‘…I used to lie in my bedroom in New York City gazing with a kind of longing love-sickness at the tourist posters I had pinned to my walls. Amalfi was a giant conch shell sheltering in its mountainous side little white houses that clustered the cliffs to the sea. Les Hautes-Alpes was a moraine of snow, chalets and skis. Sicily was a maid of harvested fruits and musical instruments and a suggestive Corinthian column from a ruined Greek temple. How my imagination played upon those images as I heard, below my window, the Third Avenue E1 go roaring by!…’
In 1954 American poet Harold Norse cycled south from Rome (where had been living since 1953) and from there hitch-hiked deeper south, along the coast of Sicily, back to the Italian mainland and up north again to Venice. Equipped with his Baedeker and no more than two dollars to spend each day of his trip, Norse’s idealised views of Italy and his knowledge of its ancient history clashed with everyday reality in the poverty-stricken regions of post-war Italy, where Americans were not greeted as liberators but as rich tourists waiting to be shaken down… Norse’s journal of his trip through Italy, remained unpublished until his friend Todd Swindell took it upon himself to have it published posthumously after Norse had died in 2009. Swindell not only recovered the manuscript but also edited it, cleaned it up, wrote an introduction and found a publisher in Ralf Friel’s Moloko+, who did a good job making it available to the public under the title Autostop!
Harold Norse was born Harold Rosen to a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant in 1916. After having graduated from Brooklyn College he became close friends with W.H. Auden (after the latter’s move to the USA in 1939) and William Carlos Williams, who helped publish Norse’s experimental and groundbreaking poems. In the early 1950s Norse got his master’s degree in literature from New York University and saw his first poetry compilation published. Norse lived in Italy in the second half of the 1950s and was a resident of the Beat Hotel in Paris with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso from 1959 to 1963. After having moved to the Greek island of Hydra and Tangier, Norse returned to the US in 1968. The last 35 years of his life were spent in the Mission District of San Francisco. With his ‘Carnivorous Saint: Gay Poems 1941-1976’ and publications in magazines such as Gay Sunshine, Norse established himself as one of the leading gay liberation poets of his era.