OnBooks/Opinion

Ed Madden tells his story through poetry in “A pooka in Arkansas”


Sometimes when it's cold out,

I pull on my father's old denim

shirt, warm, worn, the past

a thin jacket, what I have left.

-- Ed Madden,

from "A pooka in Arkansas"

What have we to do with who we are?

We are not polled on our choice of parents; or where we should be born. Or even what species. Or if we should be born at all.

They say we have free will, but we can only choose between the options presented. Our hearts will yearn, and misfit thoughts will come unbeckoned. We will want what we want, and if those wants are nonconforming, feel the shame of societal opprobrium. Our parents may not know how to love us; they might find it difficult to embrace their alien child. Those who might otherwise be our friends might shun us.

Ed Madden grew up in rural Arkansas, near Newport in Jackson County, amid the churches and a sprawling family. He was an unconventional kid. Quiet, gay, mysteriously stirred by the "smell of [his] young uncle" on the hand-me-down shirts he was given to wear. "A Pooka in Arkansas" (The Word Works, $19) is Madden's book of autobiographical poems about finding his way up and out of Arkansas, a rare journal of escape and rapprochement with one's self and one's history.

The central conceit of the collection is of the poet as shapeshifter, as embodied by "the pooka," an Americanized spelling of "púca," a creature of Irish mythology. I imagine Madden was aware that "pooka" sounds vaguely like an American Indian word and that the pooka of his book is a near relation to the mythic trickster Coyote. (The cover illustration by Michael Krajewski evokes a face on a totem pole as much as it does a changeling of monstrous possibilities.)

Madden also uses the word "púca," explaining in a note that "in my own erratic use, the pooka shows up at home, in the past, while the púca appears in spaces that are mysterious, magical, queer. This was unintentional."

A púca can assume any number of forms, often manifesting itself as a human being with some sort of animal feature, such as a tail or cat-like ears. (The púca is likely a forerunner of Shakespeare's Puck.) A púca might also appear as a black horse with a flowing mane and luminescent gold eyes, or as a black cat or wolf, or some other creature. According to Irish legend, the púca is playful and sometimes terrifying but benevolent toward humans. If you climb upon its back it will give you a wild and frightening ride, but in the end it will return you safely. About the worst it will do is ruin a crop with spit or feces -- "fairy-blasted" they call it.

"Some of us were made to be ridden, riddled, riven ..." Madden writes. "If the frost has silvered the blackberries -- If they've spit on what you want -- "

Madden went to college at Harding University, which, he told J. Michael Norris of the Screen Door Review ("Literary voices of the Queer South") some years ago, "kept [him] closeted and afraid for longer than" he might otherwise have been.

"And yet I got such a grounding there, academically, spiritually, ethically," he said. "I've had to grapple with the fundamentalist religious tradition I grew up in, but I think maybe the grappling was not only more difficult but maybe more mindful, more thoughtful, if only because I had such a rich understanding of the tradition and the culture because of attending Harding. I also did study abroad in Italy while I was there, and that experience opened me up to so much aesthetically and culturally. I wouldn't be who I am now if it hadn't been for that life-changing experience."

He became an academic, another kind of pooka, and left Arkansas, first for the University of Texas and a Ph.D. in literature, specializing in Irish culture, British and Irish poetry, LGBTQ literature, sexuality studies, and creative writing and poetry. Eventually he settled in South Carolina, where he teaches and writes and advocates for the fair treatment of gay people.

At some point, he returned to Arkansas to care for his father who was dying of cancer.

He had been dying

for weeks. I went for a walk down

the old road beside the family home,

the sun declining in the distant trees.

"Be careful," my mother said. "There are wolves

in the fields" -- she said she had seen the tracks.

I used the walk to phone my love back home,

the man they didn't know, refused to know,

a name they never used ...

He goes back, to his husband, to his students, and his work.

I am not someone who writes home anymore. I am not someone who goes home anymore. I am not stuck in the past. I am not very rational about this. I am not this. I am not that. I am not one of those or one of them. I am not one of us. I am not one of you. I am not handsome. I am not wholesome. I am not holy. I am not coming home.

Thomas Wolfe famously wrote that "you can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time -- back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

But Madden ends this slight and remarkable book with an acknowledgment that lives can be sorted and re-imagined, and that we can choose new families and find a capsule of comfort with "the hot water bottle" of a husband and a purring cat.

The pooka takes you on a wild ride, but delivers you safely home.

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com


Upcoming Events