Well Bottom Blues

I wish to claim the designation poète maudit not as Verlaine first meant, the edgy Madness of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. I know what poète maudit looks like. Thaddeus Comti was my friend. I claim it as one possessed by poetry, mounted as by a loa. Is this symptomatic or bipolar disorder as some believe, or something older than that diagnosis, that madness recognized as far back as we have writing.

I also claim it as the misunderstood, a writer disassociate from the new poetical reality, an almost deliberately marginal poet.   I refuse to ban classical statuary to get rid of the Confederates, to sunset the ancestors for the deep dysfunctions of their own time that would damn them. You will have to pry the poems of  John Berryman and Charles Bukowski out of my cold dead hands. I am at my core post-post-Wallace Stevens.

I can be edgy when the poem calls for it but also often fall into accentual, stanzaic verse. I asked another poet of my age if this was a universal tendency in our cohort and he just smiled and agreed. None of the amazing ancients were 20-something MFA graduates. They were grown ass poets steeped in the tradition. I wonder if the Tuscan poets would find Shakespeare as edgy as Hopkins was later.

I am cursed because I began writing so late in life, around age 50; because I was locked out of poetry for seven of those 20 years by a necessary medication; cursed because I can’t afford the MFA I was admitted to; cursed because I can’t quite crack what the Poetry Industrial Complex wants in a manuscript. One year in MFA on craft and workshops gives me an idea what that target looks like. Reading fees are a burden so I give away much of my pretty good poetry on Meta and blogs. The very best I shuffle like a familiar deck of tarot cards trying to find the future in which there is a chap book or a collection..