Issue Seven

Under a low ceiling of branches, the shade a well watered green, robins rummage among the pachysandra at our feet. Carl Dennis’s soft voice rises to compete with the urban chatter of dogs and the ringing clatter of horseshoes emanating from the neighbor’s yard. We were invited into his well tended garden to discuss this poet’s life, a life carved from words in much the same way that Thoreau’s cabin was shaped from wood. Dennis’s poems are built to last; they have solid frames meant to withstand the test of time.

“Certain critics congratulate themselves for having discovered that poets are really not prophets, that they really don’t have a special source of information from on high, but are just like you and me… and still you can say that even a platform of a couple of feet above the street is enough to give (you) an angle of vision that might be useful.” Dennis’s vision has been celebrated with fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He received the Ruth Lily Prize for career contribution to American Poetry from The Poetry Foundation, and in 2002 was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Practical Gods, his eighth collection of poetry. In an interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth, the dueling aspects of his humility and ambition were wryly acknowledged: “Your humble side thinks of the many people that you admire who haven’t won it, and then your ambitious side says something like, ‘Well, it’s not a miscarriage of justice.’”

Carl Dennis was born in St. Louis in 1939 to a family that championed the virtues of “independence, industry, loyalty, and good posture.” He reluctantly speaks about the influence of his family. His mother, a practical nurse, wrote a little in high school, and he characterizes her as “extremely independent, headstrong and stubborn.” Upon further reflection he adds that she was a “confident” and “principled” woman. His father was founder of a chemical company. The youngest of three boys, he reminisces most easily about his eldest brother Robert, who grew up to become a composer. “I always thought of him as a free spirit, someone who I could go to for an opinion that wouldn’t be filtered through the usual conventions. He lived elsewhere, in the world of music, and visited the world his parents and brothers lived in, and took pleasure in their company; but he didn’t rely on it for his deepest satisfactions. It was liberating to grow up with a brother who spent the earliest hours of the morning of his Bar Mitzvah listening to Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring.’” His parents wanted their children to play instruments and to that end Carl was given piano lessons. “That was a painful experience. I had no gift for it, and with my brother so gifted, why would I want to try?” He turned his attention to the flute but it sat in his attic for so long that he finally gave it away two years ago.

It isn’t an accident, as I sit in the yard reading poems
Under the hemlock, that I’m drawn to Basho.
It’s clear that his blood flows in my veins
“Basho”
Practical Gods

Dennis feels that “it’s very hard to trace any characteristic of a child back to his parents; it presumes too easily a series of causes.” He would much rather discuss his poetic lineage. “The poem ‘Basho’ in part is about roots. It mocks the notion that you could really understand someone by understanding their  ethnic or genetic roots. I make up fanciful notions of parentage and then at the end I choose Basho as my real brother or uncle because I feel more kin to him than I do to my blood ties, uncle and so on. I mean... your deepest roots… are the roots that you choose to be influenced by, so Basho may be a deeper influence, even though he’s a cultural choice of mine rather than anything that comes with family influences.”

If Basho is a fanciful uncle, then Emily Dickinson is likely mother to Walt Whitman’s father. Dickinson is a “woman who was in conversation with belief.... She is a sensitive, discriminating poet.” Dennis remarks that “she often speaks with the ardent hope and painful disappointment of a frustrated believer.” As for the relation between Dickinson’s religious questioning and his own, Dennis’s poet in Practical Gods “is not so much a believer as someone who is trying to find out what he can learn by engaging believers in dialogue.” To balance Dickinson there is “Whitman’s ‘Walt’ who wants to celebrate every fact in the world and find its equivalent within himself.”

When asked what mythical figure he might find a connection with, Dennis states “Orpheus is someone I can identify with a little since he was a poet. He had big dreams about what poetry can do.” Orpheus thinks that poetry “can bring the dead up from the underworld. Metaphorically poets do that. They write about things that seem to be lost to that extent, try to keep what is lost from sight from being lost for good… and he’s doing it for love.”

To be a vehicle for the dead to speak through,
Surely that’s an improvement over being a showman
Who shifts his costume to please a moody audience.
It’s a comfort as long as I’ve many dead to choose from
“Basho”
Practical Gods

“From early on in my writing I’ve been thinking… that the life you happen to be living is only one possible life. (I) have written over and over again about the issue. What kind of presence do those other lives have in your life? Do they still exist somehow, somewhere? What do they give? What do they take away? It’s one of my central concerns, if not one of my obsessions.”

Carl Dennis graduated from University City high school in 1957. He then attended Oberlin College in Ohio, transferring to the University of Chicago, and then to the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1966 and started teaching at the University of Buffalo that same year. He has resided here ever since and has been an active community member. He remains a resource to UB students as a Writer in Residence, though he is no longer defining curriculum, teaching classes, or even a paid faculty member. He does teach occasionally for Warren Wilson College in their low residency MFA program, corresponding directly with students, offering detailed critiques of their work.

