'And Kept on Drinking'

I knew a guy years ago in Cleveland who already thought of himself as a poet. He published in “underground” magazines that briefly flourished around the city in the sixties and seventies, usually mimeographed on odd-colored, pulpy paper and stapled along the edge. His poems buttonholed the reader. The word that comes to mind is exhortatory. Combine it with the fashionable politics of the era, the presence of obscenity and absence of upper-case letters and you get the picture.

 

For me he was more of a drinking companion than a poet. I was on the fringes of his retinue, and haven’t seen him in forty-five years. He never published anything beyond the throw-aways I described. I never took his poems seriously. What bothered me was that I feared I might turn into him. Now I hear he is dead at age seventy-two. There’s no obituary. What I know is scuttlebutt relayed by old acquaintances. People tell me he taught for a long time in an “alternative” school. He never married and had no children. By the end – I’m extrapolating here – poetry for him was a threadbare memory. They say he drank.

 

I remember him more vividly than I might have because I always associated him with a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson. “Miniver Cheevy” was published in the March 1907 issue of Scribners and collected in 1910 in The Town Down the River. I suppose it’s Robinson’s best-known poem after “Richard Cory.” He had a gift for concise storytelling. We remember his people the way we remember Chekhov’s. Like Cheevy, the old poet in Cleveland “sighed for what was not, / And dreamed, and rested from his labors.” The final stanza is grim and prophetic:

 

“Miniver Cheevy, born too late,

   Scratched his head and kept on thinking;

Miniver coughed, and called it fate,

   And kept on drinking.”