Posted by joe fodor on January 25, 19101 at 16:15:02:
In Reply to: Re: The Influence of McDonald Clarke to the young Whitman posted by Allison on January 15, 19101 at 07:28:07:
I was intrigued by your posting on the Walt Whitman Campfire. I've done a lot of work with "Sandy" Clarke, and feel like I almost know him. Because he's buried in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, I wrote a story about him in 1996 for the Brooklyn Bridge Magazine, and have been fascinated by him ever since, going to rare book rooms and reading his poetry, which is so weird it's readable.
He has a lot of history in Brooklyn, even though he was a New Yorker, and the Brooklyn Historic Society owns a painting of the Mad Poet, which is in pretty bad repair; brown and muddled with age. I've got a number of good images of him from other sources. A 70 page biography (written by a woman-I can't recall her name)is in the New York Public Library. This book talks about how he supposedly struck his head on a rock in the Thames River in Connecticut as a boy, and was never quite "right" afterwards.
I've also collected a few obituaries of the Mad Poet, which all talk about how he died of a neurological wasting disease-on the internment books at Green-Wood he is listed as dying of dementia. The story about drowning under a faucet of water, which is included in the circa 1870 biography, seems like a poetical invention. It is included in an earlier guide to Green-Wood cemetery, and seems to be something a cemetery tour guide made up, and was ped along.
I'm thinking someday that an edited version of his poetry should come out. He is a pretty good writer, and his stuff lives. Walter Whitman's first published poem was "An Elegy for Poor M'Donald Clarke" In 1842.
Joe Fodor