Harold Norse

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His life was about being overlooked. Harold, who died June 8 at 92, was a brilliant poet in an era in which you were supposed to veil your marital problems or homosexual angst in 10 layers of metaphor. But in poem after poem, Harold used his tremendous pain--he was an illegitimate child who stood 5 ft. 2 in. and was openly gay--and, in a language that was accessible to anybody in America, made you feel very powerful things.

Harold's poems were chiseled. William Carlos Williams, who was pretty much a god of American poetry, called him the "best poet of [his] generation." In Harold's most famous poem, "I Am in the Hub of the Fiery Force," he flashes back and forth between three or four rhythms like a virtuoso. He was writing about the agonies of being a gay man and an outcast in the U.S. before Allen Ginsberg. The Beats looked up to him. It was a tragedy that Harold never got the recognition that he should have.

But it wasn't in his nature to promote his work. Harold just loved to talk to people. There was a warmth about him. Put him in a café with a cappuccino and he could talk for hours, telling stories of people like Jack Kerouac and James Baldwin. Who wouldn't want to listen?

Nicosia is the author of Memory Babe, a Jack Kerouac biography