The Review Volume 22 Article 25 Issue 3 Fall

1992 From Deep Space: The oP etry of Robert Dana Edward Brunner

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Recommended Citation Brunner, Edward. "From Deep Space: The oeP try of Robert Dana." 22.3 (1992): 115-134. Web. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.4199

This Contents is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in The oI wa Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. From Deep Space: The Poetry of Robert Dana Edward Brunner

IFONE ATTENDS primarily to the brisk, clipped tone that sounds fre I I Know a quently in Robert Dana's What Think (new poems, with selec a tion from his four previous volumes plus number of uncollected works from the 1950s) one might conclude thatDana descends from the long line of street-tough poets ?sharp, brusque, guarded?that originated with now to Villon and extends , C. K. Williams, and Raymond a Carver. For such poets, the urban setting supplies backdrop of random must violence against which they define themselves. Their essential prob can in so an lem is whether anything like tenderness be sustained hostile to amoment or environment. Often their solution is recall of fragility vul nerability that emerged unexpectedly, despite violent circumstances. These poets deploy the poem as a guard or shield: the hard shell of their serves to it brusque voice sequester that fragile moment, preserving for so always. And Villon's poems naturally take the form of last wills and testaments, handing down gifts for posterity (even ironic gifts); and return to in to a Levine's poems frequently adolescent days Detroit, time same when toughness and tenderness seemed opposite sides of the coin. Yet ultimately, Dana's work fits awkwardly alongside poems in the on street-tough tradition. That tradition depends plain speaking. A flat, next-to-prose discourse is useful because its very blankness alludes to the it can cast to weight of the city streets, but also because easily be aside an reverence. redeem instance by depicting it with special But the verbal a to con surface of Dana poem is apt be unusually disrupted. Several voices tend for dominance in the middle of "Aquamarine":

We shell before breakfast, washing the morning's haul in the kitchen sink. Dull

Atlantic cockles mostly; a one Baby's Ear; perfect Lion's Paw; a few, small

115

University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Iowa Review ® www.jstor.org bright calicoes my sister wouldn't walk so far for, as just she won't sketch or swimmers, the jeweled hues of the blue crab I hold up one for her by of its blue or tipped claws, recall from deep space the years before my mother's death the voice I can't remember. "Those weren't nice times," she says.

Dana's meditative discourse lists evocative names that enliven a humdrum exerts routine. But that is interrupted when his sister's presence its author names not ity. Dana holds up for pleasure but everyone will be apprecia tive. Others deny themselves pleasure, including the beauty of "blue- / one tipped claws." His sister's prohibitions prevent recovering the voice an an Dana would hear, absence introduced by unusually tangled syntax that replicates the "deep space the years." That precious voice is lost, while we ? the voice hear is its sheer opposite the flat speech of his sister, pivoting on an the inert word "nice." Her voice effectively duplicates absolute more one border. And the lost voice is all the haunting because the who a so a might hold remnant of itwithin herself is notoriously poor judge of what is worthwhile. in moment Street-tough poets seek the bucolic the urban?the tender to counter streets. that, while frail, is strong enough the violence of the or restore a tem Through such redemptive gestures, they promote order, measure porary of civility. Dana inverts that characteristic trope: he finds scene the urban in the bucolic. The placid discloses marks of distress; the a settled region is grim frontier. Rather than promoting order, he would a to lower barriers. Instead of closing with unifying gesture, he yearns step to beyond conventions speak easily, intimately. The street-tough poets say we we are we moments may think tough but have great of tenderness. we are we are we Dana says we may think fragile but tougher than think. we our We can endure dislocation, the disruptions of loss; should celebrate resilience.

