Duane Vorhees’s Love’s Autobiography: The Ends of Love comprises of selections from The Many Loves of Duane Vorhees. Apart from the Prologue, the book is divided into three sections titled “Beth”, “Jenny” and “Yeobo”, with the last section having the greatest number of poems. As the title suggests and the poet himself acknowledges the poems are about the many aspects of love and relationships. But what is so different in writing about love by Duane Vorhees? Duane’s poetry is highly steeped in allusions which provide the poems their richness. It is also his craft that catches the readers’ attention. The opening poem “Either Alzheimer’s of the Lightning” starts like this:
Whizdizzyingly
cruising The Moment,
arrowing past all awareness:
highway, enginewhiine, (p. 7)
Duane employs Joycean syntactical innovations in his poems because a poem is as much, if not more, about expression as communication. His poems display metaphors that make a reader pause and ponder: “The sun is a gong hung low across the sky” (“Another Spring Night In Farmersville, Oho), “Ah! Nights you were a harem/ and I the unmade Bedouin too long in the thirst” (“Ah! Nights”) or “:daybreaks are harlots all scarlet and huge with rouge and paste” (“Her Name is Jenny and Many a Morn Has Worn Her Face”).
Sometimes he can be sexually explicit in his imagery but in a beautiful way reminding of the metaphysical poets like Donne or Marvell. In the poem “The Beast” the two layers of meanings simultaneously skim in our imagination as we read the lines:
Imagine our bodies in Braille,
finger tongues perusing,
teasing our nuances,
weighing every significance.
We turn over
sheet after sheet.
Each climax foreshadowed,
we read ourselves to sleep. (p. 24-5)
The poem is as much about making love as it is about poetic creation where the poet makes the reader foreshadow and the lovers reading each other’s bodies and the reader reading the lines of the poem into a single act. Sometimes he can be succinct and yet profound as in the poem “Evidence for the Mutational Codependence of Time”:
Yesterday
today
was
tomorrow.
& my future
:ours. (p. 44)
This short poem not only convey a sense of loss but also a pathos and more so when the last line comprising of a single word comes as a separate stanza. It is this structuring that makes Duane’s poems so potent. He is a serious poet who uses his experiences of love, loss and longing to hone his craft of poetry. In another short poem “Hawked and Doves” he writes “Love is hawked from every ad,/ is sent like doves from all our arks,” and achieves in two lines a contrast between the new and the old concepts of love through the allusions to the contemporary and the Biblical and through the imageries of the bird of prey, the hawk and the mild and docile dove.
Duane Vorhees’s loves have become his muses and nowhere it is more evident than in his poem “(And) Purple Prose” where he writes:
And I’m just a poet in search of a muse,
just a sea-starved seaman in need of a cruise.
A poet needs a muse to sweeten his songs,
so won’t you play sugar if I play tongue? (p. 58)
There is a sort of mercenary-ness in poets who make their loves their muses. Duane is no exception. The duality of being a lover and a poet is sometimes conflicting because it no longer love for love’s sake. Now love has more purposes – of inspiration, of stimulus, a sort of utilitarianism is attained. This might not be acceptable to the love-turned-muse who might object to the poet when he says: “For to fill my verse up, rim, barrel, and bung,/ let me borrow your breaths to stuff my lungs.” This is the tragedy of the poet and Duane further expresses it with an innovative metaphor:
Poet needs muse to keep his thoughts young.
The muse is the clothesline on which are hung
poet’s pants & fancies before they get cold. (p. 58)
This is it. No doubt a melancholy pervades the love autobiography of Duane Vorhees.
Dr. Amit Shankar Saha is a widely published award-winning poet and short story writer. He has authored a collection of poems titled Balconies of Time. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Seacom Skills University.
Love’s Autobiography: The Ends of Love by Duane Vorhees is published by Hawakal Publishers, and available here: http://www.hawakal.com/books/english-books/loves-autobiography-the-ends-of-love/