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Poetry is Richard Deming’s native tongue

Hank Hoffman

Richard Deming. Photo by Jean-Jacques Poucel.

In the beginning was the (fill in the blank). For poet Richard Deming, finding the right word is a means to challenging expectations rather than fulfilling them. With a shout-out to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Deming considers attentiveness to language — and particularly its surprises and revelations — a way of being fully alive.

Deming’s first book of poetry, Let’s Not Call It Consequence, was published last year by Shearsman Books. A lecturer in the English department at Yale University and a literary critic as well as a poet, Deming has also authored Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading, published by Stanford University Press in 2007. With Nancy Kuhl, he edits the New Haven-based Phylum Press, which publishes poetry chapbooks and pamphlets.

Just as we cannot know how each day will end, Deming crafts lines that demand attention and resist pat conclusions. If you think you know where a phrase is leading, you are bound to be confounded. He calls it an “allergy to narrative.” When I ask him, in an interview in his New Haven home, whether he considers himself a postmodernist, he demurs.

“I think of myself as a neo-Modernist. The Modernists were interested in how you inherit authority or how you think of form,” says Deming.

Deming cites what he calls poet William Carlos Williams’ “polemical and provocative” contention that “all sonnets say the same thing.”

“What he meant was that there is a formal and rhetorical structure of a sonnet and one of the things we love about a sonnet, and one that’s well-written, is the way it surprises us in fulfilling all its requirements. Where it zigs where we know it should zag, but still comes to the same sense of closure,” explains Deming. “If you are saying form is a way of creating and mediating experience, then we know where we are going to go. We know, to use (a) narrative (example), that James Bond will get out of the problem. It’s how he does it that interests us. And it’s the same way with traditional form.

“I’m more interested in finding ways of writing form that discovers itself as it goes along, and thinks through its own logic,” says Deming. “Otherwise, it’s not your experience. You are just using a template that you pour that into. That’s the kind of narrative that gets me uncomfortable. I know where I’m going and it’s almost as if I don’t need to show up.”

There are recurring themes, motifs, words. Mirrors, the night, insomnia and sleep, tongue. The latter word evokes various associations: lust, speaking and, perhaps most relevant in considering Deming’s poetry, the phrase “it’s on the tip of my tongue.” The meaning you know is there — believe is there — but lies just beyond your reach.

Deming’s poems are anchored in earthy images and an appreciation of the tactile, physical nature of existence, but they are as easy to grasp as smoke. Two lines from the powerful and elusive “The Logic of Green”: “Kindergarteners drag their feet and leaves make it/sound like rain. Or, sound like sound. Or, sound.” In the same poem, Deming offers an algebraic metaphor: “let x stand for the Scioto River running through Columbus, OH” but subverts it by soon using x in a different context with a plainly different meaning. Words are variables in the search for meaning, not constants.

Deming’s love of finely wrought poetic language has deep roots. When he was 6 or 7 years old, his parents would drop him off at the local high school to hang out while his older brother rehearsed Shakespeare plays. It was a cheap means of babysitting.

“I fell in love with Shakespeare. It wasn’t presented as hard. And I got to hear the same lines over and over. It was my knucklehead brother acting, so it wasn’t at all scary,” recalls Deming.

His parents helped him out when he told them he wanted to read the plays. Playing in bands in high school — Deming was a drummer and percussionist who majored in music and composition before switching to English — he wrote lyrics as an “underground way of writing poetry” in an “anti-intellectual town.”

After switching his major to English, Deming was fortunate to have teachers who validated his desire to be a writer. Many of the professors in the doctoral program at the University of Buffalo — Deming took theory and poetics — were poets themselves, including Robert Creeley, Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe. They taught literature, Deming says, as a living art.

He sees an important corollary to his approach in the visual arts, specifically the work of the Abstract Expressionists.

“Thinking about the actual material of the paint is to me like thinking about each word, or each letter sometimes,” says Deming. This concern for the minutiae of the writing experience is one of the characteristics that distinguishes Deming from his friends who write fiction.

“The story itself takes over,” Deming says of fiction. “It’s harder to pay attention to the experience of every word because there is a narrative force driving things along.”

Where narrative writers paint in broader strokes, Deming says, “poets are really obsessed with every moment and the effect of each word and each series of words.”

The process of meaning-making matters more to Deming than trying to convey a particular point. His poems, he says, “don’t have morals. They don’t necessarily have an argument. I’m so allergic to narrative that even within a lyric sentence it will double back on itself. It will start to contradict itself. Nouns become verbs, verbs become nouns. It’s not ungrammatical. It’s a-grammatical.”

He is engaged in a balancing act, “the concrete particular giving rise to the abstract thought,” and vice versa.

