Dumuzi

Dumuzi, my second book of poems, was published in 2020 by Gaspereau Press.

It began in the last millennium when I woke from a dream. I was in the wings of a stage. My parents held my hands, one on each side. Onstage was a market I walked out into: it was all colour, sound & form, the great world. My parents were gone, and running down alleys, overleaping puddles, hesitantly approaching inscrutable displays, I shone with joy, knowing the ruin around me & in me was held in a perfect form by their love. I woke & spent 20 years making images of that form. Dumuzi is an assemblage of my failures.

Twenty years! A longer trail of wreckage and rejects, cast-off forms & angles of approach, than I could ever remember. It sprawled, got vispo, spun off other projects, danced tarantella to a verbal-visual polyrhythmic syncopation. Busted every damn frame I gave it.

Now at an end, it’s simple, 50 or so lyrics enacting my struggle to have faith in being.

At Leaf

A son of my
first mind, was
at leaf, wind on
raw skin, fist
of one thirst
upthrust.
                       Roars
snowmelt where
hemlocks over-
hanging shiver
motherlove.
                              Sur-
round of what
no one had
made, made
of what no
surround
had.

That’s the first, and the title poem comes next.

Dumuzi

Let no state be
enemy. Wet, dry, agon.
Work an inmost first
flower mutedly.

Wind blows light about
the life (hemlocks) from
which art is not apart

nor of a part. What a
rock thought to do
was rain and it
rained.

Deer come
out of th
hill.

Dumuzi – a Sumerian god of the vegetation, fertility, ongoing spring. The poems invoke his deathless earth energy for aid. There’s not a lot about Dumuzi in the poems, so I give this by way of a note at the back:

Out of Sumer, Dumuzi, fertility god, crushed king. His other, Inanna, she of increase, went down to their underworld for fun and profit; why for real though’s a hard story to tell. On her way up & out, guided by hyperathletic postal demons called galla, and told one’s got to take her place, divine rule of bloodless metamorphosis they sez, who’s her eye land on but her arrogant lovely benighted D. Take this one sez & game afoot. Flees. Caught. Ta’en in chains. His butter churn’s broke & an empty windy sheepfold. Sumerian cuneiform’s the same glyph for sheepfold & vulva; both have place in the formless field of his shining care. Later the women find his body unmoving outside citygates. Geshtinanna, his sister & my book’s hero, sez I will take his place, ½ a year underearth, & so she does.

A further account of their intersecting cycles here.

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The image did not stay gone. As I was to start proofreading, a new idea for making pictures came, and my editor at Gaspereau, Andrew Steeves, graciously indulged it.

Dumuzi and Geshtinanna in the underworld, with clay to eat & dust to drink, wearing dead wings, watching the dust thicken:

And Geshtinanna, above ground, asking Dumuzi not to tell her his prophetic dream:

The images began from this scrap of security envelope lining:

I write at length about the process, a sort of digital relief printing, here.

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Wasn’t easy to strip the book down. I wanted mess multiplicity & sprawl – a whole as unrehearsed as a vacant lot gone to weeds in an ugly corner of New Jersey, yet shapely also, each note in its suited place, like a late Baroque symphony.

It’s what comes of taking Spring and All as your, not model, your own insight.

Several times, thought I had it. No press agreed; the book was not getting picked up. So, I surrendered my intention for it, scaled it way back – and then, like a Dionysian vine pruned down to earth, it sprang out again; as said.

☜ poetry portfolio

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Post Holes

Most of these blog posts speak of earlier drafts, in their innocence.

Dumuzi, the meta-poem
Table of contents of the [almost] finished MS

Handwriting practice
An early try at aasemic writing on the photocopier

Trust yr boredom
On Kuan Yin & junk mail bricolage

Dumuzi at an end
Announcing [three years early] that the MS is done

Interstellar Addendum
Science fiction and the mathematical sublime

Sad Inanna
Back when Inanna’s story was folded into Dumuzi’s

Junk mail bricolage II
On pareidolia and handwriting

Paperwhites, for Elise
The last poem

Junk mail bricolage I
Missing my friend, getting that down in paper

Out of Sumer,
The prose that became the base text for the aasemic pages