Tag: American Poetry

A Review of Sundown At The Redneck Carnival By John Dorsey

Posted on by Chase Dimock

Chase Dimock Reviews

Sundown at the Redneck Carnival

By John Dorsey

With his trademark spare and exact style, John Dorsey’s latest book of poetry guides us through a carnival of characters that stretches across the country in space, and deep into his decades on the road. What sets Dorsey apart from the other geographers of trailer parks, small town diners, and dollar stores is the balanced empathy of his writing. There isn’t anything sensationalized or exploited. What he reports may shock, but his work never relies on shock value or gratuitously gruesome description to strike its blow. The power of his work is in his ability to make his readers empathize with the marginalized and grotesque without straying into the cheap pathos of pity.

In a poem about a man who lost part of his nose to cancer, Dorsey concludes in the final stanza:

but he’s not pretty enough for heaven
or the silver screen
& not ugly enough
to hide his face
& let some lonesome dirt road
forget he was ever there

This liminal space between beauty and ugliness, between heaven and hell, is where Dorsey’s redneck carnival is located. Beauty is always tempered by the constraints of the environment in which it lives, and what gets written off as ugly is infused with humanity, glowing with careful understanding. At this carnival, the “prettiest girl in town,” “pours drinks/ &becomes a wingless canary/ singing for tips/ in a cage filled with smoke.” Later, Dorsey’s poem for his grandmother similarly envelops us with smoke, describing her with the following:

I never remember you looking young
shaky hands lighting one cigarette
off the other
black rings under your eyes
but your smile was magic
talking about tv preachers
by their first names
as if they really did care
about your salvation

Cigarette smoke is the before and after: beauty destined to shrivel in its environment and the unsinkable beauty deep within an already withered face. As you thumb through Dorsey’s poems, the question is always, who is living in the before and who is living in the after? Who is the young and beautiful destined for pain and age, and who is the weathered soul whose beauty still flickers from inside a battle scarred body?

Take his short “Trailer Park Song, 1982” for example:

my brother
angry
red faced
screaming
& beautiful.

Brief, simple, yet unexpected. Dorsey hands us the unanticipated connection of anger and beauty without a treatise on their causal relationship. In another poem, “Love Letter for Jana Horn”:

the mailbox is full of postcards
from hipster boys
&aging dreamers
who just want
to be swallowed whole
by a desert rose

The young who are destined to become old, and the old who cling to what makes us young in spirit all desire to be consumed by beauty. In Dorsey’s poetry, beauty is as much an aspiration as it is a physical state. Physical beauty is fated to fade, which in of itself is beautiful, but the aspiration toward beauty is what remains after flesh fails.

The only time Dorsey is explicit in labeling true ugliness, is ironically, when he describes a young woman asking “for donations/ for a baby beauty pageant”:

$10 here
$5 there
for a twirl
at the baton
of immortality

sometimes there
is nothing uglier
than
hope.

It’s here where Dorsey draws somewhat of a line where his appreciation of the aspiration toward beauty stops. There is an inherent ugliness in these pageants that exploit the bodies of young people and inculcates in them a belief that beauty should be subject to the judgment of others. Yet, even in his distaste for the pageant, Dorsey isn’t judgmental of the young woman asking for donations. She has bought into the ugly side of hope when our culture commodifies our aspirations to be beautiful. The same is implied in the earlier poem about his grandmother and the TV preachers who pretend to care about her salvation. It’s not the women having hope that is ugly, but instead, the ugliness is in the cynical hope sold to them by institutions that promise what they won’t deliver.

Dorsey never patronizes his subjects by lapsing from empathy to condescension. Sympathy can often be a temporary license we give ourselves to gawk at someone’s misery. While Dorsey doesn’t shy away from presenting the sad circumstances of someone’s life, he also never infringes on their agency by flattening them into one-dimensional victims. Even the aforementioned cancer survivor:

says we are all ravenous locusts
at the same overcrowded trough
as he explains his theories on women

We can only imagine what these “theories” might be, or what he might be expressing with the locusts comment. What is sure is that these complicating aspects of the man’s personality play against any impulse to use his cancer as a thin premise for sympathy. He is not the perfect victim, just a human whose cancer is part of his story. 

