June 3, 2026

There's an episode of Two and A Half Men where Elvis Costello, Sean Penn, and Harry Dean Stanton play a support group for Charlie Harper, Charlie Sheen's character. I could use such an illustrious support group, too, especially, as I've struggled for several weeks to write this installment of A Life In Words Mostly Unread. While some personal complications have certainly affected my focus, the truth is that I have been completely uninspired, which is pretty sad given that the theme I desire is one of inspiration. 

Throughout the last 45 years, I have channeled some famous writers (song, poem or prose). I just needed to contact them to see if they'd come to my living room to smoke cigars, drink beer and a-muse me. Costello's still alive, so I started with him.

"No way, Dave," EC bluntly told me. "You've shown a superficiality when modeling your writing after me."

"Come on, Elvis. That was a long time ago when I was still searching for direction. After all, you were my first. Doesn't that count for something?"

"First off, you lie, or more accurately conveniently forget the truth. That Styx crap was your first. Secondly, at this point, no. You were just like my party girl, Dave, with the whole thing starting 'like fascination,' and ending 'up like a trance.' Some of that drivel in those early years could have been churned out in your sleep."

"That hurts, Declan," I said, hoping I might reach a deeper connection by using his birth name.

"Don't you dare!" he snapped. "That flippant use of a name is exactly why your earliest writing could be so shallow. Remember when you wrote a whole set of crappy poems as inspired by Imperial Bedroom? You even appropriated my fictional Alice as yours, a rabbit hole appropriately ignored."

"Well, you stole her from Lewis Carroll!" My bitter retorts were not helping me.

"Then, how about all of the lame drinking references? Remember your 'will there be trouble tonight/if I come home drunk, looking a sight?' from 'Looking Glass.' Think you listened to 'Boy With A Problem' enough times? Pretty brazen given you came home alone every night in those days."

"Cut me some slack, Elvis. That was 1983. I was still a pretty insecure young man."

"Speaking of 'slack,' Dave, don't bother contacting those other musicians whose words you clumsily fondled all those years. I know Ocasek, Knopfler, Dylan, Zevon, have all put out restraining orders against you."

The sound of the phone slamming down shocked the hell out of me. Did Elvis actually use a landline? I knew Elvis wasn't wrong, though. My website proudly proclaims me as a hack writer, and certainly prior to 1984, I did hack away at ideas with crude strokes as if creating a rudimentary path through a forest. Or, if it helps, hacking away like I do playing golf, not learning much and thus not improving.

I considered who else I might channel from those early days of writing. When I wasn't stealing from musicians, I was taking vague ideas from writers (Frank Herbert, William Goldman), games (Melee, Dungeons & Dragons), or even dull classes. Poor George Sallows, Morgantown High School history teacher, must have really inspired me one week when I cranked out "Old Brown Suit," "On The Wagon," and "Crusades." All are lost but I feel confident in admitting that even "Crusades" probably had nothing to do with what he taught. "Old Brown Suit" had everything to do with what he wore.

So, if Elvis wasn't going to help me define this part of my life unread in words, I needed to reach out to the pantheon of writers, mostly American, who influenced my creativity in more tangible ways. Who should that be, though? Herman Melville? No, my "Miss Ahab" might trigger the same anger Elvis felt about my usage of his Alice. Robert Penn Warren? All The King's Men is one of the finest novels ever written with one of the great narrators of all time, Jack Burden. However, I am sure Warren would tell me that my "We Never Knew The Man" was the most pathetic attempt at fan fiction at a time when fan fiction was not even a coined phrase. Theodore Dreiser? He would almost certainly lament my lack of authenticity in trivializing Sister Carrie's adultery via the poem "Married Men."

I settled on Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter sparked several poems in the mid 1980s. I don't know what channel I found him on, but it certainly needed subtitles and/or closed captioning.

"Nathaniel? It's Dave Fleming. I was wondering if you could be free for a good old writer's circle?"

"Dave Fleming? Who write thus?"

"Dave Fleming. Your spirit infused me once as I wrote several poems. 'The Ballad of My Fair Maiden.' That was a good one. Don't you remember?"

"Why doth thou bring this to me hither? The symbol remain unseen."

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. I tried one last appeal. "Nathaniel, I was so moved by your tale of Hester, Arthur, Roger and Pearl, I recast it as a love poem for my own Hester at the time. I even had a parenthetical saying that the poem had been 'found among some manuscripts in a Boston custom-house.' All in your honor!"

"Silence! You thief! Suffer. Repent. Repeat."

"Through the trees, an old man heard 'goodbye.'" My own poem was now mocking me.

Enough of this messing around trying to contact the lower ranks of my favorite writers. It was time to suck it up and go after the masters. After all, in 1987, I made no pretense that I wasn't clinging to their coattails with "Looking Into Master's Eyes”, which takes "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" to heart, sampling T. S. Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and William Butler Yeats as I laid bare my limitations as a poet.