116 In another deviation from the street-tough tradition, Dana's poems rarely a unfold in urban settings. Their backdrop is usually rural Midwest of farm towns. are fields and small To be sure, these patchwork settings hardly bucolic; they are, if anything, disheveled, half-finished, incomplete. Their haphazard features suggest misalliance. Not everything has worked out properly; untold stories and broken narratives lurk everywhere. In this dis turbed area, the domesticating presence of the human may dwindle down to a we are sus few tidying gestures. Halfway through "Wichita" held in pension, in the middle of nowhere:

Take a meadow abandoned to real estate; the real estate abandoned to grass and weed; the sky, zinc; the north wind, iron; and banging, sliding, down the shadows of wheel ruts, down the long double lane of trees that lead to no abandoned farm house, no tumbled foundations; theway just stopping dead at the swampy crossing newer cut where tracks through.

not This is Robert Bly's Midwest with its profound solitudes that sanction nor the inner life, James Wright's Midwest with its river town porches a retreat. as that offer the solace of Dana's silences emerge the deepest of are to a spaces, and his weeds tall enough swallow house. If anything, his Midwest resembles the slums and ghettos, the heedlessly dispersed seg ments a of once-prosperous city, where growth has been abrupt, dis jointed, unplanned. seems What hopelessly shattered, of course, may be only in need of the poet's attentive eye. But "Wichita" concludes unexpectedly:

There, we're left to do what we can with the hawk

driven off by the crow, the couple

117 of pines flanked south, and the rosebush, run wild and in tough the pale sun, flashing rose as hips bright any petals. You get all this like a slow post one card from of those tropical countries, the view fixed in one corner in the window

of the stamp: cheap, exotic, vivid.

For all his affection for this fallen world, Dana declines to redeem it. The

hawk, the crow, the pines, the flowerless rosebush ?these together make no Yet on up community. the eye falls them longingly, husbanding them as as can swerve a with much congeniality be mustered. Why the toward Dana own con postcard? By swerving so, recoils from his impulse toward geniality. Is he mocking his yearning for order, judging it as all too prim? its as a to Or is he (The stamp fixes view neatly, window gaze through.) to out a scene savor taking subtle delight in his ability look upon and the is to nothing that there, relish details others would overlook? (The vulgar own ity of the stamp's official view has its sweep of energy.) sets Dana's wonderfully improbable ending, with its colliding of diver most swerve gent impressions, may draw attention away from the obvious to to he has taken: his shift direct address, speaking straight the reader. It is proper that this turn should be easiest to miss, however, for the lasting as effect of this poem is to render the isolation of its setting, as well the as isolation of the poet. That isolation remains beyond transformation, to as a on a resistant altering the official version of republic that circulates it cannot stamp. The poem's isolation commands the greatest authority; be broached. The poem revolves about it helplessly.

What is so unnerving about Dana's poetry is that it brings forward the very isolation itwould overcome. The spaces in aDana poem seem unusu vast are "A ally because they filled with missed connections. Short History a roll of the Middle West" begins with venerable analogy comparing the to ocean ing land the swell and surge of the ocean, "an of dirt tilting and an is tipping." It is appealing image, but what Dana understands the so to human cost of living close this powerful force:

118 Its towns

toss up on the distance, your distance like thewink

of islands.

Towns are as cut off as islands. The pronouns tell: the towns are "its," the Midwest's, the ocean's, but the distances between them are "the distance, your distance," that gap opening between persons into which we fall. are are too These gaps filled unsubstantially?they consequential, their too emptiness profound:

Your neighbor out is early this morning?the air as raw already humid diamond.

Drunk or lonely, he's scattering large scraps of white bread for birds

as if it were winter.

sour He'd give you the undershirt off ? his back sweet, bad man.

Does he remember

rain salting down from that flat, far shore of clouds

slowly changing its story?

On this shore, the trees all babbling with their hands?

