Issue 16, March 1998
John Carle - Book Review

I've been reading Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, a series of lectures on literature Calvino was to deliver at Harvard in the eighties. In them, he makes the case for including different "themes" in writing: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. (The sixth, consistency, remained unwritten at Calvino's death.)

I confess to having had a reluctance at times to delve into this book, primarily because I take the opposite view on the first topic, lightness. I like works that have some heft to them, works whose metaphors are of the body, or dirt, or rock, rather than images of, to use one overused example, the moon.

(Incidentally, I think the emphasis in the classroom on airy poetry may have something to do with why it's so hard to get high school kids to read poetry at all. High schoolers are interested in, above all, the body. This is not to say that we shouldn't teach "Kubla Khan" or "Tintern Abbey" but why belabor the point? Hell, let's have the courage to give them some Sandra Cisneros too. They'd listen to that, I'll bet.)

This taste for concrete imagery which has drawn me to the likes of Carolyn Forché and Galway Kinnell also draws me to much of Dancing Bear's work. Consider the evocation of what I take to be migrant farm workers in California's Napa Valley, from "When I Picked Grapes".

	We eat life
	because we are hungry
	and have no choice

However, for all that his work has been represented in all sixteen issues of Gravity to date, Dancing Bear almost always presents a challenge for me. The thing I enjoy most about this work - its plainspokenness - is also what troubles me the most. Undeniably poetry at many levels, at other points the writing in Dream pushes the envelope hard toward prose. Conversation, even.

I stole grace and eloquence
	from your life
because I do not see living life
	any other way

Forgive me
if you can
		-from "Morality"

Of course, this is a risk that any free-verser runs, and the temptation is always there to use that inherent freedom of form loosely. But what, for me, makes free verse work is the poet's ability to give life and meaning and movement and color to the images he creates, and this Dancing Bear does successfully more often than not. Take the opening and closing lines of "Stone":

I have a piece of the Earth Mother's heart
in my pocket
smooth, polished and warm
...
I have a stone of mother's heart
and when my work is done
it will lead my ashes
back to her

From a Reconstructed Dream is printed with every poem in a different font (some of them all but unreadable), which is distracting at best. Still, at thirty five pages a decent sampling of one writer's vision of American poetry outside the university writing programs, Dream is relevant and real.