{"id":52908,"date":"2013-05-23T11:31:07","date_gmt":"2013-05-23T15:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=52908"},"modified":"2013-05-23T14:36:32","modified_gmt":"2013-05-23T18:36:32","slug":"poetry-gone-to-pieces-talking-civilization-with-dana-crum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/05\/23\/poetry-gone-to-pieces-talking-civilization-with-dana-crum\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Gone to Pieces: Talking Civilization with Dana Crum"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DanaCrumlarge\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s early on Sunday morning, about five-thirty, and Dana Crum has awoken without meaning to. His apartment lights have been left on. Craning his neck from the couch, he observes that he never found the bedroom.\u00a0 Sloughing off the rude awakening, he decides to get an early start on the puzzle of his poetry. He bears down to write. He uncaps his fine-pointed roller ball pens\u2014blue, black, red, and green\u2014and confronts his notebook.<\/p>\n

And he sounds rather startled, some hours later, by my phone call. \u201cHello,\u201d he groans, after the third ring. I ask how he\u2019s doing. \u201cAll right,\u201d he says, then interjects, \u201cActually, can I call you back?\u201d Trying once again to get himself going, he puts on a pot of cinnamon stick tea (Lipton, for a change from Bigelow), while I begin to wonder whether he\u2019s nursing another hangover (Scotch, single malt). As I look over his autobiographical poetry, the canon seems to divulge as much. \u201cIn my unlit apartment on Valentine\u2019s Day, me on a soiled sofa above rotten piping, drinking \/ Macallan from the bottle. My cat\u2019s tail curls into a question mark,\u201d he writes in \u201cPortraits of a Former Lover,\u201d a zuihitsu of imagistic confessions published recently in Blackbird<\/i>. When we resume talking, though, he explains that not even a single line had taken shape and so he had simply given up and gone back to sleep. \u201cI really wish I could start a poem, and write the first line first, the second line second, and so on,\u201d he insists. \u201cBut that doesn\u2019t happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

What does happen, as he described it, is something like a young boy emptying his collection of jigsaw puzzles into a heaping jumble then kneeling down to rummage through the pieces. Each piece, for Crum, is a \u201cfragment\u201d of poetry. Often, he has no sense of where a fragment belongs within a poem, no inking even of where within his entire body of work. Unbidden, fragments infuse his days with poetic potential: falling from a giant puzzle box in the sky as he walks to work, or turning up under a school paper he happens to be grading, or springing from the jostle and bounce of a subway ride. His craft is not so much writing a poem as it is cobbling together myriad lines and images and phrases\u2014\u201ca m\u00e9lange,\u201d he calls it\u2014into the provocative, confessional free verse for which he is becoming known. \u201cI\u2019m receiving a piece of my vision of life,\u201d he says. \u201cThese bursts of inspiration are me expressing myself all the time, something my imagination has been trying to get out all along.\u201d Somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind, the lights are always burning. <\/p>\n

Crum is never without a recording device. Digital is preferable, since search functions can help in locating specific fragments later on. If a computer is beyond reach, tapping the video recorder on his phone will do. As a last measure, he carries a notebook\u2014full composition size, if he\u2019s got his shoulder bag, or pocket-sized, if not\u2014which is loosely labeled by month or year. In any given notebook, sudden things he finds beautiful, striking, or strange are scribbled in blue or black ink, revised gently in red or green.<\/p>\n

Sometime around March of 2006, Crum pulled his composition notebook, labeled with the year, from his shoulder bag to jot down something in blue. He was crossing the campus of Ramapo College of New Jersey, where he was teaching at the time. (\u201cGo figure, poets usually have to do something else to support themselves,\u201d he says, and, with the exception of a several-year interlude copy editing, mostly the job has been teaching\u2014composition and rhetoric at Virginia Commonwealth University while studying for his MFA, English at Horace Mann, and then writing at Ramapo.) Fresh snow was spread on the ground. Snow had not fallen since the previous winter, and Crum, having been recently persuaded by Al Gore\u2019s An Inconvenient Truth<\/i>, was growing suspicious. Inspired by nature\u2019s precarious state, this phrase materialized, as if in attempt to restore balance: \u201cSomewhere between a spring-like winter and a winter-like spring.\u201d In green, Crum immediately added a note \u201cto use the line to comment on global warming.\u201d<\/p>\n

