Skip to main content

Featured Poet: Dean Rader

Eyewear is very glad to welcome American poet Dean Rader (pictured) this autumnal mid-October Friday. Rader has published widely in the fields of poetry, American Indian studies, and popular culture.  His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize (American version), judged by Claudia Keelan.  In 2009, Kelly Cherry selected his poem “Hesiod in Oklahoma, 1934” for the prestigious Sow’s Ear Poetry Prize.  He is the author of a best-selling textbook on writing and popular culture, The World is a Text (with Jonathan Silverman), which just went into its fourth edition.


With poet Janice Gould, he co-edited Speak To Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2003), the first collection of essays devoted to Native American poetry.  Most recently, he curated a special issue of Sentence devoted to American Indian prose poetry.  His newest scholarly book, Engaged Resistance: Contemporary American Indian Art, Literature, and Film is forthcoming in 2011 from the University of Texas Press. Rader blogs about the intersection of literature, culture, politics and media at The Weekly Rader, one of the best blogs of its kind in the English speaking-world, and he reviews poetry regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle for whom he has also contributed a number of op-ed pieces.


He has taught at SUNY-Binghamton, Georgia Tech, and Texas Lutheran University.  At present, he is a Professor of English at the University of San Francisco.  Rader is an American poet that readers in Britain should begin to get onto their radars, to state the blinkin' obvious.



Traveling to Oklahoma for my Grandmother’s Funeral,
I Write a Poem about Wallace Stevens


                                                            I
Early October and in Hartford,
The leaves leave on their orange parkas.
Winter sidles up like a bad salesman.

Section 14 of Cedar Hill Cemetery.
The grass, autumn-flecked, stubbles
up: the uncut hair of graves.

Twenty-three days from now,
A maple leaf will unzip and
Head to the hard world below

Lighting on the ground about seven feet
Above the darkening body of Wallace Stevens:
Fat man, terrestrial, invisible as a god.


                                                            II
October on United Airlines flight 5481, seat 7C.
I am traveling to Oklahoma for my grandmother’s funeral,
But all I want is to write a poem about Stevens:

The porch of spirits lingering, the grave in Hartford
Where he lay.  My grandmother lies on a table
In the Southland funeral home in Tulsa.

Her body flies out of her body at an astonishing speed,
As though with purpose or direction, like an airplane
funneling home inside some great blue tube of sky.

Like everything else, we are in transit.  We all sail
Toward the ocean of the dead, land of unknown arrival
And itinerary.  Who is  it that plans the schedule of ghosts?



III
The priest attending to Stevens
During his final days in the hospital,
Swears he made a deathbed conversion


to Catholicism, a claim his daughter denies. 
I deny him nothing.  It is cold in Connecticut.
The heavenly palms and bright green wings

Of Florida might as well be in Ceylon or Esthonia.
Is it possible that in the dissolving moment,
Stevens asked something of the God he believed

Might be a poem, or a woman skating?  Who
Is to say that God took him seriously? At what
Point does the believer become the believed?

                                                            IV
The elderly woman next to me
In 7D has been peeking at this poem
For several minutes.

I don’t mind,
Because the next line is this:
She will die before I do,

As will the man two rows in front
In 5C and his wife in 5D.  But then again,
All of us on the plane could get there

In seconds.  In the reverse burial that is this sky,
We die forward into the nothing that is not yet revealed. 
We are the fading Stevens: we have no idea what lies ahead.


                                                            V
I wake and realize it’s October 2, Stevens’s birthday. 
In Oklahoma, the red dirt goes on being red—
The dogwoods, the willows, the beige bony wheat stubs:

The riven days of wind: the sky like a drive-in screen:
The sky like an empty page: the sky like an underground sea.
Take me down, I say out loud, in this soft silver coffin. 

It’s the other world I want right now.  But Oklahoma spools
On below.  What I need is to ask my grandmother—
Her entire life a believer—if, in that flash of black light,

In that dissolving instant, she had the opposite doubts
Of Stevens; if she renounced the supreme fiction, the emptiness
Suddenly so clear, beyond the dividing and indifferent blue.

poem by Dean Rader, from his ward-winning collection Works & Days; reprinted with permission

Comments

Anonymous said…
Kudos to Radar for his amazing debut collection! I had him as a professor at USF and he's truly one of the best that campus has ever seen. Here's looking forward to many more works ahead by this talented teacher, poet and writer!
Anonymous said…
great work Dean! Enjoyable, insightful and earthy Oklahoman :) Ken Hada
PoInOak said…
I saw him read last week in Berkeley with Troy Jollimore. It was one of the funniest--maybe THE funniest--poetry readings I've ever been to. This poem is pretty humorous but it doesn't capture how funny the whole book is. It's already sold out at all of the bookstores in the East Bay!
BKD said…
Buy this amazing book. You won't regret it. A tour-de-force and fun yet intellectually engaging read from an all-around great poet and person. --From BKD at USF

Popular posts from this blog

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise...