for those who go before us & we who will follow

death is a void, a negation, a luminous absence we shall all know. still death comes at a shock and delivers horror and loss. so much for eloquence, which for now can kiss my ass. i am in shock to wake up this morning to the news that the very gifted writer david foster wallace committed suicide friday night. i am literally struck dumb by the news. i've been an admirer of his since the early '90s when i found a few of his pieces i think in the paris review. and when i read his non-fiction essays published in harper's i was hooked. i have a confession, my prose style owes much to wallace's style as it does to my own invention. i loved how wallace mixed high erudition with low slang, bad grammar, double-negatives and so on which amped his black humor to the first degree. my own prose style is to wallace's style as that of an italian exploitation filmmaker ripping off the movie jaws, but still it was eliot who announced bad poets imitate, good poets steal. if that doesn't give a writer license to ape his masters then what. . .

a video of an interview of wallace with charlie rose can be found here.

on top of this news i am still reeling from the death last week of reginald shepherd, a poet i discovered also in the early '90s. contemporary poetry lost a luminous voice and one of it's brightest talents. i didn't know the poet except from his work and his blogging. our paths crossed only when we both appeared in an issue of the zine concelabratory shoehorn rievew. his death comes as a shock just the same.

it is significant to me that both these writers were born in the 1960s. they are part of my generation and i guess i've reached that crucial and weird age when our contemporaries begin to leave. it sucks big time.