Rooftop Poetry Club - Dennis Reed

Dennis Reed
reeddj@buffalostate.edu

Bio:
Dennis works in Butler Library's Media Services, helping maintain various library Web pages (including this one) and fielding questions from students. He took his M.A. in English from Buffalo State in December 2008.

He first became interested in poetry in the 2nd grade, where he quickly discovered that writing poems was a reliable way of escaping handwriting drills. His first poem concerned a "sunny sun" that "shone on everyone" that "day that [he] went out to play." Dennis tackled darker themes in subsequent efforts that year, including a meditation on the hazards of frostbite, and a tale of a vacationing witch whose chief delight was "witchy soda."

His first memorable encounter with the poetry of others came in the 9th grade, with the acquisition of a 25-pound, jacketless, frayed, blue anthology of American and British poetry at a local flea market. At lunch time Dennis would tote the massive volume into the cafeteria to read aloud to other classmates--thus putting to rest any early speculation that he might find a date for his senior prom. Whitman, Keats, Shelley, and Millay were immediate favorites. Dennis has since made amends with Emily Dickenson, whose six pages of poems he had ostentatiously torn out of the big blue anthology in front of his lunch-time friends when the poems' meanings remained obstinately hidden after two readings.

After high school, Dennis resumed writing his own poetry. He haunted readings in the Buffalo area, and had a poem published in the small, discriminating, Lockport-based Words on Paper Press. The Buffalo State literary publication Portrait also selected a half-dozen of his submissions for publication between 1996 and 2003. His future plans include eating eggs, and finishing Finnegans Wake this weekend.

Poems:

morning and night song

Because these are these words exactly,
and nothing else;
Because each new word is a new flag in a new country,
that we must abandon immediately, or die;
Because my heart mingles with night airs,
and communes in silent joy with the white spray of stars;
Because the way out is truly the way in;
Because the wisdom of a trillion unrecorded lives
is awake inside me, and will speak;
Because the sky has portals enough;
Because the afterlife is loaded with darkness,
but light is only one kind of tangibility;
Because no fact nor whim nor apprehension is
without its own little life, its own holy vector;
Because the mystic accent is what is required here, and
will be required again, and will not be required;
Because songs must end, but a miracle is a timeless commodity;
Because the crows of time have grown fat on our breadcrumbs;
Because we are capable of throwing hoops around “Time” and “Nature,”
and of framing the shifting mists;
Because the workaday world melts into the long night of prayers;
Because we must push and pull at a thing
in order to discover its true shape;
Because prophecy is, happily, inevitable;
Because everything at our feet may be fashioned into a conveyance;
Because those are ropes, hanging from the stars;
Because our sorrows are as seasons in the mountains;
Because reverence is the better part of reverie;
Because my poem wanders to find its theme.

Getting Lost

those summer nights are just too huge
to carry around;
too vast to hand to you
the way I want.

how to get a hold of:
moisture held aloft in the warm folds of the wind...
yellow stars swelling and shuddering in the sympathetic ether...
the lake shedding skin after aromatic skin...
hot sand at midnight, hissing under our blanket...
your milky breath in my ear,
and a love act performed in full view
of countless galaxies...?

I can give you this tattered half of a map,
but it will be useless unless
you have the other half:
unless you've already found these places for yourself

For Blake

the soft, newly-living eyes of Eurydice;
the burning husk of carefree Gomorrah;
the once-lovely head of Gorgon Medusa,
crowned with snakes;

these are the Gates of Paradise
these are the necessary fire-paths

and we are not fooled.