Bombing the Thinker: Darren C. Demaree

Description

Available at Amazon, and select independent bookstores.

After the Pause Review

Clear, precise, and elegant, Demaree’s newest collection is a profound investigation of our relation to art amid turmoil. Using the unsolved bombing of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s copy of Rodin’s The Thinker from 1970 as the backdrop, he explores the relevance of the emotions and implications of that moment nearly half a century past to provide insight into our present and future.

In 1970, a pipebomb tore the legs and base off the 900 lb statue that had stood on the museum’s steps since shortly before Rodin’s death in 1917. The museum eventually chose to reinstate the statue, defects and all, with a photo of its original state beside it. This engaging juxtaposition becomes the heart of this collection, varying from letters to a deceased Rodin, the inner thoughts of the statue, and observations of an Ohio poet trying to make sense of why art would get attacked.

After the Pause Review

Flowing Poetics

One of the early poems here closes with the lines, “we don’t / need to know what / would happen if / the bomb had been / as flawed as the reason.” For Demaree, art is often found in the rubble and the remains. With Bombing the Thinker, he proves once again how adept his flowing poetics are at capturing beauty from destruction.

In contemplation of the damaged statue, Demaree says, “art is always pulling / close to other art, creating a home / undefeatable by simple dynamite.” The bomber could not destroy Demaree’s impulse to create. In fact, it obviated his impulse. And, were Rodin alive, the reader is welcomed to assume Rodin might have made much from the initial desecration. That thread goes further in one of the best of this collection’s poems written from the perspective of the thinker himself, when, in “A Damaged Thinker #47”, the statue claims, “I’m not / really needed, / but I feel / integral / to the hot tide / of the past.”

A Poetry of Salvation

Of course, we could survive without art. But what survival would it be? Especially if we had no art to commemorate how base we sometimes become as a warning to our worst predilections. While Rodin originally made The Thinker in response to Dante’s Divine Comedy, his sculpture now rises above that dialogue, having incorporated a multiplicity of divergent narratives, all of which Demaree captures with sublime elegance and ferocity.

With this line of argument, there seems no better fitting end to his collection than when Demaree tips his hat to humanity’s ability to blossom from tragedy into a higher plane of being. His concluding poem “Any Night (Part of the World)” begins with the lines, “We create / multiple salvations / with every piece / of humanity / we re-create.” Inimitably, Demaree has created a window into how we might fashion a poetry of salvation, a handbook for how to take someone else’s ill-conceived bombs, and create a better future. His hand will always be one that points back at our souls.

Conclusion: This fantastic work does not just delineate a poet at the height of his powers, but more importantly shows a human deeply in touch with his humanity. It’s refreshing to read poetry by an author who I believe agrees the latter must always outweigh the former.

Trampset Review by Scott Neuffer

A famous statue sits thinking with its legs blown off. And a poet who just wants a friend — who just wants to be whole — talks to the maimed statue, tells it dirty jokes, writes letters to its long-dead creator.

This is the world Ohio poet and trampset contributor Darren C. Demaree creates in his profound and strangely touching poetry collection, Bombing the Thinker.

The city is Cleveland. The statue is a metal casting of Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker.” From what we can gather from the poems, this Thinker was in his famous thinking position sitting outside the Cleveland Museum of Art, circa 1970, when radical anti-war protestors blew his legs off with dynamite in an ill-conceived gesture of revolution. The seventy-plus poems in Bombing the Thinker explore the incident and partial restoration of the statue from the perspective of the poet — who criticizes the misguided attack but has his own ideas about art and revolution — and from the perspective of the statue himself, who, though made of inanimate material, is able to express his thoughts in a series of poems entitled “A Damaged Thinker.”

“I can tuck / almost a feather / in my ribs, that’s how / close I am to flight,” the Thinker tells us. He wants to be real. He embraces his scars. He embraces the aftermath of violence. He aches for dignity: “I am waiting, here / because the action / here, still comes to me / & I am fucking ready.”

The Thinker even taunts his assailants, musing that if he had been blown backward, “I could have had the sky.”

As art, he knows, he’s indomitable. The world has envy “for my metal’s / willingness / to be blown / & remain blown / & above / the water’s cool, / lapping burial.”

The poet, on the other hand, is real, if incomplete. Flesh-and-blood men, of course, are also broken by cycles of violence. The two share the pain and beauty of history, that of “compromised Ohio.”

The poet wants to believe art is enough. Even bomb-blasted art has restorative power, “thick with purpose.” But the poet is mortal. Where is his dignity when “the light / itself is black dots”? Can he lose himself in the eternity of creation and re-creation? The end of the collection suggests he can: “Stare at the first / promise. / It has nothing / to do with God. / It is fullness / & the time for more.”

We’d be missing something, however, if we came to view art as some cold absolute. For the poet has filled this collection with warm “tethers” between himself and the statue. At one point, trying to make sense of the explosion, he says, “I would cradle the man, / as he would cradle / me.”

This is Demaree’s genius. He writes in terse lines that splay the metaphysical but also the beautifully human. His art connects to something greater because of the deep well of humanity pumping it up to the surface. “Some day,” he writes, “all of these / fragments will make us / both feel quite whole.”

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Author Biography:

Darren C. Demaree is living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children. He is the author of seven poetry collections. He is the winner of the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the recipient of ten Pushcart Prize nominations. Currently, he is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry.

Available at Amazon, and select independent bookstores.

Book & Cover Design: The Scrutineer, Rachael Adams