Poets and the fools who love them : a memoir in essays

Poets and the Fools Who Love Them blends autobiography with cultural commentary and meditates on creative writing as a cottage industry within humanities higher education. Celebrated poet and memoirist Richard Katrovas examines his picaresque early years with a criminal father, a beleaguered mother, and four siblings as state and federal authorities pursued the family across the highways of America. His freewheeling, wide-ranging essays consider, among other social constructs, the relation of crime and art, and the relation of both to the authority of the state, particularly in terms of race and class. Katrovas speaks candidly about how white privilege facilitated his father’s criminal career, as a lifestyle of larceny and used-car scams, perpetuated state to state, would have surely had different implications for a family of color. Drawing on his adulthood in academe, Katrovas’s memoir in essays chronicles a quest to locate surrogate fathers among older poets and other creative writers, and reflects upon the ways in which that search has affected his role as the father to three Czech American daughters. The book flows from the love of a poet for other poets, for the “community of poets,” one likened to a “gang of priests” and a “herd of bears.” Katrovas maintains that most lovers of poets are themselves poets, and those lovers of poets who are not themselves poets are saints. At its heart, Poets and the Fools Who Love Them contemplates, with care and unabashed honesty, the role of art and the artist in the madcap twenty-first century. "In Poets and the Fools Who Love Them, a wide-ranging, freewheeling work of memoir, Richard Katrovas describes his passage through the world of poets and poetry over the past forty years. He braids personal, institutional, and cultural histories while considering the relation of lyric art to its pedagogy, framed in the context of his own idiosyncratic, sometimes picaresque life story, which included a childhood on the highways of America with criminal parents, an adolescence in federal housing projects and later in Sasebo, Japan, and an adulthood in academe. Featuring over twenty essays, each self-contained yet adding to a larger portrait of a life in poetry, Poets and the Fools Who Love Them both celebrates and critiques, as well as attempts to describe broadly, what it means to be an American poet in the twenty-first century. Katrovas meditates on what he takes to be the defining issues of our time regarding the role of the poet specifically and the role of the artist broadly. At its base, the book offers a love letter to American poetry and to literary artists"-- Provided by publisher My Father's Job Was Crime -- Name-Dropping -- My Penchant for Violence: Poets and Physical Courage -- Their Fathers' Queer Sons: The Apotheosis of Larry Levis -- My Gorgons -- Local Poets -- Shakespeare, on Acid -- My Wicked Thirties -- Fresno, California: "Armpit of America" and Breeding Ground of American Poets -- Poetry Is a Dead Art -- What Poets Know: Dry and Wet Knowing -- The Magic Book: Why I Thought Publishing a Book Would Change Everything -- Take My Wife, Please: Poetry Readings and Stand-Up -- AWP and Me: A Meditation -- A Privateer in the Arts: Arnold Johnston -- Soul Retrieval -- Straight and Normal: Poets and Drugs in the New Age -- "The Raggedy-Ass Masses": Poets and Democracy -- The Dick and the Donald: White Privilege and Flimflam -- A Dead Dog and a Boy