Can You Feel That?

“NEW ORLEANS — More than 400 people crammed in to a bar Sunday to pay tribute to Mr. Everette Hawthorne Maddox, one of the city's most acclaimed poets, who died homeless last week at age 44.”
— Associated Press, February 21, 1989

“Nobody loses in my poems.”
— Everette Maddox

When it comes to the poet Everette Maddox—and outside of New Orleans, it rarely does—Emily Dickinson gives me hope. As Susan Howe notes in My Emily Dickinson (1985), the agoraphobic poet from Amherst accomplished something unexpected and fortunate: she was castigated before being canonized.

Castigated puts it mildly. “She cannot reason at all,” Allen Tate, premier critic of his day, complained in 1932, “she can only see.” Harold Monro, experiencing some sort of fit, called her “intellectually blind, partially dead, and mostly dumb to the art of poetry.” Denise Levertov described her pioneering predecessor as “a bitchy little spinster.” Such invective is even more reason to thank Howe for rescuing Dickinson from this pile-on of critical vitriol.

Everette Hawthorne Maddox, a master of poetic compression in his own right, was not so lucky. Rather than castigation, he became, as Dickinson would put it, “nobody.” He’s been ignored. He anticipated as much, assuming early on that he’d be the one to manage his reputation. “Everyone should have an epitaph ready, just in case,” he said in a rare radio interview in 1983. He called his version, written around 1974, “Hypothetical Self-Epitaph,” and it comes as close to anything else he wrote to capturing his inner character:

What if I just caved in 
gave out, pulled over 
to the side of 
the road of life, 
& expired like an old 
Driver’s license? 
You might say He didn’t 
get far in 31 years. 
But I’d say That’s 
all right, it was 
the world’s longest trip 
on an empty tank.

Search for Maddox online and you’ll click long and hard before finding this poem—or most of his others. This summer, when I asked a chatbot to identify and describe Maddox, the answer botched every detail, including his year of birth (1944), his place of birth (Prattville, Alabama), and even his sexual orientation (Maddox was, by all accounts, not gay and is not “known for his contributions to LGBTQ literature”). This misinformed chatbot still knows more about Maddox than most informed poetry readers do today.

Here are some basics: Rette, as he often called himself, published three books of poetry between 1975 and 1988 before dying of complications from esophageal cancer in 1989 at age 44. The 13 Original Poems (1976), The Everette Maddox Songbook (1982), Bar Scotch (1988), and the posthumous American Waste (1993) are obscure literary gems that remind us, as Howe said of Dickinson, that “the language of the heart has another grammar.”

These books were published by small presses and are rare even by rare-book standards. Were it not for the labor-of-love publication of two posthumous selected works—Rette’s Last Stand (2004) and I Hope It’s Not Over, and Good-by (2009)—there would be minimal access to what C.D. Wright has called “the starved grandeur” of Maddox’s discursive, humorous, and emotionally piercing poems.

A few more basics: Everette Hawthorne Maddox’s regal name (which he loved) and shabby aristocratic bearing (which he cultivated) belied an upbringing marked by persistently rural and ungenteel poverty. With a dash of myth, he described his childhood home as a “tarpaper shack” nestled in the red clay hills of Prattville. His mother was bookish, unemployed, and depressive; his father drank heavily and juggled jobs, including work at a cotton gin and stints as a preacher, and something or other at a newspaper. Both died of cancer within months of each other before they were 50. Rette and his brother Bill were orphaned in their early 20s. While Rette rarely discussed his parents’ deaths or his early family life, he did poignantly note his mother’s illness in a poem titled “Home in Their Biblical Beds”:

The very spiritual 
bodies of women 
flow away 
in white dresses 
in Poe & Rosetti 
the most famous 
flow-away being 
Millet’s “Ophelia” 
in the basement 
of the Tate gallery 
How come people 
don’t really flow away 
but grind & groan & crackle 
& waste into a naturalistic stick 
like my mother did 
at St. Jude’s 
in Montgomery 
20 years ago

Perhaps you gasped at those last four lines. Beauty, pain, inspiration, tragedy, wry humor—these elements creep in with uncanny power in a Maddox poem. The benign generalization of women flowing through art is distilled into the malignant turmoil of “my mother” withering into a “naturalistic stick”; the personal grief in that abrupt transition is Dickinsonian in tone but pure Maddox in execution. How suddenly art becomes real life in a Maddox poem. In this way, he can be emotionally sucker-punching.

