Won't Fade Away 

Poetry is a discipline that escapes my writing and, like anything out there minted in a different factory than my own creative forge, intrigues me. Looking through the windows at the production line, I've seen quite a few shapes of blurry contradiction that seem to make up the important qualities of the form, once you get past the rhythms and patterns of engineering. Among those contradictions is the discovery of truth through the application of metaphor, a process of costuming and fattening language until it pops out a naked expression, birthed in the chaotic, open fields of natural reality. Another contradiction is the notion of making the personal universally understood, which is a first cousin of the near-impossible feat of making something of its own time timeless. We clump poets and their work together with movements, freezing them in place in prismatic amber that reveals new colors and shapes when held up to the light of study. From ancient mythmakers to choleric romantics, there is a common purpose behind those marking sketches of our eternal struggle. That these mighty monuments are often built by people who are weakened by physical and mental illness is another contradiction. And poetic as well, I suppose.

Jim Dodge sits in a very interesting place. The reaction to the modernist poets who bloomed in the early 20th century belongs to the Beats, who existed a couple decades before that pivot from modernism to postmodernism. Dodge is interesting because he seems to abandon that rebellious structure while still retaining its humor and sexual frankness of the modernists as well. He's an ecologist without getting too meditative and Gary Snyder-esque about it. He strikes me as someone who has abandoned the city, literally and metaphorically, abandoned the structures, and replaced them with a provocative mix of occasionally surreal imagery, as well as the "kitchen sink" realism of being human, growing old, loving and caring.

Now in his late 70s, Dodge has the poet's charm-bag of contradictions all around him and his latest work, a chapbook of poems titled Always Something from Limberlost Press, glitters with the references and casual "fuck it" attitude of his generation, welded to a brilliant trick of turning personal stories into compelling reads, while shuffling the deck with flashes of human landscapes built on ancient foundations. He writes with humor as often as not, with a crudity that trades stories about chemo and vomiting with roaming affirmations of resonant love. Those affirmations have the power to drop you from your safe seat into the frail cradle of the sick bed, fully attended to by both the profane and the profound. The title poem is a postcard from Shitsville, where we've all been or will one day go on a downswing, and where "It's always something, and when it's not, it's something else." It ends with a personal — and very universal — recipe for climbing back out of that stinky mire. Or at least a way to make the time go by with a better soundtrack.

Another piece imagines a contemporary Robin Hood throwing a "jug of nitro" off a skyscraper onto the street below, where, rather than blasting out a scene of carnage, the explosion kills no one, only blowing open a bank vault and treating the onlookers to a flurry of free money. The narrator informs us he lived "like a prince two years in Tahiti" from his share of the spoils. A low (and by my lights, correct) view toward the stupid existence of finance capital and commercial culture pops up again later as a theme, an attempted breakout from the modern city, with its suffering on the streets and its bright impossibilities beaming from skyline adverts.

As stated before, I'm not a poet, but Jim Dodge certainly is, and a splendid one at that. It's not my place to air out the man's work when his work is right there for you to read. Poetry is a lot like music, and my recently late father once said that talking about music is like dancing about carpentry: Some people out there must do it, but how often does it work? Jim Dodge's poetry is music, dance and even construction, all spinning around together in a wild monologue. And he has made all of it work.

Collin Yeo (he/him) writes (and talks) about music, in defiance of family tradition. He lives in Arcata.