Dorsey’s poems are all honest reports on the damage we all live with, and whether this damage is a circumstance of birth or self-inflicted, the damage is inextricable from our stories. For example, Dorsey bluntly spells this out in his poem “Young Man”:

david
i’m not saying 
you were no good
just rotten on the inside
like a bag of sour apples
who left us too young.

Dorsey does not fear pinpointing the rot inside this young man, but also avoids any kind of judgment on him or blame on anyone else. It is taboo to speak ill of the dead, but our culture’s fear of this taboo often leads us to invent a fictitious version of the dead that paints them as blameless and brightsides their darkness. This is more of a dishonor than providing an accurate record of the life they led because it erases all their choices and every mark they made, good or bad. It doesn’t remember the dead; it forgets them immediately and entirely.

This leads me back to what I refer to as John Dorsey’s balanced empathy. Empathy doesn’t mean excusing or ignoring the faults and failings of an individual, but understanding the trauma residing in someone’s scars, including the self-inflicted.  Dorsey’s balanced empathy calls attention to the ugliness of the sour apples rotting in all of us, but in just a few words, he makes the pain of carrying this rot momentarily beautiful.

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Sundown at the Redneck Carnival is available via Spartan Press

About the Reviewer: Chase Dimock is the Managing Editor of As It Ought To Be Magazine. His debut book of poetry, Sentinel Species, was published in 2020.

Diana Rosen: “Traveling on Our Stomachs”

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Traveling on Our Stomachs

Leaving the excess of old-world Utrecht, 
all gargoyles, staggeringly high churches 
with their proverbial lesson in perspective, 
arched doorways folding into arched hallways 
like bellows on a monochromatic accordion, 
I enter the gray-gray of its New Town: Massive, 
hard-edged concrete slabs of cold contemporary 
Dutch architecture dedicated to function over form, 
utility over any hint of Rococo. I’m drawn to an 
Edward Hopper-lit café, empty save the silent 
server who presents a slab of creamy yellow cheese, 
flaky golden-dusted brioche its tenderness cradling 
the bright orange yolk of the freshest egg, satiny hot 
coffee in a white-white cup, the perfect American 
travel memory on a gray-gray day in Utrecht.

About the Author: Diana Rosen is a poet, flash writer, and essayist with work in online and print journals in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada, and India. Her first book of flash and poetry, “High Stakes & Expectations,” was released in spring 2022 from thetinypublisher.com Diana lives in Los Angeles where she writes website content on food and beverage. To read more of her work, please visit www.authory.com/dianarosen

Image Credit: Édouard Manet “The Brioche” (1870) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee

5 Erasure Poems By John Dorsey

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Author’s Note: These poems, along with several hundred others, are part of a larger erasure collection entitled Pocatello Wildflower, which examines the words of a group of Idaho writers who worked primarily from the 1970’s to the 1990’s, including the late Bruce Embree, who really got the ball rolling in my head and heart, with a few still working today. It is my great hope that folks will be interested in the original writers work, in addition to my own. Pocatello Wildflower will be available in 2023 from Crisis Chronicles Press. Thanks for reading.

My Parents

strangers raised us
in ditchbank weeds
on combat rations

it was love
& bruises
no pity
in the blowing dust.



Moving Past the Fetish

last year’s growing storm
a lost friend

famous people
not humping boulders 
like me
in the foolish
september moon.



The River of Lovers

could burn enough nostalgia
to find comfort
in our past

a whirl of wind.



Rosie Died

goats
river rock

his father never blinked
feet first

alley shadows
lilacs

a bad dream
catches in his throat.



Pocatello Tattoo

i lost my horse

my body
a boxcar
of coaldust

pocatello
pocatello
pocatello

this country of shame
died in the trees

rolled west
in shoshone
in boise

in pocatello
pocatello
pocatello

april whiskey
on the spot

where the sun goes down
like a red-hot needle.

About the Author: John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw’s Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Poetry, 2017),Your Daughter’s Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019), Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Afterlife Karaoke (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2021) and Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022).. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. He was the winner of the 2019 Terri Award given out at the Poetry Rendezvous. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.

Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Cholla Bone” (2021)

Hannah Bagley: “Stay A Spell”

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Stay a Spell

The cicadas kissed the curves of my ears,
pale fingers fighting nothing but air and the thinness of wings.
Chop, shift, I split the wood again
chop, shift, the butterscotch chips catching in the frays
of an old knitted coat.

