11thour Press, 2023
Paper: $16.00
Genre: Poetry
Reviewed by Richard Hague
Robert Collins is co-founder of The Birmingham Poetry Review and author of several previous volumes of accomplished and varied poems. His latest collection, D.O.A. at Dante’s, is set in a college-town bar haunted by the lost souls of wasted adjuncts and professors, graduate students, hippies, slumming sorority girls, drop-outs, and various ne-er-do-wells and hangers-on of the kind Dante might have encountered in his Inferno, of which this place is an avatar. Its speaker, our guide, is a former denizen of that bar and city and university in another life. His cycle of poems is an extended complaint, confession, wry celebration, rebuttal, and finally, one suspects, exorcism of the demons of this pandemonium.
It’s as if Chaucer’s “Prologue” has been displaced to Eliot’s Waste Land via Dante’s Inferno— “so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.”
Ten thousand cars a day,
a few more or less perhaps,
plus passersby on foot didn’t know
and didn’t really give a damn
about the histrionics going on beyond
the slate-grey double doors
inside Dante’s bar room every night.
Dante’s (not its actual name, though this was an actual place: I was there, sat through some of its episodes, and snickered over its bathroom graffiti) was the site of a raucous poetry scene in the sozzled early Seventies. Crowds of lost souls with poems in their pockets or folders vied for position there, drinking, cursing, musing. They stood and declaimed.
Heckled
without respite by the groundlings,
some stammered, were embarrassed,
and fled the boards in tears, upstaged.
This complicated, often grimly hilarious drama of poetry and its academic fringe culture is presented to us by Collins as a kind of tragedy, with its parados and exodos chanted by the chorus of “Regulars” composed of dipsomaniacs, drug-addled professors-to-be, and innocents sucked in off the campus streets like moths into a black hole.
As in Chaucer’s “Prologue,” the cast of characters is presented in lively descriptions, the “abstract and brief chronicles of the times,” as Hamlet said of his own Players. They include Captain Bringdown, The Owl, The Big Kahuna, Beer Clowns, Krishnas, Three Wyrd Sisters, The Cynic, Mr. Wrath, and again, as in Chaucer, The Proprietor. Though, this is no hearty Harry Bailey but a florid, damaged control-freak mismanager of misrule and disorder.
Here is the beginning of a sketch of one Regular, “Volo”
The only name he ever gave
(sometimes misconstrued as Bolo)
made it sound as if he’d gotten
an MFA from clown school.
He mentioned a career as a biker,
ex-Outlaw or Hell’s Angel,
none of Dante’s regulars were sure,
but, along with a gold swastika
embedded in a tooth, he had a shtick
of parlor tricks he’d perfected up his sleeve.
As a foolproof money-maker,
he’d seed the filthy urinal
in the malodorous men’s room
with small change, most often pennies,
hoping other drunks might submit
and follow suit. Never one to beg
or borrow, he’d retrieve the profits
later, reasoning rinsing sour urine
off the coins was easy work and small
premium to pay to score another brew.
Such instances of alcohol and drug-induced degradation prevail; they are at once painful but, because of their keen presentation of types, often cringingly funny.
Collins has framed and punctuated this hellish phantasmagoria within passages from James Hillman’s The Dream and The Underworld. “Carnivals, masked balls, traveling fairs and shows—the underworld as a mad, upside-down liveliness of autonomous figures, disguised, spontaneous, fascinating and frightening, drifting through the night or set up during the night right in the middle of town.”
It is something of an ordeal to navigate this world, but Collins pulls it off with verve, poetic skill, and an abundant vocabulary of intoxication. His lines are lithe and lively, again reminiscent of Chaucer’s decasyllabic sketches of the pilgrims. There are quite effective variations in stanzaic forms, from two-liners, three and four-liners, to longer forms, which the poet manages expertly. One poem is a wry villanelle, “The Piano Teacher,” which deploys the rhymes doom, gloom, pantaloon, and buffoon.
Readers will be reminded in these poems of the warning inscribed over the gates of Dante’s hell: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” And yet Collins manages this tour of the underworld with an unwavering sense of survival. He has been there, seen it, and, most importantly, returned to tell us what he saw. In our own times of runaway egos, violent scofflaws, Ivy-league desperadoes, common liars, and haters, Collins offers a vision of the worst human nature has to offer so that we may again be warned, on guard, and prepared.
Richard Hague’s work has appeared in Poetry, Appalachian Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, and dozens of other journals and anthologies. He is author or editor of 22 volumes, the most recent being the poetry collection Continued Cases (Dos Madres Press, 2023) and an essay collection, Earnest Occupations: Teaching, Writing, Gardening, and Other Local Work (Bottom Dog Press, 2018), listed as “Recommended” by the U.S. Review of Books.
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