The drunk poets Society – Fort Myers Florida Weekly

I drove 1,349 miles once when the editor of a daily newspaper in Springfield.

I was looking for a job. Write messages.

I had never written a message before, but it didn't matter. I had seen news. I was confident.

I'll be there Monday, I told him. It was a Friday afternoon at the Missouri River in Kansas City, 248 miles west of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, even 1,100 miles from the Springfield Morning Union newsroom at the Connecticut River in Springfield.

Life is like a river and I jumped from one river to the next in an old 357-chevy. When I went on Monday morning, I found an aging New Yorker in the corner office of a busy newsroom with IBM Electric writing machines and windows with a view of some greasy roads that flank the Connecticut River. He was wearing a white shirt and a red fly.

Arnold Friedman.

Mr. Friedman was surprised to see me, but he spent 20 minutes to chat. He didn't offer me a job, but he took off the phone, called a woman who headed the alumni relationship with a local college and asked if she had something for me.

Carey Jack. She had something.

She also had 40 dollars in her handbag, which she offered me without a question when I told her that my money would not extend until the first payment day.

Some unspoken wisdom were also offered in exchange. One thing: don't drive through the country halfway without a better plan than think. Two and the words of Arnie Friedman, Alter School, who briefly corresponds to a few chic essays: “You write for people who read like an average 12-year-old.

As much as I liked Mr. Friedman, I never really believed him. And now that I wrote for a few years – and especially after writing columns for Weekly readers from Florida – I decided that he was dead.

My readers are often ingenious, sometimes refined and occasionally brilliant enough to ask me why I have ever written the hell, and they didn't.

I share all of this because I do not intend to patronize them with what I will suggest, like a 12-year-old. Many people know a lot of things I don't do.

One of them is Sidney Johnson Burris, formerly from Danville, Virginia, and now from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, a man who drove fast cars, quick music, drunk too quickly, fired many weapons that were part of literature that were a lot of literature that were written to the literature. Words “founded a Tibetan oral taste project.

My kind of English professor.

At the end of his essay, his boiler records appear “a responsible joy”, which is now listed in a short series of his reflections as second.

If you go to Sjburris.medium.com and open the Joy door, you will find the following: “Belfast, Ireland.

Seamus Heaney, who would win the Nobel Prize for Poems 23 years later, and his friend, singer and songwriter David Hammond, did not go to a recording studio long after the incident to promote “happiness and expansion, which song, both poems and music, exists to promote first place.” But they heard shots and explosions outside, knew that people suffer from singing and decided not to do so.

So they packed up and left the studio and hit silence.

It was the wrong decision, a conclusion that Heaney later reached after he had asked himself whether “song was a betrayal of suffering”, as he put it in his own essay “The interesting case of Nero, Chekovs Cognac and a knocker”.

Perhaps it is in difficult times to celebrate happiness and expansity, to call it joy, just bad manners.

But no, as both Heaney and Burris suggest.

In Burris' words: “Joy … is our efficient builder of the communities-not attracted to joy?

And another thing. “Joy is the natural predator of the despot.”

If you read his short essay, you will get the idea: Joy is an essential tool for our times.

Burris remembers EB White, “Writing in 1939, on the edge of a massive world fire: 'A despot is not afraid of eloquent writers who preach freedom – he fears a drunk poet who cracks a joke who may have the grip.”

Now I call Burris in a new position: main resistance and unprentant head of the drunk poets Society – for a long time they like life and joyful. ®