And if your heart isn’t receptive, Maddox—whose poems fire outward—has some advice. Take an excerpt from “Even Odd,” written in 1980 for his poetry students at McCain-Spectrum Junior High in New Orleans:

Where do you fall? 
Are you the odd one in line? 
If you told a kid that 
he’d laugh. 
But that’s the language 
doing that. That’s 
the language 
making you laugh. 
Put a hand over 
your shirt pocket. 
Can you feel that? 
That’s your heart doing that. 
That’s your heart 
laughing at the language. 
The language wants 
to love you: Let it.

Whenever I ask my poet-writer-musician friends in New Orleans why a poet of such generosity remains so unknown, they respond with mystified frustration. One could argue that Maddox’s star rose and fell too fast for its voltage to register. His earliest poems, written in Tuscaloosa while he was working toward a PhD in literature in the late 1960s (never completed), landed in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. His last poems, written in New Orleans in the late 1980s, landed in a paper bag behind the cash register at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street, thanks primarily to the faith and foresight of bar owner-cum-curator, Hank Staples.

Maddox’s housing situation paralleled this trajectory. His first home in New Orleans, rented with his wife Celia while teaching at Xavier University, was an apartment in a stately American townhouse at 2900 Prytania Street once occupied by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Later, unemployed and divorced, he moved into his last home: the bed behind the driver's seat of an 18-wheeler outside a used furniture store on Dante Street. “He was a mess,” declares a small plaque honoring him in the Maple Leaf courtyard. “A museum of consolation prizes” is how Maddox described his own life as his throat became so tightened by a tumor that only a steady stream of scotch could pass through.

Dramatic as this declension narrative is, it doesn’t fully explain Maddox’s obscurity. While the early poems published in the elite magazines were strong, his final book, American Waste—which he wrote while drunk and sick and homeless—was somehow better. More stripped down and observant. Panicked and more truthful. More direct and less affected and self-conscious. More I’m dying and these words just might matter more than the old ones did. 

Maddox’s later, more distilled work increasingly reflected what his friend and one-time roommate Rodney Jones called “the behavior and spirit of the man” as his liver failed, his cancer metastasized, his teeth blackened, his clothes disintegrated, and everything about him seemed to rot from within. This is not to romanticize alcoholism or homelessness or the insouciant tossing-off of dazzling poems onto scraps of paper. Rather, it’s to establish as accurately as possible the historical context in which to situate Maddox in canonized literary space—space that, for starters, includes Alan Dugan, Franz Wright, James Tate, Michael Benedikt, and—perhaps his greatest poetic influence—John Berryman. One might understandably ask why we should care about this kind of canonization and categorization in the first place. But rest assured: Maddox cared.

***

Maddox worshiped literature, craved inclusion, and dreaded loneliness. When he moved to Tuscaloosa from Prattville in 1962 to study literature at the University of Alabama, he began an intricate process of merging these concerns into nothing less than a full-blown literary persona, one that made people feel, as one friend described it, that you had encountered genius and did not want to leave its aura. Maddox, in essence, put on a show, cast himself as the star, and got nothing but rave reviews during his 13 years in Tuscaloosa.

The choreography of identity construction began with his prodigious literary consumption. It was canonical, male, immersive, voracious, and heroic. In a Maddox poem, you can hear the linguistic command of Shakespeare, the sardonic undertone of Philip Larkin, the howling passion of Thomas Wolfe, and the gothic hints of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. But reading was the gateway to performing. Maddox memorized and theatrically recited extended passages from the world’s most lauded writers, especially Proust, usually doing so while drinking at The Chukker, his favorite (now defunct) Tuscaloosa bar.

This performative literary obsession became increasingly integral to who he was. “[A]nyone seeking to understand the man behind the poems should know that . . . books were his religion and poets and writers his gods,” Rodney Jones has written. When the two friends roomed together, Jones would often enter Maddox’s bedroom late at night to find him alone and performing “Rabelaisian passages” from Ulysses with “the fervor of an evangelist.” On one occasion, the two deeply Southern poets offered Faulkner the impromptu accolade of making the three-hour drive to Oxford to piss on his grave.

