The Mad Poets Blog

To Marie Howe:

I am writing this now, at the end of the night, with the cat asleep over the comforter folded off to the side of the bed, the dog sprawled on the hardwood floor absorbing the cool, and Wojtek passed out over his Harry Potter tome, dreaming of the strategic and the tactical in long calibration meetings… I am writing now, just as my wet face is drying from reading your book again. It haunts me… I am writing now before the insanity that possesses me when I read it dissipates, as it is doing already.

I got up, after I’d shut down the computer, and locked the door, and turned the right lights on and the others off, I got up and pulled it out again, your book, from the low black shelf in the study, back to the stack by my bedside. I start from the end, from “What the Living Do”, read about the clogged sink, and the dangerous smelling Drano, and the coffee spilling on your sleeve, and your chapped face reflected in the glass… And despite that nagging comment that I read in an interview with you once, about how irritated you are by readers who assume that your poems are autobiographical, and how the I in them is not you—despite that I ignore you and chose to cry. Not for you, but for the release. “That yearning”…

And then I read backwards. I read “The Visit”, and “Yesterday”, and “The Memorial”. And I sob at the Memorial, at when you throw the ashes, and some are blown back at you, and how you didn’t think it was him, his bones and his skin and his cock… I stop after that. I want to read back to “Separation” and “The Gate”, but I must stop, write this, before it’s gone… I must stop now, because it’s gone.

Recommended Link:
In a Dark Time … The Eye Begins to See

Fiction writers: for some poets, like me, they are alien creatures who don’t break their lines into jaggedy bits, who are obsessed with making sure all their nouns and verbs go together in a certain order, and who abide by the nasty little narrative arc. *shudder*shudder*

Some writers are agile enough to not just walk the genre balance beam, but to do cartwheels and back-walkovers and flips on it. We’re lucky enough to have several such genre-gymnasts among the Mad Poets members. And Peter Baroth is one of them.

This week, the Guild of Outsider Writers posted a review of Peter’s novel Long Green, deeming it a “well-crafted, absorbing read.”

I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t read the novel yet, but Peter is an engaging poet, whose work be-bops through space and time, travelling social, political, cultural and geographical distances. So, I trust the commenter who said that Long Green “is also a story that authentically depicts the angst of a generation” because that resonates with the tenor of his poetry, which I’ve come to know and admire. I look forward to reading the novel soon.

If you’re interested, you can get Peter’s novel in paperback or Adobe eBook at iUniverse. You can also read some of his poetry online, from Off the Record: An Anthology of Poetry by Lawyers.