Denise Duhamel and Sequences in Books of Poetry

Wherein Characters or Themes Repeat

I have always been a fan of short-story and poetry sequences where characters keep reappearing or a central “I” controls the tale. Often we are supposed to look at those “I”s ironically, as in John Berryman’s The Dream Songs or Denis Johnson’s short story collection, Jesus’s Son. I did my own take on sequences in my second book of prose poems, Miracles & Mortifications, which includes two sequences, narrated by two very different first person narrators. Miracles & Mortifications in my Collected Poems The first narrator is an obsessive lover chasing his often unfaithful girlfriend all over the globe; the second narrator is a worried father who time travels with his teenage son in order to meet some of the most famous personages of history in a failed attempt to teach his son life lessons.

But you don’t have to have a first person narrator to create a sequence, as in shown in Nin Andrews classic book of prose poems, The Book of Orgasms, or Denise Duhamel’s book of verse, Kinky. In the former book, Andrews satirizes the way both sexes perceive orgasms by personifying the indescribable; in the latter book, Duhamel channels the Barbie myth to poke fun of, quite frankly, just about everything.

Duhamel new chapbook, In Which, a verse sequence was just published by the Rattle Foundation. In Which Denise Duhamel is at the top of her game in In Which—the title paying homage to and parodying an 18th-century chapter-title conceit. In Which is a comically brutal book where Duhamel, employing a kind of amused outrage, deconstructs the grand narratives we stupidly accept and live by. No one and nothing escape her biting wit, not even herself, which makes this little book even more charming and authentic. For as we all know, every satirist is really an idealist who is chronically disappointed by the silliness of the human condition, but whose satire can only work if she has the courage to ridicule her own fears and desires. Duhamel succeeds in this difficult tap dance, creating an energy throughout the book that kept me constantly jotting down in the margins, “Whoof!” or “Wow!”

Here are a few poems from the book.

POEM IN WHICH MY SPEAKER IS BORED WITH MY REAL LIFE 

My speaker wants to make some big pronouncements, fly
with extended metaphors. She’s disgusted when I toss 
the coffee grounds in the trash without even trying 
to make an image. Don’t they look like loam,
the crushed beans once whole—yes, crushed and used,
the way I sometimes feel? My speaker wants to know
where the trash ultimately goes. Reminds me 
about Thoreau—I can stand as remote from myself 
as from another. I have long loved the way the poet 
Ai’s name was pronounced “I,” but my speaker is bored—
I have written about this before. My speaker
wants me to be someone else in this poem—Dumbo 
or Marilyn Monroe, or catapult back to my younger self, 
a little girl wrapped in victimhood or a Superman’s cape
depending on the day. I tell my speaker the old joke 
about the naive bride—First the aisle, then the altar. 
Then her hymn—I’ll alter him. Hear the “I” in aisle? I ask. 
But my speaker is unimpressed. Aye aye aye aye, 
I am the Frito Bandito, I used to sing with my sister.
The first “aye” sounded like “I” and then
the next three sounded like they began with a “y.”
A Frito bandito robbed people of their chips
at gunpoint. He was a mascot of our youth. Back then,
we weren’t afraid of banditos or guns. They were just 
cartoons. We weren’t outraged by any Mexican stereotypes 
as we would be now. I could have never predicted
the gun violence so prevalent in my adulthood, 
a recent mass shooting right on the beach
where I walk every day. A 15-year-old boy 
who the medics thought was hit in the heart, 
his left side torn open by bullets, lived. He had
a congenital condition that placed his heart 
on the right side. Can there really be a feel good story 
about a mass shooting? I think not. And yet 
how giddy I was to hear this. I imagined 
the shocked medic wondering at the magic 
of this young man still breathing. Brig, a fiction student, 
said I could use his image—the fluorescent light of lies. 
He meant the ceilings of hospitals and the false promises 
of enthusiastic doctors and nurses. He recently lost 
his young wife. I, my mother. This boy will live, I told Brig.
This boy will live. The coffee bean unground, become whole
in reverse. This boy’s heart intact. I had walked 
the same beach only hours earlier. I walk it almost every day, 
my speaker wanting me to make big pronouncements—
today about violence, but most days about the dying sea.

SELF-PORTRAIT IN WHICH I REFUSE TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY
				
That’s me not voting because I am sick
of being lied to, me tossing my Coke Zero can
out the car window—let Coke clean up the planet.
That’s me not saying sorry. That’s me
not picking up your socks or mothering you
so you’ll feel better about your temper. 
That’s me not paying my taxes and not bringing
my cloth tote to the store. That’s me refusing 
to wear my seatbelt, my perpetual smile. That’s me
eating a pink steak, running up a credit card
I’ll never pay. That’s me calling in sick—so sick
of being lied to I burn down a perfectly nice house.

POEM IN WHICH I NEVER STOPPED DRINKING

I’m dead by now—car crash or bad fall. Or I’m still here, but feeling dead inside, yelling at Target cashiers or maybe staying home, my Tower Vodka delivered by Total Wine. I have more cringy stories or stories swirling about me. I might have slept with a student by now or a dean who’s a drunk like me. I might have been fired, actually, claiming my dismissal was all someone else’s fault. I never developed the good habit of flossing daily or trying to get eight hours of sleep in a row. I might have drowned in a pool or the ocean or a bathtub. I might have pissed myself in public. I have surely forgotten the rent check, credit card payment, lost my voter ID. I might have stopped writing poems entirely, with excuses about why they are stupid. I might have stopped reading them too. Or there I was, until I wasn’t—a high-functioning, lampshade-wearing jokester who tripped on a step and hit her head, who tore through that stop sign on her way home. 

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss