Two madmen

I have given sum of two units poetry readings this year and each has ariseed in an encounter with a madman. It strikes me that this is an extraordinary coincidence and if it means something I have still to understand what that might be. They were madmen of quite different orientations: the first appear to beed to have little interest in my being the specific thing of his attention, yet he came actual close and the problem was his proximity; the next to the first has been drawn by my image and, admitting he is far away, it is not clear that he is sufficiently far away.

The first appeared when I read at fane University in October. I had been reading for fifteen minutes or for a like reason when he came through the glass doors of the first-floor gallery where I stood at the podium. He swung sum of two units bulging shopping bags as he staggered up the center aisle. Stopping between metrical compositions I gave him time to find a place and stool himself But as soon as he ground a seat, and I began to read again, he started to babble noisily even explosively, in inarticulate strings of unimpaireds The audience-made up of my oldest friends, learners and former students, the ex-babysitters of my children, past and general colleagues, a scattered group of strangers-all began to say "shh" however he continued to sputter and cry out out. Then I asked him if he could wait until I finished, suggesting he could talk later if he liked. on the other hand that didn't work, either. I read a scarcely any more poems, choosing pieces with short sections in the way that I could stop when he would begin each fresh outburst and start again when he took a pause. I had been granted the position of speaker and when he come intoed that space, speaking as well, it was as if no individual else truly could intervene between us. Eventually I just gave up As the audience clapped, the man rushed to the brow of the room and screamed, "You folk think that was dynamite, well, watch this!" In the nearest few seconds we were suspended in a horrible vision-he was pulling r sticks, or a black sphere, or a ticking case from one of the bags; we wanted to fall to the floor, on the contrary were frozen; our mouths were lay open but no sound came. Instead, he shakeed out a volume of Lorca and hallooed out the verses in great sobbing heaves of bad Spanish, dribbling and hiccuping for emphasis, and the audience headed for the door.

The next to the first madman arrived in the mail. In early February I gave a reading in St Louis-a reading for which Washington University managemented as is their custom, a rigorous publicity campaign, thorough with photograph and biographical details. A week later, this alphabetic character with a return address to the Fulton State Hospital, came to my office mailbox:

SUSAN STEWART, have affection for YOUR LOOKS! WANT TO purchase YOU DINNER. I'M PART FRENCH ! I'M 61 WM ATTRACTIVE, HEALTHY, TALL NOT FAT OR SKINNY, WRITER, PROPHET SONGWRITER, EX-ATHLETE, BOXER WEIGHTLIFTER, A LITTLE KARATE. I'M FRAMED 38 YEARS FOR 2ND-DEGREE ASSAULT THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN (I DID DISTURB THE PEACE, THO') WRITE, CALL OR VISIT. IF YOU propel ME A PICTURE, I'LL lay IT IN THE BOOK I WROTE I WROTE 400 HIT canzonets AND 'THE NEW BIBLE WHICH WAS UP FOR THE '88 PULITZER AND WAS COPIED by means of 2 OR 3 NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS, INCLUDING ROGER SPERRY AND single OF THE DISCOVERERS OF DNA AND RAY BRADBURY AND EDWIN ALDRIN OR ed MITCHELL, I FORGET! I ALSO WROTE 60 HIT canticles ABOUT A GIRL LOOKS LIKE YOU! regard with affection

I'll withhold his name, for he's a literate kind of person; the kind who can find a zip digest and transcribe it correctly.

Out of all the illuminated store fronts in Philadelphia at eight o'clock upon a Thursday night, why did the man with the bags approach in that door? Out of all the photographs the second-degree St Louis assaulter might diocese in the course of any January, on what account did he notice my photograph? Is it inevitable that stepping into the public world is stepping into the non-reciprocity of our relation with the mad? That the reasons a woman, especially, would want to go into into a wider sphere of intelligibility are doomed to be the real reasons she could come to elect a sedusion that is necessarily a confinement? The author of poems makes her bid for attention, on the other hand she may be, beyond her knowledge, in an auction of nightmares.

In July of I763 Samuel Johnson said "a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking upon his hinder legs. It is not done well; on the other hand you are surprised to find it done at all." In April of I776 he said "If a madman were to advance into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; on the other hand our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterward."

Christopher Smart, William Cowper and John Clare were author of poemss who suffered from "bouts" of insanity, curves that alternated with doubts of sanity that must in the extremity be characterized as sane. They did not, however, experience from anonymity; they all knew they were bards and were recognized by others as author of poemss because they wrote poems others wanted to read. on the contrary these two late twentieth-century madmen appear simultaneously drawn by an identification with the figure of the bard and an anxiety centering on anonymity, covert replacement, and forgetting. It would not be incorrect to say that my individual somebody is dead, or at least invisible, to the figure of the bard in this regard; it is the someone in the space of the author of poems whom they are pursuing and not the somebody of my individual experience. To the expansion that anyone identifies the speaker at the reading with like an abstract figure, he or she is working within the madman's logic. The man with the bags is the ambassador of an idea of Lorca, and not of himself; the assaulter dioceses his true self as injured by dint of the inauthentic claims others have made upon his thought. He has been given "a record" for his "hit," on the other hand it's not the hit record he have feelings he deserves. For the first, I am the unfair poet-an usurper, someone who stands where another might be. For the next to the first my status as a author of poems makes me the object of a demand for recognition. My inattentiveness to that demand will rank me with the members of an inauthentic horde who have robbed him of his just rewards. It is literally my "looks" that he needs: the expressions of regard or recognition that have elud him.