119 we never a sure The cost of living in isolation is that have way to measure the propriety of another's gestures. Gestures seem either not informative or too or enough excessive (like the line-lengths here, abruptly truncated out Is or strung very far). your neighbor "drunk lonely"? Is he longing for or winter wishing for company? Does that "sweet, bad man" know? Is it his desire to befriend others or define himself defiantly? a not Dana's Middle West has "short history" because history here has properly begun. Things still remain unfinished, and the distances between more everything remain noteworthy than any connections established. one Yet such understanding points two ways. If aspect of Dana's Midwest are is its harrowing isolation, another is its exhilarating spaciousness. Both evoked in the questioning mode that ends the poem. As inquiries that go as unheard, Dana's questions register isolation; broad gestures that escape as fixed meanings but place the neighbor part of the landscape, they express wants to the poet's longings. Dana end with something that is neither iso nor a lation spaciousness but realm charged with positive obligations. Even if no contact ismade, the poem makes such contact seem necessary, urgent and just out of reach. as recasts sense an Dana's poems expand he his of isolation into occasion a counts that prompts speech. Imagery in Dana poem often for less than tone of voice. Most poems approach closure by drawing themes together, a a but Dana poem signals its end when voice emerges that is casual, to a unguarded, and directly addressed reader. The poem is complete, that is, when the poet can step outside the mechanics, the framework, the pat terns ? of "the poetic" and simply speak. For poets directly in the street occurs tough tradition, the corresponding moment when the city's vio an lence recedes, giving way to instant of recollected tenderness. But not Dana's nemesis is isolation, violence. Not tenderness but intimacy is in question. an a rare For Dana, the poem is opportunity for intimacy, for amoment that fleetingly denies the isolation the poem otherwise displays. The title poem of StartingOut for theDifficult World displays the dilemma in the first of its two stanzas:

once This morning, again, see I young girls with

120 their books and clarinets starting out for the difficult world. The wind has turned a into the north. It picks few leaves from the trees, leaves some already curled, brown. scatter. They Even so, their circles under maple and hack berry thicken. The light, clean as juice to the taste.

The young, frail students he views from afar have his sympathy. But they are not sorrow. a also given what they do need: his Looking from distance, as he imagines them indistinguishable from leaves that will be scattered. Only a few will succeed in the difficult world. Most will be leftbehind, as numerous as trees. the leaves thickening in circles around the In this melan morose are choly, attitude, everyone is isolated and all lost ?especially the autumn poet who observes this ritual "once again," enduring the weight of the circles of time that have thickened around him. a But when Dana raises his eyes from the ground his poem takes different turn:

Great art, someone said, rides on the backs of the poor. so. Perhaps that's But this not is Long Island. No packed waves on white leap yelping the shore. are Here, the nights cold and starry. Three solitary clouds pig along the near horizon. And you could mistake this autumn for Keats's

or your own, or the autumn of someone you once knew.

stanza was not. to This is everything the first It draws in other voices to engage with them. It invokes poetic imagery only mock its limitations

121 / white waves" that reduce oceanic to (the "packed energy puppy's barks). our to an It leads eyes expansive horizon. And most important, it closes with an address almost like a in its voice must whisper intimacy (the pause, as a though with catch in the throat, in the hard cut between "the" and Yet the is to "autumn"). ending wide-ranging and all-inclusive, in homage of a season we us our the continuity all share and that links through memories. momentum Dana rides this because he recoils from his melancholy, but momentum he feeds his because he would argue against elitism of any or kind, either in poetry in the success stories of those who appear to make in it the difficult world. He introduces the disturbing idea that great art on to turn "rides the backs of the poor" only that notion around: art has to acts not to nothing do with of elevation?it is elevating but humbling we are so us. realize surrounded by that which extends far beyond Great art us seem makes all poor, in comparison with its elemental power and ocean waves so are authority. That iswhy poets who shape their delicately simplymistaken: art has nothing to do with such shaping but everything to our to we are. do with opening eyes where The effect of Dana's ending on depends heavily the unsettling quality of "Three solitary clouds pig near a as along / the horizon." Is this figure of abundance the companion to a able clouds seem bring the distant horizon near? Or figure of isolation as the solitary clouds press along, absorbed in their passage by the edge of the sky? That these questions cannot be resolved allows Dana his final turn a into sense of autumn that includes the essential poetry of Keats, aswell as own as as one's personal response, well the autumn that remains just on someone beyond the grasp, the edge of the horizon, like you once knew and now recall. Art should offer shared moments like this inwhich persons seem to across able speak immense vistas. It is the true difficult world in its cannot indeterminate abundance. It be reshaped and altered but remains palpable, like the light, available to allwho look up. But it is not simply as as us empowering; much anything, it is disempowering. It ravishes with us a we its endless possibilities, and it leaves in spaciousness greater than could have believed.

recent a In his poetry, Dana inhabits large, jagged, contrary, threatening and-welcoming landscape scarred with the passage of previous survivors.

