By Hank Hoffman
In the beginning was the (fill in the blank). For poet Richard Deming, finding the right word is a means to challenging expectations rather than fulfilling them. With a shout-out to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Deming considers attentiveness to language — and particularly its surprises and revelations — a way of being fully alive.
Deming’s first book of poetry, Let’s Not Call It Consequence, was published last year by Shearsman Books. A lecturer in the English department at Yale University and a literary critic as well as a poet, Deming has also authored Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading, published by Stanford University Press in 2007. With Nancy Kuhl, he edits the New Haven-based Phylum Press, which publishes poetry chapbooks and pamphlets.
Just as we cannot know how each day will end, Deming crafts lines that demand attention and resist pat conclusions. If you think you know where a phrase is leading, you are bound to be confounded. He calls it an “allergy to narrative.” When I ask him, in an interview in his New Haven home, whether he considers himself a postmodernist, he demurs.
“I think of myself as a neo-Modernist. The Modernists were interested in how you inherit authority or how you think of form,” says Deming.
Deming cites what he calls poet William Carlos Williams’ “polemical and provocative” contention that “all sonnets say the same thing.”
“What he meant was that there is a formal and rhetorical structure of a sonnet and one of the things we love about a sonnet, and one that’s well-written, is the way it surprises us in fulfilling all its requirements. Where it zigs where we know it should zag, but still comes to the same sense of closure,” explains Deming. “If you are saying form is a way of creating and mediating experience, then we know where we are going to go. We know, to use (a) narrative (example), that James Bond will get out of the problem. It’s how he does it that interests us. And it’s the same way with traditional form.
“I’m more interested in finding ways of writing form that discovers itself as it goes along, and thinks through its own logic,” says Deming. “Otherwise, it’s not your experience. You are just using a template that you pour that into. That’s the kind of narrative that gets me uncomfortable. I know where I’m going and it’s almost as if I don’t need to show up.”
There are recurring themes, motifs, words. Mirrors, the night, insomnia and sleep, tongue. The latter word evokes various associations: lust, speaking and, perhaps most relevant in considering Deming’s poetry, the phrase “it’s on the tip of my tongue.” The meaning you know is there — believe is there — but lies just beyond your reach.
Deming’s poems are anchored in earthy images and an appreciation of the tactile, physical nature of existence, but they are as easy to grasp as smoke. Two lines from the powerful and elusive “The Logic of Green”: “Kindergarteners drag their feet and leaves make it/sound like rain. Or, sound like sound. Or, sound.” In the same poem, Deming offers an algebraic metaphor: “let x stand for the Scioto River running through Columbus, OH” but subverts it by soon using x in a different context with a plainly different meaning. Words are variables in the search for meaning, not constants.
Deming’s love of finely wrought poetic language has deep roots. When he was 6 or 7 years old, his parents would drop him off at the local high school to hang out while his older brother rehearsed Shakespeare plays. It was a cheap means of babysitting.
“I fell in love with Shakespeare. It wasn’t presented as hard. And I got to hear the same lines over and over. It was my knucklehead brother acting, so it wasn’t at all scary,” recalls Deming.
His parents helped him out when he told them he wanted to read the plays. Playing in bands in high school — Deming was a drummer and percussionist who majored in music and composition before switching to English — he wrote lyrics as an “underground way of writing poetry” in an “anti-intellectual town.”
After switching his major to English, Deming was fortunate to have teachers who validated his desire to be a writer. Many of the professors in the doctoral program at the University of Buffalo — Deming took theory and poetics — were poets themselves, including Robert Creeley, Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe. They taught literature, Deming says, as a living art.
He sees an important corollary to his approach in the visual arts, specifically the work of the Abstract Expressionists.
“Thinking about the actual material of the paint is to me like thinking about each word, or each letter sometimes,” says Deming. This concern for the minutiae of the writing experience is one of the characteristics that distinguishes Deming from his friends who write fiction.
“The story itself takes over,” Deming says of fiction. “It’s harder to pay attention to the experience of every word because there is a narrative force driving things along.”
Where narrative writers paint in broader strokes, Deming says, “poets are really obsessed with every moment and the effect of each word and each series of words.”
The process of meaning-making matters more to Deming than trying to convey a particular point. His poems, he says, “don’t have morals. They don’t necessarily have an argument. I’m so allergic to narrative that even within a lyric sentence it will double back on itself. It will start to contradict itself. Nouns become verbs, verbs become nouns. It’s not ungrammatical. It’s a‑grammatical.”
He is engaged in a balancing act, “the concrete particular giving rise to the abstract thought,” and vice versa.
Referring to his book’s title, Let’s Not Call It Consequence, Deming says “the idea is that in every sentence we speak, more or less, there is a way you can anticipate the ending. But if you change direction, the reader has to stay with every word. How does this make sense? And if it doesn’t make sense, what about it doesn’t make sense?
“When you do that, you’re starting to realize what makes meaning and what resists meaning,” Deming argues. “And what happens if it resists meaning and you try to make that meaning work anyway? Then you’re investing yourself in that process.”
This mode of literary play extends to the layout of the poems. Line breaks, indentations, are as much a choice as lyric. Why should every line be flush left?
Deming muses, “What happens to us cognitively when we start to let those words drift? If the white space around it gives it more emphasis or somehow isolates that word, and what happens when that word is isolated? I think of the page not as a canvas but it is a field, so why not make use of that field?”
This is not populist poetry. I ask Deming what poetry of this type demands of the reader. Prefacing his response by saying it “isn’t going to sound necessarily fair,” he tells me, “Poetry should ask us everything of ourselves. A good poem, a great poem, does do that.
“If we say a poem resists easy summation, easy reading, and then we have to give more of ourselves — at least our time — to respond to it, then we’re discovering ourselves through that act,” he argues.
“We live complex lives so our art should be as complex,” Deming says. “Poetry is that kind of wager.”
Deming offers an algebraic metaphor: ‘let x stand for the Scioto River running through Columbus, OH’ but subverts it by soon using x in a different context with a plainly different meaning. Words are variables in the search for meaning, not constants.
This column was originally published in The Arts Paper, a publication of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven.