A longtime faculty member in the Graduate Writing Program of the School of the Arts at Columbia, Corn has also held visiting posts at the University of California-Los Angeles, the University of Cincinnati, Ohio State University, Sarah Lawrence, Yale, and the University of Tulsa. Recently, he has also been a fellow of the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center at Bellagio, Italy, and in 2004-2005 he held the Amy Clampitt residency in Lenox, Massachusetts.

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Conclusion

It is a testament to Corn's talents that he is so often compared to several of the great American poets, many who happen to be gay. Yet critics seem to conclude that Corn has carved out his own space in contemporary poetry by combining unaffected honesty and a finely honed poetic skill. Further, Corn's expansive thematic reach and embracing vision have set him apart from many of his contemporaries.

Part of his singular ambition as a poet lies in setting the intensely personal against what lies outside himself--elements ranging from the European tradition of art to twentieth-century Americana. His quiet but frank autobiographical explorations and charged observations (on self, friends, lovers, city, nature, history, art) can serve as a chronicle of an artist (and man) who lived through personal and historical turbulence, who has sought out beauty and grace, and eloquently traced his own emotional, social, intellectual and sexual discoveries.

In the twenty years since its first appearance in the West, AIDS has been the subject of a large body of literature, most of it written by gay men and much of it designed to expose readers as closely as possible to the emergency of the epidemic and the suffering of affected individuals.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

John Ashbery, one of the leading contemporary American poets, avoids explicit gay content in his poetry, but his work shares concerns with other late twentieth-century gay writing.

One of the most accomplished poets of the twentieth century, W. H. Auden found that his gayness led him to new insights into the universal impulse to love and enlarged his understanding of all kinds of relationships.

A successor to Walt Whitman, Hart Crane found spiritual transcendence in homoerotic desire.

Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer and pianist David Del Tredici, known for his famous "Alice" works and neo-Romantic style, has also written music concerned with gay experience.

Richard Howard's searching and witty poetry, in which homosexuality is not a problem but a solution, is a significant contribution to the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

Poet J. D. McClatchy, Jr., a master of traditional poetic forms, most notably the sonnet and sonnet sequence, ranks as a significant voice in contemporary American letters.

James Merrill's significance as a gay writer lies in his deliberate use of a personal relationship to fuel his poetry.

The novels of David Plante examine a variety of homosexualities, their male characters ranging from openly gay to sexually ambiguous.

Celebrating an ideal of manly love in both its spiritual and physical aspects, Walt Whitman has exerted a profound and enduring influence on gay literature.