Everette's ghost of awe plays pachinko

As I usually do when I find that the site www.everettemaddox.org has gone down, I shoot off an email to the fellow who keeps it up and let him know. And when he gets it online again I celebrate by posting up one of Everette Maddox’s poems. This being Monday the idea of actually having to think through and write something, well, that transgresses the fine line between propriety and masochism.

Here’s one I like if only because the poet and I appear to both suffer the odd symptom of spending most of the night in REM sleep, and being woken all the time by our dreams. Dedra tells me this is a symptom of sleep deprivation and she more than anyone would know, but I like to think of it as part of the lucky curse of an over active imagination. All that stuff just rumbling around somewhere behind the daily grind of the counting house has to pop out somewhere, if not here.

I love the line “the ghost of awe” in POEM. It has a certain musical ring that I don’t have a technical term for (near assonance?) but which lights up my synapses like a digital pachinko, a vibrational affinity that sings as clearly as an easy example of assonance. (My favorite example of that being Bob Dylan’s “the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face” which I like partly because of its wonderful mix of assonance and the soft alliteration of “s” and soft “c” sounds. Just my personal favorite. There are better technical examples. Try googling “Sound and Sense” if you must have one).

So now I’ll just do my lazy online jig of joy (Cntrl-X! Alt and Tab! Cntrl-V! Cha-cha-cha!) and offer this up from the Everette Maddox Songbook. (It’s in my Amazon wish list for only two hundred and some odd dollars if you’re feeling guilty about missing my birthday, or just won the lottery and are thinking of ways to share the joy). Oh, and if you can identify the line in this post above this point that is a quote from Everette Maddox, I’ll buy you a scotch, from the well, at the Maple Leaf. Oh, and you’ll be entitled to give this post a more sensible title.

POEM

After everything quits,
things continue
happening. The phone
rings. A knock comes
at the door. Lightning
flashes across the bed
where you bend, looking
at the dictionary.
Asleep, you keep waking
from dreams. The surface
of your life keeps
being broken, less and less
frequently, at random.
Raindrops after a storm:
surprise: the ghost of awe.

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