shoes of a poet (excerpt) by Clarise Foster

When poet Patrick O’Connell passed away in June, almost instinctively, I pulled his books off my shelves and reread them. I believe there is no finer tribute to a poet’s memory than to read what they have left behind. Since that time, I have read through his work over and over again, each time finding something else, both about the man he was in the flesh and about the imagination of a man whom I could tell at distance by his familiar shape and shuffle. It is interesting to me that Patrick’s gait was like no one else’s I know. Patrick walked a lot before worsening health problems made that struggle almost impossible, travelling most places toward the end of his life in a cab. In all my encounters with Patrick, and there were many over the twelve or so years that I knew him, I only once ran into him on the bus. It was also the only time I thought to get a good look at his shoes.

Now it might seem a little odd to catalogue a particular moment in memory by someone’s shoes, but in talking about Patrick O’Connell’s poetry, one can hardly avoid at least one reference to shoes. There is a lot of footwear in his writing: battered, busted and ragged, running, $75, glass, old, lost, simple, mismatched, scorched, shoes that are thrown against a wall, hang from a clothesline, that owls fly through, not to mention sandals, a ballet slipper, and boots, red, broken, hobnailed, and cowboy.

So what might be the symbolism of shoes in Patrick’s work? Well, most obviously it has to do with the ways in which Patrick registered the world—you can tell someone’s economic status by their shoes, their troubles, their disposition. And shoes are more or less the only medium of transport in the underworld in which Patrick lived.