122 But earlier, he felt differently enough tomake a decision nearly fatal to his career. in set Instead of inhabiting his world all its imperfect splendor, he out to heal or redeem it. To do so, he had to keep his world small so it ten would remain manageable. When, after years of writing, he assembled his first book-length volume, Some Versions of Silence (1967), he favored a to as minimal verse, poetry shrunk the smallest proportions, if he could one a us work with only word at time: "It is / whatever / it is; / binding / like time / into time. / Mattering. / This room, our universe." He widened his horizon in a sequence begun in his second book, The Power of theVisible (1971), and revised and completed as his third, In aFugi tiveSeason: A Sequence of Poems (1980). There, national politics intruded as markedly, it did for other poets in the 1970s. But at moments, his future subject appeared, if fleetingly:

see am was I that I what I always

man on That ordinary his front steps bewildered under the bright mess of the heavens by the fierce indistinguishable language of its stars.

was not to see so He always able, in this sequence, himself truly. Heavily in to ?a to act as debt the poetic diction of the 1970s style calling for the poet a as a redemptive seer?he excoriated his country prophet while reshaping own new his life along principles. Almost every line is burdened with the to need display seismic change. The novelty required by this operates with punishing regularity. a a In Fugitive Season casts off its burden in final group of London poems. Outside America, Dana also stands outside the ruling poetic discourse. As an to to on exile he writes others in exile: Suetonius camped the outskirts of the Roman to Blake as a Empire; perennial outsider (whose heritage lives on in graffiti); and toDuke Ellington, who did not have to leave his country to be in exile. The situation calls for a vernacular response. His London poems resemble letters; they dip into colloquial phrases, cite graffiti, andmove as though improvised. The exile findswhat he had been missing in the America he had been excoriating, and in his final poem, "En an as as voi, July 4th," he embraces American landscape humid and steamy the English landscape had been frigid and gloomy:

123 By dusk all the pie has been eaten

on flies sleep the ceilings of heavy verandas the day slows and softens

spear by spear grasses burnt blonde

foxtail turn silver

disappear

In a way he had not allowed himself before, Dana relaxes into this work. a Aggressive spears turn into leaves of grass and blur. In Fugitive Season a worn evolves through nearly decade of change, and by its end it has out the language with which it began ("They lie under claws of light /who to own have been sentenced their names"). Its predictable novelties have been replaced by the unpredictable effects of close observation. is to true "Envoi, July 4th" Dana's point of entry his poetic landscape. to to to to see "Envoi" asks the poet rest, yield the encroaching darkness, can moments a what still be glimpsed in the final of gathering dark. The as career was over: poem could be taken announcing his all the pie has been eaten, the long poem is done, the poet fades into oblivion. Instead, its quiz a new zical, self-mocking air is the basis for beginning. All the pie has been eaten: at last the table is clear.

Dana's most recent work, like "Envoi," is both idiosyncratic and ordinary, in Its is both intensely poetic yet prose-like its apparent modesty. artistry wants of a observa deeply hidden because Dana the impression rambling, sets in motion on a tional poetry that picks up anywhere, that itself almost a whim. He is fond, for example, of beginning with gesture toward the or chronicle, recording the time conditions under which the poem begins. seem so statements These openings straightforward they could be prose typeset as lines of verse:

over a You come hill, suddenly or late afternoon early evening on 6A to Beach Point.

