Patrick Phillips Elegy for the Dying Machine poem deserves better than this silliness

  Through interlibrary loan I got my hands on Patrick Phillips beautiful unflinching collection of poems about things that run their course. I heard him read a few in 2018 or so in Berry Chapel Rome Ga from the same pulpit where I heard James Dickey about thirty years ago mock the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

    Phillips is a Methodist minister's son who was in Rome Ga to promote his newly minted book on Forsyth County, Blood at the Root,  come to find out the home of Marjorie Taylor Greene, about the lynchings of 1914 and the ethnic cleansing of an entire county, many of whom went to nearby Hall (Gainesville Ga) where a couple possibly coulda been the ancestors of Deshaun Watson.

    But I do not know that for a fact

   Phillips has a great chapter title, a Thirty Karat Son of a Bitch with Spare Parts. It features a fellow who stoked the lynchings in Forsyth and only a few years later found himself in a picture of the Hanging Leo Frank which I understood to have been roped in a meadow that is now under the South Bound Lane of I 75 almost exactly where the Water Park is, about seven miles of Truist Park where the Braves Play.

    My Favorite poem is about friends of Phillips father in decline at St Simons Island who talk about sham funerals and who will dye next while young Phillips tries to be light and witty and they pretend interest in his life that at the moment they find "goddamned irrelevant."

    I thought it grand poem and shared by reading to the voice message of a once promising forty something in Alabama. He felt compelled to concoct a little ditty immediately at my expense and for most of the day yesterday my good intentions were turned into sport between him and a UPS worker and a Methodist woman who compared the Charlatan, the prankster to William Blake himself.

   He Has since deleted his text but his lines were about containment and the monkeys and crackers at the cracker barrel who yearn for the kids meal and the tea for free.

    He is no point, no poet, his tartness with the English language is wearing thin and he is not as cute as he thinks he is or once was.

    He does do a good impression of whats his face in the Deer Hunter who says in the Denzel Washington Movie Creasy is about to Paint his Masterpiece--Christopher Walken--but a four foot something impersonating the great Walken is such a sight gag even that is losing its luster.

    All this to say  Phillips is the clear winner here, the true poet and this two day fiasco more proof of his elegies as it is clear we are all fading, the Read and the Reading.