Stephen Dobyns Reading to Packed House at ASU, originally uploaded by johntynan.

A creative writing instructor, a young woman, I did not get a chance to ask her name, sat next to me in the Pima Auditorium in the Memorial Union at Arizona State University tonight for a chance to hear Stephen Dobyns give a reading of his poems. And for a considerable segment of the reading, she bent over, her head to her knees, presumably giving full concentration to the poems, but also, I gathered, to hide her head from the audacity of the images that Dobyns whipped out (as in the poem “Payback”, for example, where a boy is caught bending over backwards naked to light his own farts; one of the tamer, scatological scenes of the evening). But for her, as an instructor, I imagined this reading conjuring it’s own particular, hellish premonitions of freshmen poems blowing past all current boundaries of decorum, emboldened by tonight’s reader’s talent for riffing off visceral thrills (as he does in channeling a dog and a dog’s inhibitions in “How to Like It”, or when advocating, in “Desire”, for the joys of the flesh). And I can imagine the unvarnished poems of confession that this instructor might have to grade, and I have to say, “Bravo! What a bold way to start a semester!”

And while the central image of “Tenderly” has to be the strangest dinner scene I’ve ever imagined, these poems make good use of the whirlwind that these images and situations create to come through with some great language, great lines and remarkable moments of reflection. For instance, in the poem “Bleeder” the frenetic peak of absurdity at the climax of the poem arises to lines like:

and what he gave us was a sense of being bad
together. He took us from our private spite
and offered our bullying a common cause

Or take this stanza from “Pastel Dresses”:

Was that her or some other girl?

Scattered fragments, scattered faces —
the way a breeze at morning
dispenses mist from a pond,
so the letters of her name

return to the alphabet.[..]

It’s beautiful and magical and helps to set up a memorable last line.

But where the reading paid off for me was in the last two, as yet unpublished(?), poems. The poem “Rhinoceros” cleverly likens the solitary itch to create to “being your own Swiss Army Knife or SUV.” In “Ducks”, Dobyns literally pits the phrase “Demand-Side Economics of Poetry” (which I Googled, you can find it here) with Basho’s sense of Art for Art’s Sake. I couldn’t stop thinking that this tour de force of incongruity was meant to be a counterpoint to Lary Levis’ low-flying Ducks, and if so, it did achieve sufficient lift. Another example of “a great way to start a semester. Bravo!”