Home >  A & E >  Books

Poet's light touch illuminates Pulitzer winner

Sunday, May 19, 2002

By Mike Schneider

When I take the time to read slowly, the words sink in. " It's a colloquial truism you might see posted on a refrigerator or computer screen, a reminder to yourself about what matters in the midst of busy life. Seldom do you come on a sentence this plainspoken and unassuming as the opening line of a poem.

The poem is "Audience" by Carl Dennis, winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. As the title suggests, the poems revolve around deities -- Greek, Roman, Christian, Buddhist and extra-terrestrial.

	"Practical Gods" By Carl Dennis Penguin, $17

Dennis, 62, who teaches at the State University of New York, Buffalo, approaches the gods without prejudice. While some poets avoid the ambiguous, indefinable concept of "the soul" as if it were toxic gas, he dives in with mild-mannered abandon.

Although he's been publishing poems for 30 years -- this is his eighth collection -- my impression, reinforced by a quick survey of friends, is that even among poets he isn't well known. His relative obscurity, ironically, may be a by-product of his work's distinctive quality: its quietness.

The voice is calm, mature, stoic -- a voice of reason searching for balance. Like the opening line to "Audience," it refuses to announce itself as "poetic."

If this sounds staid, keep in mind that utmost seriousness for a stoic demands comic relief. Dennis weaves his poems with lovely, wry patches of it, such as in "Guardian Angel." That plaid jacket you're putting on, the angel advises its charge ...

Will prove too loud for the soft-spoken sensitive woman
You're destined to meet tonight in line at the theater
When everything depends on a first impression.

"Progressive Health" is hilarious and also provoking -- to the reader who cares to go there -- as it instructs in the consequences of ethical thought. The speaker is asked to donate all his organs to six people who will otherwise die.

How can you with clear conscience refuse? What of those six lives you've denied?

Why be a drudge, staggering to the end of your life
Under this crushing burden when, with a single word,
You could be a god, one of the few gods
Who, when called on, really listens?

It's a voice that wears wide knowledge lightly, with surface simplicity that's often deceptive. That unadorned first line of "Audience," for instance, commands attention without trying.

If only he'd read "Anna Karenina" more carefully -- the speaker continues -- maybe he'd appreciate how a husband, just as he learns his wife loves someone else, can give a cool lecture about propriety: "Why does a man who's tumbling into the void?/ Want to tumble in silence, without a cry?"

With a deftly managed turn of thought, at which Dennis excels, "Audience" takes up the subject heralded by its title. What audience do we imagine watching as we perform our lives? What approving or disapproving figures? The poem suggests this conjured audience is one version of what we mean when we say god.

It's a perceptive notion, and just as it clarifies, the poem throws us back into disarray. How can we ever know, really, what our "audience" thinks?

Take Dante. Even when he looks at his beloved, Beatrice, how can he be sure, since her wishes "don't all show in her face, or only show / As if veiled by mist, and he sees them darkly"?

Now and then, Dennis follows his thought down an interesting path without an easy exit, leaving us with a wrap-up that feels strained. Still, some of his best poems explore the limits of rationality and its deceits as they manifest its usefulness.

"From beneath that comforting, tranquil, processional hum of reason," says University of Pittsburgh poet Tony Hoagland about Dennis' work, "a subterranean order arises, subverting its intended ends."

In "A Chance for the Soul," the speaker cajoles his to speak. Having awakened three hours before dawn, he pleads, he's ready as never before to learn if his life is on track. No reason to fear, he says to his soul, "that to talk my language / Means to be shoehorned into my perspective."

It's a daring poem that displays mastery of a finely balanced, light tone, without which these poems, with their big topics -- gods and the soul -- would fall from sheer weight.

In the end, Dennis, whose work exemplifies the searching, self-aware equanimity we call wisdom, leaves his speaker waiting for revelation.

"Be brave, Soul," I want to say to encourage it.
"Your student, however slow, is willing,
The only student you'll ever have."

Mike Schneider is a poet living in Edgewood.