John Enright, a poet and participant in the 2023 Southwest Word Fiesta, passed away on Tuesday after a long illness. He will be missed by our community.
What follows is an obituary John wrote for himself, likely many years ago. It is shared here as written, in his own voice.
One of the great losses of the 19th century was that John was not born then. Enright, whose organic support systems finally surrendered sometime this past weekend, often expressed fondness for other centuries but was especially fond of the “freakish 19th” because “You know it was closest once and there was less stuff to translate.” In the immediate pre-digital, pre-Internet era Enright was among the first rank of poets in the number of verses neither published nor read by anyone else. He often asserted that he wasn’t “just practicing here” and famously once produced a profit/loss spreadsheet showing how much a half-century of poesy had cost him.
His peripatetic life guaranteed a financially insecure old age, which he rejected in favor of an abused-substance-enhanced search for reality wormholes. “Maybe success is when we outlast our purpose,” he once said. “I love the way the horses keep running after the race is done.”
John Enright was part of the Southwest Word Fiesta community in 2023. We honor his voice, his words, and his presence among us.
