Dick Allen is one of those poets who seems to not get invited to things. He's too old for one group to be collected in their anthology or to be asked to participate in their conference, or, for another, too formal in his approach (he uses meter and rhyme, and writes in many narrative voices). At the recent Derriere Guard Festival, Dick Allen, who lives close by, was not invited. If a note of irritation is detected here, it isn't the reader's imagination. This is because Dick Allen is one of the principals of the Expansive Poetry movement; leaving him out of programs labeled Expansive Poetry events is like saying "the Metaphysical poets were a terrific lot" while carefully failing to note the writings of John Donne. Evidently, however, age discrimination is as high fashion in certain poetry circles as it is when the government hires engineers. And, it is true that many writers lose that special passion as they age. But few poets have as passionate a voice as that of Dick Allen, even though he is 57. Perhaps one day he'll be granted a dispensation by the power that be, but that seems about as likely as the Pope making a wine tour of Sonoma County.

Fortunately, before the Expansive movement was split into the New Formalism (the group currently fighting to gain what they describe as "legitimacy" in academia) and the New Narrative (poets who tell stories in poetic form, oftentimes in meters), Allen wrote some of the principal essays that laid the critical groundwork for the Expansive movement. His essay in Story Line's Poetry After Modernism is to some minds a kind of summa of the movement. And more fortunately than that, Dick Allen has written poetry that has been widely published. And now Sarabande has brought out a treasure trove of Allen in Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected, which not only has a new book enclosed in its 148 pages (Ode to the Cold War) but substantial segments of several of Allen's prior collections. Is that old passion still something more than an ember that yet lives?

If it wasn't that her body weighed so much
more than a paper cutout, we could have grasped
her ankles, and under her armpits, and lifted her
easily upwards, swung her lightly out
over the cliffs and watched her spin and whirl
like a loosened sail, like a newspaper page,
we would have done it earlier....

from "Throwing Caution to the Wind" by Dick Allen

Taking an old cliche and fleshing it out, Allen personifies caution as that terribly sweet and overprotective mother we all have or can all be, male or female. Allen doesn't hide behind euphemism or fashionably desexed language; instead, the poem is a great shout against the naysayers and against fear, the strangler of all living, free expression. But it won't profess the Romantic assumption of triumph; fear and trepidation wait around every corner.

Our children half-lost, we gather at the table
Making small polite jokes
About weather and coffee. The blinds are drawn.
Outside, the summer afternoon is tennis strokes

A grackle calling to its mate, windchimes
Sliding tailgates of delivery vans. Long-timers smile
And pat the new arrivals' backs. Our therapist
Takes a long, long, long, long, long while

Before he starts, reluctantly. That hot potato, Pain,
Goes round and round the table. Who of us
Are blameless, who share blame
For why our children left a crust

Of blood across their wrists, gulped pills, or think
Their terribly thin bodies still are fat,
Did drugs, did drink
Behind ripped billboards of their raw self-hate?

We don't know....

from "Parents Support Group" by Dick Allen

We hear the juvenocracy's complaint, its great rage against the failings of the old, too often expressed in catastrophic behavior, whether the turn to drugs, the post-graduation party that leads to a drunken car accident or some other tragedy. Then we hear the usual cries of how the parents of these angry young (men, women, children, what you like; it is one youth offering) were guilty of grave crimes while the felonies of their offspring are held to be misdemeanors. In most cases, there's no evidence to support either the accusations or the excuses. Further, we rarely hear about cases where the evidence doesn't fit (that would be telling). And what about those parents?

In this poem, as in the others in this book, Allen won't lie; it is one of his most engaging traits as a writer. He will create a fiction, as storytellers will do, but that's not lying, Mark Twain to the contrary. He will make things up; this may not be a scene he participated in. But he won't lie; he knows this scene happens every day. When children get into serious trouble, parents don't adopt slogans as their rationales; nobody with any experience does. Only children do that. Parents, on the other hand, feel guilty; they feel angry; they want to know who failed; and they suspect and fear most of all that they did. Whole sectors of the helping professions build markets for their services by appealing to this guilt, anger and fear. And yet, Allen doesn't lie about something else in this poem. The fear in parents comes in no small degree from knowing that what they've reared will replace them; and you can feel that as this poem moves toward its conclusion. As in all of his poems, Allen builds by both metrical expressiveness and a sharp attention to details; they pile up in those first three, short stanzas, only twelve lines, forcing an exploration of the questions the exposure of a pattern of details always brings.

