'Failed in Life and Love'

“Usually he took for his subjects those who failed in life and love. He wrote about the derelict and downtrodden, the old and bereft. Who wanted to read about successful alderman, anyway?” As a newspaper reporter, “celebrities” never interested me, the politicians and captains of industry hungry for headlines. Too often they sought the “glamour” a reporter might supply then, even in the provincial pages of a smalltown newspaper in the Midwest. Smugness and entitlement are repellant. At the same time I resisted romanticizing the plight of the outsiders, the ready-made poignancy that comes with poverty and failure. It was impossible to avoid both types, of course. The best I could do was maintain an uneasy neutrality, sticking as close as possible to the facts, sorting them out and resisting the effortless clichés. The comment at the top is by Scott Donaldson in his biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson, and I think it accounts for my love for the best of Robinson’s poems. He usually…