There is Hermes, who, if you can hold
him still, will "want to sit on the step/Under the stars for as long as
you live/And stiff the fragrance of wine and barley/As it blows from the
altar on a salty sea breeze…"
There is a guardian angel who tells her
charge that the plaid jacket he's about to put on "Will prove too loud
for the soft-spoken sensitive woman you're destined to meet tonight in
line at the theater/When everything depends on a first impression."
And its pages are colored by saints—official
and of a kind. There is St. Francis, who cannot comfort the dying young
nun with the assurance that her suffering has a purpose. There is the
limonata peddler who appears to the speaker beside a Roman cemetery
in the brutal head of an August day—a "windfall" from the "Bureau
of Joy." Even the Oracle at Delphi, offers a blessing—her foam-flecked
lips uttering words meaningless and mysterious enough to mean what we
need to believe they mean.
In a voice reminiscent at times of the
Chinese poet Li Po, whom he honors in a poem dedicated to his friend and
colleague, the late Mac Hammond, Dennis, a professor emeritus of English
at UB, rides the waves of spiritual expressiveness and wonder, piercing
the reader with observations so honest that they startle and shame.
Haven't we sat bored at the deathbed of
a dear friend who forgives us even as we twitched in silence, acutely
aware of the other things we might be doing? Haven't we allowed ourselves
to imagine lives we envy as unhappier, more disappointed than our own—and
hasn't it drowned our envy in a moment of satisfaction that allowed us
to keep going?
Dennis' gods, if they are real, if they
are anywhere at all, are sitting in our kitchens, whispering in our ears
about what to order at Happy Jack's, soothing our hearts and making them
ache. In one rather startling poem, "Progressive Health," the speaker
is invited to become a god himself by donating all his organs while still
alive.
However long he might have to live, the
would-be procurer assures him, it is nothing compared to the total years
of life that would be realized by the six individuals who would receive
his assorted parts. It is a burden the speaker can hardly bear. Can he
make a life six times as full as it would be if he died?
He is asked, "Why be a drudge staggering
to the end of your life/Under this crushing burden when, with a single
word/You could be a god, one of the few gods/Who, when called upon, really
listens?"
The book was not planned as one that would
express religious—"I would call then 'spiritual'"—sensibilities,
Dennis says.
"It was only in retrospect, after the
poems were written, that I saw the connection among them," he says. "I've
expressed an explicit religious perspective in other books, but this one
is more focused, which is why I chose the name 'Practical Gods.'"
Dennis was not aware that he had been
nominated for the Pulitzer and, in fact, the news that he had won for
his eighth book of poetry was delivered in a call from an Associated Press
reporter.
He is honored, but says the ultimate benefit
may be in book sales and in a new confidence on the part of his publisher.
Although the prize was awarded for "Practical
Gods," he assumes that he probably received it for the body of work he
has written over the past 30 years, which includes eight critically acclaimed
books of poems, scores of magazine publications, inclusion in the most
prestigious literary anthologies and a book of essays.
"I think the judges were investing in
a commodity that has legs," he says.
If "Practical Gods" has a message, he
says, it is that we live our lives with care and attentiveness. Or listen
to those voices we may call "gods" who give us practical advice or tell
us the way things really are, as, in one poem, a gentle-hearted but realistic
Euridyce tells Orpheus that she was gone from his life before he ever
turned around to look at her face and that, frankly, if he could see the
future like she can, he'd be relieved.
These gods speak of forgiveness and suggest
how we should live, but do so during dinners at May Jen as we watch the
rain on Elmwood Avenue; they engage us in Kaufmann's men's department
or while traveling in the Tyrol. Their world is fraught with possibilities,
parallel universes that do not exist but offer alternatives to the way
things actually turned out.
Regardless of the plethora of deities
named and unnamed who populate "Practical Gods," Dennis says that he is
not a particularly religious person, nor one who embraces the likelihood
of a life beyond this one. Although he might not entirely discount any
possibility, from Odysseus' shades to Buddhist notions of the reincarnation,
he's just not counting on anything like that—he says it seems too
good to be true.
"I wouldn't dignify the spiritual process
here with the term 'search,'" he says. "I'm intrigued by religion and,
of course, regardless of what we believe ourselves, we can hardly help
but be engaged by various religious points of view. I've found that the
dialogue with religious perspectives helps sharpen my notions of how I
should live."
As his poetry makes clear, Dennis is acutely
aware of life's losses and gains. One source of good fortune for him has
been the UB Department of English.
"It has been a very congenial and welcoming
place to work all these years," he says. "It's been open to writers being
on the faculty and being a part of the life of the department. This isn't
true about many English departments in the country, where there's often
a radical split between the writers and the literary scholars. I've been
very fortunate in that regard, and I'm grateful for it."
