Review: Douglas County Jail Blues published by Coal City Review (Oct. 2010)

Brian Daldorph, editor of this collection of poems by inmates at the Douglas County Correctional Facility (Lawrence, Ks.), presents a decade of writings from his and Michael Caron's writing class. The collection is raw and honest. The images are like bricks--indeed a strength of the group of writings is the original, confrontational descriptions. Voices of the twenty-plus writers collect in these pages and narrate a counter-reality of American failure and anguish. Mike Caron writes about the project: "Words on paper can be an effective alternative to smashing fists in concrete walls or screaming obscenities." Caron has it right--these poems are immediate and necessary. This is where poetry resides, in the incarnation/incarceration of spirit within walls of flesh.
The blues, referenced in the title, are a strict musical form, 8 bars; the prisoners use regular forms as often as free verse. The editor's touch is light, so authenticity is preserved. At the same time, this is a group of poems with evidence of thoughtful revision/reflection. Here is one that shows the kind of punch many of these word-bombs create:

Danegrus Dane: Confession of a Killer
It's like this, I tried everything
but nothin' worked, everywhere I
looked they had me surrounded
where the shadows lurk. What I don't
understand is why every time I look out
the window I'm the guy standin' there
holding that big silenced Desert Eagle
with the laser sights & teflon-rubber grip.
I'm the one comin' to get me & all I got:
the gold bars, the diamonds & all that
blood money. So much money like you've
never seen. So much more blood. I guess the
best way 2 kill a killer is 2 send another;
I guess that's why they sent me,
the most dangerus of 'em all. Good, at least
it'll be quick, at least
I don't think I'll let me suffer.

In Lawrence at the Raven Bookstore and Jayhawk Ink. To order, send $10 check or money order to Brian Daldorph, Coal City Review, English Department, University of Kansas, Lawrence KS, 66045.

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #21

BRIAN DALDORPH (1958 - )

Brian Daldorph came to the University of Kansas English Department almost 20 years ago and has become a permanent resident of Kansas. He contributes to Kansas belles lettres in many ways: he writes; he organizes readings; and he is a writing class instructor at the Douglas County Jail—featured in Poet’s Market 2008. He advocates for writers by publishing Coal City Review, a nationally recognized literary magazine. Daldorph’s writing is marked by his awareness of social justice. He often uses the form of a dramatic monologue, where he assumes the voice of another character, to get inside human experience. In this way he is able to energize historic works.
“Last Word” is from Daldorph’s new book of sonnets. Readers may be surprised at how this does not follow the pattern of a Shakespearean sonnet, yet some of the lines do rhyme; there are fourteen lines; and the ending is an unexpected reversal. This is a contemporary sonnet—it still has a lyric, emotional focus, yet it uses the sonnet form as a guideline, not a straitjacket. One of the enduring qualities of the sonnet form is its length, which sustains thought as long as most of us can concentrate. It fits the human mind like the length of a breath is gauged to our lung capacities.
The speaker of this dramatic monologue is a writer. He believes God is counting his words, like breaths, from birth to death. As he writes late at night, he listens to night music of train whistles and “Yardbird,” nickname for Charlie Parker. For The speaker here, these evoke thoughts of mortality. He may think that he will live forever, but in this poem he imagines his end—a single significant word. This prompts readers to ask the same question.

LAST WORD

God knows the number of words I’ll write.
God knows my first word
and He’s been keeping score since then,
even when I’m up past midnight
listening to night trains and Yardbird,
trying to hold onto my heavy black pen.
Sometimes I think I could write forever,
just sit at my desk and not move
beyond the twitching of my hand. I’d not need a lover.
Words would be my picture-framed love.
Eventually there’d be only my last word left
to write. Perhaps I’d think about it for days,
stretched out on my death bed.
What should it be? Rain? Sea? Alone? Amaze?

Education: Brian Daldorph was born in Harrogate, Yorkshire, England. He received a BA at the University of Kent (1983); MA at Illinois State University (1985) and Ph.D. in English at the University of Illinois (1990). His dissertation topic was the poetry of W.S. Merwin.
Career: This poet has taught English at the University of Kansas since 1990. He also has taught in Japan, Senegal, and England. His books are The Holocaust and Hiroshima: Poems (Mid-America, 1997); Outcasts (Mid-America, 2000); Senegal Blues (219 Press, 2004); and From the Inside Out: Sonnets (Woodley, 2008). He publishes and edits Coal City Review.____________________________________________________________ © 2008 Denise Low, AAPP 21 © 2008 Brian Daldorph “Last Word” in From the Inside Out (Woodley)

A Guest Contribution: Brian Dadolph’s Introduction to Paul Muldoon Lecture: “The Eternity of the Poem" 27 Feb., KU

