Collection of poems rejects the traditional ‘Ocean Drinker’s’ word play dances over topics, content

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Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books that are written by Maine authors or set in the Pine Tree State.

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

OCEAN DRINKER: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, by Carl Little; Deerbrook Editions, Cumberland, Maine, 2006; 102 pages, paperback, $14.

The “Ocean Drinker” of the title poem in this collection by Carl Little of Mount Desert Island is an Indian in a painting. Painstaking description reveals the Indian is a figure of natural “wisdom.” But the sense of solemnity and cosmicity in the image is rejected by the speaker of the poem.

A clinical, slightly glib distance from the imagery’s content is created by the strategy of beginning the descriptive stanzas with the legal word “whereas.” Eventually the speaker straightforwardly confirms that the distance is a rejection of the painting’s moral content:

whereas other oceans

remain to be cleansed,

I cling ever tighter to the notion

of discarding calm.

The speaker says that even if he felt called to become a mystic like the ocean-drinking Indian, he wouldn’t do it, because he prefers the down-to-earth comforts of home and family. The Indian, in the end, “fails entirely before the fog,” an image meant to suggest that past notions of “wisdom” are more or less illusory, and what’s real is the happy chaos that’s right before your eyes.

The rejection of traditional wisdom (such as: calm detachment from the world fosters cosmic consciousness) is basic to many postmodern philosophies, both professional and personal. And most of the rest of the poems in “Ocean Drinker” are bounced off this rejection through their emphasis on words. This, too, is a postmodern characteristic: The subject of any given poem is assumed to be not its topic, but the words it’s made of.

Accordingly, most of the poems in “Ocean Drinker” offer splashy puns and jeux de mots – sometimes sprung in passing, sometimes developed as full-blown conceits – where the topics are usually just platforms for dances with words. “Cardiac Infarction,” for example, points to the humor in the language of heart attacks – “What bold ‘r’s these words can brag.” It’s sort of amusing in a way that a heart attack isn’t. But the poem’s not about pain and terror; it’s about word sounds.

A few poems evoke emotional complexities that word play alone can’t. “Closing the House (Great Cranberry)” and “The Clearing” leap from the pages because their emotional atmospheres are the subtly and sharply formed focuses of attention. The rhythmic and syntactic shapes of these poems’ lines are far more precise than others’, and probably reveal more about Carl Little’s abilities with language than any of the poems that glibly comment on themselves.

Splashing the surface of language and rejecting premodern moral sensibilities have been prized characteristics in American poetry for about half a century. And Carl Little’s poems indeed have been well-received in literary circles that include Columbia University, where he earned an MFA in creative writing. “Ocean Drinker” is witty, amusing, and a lot more conventional than it realizes.

BY RICHARD DUDMAN

SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

THE RELUCTANT PATRIOT, by Roger F. Duncan, Down East Books, Camden, 2006, 205 pages, $15.95.

There are few people cruising the Maine coast who have not heard of Roger Duncan. Probably fewer still have not picked up some edition of his “A Cruising Guide to the New England Coast.” Duncan has been editing that tome since 1961, succeeding his father in the role. If you haven’t shared a wooded cove with Roger and his lovely wife, Mary, you’ve truly missed one of the finer experiences that sailing the Maine coast has to offer.

Now Roger Duncan has tacked into new waters by writing his first novel. It’s a yarn about the opening naval battle of the Revolution, near Machias, and the events leading up to it. Of course, a novel is nothing without its cast of characters. In this case, we follow young Chris MacDonald, who arrived on our shore as a baby under very strange circumstances. The story follows his progress to adulthood, as his family moves from near Portland to what was to become Machias.

Having been scarred by a fire, Chris is terrified in the woods. Not being close to comfortable as a woodsman, he sets sail, eventually becoming mate on the small coasting schooner Polly. There are trips back and forth to Boston in all kinds of weather as well as the occasional stop in Townsend, where he meets Ruthie, a girl about his age.

Political events in Boston cast a shadow all the way Down East and it isn’t long before men are looking at each other and questioning where they stand. Chris MacDonald is torn between protecting all he holds dear and throwing in with the Sons of Liberty. Only an accident can tip the balance and chart his future.

BY WAYNE REILLY

SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

RECASTING THE MACHINE AGE: HENRY FORD’S VILLAGE INDUSTRIES, by Howard P. Segal, University of Massachusetts Press, 2005, hardcover, 245 pages, $34.95.

Henry Ford was either a progressive visionary or a reactionary crackpot. He plays both roles in history books.

Howard P. Segal, Bird professor of history at the University of Maine, tries to explain some of the discrepancies in examining Ford’s quest to shift some of the production of his Model T’s from giant centralized factories to 19 smaller plants within 60 miles of company headquarters. Each would manufacture two or three parts. Ford’s goal was to create “village industries,” which would replace Detroit and other industrial wastelands with smaller communities, where agrarian ideals would flourish. Factory operatives would be able to work on production lines part of the year and run farms the rest of the time.

All 19 experiments succeeded. Workers preferred them to the factories in Detroit and Dearborn. But was Ford a Jeffersonian genius acting on behalf of the common man, a union buster, or primarily a self-indulgent reactionary? Segal explores such issues in his interesting book about one of the most fascinating and complicated business geniuses in American history. His answers are not simple or simplistic.

“Were the village industries more widely known today, Ford might be a folk hero to a new generation of Americans, few of them raised on farms or in small towns,” Segal writes. “Ford, however, should not be put back on his pedestal solely because of those 19 experiments. He almost certainly established and maintained them for a variety of reasons – for profit, for public relations, for union busting, for social control of the work force, and for love of small towns and of waterpower – but it is impossible to be precise.”