Referring to his book’s title, Let’s Not Call It Consequence, Deming says “the idea is that in every sentence we speak, more or less, there is a way you can anticipate the ending. But if you change direction, the reader has to stay with every word. How does this make sense? And if it doesn’t make sense, what about it doesn’t make sense?

“When you do that, you’re starting to realize what makes meaning and what resists meaning,” Deming argues. “And what happens if it resists meaning and you try to make that meaning work anyway? Then you’re investing yourself in that process.”

This mode of literary play extends to the layout of the poems. Line breaks, indentations, are as much a choice as lyric. Why should every line be flush left?

Deming muses, “What happens to us cognitively when we start to let those words drift? If the white space around it gives it more emphasis or somehow isolates that word, and what happens when that word is isolated? I think of the page not as a canvas but it is a field, so why not make use of that field?”

This is not populist poetry. I ask Deming what poetry of this type demands of the reader. Prefacing his response by saying it “isn’t going to sound necessarily fair,” he tells me, “Poetry should ask us everything of ourselves. A good poem, a great poem, does do that.

“If we say a poem resists easy summation, easy reading, and then we have to give more of ourselves — at least our time — to respond to it, then we’re discovering ourselves through that act,” he argues.

“We live complex lives so our art should be as complex,” Deming says. “Poetry is that kind of wager.”

A harmonious operation helps GIs

Alyssa DellaCamera

	Darryl Salzman of the Wisconsin National Guard plays a guitar he received from Operation: Music Aid at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Madison residents George Hauer and Clark Kniceley are as familiar to the patients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. as the doctors and staff.

Hauer and Kniceley are cofounders of Operation: Music Aid, a nonprofit organization founded in 2006 that provides musical instruments to wounded soldiers in an effort to help with their physical and psychological rehabilitation. For both men, the mission is a natural fit. Hauer’s father, Dr. Emanuel Hauer, was an Army field surgeon during World War II. He earned a Bronze Star Medal for “saving 14 GIs … at the invasion of Luzon in the Philippines,” (George) Hauer said. And while deafness in his left ear prevented the younger Hauer from serving in the military, the founding of Operation: Music Aid has allowed him, in his own way, to commemorate and continue his father’s work and legacy.

Kniceley is a 21-year Army veteran who served in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Since his return from the First Gulf War, he has undergone 13 surgeries. One afternoon at Hauer’s Madison Music Center, Kniceley sat down and began strumming a guitar.

“I wish I had this (guitar) while I was in the hospital,” Hauer remembers Kniceley saying at the time, to which he replied, “What about the kids now?”

Hauer thought about the relative lack of entertainment in many military hospitals: small, black and white televisions, jigsaw puzzles with pieces missing and magazines with pages torn out. It occurred to both men that music might be just the type of therapy wounded soldiers could benefit from.

Hauer and Kniceley held off launching Operation: Music Aid after hurricanes Katrina and Rita; then came the earthquake in Pakistan. At that point, Hauer said, he and Kniceley decided to “take care of our own people,” referring to soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom were being treated at Walter Reed.

Hauer said officials at Walter Reed were “very standoffish” at first. On their first visit to deliver musical instruments to wounded soldiers, Hauer and Kniceley, in the latter’s van, were instructed to drive through a circuit of Jersey barriers as they approached the hospital. After weaving through the entire maze, they ended up right back where they started, and realized that the procedure had been a precaution to allow security officials to thoroughly check them out.

The second time Hauer and Kniceley traveled to Walter Reed they did so in a caravan that included an ambulance donated by the Town of Waterford and driven by firefighter Brian Anderson that carried two large organs. Also on that trip was Mark Shenking, chief of the Oswegatchie Fire Company in Waterford.

During that visit, Hauer and Kniceley spent two hours in the hospital’s occupational therapy area where they met a man whose lower leg had been replaced by a prosthetic. He’d received a guitar from Operation: Music Aid.

Hauer remembers the man’s wife saying, “You have no idea what a difference that guitar has made to him.” He vividly remembers the expression on the woman’s face, and learning that her husband had a guitar at home that he loved to play.

Three years on, Operation: Music Aid has donated musical instruments — guitars, harmonicas and electronic keyboards and drums — to 1,284 recipients in hospitals in this country and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We have turned $70,000 in public donations over three years into over $520,000 value retail product,” Hauer said.

Operation: Music Aid has captured the attention of all types of people, from veterans to children and even celebrities. Personal letters from soldiers and their families adorn a wall of the Madison Music Center. Among the letters are two guitars autographed by both David Crosby and Graham Nash, and two guitars autographed by Petula Clark. Hauer said the autographed guitars would be auctioned in late spring or early summer as part of an Operation: Music Aid fundraiser.