On e of the good thing about working at a university for a number years is that sometimes you’re lucky enough to meet a great speaker a second time around. So I’m very glad that poet Paul Muldoon is with us again.
In introducing our speaker tonight, I don’t want to make the same mistake as the one made by the university president of Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, a mistake referred to by Paul Muldoon in his marvelous new book of Oxford Lectures about poetry, The End of the Poem. According to Muldoon, the university president insisted on introducing Mr. Yeats to the audience, and did his own research about the poet. Unfortunately, however, he made the mistake of thinking that the speaker was Keats and not Yeats—it’s the difference of one letter after all—and introduced the great Irish poet as Keats, the author of “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode to Melancholy.” I hope to do better than that.
Paul is one of the most honored of contemporary writers. He has won the prestigious T.S.Eliot Prize for poetry, and the Pulitzer Prize for his 2002 collection, Moy Sand and Gravel. There have been many other prizes and honors, too many to mention now. As well as his Professorships at Princeton and Oxford, Paul Muldoon is also the new poetry editor of The New Yorker.
I have been reading Paul Muldoon’s poetry for many years, following the course of his prolific career. In reading his early poems, I always appreciated the way that Muldoon could make the political both personal and immediate, and I like in particular his poem “Cuba,” which yokes together very disparate events. In “Cuba” the Cold War confrontation between America and the USSR is the unlikely backdrop for a young girl’s confession. It is typical of Muldoon to see the Big Picture in the small scene, and enable his readers to clearly see it too.
Muldoon’s poetry is in many ways a series of contrasts between, for example, a sort of casual tone and yet tight form; between commonplace events and their great significance; between the new world and the “old country”; between very different events, unexpectedly yoked together. Muldoon himself has said that he wants his poetry to sound “very off-the-cuff,” aiming for “clear, translucent surfaces,” which on closer inspection hold, “other things happening under the surface.”
Muldoon’s most recent book of poems, Horse Latitudes, is another powerful and intriguing collection. First of all, I found myself learning about the significance of the title: “Horse Latitudes are the latitudes close to the equator where ships were often becalmed, and horses were supposedly thrown overboard so they didn’t have to be fed and watered.”
This is a collection of masterful poetic technique and considerable emotional power, the two in perfect combination in “The Old Country,” for example, in which Muldoon describes a country—his old country, perhaps—in which “every resort was a last resort,” “every cut was a cut to the quick,” and “every slope was a slippery slope.” Muldoon evokes an awful sense of impending doom, which reminded me, at least, of Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding songs. Perhaps I was thinking of Dylan because there’s a sort of tribute to Dylan in this collection, “Bob Dylan at Princeton, November 2000,” in which Bob picks up his “ornery degree” at Princeton with “absolute refusal to bend the knee.”

“Absolute refusal to bend the knee”: that might be applied to Paul Muldoon too, who has, it seems to me, always gone his own way in his writing, and everyone who loves poetry—and art in general—should be glad of that.

There are many Big moments of Paul’s career that I might mention as a final point, but instead I’d like to mention just one small point, and small poem—a haiku, in fact—which not only shows Paul’s mastery of form and wit, but also shows how much fun it is to read this poet who seems to have an endless supply of surprises in his magician’s hat. In the long haiku sequence “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore,” Muldoon writes:

Skirts round their middles,
the girls have a right confab
while taking widdles.

Coffee Shop Poetry Reading: Matt Porubsky

Brian Daldorph, a professor at the University of Kansas, hosted a reading tonight at Aimee's coffee shop in downtown Lawrence. The occasions was publication of a book by his former student Matt Porubsky. See the Lawrence Journal-World article by Mindie Paget: http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/dec/02/poet_wellversed_voyeurism/?arts There were also readings by visiting writers from Kansas City connected to Kansas City Voices, a literary magazine.

Brian has worked as an organizer of readings for years in Lawrence. He also edits Coal City Review, and he has published strong collections of his own writings. During his own brief reading, he mentioned he has taught poetry writing at the local county jail for five years. He and the editors of Kansas City Voices embody the assertion of independent voices against corporate publishing interests. Their work is so important.

I was happy to hear readers from KC and to acquaint myself with Porubsky, a railroad conductor by day and a free-thinking poet all the time. My own dad worked on the railroad, and his writing made me nostalgic for that travelers' lifeway.

Porubsky's $10 book Voyeur Poems can be ordered through briandal@ku.edu.

Photographs fit seamlessly into the text, as the archetypal human figures in them echoes the sense of distanced and mediated sight. This is a great debut book--Porubsky has a fully formed narrative voice throughout, and he controls long lines well. The poet's voyearistic doppelganger discloses eroticism, intimacy, and humor, as in the ending of "The Walkin' Away Solo Blues: "You watch her walk off/ along the creack you though you made/and her shadow comes back/ and sits down to gnaw at you for a while/ and you abide./ yes, you oblige." This is a young poet to watch.