SO MUCH MORE: Abstracts, Unfinished Sequences, and Political Poems
(Small Harbor, 2024)
by Darren C. Demaree

Flailing Load Stones Catching Light
A Book Review by Tim Staley

In the title poem of W.H. Auden’s 1969 collection City Without Walls, Auden lays out the “dire poetics” which would topically drive American poetry for the next 55 years: environmental concerns, colonization, white supremacy, civil and political rights, the prison industrial complex, cops and robber barons, the fear of a computer takeover, violence, poverty, consumerism, and our addiction to gadgets, just to name a few. At the end of Auden’s poem you see all these dire concerns keeping the speaker up late at night in New York City. There’s nothing wrong with using your talents to stand up for what you believe in. Darren C. Demaree practices dire poetics as well, but there’s a difference between him and Auden in terms of their speaker’s location. If you imagine Auden’s speaker at sea describing the horrors, he’s in a yacht watching a sinking lifeboat of America on the horizon. The lifeboat is mostly submerged and there is a lone survivor flailing. You keep your eyes on the person flailing because flailing keeps our attention, and when you try to help them they pull you under too.

Demaree, a restless and probing poet (with 23 poetry collections by the age of 43) has developed a technique reliant on the flailing of language. Demaree’s speaker admits near the end of the book, “I always flail / with more words / than the washing off of words”. In So Much More sentences fly off in every direction but you don’t know if they even are sentences because there’s rarely punctuation, but you feel the presence of sentences because that’s how English builds; for example, you can’t attach Lego bricks by their sides. There’s just one direction to build Lego bricks and that’s how English is too.

The way in which Demaree is punctuation free risks more ambiguity than a touch like, say, W.S. Merwin’s when it comes to no punctuation. Merwin uses line breaks to parse and tie down meaning, and much of So Much More comes to us right-justified as unindented bricks of flailing text. I’ve never felt lost in a Merwin poem, but some of Demaree’s greatest successes in So Much More occur when you get lost, when you become unmoored, when you’re not sure if you’re in the middle of the sentence, the end of one, the beginning of another, or some rarefied territory in between. This form lends itself to the individual reader’s style of Lego building, allowing us to run-on, linger, or slingshot at will. For example, look at this structure from “#14”, the first piece in the unfinished bone requires bone sequence:

“…empathy empathy / empathy is the ending of just enough men to make it worth / being everything we need more of it should be glowing by / now that is how much we need it…”

The “it” before “should be glowing” could be doing at least 3 things at once: ending one phrase, beginning another, or doing both. I start playing a game of darting fragments. I start arranging blocks of information spilling from different phrases into sentences, moving backwards, forwards, swimming around, flailing for fun.

Demaree is also a master of repetition on par with Sylvia Plath. Unlike Plath, he often repeats 3 times, instead of 2, as he does with “empathy” in the passage above. In a 2024 interview Demaree said, “if you use a phrase once it’s typical, twice it’s hitting the brakes, three times it’s a slingshot.” In the same interview Demaree names Samuel Menashe as an influence. Samuel Menashe once said, “Rhyme seems natural to me. There is a lot of rhyme, unnoticed, in ordinary speech.” I mention this Menashe quote as Demaree relies on those unnoticed rhymes; for example, in the passage above notice all the soft, short “e” and long “e” sounds under the surface, not getting the attention they otherwise would in a lineated poem.

Many of these poems are the hypothesis and the figuring out which gives the book its charm; however, within each experiment is a load stone, a natural stone strong enough to bear significant weight. A foundational “sentence” or sticking point that seems to inform or give purpose to the flailing. You’ll have to read So Much More to find your own favorites; until then, here’s some of my favorite flailing load stones catching light:

“when we make promises to the wind we are as worthless as a held breath”

“I have been threatened by this world to be made into something other”

“if you’re stopping to create the insignia then the revolution has already failed”

“I thought we all promised to take the capital”

“a garden that refuses that refuses to steer the bloom towards the merciless crowds that want so badly to name the garden”

“the fixed dissolves in the fixing the fixing”

Demaree writes, “America chose to drown in the desert”. Imagine in the South Central New Mexico desert a carp writhing around in an irrigation ditch that’s been cut off. There’s just a little bit of water left, more of a puddle, and he’s flailing in the bright sun for his last breath and nobody’s watching him drown, but every once in a while the light cuts through the traditional dire poetics and catches the flail of scales, spine, and tail just right. With light Demaree catches all of it and So Much More, just right.

January 3, 2025
Las Cruces, NM