On a hill high above
the mild October day
I stand, heroic, hands
clasped behind my back,
as the last musket’s
crack fades
and the smoke drifts away
from the place where the famous
battle of my youth was fought.
Who won? Who lost?
Who knows? My speech,
which I seem to have misplaced,
tells. Oh well:
myself and loves and grey
uniform were not among
the casualties, quite; though
a gold button dangles.
Now we’ll bind the wounds,
free the slaves, and set up
(oh shrewdly!) a national shrine
in the decaying mansion
of my body: post cards,
stuffed possums, and (out back)
whiskey to be sold
[to] such emissaries
from the glacial future
as have coin to spend

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.

It’s been a long time since I added anything to this site so here it is:

THE DOOM

Of course there is a loud
and multicolored doom
on the street. But it is
the deafening absence
of your voice over which I
am straining to make you
hear me, at whatever corner
you are lost: Take me
with you in the traffic.

Edited by Ralph Adamo

ISBN:1-60801-000-7
ISBN 13: 978-1-60801-000-4

Paper, 5.5 x 8.25, 168 pages
16.95 (Order Now)

October, 2009

“Ralph Adamo’s selection from Maddox’s four books provides an accessible introduction to readers new to the work, but in its novel organization it also suggests new and surprising readings for those who know the work, or thought they did.
Everette Maddox was all poet and died for it— the Christ of New Orleans— but not before he hosted a good army of angel-poets who can be found all over these states.”
—Andrei Codrescu

“In all the thunderous herd of contemporary poetry, I don’t think I know anyone who has so completely captured his own voice, his own being, in his work as Everette Maddox. This book is Everette Maddox. It pleases me to think that the best of these wonderful poems, like “Crunch,” “Breakfast,” “Disaster Poem,” or “The Miracle,” appear to be effortlessly carved on the morning air, floating there like beautiful little spider webs beaded with dew. Seemingly benign and even fragile, they’ve caught you before you know it.”
—Leon Stokesbury

“In New Orleans, Everette Maddox is to poetry what Marie Laveau is to voodoo and Buddy Bolden to jazz. His legend haunts the streets he lived on, the bars where he drank and wrote and read his poems. As Ralph Adamo says in his Introduction, everyone has their own Everette, “and then we have the poems.” This long-overdue selected brings together a substantial body of Maddox’s work— much of it long out of print. It presents Maddox as a poet “exploding within the memory trace of an older idea of form”— at once tragic and humorous, plain spoken and “cagily ensconced in his own words.” I hope it’s not over, and good-by will be treasured by those of us who were already fans of his poems and introduce him to the larger audience he deserves.”
—Grace Bauer

“This book frames an outpost of exigencies in poetics never before realized on the American terrain. Everette Maddox lived poetry in the saddle, fast and loose, slaking his muse with a reckless grace, all the while knowing it was the ultimate high stakes gamble – not just to win, but to break the house. Taken together, these poems exact some of the most deadly quotients of realness ever to appear in 20th century writs. If today’s mission for the poet is to present a staggering neo-ancient command of alphabets hell-bent on liberating the polyphonic sensibilities of the human vernacular, mission accomplished! Truth be told, for any modern day troubadour who intends to carry forth the torch in poesy, this is where to find it.”
—Dave Brinks

“[This work] captures so palpably the nuances of Maddox’s speaking voice that to read it is to almost touch the man: the savage world-cartooning wit, the sense of beauty and civilization, the carnal-cry, the fascination with history, the resigned and stoically self-caricaturing romantic. It is, as Bob Woolf pointed out… jazz… New Orleans jazz…”
—Rodney Jones

The stars going out one by one
leaving the sky black

God sweeping the last stars
under the celestial rug

Muttering not Good riddance
to bright rubbish but (more kindly)
Out of sight out of mind

Another poem from the Songbook.

IRRELEVANT

I’m not going to
dignify Mozart
or metaphysics
any longer by
pretending they touch
me. I won’t even
say I like these leaves
except as they swirl
against a special
emptiness. Nothing
is relevant since
losing you is what
my life is about.

– Everette Maddox, The Everette Maddox Songbook