- "The names have been changed to protect the innocent"
None of the people mentioned here asked to be included in my
nervous breakdown, and they deserve to maintain their privacy.
Chuck is currently working in Tulsa.
Andrea is a few years older than I. Her last known address was a
Community College in Texas. Around the time of this poem, she flew to
Spain to study the work of Frederico Garcia Lorca.
Parsival, who appears in other poems written during this period, is an itinerant poet,
now married and gainfully employed in Tulsa.
Around the time I wrote this, I was very influenced by the work of Henry Miller
(Tropic of Cancer) and Jack Kerouac (On The Road). I had
read Anne
Charters' excellent biography of Kerouac which included a chart indicating which fictional
names related to what real people (e.g., Dean Moriarty was the name Kerouac gave Neal
Cassidy in On the Road). I liked this, but decided as I made a
fiction of my mental dissolution I would use the same fictional names throughout
all the works. So, once someone cracked the code, they'd only need a
fairly simple chart.
I take a measure of perverse comfort in the belief these poems may not stand
the test of time. It's a truism, at least, that whatever an author believes is his/her
best work is not the work for which s/he is remembered. So, since I think this is one
of my best long works, it probably isn't, and no one will be moved to "crack the code."