Skillet fried dinner blends to skillet fried dessert—
What was that?
A rustle of leaves yields sunny-sides filled with shell
and the squirrel chuckles up his chestnuts.
He picks his shells with ease.

The warm fire deepens the orange of my hair
and blushes the apples of my cheeks.
Oxygen and black smoke trickle through my lungs—
carbon dioxide bleaching the fumes clear.
We need more tinder.

My eyes meet a doe dancing behind the flame.
Thin ankles locked straight to the left and chin whiskers 
quirked to the right; she stood firm.
Who was I to stay a spell in her living room?
I didn’t even take off my shoes.

About the Author: Hannah Bagley lives and attends the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega, Georgia. An English literature major and German minor, she has also been published in The Chestatee Review. Hannah draws inspiration from her upbringing in Southern Appalachia and its rich history. She plans to continue poetry in the pursuit of nature, life, and expression of the human experience. 

Image Credit: Winslow Homer “Campfire” (1880) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee

Samuel Prestridge: “New Highway Promises Development for Local Communities”

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“New Highway Promises Development for Local Communities”
                                     The Starkville Daily News
 
The new highway skirts struggling towns obscured 
by second-growth—black jack saplings, pin oak, 
scrub pine decked with hand-struck signs for still-born 
cafes, yard sales, deer skinners, promises 
of God’s wrath, purchases non-refundable.
 
I wonder who could live in these small towns. 
I tell the trees, Not me.  I still look, though,  
still try to see how, within their limits, 
mysteries keep them seething.  Having failed 
with farming, having wheeled to fail at retail, 
 
their faith’s in resurrection.  New highways.  
In buyers who’ll slab jack foundations, 
true frames, gingerbread all the worn storefronts.  
Paint the whole into a groggy, pastel wet dream 
with awnings, stratocumulus, lighting subdued
 
to shade by day, illuminate by night.  
The latest iterations in gutter 
technology, sewers gussied up.  
Rains falling like money will hurry away, 
down to the channelized river. Its banks 
 
will blossom with summer homes.  Angelic 
water skiers’ wash will lap the cut bank, 
will rinse mulish roots, will swamp the hand-struck 
signs I’d have placed there:  “No trespassing.”  
“Free rooster.”  “Chickens, fresh brown eggs for sale.”

About the Author: Samuel Prestridge, a post-aspirational man, lives and works in Athens, Georgia. He sometimes plays acoustic blues and jazz in local bars under an assumed name. He has been published in Literary Imagination, The Arkansas Review, Southern Humanities Review, As It Ought to Be, Better Than Starbucks, Autumn Skies, among others.

Image Credit: Marion Post Walcott “Signs advertising liquor stores are seen frequently along all Kentucky highways. South of Bardstown” (1940) Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress

John Grochalski: “collection days”

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collection days

it seems as archaic
as kids carrying newspapers now

but they used to give us
a thick ring full of cardboard paper
cut into perforated tabs

they acted as receipts 
when people paid you for their papers

once a week
in summer or after school

i had to walk my paper route
with the ring of cardboard tabs
knocking on people’s doors
to get the post-gazette’s money

in winter
i saw the dark on both ends of the day

i was the great interrupter of dinners
sexy time after long days at work
of infants falling asleep after hours of struggle

the great ruiner of
children’s birthdays and underage parties

i stood at closed doors
listening to hushed voices 
hoping that i’d just go away

while the same dogs that barked at me in the morning
got a second chance to go at me in the evening

the people who condescended 
to open their doors
looked at me as if they didn’t understand

like their newspaper just arrived 
by some voodoo or magic

and not by some fat kid
trudging along in the rain or snow
or the humid damp of summer heat

i delivered to rich people with big houses
but no one ever had the money to pay me

next week, they’d say
and i’d walk away from their homes
my labor given away free for another week

left to explain to my angry dispatcher
why i didn’t have his cash some saturday

promising him
i’d have his money come next monday

like i was some errant tenant
or a goddamned junky begging to a dealer

a feeble man with empty pockets
and a huge-ass gambling debt

who’d let his life fall off the rails
yet again.