124 Or: "The month is August, / but the day isOctober." Or: "Midsummer, and my neighbor's / cutting weeds in the dusk." Yet these openings sets out as a deviate from the simplicity they evoke. The poem that chron or icle undermines simple chronology. It's late afternoon early evening, and as we are we crest a suddenly we're poised in time in space when hill. Or summer it's August but feels like October. Or we're deep in except the one even moment is the transitional of twilight. Cross-currents operate in to a these offhand beginnings; the usual time is unusual. Appearing be nor "transparent" discourse that is neither poetry prose, the opening lines are to seem to already committed eliding the very certainties they ref erence. occur He is also drawn toward producing small epiphanies, visions that on a modest scale. His poems could be mistaken for minute adjustments measures extremes. that seek balancing among What complicates that, a however, is the lavish, extravagant weather that periodically floods poem with enough force to bring it to a halt. Light is frequently the vehicle of that power: "the quick, / illimitable light," or "the light, clean as juice to the taste," or "A brilliant bush, tipped now / with clear light." But the never one weather is far from any passage in of his poems; it hovers nearby as a to powerful, benign force that is apt take sudden precedence:

Blue field. Great white bison of cloud lugging their easy humps. It's that kind of day.

However it may appear, this extravagance of weather always occurs as a same abruptly, disarming intervention, and it delivers the message: it is too us can we more can rich for ?how deserve it? It is expansive than we so it us. bear, abundant diminishes (Sunlight is especially voluptuous in our most never more poems that confess shameful actions: sunlight is in "At glorious than the Vietnam War Memorial, Washington, D.C.") a too Dana's epiphanic weather is small enough, detail in passing, yet also to grand. Almost dislocating the poem, threatening steer it off course, it serves as a reminder of Dana's urgent wish to step outside his very work. His cannot into weather be resolved something other than itself. And by

125 us so to us returning vividly the physicality of this world, it reminds of the rewards of sheer, simple attention. a Dana's most persistent trait is syntax organized around the sentence as fragment. Long passages, whole stanzas, build from fragments, though were so notes the poem being dictated rapidly only would do. But the final not effect is just spontaneity. These fragments hover precisely between the spare bones of prose and the deep currents of poetry:

The slender tongues of grass. The clotted lips of stories to crumbled and tugged humus. Dirt of the soft bodies of mothers, work-hardened bodies of mothers, the roots and twisted bodies of fathers. Hands of a dead soldier. You haven't come here for this.

a sentence to a As narrative element, the fragment points story told incom a pletely, its truncated syntax the very sign of broken link. But just because on the fragment defers full understanding, it also verges its very opposite: the intense image folded upon itselfwith such density of meaning that its a sentence. weight prevents it from opening into complete Employing the to move sentence fragment in this double way, Dana is positioned toward or to the expansiveness of narrative the density of images. He is free lapse as to move into passages impressionistic and descriptive, but just free toward commentary and direct address. Dana is actually chronicling the poem he iswriting, the material that, we momentum juxtaposed in the order have, generates toward the conclu moment can to most sive when he speak the reader freely. A felicitous at example of this, "On the Beach St. Augustine," begins:

Sanderlings. Turnstones. A lone willet. Fog-colors morning sun cut hasn't quite through. The still cold, grey-green March Atlantic rolling shoreward flank after glassy flank.

126 Dana positions himself between notations that might be found in ajournai a names and the complex associations that accompany poem. The of as wading-birds, rich and strange they sound, stand by themselves. But names creatures since these exotic obscure the they would recall (to the names uninitiated they might be of seashells), they lead toward observing sun cuts fog in its different colors that the unsuccessfully through. Why is sun so It is the weak? is only March (there Dana's chronicling gesture), and the ocean is a "cold, grey-green March / Atlantic" that rolls forward in an flanks, like army marching ?and with the metaphor of invasion, the is into nomenclature of chronicling ("March") retroactively elevated poetic same on a discourse. At the time, of course, Dana is simply strolling foggy on a beach, early March morning, spotting seabirds. In its careful description of St. Augustine, weaving memories of earlier visits, the poem seems remote from the Midwest. Then we learn:

