In matters literary and artistic, I always feel it is best to grapple with the work itself and to set aside the life which created it. Lives are messy things, crammed with inexplicable events and irrational behaviors, and directionless to the human eye. Careful work, by contrast, is neat, logical, clean. It comes to you already organized, so you may enjoy it. Unlike a life, which is a trash-heap of irrelevancies.

Put another way, work is clean and life is dirty.

Yet people are oddly curious about my dirty life. Perhaps this is because there are not very many formalist poets who are also mainstream journalists who also admit publicly to being sadomasochists.

So, for those who feel a visit to this domain would be incomplete without a glimpse into the people, places, and peculiarities which shaped my literary imagination and private passions, below is a deliberately incomplete listing of the particulars. As with my life, this biography is a work in progress, constantly in flux, responding to outside forces and caught up in daily life. Only when I am forgotten will the final chapter be done.

Chapter One: The Big Shebang

I am born. It is August 20 ,1955 in New York. The city has been struck by a heat wave. The temperature is 96 degrees. The hospital is not air-conditioned; doctors, nurses, and patient alike sweat over my delivery. Already I am causing a disturbance. To add injury to insult, I arrive feet-first, like Alexander the Great.

The similarities end here. (Except for the Amazonian chin.)

There is another honor that history bestowed upon me: I am the child of Holocaust survivors. Six years before I arrived at Beth Israel Hospital, my parents arrived at Boston Harbor, direct from a deportation camp in Germany where they had waited three years for their visas. (Oddly enough, the DP camp was Bergen-Belsen--which, after the War, had been transformed from a concentration camp to a harbor for displaced Jews.)

So there I was: a breech baby, Survivors' child, delivered into an inferno. An auspicious beginning, wouldn't you say?

Yet, since that beginning, I have always landed on my feet.

---

Chapter Two:
There's a Whole Lot of Hokey-Pokey Going On:
sundry schools and related traumas

Ballet School, Brooklyn, circa 1959:
first evidence that I would never dance on command
"Don't you want to do the Hokey-Pokey?"--dance instructor.

P.S. 169, Brooklyn, NY (1960-67):
first lessons in sex education

LESSON 1: "When a girl becomes a woman, her blood gets poisonous, so she has to get rid of it every month."--fifth-grade teacher, explaining menstruation LESSON 2: "Sex is when a man puts his thing in the woman's thing." --sixth-grade girlfriend, whom I took for a filthy liar, secure in the knowledge that my father could never do anything so disgusting to my mother. HOMEWORK: "But how are babies actually made?"--toxic daughter "I don't know!"--freaked out mother

Brooklyn Conservatory of Music (1966-69):
first case of stage fright.
"You won't forget to play the grace notes as you did during practice?"--
helpful music teacher.

John J. Pershing J.H.S., Brooklyn (1967-69):
first puff of marijuana
"It costs 20 whole dollars for an ounce?!"--
pre-inflationary babe in the hemp woods.

Erasmus Hall High School, Brooklyn (1969-70):
first anti-war rally, in which our heroine sustained a fractured
pinky in the name of World Peace.
"Get the fuck out of here, hippie freak!"--kindly police officer

Third Street Music Settlement Manhattan (1969-72):
first evidence I would never be a virtuoso pianist.
"You vould make a wery goot accompanist!"--
another helpful music teacher.

A Nameless Catskills Resort, circa 1970
first evidence that men had a strange fascination with me
"Don't you want to do the Hokey-Pokey with me?"--
entertainment director, night manager, hotel owner, nightclub performer,
three cooks, four counselors, and six waiters.

Sheepshead Bay High School, Brooklyn (1970-72):
first affair with a teacher
"Are you sure no one saw you?"--Mr. X.

Alliance Francaise, Paris, France (1974-75, Diplome de langue, Teaching Certificate):
first case of ennui, inspired by last affair with a Pole
"The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books.
To escape! To escape far away!"--Stephen Mallarme

York College/City University of New York, Jamaica, NY. (B.A. in English '77: Regents Scholar, Dean's List, President of French Club, summa cum laude)
first existential crisis, the inevitable result of studying Sartre's Nausea
while dating the professor, who read The Phaedrus to me in bed.
Our love was not Platonic.
"Do you want to do the Hokey-Pokey again?"--philosophy professor
"I know perfectly well that I don't want to do anything; to do something is to create existence--and there's quite enough existence as it is."--Jean-Paul Sartre

Columbia U Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, NYC (M.A. in English '78):
first proof that hypocrisy is rampant wherever you least expect it.
I studied with Carolyn Heilbrun, renowned feminist, who was also renowned for distinctly favoring the men in our class. I wanted to study with the brilliant critic and eminent Palestinian apologist Edward Said. But he made all potential students complete a questionnaire to determine their political preparedness for his class. The only thing I've ever been politically prepared for is an anarchist commune. Needless to say, I didn't make the cut.

Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, San Francisco.
proof that adult students have more fun
(PhD in Clinical Sexology, '99 or thereabouts)
As if I didn't spend enough time thinking and writing about sex, I'm back in school again, working on a doctorate in sex. Say, what's with me and sex? Oh, well: it's a living.

Chapter Three:
Poet Teachers

OWEN DODSON: My first poetry teacher was African-American poet Owen Dodson, who rose to prominence young, then faded into obscurity as illnesses (among them Sickle Cell Anemia) ruined his body and undermined his artistic powers. Owen was the first true poet I knew--generous, loving, kind, and more than a little quirky.

Owen lived in a vast apartment on the Upper West Side with his maiden sister, Edith, who tended to her brother's domestic needs. The apartment was a tribute to Owen's travels, his achievements, and his fantastically eclectic imagination. In one corner, he had a large puppet box, with Thai figures limned by pale white lights. Throughout the house were figures of horses: small statues and carvings and dolls, and even an ornate rocking horse.

Owen told me, "Whenever I get a royalty check, I reward myself by buying a horse. That's the first thing I do."

The bathroom was a writer's paradise: the walls were covered with postcards received from his many friends, most of them now legends in poetry, jazz, and the arts. In a prominent spot were countless cards from W.H. Auden, whose villa in Greece Owen had visited many times.

"Heaven to me was sitting in a lounge chair by Auden's pool with a cold drink in my hand," Owen said.

After college, I lost touch with him. His eagerness to help me had perplexed me. I was too young then to understand what his friendship meant. Also, I felt I had betrayed his hopes for me by abandoning poetry and taking a conventional job. But by 1984, I wanted more than anything to reclaim the poet's life, and I needed to talk to him again.

I couldn't find him. He was not at his old address; when I dialed his old phone number, it rang and rang and rang. Finally I learned that he was dead.

Just at this time, a strange chance came my way. I was restless and unhappy with life on Wall Street: the work was spiritually meaningless. I wanted to do something good. An ad in a neighborhood paper said that a blind person sought a reader. The address listed was Owen's last address. I knew he had died and yet, when I called, I wildly hoped that he would answer the phone. Instead, it was a nice old lady who needed help sorting through her belongings.

It seemed fated. I went to her apartment and was charmed when a plump, tiny lady in winged, rhinestone-bobbed glasses and a day-glo housedress met me at the door.

She led me in to a dark and claustrophobic space. The 70 plus years of this eccentric life had been converted to stuff. Stuff overflowed from shelves, lined floors, leaned against walls, fell out of drawers. There was good stuff, like a superb collection of Depression Glass stacked on a towering breakfront; there was kitsch stuff, like souvenirs of cheap holidays to popular resorts of the 40s and 50s. But mostly there was personal stuff, the sort which means everything to its collector and nothing to anyone else. My job was to read through the boxes of papers she had collected: her landlord had threatened her with eviction if she did not pare down. Her apartment was a fire hazard.

So, hour after hour, during lunchtime or after work, I would pore through her boxes, finding receipts for meals at restaurants that went out of business in the 1960s, and playbills for shows that closed decades ago. "This can be thrown out," I would say, coming upon a mysterious set of ticket stubs from a theater since burnt down. "Oh....no," she would say, taking them from me and peering at them, sadly, "I remember I went there with Martha, my brother's girlfriend, when he was away with the Navy. That was during the War. I can't give them up."

"What about this?" I'd try a few minutes later, holding up a shred of wrinkled paper with a theater's address scrawled in faded ink. "Oh!" she would squint at me disapprovingly, "I worked there once! I was a dancer. I was in their chorus line. Oh, we danced down the aisles in that theater. I could never throw that away!"

After several weeks of this, I simply gave up. She did not want to be parted from her stuff. She could not live without her stuff. Her stuff was her history. I could not come between her and her history.

In the course of our conversations, I found out that she remembered Owen--remembered seeing him struggling through the halls, his sister by his side. And she remembered when he died. Meeting someone who had seen him at the end of his life somehow gave me closure. But I miss him.