So inspired by the letter- and-guitar-adorned wall was 10-year-old Madison Music Center customer Meilia Piquet that she decided to play her violin at a local grocery store in order to raise money for the organization.

“She plays most Sundays at the Stop & Shop in Madison and has raised over $4,000 in donations,” said Hauer, who, along with Kniceley, hopes someday they’ll be able to provide every soldier with his or her own musical instrument.

Operation: Music Aid appreciates donations of any size. For more information or to make a donation, call (203) 318-5007 or visit www.operationmusicaid.org.

Festival celebrates the steps of a master

Lucile Bruce

The new Cooperative Arts and Humanities Magnet High School, slated to open in downtown New Haven on January 20. Photo by Harold Shapiro.

March may be a gray and gloomy month for some, but for dance enthusiasts in Connecticut it brings a special glory: DanceMasters Weekend, the annual two-day festival of dance education and performance held at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, in Middletown.

This year, DanceMasters feels especially meaningful, perhaps even bittersweet. That’s because when the Limón Dance Company, Battleworks Dance Company and Brian Brooks Moving Company take the stage, one important person won’t be there.

Mariam McGlone, founder of DanceMasters Weekend, died in May 2008. This year, she won’t get to see dancers, choreographers, teachers and audience members flocking to the workshops and performances of the tenth annual DanceMasters Weekend. But her vision lives on.

McGlone was a professional dancer, critic and educator. Born in 1916, she trained in classical ballet then left college to join the Humphrey-Weidman Company. She was an early member of the Martha Graham Dance Company in New York City and later danced with the José Limón Dance Company. After dancing professionally for many years, McGlone turned her attention to teaching, writing and thinking about dance, and became a mentor to dancers, choreographers and audiences.

In 1983, McGlone, then in her mid-60s, moved to Guilford with her husband, James McGlone Jr., to live with their daughter, Stacey Gemmill. Until then, McGlone had spent most of her life in and around New York City.

“When she came here, she thought she’d moved to Siberia,” Gemmill says, laughing. In particular, McGlone felt the absence of dance.

“She believed that people in Connecticut were disconnected from the world of professional dance,” notes Pamela Tatge, director of Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts, who, along with Associate Director of Programs and Events, Barbara Ally, curates DanceMasters Weekend.

Gemmill says McGlone was particularly interested “in bringing the younger people along by introducing them to the world of dance and choreography.”

McGlone set out to bring professional dance to Connecticut. In the late 1980s, working in collaboration with the Shoreline Arts Alliance as founding chair of its Dance Committee, she launched a program of dance master classes, bringing dancers and choreographers from such renowned companies as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and New York City Ballet to the shoreline. McGlone also invited a few Connecticut companies, including Pilobolus and others, which were actively working in Connecticut at the time. The master classes and studio performances took place at a Branford school and at the Guilford Community Center under the auspices of the Shoreline Arts Alliance. The program continued to thrive through the late 1990s. And thus, DanceMasters Weekend was born.

Today, the program has a permanent home at Wesleyan, where it is endowed through the Mariam McGlone DanceMasters Endowment Fund. How DanceMasters Weekend came to the university is a story of women’s lives converging through the arts. Tatge met McGlone in the 1990s. Tatge was director of development at Long Wharf Theatre and McGlone sat on the organization’s Board of Trustees. The two became friends. After Tatge became director of Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts, McGlone approached her about moving DanceMasters to the university.

Tatge recalls, “She said to me, ‘This is such an important program, it would be wonderful if it could be adopted by a university and given more support.’”

“At the time,” Tatge says, “I looked around and thought there was very little going on in terms of dance-presenting in Connecticut; no one was really presenting contemporary dance and contextualizing it in the way that should be done somewhere in the state. I also knew that there’s a lot of enthusiasm for dance among Wesleyan students. So we decided to experiment with adopting this program.”

Under Tatge’s leadership, Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts has become one of Connecticut’s most vital arts destinations and a leading presenter of contemporary dance in New England.

Wesleyan first hosted DanceMasters Weekend in 2000. In the subsequent years, Tatge, McGlone and Ally have refined the program, which focuses on learning and sharing, and have watched it grow. DanceMasters now offers 15 classes (up from nine in 2000) and a showcase performance. In addition, the Mariam McGlone Emerging Choreographer Award is sometimes presented to an artist who shows outstanding promise.

And this year, for the first time, the festival will offer a program featuring New England-based choreographers, as well as lunchtime conversations with chorographers, to which attendees should bring a bag lunch.

The weekend culminates Saturday night with performances by three leading dance companies. This year’s program is dedicated to McGlone. Accordingly, Tatge and Ally chose companies with special connections to McGlone: the Limón Dance Company, with which McGlone danced in the 1940s; Battleworks Dance Company, whose founder, Robert Battle, was the first recipient of the Mariam McGlone Emerging Choreographer Award; and Brian Brooks Moving Company, whose first performance outside New York City was at DanceMasters Weekend after McGlone recognized the choreographer’s unique talent.