The last time we came here in'79, Hurly'd just killed himself, blown his head open, back in Iowa, with his god damned Smith & Wesson, corn the brown stubble essing easy over the winter hills like the ancient Chinese character

for river.

to moment a So the lavish attention paid recording the has been deliberate distraction. Unlike the erratic, shifting pace in other passages, these lines race one con by, thought spilling rapidly, helplessly, into another. The traction of name name matters Hurly's (and the itself) speeds up further? until the passage slows into the soothing hills whose slopes suggest ancient civilizations. Cultivating land is associatedwith the sophisticated skill of in contrast to calligraphy sharp the business-like ampersand in "Smith & " Wesson" and the apostrophe clipping 79." once Dana has been skirting this memory all along. And this hidden can ease one ?an detail is disclosed, he into what is of his gentlest passages to to extraordinary example of his desire speak directly and freely others, a presented in visionary context underscoring its rarity:

127 no Now, I longer believe we return as birds or fish or even on grit the heave of the wind. we were never I think anything we are: but what the last, lovely complex turn of it. And like one the planet, once, and for time only. Inventors of this sea of cloud-struck afternoons, of heat-haze, the happy dog of the waves ?walking at sunup with other strangers this flat reach of sand, and smiling at occasionally back them as we pass. Saying, occasionally, "Good morning. Good morning."

not a Dana does often permit himself such graceful close. It may emerge to here because its gentle ebullience is also being offered those like Hurly, to see caught in the harshness of their frozen winter fields, unable the life giving grace in gentle undulations. an one So harmonically deft ending is, in sense, untypical of Dana's steers recent work; he ordinarily clear of the imposing summary. But in sense are another the ending is typical. Its final words greetings, colloquial to Dana's phrases spoken directly others and including the reader. poems, as a strung together series of impressions, could be mistaken for the associa an "I" as tions of the lyrical ego, that emphasizes its sensibility by hovering a virtuoso between prose and poetry, the broken narrative and the dense a image. That description, however, omits striking trait. Nearly all his at some someone center as recent work point introduces who could the or ideal audience for the poem under way: the neighbor feeding birds, the to or students trudging class, Hurly. These people may not, within the are not a poem, respond; they heard from. But the poem is for them. Not mere an atten sequence of associations, it is interchange in which Dana's is a an tion is gripped by another's presence; the poem space for indirect transaction.

128 are concerns These fundamental, abiding for Dana, evident from early not to writings produced under conditions always congenial expressions of a intimacy. As student in the Iowa Writers' Workshop (where his teachers were and , and his classmates included W. D. Snodgrass, , Philip Levine, Robert Mezey, Henri Coulette, and Jane Cooper), he mastered the high rhetoric that prevailed in even the 1950s. But his approach then favored direct speech, though "For Sister within the grid of elaborate forms. Mary Apolline" (first col lected in his 1957 booklet My Glass Brother and later published inPoetry) a rare was achieves level of excellence in the 1950s, though it the standard to A which all poets aspired. sequence of six 10-line intricately rhymed it is (ABBCADCEDE) iambic pentameter stanzas, the first of Dana's awk ward verse encounters with his half-sister, a sister grown into an institu tion herself by her acceptance of the nun's habit. Like W. D. Snodgrass's "Heart's Needle," Dana's poem frees itself from stifling conventions by a so employing mode of direct address, the work becomes the occasion for to not For speaking another who might otherwise hear. Snodgrass, the too to subject of his address, his daughter, is young understand his anguish is events of so (she between three and five when the the poem occur), he must as curtail his speech in various ways. But Dana's subject, his sister not to: to to Sister, cannot hear because she chooses hear might be open to one herself such grief that she would be undone. Indeed, in respect, she to enter has already heard and is already undone: she has chosen the world to on only by way of removing herself from it, take caring for all children own. instead of bearing her "When I called 'Sister' half the convent own a turned / And smiled." In transforming her grief into universalizing at once grief, by institutionalizing herself, she escapes her anguish and can never simultaneously guarantees it be escaped. so What makes Dana's poem harrowing, though, is the way its stop care a time implicates the poet. His sister's selfless for other children is reminder to her brother of the care withheld from him. At the center of the stanza poem is this explanatory whose autobiographical referents, while in echoing Lowell's dramatic monologues The Mills of theKavanaughs, still breach 1950s decorum:

