Dan Schneider on Norman Dubie's Of Politics, & Art

TOP116-DES113

This Old Poem #116:

Norman Dubie’s Of Politics, & Art

Norman Dubie is one of those generic names you hear about in any profession that vaguely rings a bell, although you cannot place the face, the profession, or in terms of his career as a poet, any of the poems. He’s not a good poet, but there are far worse poets plying the trade- some are absolute monstrosities, as chronicled within the hallowed halls of the This Old Poems essays.

He was actually quite a big name back in the 1970s- from the Hippy Generation (born in 1945) and informed of all that blather, not to mention sporting a surname that evokes a joint (ah, synchronicity). His early books are adorned with photos that show old Norm in typical 1970s apparel. In fact, by the age of 38 he had a Selected And New Poems book out, so much was his output and early success, at least publishing-wise. One of the Dead White Davids, David St, John, even blurbed on the back of the book, ‘Dubie is one of the most, if not the most, radical poetic imaginations to have appeared in Post-War American poetry….’

What exactly does that mean, in regards to a poet whose work is bloated with bland embellishments on Academic topics beyond his purview, not to mention being larded with clichés and lacking any music, while being cast in typical, bland left margined forms. Witness this selection from a poem called The Czar's Last Christmas Letter: A Barn in the Urals:

Illya told us later that he thought the voices

Of mutes combine in a sound

Like wind passing through big, winter pines.

Mother, if for no other reason I regret the war

With Japan for, you must now be told,

It took the servant, Illya, from us. It was confirmed.

He would sit on the rocks by the water and with his stiletto

Open clams and pop the raw meats into his mouth

And drool and laugh at us children.

We hear guns often, now, down near the village.

Don't think me a coward, Mother, but it is comfortable

Now that I am no longer Czar. I can take pleasure

From just a cup of clear water. I hear Illya’s choir often.

I teach the children about decreasing fractions, that is

A lesson best taught by the father….

Why is this in couplets? There are few self-contained images or ideas, there is no musical rationale, and the story is rather straight-forward. A poem like this exists only to show off that ND is knowledgeable about world history. The poem drones on in a similar vein, dropping facts and factoids to impress the reader, except for those readers who want something poetic to occur, rather than just a recitation of minutiae. Many of ND’s poems are in a similar vein, with titles like The Parallax Monograph For Rodin, The Trees of Madame Blavatsky, and Coleridge Crossing The Plain Of Jars.

Here’s another poem title that expresses ND’s longing for intellectual respect, February: The Boy Breughel, and a selection from it. This painter has been the subject of many poems, most bad:

Ice in the river begins to move,
And a boy in a red shirt who woke
A moment ago
Watches from his window
The street where an ox
Who’s broken out of his hut
Stands in the fresh snow
Staring cross-eyed at the boy
Who smiles and looks out
Across the roof to the hill;
And the sun is reaching down
Into the woods….

This is not necessarily bad poetry because it’s not really poetry- at least in the sense that it has no layers of multiple meanings, for ND is a very prosaic thinker. Here’s the lowdown on ND, culled from ubiquitous online bios:

Norman Dubie was born in Barre, Vermont, in April 1945. He received a B.A. from Goddard College in Vermont, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. The author of more than seventeen books, including The Mercy Seat: Collected & New Poems 1967-2001 (Copper Canyon, 2001), Selected and New Poems (1983), and The Clouds of Magellan (1992), Dubie is perhaps best known for his reconsideration of the lives of writers and artists such as Chekhov, Proust, Ingmar Bergman, Rodin, and many others. For his poetry, Dubie has received the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Antaeus, The Antioch Review, Field, and Poetry. Dubie is included in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Dubie is a professor of English at Arizona State University and a graduate faculty member of the MFA program there. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Tempe, Arizona, with his wife, the poet Jeannine Savard, and their daughter, Hannah.

On to the poem in question:

Of Politics, & Art

 --for Allen

Here, on the farthest point of the peninsula
The winter storm
Off the Atlantic shook the schoolhouse.
Mrs. Whitimore, dying
Of tuberculosis, said it would be after dark
Before the snowplow and bus would reach us.

She read to us from Melville.

How in an almost calamitous moment
Of sea hunting
Some men in an open boat suddenly found themselves
At the still and protected center
Of a great herd of whales
Where all the females floated on their sides
While their young nursed there. The cold frightened whalers
Just stared into what they allowed
Was the ecstatic lapidary pond of a nursing cow's
One visible eyeball.
And they were at peace with themselves.

Today I listened to a woman say
That Melville might
Be taught in the next decade. Another woman asked, “And why not?”
The first responded, “Because there are
No women in his one novel.”

And Mrs. Whitimore was now reading from the Psalms.
Coughing into her handkerchief. Snow above the windows.
There was a blue light on her face, breasts and arms.
Sometimes a whole civilization can be dying
Peacefully in one young woman, in a small heated room
With thirty children
Rapt, confident and listening to the pure

God rendering voice of a storm.

This is one of those poems that has a good idea, but simply fails in its execution. It’s actually one of ND’s better poems. In this case its prolixity. Let’s trim and up this baby!


Of Politics, & Art

--for Allen

How in an almost calamitous moment of sea hunting

Some men in an open boat suddenly found themselves

At the still and protected center

Of a great herd of whales

Where all the females floated on their sides

While their young nursed there. The cold frightened whalers

Just stared into what they allowed

Was the ecstatic lapidary pond of a nursing cow's

One visible eyeball.

A woman said Melville might be taught 
In the next decade. Another woman asked, “And why not?”
The first responded, “There are no women in his novel.”

Sometimes a whole civilization can be dying
Peacefully in one young woman, in a small heated room
With thirty children rapt, confident and listening to the pure
God rendering voice of a storm.

The original veers toward mawkishness and explaining what the metaphors and imagery of the poem says better. The first two stanzas clumsily try to explain that this is a fringe element. By centering and using stanza three as a de facto epigraph we are thrust in media res into action that the rest of the poem reveals as metaphor. I trimmed a lot of unnecessary verbiage and the decalaration of the speaker informs us the above scene comes from Melville. The PC impulse, in my version, is shown, not shown, and explained (in case ND didn’t hammer hit home for you, as he distrusts his own poem). The last stanza is still a little over-the-top in melodrama, but by excising the Mrs. Whitimore angle we are left with the clearer, crisper metaphor, not the redundant, pallid bookended one. Ah, Dubie! Just cut down on yourself!

Final Score: (1-100):

Norman Dubie’s Of Politics, & Art: 70

TOP’s Of Politics, & Art: 85

Return to TOP