Welcome to poet George Bilgere’s online newsletter. Every day George selects a poem by a writer he’s crazy about and he says a few words about why he picked it.

Here’s a poem for today, August 16, 2026

God Bless the Experimental Writers

by Corey Mesler

for David Markson   “One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with.” —Flann O’Brien from At Swim-Two-Birds   God bless the experimental writers. The ones whose work is a little difficult, built of tinkertoys and dada, or portmanteau and Reich. God help them as they type away, knowing their readers are few, only those who love to toil over an intricate boil of language, who think books are secret codes. These writers will never see their names in Publisher’s Weekly. They will never be on the talk shows. Yet, every day they disappear into their rooms atop their mother’s houses, or their guest houses behind some lawyer’s estate. Every day they tack improbable word onto im- probable word, out of love, children, out of a desire to emend the world.

__________

From Some Identity Problems, FootHills Publishing, 2008, by COREY MESLER.

Photograph: David Markson, whose Wittgenstein’s Mistress was published to critical acclaim in 1988, though the original manuscript was rejected fifty-four times.

Why I Chose This Poem One night a few years ago I attended one of the weekly meetings of the Finnegans Wake book club here in Cleveland Heights. There were eight regular members. A lawyer, a retired history teacher, a newspaper columnist, an actress, a few others. Someone poured a round of Jameson, Joyce’s favorite whiskey, and for the next hour we all puzzled through one single page of the so-called “greatest novel no one has ever read.” The novel is over 600 pages long. The group had been meeting for three years and they were only on page 85. At the end of our discussion nobody had understood a word of what was read or said. We hailed the book as a work of genius and poured ourselves another Jameson.