Book Review SpinMeister on 22 Jun 2006 07:57 am
Dead Poet’s Revival
Bar Scotch poems by Everette Maddox was published in 1988 by Pirogue Publishing, one year before his alcohol related death in 1989.
Theatrical group Mondo Bizarro is staging performances based on the poetry of Maddox, called Catching Him in Pieces. He lived the self destructive life of downbeat decay and doom of New Orleans.
“An Alabamian, he loved his adopted city of New Orleans because of its faults, not despite them, just as he demanded that people accept him as he was, and not as they wanted him to be. “The dream of New Orleans seems to be receding,” he wrote, “it seems increasingly unreal. Or am I the one who’s unreal?”
“We’re a city on stilts — what’s holding it up?” One might ask the same of Maddox, who rejected responsibility and respectability and yet dressed like a Southern gentleman, drank like a fish, disdained change, sympathized “with Huck Finn’s taste for the mixed-up” and gloried in “cruising down the river on a Sunday afternoon.” Preferably with a good book. All he asked for was “a front row seat to watch the Titanic go down.”
From David Cuthbert’s recent New Orleans Times-Picayune article.
On a related poetic note, I have digitized a set of photographs taken of Allen Ginsberg when I met him in October 1982 in Madison, Wisconsin. They will be released on this site in the near future.
