The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

I have written poetry since I was twelve and fell in love for the first time (seventh grade). Since then I’ve written hundreds of poems, usually scribbled on scraps of paper or in half-used notebooks, and have published less than half a dozen of them. Most are stowed in various drawers, God knows where – I don’t. There’s a reason for this; I’m not much of a poet. That’s not lowballing, just the truth. When I do manage something I like, it’s mostly by accident.

The rationale for including this piece of work is that it (like the other poem in this collection) is narrative rather than lyric. The first draft – long lost, like my original take on the story that became ‘Mile 81’ – was written in college, and very much under the influence of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, most notably ‘My Last Duchess.’ (Another Browning poem, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,’ became the basis of a series of books many of my Constant Readers know quite well.) If you’ve read Browning, you may hear his voice rather than mine. If not, that’s fine; it’s basically a story, like any other, which means it’s to be enjoyed rather than deconstructed.

A friend of mine named Jimmy Smith read that lost first draft at a University of Maine Poetry Hour one Tuesday afternoon in 1968 or ’69, and it was well received. Why not? He gave it his all, really belting it out. And people are captivated by a good story, whether it’s in verses or paragraphs. This was a pretty good one, especially given the format, which allowed me to strip away all the prosy exposition. In the fall of 2008, I got thinking about Jimmy’s reading, and since I was between projects, I decided to try re-creating the poem. This is the result. How much resemblance it bears to the original I really can’t say.

Jimmy, I hope you’re out there someplace, and come across this. You rocked the house that day.