Norman Dubie

Posted on December 13, 2006
Filed Under Poetry, Reading, Writing |

The other day I pulled an old Selected & New Poems by Norman Dubie off the shelf in my office & stuck it in my briefcase to take home. No particular reason. I’ve been dipping into the book more or less at random over the last few days — giving myself a break between reading student papers — & have found much to admire. Dubie’s sentences are lush & supple, he has a subtle ear, & the rural landscapes & narratives I once found difficult to connect to now seem emotionally resonant. So I was surprised — shocked — when I flipped to the copyright page & discovered the volume was published in 1983! I own a couple of Dubie’s books from the 1990s, but I haven’t read them with care. Makes me at least tempted to shell out for The Mercy Seat: Collected & New Poems, which from the descriptions in Publisher’s Weekly & Library Journal, appears to be a career summation, the way a retrospective at MoMA might sum up the career of a contemporary painter. Not a final statement, but a declaration of lasting value.

It’s not surprising that Norman Dubie’s aesthetic & my own would have similar contours. He was a student & then a teacher at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the early seventies, though he left just before I was a student there. If he took the Stevens path out of the Workshop, I took the William Carlos Williams path. Third person versus first person.
Dubie has certainly been more prolific than I have. (Twenty books to my four.) But both of us have remained within the modernist framework of particularity, precision, rigor, & realism. That is, what Charles Bernstein has called the “turn toward language,” has left us unmoved. I have to admit that this “turn” profoundly undermined my confidence in my own poetic project over the last decade, slowing me almost to a crawl. Dubie is a little older than me, perhaps better situated in the literary flow to survive the attack on representation. I’m just recovering my balance.