The Sunday Poet: Dennis Daly

Dennis Daly

Dennis Daly lives in Salem, Massachusetts. He has published five books of poetry, and his sixth book, Pantoums, has recently been accepted for publication by Dos Madres Press. Daly is a former factory worker and union leader. Follow his blog at dennisfdaly.blogspot.com.

Tongue-Tied

Wait to say what one cannot,

Presumptuous of advantage,

Frozen in panic of forethought,

Abandoned, there appears one passage.

Presumptuous of advantage,

Of importance that never flinches,

Abandoned, there appears one passage.

Think not in feet, but in inches.

Of importance that never flinches,

Words hesitate in their pressing.

Think not in feet, but in inches.

The answer redoubles regressing.

Words hesitate in their pressing,

Break down into dread syllables.

The answer redoubles regressing,

Freeing the oracular muscles.

Break down into dread syllables,

Frozen in panic of forethought,

Freeing the oracular muscles,

Wait to say what one cannot.

Windows Julia Denos – Illustrated by E. B. Goodale (Candlewick Press, 2017)

Windows

Julia Denos – Illustrated by E. B. Goodale (Candlewick Press, 2017)

By Lawrence Kessenich

The best books for small children take a simple concept and play it out in a way that isolates the subject and strikingly illustrates it, thereby focusing the child’s attention on it—and, for that matter, the attention of the adult reading it to the child. Windows does this with the subject of windows at dusk in an urban setting—in this case, Somerville, Massachusetts. (Although the area is not identified in the text, anyone who knows Somerville will recognize some of the stores and buildings, and the authors identify it in their bios.)

At the outset of the book, an unidentified child (I believe it’s a girl, although there is an androgynous quality that may be intentional) looks out the window as the sun fades and sees

   

…little windows

lit up like eyes in the dusk

blinking awake as the lights turn on inside

a neighborhood of paper lanterns

She puts on her red hoodie and takes a walk through her neighborhood with her white dog (these colors contrast nicely with the city as its colors dims over the course of the book). As the child passes apartment buildings and stores and an abandoned house, the book’s narrator talks about some things one might see during a walk at dusk:

You might pass a cat

or an early raccoon

taking a bath

in squares of yellow light.

The “yellow light” is from a window, of course, one of the many kinds of windows one might see on such a walk:

One window might be tall,

with curtains drawn,

or small,

with a party inside.

An enjoyable two-page spread in the middle of the books shows no less than 18 windows with the kinds of things one could see through them as they are lit up inside in the evening. One can easily imagine a child being fascinated by what’s in each of these windows—and being prompted by the reader to find specific things in them.

The palette of the illustrations throughout is deep gray-blues contrasted with the oranges-turning-to-purples of the sunset—and also contrasted with the lit-up windows. It’s a very pleasing palette that unifies the book, providing a sense of mystery throughout. The colors darken as the sun goes further and further down behind the horizon, and the child ends her walk with the most familiar window of all:

Then you arrive home again,

and you look at your window from the outside.

Someone you love is waving at you.

and you can’t wait to go in.

The books ends with the child, having completed her adventure in the near dark, sitting cozily beside her mother, who is reading a book, while through a picture window we see the darkened city with its window “eyes” alight. 

Doug Holder Interviews Kim Nagy and John Harrison editors of "Dead in Go...

  My interview with the editor of the anthology  " Dead in Good Company: A Celebration of Mt. Auburn Cemetery."

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick Hidden Treasures found poetry discovered by Stephen Durkee

 

Steven Durkee

Herman Melville’s

Moby-Dick

Hidden Treasures

found poetry

discovered by Stephen Durkee

Provincetown Arts Press

Provincetown, MA

ISBN: 0-094-854-65-6

119 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Up from the bottomless buzz of swirling current and sea-foam, a whale’s fluke breaks the surface of our consciousness and reaches toward some exultant and forbidden heaven, and, dammit, it changes everything. Stephen Durkee, in his posthumous book, Moby-Dick Hidden Treasures, trawls through Melville’s metaphysical masterpiece seeking, finding, and resetting poems of high caliber and higher interest. The separation of these lines from their original prosaic context counterintuitively enriches them with new powers of artistic independence (such as slow-walking both images and lyric) and a capacity for creative, far-flung allusions. Who knew?

As one who has confidently (read smugly) denied the very existence of the “found poetry” genre, never mind its validity, Durkee’s book has been an unsettling enlightenment. Could this be the exception which proves the rule? Not bloody likely.

