I Am the Poetic Kiss of Death

In a line much admired by Jorge Luis Borges, Christopher Marlowe’s Faust says to the apparition of Helen of Troy “make me immortal with a kiss.”

I’ve got the opposite capacity–I am the poetic kiss of death.


Jorge Luis Borges

In the fifteen years since I began writing poetry seriously–and comically–I have persuaded editors to publish thirty-five of my poems.  If I’ve got the math right, that’s an average of 2.33 a year, more frequent than my birthdays. I’d like to think this isn’t too shabby a track record for a tyro just starting out, but I don’t think I can continue at this torrid pace, in much the same manner that I predicted Pedro Ciriaco, shortstop of the 2012 Boston Red Sox, would cool down from a torrid .293 batting average in his rookie year. Pedro spent the next season with the Kagawa Olive Guyners of the Shikoku Island League Plus and has been out of baseball since 2015, so I was right about that.


Pedro Ciriaco, rookie shortstop phenom: Gone and forgotten.

I anticipate that the frequency with which my poems get published will dwindle and then come to an end entirely, like our solar system, but for a reason other than the law of averages; I am the poetic kiss of death. If I keep writing poems and having them accepted, soon there won’t be any poetry publications left–for anybody.

My poems have appeared in fourteen different publications; four have died shortly after they ran my stuff. Coincidence, or something more sinister? You be the judge.


Philip Larkin: “You sure you’re a poet, old man?”

Light Quarterly had been around since 1992, and had published John Updike, among others. Its subscribers included the libraries at Harvard, Brown and Columbia. Tough noogies. They made the mistake of accepting my Lines in Contemplation of a Tragic Accident, and the rest is history, or the end of their history. They’re gone.

Then there was Literary Dilettantes. I actually won their Parody of Epic Proportions contest with The Beerneid, a parody of Virgil’s Aeneid. For those keeping score at home, I hadn’t won anything since 1962, when my Little League Team shocked the world with a 4-2 upset of the Optimist Club team to win the B-level city championship. Chicago Cubs fans like to say that any team can have a bad century, and I can sympathize; I only had a bad half-century.


Virgil: Did he have something to do with it?

But before my poem ever hit the shelves I received an email from the publisher saying “our art director had some personal issues to take care of. She was able to start working on the issue but the demands in her personal life are not allowing her to finish for the foreseeable future.” (Note that he didn’t avoid the gerundic, as Strunk & White recommend.)


Strunk & White: “You’re still confusing ‘that’ and ‘which.’”

So just like that, I’ve got two literary homicides hanging over me. The circumstantial evidence would strike a cynical, world-weary cop as suspicious. “What kind of freaking rag shuts down just because its art director has personal issues to take care of?” you can hear him sneer as the glare of a bare light bulb shines down on my sweat-drenched face. “I don’t know, they said they were legit,” I say after he stops beating me with a rubber truncheon and the Yellow Pages. “They didn’t even charge an entry fee.”


“Okay, let’s take it from the top. You was mindin’ yer own business, imitatin’ Philip Larkin.”

Then I got two poems published in The Poetry Ark, an on-line anthology that was the product of a multi-round competition, like Dancing With the Stars, sort of a Who Wants to Be America’s Next Poet Laureate? I tried to track it down as I wrote this post and I found a reference to it on the internet, but when I clicked on the link I got that “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” message, the same one I get when I try Nigerian websites hoping to get refunds for my kids’ on-line purchases of high-tech baseball bats.

So that’s three down.  Putting this post together I checked on a little litmag that specialized in prose poems–right in my wheelhouse, as the baseball announcers say.  They published my piece The Mutes, but when I went back to get the exact date and year, I found a sad little message saying “Mulberry Fork Review is on hiatus.  Indefinitely.”  You beginning to see a pattern?


Eliot:  “What’s more boring than a baseball game?  A double-header.”

Which leaves The Christian Science Monitor and Spitball, “The Literary Baseball Magazine,” which has published four of my poems about the St. Louis Cardinals, a field of literary endeavor overlooked by T.S. Eliot, a native of the city that was “First in booze, first in shoes, and last in the American League. ” I’ve got copies of the issues in which they appeared, and I’m guarding them with my life. I need something to show the grammar police when they knock on my door and say “Are you gonna come quietly, or do we have to beat you in iambic pentameter until you wheeze like a Hallmark greeting card?”

Available in print and Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “poetry is kind of important.”

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