Poetry Readings: The Crazy Rainey Poems

Terence Culleton

"Crazy Rainey and the Broken Bird"

"Crazy Rainey's Delirium"

"Crazy Rainey and the Jesus Priest"

"Crazy Rainey and Cuddle Bear"

"Crazy Rainey and the Hanged Man"

 

Link to Terence Culleton's poetry.

Terence Culleton, a Bucks County (Pennsylvania) Poet Laureate emeritus, has published three collections of narrative and lyric poems: A Communion of Saints, Eternal Life, and A Tree and Gone. His work has appeared in Antiphon, Better Than Starbucks, Blue Unicorn, Eclectic Muse, Innisfree, Orbis, Raintown Review, Schuylkyll Review Journal, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, and a number of his poems have been featured on NPR. Mr. Culleton describes the poems published in this issue of Caveat Lector as follows: “Crazy Rainey . . . is loosely based on W.B. Yeats’s Crazy Jane but perhaps crazier, living as she does as an alien in the post-Enlightenment world Yeats’ poems adumbrate . . . . Rainey’s craziness stems from the fact that, organically, she lives in a civilization, but, actually, in a system, the fatal difference being that the latter is something that is engineered, whereas the former is rooted in what used to be referred to as “inspiration,” which, of course, being inaccessible to system theory, can only manifest in the postEnlightenment world as a species of insanity.”