Bruce Boone (b. 1940) was born and raised in Portland, OR. He attended Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, CA, double majoring in Philosophy and English. Following Saint Mary’s he became a Catholic postulant, but moved away from this pursuit just a year and a half in. After a return to California’s bay area, he attended Berkeley College, earning a PhD. in English in 19761. Boone’s dissertation, Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O’Hara centered on positioning Frank O’Hara’s verse as part of a larger movement and analyzing the depth of his poetry without turning a blind eye to his sexuality, which many critics of the time did. Early in 1970, Boone connected with Robert Gluck, establishing a friendship on their mutual love for Frank O’Hara’s poetry. Together, they—along with a group of other writers in their literary circle—founded a movement they termed New Narrative2. Writers in this group included (but were not limited to) Kathy Acker, Steve Abbott, Dennis Cooper, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Michael Amnasan, and Camille Roy. The movement was largely focused on creating a new experimental formalism marked by a tone of honesty and confessionalism that pointedly draws threads between identity and social and political issues. Two important early publications were Gluck’s Family Poems (Black Star Series, 1979) and Boone’s My Walk with Bob (Black Star Series, 1979). Made up of dialogues and reflections from walks around San Francisco, Boone’s novella proved to be immensely influential with his contemporaries from Small Press Traffic and attendees of Bob Gluck’s workshops, who were all looking for a new modes of communicating and connecting through writing and art. With Century of Clouds (Hoddypoll Press, 1980), published in 1980, Boone centers his narrative on the Marxist Literary Group’s Summer Institute on Culture and Society in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Boone attended the summer institute, which featured speakers such as Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton. While the story of Century of Clouds jumps off from this setting and milieu, it blossoms out into much further reaching and personal territory, touching on themes of community, connection, sex, feminism, identity politics, and spirituality. With his characteristic humor and candor, Boone’s cyclical, discursive writing profoundly finds strands between seemingly disparate events and ideas, continuously rebuking the readers expectations.

The 1970s and 1980s were a prolific period for Bruce Boone. He published poems and essays in numerous journals and publications, including American Book Review, Fuse, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Poetics Journal. He published the chapbooks Karate Flower (Hoddypoll Press, 1973) and The Truth About Ted (exempli gratia, 1984). Other works from around this time include a poetry collaboration with Bob Gluck titled La Fontaine (Blackstar Editions, 1981), the self-published pamphlet Toward a Gay Theory for the 80s, and the stories David, His Charm (Storytellers 1986) and A Visit with Roy (Tamarisk, 1983).

In 1988, Boone embarked upon translating works from French to English, beginning with Georges Bataille’s Guilty (Lapis Press, 1988). Throughout the nineties and into the early-2000s he translated another work by Bataille, On Nietsche (Paragon House, 1998), works by Pascal Quignard, including On Wooden Tablets: Apronenia Avitia (Burning Deck, 2001) and Albucius (Lapis Press, 1993), and Pacific Wall (Lapis Press, 1990) by Jean Francois Lyotard.

In the early 1990s, Boone met James Holley and the two became partners up until 2009 when Holley passed away. Holley was an inventive writer, musician and artist in his own right. The two lived together in San Francisco and had immense impacts on each other’s work. Following Holley’s death, Boone began a wordpress blog titled “A Stele for Jamie”. The blog is a diaristic account, commemorating their relationship and confronting the profound grief associated with the loss of a partner. The blog begins in August of 2010 with a poem titled “Jamie” and ends in August 2011 with a post simply titled “The End”. The blog is heart wrenching in its openness and honesty and exemplifies the energy and urgency that typifies Boone’s writing.

With increased interest in the work of New Narrative writers in the early 2000s, came recognition for Boone’s work. Nightboat Books reprinted Century of Clouds (Nightboat Books, 2009) and in 2020 they published a large collection of previously published and unpublished poems, essays, reviews, interviews, and other works, edited by Rob Halpern titled Bruce Boone Dismembered (Nightboat Books, 2020). The book highlights Boone’s versatile talent and the scale of his interests, always considering community and introspection together. Interviews with Boone and writings about New Narrative continue to position him at the center of the literary movement, cementing his reputation as an influential and integral modern day literary figure.

Notes

1. Sneathen, E. (n.d.). Bruce Boone, author at Open Space. Open Space. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://openspace.sfmoma.org/author/bruceboone/

2. Kennedy, E. (2020, April 6). Bruce Boone. BOMB Magazine.