Arnold sneaked in there because of one line from "Dover Beach," but Eliot and Yeats became two of my most frequent standbys as I sought to establish my poetic voice. They needed channeled.

Instead I got a spokesperson.

"Why are you trying to contact these two men?" the stern voice asked.

"Uh, well, uh," I stammered, "they both were idols, of a sort, for me when I was younger. I was hoping they might help me frame what I am becoming in old age."

The man snorted. "You and everyone else. You do realize they are sick and tired of being the voice of the septuagenarian. Eliot says he may shoot the next person who quotes "do I dare? do I dare?" as a summation of advanced doubt."

"But, that's the point. I did it when it wasn't cool and to pay homage to him. I mean, come on, the poem is called 'Looking Into Master's Eyes.'"

"How droll! Well, he is extremely busy, as is William. Besides, I am sure you quoted 'Leda and the Swan' ad nauseam."

"Hah! Shows what you know. While I adore that poem . . ."

"Everyone says they adore that freaking poem. Or 'The Second Coming.' Adoration comes a dime a dozen for these dead poets. It makes all you living hacks desperate for such adoration."

'You'll never know,' I thought, before making one last attempt. "Anyway, in this case, I use a line from 'The Long-Legged Fly.' More importantly, my whole point is the continuum of writing. Yeats build his poem on associations of Julius Caesar, Helen of Troy, and Michelangelo, and then I do the same with Yeats, Eliot and Matthew Arnold."

"Good lord, you types just won't give up. You think you are so freaking profound. Goodbye."

And I am left holding my phone feeling the final stanza of "Looking Into Master's Eyes" all the more:

As my mind moves upon silence/

I quietly curse the names/

of a hundred men and women who before me stood/

like great Greek statues/

and somehow overcame invoking on their masters violence.

Imagine my surprise when not long after this failure, I was the one summoned, this time by Robert Frost.

"What the hell you doing, Fleming?" he asked, his voice as brittle as three-day old New England snow.

"Uh, Bob Frost! Wow. What do you mean?"

"Word is you were trying to recruit Eliot and Yeats for some kind of support group."

"Oh, yeah, that is true. I am trying to take stock of my literary life now that I am retired."

"You doing that again? Didn't that fail miserably with 'The Child of the Soul.'"

I was hurt. "The Child of the Soul" is one of the finer things I have ever written. "C'mon, Bob, that's hardly fair."

"I'm not saying the poem failed, you chowderhead. I am saying that the support group idea failed in that poem." It sounded like Bob might be drinking.

I was more struck by the first thing he said than the latter. "Are you saying that you think it is a good poem?"

"Stop looking for external validation. You're the one that had me say, 

'Where grass grows all gangly and spitefully,

The solitary cutter finds all truth,

Perhaps finds Jesus and all that, also.'"

He was right. He, Eliot, Yeats, Walt Whitman, even Geoffrey Chaucer did try to support me finding my voice to pen the greatest love poem of the 20th century. With my feelings unrequited at the time, it was inevitable that for my imaginary support group, "the wine was still passed around/I had to fight to keep mine down."

Frost must have taken my silence as anger. "All I'm saying is that only you know your truth."

"Thanks, Bob. Still, I'd like to try and get a group together one last time. You in?

"Hell, no!"

"Why not?"

"You abandoned me when you went to Indiana University. All that 'I want to do my dissertation on Robert Frost' went out the window. It wasn't just me you abandoned, you went from appreciation of the rural to writing about the inner city. Nope, get someone else to do your dirty work."

As the sound of another phone slammed, I wondered if maybe landlines were coming back into fashion.

I guess I couldn't count on my old mainstays, my once wing-men, my dissolved posse. Should I conjure up John Milton? You see, at one time, Milton, or rather a 1985 seminar on Milton, inspired multiple poems (and a surprising award-winning essay). Neither Milton nor his era do much for me, but no fewer than six poems can be linked directly to that class. There is a gravitas with John Milton, a reminder to ponder a broader perspective of art, to articulate the world at large, especially in its great mysteries. However, if I struggled to understand Hawthorne, Milton would have to be worse. Still, with some hesitation, I sought him out.

Instead, I got a chorus of angels.

"What do you want? What do you seek?" they sang in perfect harmony.

"Wow, I wasn't expecting a chorus. Just looking for John Milton."

"You're the one that begged us to come back/You're the one that needed us into existence." The sound of a background harp was most disconcerting.

"That is true. I did write 

'Bring back the chorus/

Bring back the chorus of angels/

Bring back the chorus of men/

Bring back the chorus.'"

"Well, we represent only the angel side of that request. You'll need to check with the maestro for your men chorus."

"My, oh my," I admitted. "I had forgotten how desperately I yearned for the kind of collective morality a good classical chorus could provide."

