Truth and myth have merged since the poet Everette Maddox passed in February 1989. He is better known now for starting the Maple Leaf Poetry Reading series and for his barfly lifestyle than for his own poetry. Editors Grace Bauer and Julie Kane, both poets and professors who knew Maddox, have attempted to remedy this by compiling a book of works inspired by or written about Maddox. The selections included consist of poetry, fiction, criticism, and journalism. (A transcription of my radio documentary about Everette Maddox is included.) The authors range from the famous—Ellen Gilchrist and Rodney Jones—to more locally known writers such as Ralph Adamo, Nancy Harris, and Kay Murphy.

Many of the works included here give descriptions of Maddox that add depth to his clichéd-on-the-surface life as the booze-soaked, ornery-yet-wise, slowly suicidal poet. Kane’s accounts of their last reading tour shows an honest affection and respect for Maddox based on their friendship and his great breadth of knowledge of poetry. Maddox was a teacher, and many of the recollections incorporate that. Manfred Pollard calls him the “teacher of the strength of strings,” and in other works there are references to all that people learned from Maddox.

However, Richard Katrovas also reminds us of the other side of Maddox in his thinly disguised portrait of Maddox, where the main character takes Maddox home after a bender and describes the putrid nature of his clothing and hygiene before putting him in the bathtub. As artistic and poetic as it was, the life of Everette Maddox was often not pretty.

In all, this compilation is a fascinating way of portraying Everette Maddox through the eyes of his friends, students, and loved ones. It also serves as an impression of the Carrolton milieu (in one piece, Maddox refers to it as “The Montmatre of New Orleans”) that revolved around Oak Street in the late 1970s into the 1980s. Hopefully, publication of Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum will allow more people to know of and share in at least the poetry of Everette Maddox.