Obituary

He was a reckless drunk and hopeless in one breath, an idealist the next. I first saw him, leaned into a podium for stability, in the little pizza joint on Chester in Little Rock. He read poetry for half an hour maybe longer, weaving personal stories in between as he went. It was October 2013. He was soberish, which was a surprise; he was soulful and funny, which wasn’t. The adoring audience sat transfixed through his entire thing. They laughed at all the right things, and spoke in collective silence during the saddest parts.
 About two years later I saw him again. He was so drunk he couldn’t finish a thought as he tried to speak between poems, the poems themselves could be heard well enough despite his slurred speech, it was clear he'd done them over and over, his most polished set. His go to, nearly gone. Embarrassed fans started filing out after fifteen minutes as he fumbled and twisted his words into gibberish. Some stuck it out to the end, feeling guilty for watching, but—well, you never knew what might happen when The Outlaw Poet Ethan Blue was onstage. After the show, he they woke him at his table and helped carry him out, where they took him I don't know.
Blue was a holy mess, his life a mix of the sublime and the horrific. By the time he died of a heart attack a couple of years ago the Arkansas native had written a large batch of enduring short stories and poetry and a novel, Hooker's, Ex-wives, and Other Lovers. The larger than life cult figure had also become the subject of colorful tales - some of them probably even true.
And yet he remains today what he was all his wild, heartbreaking life: a Delta native half poet and part performance artist honored by peers and ardent fans but largely unknown in the mainstream. He never had a book deal with a major publisher. He was not a college graduate, didn't go about being a writer in the conventional way and was never much concerned with his career. He was never concerned with much of anything, in fact, but writing, touring, and hanging out with friends and families who had adopted him. That is how I knew him all that time ago. My mother brought him home and he lived with us off and on until a move to Austin separated us all. He stayed in Arkansas, and even for me and others that knew him a while, became half living and half legend.
 He loved paradox—living it and spreading it. Born into comfort if not riches, his father was an Elder in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, he preferred the company of sinners, the poor and desperate and sometimes gave away what money he had. He was a lighthearted prankster who wrote some of the saddest poetry in the last half a century. He wrote about how precious it was to be alive yet spent a good deal of his life killing himself with drugs and alcohol. A kind of death cult grew up around him fed by stories and myth—some of his own making, some of his fans’, many of whom saw romance in his self-destruction. When he died, for me the most surprising thing was that he had lived so long.