I breathed upon the teacher’s throne, the wooden chair with
Yellow pillow
“Mind Breaths”
Allen Ginsberg

When Carl Dennis was 27 years old he made a pilgrimage to Emerson’s house in Concord, Mass. “I had a special feeling about it… It was a magical visit. The woman there let me sit in his chair. She said, ‘Don’t tell anyone.’” Emerson is especially resonant for Dennis as “the great celebrator of self reliance, and that means being courageous enough, energetic enough to resist pressures to conform that are all around us.”

A House of My Own, Dennis’s first collection of poetry, was published at age 35. This volume is dedicated to Augusta Gottlieb, a favorite English teacher from high school. He found that teaching came naturally to him and he attributes this to his interest in reading and enjoying literature. For him “the best kind of teaching is sharing  your enthusiasm.” Besides American literature, he deliberately chose to teach Ancient Greek and Roman writers in translation. “The more distant they are from your own culture, the more likely they are to possess excellences that stand outside of your own cultural biases, to play a fundamental part in the history of taste.” He believes that “you can’t be the best judge of the effect of your own teaching—all you have to do is do the best you can and try not to talk down to your students, imagine them as good as they should be.” Dennis “looks askance on the teaching of skepticism.” As for the kind of criticism he most admires, he prefers “criticism that doesn’t try to approach the work as a cultural document that illustrates the writer’s entanglement in cultural convention.”

He wrote Poetry As Persuasion, a book of prose, to “attempt to persuade people that this is what is important in poetry.” It “approaches poetry as a special form of rhetoric, one that depends on the virtues of a strong speaking voice more than on logical argument.” He believes that lasting writing doesn’t trade “in the going clichés of the moment.” Dennis recommends “poets that are immediately engaging... such as Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch; poets from The New York School.” He found Koch’s “New Addresses charming, especially the wonderfully funny ode ‘To Jewishness.’” Among strong-voiced poets now writing, he remarks, “Tony Hoagland, Mark Halliday, Louise Gluck, and Adam Zagajewski come immediately
to mind.”

Who would believe you in the morning
Unless you’d practiced for years
A convincing style?
So you must learn to labor each day.
“Useful Advice”
A House of One’s Own

He has said that writing poetry “was the thing that gave me the most pleasure, the thing I felt most alive when I was doing.” Dennis is an early morning writer, and quotes Thoreau, “Dawn is when I am awake.” According to his friend and critic Alan Feldman, “He seems to live with the worthy deliberateness of Thoreau, rising well before dawn each morning, living a whole day of creative work before most of us have gotten out of bed.”

Dennis is disinclined to write solely autobiographical poetry and in fact finds writing about family quite difficult. He quotes from Coleridge’s Biographia in his doctoral thesis: “A mark of genius,” Coleridge contends, commenting upon Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, “is the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself.” “My life,” Dennis remarks “has been essentially uneventful… on the whole without grand, dramatic trauma... I started reading because I wanted to increase the variety of my life. I felt that my life was provincial... and somehow unremarkable and I wanted to write to widen my perspective.” His point of view was fueled by “a wish to turn from myself to the world, because I feel that the world interests me more than I do myself.” He says the “danger of autobiographical poetry is that you are lead to believe that things are important because they happen
to you.”

His writing style has changed little over the years. Richard Howard wrote in the introduction to A House of One’s Own about Dennis’s “easy diction” and his “characteristically American speech,” a statement that still rings true seven volumes later. R.D. Pohl, editor of the Buffalo News Poetry Page, in a review of Practical Gods writes, “What remains unique and compelling about Dennis’s approach… is the intimate, conversational tone of his narrative, which permits him to take on the weightiest subjects in his quietly insistent voice.” William Slaughter writes that Dennis’s poetry “grants its reader privileged access to a man’s mind,” it “stops me… I have my own desert, a private Nevada, inside me. Dennis’s poem makes me go there, won’t let me forget it.”

Criticism being subjective, not everyone finds his straightforward style engaging. Elisabeth Lund, commenting on Practical Gods, said that “not every poem is equally successful or memorable. At times, the speaker is too distant, too trapped inside his own head; and the work jumps unconvincingly from one thread to another. The language, which is always understated, sometimes feels a bit too pedestrian, too obvious as the poems progress quietly, uneventfully, until the last segment of the poem… the endings however are often a delight.”

Dennis affirms that poets often begin to write because “your heart is broken, something has hurt you.” He is quoted in an interview with Nicole Peradotto for UB Today as saying “When you write poetry you are giving a lasting shape to temporary states of mind.” He believes that to “write poems you need to have some standard of what you want to achieve... You need to keep your mind moving around the material... by the third draft you are asking if it’s working, what it’s really about, does it have direction, a plot that moves it from one point to another?” And “When you think that every part is as good as every other part, then you stop.”