The New England Choreographers Showcase on Friday will feature works by Deborah Goffe, Adele Myers, Lisa Race and Candice Saylers, who were chosen by a juried panel. The panel also awarded an honorable mention to Arien Wilkerson, a student at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, who will open the program.

At the heart of DanceMasters Weekend are workshops that feature choreographers and/or company members in seminars that give students insight into artists’ ideas, influences and vocabularies before seeing them perform. New this year, Wesleyan dance faculty members Hari Krishnan, Urip Sri Maeny and Iddrisu Saaka will introduce South Indian classical dance (Bharata Natyam), Javanese dance and West African dance, respectively. Workshops in ballet, jazz, tap and more will also be offered, as will a master class with choreographer David Dorfman, chair of the dance department at Connecticut College.

Gayle Micca, director of Valley Ballet in Canton, says DanceMasters Weekend is “exhausting, but exhilarating.” Each year she brings a group of 10 students to the festival.

“Some don’t realize until later in their lives what they have been exposed to,” she says. “It’s phenomenal, the quality of artists they bring.”

Micca appreciates the weekend’s emphasis on both older and new forms and companies. For Battle, that’s an important aspect of DanceMasters Weekend, one that reflects McGlone’s life and spirit. McGlone, Battle says, understood the past, yet remained committed to the future. Talking about receiving the Mariam McGlone Emerging Choreographer Award, he recalls, “For me, it was quite an honor, especially because I’m an artist who looks to the past to guide me into the present and future.”

Battle describes McGlone as “a genuine trailblazer and lover of dance,” and says, “She believed in the power of dance to transform the human spirit.”

Tatge says McGlone “set a very high standard … She dreamed very big.”

McGlone believed dance is not just for everyone, but is in everyone.

“She believed that movement is this incredibly elemental aspect of what people have to do,” says Gemmill. “It’s part of what makes us human beings, mammals and alive.”

“Mariam would say, ‘Pamela, we’re conceived in dance, we’re born in dance, and we dance until we die,’” remembers Tatge.

For information about DanceMasters Weekend visit www.wesleyan.edu/dancemasters.

In the Write...
Local writers' projects include history, science fiction

As a courtesy to the arts community of Greater New Haven, the New Haven Review staff preview here writing projects that continue to place local writers on the national literary map.

Author and Westville neighborhood resident Mark Oppenheimer (http://www.markoppenheimer.com) is busy at work on Wisenheimer: Memories of an Articulate Childhood (Free Press, 2009), a hilarious yet self-deprecating look at a smart-alecky kid who finds his true calling: high school debate. From New England to Canada, England to Australia, Oppenheimer records his quest for international debate glory and ever more plastic, spray-painted trophies.

Hamden writer Chandra Prasad, (http://www.chandraprasad.com) a Connecticut Book Award 2008 fiction finalist (On Borrowed Wings), is preparing a fictional biography of aviatrix Amelia Earhart. In Breathe the Sky, Prasad explores Earhart’s fascinating career and personal life as a staunch promoter of equal rights for women, part-owner of an airline company, good friend to Eleanor Roosevelt, influential fashion designer and record-breaking aeronaut. Prasad even includes a wonderful scene in which Earhart visits New Haven to give a lecture.

Meanwhile, corporate managers eagerly look forward to the next book from the pen of prolific business writer and Whitneyville resident Bruce Tulgan. In Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y (Jossey-Bass, 2009) Tulgan takes a hard look at how Generation Y — those born between 1978 and 1990 — may well be the most demanding workforce in America and yet its most high-performing ever.

For fans of Gone with the Wind, Westville author and historian Marc Wortman’s The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta (Public Affairs, 2009) brings to life the story of America’s most terrible urban siege, exposing the many paradoxes of this slavery-dependent Southern city with a pro-Union mayor.

Science fiction aficionados with a distinctly literary bent are also warmly welcoming the latest work from Hamden denizen Brian Slattery, another Connecticut Book Award 2008 finalist (Spaceman Blues). With Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America (Tor, October 2008), Slattery offers a brilliant dystopian tour de force that imagines an economically devastated America in which slavery has reemerged with a vengeance.

But, of course, this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, with many other projects that space does not permit us to describe. If there are projects you’re aware of, please feel free to contact us at editor@newhavenreview.com.

Bennett Lovett-Graff is publisher of the New Haven Review, a literary journal and Web site that hosts parties, sponsors speakers and supports and celebrates the literary activities of the Elm City.

For more information, visit www.newhavenreview.com or e-mail publisher@newhavenreview.com.

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