129 we no common Sister, share heritage. A son who does not wear his father's name, My birth engendered all: the public shame That rattled mother screwloose in her bed; Your father, shattering in his rage The sideboard glass, the radio and the clock; Your trembling prayers, and your bowed head. Above my crib dry birds of paper twirled, And I, startled by the sounds, the shock, Woke weeping in the dark and adult world.

on The anguish in this poem is that the love his sister offers to the children to the convent playground, allowing them grow with security, is the love that had been withheld from the speaker'sown childhood. As evening falls at a the visit is complete, and Dana, the time Navy ensign, will return to his ship. The poem ends:

The bells, sound without reason, Summon the sailor seaward, the nun to prayer. Where there is time, time is its own reward. We say goodbye. I turn and go, but stay Fixed forever in your parting stare: are Eastward, the darkness that the doves bringing; a But in the street, boy prolongs his play, to now Now murmuring himself, softly singing.

In is at once a this parting, which staying, the intervening years suddenly fold in, plunging the speakerback to that childhoodwhere he never enjoyed that endless play. That iswhy he "prolongs his play" now, in this instant which expands, delaying the poem's end. The boy's play is noticeably muted?murmuring alternating with soft singing ?turned inward, self a of absorbed, form self-caring made necessary by the absence of others (and sternness perhaps evoked, inadvertently and sadly, by the lurking in his moment an sister's "parting stare"). This of intercession, in which older a a Dana guards younger, making sheltering space in which that younger can flourish briefly, is the earliest instance of Dana's characteristic closing

130 gesture inwhich the entire framework of the poem suddenly recedes under to even to the poet's new-found ability speak with intimacy, if only himself as a boy. a severe Dana's early work is reminder of the and stringent standards to master. an poets beginning in the 1950s had Direct speech gains unusual to across a value because it has make its way formal grid. "Goodbye. is not a Goodbye." (from My Glass Brother) only farewell poem between a sonnet. on lovers: it is also Shakespearian "For Lori My Daughter Her com Second Birthday" unfolds in four 8-line iambic trimeter stanzas. A to panion poem his son, "Late Fall Zinnias," follows the rules for end a ses words dictated by tina. In this poem, he admires tough-stemmed zin nias that "say 'no' / To the frost fallen." But his admiration is complicated by his tenderness toward his young son, whose fear of the dark draws him autumn are toward the late evening fire where leaves being raked and son so burned. His is young he knows only "Delight in snapping / Coals, a to bright content." His father wants turn his son's attention away from that glitter toward those flowers that endure despite the cold:

Praise these Unf?llen

Then, tough-stemmed, intent. Pick, and hold them. No Emblem is slight. Roots are to hold by When all else is snapping.

son But his has fallen asleep and cannot hear these words of strong advice. an The father lifts his sleeping son, and this simple gesture becomes act of can a moment helpless guardianship. The poem only end with of fragile as on on beauty sparks from the fire light distant yards, "Firebirds black to an snow." Nothing is rooted for long, everything is fated be ember, even the earth is snow, and the zinnias are doomed. There is no advice that

saves, only the reaching and holding that temporarily protects. The tough in wisdom lies accepting that frailty. Dana's inexorable movement, in his later free verse, toward direct

address, toward speech that claims the reader's attention, is deeply rooted in now his earliest work (much of which, previously uncollected, is avail

131 able inWhat I Think IKnow)."In theGardens of FabulousDesire" is a very recent on counts our extended meditation what for community in present It a we to surroundings. begins with swerve, allowing that might prefer avoid the experience entirely:

39, West of Hollandale, a curve sharp, backward and you miss it, the small set house in deep shade; lion and swan and tower

rising from the burnt grass.

