The contemporary poetry scene is rather disparate these days. Ask anyone to name a contemporary poet and you’re bound to get a dozen different answers.
This all goes to say that there are very few standout academic voices whose words resonate beyond the walls of their institutions. One way to assuage this problem: Seek out your local poets on campus.
University English instructor Paul — or “Beat” — Dresman’s latest book is titled “The Silver Dazzle of the Sun.” The book is subtitled “Selected Poems,” and the material spans a large portion of Dresman’s life. The oldest poem in the collection is “Xanadu’s Dome Revisited,” written in the late 1960s, with “The Art of Detection” being the most recent piece, written in the past few years. Dresman will read selections from the book today at 7 p.m. at Tsunami Books, located at 2585 Willamette St.
Dresman said he organized the book into a kind of “false chronology,” meaning that the poems are not ordered by year but by theme. These themes are written in unassuming lowercase and called: “a western child,” “histories,” “california frontage,” “how to make a chinese landscape painting,” “en castellano” and “on sundays in america.”
The opening poem in the collection is “Sam Bull Was a Man,” which Dresman said he “experienced” during the 1960s but ended up writing only recently. The poem is constructed in a kind of formalized manner due to its meter and rhyme, clearly indicated by the opening lines: “When we were boys with skinny chests, / bird legs and fresh suburban smiles, / we gaped and gawked and talked the talk / while Sam Bull climbed silently inside / the van on the beach with Twinkling Eyes / — that summer’s surfing girl wonder.”
While the bulk of Dresman’s poetry has been self-published in the form of chapbooks, he has received wide recognition for his work including publication in Rolling Stone magazine during the 1970s. The Surfer’s Journal will also publish “Sam Bull Was a Man” and reveal the characters’ true names. “Silver Dazzle,” also self-published, was designed by Dresman’s son, Drew.
The 60-year-old Dresman has had a connection to poetry throughout his life. He’s been an activist for the art form wherever he’s gone — not only through his own works but through others’ as well. Dresman lived in San Diego during the 1980s and ran “Wild Mustard Press,” which published the work of local poets. Before that, Dresman lived in San Francisco. He spent 1986 teaching in China and moved to Eugene in 1987, where he has remained since.
Despite his nickname, Dresman said that he does not consider himself a beat poet, although he considers the beat generation — along with Dylan Thomas and Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology of “The New American Poetry” — to be immediate sources of influence. He also mentioned the Black Mountain poets as influential, including Charles Olson and Ed Dorn, about the latter of whom Dresman wrote his Ph.D dissertation.
On Nov. 14, Dresman will chair a panel on beat poetry during the Ken Kesey Symposium entitled “Fifty Years Young: The Beats Go On.” The event will commence at 7:30 p.m. in the EMU Fir Room.