Carl Dennis
Carl Dennis | |
---|---|
Born | St. Louis, Missouri | September 17, 1939
Education | Oberlin College University of Chicago University of Minnesota (BA) University of California, Berkeley (MA, PhD) |
Occupation(s) | Poet and college professor |
Notable work | Practical Gods |
Carl Dennis (born September 17, 1939) is an
Life and work
Born in
Dennis has received several prizes for his poetry in addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, including a Fellowship at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (1988), and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2000).
Dennis is the brother of American composer Robert Dennis.[2]
Dennis's poetry
Dennis writes often of quotidian, middle-class life, but beneath the modest, reasonably lighted surfaces of the poems lie unexpected possibilities that create contrast and vibrancy. An example from his 1984 collection The Near World is "The Man on My Porch Makes Me an Offer," which begins:
- "Above all houses in our town
- I've always loved this blue one you own
- With its round turret and big bay window.
- Do you dream about it the way I do?
- Wouldn't you be just as happy
- On a street with more trees
- In a larger house, whose columned porch
- Impresses every passer-by?
- Does it seem fair that you've won the right
- To gaze from these windows your whole life
- Merely because you saw them first,
- And consign me to a life of envy?"
William Slaughter has given a close reading of this poem in an essay[3] comparing poems by William Stafford, Dennis, and Louis Simpson. The form of Dennis's poem - a plainspoken, dramatic monologue - is fairly characteristic of his poetry. In the poem "Progressive Health" (from Practical Gods) Dennis uses a similar approach for a proposition that is a bioethicist's nightmare.
In some of his more recent poems, Dennis invokes guardian angels and other domestic deities to animate his poetry. In his 2004 review, David Orr wrote:[4]
"In 'The God Who Loves You,' his strongest poem in this vein, Dennis avoids bathos by deftly changing the focus from our own anguish at missed opportunities to the grief of the god who loves us. As the poet reminds us:
- The difference between what is
- And what could have been will remain alive for him
- Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
- Running out in the snow for the morning paper
- Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
- Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene.
Dennis's language here is so quiet and straightforward that when he alters course yet again to imagine the transformation of a god in the mind of his reader, the change seems natural. This is public poetry that sounds private -- an achievement that's easy to underestimate."
In his 1984 review, Tom Sleigh addressed the originality of Dennis's art:[5]
"The reader feels hemmed in by Mr. Dennis's laconic truths because they make visible the narrow cage of circumstance and contingency in which we live. Many poets attempt this, but how many succeed? His distinctive force originates in his insidious determination to stay inside that cage, to map it inch by inch and find there - or nowhere - the justifications for human action."
Bibliography
- A House of My Own. George Braziller. 1974. ISBN 9780807607534.
- Climbing Down. George Braziller. 1976. ISBN 9780807608142.
- Signs and Wonders. Princeton University Press. 1979.
- The Near World. William Morrow. 1985. ISBN 9780688048242.
- The Outskirts of Troy. William Morrow. 1988.
- Meetings with Time. Viking Penguin. 1992. ISBN 9780670843985.
- Ranking the Wishes. Penguin. 1997. OCLC 35673505.
- Practical Gods. Penguin. 2001. OCLC 469134500.
- Poetry as Persuasion, an Essay for Writers. University of Georgia Press. 2001. OCLC 928383514.
- New and Selected Poems, 1974-2004. Penguin. 2004. OCLC 52773666.
- Unknown Friends. Penguin. 2007. OCLC 71146622.
- Callings. Penguin. 2010. OCLC 567155180.
- Another Reason. Penguin. 2014. OCLC 852238359.
- Night School. Penguin. 2018. ISBN 978-0143132356.
- Earthborn. Penguin. 2022. ISBN 978-0143137016.
References
- ^ Donovan, Patricia (2000-04-21). "UB's Carl Dennis Receives One Of The Most Distinguished Literary Awards In The English Language". Archived from the original on 2002-06-13. University at Buffalo news release.
- ^ a b Peradotto, Nicole (Fall 2002). "A Poets' Poet: A Conversation with Carl Dennis". UB Today. Archived from the original on 2003-05-04. Article and Interview in UB Today, University at Buffalo's online alumni magazine.
- ^ Slaughter, William (2002). "The One Life You'd Have Wanted to Live: Reading William Stafford, Carl Dennis, Louis Simpson, and America". Frigate: The Transverse Review of Books. Archived from the original on 2002-02-07.
- ^ Orr, David (May 16, 2004). "Poet on Main Street". The New York Times. Review of Carl Dennis's New and Selected Poems: 1974-2004.
- ^ Sleigh, Tom (1985-07-21). "Of Hector, Orpheus and Max Jacob". The New York Times. Review of Carl Dennis's The Near World.
Further reading
- "Biography - Carl Dennis". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2008-08-18.
- Dennis, Carl. "Faculty: Carl Dennis". Archived from the original on 2005-02-25. Dennis' faculty homepage at University at Buffalo.
- Christopherson, Bill. "The 'I' and the Beholder: Negotiating the Shoals of Personal Narrative". Poetry Daily. Archived from the original on 2003-06-07.
- Ingersoll, Earl G.; Kitchen, Judith; Rubin, Kitchen (1989). "The Oracle in the World of Experience: A Conversation with Carl Dennis". The Post-confessionals: Conversations with American poets of the Eighties. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. p. 85. ISBN 978-0-8386-3330-4.
- "Carl Dennis (1939 - )". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 2008-08-18. Biography and links to several of Dennis' poems.