Rain On The River. Jim Dodge
Jim Dodge
Selected Poems and Short Prose
for
Victoria Stockley Dodge
covivant for over thirty years, the last seven as wife; nerve of my soul, love of my life
Contents
Notes and Acknowledgments
Selected Poems and Short Prose
Learning to Talk
The Cookie Jar
Things Thought Through
On Balance
Decomposition
Psycho Ecology
Life of the Spirit
Aweigh
Tao-to-Tao
To Be
Practice, Practice, Practice
Wisdom and Happiness
Red Sails
Squall & Commotion
Slow Learner
Bathing Joe
Mahogany China
The First Cut Is the Deepest
Waiting for Houdini to Come Up
The Countessa
Venison Stew
Winter Song
On Humor: On Mating Donkeys and Onions
Watering the Garden on the Hottest Day of the Summer
Palms to the Moon
A Firmer Grasp of the Obvious
The Work of Art
Steelhead Fishing, Smith River, January
The Third Bank of the River
Green Side Up
One Thing After Another
Unnatural Selections: A Meditation upon Witnessing a Bullfrog Fucking a Rock
Fishing Devil’s Hole at the Peak of Spring
Getting After It
How to Catch the Biggest Fish
Hard Work
There It Is
Knowing When to Stop
Vacation Expenses
Basic Precepts and Avuncular Advice for Young Men
Killing
Death and Dying
New Poems and Short Prose
The Banker
The Real Last Words of Billy the Kid
The Moving Part of Motion
How About
Necessary Angels
Prayer Bones
Magic and Beauty
Day Moon
Karma Bird
The Tunnel
Hagerty Wrecks Another Company Truck
Obsession
Love Find
Flux
Thanks for the Dance
The Stone
Woman in a Room Full of Rubber Numbers
Reason to Live
Scratch
Salvage
An Epithalamium for Victoria
Falling into Place
Play-By-Play
Job Application
The Mouth of the River
The Prior and Subsequent Heavens
Old Growth
Three Ways to Get the Carrot on the Stick
Eurydice Ascending
The Drought of ’76
True Account of the Saucer People
About Time
Smithereens
Jack o’ Hearts Shopping Mortmart
Holy Shit
With few exceptions, the selected work in this volume appeared in limited edition letterpress broadsides, cards, and chapbooks published by Jerry Reddan’s Tangram Press in Berkeley, California, who also designed this volume. I’ve worked almost exclusively with Jerry for two decades, always with a sense of privilege, delight, and gratitude.
The first group of poems in this book, from “Learning to Talk” through “Bathing Joe,” constitutes annual Winter Solstice cards mailed to friends and colleagues, and also includes a few broadsides and occasional verse.
The poems from “Mahogany China” through “A Firmer Grasp of the Obvious” are selected from Palms to the Moon, a loose group of love poems published in 1987 in an edition limited to 100 copies and given away to friends and fellow practitioners.
Bait & Ice, a small gathering of poems on fishing, philosophy, and nature, was released in 1991 in an edition of 175, and includes the poems from “The Work of Art” through “Fishing Devil’s Hole at the Peak of Spring.”
The final chapbook from which work for this volume was drawn (“Getting After It” through “Death and Dying”) is Piss-Fir Willie Poems, a suite of persona poems offered as an homage to the vernacular of Pacific northcoast working people, particularly loggers, restoration workers, commercial fishers, ranchers, and those, like my father, in the building trades. I tried to capture the idiom–the diction, cadence, phrasing–as well as that combination of aesthetics, attitude, and turn-of-mind that constitutes cultural style. To my sense of it, I was successful enough that I can’t honestly claim the poems as my own. Whatever virtues of language, wit, or wisdom the reader might find, praise should accrue to the speakers from whom I borrowed; any liabilities, alas, are likely mine. Piss-Fir Willie Poems was published by Tangram in 1998 in an edition of 200 copies.
Before 1980, I also published two other chapbooks– da Vaca in a Vanishing Geography and (with Robert Funt) Sollla Sollew–but because these Mad River Press productions were published anonymously and pointedly anti-copyright, I haven’t included that work.
New poems, written or substantially revised in the past decade, make up roughly the second half of this volume.
A few of the new and selected works have appeared in other books and journals:
A version of “Green Side Up” was first published in Dalmo’ma VI: Working the Woods, Working the Sea (Empty Bowl, 1986) under the title “Treeplanting in the Rain.” The poem, under the latter title, was also published in Paperwork (Harbour 1991) and Propriety and Possibilities (Harrish Press, 1996).
“Aweigh”