Doc Holiday

About the Book

Doc Holiday is a book of love poems like my previous books. Like them, it is a book of metrical and rhyming poetry, more or less. The muse this time is Ashley Wednesday, a devout Catholic and a figure of cold and ethereal beauty, shimmering copper hair, skin like fresh milk, and a narrow aristocratic countenance, an antitype to my own broad features and hulking clumsy gait. It is a book that applies mythological characters both from American Hollywood mythology as well as characters from classical antiquity, but it is not only these but also biblical mythology, if we can so name it without blasphemy. It is a book that delves into the philosophy of aesthetic contemplation of pictures and also of words, but all with an eye to the erotic blend of the sensual and spiritual, all the while dealing with the uniquely Christian question as to whether such blending ought to be. The book also delves into what I would like to call my personal mythology that is my childhood and the connection between erotic love and that time in life that would seem most separate from such love and sensation and the uncanny connection, unexplained at all, between the erotic and childhood memory. That said, why the title? Doc Holiday is both a factual character of the old American West and the Hollywood film Tombstone (of which I am a fan). He is a Middle-European aristocrat by lineage, a child of the Antebellum South. The thing about him that is alluring and representative of this work of poems, mostly sonnets, that I have written is the way he is wracked between the most basic of lifestyles and the highest of ideals, erudite in his love of Chopin and refined in taste in general, but wasting his life in crippling sensualism, only to find himself a hero at the side of his friend Wyatt Earp. So it is a book about redemption as well as love. It is also a book about unquenched aspirations and quotidian nature of our condition that lays a hand on even the most determined romantic.

About the Author

Rather than a factual biography, but instead to say only that Blake Townsend Romanov is pseudonym, though each name is taken from the family tree, I will give, if you will, an aesthetic biography. My three favorite poems of the English language are Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden and Digging For China by Richard Wilbur. I love all these because the sound is sweet and the imagery as arresting as it is seamless. Occasional moments of jarring diction and construction in a Beethoven like manner are often welcome in poetry. However I do hold that poetry is music and there is a quazi-musical quality to the way its images are summoned and organized, a sense of flow and interconnection even to trail of its most abstract ideas. My taste in poetry is not wholly classical: I love Robert Lowell, W.S. Merwyn and Ted Hughes and Allen Ginsburg, Frank O’Hara, and also Margaret Atwood. I myself wish to bring some of the dissonance and stark reality of contemporary poetry to blend with the classical aesthetic. I write in meter both for sound and the way in which commonplace phrases must be discarded and reworked to suit the syllabic structure, and so rhyme performs a similar function, and thus I find myself addressing the minute structure of the words and awaking from the somnambulance of every day speech.