Poets shake off the stench of death
Paul Gessell in The Ottawa Citizen has this story about a revival of sorts for a dozen long-dead, long-forgotten poets, including B.C.’s Paul Potts, who died in 1990, and who, apparently, stank.
Potts cared little about the cleanliness of his clothes or body. As a result, he stank. This peccadillo, combined with some other eccentricities, did not, apparently, help his career.
“He became a creature of derision, mocked and shunned,” according to Nova Scotia publisher Ronald Caplan, who has been busy trying to resurrect Potts’s work.
When the 1986 British book Portraits of Poets, by photographer Christopher Barker, appeared, Potts was termed “the most shamefully neglected” of the century’s poets. The photographic portrait of Potts in the book makes the bald, bearded man look like a derelict who just crawled from a ditch.
Actually, he may have just crawled from a bed, soiled from his own waste. Friends would stop by from time to time to clean up him and the bed.
Potts’s work is being published in anthology form by Nova Scotia’s Breton Books, and will be included in a special “dead poets” issue of ARC magazine, prompting Gessell to write what may be the most eyebrow-raising journalistic segue in recent history: “In death, Potts perhaps smells a little better.”
As is so often the case, Sondheim said it best, this time in “A Little Priest” from Sweeney Todd. (For those needing the context, Lovett and Todd are singing about their plan to chop up the bodies of murder victims and bake them into pies…)
LOVETT: It’s priest. Have a little priest.
TODD: Is it really good?
LOVETT: Sir, it’s too good, at least!
Then again, they don’t commit sins of the flesh,
So it’s pretty fresh.
TODD: Awful lot of fat.
LOVETT: Only where it sat.
TODD: Haven’t you got poet, or something like that?
LOVETT: No, y’see, the trouble with poet is
‘Ow do you know it’s deceased?
Try the priest!