Craft: Joe Bolton
Joe Bolton (1961-1990) ignited brightly and briefly. Born in Cadiz, Kentucky, Bolton attended multiple writing programs—Houston, Florida, Arizona. The day after he turned in his master’s thesis at The University of Arizona, a book called The Last Nostalgia, Bolton took his own life.
Bolton described his own poems as: “The scene is twilit, the mood existential, the outlook tragic.” He made poems of youth—desire and longing as if he invented them, a self-conscious display of form, and a preoccupation with a doomed romanticism. But he also had the capacity to turn his life into legend, to pick the exact right images, and to make seemingly insubstantial memories emblematic or mythological.
Most of Bolton’s poems were set in the South, mainly Kentucky, Texas, and Florida, and they feel of those places as much as from those places. Both Gothic and tropical, the poems convey an existential loneliness; they are sincere, self-reflective, and strewn with an emotional debris that is sensitively rendered.
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