Alison Croggon wrote:

>Silly question maybe, but does anyone here worry if they're "normal"?
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>A
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Oh first...I hadn't read further on when I asked Mark whether "boring"
referred to Larkin or the essay. Larkin's presumed boringness (is that
a word?) reminds me of an entirely dissimilar poet, Edmund Spenser, who
(except for "Epithalamion") is the First Prize Winner on my Euthanasia
by Poetry list. Now of course someone will tell me that Spenser is
terribly exciting, but I had to read the dude frequently years ago and
found the criticism written about him far more entertaining than his poetry.

As for normal. Say what? NORMAL? What constitutes normal? Most of
the poets cited in the David Orr essay were to one degree or another
nuts, semi-functional, aberrant, would you let your daughter (or son)
marry one, etc. I keep picturing what John Waters, auteur of Pink
Flamingos, Hairspray, and The Pecker, would have been like if he'd
chosen to write poetry: and I ask "can I go home now?" And Waters seem
eminently normal, he just makes films about outre people.

Philip Levine, in true Detroit street-gang style, once flattened John
Berryman because JB was hitting on Fran, Levine's fiancee and
(later...still?) wife. Nu, Berryman was a bit out of his mind, be it
from alcoholism combined with God knows what else: a kid who makes
suicide attempts while at boarding school before he even began to drink
makes a pretty good case for himself as "otherwise affected." But he
was too aware of his behavior and how messed up it was to fall into the
category of "bad man." I had forgotten the details of Lowell and his
wives. He sounds like Henry VIII without the lute music. The man was a
shit. The poet was not always. I still wish I could write something
half as good as "Skunk Hour." Yet Lowell was a profoundly sick man,
too: liquor + bipolar disorder, a combo I know about from the inside. A
thorazine zombie. Where do you draw the line between/among what they
were and what they did and what they wrote?

I identify with these men because (Beatles song recall time) they are me
and I am then. They are like a "Don't let this happen to you" religious
icon next to the image of Ignatius Loyola over my desk. After five
years as of last Friday without any unprescribed foreign substances, I
can recognize normality in myself at least as it relates to other people
who are like me. With people who never went to where I came from, I do
a survival act by behaving "normally" but I at least do not fool myself.

I thought of a long time you kind of HAD to be nuts to write poetry or
anything else. You were not like everyone else in every way. Actually
the kind of mind that feels compelled to turn thought and experience
into verse or fiction de facto is not like the mind of a guy who goes
home after a day roofing houses and puts on the basketball game. John
Cheever once wrote about going to a football game in Philadelphia,
decided a story he wrote was worthless, considered throwing himself
under the wheels of the train entering the station, but instead went to
the club car and got tanked. Can you spell "rapid cycling"? At least
he was the guy trying to play Mr. Rah-Rah, but then did all the stuff we
associate with writers who live on the edge: write, self-deprecate, and
drink like fish.

The short answer because I'm at work and have to act normal for awhile.
Act. I long since decided I'm a bit out of my mind, and that to me is
normal. If I am not particularly unique, my mind has a few twists and
turns that definitely qualify me as a very bad candidate for membership
in the Kiwanis or Rotary clubs. I have a definite empathy for some of
the last century's more spacey writers because while I wish I had their
talent, I'm thankful every day that I'm NOT them.

Ken

--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538