The Years The Locusts Ate

About the Book

These are mostly narrative poems of some length dealing with the nightmarish life of a psychologically disabled veteran who spends many years housed in government institutions.  He develops an alternate personality to deal with reality and is known throughout the streets and psychiatric communities of New Orleans as the Mechanical Man because he has the habit of wearing aluminum siding as a type of body armor and Richard Chamberlain Shogun masks.  The majority of this work deals with his journey through madness, including his personal journal which is his habit to keep while hospitalized  for months on end in a secure locked ward of a government facility.  The last section, Dante Working, has him again institutionalized but in a special treatment  program to teach him a skill and the basics of normal independent living.  The skill is typing; and he spends his days copying novels such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Milan Kundera’s Slowness as Educational Therapy. This particular program is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant to train dysfunctional individuals to compose publishable literature for the purpose of enriching modern North American Literature. This, in theory, is accomplished by the forming of their schizoid affective thinking mechanisms and  patterns of deeply grained anti-social habits into art, using them, as Dante is engaged, for a fresh reservoir and a complete negation of the academic credentials that seem to have become a necessary calling card to publishers and editors.            

This process mines the neglected reservoir of the great unwashed, the winos, the shell-shocked veterans and turning them out in the ilk of Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.  This method is simple - to learn to write by first by learning to type, and then copying fine literature.  This is the principle of acquiring mastery by  imitation, just as a painter sets his empty canvas up in the Louvre, and by so doing  

Turns out a fair copy of a  Matisse or a Van Gogh. Thusly, mastery is passed along to the painstaking student from Homer to Edward Albee.

About the Author

Born in New Orleans in 1950. Served with the 7th Marines in Vietnam. Have two daughters in my care and am a full time writer of poetry mostly long narrative poems. I have several models I read for inspiration: James Merrill (The Changing Light at Sandover), Wallace Stevens (The Man With the Blue Guitar), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Coney Island of the Mind), and John Ashbery (A Wave). There are more: the prose of Faulkner, Dos Passos and Stein in particular. This story is my own by right of experience and observation. Presently: I am working on a book length narrative poem envisioned while reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson; and I’m throwing in everything - including the kitchen sink just as I have in THE YEARS THE LOCUSTS ATE.