Maddox was handsome, with soft blue eyes and curly brown hair. But as his wife Celia—an art history student whom he married in 1973 and divorced five years later—noted, hygiene was an issue. His dark teeth confirm the suspicion that he may have never seen a dentist. He often had dirt under his long nails and, when drunk, would urinate on himself while passed out. Even when healthy, he was thinner than a reed. “He was the smallest, thinnest man I’d ever seen,” his friend Grace Bauer said. Maddox, whose poems impugn his own physical diminution, got right to the point in “Weigh Not, Want Not,” taking self-erasure to an extreme:

I dropped myself 
like a feather 
on the penny scale 
at K&B 
& it said “Deposit less money 
you ain’t even here yet.”

Maddox fully dressed the part of the lithe literary character he fashioned. He usually wore a coat and tie of the highest quality: Brooks Brothers was his gold standard. Jackets draped from him as if his shoulders were a wire hanger. He wore his outfits not nattily but frumpily, in a manner consistent with his feral beard, disheveled curly hair, and ubiquitous pipe stuffed with Amphora tobacco. Once he embraced this style, he never looked back. It may have been the case, as he wrote in the poem “Of Fashion,” that styles were always in flux:

If you don’t believe life 
is rhythmic, listen 
late at night: all over 
the world neckties are 
widening and narrowing. 
Lapels are widening 
and narrowing. Collars 
are buttoning up 
and flying loose. Trouser 
cuffs are folding 
and unfolding. Skirts are 
rising and falling, hair 
is lengthening and shortening.

***

As with most performances, the underlying reality of Maddox’s life was complicated. His persona harbored a mercurial psyche marked by violent mood shifts. “He could turn on a dime,” Bauer said. “He was so smart, well read, charming, and upbeat, but there was always a demon lurking underneath.” His acute bouts of depression were “so dark they were frightening.” Rodney Jones added, “I’ve never seen a man with the emotional immediacy of Everette Maddox.” He could be reveling in a “proud Yeatsian growl” one moment, only to rant suddenly about “this goddamn fucking world—I hate it.” Such were his “nearly violent bouts of self-pity and degradation.”

Suicide is an occasional theme in Maddox’s life and work, a safety valve that seemed to reassure him that, if the bind became intolerable, you could always drive your roadster off a cliff. He explores this notion in his poem “John Berryman: All American.” In 1972, after three weeks of sobriety, Berryman waved (maybe literally) goodbye to life, leaping from a Minneapolis-St. Paul bridge into the Mississippi River. Maddox’s take on the event is nearly celebratory:

John Berryman 
There’s an All-American 
Suicide for you 
Dove straight into 
The body of the nation 
off the bridge 
between Minneapolis & St. Paul 
on Nancy Harris’s birthday 
& hit the bank 
& fell open like a book 
So we could all read him 
& break our own 
respective hearts

This poem held personal resonance for Maddox. Jones recalls a road trip to St. Louis with Maddox in his pine-green TR-6 to pay homage to the mothership Budweiser factory. They hadn’t even gotten through Birmingham before Maddox, who was driving, fell into a mood and threatened to swerve off a bridge and take Jones with him. Maddox revives the scene in his poem “Shades Mountain,” which ran in the October 30, 1971, issue of The New Yorker. After asking, “ . . . what if I swerve to the right / suddenly, hauling the little car / and my friend and me over the desperate edge,” the speaker wonders,

What would it matter to either of us? 
If I am my friend’s keeper, what could I do 
kinder for him than to drag his life, 
stubborn and sad like mine, along with mine 
fluttering like a pennant into the dark?

Preferring not to flutter like a flag into the night, Jones yanked the wheel from Maddox’s thin hands and set the car—and the driver—straight.

***

Severe as they were, Maddox’s mood swings usher us unexpectedly to the core of his poetics. Rather than turn inwards and explore the turbulent interiority of an obviously disturbed psyche—as did his Freudian-focused idol Berryman—Maddox fled to the surface, assumed a stance of passivity, and allowed life to roll over him while he took poetic snapshots of fleeting moments from below. It’s not a coincidence that the first line of “Crunch,” the poem that opens his first published book of poems, reads: “It’s me:  I’m down here.”

This rejection of introspection and embrace of passivity pervades Maddox’s poetry. In “Hearing It All,” the speaker opens with: “For years you’ve heard life / talking low in the background”—note that troubling hum of the interior self—“but you’ve never quite understood / what it was saying.” Then, after wondering if perhaps he was not paying close enough attention, the speaker notes:

So you stop and listen 
closely, and strain to hear. And suddenly 
you hear it all, and you understand 
EVERY WORD OF IT, for the first time. 
And the last.