The line was\u00a0gradually hidden\u00a0by notebook piled upon\u00a0notebook. When it reemerged, several years later, in a poem about a failed relationship, Crum was relieved, if not at all surprised. In a promotional video for his Indiegogo campaign, he is seen, in black-and-white, wearily\u2014as though burdened by the weight of unplaced words\u2014shuffling toward the camera. His tousled curls and jutting, peppered chin fill the frame. He announces the unpublished poem\u2019s title, \u201cCoupling,\u201d and, one eyebrow wryly raised, begins to read the opening couplets:<\/p>\n

\n

Somewhere between a spring-like winter and a winter-like spring,
I lost you, lost you even as you strolled<\/p>\n

beside me. Over clams and calamari at The Little Owl,
over chicken kori kebabs at Kismat, you concealed<\/p>\n

the matter behind smiles, behind drinks.
And what was the matter?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One half of the couple\u2014the poet himself, Crum admits\u2014is beguiled by the other. Naively, he tries to shield his lover from her troubled past, to stave off repressed feelings and rotten relationships from bleeding into their present. The lines break to convey his ignorance\u2014of her whereabouts, her private dalliances, her ultimate intentions. Emotional turmoil unfolds, and, perhaps driven by the origin of the opening verse, is swept up in the turbulence of the world at large:<\/p>\n

\n

In bed I drank Macallan to sleep
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 but could not sleep, could only watch<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 as night blanched and passed out.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The day you left, you wore a black frock<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 and black, studded clogs, gliding
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 through the room like ever-moving night.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cEverything is wrong, constantly inverted to show that something\u2019s off,\u201d Crum explains. Night grows pale; the day the woman leaves, she is cloaked in the darkness of night. As he writes in the poem, only \u201ca different kind of coupling\u201d\u2014between woman and man, between nature and mankind\u2014could calm the maelstrom of forces, physical and non-physical alike, that have been discombobulated.<\/p>\n

What could have come off\u00a0as a maudlin plea reverberates with wider significance: our fidelity, to each other and to the environment, is never a secret. Transgressions stain. If Crum is a confessional poet, then, he works through his past for our benefit. His confessions are pragmatic, made \u201cnot because I want to reveal my secrets,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s just what I have to do to write successfully.\u201d It is through himself, after all, that he comes to know the world, and, if his poetry succeeds, so too will we.<\/p>\n

