Confessions of a Literary Mudlark (or) What It Means to Be a Poet

My friend and mentor, the late poet Robert Milby, once affectionately referred to the entourage of local poets that gathered regularly at the live poetry events he hosted and promoted in the Hudson Valley as mudlarks.

The word was a nod to Robert’s penchant for Victorian literature and culture; an allusion to street urchins that once lived along the Thames and burrowed through its muddy shores in hopes of finding something of value upon which to subsist.

I thought it an odd metaphor initially. Some months later, though, I found it quite apt when I began to cull poems for a potential collection.

What would comprise Poetic Flotsam: Confessions of a Literary Mudlark, I'd decided were pieces I wrote over the course of forty years, many by hand on sheets of faded, yellow lined paper, bar receipts, and in the margins of other people’s books. Others had been stuffed inside half-filled journals and tossed about in Rubbermaid bins in my attic. 

Many more lay buried beneath the cracked and dusty souvenirs salvaged from a broken core of dysfunctional familial relationships.  Most, however, have been stored neatly inside my own psyche waiting for the right time to present themselves for final review, discard, or restoration.

In truth, all poets, writers, and artists are mudlarks … scavengers and treasure hunters in search of precious remnants buried in the rubble of their own personal shipwrecks; muckrakers in the cultural and political waste of the current historical moment. 

We dredge the past, dissect the present, and invent futures in the hope of finding something of value that can help us make sense of our own piecemeal narratives and often to help create meaning for others as well as for ourselves.

It has taken me another 10 years to restore the collection - and now it sits in a file on my desktop waiting.

Is it time yet? it asks as I send out another flyer for my Coffee, Tea & Poetry series in Marlboro, NY.

Is it time yet? it presses as I gingerly choose one from this section, one from another to present at my own readings or at others.

Is it time yet? it demands as I wander along the mental Thames that every poet eventually visits in search of the lost and forgotten to which they will, if they will, give new meaning.

Is it time yet?

Yes, it's time. Time to start digging.