Why the last? Why is this moment of self-exploration not the promising start of self-awareness? Because the shock of recognition from listening to your soul’s Sturm und Drang is so dangerous it’s nearly fatal. Maddox, in the most anti-self-aware moment in American poetry, concludes:

while you’re standing there 
in the middle of the street, listening, 
a big bus with a beautiful 
green CUTTY SARK sign down the side 
lumbers over you, and leaves you 
mostly pavement.

Tend to your inner psychic noise too closely, get too lost in analyzing your own drama, and your therapizing self will leave you hammered. Of course, Maddox ran himself down with scotch and—much like pavement—he let the world trample him while he observed, listened, moaned, and poeticized his brand of woe-is-me brilliance from the asphalt.

This passivity is especially evident in one of Maddox’s most well-known poems, “Thirteen Ways of Being Looked at by a Possum,” published in the Summer 1974 issue of the Paris Review. The poem offers a twist on Wallace Stevens’s famed “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” In Maddox’s version, Stevens’s active viewer becomes a hapless victim stalked by marsupials.

Notably, the poem opens with “I awake,” reiterating that the speaker is anything but alert. He starts to see possums appearing in public spaces: “Hear the bells clang at the fire station: / not hoses, but the damp noses of possums issue forth . . . At an art gallery, the portraits seem to threaten me; / tails droop down out of the frames.”

The speaker grows alert as the possums seek more intimate nooks: “Midnight at Pasquale’s. I lift my fork, / and the hard tails looped there / look curiously unlike spaghetti . . . When I go to the closet to hang my shirt on the rack, / I have to persuade several possums to move over.” Predictably for Maddox, the climax comes with a fall, as the speaker, evidently imitating a possum, finds himself about to get pummeled by an actual one:

Drunk, crawling across a country road tonight, 
I hear a shriek, look up, and am paralyzed 
by fierce headlights and a grinning grill. 
I am as good as gone!

Here, Maddox transforms an outward-looking perspective into a serious poetic embodiment, one that just might make you put your hand over your shirt pocket to see if you can feel that. This passive-aggressive maneuver appears again in “The Blast,” in which the impending dread of introspection gets interrupted, in this case by a sneeze, allowing something magic (and mindless) to emerge in its wake:

This December morning, 
laboring across 
the frozen quad 
toward coffee, 
head bowed in thought 
like a truck 
bogged down in a field, 
suddenly without 
thinking I let rip 
a clarion sneeze; 
students look up 
from car-keys, 
dogs from puddles: 
the world unfurls 
at this bright blast— 
A Vivaldi trumpet note.

The arc of this poem is both basic and profound. The speaker, “head bowed in thought,” is about to sink into depression. But then—boom—a sneeze suddenly blasts the mood into the cold December morning. It’s a merciful interruption undertaken “without thought,” one that jolts everyone else around him, even the dog, out of their gloomy reveries. And it’s only then, with heads perked up in response, rather than down in meditation, that “the world unfurls”—to the sound of a Vivaldi trumpet, no less. An unfurled world was the expansive canvas upon which Maddox wrote his poetry.

To avoid introversion, to rush toward the topical, was more than the avoidance of mental anguish; it was also the empowered embrace of an unlikely source of artistic authority. In “Reflections,” Maddox describes walking “along the street” and seeing his reflection in a window. Noting how he observes “no dashing portraiture, / But image of a clod,” he admits of this clod that

his dark antics make me like him as 
I never liked myself. He’s not a prey 
To contradictions and vicissitudes, 
Almost as if no surly mind intrudes 
Upon his walk.

The speaker might have been a mess, but his reflection just so happened to have its shit together, and in the surface-level optimism of this mirror image, Maddox vested his power as a poet. In another early poem, “Elegy for My Father,” the speaker—at the denouement of perhaps the most vulnerable poem Maddox ever wrote—says, “image / Is all that we have to believe in, all we can love.”

Again and again, we find in a Maddox poem a surface quality, a foregrounding and flattening of emotion as if the poem were a Matisse painting. In “Late at Night,” published in The 13 Original Poems (1976), he actually displaces consciousness from the speaker to the objects and events around him. The impact is to lure attention from inner turmoil into outer reality, no matter how commonplace it may be:

there is a lot of
extra-conscious traffic
outside: the wind bulges
against the door, cats yowl,
and later the shades of the bedroom
crook in like knees.
The radiators groan Oh God.

