Is Barry Dempster the One?:

Shane: I must confess a conflicting interest here: as former editor of The Danforth Review, I’ve published a Dempster poem that appears in this book. I liked that poem; and I like this book.

Dempster’s poems are unassuming, but they have a mysterious quality, approaching even profundity, an air of them possessing something other, and if you haven’t guessed it by now, a quality that I can’t quite put my finger on. Take the poem "Explicit":

Even mystery has its sure
things: snakes slithering into new
skins, the closed-closet taste of Brussel
sprouts, abandoned golf balls on the moon.

This is playful, it’s felicitous with metaphor, it hints at mystery while doing its best to explicitly define it. It’s got the unparaphraseable quality that’s the trademark of good poetry.

Contra Compton, at least there are signs of life in this book (humour, regret, pining, rejoicing) and though there is little flash in the delivery - my major cavil - there is a quiet substance in the content. Dempster’s anecdotes are small portals on experience, they aren’t transformative, they tell a little story, and leaven it with a minor insight. They make for competent poems with occasional glimpses of what constitutes good poems. I’d simply like more pizzazz, more verbal pyrotechnics, more, well, poetry, than his rather quotidian method provides. 

The Burning Alphabet is a little self-centred as a book, too; I’d have liked Dempster to have tried on some liberating personas, write a rhyme or two that didn’t focus on mortality or lost loves. Or he might have lingered awhile with a few poetic devices, tried a form or two. There is a preponderance of narrative untouched - excepting metaphor - by device; Dempster’s poems therefore sacrifice music for an easy intelligibility. This guy is so damn agreeable and it’s his ever-present "I," at once genial and wry, that becomes a bit oppressive after awhile. This is a book where the poet is locked into one mode, but at least he can be emotional while also showing propriety, without resorting to manipulation of the reader. And when things do get ham-handed, like in "Handprints": "After a lonely day, I lay a hard hand / on the place where my heart / chisels away at a rock[.]" Dempster swerves back to the right side of the road by finishing the stanza with "This fumbled stroke, another / smudge lost in the blur."

These trifles aside, this is a good book, a little long at 135 pages. It’s small in scope, and that small scope is its very purpose, with no grand overarching meaning or theme. The poems basically serve as diaristic installments in the poet’s middle-aged, sometimes whimsical life. He’s perceptive, but not overly so; he knows his way around a metaphor.

Based on the timbre and content of these poems, one wonders if Dempster is somehow resigned to his lot in life, if these poems reflect a spirit that’s come to the world’s terms and accepted them. This is taken from "The Moment":

4 p.m., Oprah Winfrey’s empathy
haloing my easy chair
where I sit, statistic: white,
inner-child-abused male
in mid-life shock, watching October

blunt its crayons in the front yard,
oak leaves dying slower than
the maples, breezes breaking their falls,
streetlights waiting in the wings
for the launch of standard time.

I think one can write poems out of that, and Dempster clearly has, even convincing ones, but there is in every poet a certain amount of revolt, and saving the occasional renunciation of such a position (like "When the Gods Don’t Love You") it’s just not there in Dempster. He’s eerily right when he writes in the poem "Chill," "I am afraid poems never say / enough, words cheating me / of rage, of passion." As a member of this jury, I can’t really say that there is nothing to worry about.

This is very much a book of age ("Detached," "A Small Jungle," a whole section is titled "Sick Days"). Bald spots get pride of place, and there is a fair share of pain and pills. Although the book is a bit unbalanced in this regard, it must be said that his meditations on illness are utterly convincing.   

In short, I liked this book, with only a few minor quibbles. Dempster seems to me to be one of the obvious choices for the GG, he’s been writing a long time and he’s been relatively neglected by prize juries on the way. Along with W. H. New, the jurists may think they owe him one. Besides, he’s written well and deserves his place on the list.

Dani: This is the first time I've read Barry Dempster's work, although I did hear him read a few weeks ago at the Victory Cafe. Having seen him read, it was really easy for me to get into The Burning Alphabet, which I liked right from the start.

Shane, when you said that there are "signs of life in this book," you were right. This book is definitely populated, even if it's mostly populated with the author himself who shows up in almost every poem. Two other things that pop up time and time again are television shows and, well, time.

I have to wonder if time hasn't slowed down for Dempster. I don't want to be overly sentimental and suggest that he's making every minute count, but there's a definite tallying of minutes in these poems. In the poem "Suburban Poet," he not only notes the hours, but the days and the seasons:

8 a.m., suburban street
like an abandoned movie set.
Lawns looking fake with velvety grass
and fashionably thin lodgepole pines.
Basketball hoops in the driveways
filled with autumn leaves
like Martha Stewart centrefolds. 

And only a stanza later, time is once again front and centre:

Ah, but you should have never let a poet in
lonely all those weekday mornings
nothing to do but describe.
Sure, he sings your praises
comes up with words like velvety
but deep inside he feels abandoned
like those autumn mums in the garden
showing off for no-one
now that Daylight Saving Time
has forced it dark by 6.

I'm not sure whether or not this is intentional, but the constant references to different times slows the reader down to a pace that, I think, Dempster sets. Also, it definitely gives the reader the sense that the author is clock-watching, though we're not entirely sure what he's waiting for.