In giving directions that tell how to miss, not find, the house, Dana pre a our sents setting we will be drawn to against will. The deserted cottage he is about to an scene are describe will depict uncomfortable (there echoes of his he a childhood, says, without elaborating upon them), but missing scene we are most to on move iswhat likely feel at home with, staying the as we A a do. glimpse from the road, glance into that "deep shade," might more be than enough. Dana's deserted cottage had been decorated extravagantly, "studded with bits of bottle / glass, pastel Fiestaware, / fragments of mirror." to seen no one. more Meant be seen, it is by Even dramatically, large cut out a a figures encircle it, "Blond / Snow White," "Viking / in his griffin swan powered skiff," and others like the "lion and and tower" glimpsed from the road. The life-size creations remain both innocent and gro tesque?not quite folk art, not quite pop icons. Most disturbing of all is so their lavishness. So much energy expended, much enterprise displayed, no all for audience, all in isolation. How much madness sprawls in this self our turn contained place. Is it the inescapable truth that desires ultimately ? ?not cartoon cutouts "fabulous" just larger than life but distorted, like our a because they remain held within self-enclosed "gardens"? Thus all is even as or ruin it remains oddly intact, like frozen feelings, lost dreams, unfinished narratives. one In sense, this garden of desire, this lost museum, this fantasy play set, is the artist's nightmare. It represents the painting unviewed, the poem monstrous true unread?lost from sight, grown in its neglect. But the sub someone to even ject of this poem is the isolation that drives express desire

132 ener as that desire is distorted in expression. Overcoming such isolation gizes Dana's conclusion:

What are our calloused hands, leaky bladders and bad backs, but drunken song? Our ruined faces, but work. And you may think if you could get the words to ring down right, likeNeptune's Wheel, noun, verb; noun, verb; the clown under his pointed cap, the owl, the boy reading, noun, verb ?this whole Calliope of crumbling dream would wheeze again, whirl and sing in thewild heat and stagger of these weeds.

not a an Dana's apostrophe is simply direction for praxis but anguished to expression that implicates all, including the poet, in the failure under turns out. cutouts stand others enough. He the situation inside The and an to create a decorations first seemed the products of eccentric driven world apart. But Dana insists we all occupy that eccentric position. By the we we our we we our decisions make shape bodies; with the work do line faces. If everyone could see that in each other, then our desires would no as longer be "fabulous," freed they would be from their self-enclosed us gardens. To break through the surfaces that divide from each other would be to overwhelm the isolation, restore dreams that are lost. Dana's us to we poem ends, characteristically, by bringing the point where might turn to from the experience of the poem and begin experience the poem in our lives. to to Are gardens be restored and broken narratives be resumed? Perhaps to Dana's sensitivity gaps and omissions originates in the calamities of his childhood. He has only sketched his autobiography obliquely; it can be

133 over pieced together now, by interconnecting poems composed thirty At years. The "dapper salesman" (from "Pop: Checkers" published in who was his father was not to "To Sister 1967) married his mother (from Mary Apolline" published in 1957), who died in the 1930swhen Dana was a child (from "My Glass Brother" published in 1955 and "Blue Run" in was to a published 1984). Dana left be raised by others. In recent poem, a a now he regards photo of his father, yellowing snapshot lost for years, recovered under circumstances left unexplained:

my mother's lover, hand in pocket,

two-tone shoes, a car? maybe the black '32 Buick?parked behind him trees under dusty a in dusty lane.

The photo is described in a recent poem which begins (and is entitled) a a a "This isn't story." Is there story? Is there lasting narrative? Are there are links that endure between persons? These questions Dana worries answer incessantly. He would them in the affirmative, but indirectly, are through the acts that his poems. As his poems strive to break into open discourse, they become gestures extended to others, continuing a story now a that is shared, and expressing wish that they will endure.

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