What a challenge for poetry to communicate simultaneity. To enact “while,” like maybe “while” “will have been being” “while” another thing will have been happening “while” another thing and so on. I have been reading a series of very exciting poems by Coleman Edward Dues. Or more accurately I wish I could experience each of these poems “while” I was reading another of his poems, because that would be an exciting thing to experience.
You know, to be doing the method a poem is doing while I’m reading a poem that puts me in mind of doing things, like seeing a fire-breathing dragon donning a CPAP. Or the walker “will have been walking around.” Yes, you read that right! It’s so redundant! I’m afraid I’m just making Dues’s poems sound very didactic. GOOD! Because they are! And if you’re the type of reader summarily reducing descriptions like “didactic” or “formulaic” to a heap of poems you know you don’t like, then GO AWAY! The surprise in these poems is for readers who like to have fun while they’re reading.
I honestly don’t know how to distance myself from the enthusiasm I have for this poem (in FENCE 40) or the other Dues poems I read in that issue of FENCE and Denver Quarterly 57.2. I don’t know how to admit I wasn’t sure whether Dues was going to pull off all this didactic stuff. Because I think poems in this style are risky. There are many ways the underlying sentiment can get drowned out by an impulse to interconnect everything. Using -ing can be a weak present tense to rely on, and “while,” while it’s literally being simultaneous to the thing it wants to be simultaneous to, it can also tax the energy that churns in all the present-tense-ness (”present tension” I think, and laugh at how bad it sounds). Like why not link all these “while” statements to a paratactic sequence. Don’t commit entirely to the simultaneity. Frame and phrase the sequence of observations so there isn’t much grammatical or punctuated space between things. That does a pretty good job feeling simultaneous.
But Dues is like, “while” you do that, I’ll make a “while” repurposing machine. And then he calls it a poem. He exaggerates the simultaneity with a “have been [verb]-ing” maneuver, often stated as “have been being.” And it’s exciting to read! Because overstatement really isn’t supposed to be fun. Or when it is fun, it’s not as explicit what’s making it so fun. It’s like Dues is showing us the inside of the poem-machine while he’s also assembling a carnival of observations, which he “will have been being” observed with the other observations in the poem! OMG. I can feel more exclamation points coming on!! That’s the experience of Dues’s poem! And if you were thinking, “What Kent Shaw is describing is just a stunt,” I would encourage you to read the poem. Because it starts with this intransitive statement, “The heart will have been being, somewhat.” And by apposition, all I can think is these observations add up to the movement of a heart. Oh, generous movement of a heart containing multitudes like all the other idiosyncratic observations Dues pastes onto it!