About the Author: John Grochalski is the author of the poetry collections, The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (Six Gallery Press 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In the Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon, 2012), Starting with the Last Name Grochalski (Coleridge Street Books, 2014), The Philosopher’s Ship (Alien Buddha Press, 2018), and Eating a Cheeseburger During End Times (Kung Fu Treachery, 2021). He is also the author of the novels, The Librarian (Six Gallery Press 2013), Wine Clerk (Six Gallery Press 2016), and P-Town: Forever (Alien Buddha Press, 2021). Grochalski currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can read his baseball card ramblings at his Junk Wax Jay blog https://junkwaxjay.blogspot.com/

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Image Credit: Harris& Ewing “Newspapers Coming Off Press” (1936) Public domain photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress

Mike James Reviews James Dickey: A Literary Life

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Mike James Reviews

James Dickey: A Literary Life

By Gordon Van Ness

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In his essay, “Reflections on Wallace Stevens,” the poet and critic Randall Jarrell wrote, “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.” James Dickey was fond of quoting Jarrell’s line to students and in interviews. The quote encapsulates Dickey’s ambition as well as the luck involved in literary reputations. 

Gordon Van Ness offers the definitive biography of James Dickey and reviews how the reputation of Dickey’s work has collapsed since the 1960’s when he was, with Robert Lowell, considered one of the two most important poets in America. For those who are familiar with Dickey’s life, either through literary gossip or from the previous hatchet work of Henry Hart’s biography, it offers a familiar rise and fall. 

During the 1950’s and 1960’s, James Dickey published an extraordinary number of well received poems, essays, and book reviews. His work regularly appeared in magazines such as the New Yorker and the Atlantic. His 1965 collection, Buckdancers’s Choice, won the National Book Award. Then, in 1970, he published his first novel Deliverance. The adventure story of four men going down a river was a tremendous best-seller. Two years after the novel’s publication it became a hit movie. Dickey wrote the screenplay and even had a memorable role as the sheriff. It was at this point that celebrity began to replace the artist. 

Van Ness makes clear that Dickey enjoyed fame. He wrote several lucrative coffee table books and accepted commissions for a few occasional poems. One of these, “The Strength of the Fields,” was read by Dickey as part of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 inaugural. (The poem is one of the best examples of a “public poem” and has aged better than similar pieces from other inaugural poets.)

What Van Ness also makes clear is that after the summation of his work in Poems: 1957-1967 Dickey became interested in a different kind of poetry. Dickey’s work, in what he referred to as his “early motion,” ranges from the narrative to the lyric, from the mystic to the confessional, from the formal to the experimental. A reader would be hard pressed to find a more various or successful book of poetry and Poems: 1957-1967 remains comparable to Pound’s Personae and Steven’s Harmonium.

The later poetry (the work after 1967) is both more rhetorical and more visual. The poems often range across the page with word and image clusters which sometimes mirror a speaker’s breath units and sometimes mirror high energy synapses firing. While many individual passages often stand out, the poems are less successful and more indulgent. Dickey’s later work often asks more of the reader than it gives. 

Van Ness does a fine job of covering the later work and how it relates to Dickey’s life. He reviews the critical and public reception of Dickey’s two later novels, Alnilam and To the White Sea, as well as the wildly mixed response to his late poetry collection Puella. He also spends a considerable amount of time discussing Dickey’s role as a teacher at the University of South Carolina. Van Ness was a student of Dickey’s in the 1980’s and the exuberance Dickey often brought to the classroom is apparent. 

Exuberance is a key word for describing Dickey’s best work. In poems like “Cherrylog Road,” “On the Hill Below the Lighthouse,” “Adultery,” “The Performance,” “The Lifeguard,” and “To Be Done in Winter” Dickey’s work seems bathed in vitality and life joy. His poetry is not concerned with mundane, small moments. It is concerned with transcendence. 

There are many reasons why Dickey’s reputation has dimmed over the last fifty years. Van Ness covers all of them. His womanizing and alcoholism wrecked many of his friendships and some readers and critics remain willing to dismiss his work based on the numerous misbehaviors of his life.  Also, unlike one of his contemporaries, James Wright, Dickey outlived most of his best work. To quote Nietzsche out of context, Dickey did not “die at the right time.” Finally, the type of masculinity Dickey publicly embodied (think John Wayne and Ernest Hemingway combined with erudition and southern twang) is now out of fashion. 

Van Ness does a fine and necessary job of separating Dickey’s indulgences from his art. He focuses on key early works and adds understanding and appreciation to later, overlooked gems. As someone who has edited two volumes of Dickey’s letters, his early notebooks, and a posthumous collection of late poems, Van Ness is a worthy guide to Dickey’s work. In writing this biography he sends the reader back to Dickey’s poetry and fiction. Dickey remains a poet with a lightning rod, wide awake as he walks through a crackling summer field.

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James Dickey: A Literary Life, by Gordon Van Ness

Mercer University Press, 2022

Biography, $45

About the Author: Mike James makes his home outside Nashville, Tennessee. He has published in numerous magazines, large and small, throughout the country. His most recent book, Portable Light: Poems 1991-2021, was published by Red Hawk in April 2022. Mike’s previous poetry collections include: Leftover Distances (Luchador), Parades (Alien Buddha), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), and Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog.) 

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Image Credit: Digitally remixed image of a public domain James Dickey photo

Sally Dunn: “The Prodigal Daughter Searches for Her Home”

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The Prodigal Daughter Searches for Her Home
						
				
I am repulsed by the city:
the noise, the filth
the way you can see it from space.
Yet it is as natural as 
a bird’s nest or
a prairie dog town
as natural as I am.
For if it is not natural
then I, born of the species 
who made it,
am nothing but an alien
on the world of my birth.

In order to reconcile myself to me
I placed my hand on a large building
with its steel, concrete
and glass upon glass that doesn’t open.
I tried to feel as I have felt
when I have placed my hand on a tree
and felt that it was part of me
part of the world.
Its right to exist not open to question.

I failed my test.
I cannot feel the life in this building.
I cannot feel the buzzing of its
electrons connecting with the palm
I have placed upon it.
				
I have run, hidden, stayed away
from the city for years. 
But it is part me
as much as anything else is.
If I cannot own this part of me
how much of myself will I have lost?
How can I be part of this world
if I don’t own this building?

Or must I forever
be an exile
in my own body?

About the Author: Sally Dunn’s poetry has appeared in Schuylkill Valley Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Plainsongs and Glass Mountain among others.  Her poetry won third place in the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest. She lives on Cape Cod.

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Image Credit: Paul Klee “Cold City” (1921) Public Domain

Joe Mills: “The Scientist After the Operation”

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The Scientist After the Operation

A couple weeks after the operation, 
he finally can sit outside,
under the enormous black walnut tree
that hasn’t yet succumbed to a storm
although it loses limbs each time.
He holds in his lap a biography 
of Gregor Mendel, the monk 
who cross-bred plants 
and discovered genetic inheritance.

At one point, he had thought about
the church as a career. His mother had
suggested it would be a good place
for someone with his “proclivities,”
a comment so complicated he kept
returning to the statement for years
trying to determine if it was caring,
Machiavellian or something else.
He had studied science instead.

She doesn’t know he’s sick.
They haven’t talked since the wedding 
when the state finally allowed him 
and Greg to be a legal couple,
and yet, this was when 
his grandmother began talking 
openly to him about relationships 
in the months before her death. 
Some things skip a generation. 
Some things never get passed down. 

He sees Greg glancing out 
the kitchen window, checking
to make sure he’s okay,
awake, still alive,
and he waves the book
to reassure his partner,
like a preacher with a bible

About the Author: A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills holds the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities. He has published seven volumes of poetry, most recently Bodies in Motion. His collection This Miraculous Turning was awarded the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for its exploration of race and family.

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Image Credit: Edvard Munch “Landowner in the Park” (1903)

Paul Ilechko: “Pig Roast Sonnet”

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Pig Roast Sonnet

They all wore black and stank of last week’s 
Miller Lite     they stank of smoke and memories
they stank of bitterness     that picked up speed
as it tumbled downhill and across the town
before it skidded to a halt in front of the fire
where a pig’s head stared vacantly into 
the middle-distance     unfocused clouds for eyes
they all wore camouflage as they blended
into suburban life in a small New Jersey town
where cathedral bells were tolling to remind them
of the ones they left behind     in rough pine boxes
buried shallow     or nothing left at all except
the smell of meat and a memory of a face     staring
emptily through the stink of whiskey and pain

About the Author: Poet and songwriter Paul Ilechko lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. He is the author of several chapbooks. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including The Night Heron Barks, Feral Journal, Iron Horse Literary Review, Gargoyle Magazine, and Book of Matches. His first album, “Meeting Points”, was released in 2021.

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Image Credit: The natural history of quadrupeds, and cetaceous animals. Bungay, [England] Printed and published by Brightly and Co,1811. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (public domain)