JOSEPH BRODSKY: By far, the teacher who made the most lasting impression on me was Joseph Brodsky, whom I was blessed to know for ten years. At the seminar I took with him at PSA, he introduced me to the work of C.P. Cavafy: it was perhaps the happiest introduction of my life. To listen to Joseph brilliantly spin his stories and funny anecdotes, to see him grow warm with emotion as he spoke of literature and considered its meanings, to hear him recite, in heavily-accented cadences, the verses of English poets--it was all the heaven that this poet could ever want.

When we met, Joseph was preparing for open-heart surgery. He was only 45 but his body was paying for an extraordinarily difficult life. I remember once, months after the operation, sitting on the sofa in his tiny apartment on Morton Street-- which, incidentally, was Auden's old place. Joseph had invited me to visit and to bring work for him to read. He sat in a chair across from me, perusing the manuscript slowly. I was afraid: I knew he would tell me the truth. If he said I had no talent, I would give up my dream. Luckily, he was very kind to me, and became a friend to my work from then on. Later, over coffee, we talked about his own work. He was oppressed by mortality. He felt he might die any time. "But you have achieved great work," I feebly said, "Your work will still be read in the 21st Century." "Perhaps," he said curtly, then he smirked,"But I would like to be there to see the readers doing it!"

In the intervening years, Joseph won all the honors and awards of his profession. His death on January 28, 1996 reminded me of that conversation we had in 1986. He was right: only his words will live into the next century. Still, it is comforting to remember that his genius was rewarded in his lifetime.

I have a couple of cards Joseph sent me and I treasure them, but my proudest possession is an autographed copy of A Part of Speech, which he signed that day in 1986. He wrote out my name and drew the "o" in Gloria as a sun, then signed it, "from her humble teacher." Joseph had an excellent sense of humor.

For more anecdotes about Joseph, check out my poem, Kokoschka's Doll.

As for the other teachers on my list, I feel grateful to each, for different lessons learned.

Chapter Four:
Glory Gets a Job

After graduate school, for reasons of poverty and after spending many months being reminded told I was over-qualified for every job I needed and under-qualified for every job I wanted, I took the first job I was offered. The years of career masochism which followed probably made me the control-freak I am today.

1978: Secretary, McKinsey & Co.
"Don't you want to do the Hokey-Pokey?"--several senior partners, including one who tried to get me fired when I declined to dance.

1979-81: Administrative Assistant, Corporate Finance, Drexel Burnham Lambert
Where our heroine sustained an eye-opening education by working for (and, on one memorable occasion, doing the Hokey- Pokey with) men later indicted in the Mike Milken scandal.

1981-83: Assistant Manager, Institutional Sales, Drexel Burnham Lambert. (Registered Representative/Series 7 License.)

1983: Financial Analyst (Chemicals industry), Oppenheimer & Co.
First fateful encounter with a PC!

1983-86: Financial Analyst (Chemicals), Morgan Stanley, Inc.

1986-87: Consulting Research Director and Editor, Recruitment Research Institute.

1987-88: Consulting Editorial Director, Capital Campaign, The Cooper Union for Arts and Sciences.

1988-91: Adjunct associate professor/lecturer in English and Creative Writing (New College at Hofstra University, NYU, York College/CUNY).

1986-present: writer and editor, gardener, siren and serene bohemian, slave to none and Mistress of Her Own Destiny. With occasional time-out for the Hokey-Pokey.

Chapter Five: My Professional Life RIGHT NOW

At this stage, it would be deathly to list everything I've published. Instead, here is a snapshot of current and future projects.

SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT

Kinky Sexpert and BDSM chat-host for THRIVE On-Line on AOL (keyword: GloryB).

BOOKS

FORTHCOMING

CONSENTING ADULTS: A Commonsense Guide to Kinky Sex
(Simon & Schuster, 1999). Author.

IN PRINT

DOMINA: The Sextopians (Universal Publishers, 1998)
Author.

DIFFERENT LOVING: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission
(Villard/Random House, 1993 and 1996).
Lead author, with William D. Brame and Jon Jacobs.

WHERE THE BOYS ARE: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Mr. Right
(Avon/Cosmo Books, 1997).
Author.

AS CONTRIBUTOR

Between the Cracks: The Daedalus Anthology of Kinky Verse
editor Gavin Geoffrey Dillard
(Daedalus Publishing, 1997).
Contributing poet.

Consensual SM
by William Henkin and Sybil Holiday
(Daedalus Publishing, 1996).
Introduction by GGB.

MAGAZINES

REDBOOK (December 1998)
"Quickies: How to Have Hot Sex in Ten Minutes"

MAXIM (September 1998)
"Touch Her Right Here: New Age Sex Tips To Turn Her On"