This wheezing radiator—which recalls Dickinson’s claim to her cousin that “the rafters wept” when she read sad books in the garret—has an inner life deeper than the speaker’s. But this is how Maddox wants us to feel his poems. He’d prefer his poetic consciousness embodied in a clanking radiator than his own suicidal self. He wants us to hear his words leaving him like a Vivaldi trumpet. The man was dark and troubled, more so than most. But he aimed to offer his audience—his friends, as we’ll see—the brightest reflection of that darkness that he could project. He honed a voice capable of placing beauty and humor and pathos in the grittiest flux of everyday life, rather than in a Berryman leap into a toxic and unredeemable id.

***

Maddox moved to New Orleans in 1975 to teach at Xavier University. As in Tuscaloosa, he was a magnificent teacher. But the job did not last. He was not exactly fired for his drinking, but after one too many episodes of walking across campus with a mid-morning tumbler of scotch his contract was not renewed.

If the academic job did not work out, New Orleans, a city where a morning scotch is the moral equivalent of an oat milk latte, sure did. “It was a serious dream of his to live here,” said his friend Fred Kasten. After losing his teaching job, Maddox—with the exception of a security job at a maritime museum and a few stints substitute teaching in high schools—never again bothered with anything so mind-numbing as professional employment. He chose instead to spend his 14 years in New Orleans becoming the city’s most literarily accomplished barfly. He was warned on arrival that this might happen. As he recounts in his poem “New Orleans,” dedicated to his friend, the poet and New Orleans native Ralph Adamo:

From the air it’s all puddles:
a blue-green frog town
on lily pads. More canals
than Amsterdam. You don’t
land—you sink. When
we met, you, the Native, shook
your head. Sweat dripped
on the bar. You said:
“You’re sunk. You won’t
write a line. You won’t make
a nickel. You won’t hit
a lick at a snake in this
antebellum sauna-bath. You
won’t shit in the morning if
you don’t wake up with
your pants down.” And you
were right: Three years later
I’m in it up to my eyebrows,
stalled like a streetcar.
My life is under the bed
with the beer bottles.
I’ll never write another line
for anything but love
in this city where steam
rises off the street after
a rain like bosoms heaving.

The prophecy of this poem is uncanny. In essence, Maddox—particularly after his marriage to Celia ended in 1978, a casualty of his alcoholism—pursued the ultimate act of passivity: as predicted, he would sink. Not tumble or trip, then dust himself off and keep forging ahead. No. He would quit, let go, shed everything except his fine clothes, his pipe, his friendships, and his poetry, and fall unapologetically into oblivion.

To the extent that such a macabre plan can be orchestrated, Maddox did so with something like stately elegance. It lasted about 10 years and, as proof that Maddox fell well, Rodney Jones notes that it’s possible “the last days of his life were his happiest.” Likewise, what came at the end of this period was, in the words of Ralph Adamo, “a steady stream of poems from the lowest down place you could get in America in the 1980s.” Not incidentally, and as his New Orleans poem predicted, they were mostly about love.

His decision to forgo housing and employment meant that Maddox had to rely more than ever on the grace and virtue of friendships. He acknowledged as much in “Here’s to Falling,” a poem he wrote a couple of years before his death. After declaring “Here’s to falling on your face,” he ends with a sincere ode to his friends, those who were occasionally housing him, feeding him, taking him to the doctor, hearing his tales of woe, and, as always, spotting his drinks:

Here's to falling
not failing
Nobody loses in my poems
My friends are the Mike Tysons of friendship
& they can whip your ass
Boss

So many classic Maddox stories come from these final few years. He’d fall asleep with his pipe in his mouth and burn the carpets and couches of friends who let him in on cold nights. He’d accidentally urinate on the floor. He’d come in at 4 am, stumble around, and sleep until mid-afternoon. He could not so much as boil water and once, when Adamo made him a tuna sandwich, he was amazed that such a meal could be prepared at home. He would sit in Grace Bauer’s tub for hours and read and smoke. Another friend tried to get him on food stamps, but he feared the indignity of “walking down Oak St. with a pack of weenies under my arm.” When he was not sleeping in the dump truck, he could be found dozing on the steps of a church, curled up like a child in the back of the Maple Leaf, or on a bench in City Park, covered in newspapers—including, once, a paper with an article about him. Adamo recalled, “The image of Everette huddling into his thin coat and puffing away at his pipe to stay warm can still make his friends feel a deep, slashing chill.”

