Poetry For Weary Travelers in Distant Lands
Examining ‘Gaslit By A Madman: Illuminated Poems’ by Max J. Lewy
Every now and then I pick up a book of poetry. I have a degree in English, so I’m not unfamiliar with poems, but here in the wild I don’t stumble across them with great frequency. I appreciate the occasionally well-crafted song lyric, and enjoy the effect when somebody like Tolkien throws a poem into his prose. Poetry works like a packet of seasoning in the middle of a plate of good but otherwise homogeneous food.
A poem forces you to slow down and let the gears of your mind start spinning. If you charge right through, the effect is akin to running a marathon at the Louvre. Poems work a lot better when you read them out loud, and sometimes you can change a room by shouting words into it.
‘Gaslit By A Madman: Illuminated Poems’ by Max J. Lewy is a book of poetry that is much closer to Kurt Cobain than William Wordsworth, and I don’t mean that as an insult. There is a legitimate chaos in this book that is quite compelling, and the poems are all included as text and as a component of colorful collages like you’d see on a lamp post in a foreign country.
In the introduction, Lewy gives some tantalizing details about his history of mental illness. The short version is that he was “[v]eritably…
