Alan Justiss, “Poet Laureate of Jax,” or His Hometown Incarnated as Poet?

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Alan Justiss, photographed by Walter Coker, 1994

The poet Alan Justiss, often on the verge of homelessness, has a new home in Jacksonville Public Library’s Special Collections. He seemed to live on beer alone for years. He wrote thousands of pages of poems. He had few teeth before those too had to be pulled. Those who knew and loved him remember him as a wonderful, awful, terrible, beautiful man. If his hometown of Jax in his time could be embodied as poet, it would have been Alan Justiss.

Alan Justiss, 1990