A powerful example of this is in "MFA," a cutting poem about a young woman with literary pretensions, as she makes her way down the street toward a campus that sounds very much like Columbia.

...Well, then,
she says, snapping her fine head back, things to be done,
things to be questioned. Gargoyles. She must know
more about gargoyles, rose teacups, that man
who seems to be watching her from another dimension
veering toward hers. She takes a few strides, pauses
as dollar umbrellas rise up around her like bubbles
in a twig-clotted stream. A woman gaunt from AIDS, she supposes,
stands in the doorway of the Burger King,
both hands extended, palms up, as if wearing handcuffs,
and the sidewalk used book seller covers his sad
out-of-date textbooks, underlined Penguin editions,
in plastic tarp, huddles beneath his windbreaker.
Can you read, she wonders. So much, so much
to know, to discover....

Like "bubbles in a twig-clotted stream..." -- such images clot Allen's work and make it more vivid than most who claim to be imagist poets. And he doesn't do it just to show he can; he does it to drive the story, and, more importantly, to give his commentaries, usually implicit, a rootedness that is not available if you fail to provide your reader with those specifics that pin down place and time, atmosphere, and who was present for the occasion. What those details do of course is provide a believable, recognizable place filled with people we might know. As such, Allen is a good answer to a question posited in an earlier review about what poets are there who write about what it's like to live in the late 20th century, raising children, working, seeing the miracles and the nightmares specific to our time and place. He writes from a multitude of perspectives on these subjects, from characters as diverse as a physicist or a young woman, and occasionally he goes even further, as in "The Valley of the Shadow of Death."

Descended into it, we catch our breath
and tap our compasses. The light is from Poe,
Misty and pale with rivulets of thought
crossing back and forth, cataract-eyed,
and in this light, the path we take along the valley floor
wavers sometimes, yet sometimes becomes so clear
we see each tree root, every random stone.

Mostly , we go single file, unroped and wordless,
the bodies before us and the bodies afterwards
motions and gutturals, oddly jerking shapes
we almost forget have names. The valley walls
are steep and smell of doused campfires.
Boulders fall through the ferns. Mornings,
we count ourselves. Someone's always gone.

To where, we don't know...

Life as a plunge into a wilderness, past deserted towns, mostly unknown except as the details in literary landmarks, themselves as much of this vast and unknown order of nature as the waterfalls, a swamp, a mountain peak, lanterns swaying in the darkness, the searchers knowing that they lost someone...

I will fear no Evil, we all said,
for Thou art with me. I will be comforted
by thy rod and thy staff. Yet no one warned us
it would be this hard....

from "In The Valley of the Shadow of Death," by Dick Allen

Even as a writer, searching for what has been and not been done, so that one may work one's own miracle, can be like this -- the constant surprises, the perpetual sense of time being lost, and the resonances, beautiful and terrible, between what has been done and what is to come, and our place in the space between the dust and death.

The title poem of the book, a seven part Pindaric ode, is a remarkable summation of a time not very much past us, but as remote from our most human hopes and despairs as it ever was, a time of grave madness, whose most lasting irony is how much so many people miss its perpetual terror, an irony Allen spends much time with. It deserves a separate review of its own, and this book deserves far more commentary, as it is one of the rare ones, a book of poetry I'll consult for years after this review is nothing but scattered electrons on the Web. You would do yourself (and any visiting friend) a favor by obtaining this book. It is very highly recommended.

Don't stop at the last poem of Ode to the Cold War; the next hundred pages is a wonderful selection of twenty-six years of Allen's work, including most of Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic and Flight and Pursuit, two books from the 1980's.

                Arthur Mortensen

Ode to the Cold War

1997

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