Early in this collection the poem November in My Soul appears. It details pent up male aggression and its antidote, at least for seamen. Adventure, after all, is a survival mechanism, built into mankind with good reason. Of course the downside must be death for some. Consider Melville’s reset words as spoken by his protagonist, Ishmael,

whenever I find my self involuntary

pausing before coffin warehouses,

and bringing up the rear

of every funeral I meet;

and especially whenever my hypos

get such an upper hand of me,

that it requires a strong moral principle

to prevent me from deliberately

stepping in to the street,

and methodically knocking

people’s hats off---

then, I account it high time

to go to sea as soon as I can.

Durkee’s discoveries, like the selection above, besides their discrete poetic offerings, often do double duty as commentaries on the densely packed novel itself. It was in this same first chapter of Moby Dick that Ishmael lamented his farcical circumstances in comparison to other worldly happenings of high tragedy including a “Bloody Battle in Afghanistan” (not much has changed since). In its totality, the reset poetry deepens this farce with an added, understated irony on the nature of free will.

Remember Philip Larkin’s lines in his poem, This Be the Verse, “Man hands on misery to man./ It deepens like a coastal shelf.” Melville expresses that same pessimism, and in much the same way. I would never have connected the two without reading Moby-Dick Hidden Treasures. Here are Melville’s pointed words, from a poem Durkee titles Able Bodied Seamen,

however they may thump

and punch me about,

I have the satisfaction

of knowing that it is alright;

That everybody else is

one way or other

served in much the same way—

either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is;

and so the universal thump

is passed around

No simple description of olfactory erotica suffices in Durkee’s selection entitled They Bloom Like Their Own Roses. After praising New Bedford’s beauteous women, Melville turns the heat up a notch describing the charm of Salem’s females, all the more effective because of the cultural irony embedded in the last line. The poetry speaks directly,

…in Salem,

where they tell me the young girls

breathe such musk,

their sailor sweethearts

smell them miles off shore,

as though they were drawing nigh

the odorous Moluccas

instead of the Puritanic sands.

In Beneath the Green Grass, Melville seems to create a limbo for seamen whose remains, lost at sea, never can give comfort to family and friends. To many civilizations funeral rites are essential. Agamemnon’s Greeks could not enter Hades without them. Even that high king could not deprive his traitorous warrior Ajax from receiving them. Grave-less bodies beg too many questions, leaving only uncertainty. Speaking of the families left behind, Durkee concludes the selection this way,

ye know not the desolation

that broods in bosoms like these.

What bitter blanks in those

black-bordered marbles

which cover no ashes!

What despair in those

immovable inscriptions!

What deadly voids and unbidden

infidelities in the lines

that seem to gnaw upon all Faith,

and refuse resurrections

to the beings who have placelessly

perished without a grave.

Melville ditches the anthropomorphic God in favor of a Deity with the likeness of a sperm whale, the whale having but few noticeable features such as noses, ears, or facial expressions. His seagoing god is beyond our mortal comprehension. Size and generality define the divine. Durkee sets the poem entitled You Feel the Deity to convey Melville’s concept,

But in the great Sperm Whale,

this high and mighty god-like

dignity inherent in the brow

is so immensely amplified

that gazing on it, in that full front view,

you feel the Deity and the dread powers

more forcibly then in beholding

any other object in living nature.

Separated from their relentless predator, man, Melville portrays whales with sympathy and awe, even associating their actions with monotheistic Zoroastrianism. The whales, so different from man in visage and habitat, appear quite like their blasphemous adversary in many other ways. In Crimsoned Sky and Sea the poet explains,

I once saw a large herd of whales in the east,

all heading toward the sun,

and for a moment vibrating

in concert with peaked flukes.

As it seemed to me at the time,

such a grand embodiment of adoration

of the gods was never beheld,

even in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers.

As Ptolemy Philopater testified

Of the African elephant, I testified of the whale,

Pronouncing him the most devout of all beings.

Durkee, born and brought up in Salem, Massachusetts and a descendant of a famous sea captain, knew his subject well. More importantly, his muse and Melville’s seem to have got along just grandly. Durkee’s value-added settings themselves consistently inspire with verve and artistic majesty. Additionally, converting “found poetry” doubters like myself is not an easy chore. For that victory I especially congratulate him. Durkee’s manuscript was on the way to the printer when he died.