Phaeton’s Wheels

Description

Dennis Formento

All Fall Down

ISBN 978-1-956921-30-4 (paperback)

120 pages: $19.95
September 15, 2024 (Available for pre-order)

In a formal sense, these poems have an experimental quality, like the writer is performing experiments, which puts it always on the edge, as to whether the poem will get whatever the hypothesis is to wherever it needs to get to, to succeed. Hence risky. It isn’t like a lot of poetry where clever observations are strung together into a climax.

Creeley, say, wrote largely by “hypothesis,” but Creeley is about reserve, and pinpoint focus, whereas these poems are usually more dispersed. One gets a sense of the poet being open during a poem to just about anything incoming, including surrealistic energy, historical events and dreams, friendships and the culture of New Orleans, its music, poetry and activism.  In the end it often creates a kind of untamed yet genuine and finished poem, usually aesthetically complex.

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“I think everybody must already know this,” says Bernadette Mayer in a 1992 interview, “—I hope they do—that one person can write in many different ways.”

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“(Dennis’s) pedigree comes through the Beats, who loved and absorbed jazz, and this makes a nice literary lineage for Dennis’s home ground of New Orleans, and music that runs like a fabric through the city runs through his poems as well. 

You have to be in tune with the subtleties and come away with something recognizable as clarity (whatever that might mean).  It could mean you’re a romantic who loves his wife the way Dennis does in a number of poems, and that, too, might be slippery to explain.  “Early wake up poem (for Patricia)” from Phaeton’s Wheels:

I woke with that exotic feeling

of having been somewhere

I couldn’t remember

where the rules of reality

are different

a sound like

a rumble and a thunder

that could be a truck

could be the earth moving