When asked about his first readers, Dennis mentions two friends in particular: “Martin Pops and Alan Feldman see almost everything before I send it anywhere.” He revises the material between them. “There is always something there that I need to attend to.” He adds that “women are not my readers but my supports.” While the majority of his poems “are addressed to a woman or he is thinking about a woman,” he asserts that “I’m writing for both men and women.” He uses poems to enter into a dialogue and maintains the faith that poets can reach a diverse audience. As for his ideal reader, he quotes Emerson’s remark in his journal about trying to address ‘the unknown friend.’ “Friend,” he comments, “not friends, because the poet does not address a corporate entity. And unknown, so that one cannot make any easy appeals to a particular constituency.”

He recommends writing groups, especially to beginners, remembering with much fondness a small group he was a part of 30 years ago. “Mac Hammond, Alan Feldman, Charles Baxter, and I, would get together every other week for 2 or 3 years. We’d talk about what we’d written and show our work to each other and it was wonderful.” He noted that “writing is a solitary activity; it can be quite lonely if you are starting out. So a small group of three or four like-minded writers can be very important.” He continues, “You have to be careful;” if you “respect the critical powers of these people, it can be a real asset.”

Reading Poetry As Persuasion reveals how important earned authority is to Carl Dennis. He writes there that “I agree with Emerson... the voice that convinces is the voice of an individual, the voice of a speaker who persuades us that he has not accepted his notions ready-made from others but has figured out what he believes on his own.” In speaking with him you also come to understand just how critical freedom is to his creative sensibility. “Freedom, I can’t think of anything more useful than that.” He has found over the years that certain combinations of playfulness and subject matter, a blend of the personal and comic, can loosen up his writing and help him to be more productive. A reading given 30 years ago at UB by Allen Ginsberg, which included the poem “Mind Breaths” is remembered appreciatively for this combination of elements. These days Dennis is more inspired by what he reads.

Currently issues of age figure prominently in the poet’s life. “Growing older inevitably makes you see yourself and your world differently. And the growing begins early, as your frame of reference begins to expand, and you have a wider notion of the subjects that impinge on your life, including the people you know that the world does not seem to have treated fairly, or the values that you think have been neglected.”

It also means the poet’s perspective of his own work has changed. The New and Selected Poems due out in April of 2004 contains very few poems from his earliest books. In speaking of older work that he chose not to include, Dennis states “I can see why I wrote them, but I no longer believe they were successful, and I want to include in the book only poems I still can stand behind. Some with only local problems I’ve worked to revise.” He goes on to say that he was “probably least discriminating about the last book. Maybe if I were farther away from it I’d leave more out.” Dennis’s new collection will also include 20 new poems. They were part of a larger manuscript themed around questions of gratitude: “How do you express gratitude toward impersonal things, like good luck? To what extent do you live in a world in which you’re dependent upon other people?” Eventually, he realized the manuscript “wasn’t really a free-standing book.” “It was clear to me,” he comments, “that I’d be much better off taking the best of these and letting the rest go.”

This cultivated distance also allows Dennis some perspective on the modern American poetic scene. “Postmodernism was a necessary corrective to certain aspects of modernism that people became rightly suspicious of. The moderns, for example, were system builders, and too many rigid systems of belief have in our times proven extremely destructive. And sometimes in its wish for the monumental modernism ignored the mortal. I think in this regard of modern architecture, which goes wrong when it strives for the grand monolith coolly indifferent to questions of context, proudly ignoring basic human needs.” But postmodernism has its own failings. According to Dennis, “In its suspicion of grand claims to truth, it loses sight of the real difference of an honest attempt to hold up one’s beliefs to critical scrutiny and a passive acceptance of cultural cliché.”

It is notable that Dennis was invited to the White House for a symposium entitled “Poetry and the American Voice” that was to have taken place on February 12, 2003. Sam Hamill was hoping to attend and present a petition of poets who were opposed to a U.S. led war against Iraq. For Carl Dennis there was “no moment of deep soul searching on this one… It was very easy to refuse. I couldn’t come to the White House without seeming to endorse (their) policies. The notion that somehow poetry was walled away from politics that they were operating on was so silly. What did they imagine people would do in the literary community?” The event was cancelled by First Lady Laura Bush because she “did not believe poetry should be used for political purposes.” This opposition of the poet engaged with society and yet standing a step back from it is just one of the ironies that continue to create tension in Carl Dennis’s work.

The poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth....
“The Poet”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

If a poet, as Emerson said, “turns the world to glass,” how fitting for us to look back through decades of Carl Dennis’s life, to see him as a young man, sitting in Emerson’s chair, looking out at a life that would include literature’s highest honors. It’s as if Dennis heard Emerson whispering into his ears… “For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down… The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of nations.”