After viewing the clip, contributors shelled out sizeable chunks\u2014some $250, even $500 at a time\u2014to Crum\u2019s campaign. (He eventually pulled in $3,441, perhaps a modest sum but one that nonetheless exceeded his goal and will help him publish his first book of poems.) Having established his \u201cbase\u201d of fans and supporters through crowdfunding, Crum had finally established the catchall identity headlining his Web site: \u201cpoet, writer, and English-language expert.\u201d No longer did he resign himself to the scattershot life of a creative \u201cwho sometimes teaches, tutors, edits, or writes articles.\u201d Now he was gaining recognition for his poems alone. Now he was securing poets\u2019 residencies, including the Eva Jane Romaine Coombe, at The Seven Hills School (recently extended for a second year), and another at the Vermont Studio Center. \u201cNow,\u201d he says, just several years after writing his first poem, \u201cI tell people I\u2019m a poet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matthew Lippman, a poet and author of The New Year of Yellow<\/i>, which won the 2005 Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize, is Crum\u2019s manuscript consultant. He met Crum while teaching an advanced poetry workshop online, about four years ago, and soon took him on privately. \u201cI knew pretty quickly that he was talented,\u201d Lippman recalls. \u201cHe was a force.\u201d Sensing promise, Lippman was the first to coax more of the poet into the poems. \u201cI\u2019m like, Dana, man, this stuff is incredible,\u201d he recalled telling him. \u201cBut you need to put yourself in here. We need a little bit of the Crum blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking with Crum, the counsel seems wise. When I ask about his work, her responds by scanning his mental expanse for references\u2014from major poets like Eliot and Yeats to Macbeth<\/em> and Apollo and Daphne<\/em>—elliptical flights that eventually, always, return to my question. \u201cI think in fragments not just when writing,\u201d he explains. \u201cBouncing all over the place can be helpful because that\u2019s how I come up with my best ideas.\u201d Sometimes, he warns, \u201cI\u2019m going to get off topic, then get back on topic.\u201d And mostly, he does just that. \u201cNietzsche believed both the Dionysian impulse (wild, powerful, messy creativity), and the Apollonian impulse (imposing structure on inspiration\u2019s messy output) were both necessary when creating literature,\u201d he says. \u201cThe challenge is to organize that jumble of insights, ideas, and strategies into an intelligible whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even a groovy one.\u00a0Yielding a refined intellect melded with an inherent sense of rhythm, Crum can turn an erudite phrase that makes you bop. \u201cHe\u2019s able to make music out of his imagination,\u201d Lippman said, referring me to \u201cThe Broken Hand of Husbandry,\u201d part of a larger compilation of Crum\u2019s new World Poems<\/em>. This section discusses the effects of global warming, and yet its opening stanza can be read for the melody alone:<\/p>\n

\n

Below a sky like liquid lead
dry riverbeds are unslaked gullets.
Bred over the feverish Atlantic, a clan
of hurricanes stand in line, then one by one
flog and stomp
Barbados and Dominica,
Haiti and Jamaica,
Cuba and New Orleans.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If the catchy tune draws the reader in, though, the content stretches them. Crum\u2019s World Poems<\/em> deal with cosmopolitanism, the idea that, as he understands it, concern for others should reach beyond national borders. \u201cIt\u2019s being a world citizen,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t mean in the sense of, I\u2019m American so I\u2019m going to tell the rest of the world what to do and how to think. It\u2019s being concerned about a fellow human being, whether they live in Idaho or Burma.\u201d If the idea is to be compelling, universal concern must begin with universal perspective, which is where Crum takes aim. In \u201cThe Gods of Darfur,\u201d appearing in The Innisfree Poetry Journal<\/i>, he renders in sharp relief the gap between worldly ills:<\/p>\n

\n

Around the smoldering huts of Hamada, the dead smudge brown grass: naked
babies with bashed-in faces; charred schoolgirls bound together and burned
alive; gelded men who bled to death, their voices thin like wind through a
cracked window, whispering to Allah.<\/p>\n

What gods there are have killed them. But no
hyacinths sprout from their blood.<\/p>\n

The gravest danger I face? A woman from match. Biracial with gray eyes and
corkscrew curls, she drank half a cappuccino at Starbucks on Sunday and can
destroy me by not returning my call.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The gravest dangers we face? Crum rattles them off: global warming, dwindling natural resources, terrorism, poverty, nuclear arms, Middle-East tensions. \u201cI might warn that civilization as we know it is on the verge of collapse,\u201d he says. \u201cPoetry\u2014being able to say it concisely, without excess anywhere\u2014somehow lives up to these things that I\u2019m writing about. It does them justice.\u201d The world is wounded; perhaps the salve calls for a transfusion of Crum blood, for poetic fragments which now, as they did for T. S. Eliot\u2019s modern world, shore us against ruin.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dorian Rolston is a Canadian-born writer in Princeton, New Jersey. His writing has appeared online at<\/em> The New Yorker,<\/em> The Atlantic,<\/em> Columbia Journalism Review, and other places.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s early on Sunday morning, about five-thirty, and Dana Crum has awoken without meaning to. His apartment lights have been left on. Craning his neck from the couch, he observes that he never found the bedroom.\u00a0 Sloughing off the rude awakening, he decides to get an early start on the puzzle of his poetry. 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