It’s September, y’all, and Don Peteroy is not only blazing back onto our blog, he is also claiming a chair in our cluttered little office. Many of you know him by his rap moniker Freezy P, but to his colleagues, fellow staffers, and to readers of his work, he is known as, um, well, Don. We’re excited to have someone new around to good-naturedly needle, not to mention coffee runs just got easier (he drinks his Starbucks black). This time out, the hapless focus of Freezy’s irrelevant inquisition is CR contributor Andrea Scarpino.
Andrea Scarpino is the author of the poetry collection Once, Then (Red Hen Press, 2014) and the chapbook The Grove Behind (Finishing Line Press, 2009). She received an MFA from The Ohio State University and has published in numerous journals including The Cincinnati Review, Los Angeles Review, and Prairie Schooner.
Question: You are currently on a book tour, which is great. Let’s imagine that tomorrow, when you show up for your reading, you see a sign on the bookstore’s door. It reads, Andrea Scarpino’s reading has been cancelled. You’ve been replaced by a different poet. The ghost of Samuel Taylor Coleridge will be reading “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” You’re okay with this; you’re too awed to be upset. But when you show up for your next reading, in a different city, you see the same thing has happened. And the next, and the next. You write some new poems, send them to literary magazines, and they all get accepted. But when you get your contributor’s copies, you notice that your poems have been replaced by “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” You email the magazine editors and they respond, “Sorry. There’s nothing we can do about this.” The same ill-fortune occurs in every venue: AWP panels, chapbook publications, book reviews. You track down and call the agent who represents the ghost of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She never returns your calls. Finally, you try to approach the ghost. You do it on three occasions, and every time, the second you start speaking, he vanishes. You even try this at a reading, and the crowd gets so mad, they throw Danielle Steel novels at you. Tell me. What do you do?
AS: First, I get myself to a safe place. An angry Danielle-Steel-wielding mob is not something to be taken lightly, especially since those glossy book covers pack a real punch (take my word on this). I find a bathroom near the bookstore’s café—I will need to be well-caffeinated to think through my next move—and I try to remember back to all those undergraduate English literature classes. And I realize, slowly, how much Coleridge and I have in common.
Coleridge was addicted to opium, for example. I am addicted to sugar, which causes a high in similar parts of the brain. Coleridge wrote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a poem I think is terrible. I wrote a book-length poem about water that I now also think is terrible. Coleridge had a thing for albatrosses. I have a thing for crows (Hughes’s Crow and/or otherwise). Coleridge was a Romantic. I’ve been known to be romantic. Uncanny, really, how similar we are, I 
realize as I sit in my locked bookstore bathroom, Stevia-sweetened almond-milk cappuccino in hand, angry mob gathering and lighting torches on the other side of the door.
And the truth slowly dawns on me: I am Coleridge’s ghost. Or he is my ghost. Or the Ghost of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is both of our ghosts. The workings of the supernatural world are difficult to hold to any particular space-time continuum. The point is that I am writing his poetry (as terrible as I may think it), and he is writing mine (as terrible as he may think it). I unlock the bathroom door and quell the angry crowd with my best Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman impression. And then the Ghost of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and I share a lemon poppy seed muffin.
