"Practical Gods" by Carl Dennis

The tone of all of the poems in "Practical Gods" is very conversational. While many of the poems have religious themes (that have the potential to become didactic and pompous), all of the poems retain an accessibility that is far more effective than a didactic tone. The title for the volume that Dennis chose suggests this; in many ways, "practical" and "gods" conjure very different images. A synonym for "practical" is down-to-earth, and this is the opposite of the gods, which are in the heavens and are traditionally inaccessible. From the beginning, the reader realizes that while Dennis might address philosophical and religious material, it will be in a context that is accessible to the lay reader.

This poem, which does not have religious overtones like many of Dennis' other poems, indicates the conversational syntax and diction.

School Days

On the heart's map of the country, a thousand miles
May be represented by a quarter inch, the distance
Between St. Louis and a boarding school in Massachusetts
Where the son will be taught by the same teachers
Who taught his father and will reappear Christmas
At Union Station singing his father's songs.

Likewise the distance walked by an immigrant mother
From the tenement on Locust to the school on Seventh
Equals the distance on the heart's map of the world
Between the Volga and the Mississippi.

Now she's left the children at the school door
And has watched them enter a country she'll never visit
From which they'll return this evening with stories
She won't be able to understand. And on weekends,
When she and her husband fill their one big room
With the clatter of piecework, the children wait for a seat
In the reading room of the Cass Avenue library
Where a book is a ship, its prow pointed toward Ithaca.

A thousand kisses to you, Miss Winslow, senior librarian,
With a slice of poppy-seed cake that mother made
For your help in boarding and raising the sails.
Now for the lotus-eaters and witches, princesses, gods,
Not one of which leaves Odysseus at a loss for words.
And all the words in English, a language stiff as a stone
On the tongue of the oldsters but flexible for the children.

What skill could be more useful than making a stranger
A friend with a single speech or tricking a giant
Eager to eat you? The boring parts can be skimmed
Like the trip to shadow land, where the hero has to sit still
And listen to the sad stories of shadows.

Three times he tries to embrace his mother,
Who pined away with longing for her lone son
Wandering far from home, buffeted by the sea god.
Three times he embraces only air.

The strength of Dennis' poems is his ability to take mundane objects and ideas and then weave them together to create ethereal imagery. Dennis moves the reader from a very concrete world to the abstract without any awkwardness. For example, in the first stanza, there is a concrete, recognizable observation: a thousand miles can be a quarter inch on a map. Dennis, however, equates this physical distance with the "heart's map of the country." Either image by itself would fail to evoke the same understanding from the reader. Dennis continues the map imagery in the second stanza. Then, in the third stanza, Dennis only alludes to the map idea when he writes that the mother has "watched them [her children] enter a country she'll never visit / from which they'll return this evening with stories." Now, school represents a foreign country, and the children are described as returning with exotic stories from a foreign land. At the end of this stanza, Dennis adjust his imagery once again, but still keeps it in the "travel" category. In the last line of the stanza, he uses a simple metaphor: "a book is a ship." At first glance, this metaphor is child-like...but this is the idea--it so utterly noncomplex that it conveys the single-mindedness of the children learning. In the fourth stanza, Dennis continues his ship metaphor. Here, the poppy seed cake is a mechanism to raise "the sails" of learning, knowledge, and exploration.

Throughout the entire poem, Dennis uses a sequence of concrete objects to convey specific images. The words of the poem are often prosaic, but the cumulative effect is much more impacting than a string of high-sounding big words. This, I think, we could emulate: sometimes, we spend too much time crafting images and philosophical sounding ideas with too many "million dollar" words, when simpler, more specific words would do a better job. Consider the last line of the poem: "Three times he embraces only air." None of the individual words are particularly complex or descriptive, but the sum of the sentence perfectly portrays the lack of connection between the young man and the mother.