Anyone who knows the phrase *bon vivant*, a person who enjoys life's good things, will hear what Dave Bonta is doing with his title. "Mal vivant" reads as its mirror image: someone who lives badly, or lives ill. The six lines that follow back this up with a small, unflattering self-portrait. The speaker drinks, doubts himself and talks too long, while the people who host him quietly pay for it. The poem's central idea is that artistic self-doubt is not a noble solitary struggle. It spills out onto other people, and the speaker knows it.
The opening line sets the tone: "doubt flowers in each place I drink." Flowering usually suggests beauty and growth, but here the only thing growing is insecurity. The word "each" turns a single bad night into a habit, so wherever the speaker goes, the doubt goes with him and thrives. The syntax is slightly slippery, too. "Place I drink" is left without a "where," and the next line quietly redefines these places as "each quiet home." They are not bars, then, but private houses, and the word "quiet" matters because it makes them peaceful until he arrives. The speaker calls his presence "the misfortune / of having me within," as if he were a bad-weather event or an illness the household has to endure. The phrase is comic, but it also has an edge of real shame. "Within" may even do double duty. The homes have him inside them, and, judging by the rest of the poem, the doubt is inside him.
The structure is simple but carefully timed. There is no punctuation, no capital letters and no rhyme, so the poem moves like speech. The sound patterns that do exist are subtle. "Doubt," the first word, and "about," the first word of the second stanza, nearly rhyme, so the subject and its object answer each other across the white space. That gap also does some work. The sentence is unfinished at "within," and the reader has to leap the stanza break to learn what the doubt is *about*, just as doubt tends to interrupt a pleasant evening. The line lengths shift as well. The first stanza runs long and rolling, while the second begins clipped ("about my art") and then stretches out again with "about my purpose" and "and I rant till past two." The lines grow as the rant gets going.
The repeated "about my art / about my purpose" is the poem's most musical moment, and it sounds like a stuck record. The doubts are big ones, concerning the point of making anything at all, yet the speaker states them flatly, without embellishment. This is where the poem refuses to flatter him. He does not "muse," "confess" or "wonder aloud." He says "rant," a blunt word that sees his behavior through his listeners' ears. The final phrase, "till past two," is just as deflating. It gives no dramatic hour of the night and no sunrise, only a mundane time when everyone present is tired. The poem ends without an epiphany, apology or hangover, as though the evening simply stops, or the hosts finally give up.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it handles an old cliché, the tormented artist. That figure usually gets sympathy, and here the speaker takes the sympathy away. In his telling, the real casualties of his torment are the quiet homes and whoever has to sit there listening. The humor is dry, and it works because it is self-directed. He also does not pretend the doubt is fake. Questions about art and purpose are treated as real, even as the poem sees how tiresome it is to voice them at two in the morning.
In just six lines, Bonta gives us a character, a setting and a habit. He also gives us a self-awareness sharp enough to make us laugh and wince at once. Any student who has ever made something and wondered whether it mattered will recognize the feeling, and perhaps the embarrassment of having talked about it for too long.