You think you know something about a man, some things about him, and then you read the book of poetry he has written, and you understand that you know next to nothing about him at all.
House Where People Dance is a new book of poems by Robert Cumming, published just this summer by Horse and Buggy Press, a small fine press in Durham, North Carolina. Forty-nine poems; 91 pages; a thousand or so splendid images and figures; countless voices, cadences, pitches, and tonal modulations; and not a single, not one, missed note.
Cumming has been a faithful cohort in our Wednesdays@One salon for several years. He brings us poems he's struggling with along with poems that he's nearly finished off. Some of those appear in this fine book. We read them once, twice aloud, then ask about this or that line, image, word choice, tonal shift, this use of italics, that interrogative. Inevitably, somebody wants to know whether the poem is autobiographical (and rarely gets a definitive answer!). Always, every week, we know that the hour and a half we spend together on Wednesday afternoons aren't nearly enough to get next to one of this writer's poems, let alone the eight or ten minutes that we actually have time to spend on any given poem.
And this is why I'm so surprised by House Where People Dance. As good a writer as I know Robert Cumming to be, I had no idea he is this good.
This book is as well composed as any book of poetry I've ever read. In fact, it puts to shame just about every book of poems I've come across in the past five or ten years. Anywhere. By anybody. Its poems are fresh, taut, and resistant to facile reading. They make you work. I'm not a fan of "difficult" poetry. But I'll tell you this: any poem, image, line or phrase that makes me smack my forehead and cry what the . . . ?, is a work of art. Whenever I feel I've got to wrestle the thing, I believe I'm reading true art.
And that's exactly what happens with every poem in this book. So reader beware. If your idea of a good read is a skim-and-a-nod, or even an afternoon of oft-thought-but-ne're-so-well-express'd verse, this is not the book for you. But read it anyway. It'll be good for you.
One of the great accomplishments in House Where People Dance is its near-impenetrable depths. The poet doesn't give them up to you freely or without conditions. You've either got to cast your line in again and again and hope something strikes, or you must strip down and dive into the thing, get below the bright surfaces of the images.
Cumming describes his book as a "collection," which surely is an oversight. He says, "each poem is a separate exploration," which may be true or it may not, depending on how you write and read books of poems. But eventually you'll come to the conclusion that though, like trees in a wood, each poem may appear separate, it's hardly independent of the others around it. Like all forest trees, in all healthy forests, the poems of House Where People Dance connect underground through a vast network of shared images, harmonic sound, common themes, echo, figural root and inter-twining of diction. They speak to one another. Learning that language, what they're saying together while "exploring separately" in the bright sunshine of line and diction above, is what makes reading this book work and rewarding at the same time.
One passage into that language is through questions. Nearly every poem turns on a crucial question (no toss-offs here), some are nothing but questions. I know from years of experience with this poet in our Wednesdays@One salon that the interrogative is his modus operandi. It's almost a stylistic tic. And where some poets might ask the occasional rhetorical question, or the question that actually expects an answer, Cummings' interrogations--all self-interrogating, by the way--are largely unanswerable. They are another way of saying something and they do not crave responses.
There are other ports through which you can go to get into the language of Cummings' poems in this book, all of which take you down, down down, into the root-mass under the woods (or the floorboards) of House Where People Dance. I'd quote some examples, but that might ruin the experience. If I were you, I'd buy a copy soon. I'd take a weekend away somewhere where you won't be disturbed, preferably with a decent dictionary in your luggage (what is sciamachy, anyway?), as well as patience, and read. Then read again. And one more time.
It'll be worth the time, the effort.
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