"That doesn't change, however," boomed one baritone from the back, "how snide you could be with your own verse. 'Watching the endless train of endless quatrains/is about as memorable as unclogging drains?' Really? That was the counterpoint to collective morality?"

"I will admit," I did admit, "that is a pretty embarrassing couplet. Talk about the stench from an unclogged drain. What can I say? I was still taking baby steps back then. Anyway, is John around? Can I talk to him."

"No," shrilled one tenor. "He says he can't be bothered. He's roaming through the great hall of Greek art again."

There wasn't even a click or a dial tone when I realized that was the last from the heavenly chorus.

However, they had helped me with my thinking. Maybe this fantastical support group was unnecessary.

Most of my writing heroes were linked to my writing while a student (mostly graduate student). As a professional, I spent a lot less time attempting to show my relevance through such direct allusions to previous writers. I am not saying this was ideal; Perhaps if I had linked It's All Academic more directly to the great satires of the past, academics might have noticed it more. A less-than-subtle nod to Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal (It's All Academic when presenting colleges as necessary for making them beneficial to the publick). A few "borrowed" lines from Orwell's Animal Farm (all deans are equal but some deans are more equal). A twist on Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (I hate people who are not serious about their meetings. It is so shallow of them).

If I was going to conjure figures to help me frame my literary life, the Greek gods and mortals of their myths would help the most (especially since one could argue my literary life is a myth). Yet one can't call fictional figures to a mixer in one's living room. Besides, like Eliot and Yeats, these mythological figures had already helped me do some heavy lifting - literally. I would be old news, even to these elders.

After all, Sisyphus was there when I resigned my position in April 2010. Or, more precisely, Sisyphus' Dream was there for me:

Moving those smaller stones was agony,

Proved pointless for recognition's sake

Or showing Zeus that he made a mistake,

As my repute remained for history.

I take my punishment, admit my plight,

Gladly, in exchange to sleep through the night.

Heracles was there for me when I retired from my position in May 2024. Or, more precisely, his labors indulged my fantasies in For The Thousandth Time, Please Indulge Me when I sarcastically speculated that I had accomplished many of Heracles' labors, save "the stealing of the garter of Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazon. . . I might have wanted to try that when I was a younger man, but this old man may need the girdle himself." A professional life in academia apparently equals the pointless labors bestowed by a petty monarch. 

In between those poems, I shouldered "weights of the world" long forgotten (I speculate they were tied to distractions and discord at work) in Atlas Hugged, my most ridiculous personal analogy ever:

For a Titan who displeased

Petty Gods from whom he came

He always believed

The sanctity of all his aims.

As the shoulders sagged,

He saw that any embrace

Would require him dropping

His obligation all over the place.

Not surprisingly, then, I come to the conclusion that I might be overthinking this. A life in words mostly unread means a life with words mostly unsaid. And I am o.k. with that. I am pretty sure I know people whose lives have barely interacted with words. If I had a group like Charlie Harper's, its purpose would be less to support each other and more to entertain each other. Frost was right when he told me that only I would know my truth. Maybe I should have done my dissertation on him!

I actually figured that out about half a year ago, but have been blind to see it. Amidst turmoil at my former employer, a few people had asked if I had considered running for public office. Intrigued, but not sold on the idea, I heard these voices as sirens. Almost as if via some kind of coda, I sought comfort from my masters. My November 2025 poem "The Sirens" made the voices of the masters louder than the voices of the masses:

First, good old T.S.:

I can hear them,

Songs resonating through the hours,

Plaintive pleas to save their souls.

I'd love to think they do not sing to me,

But my Prufrock act can't dim their powers.

Then Milton and the Greeks:

Upon this narrow cliff where I retire

They can still tempt me with real estate,

A return to my final resting place.

Their chorale both shrill and thrilling,

It implores me to get on board

And once again serve

In ways I no longer thrive.

And in a return to the first (sorry, Declan, I still proclaim you as my first), Elvis Costello with one more nod to the Greeks:

My dilemma as they drag the Lake

Is whether to file or not.

Through its mixed messages, my heart aches,

While the Fates seem to curse their lot.

"The Sirens" was not validation in anyone's eyes but my own. If others read it, eyes twinkling because they find something that moves them, that's just the cherry on top. They can, however, find their own disasters to avoid.

Only I really care about these master tapes. Yeats once wrote, "an aged man is a paltry thing." T. S. Eliot once wrote "I can connect nothing with nothing." I once wrote "Love yourself/Love what's in store/someday, maybe/love the rest of us even more."¹ We can all be right. It never has to be a competition.

¹The ending to "The Child of the Soul"

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If interested, fuller readings of the sources mentioned here are linked below (and available at the ever-expanding "The Blog Under The Bed").

The Ballad Of My Fair Maiden

Looking Into Master's Eyes

The Child of the Soul

Bring Back The Chorus

Sisyphus' Dream

For The Thousandth Time, Just Indulge Me

Atlas Hugged

The Sirens

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