Book Review: Night School

Carl Dennis’s thirteenth and latest book of poems, Night School, seems at first glance utterly nondescript. Of the forty-six poems, none boast a first line that would have made Auden proud; and the volume as a whole lacks the oblique allusiveness that makes poetry so challenging to read. It addresses no political or ethical issues. Nor do the poems capture, to quote Ginsberg, “the minute particulars of mankind.” Also, isn’t great poetry the anatomy of melancholy, which in turn stimulates in its perusers the symptoms of profound sadness? And although we get a poem titled “At the Graveyard,” death is more often an arm’s length away from this poet’s mind.

Night School is, instead, full of life. More precisely, lives — the late greats, the unlived, the could-have–beens, the if-onlys, and the multitude of avatars possible if only one had taken that other turn. Unlike Frost, Dennis is not apologetic that he cannot take both paths. On the contrary, he knows that not all can walk the one less travelled, so he makes it his business to speculate, while surrounded by the mundane, on how it could all have been so very interesting. Winging free verse with what-iffery, but unweighted by wishfulness, Dennis’s poems take flight into an imaginative heaven only to alight finally on the firm ground of reason. A sparkling simplicity and clarity of thought inform his compositions. The poems talk of difficult things but are completely uncomplicated. They are eidetic and imaginative, long and limpid, interweaved with competing perspectives that are piercingly insightful without being perplexing. Dennis won a Pulitzer in 2002 for the collection Practical Gods. In one of the poems there, “The God Who Loves You,” he writes: “The difference between what is / And what could have been will remain alive for him…” After reading Night School, one can’t help believing the “him” of that poem to be Dennis himself. But he is never sermonic or waxing philosophical. He aligns unerringly with Kipling’s maxim — “And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise” — and betters it by being funny.

What is and what could have been is a dominant theme of Dennis’s poetry, and it comes to full fruition in “Two Lives,” which begins with a bang:

In my other life the B-17 my father is piloting

Is shot down over Normandy

And my mother raises her sons alone…

The real life saunters in next:

Not once do I play with the boy I am

In this life, whose father, too old for the draft,

Starts a paint company in a rented basement

The real life has been quietly conventional, we learn, and has sought “stories of trolls, wizards, giants, / Wandering knights, and captive princesses” to drive away boredom. The other life would have been where he’d “leave high school / To bolster the family income,” and, in less comfortable circumstances, “rise on the ranks / To become a shop steward.” The real life has been limited in experience, lacking in social candor — a “life deficient in incident,” but also a life “uncluttered.” In another life he would have embraced hardships, would have been charitable and made friends among neighbors — a true man of the world. If there’s yearning for that other life, it comes from the comforts earned in the present:

It won’t be long till I knock at the door of the house

Where in this life I’m at my desk preparing a class

On solitude in the novels of the Romantics

In the hands of a lesser artist, this is a nudge away from sounding peevish. But Dennis is a worldly idealist who isn’t idly ruminant of the unfeasible. For him the imagined life throws up a roaster of deeds not done in actuality, and thereby scope to improve upon what is already a blameless life. Speculation leads to introspection, but regret is kept in check; and, without indulging in parsing the poet’s autobiographical impulses, it serves best if we follow suit and look within our own self. Without being too eagerly preceptive, Dennis leads from the front, reminding one of Socrates’s words: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Dennis writes beautifully about people who are perhaps lightly fictionalised version of those he knows in Buffalo, where he has lived for more than four decades. In Dennis’s 2010 collection of poems, Callings, we met an unnamed wine merchant: “He’s a man whose words are few and measured / The owner of the wine store at Hodge and Elmwood.” Here we meet Joseph: “He’s done his work well for many decades, / Overseeing the produce at the market.” Dennis chooses as his subjects people from the middle-class, who are virtuous in words and actions, and who embody the mores of grind and unshowy grace that are becoming increasingly old-world.

Dennis might not be occupied with death, but many a dead appear in the pages of Night School. Elegies for Whitman, Dickinson, Babel, and Thoreau, and a remembrance for a Mrs Gottlieb, whose course in world literature introduced Dennis to Karenina and Crime and Punishment. Most vivifying of all is a writer-friend, in “A Typescript,” who has left a manuscript with Dennis:

The book on ending war once and for all

The my friend devoted the last ten years

Of his life still sits on my shelf

In typescript…

The poet has promised to get it published, but to no avail: “The only editor willing to give me an interview / Told me the book had no target audience.” The late friend’s ghost, with an unrealised last wish, refuses to leave his side, or so Dennis thinks: “Nodding in silence to urge me on.” If Dennis is so sympathetic to even the spirits, it is perhaps because he is surrounded in life by friends like Louisa, who appears in “A Friends and a Book”:

My great-hearted friend Louisa, who does all she can

To help when I need a favor, and does it

Not from a sense of obligation that others

May have to fall back on, but because it makes her happy

Recognizing such acts of generosity is itself a generous act, and Dennis might be selling himself short when he says, “In the realm of extra sympathy that I myself / Don’t feel obliged to dwell in….”

I was not entirely correct when I said earlier that death is not on Dennis’s mind. It is; but it is not (only) the passing of human life he’s saddened by. There is time and the current of changes it brings with it, irreparably mutilating that which once was dear and whole. Remembering the lost grandeur of the port of Buffalo, in “A Stand of Cottonwood,” he writes:

… what used to be numbered among the top three

Grain ports of the Western World.

None of this, however, is worse enough to cow Dennis into fatalism. If anything, it makes him even more avaricious to what little scraps life has in store:

So what if the grain is stored elsewhere now.

It is time to focus on the life at hand,

Which explains why I’ve donned my safari hat

And brought my binoculars:

The sweet chimes of Dennis’s prosody, his resistance to grand espousals, and his easy conversational tone lighten the load of even the gravest worries.

What ails this book is also what makes it so alluring: a lack of personality. We respond to these poems through the reflex of recognition rather than to the poet’s stamp of authorial voice. The transparency of the verses bedecked with wisdom is like the calm surface of a pebbled pool: a glass that reflects us like no mirror can. But stand back a little, and the illusion evaporates. Then, one cannot help feeling that these poems could be anybody’s. That is not to demean Dennis’s work; his mastery of a straightforward poetic style is anything but simplistic. But that style cannot be called as unmistakably his. Dennis can run away with an idea, and, quite unexpectedly, arrive at a revelation. We follow for the most part without actually following him.

Think of Larkin. One might not share his despair on reading “Man hands on misery to man / It deepens like a coastal shelf,” and still feel the plaintive punch of the verse. He is a very sad man who agrees with Larkin’s “greenness is a kind of grief.” It is as if Larkin examined life and promptly deemed it unworthy to go on living. But there’s no denying that the lines play like a mental soundtrack, and loop sonorously long after the spring of sadness has ebbed dry.

Carl Dennis’s poems might not ring eternally true, but they are a calm antidote to these fraught times. Night School is neither oblique nor is it leaden with rhetoric. Nor is it smut with politics. All of that is there as it is. Everywhere and all the time. That is why, when Dennis hints, equally with hope and conviction, of there being several other worlds other than the one we love and hate — in the book’s best poem, “On the Beach” — we readily share his credo: of alternately escaping and accepting the world and life we are born into:

That the world of discord she’ll soon return to

Will be claiming too much

When it claims it’s the only world