Maddox’s last volume, American Waste, was written at the tail end of his decline, between 1987 and 1989, and published on Valentine’s Day, 1993. Titled after the sign on the dumpster that sat outside the Maple Leaf, the book consists mostly of brief but sweet love notes to the network of poets and artists who filled his cup and stuffed his pipe as he journeyed into the abyss. These poems were small, loaded guns written in his own attic of isolation—a stool at the corner of the bar. He jotted down what Jones called “victories of hopelessness” in a jagged script with a cheap pen onto Abita beer coasters, on the back of bank slips or bar menus, or even on napkins. If he could have sewn, he might have patched together these artifacts, if only as a way to gather these friends around him as he became thinner, as one friend put it, than his own tie.

Consider, as a representative of this tender genre of poetics, “For Robin at 40”:

40
Shit
Chickenfeed
Time I turned 30
I shook so bad
Time I made 40
I had shook my shoes off
But I didn’t feel a thing
Point is
Robin
Whichever way
You look through the telescope
You’re looking at heaven

Maddox’s most enduring show of thanks to his social support group was to co-found a weekly reading series at The Leaf in 1979 with poet Robert Stock. When Stock died in 1981, Maddox took charge, quickly distinguishing himself as a charismatic host. He had rules: “No holds barred, no fisticuffs, intolerance will not be tolerated.” He brought humor to his introductions: poet Ken Fontenot was “the Cajun Keats,” and Helen Toye was the poet “whose voice has launched a thousand sips.” He brought the shyest poets out of the woodwork—Fontenot said he attracted people “the way a magnet attracts filings”—and made them feel, even only for a few minutes, like they were the reincarnation of Walt Whitman. On these occasions, Maddox was happy to cede the floor to less-experienced poets, reserving for himself the chance to read bawdy poems by an alter ego he created back in Tuscaloosa with friends Fred Kasten and Bob Woolf named “Buck Potatox” (inspired by Berryman’s Henry Pussycat.) The Maple Leaf readings continue to this day.

Maddox’s final poetic act, written as his throat constricted so severely that he had to cut his food into tiny cubes to eat it, was a declaration of ersatz love to a veritable stranger. It came through an idealized and over-the-top romantic effusion of short poems, impassioned heartbeats for one Suzy Malone: a beautiful barmaid who worked across the street at the Muddy Waters Tavern. Not only was this infatuation never consummated, Maddox never even talked to Suzy. Nonetheless, his feelings for her, expressed in this case on a napkin, grew into the most monumental crush ever suffered on Oak Street:

Suzy
You got eyes like
bumblebees
Your voice is like
raking the yard
(in Alabama)
No wonder when you
pour a drink
I hear that long lonesome
whippoorwill

In most of these Suzy poems, Maddox is topical and passive, as beaten down as he’d ever been. It’s as if the deeper he sank into his own real-life misery, the faster his words rushed toward an imagined and even sanitized reflection of romantic bliss, a rendition of what he thought love should sound like: an imitation of a Hollywood version of unrequited passion. This inverse relationship between self-loathing and utopian romcom clarity is on display in “Rational My Ass”:

pisses me off
call this a rational age
how come every time
I get up my nerve
& a buck seventy-five
& go over the road
to look at Suzy
I don’t fall out of love
with her
au contraire

These poems—for all their ostensible inauthenticity—still evoke in me such a heartfelt response. It’s a paradox that brings me back to what I think makes Maddox a poet of rarefied talent: he somehow gives depth to the surface of things. Poet and friend Bill Lavender touched on this quality when he wrote, by way of a compliment, that Maddox in American Waste wrote “poetry that is worth nothing.” Perhaps. But there’s one standout Suzy poem—“Cameo of Suzy”— to remind us that there might be a critical something in that nothing: namely, honesty.

This is not a funny
poem
about the life of
glamour & beauty
I wanted when I was
young
You weren’t too late,
I was
You were the lovely
face
I glimpsed in the
lobby
Leaving the B movie
of my life.

***

One afternoon in January 1989, Julie Kane arranged for her friend, a doctor, to come to the Maple Leaf and give Maddox a checkup. It went badly. Within days he was in Charity Hospital. This went worse. Maddox thrashed in pain and screamed at nurses, shook with the effects of withdrawal, haunted the hallways in his thin gown like the ghost of Berryman. He finally settled into his bed, calmed down, and looked at Ralph Adamo, who was there to keep him company. He quietly asked Adamo to do him one more favor: read aloud the opening section of Ulysses. A couple of hours later, after two decades of giving the world the love he refused to give himself, Everette Maddox expired. We owe it to him to finally listen.