And, Shane, I also have to agree with you that the poems about illness are, as you put it, "utterly convincing." In poems like "After Reading Yet Another Article on Deadly Viruses" and "In Camera," Dempster successfully weaves together the science of his illness and his feelings about it. The result is a section of poems that curiously explore the dichotomy of his
illness. I think this is best showcased in "After Reading Yet Another Article on Deadly Viruses":

I take my fears to
that great copy shop in my head,
make a thousand replicas, a squad
of paper panic boats setting out
across the woozy mucus seas.

I think the "Sick Days" poems are the most successful in the collection. I have a difficult time trying to connect with the dulled anger of the poems in the last section of the book; however, I'm hard-pressed to find little else that I didn't like. Maybe it's Dempster's colloquial tone, or the careful infusion of science and pop culture references, but I feel at ease reading this collection. No, it doesn't make me want to riot or tear down the walls, but the book, I think, is passionate and gutsy.

Alex: I really liked this book as well. But then, it's a hard book not to like. The voice belongs to a sort of suburban Everyman we can all identify with: memories of sitting on the couch discussing the new Toyotas with his dad, watching Oprah or reruns of The X-Files, cocooning at night ("Slam those doors, snap those chains, curtains keep us / safely 60 watt"), raking leaves in the Fall, playing with the neighborhood dogs, etc. When this Normal Joe gets sick and has to go to the hospital it's like he's visiting another planet filled with alien technologies. And isn't that the way most of us experience it? I love the way the poem "In Camera" shows him trying to imagine his biological self as a collage of televised images. I shared Dani's sense that Dempster watches a lot of TV. But the tube is at least as much a part of our everyday lives now as a garden. Its relentless stream of images and information shine on the mind like a grow lamp:

  Facts to live by, filling the empty
vases with energy, swelling the brain cells
into fuchsias and peonies. Alive!

That's from the poem "Etcetera," but the same effect is described elsewhere. There's something intrinsically poetic about TV for Dempster - its language of desire and immediacy, its lyrical imagery, its wealth of ready-made metaphors. But as in the poem "In Camera" it is mainly something identified with comfort. Feeling a bit panicky in the hospital room he naturally regresses to associations with the electronic tit: Baywatch cleavage and the rhythms of Sesame Street. And why not? Television is our mass media (far more than radio or books). It's the collective unconscious, something universally accepting, something greater than the individual, a grammar of references we all share. 

Now this book isn't all about watching TV. In fact that's just one strand of imagery. But I mention it because the way Dempster uses TV is typical of almost all the poetry in this book - sparklingly inventive and imagistic, but still graced with a common touch. I want to compare it to Larkin, but it doesn't have the Master's formal ease, his conversational measure. Dempster has an ear, no question, but it isn't for the rhythm of speech. And this is something I missed.

It isn't all good. At times he seems to be trying too hard. Get a load of this:

It looked like a Siberian Husky,
thought it thundered like a waterfall,
soaking me with approval,
circling until I was ringed with
afterglow, my jeans streaked with paw-print
comets. If ghosts had tongues like
post-coital penises, then that pounce
of wet fur was a four-star phantom.
There was nothing I could do but 
open my arms, like hugging a
cosmic flood, holding nothing back.

Parts of this are great. I love the paw-print comets because they're right. That's what the wet paw-prints look like, with their dark core of impact trailing off into a fading smear. And, having a Newfoundland dog of my own, I know what it's like to have an armful of big dog, hugging them like a cosmic flood. But I don't know about the thundering like a waterfall. That doesn't seem right. And then tongues - the tongues of ghosts no less! - appearing like post-coital penises . . . can anyone explain what the fuck that means? I just don't get it. In fact, I don't get why Dempster uses the word "penis" in any of his poems. As he does three times in this book, to questionable effect. Here are the other two instances:

Even his penis is fleecy,
like one of those lucky crystals
nestled in a blue velvet bag.

Your penis at attention, extra inches
loud, gushing over with sheer delight.

I don't like the word "penis" in a poem unless there's a really, really good reason for it. On its own it's a limp trochee and sounds awful, with built-in emasculating echoes of "teeny-weeny" and ending in that long sibilant noise that mimics its secondary function. If at all possible poets should try and go with "cock," which is far more forceful and direct. Look at that second passage! Is that a penis that's standing at attention, extra inches loud, gushing over? Nay! A penis does not stand at attention. I thought Dempster's credo was to "cherish the explicit"! When a penis stands at attention it turns into a cock, with all of those aural connotations of being something shocking and hard as a rock. 

But I have to say I did enjoy this book immensely. It has an energy and verbal playfulness that I didn't find in many of the other books. In a lot of ways it does seem smaller, or less ambitious, but it's more effective at what it does.

Dani: I think I have to agree with you on the penis issue. In contrast to Dempster's generally colloquial tone, "penis" comes off as very clinical, not at all a word used in everyday conversation. In fact, I can't recall the last time I heard a guy refer to his penis as, well, a penis. I can't even recall another time when I've written the word "penis" so much.

Shane: I'd like to weigh in on the penis issue, but I think you two have, um, done it to death. I'd just like to say again that Dempster's method - colloquial, anecdotal, topical - makes it, like Alex has said, an easy book to like. There's nothing difficult about Dempster, which is fine, but perhaps more importantly, there's nothing challenging about him. His agreeableness of tone is reflected in his accessibility of technique.

Oh yes, penis, penis, and penis. What a fun word to say! Haven't in ages.

NEXT: Dealing with Erin Moure