Poets and Mood Disorders

Not every writer makes private issues public. But Joshua Mehigan of New York, who reads at 8 p.m. March 27 in Ketner Auditorium at Charlotte's Queens University, writes openly about his mood disorders.

"If the typical poet's profile combines mood disorder and addiction," he wrote in Poetry magazine in 2011, "then I am roughly typical. If my story is worth telling, it's because my experience hasn't been especially poetic. My problems ...inform all my actions. ...In vivid ways they sometimes make even a very good life bad."

A Mehigan poem:

Cold Turkey

They're over now forever, the long dances.
Our woods are quiet. The god is gone tonight.
Our girls, good girls, have shaken off their trances.
They're over now forever, the long dances.
Only the moonlight, sober and real, advances
over our hills to touch my head with white.
They're over now forever, the long dances.
Our woods are quiet. The god is gone tonight.

-- Poetry, 2006