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Daniels shows and tells thoughts on big issues

Sunday, June 15, 2003

By John Schulman

When a poet issues his "New and Selected," it is a moment of triumph, a gazing backward and a looking forward.

The title of Jim Daniels' book reflects his generous impulse to share with his readers a hefty selection from his previously published work, from "Places/Everyone" (1985) on.

	"Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems" By Jim Daniels University of Wisconsin Press ($14.95)

It is also a play on the oft-voiced and perhaps overused maxim heard in many a writer's program to "show, don't tell," that is, to show what you mean through images, metaphors and all the other verbal tools, rather than simply to tell, which can be prosaic and boring.

Daniels' meditative, reflective voice, ruminating over the Big Issues, mixes lyrical images and flat statements of idea and fact to get his points across. He is arguably writing counter to the trends of most writing programs as he both shows and tells.

What are those Big Issues?

The selections from his previous books chart a fairly unbroken path from issue to issue: work, race, religion and family.

His new poems defy easy categorization, but perhaps the issue we can loosely assign to them is history.

Daniels grew up in Warren, Mich., outside Detroit. He worked, as his father did, in car factories. The poems in his first two books are almost wholly blue-collar poems set in and around the workplace. These early poems show the influence of the dean of Detroit labor poets, Philip Levine, but there is a punchy Motown lyricism to them that adds another layer.

The risk that Daniels takes in these poems is in showing and therefore unintentionally romanticizing blue-collar culture. These poems were published by university presses, which have a bedrock readership that consists mainly of graduate students and highly educated white middle-class readers.

Educated white readership often exhibits a kind of prurient interest in the realism and grit of grim, despairing walks of life far from its own. We can see this in the popularity of Holocaust narratives, Vietnam literature and memoirs of life "on the street." Authenticity is often celebrated over quality.

Daniels, who is now director of the Creative Writing Program at Carnegie Mellon University, is haunted by his own history. In "The Tenured Guy":

"Half my friends hate me for getting tenure.

They think I'm lucky or that I sold out."

But Daniels didn't sell out. In "M-80" (1993), he continued to write about social issues, this time turning to the politics of race. The selection from that book luckily includes the long poem "Time, Temperature," which, with its varying tempos and styles, moves back and forth in time and place between Detroit and Pittsburgh.

The ending of that poem, in which the poet joins "a young black kid, maybe 6" in dancing in the spray of a fire hydrant, suggesting that poetry, song and dance can effect a kind of healing or absolution, still seems, after many readings, a too-hasty exit, a nonanswer to all that has come before it. But this is a poem that keeps on yielding in the play between its many sections. It's worth the time.

We are also lucky to have the whole of "Niagara Falls" (1994), a chapbook-length poem on religion, worship and belief that spans a number of places, from the Falls to Northern Italy. The chief characters in this poem are St. Francis and Elvis.

It is a treat to witness the increasing complexity in Daniels' work. There is an uneasiness and discontent with the status quo. He constantly challenges himself to use his poetry to ponder heavy subjects with clarity and insight and not to shy away from easy solutions.

The final poems in this book, from "Blessing the House" (1997) onward, use ever more trenchant and plangent language to address issues of family and history. These poems attempt to situate the poet against or within the social milieu of his youth and his current position, as he sorts through "shards" of memories to find out what he's made of.

This collection will make his readers eager to find out what he'll turn to next.