Dale Jensen is one in a handful of poets who takes the personal and treats it as something so much bigger than himself without making ego part of it. His poems are full of word-play, e.e. cummings‘ economy and musicality, and a wickedly droll sense of humor where the ‘thing itself’ expands into larger meanings about what our lives are about:
MONDAY AFTERNOON
i’m gonna get tattoos
i’m gonna get little file cabinets
tattooed all over my forehead
with all of the file drawers
closed
Auto Bio (2010) is Jensen’s latest of several chapbooks that include Oedipus’ First Lover (2009), Cyclone Fence (2007), Purgatorial (2004), Twisted History (1999), Bar Room Ballads (1992), and Thebes (1991). As a result of their being published by small presses--Beatitude Press of Berkeley, Norton Coker Press, and Jensen’s own Malthus Press--these little gems have never received the kind of attention they deserve. I fear Auto Bio will suffer the same neglect, so addicted are we to the drab imprimaturs of university and better known publishing companies.
i take my pasts each
examine them
each in a sepia of its own dust
through which i can see
only when i look away . . .
all but the details grown over
by layers of mechanical dust
seen through the stone age of my imagination
as on the mechanical back of someone else’s android hand
(from “Notes For Auto Bio”)
Jensen started writing poetry around age 16. After college, he encountered the “cut-up” school of artist and poet Bryan Gysin and novelist William S. Burroughs. Initially inspired by Tristin Tzara, Surrealism and the Dadaist movement, this approach to writing is not driven by narrative as it challenges writer--and reader--to confront the chaos sequestered just beneath the surface of our seeming consciousness as well as in the universe itself. The poet uses various techniques to shake up language and discovers a freedom through randomness and reliance on “found” language. A delicate aesthetic evolves in the skillful hands of a poet who has something to say, as he or she discovers unexpected juxtapositions and surprising, often bizarre images. The surrealism of the technique appealed to Jensen as being “fun and unexpected but having a depth to it.”
Jensen has been working on Auto Bio for several years, putting out other books in the meantime. He noticed in the 1980s that “a lot of people were writing ‘therapy‘ poems. While he respects the conventions of narrative, he discovered that it is “the metaphor that keeps the auto-bio going.” In his book, historical fact or chronological order are forsaken in favor of finding another way to explore a life story, so the “i”of the poems (the lower-case is taken directly from cummings) is not necessarily that of the narrator, nor is it a persona. The poems are at once “accessible” yet strange, disturbing and inviting, silly and profound.
i missed your hints
they went sailing over my head
like ships in a higher atmosphere
and you’re gone
with them
so i’m here in a dried up world of cracked blood
even the sirens have gone home
even their rocks are left dry and saltless
even the sun shines tinnily like the edge of a knife
(from “Poem from Another Lifetime”)
Jensen’s real autobiography is actually quite interesting. Grandson of Danish immigrants, the Berkeley poet knows that “a lot of disasters exist behind immigration.” Many of his ancestors lost businesses or loved ones (due to tuberculosis) in the old country; those who emigrated landed penniless in America speaking a few words of heavily-accented English. His grandfather who was a stonemason in the old country became a chicken-farmer in Petaluma. His father, a carpenter, wanted his only son to become a doctor or lawyer. Jensen’s maternal Swedish relatives had similar life-stories and ambitions.
it wasn’t as if you were steam or magician’s smoke
rising like the first dawn over an ocean’s surface
or a newly strange man in a top hat
zinging out of a doorway in a city so medieval I had to blink twice . . .
it was that i saw your back from my book booth
in the town square of my own home town
as I talked to travelers from russia and oakland
under a sun only italy could imagine
as you bargained time with the cobbler’s daughter
in front of the well in front of the town hall tower
that you can stand on solid ground
here and redefine my own time
(from “Anachronism”)
His parents moved to East Oakland and Jensen grew up surrounded by families struggling to achieve the American dream or succumbing to its disappointing endgames. “I looked at all the hard knocks in my own family and wondered why it has to be this way. I got political.” At Castlemont High School, where the majority of students were African-American, the discrepancy between his father’s conservatism and class-defying dreams didn’t quite jive with the poet’s understanding of what his neighbors and friends were going through. Jensen, aware that in some way he was being destined to “to live out my father’s immigrant dreams,“ attended university, but instead of pre-med or law, he majored in psychology. No doubt he was struggling to understand why human beings do the things they do, or believe the stories that they tell themselves:
the force of narrative will goad the dog
into carrying the bones home
despite their glittery brightness
their strange really strange taste in his mouth
and he will guard them as his own
despite the will of the pack leader in the house
even when you’re small some things are your own
a dog could think that a dog can think
and they’ve found that the genes that make small dogs small
don’t make them think they’re small
(from “Finding Bones”)
What Jensen has honed in Auto Bio are poems that evoke truths even as they “talk story” in a highly musical way:
so sing to me in the voice of the ocean
that carries cities of fish in its tide
sing to me in the voices of sea bottom sand
that the water smoothes into cloth in its ebb
sing to me in the voices of expectant towns
that I hear near their infancy in the slow rolls of water
sing to me in the foam of the tide
that rolls in like the lifetime of butterflies
so I found myself happy
in the songs of the gnomes
in the meadow where I grew up
in the bright field of flowers
with no nightfall
in dream
(from “Expectant Buildings”)
The poems follow the feminist dictum that the personal is political; however, in Jensen’s terms, the personal is also something of a myth, and that politics are always . . . always . . . linked to class consciousness, economic injustice and the tendency for cultures to preserve their myths as a way to resist change:
WAITING FOR THE ULTIMATE PIGEON
so the wolves are tired even the wolves
as they loll on the flat roofs of the office buildings
lick their paws sniff snort
don’t even bother looking into windows anymore
they remember trotting across prairies
concrete and asphalt are hard on paws
it’s time to retire even if it’s easy pickings
up here with all the pigeons and seagulls
you can sit on your barstool and you can howl
next door they eat children and you can smell the sauce
here it’s the rest of the office workers and you’re
all bored silly even alcohol can’t change that
the lupine presence is still too far away
it’s night all you can hear is car horns
Jensen’s understanding is refreshingly sophisticated and does not flinch from being “too negative.” He earns our trust through making his poems enjoyable. Relatively short and punchy, the poems have twists and turns--and the occasional bawdy joke--which hold our interest. They do not require that we get to know the most intimate details of the poet’s life, as if those could rivet our attention by their seeming versimilitude. But the undertow, what I take away from the book most especially, are the poems' biting critique of just the kind of mythologizing many of our ancestors were attached to coming to America from distant shores. Jensen manipulates many types of languages in Auto Bio--everyday American speech, bureaucratic and workplace jargon, political and media propaganda--and takes obvious pleasure in doing so. As a result, we are invited into the poet's consciousness in a much more honest and intimate way than the revelation of obvious personal details could ever accomplish. It takes a little work, and more than one reading: what poetry should expect of us as it bestows its richest gems.
remember fun?
man! media reiterating the producer’s help
settlement negotiated continual public appearances
consolidating his death row
culture hasn’t moved in twenty years . . .
everything in sight aflame closed eyes two revelations
a bible for later generations of groupies
(from “Nostalgia Grump”)
Auto Bio is published through Beatitude Press and is available through Small Press Distribution for only $5 (ISBN is 978-0-9825066-9-1). You can catch Jensen at the Nefeli Café reading series on Friday nights in Berkeley, where he frequently hosts.
