Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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I'm Jonathan Kay.

For years, Frank Sherlock has been a well-known and respected member of the Philadelphia Arts Scene.

In 2013, the poet received a prestigious Pew Fellowship. The next year he became

Philadelphia's second poet laureate. But in April Sherlock's world came

crashing down when a fellow poet posted a poem to social media describing

Sherlock's flirtation with white nationalist punk music in the 1980s.

Sherlock himself then wrote a lengthy Facebook post, which has since been deleted,

confessing to the truth of that accusation.

Sherlock is now 50 years old, and his brief career as a white nationalist musician played out more than half a lifetime ago. Nevertheless, he has been mobbed online and one of his co-authors from 2010 has publicly demanded that his publisher pull all copies of the book they'd written together. This week I spoke to Clint Margrave, a Los Angeles-based poet who has written about Sherlock's plight in a quilette story entitled The Impassable Road to Redemption. He joins me on the phone

with his fellow Angelino poet Timothy Green who is also the editor of the

poetry journal Rattle. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

Clint, who is Frank Sherlock?

He's a widely published poet recently having work in Poetry magazine

and American Poetry Review. He grew up as far as I know in Southwest Philly. While he was Poet Laureate, he did a couple projects. One was called

Write Your Block, which was a project in which people could submit poems about their

...