SCHMITZ, Dennis (Mathew)

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Nationality: American. Born: Dubuque, Iowa, 11 August 1937. Education: Loras College, Dubuque, B.A. 1959; University of Chicago, M.A. 1961. Family: Married Loretta D'Agostino in 1960; three daughters and two sons. Career: Instructor in English, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 1961–62, and University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 1962–66. Assistant professor, 1966–69, since 1966 poet-in-residence, associate professor, 1969–74, and since 1974, professor of English, California State University, Sacramento. Awards: New York Poetry Center Discovery award, 1968; Big Table award, 1969; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship 1976, 1985, 1992; Guggenheim fellowship, 1978; di Castagnola award, 1986; Shelley memorial award, 1988. Address: Department of English, California State University, 6000 Jay Street, Sacramento, California 95819, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

We Weep for Our Strangeness. Chicago, Follett, 1969.

Double Exposures. Oberlin, Ohio, Triskelion Press, 1971.

Goodwill, Inc. New York, Ecco Press, 1976.

String. New York, Ecco Press, 1980.

Singing. New York, Ecco Press, 1985.

Eden. Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 1989.

About Night: Selected and New Poems. Oberlin, Ohio, Oberlin College Press, 1993.

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Critical Study: "The Crystal and the Flame" by David Young, in Field (Oberlin, Ohio), 42, spring 1990.

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Dennis Schmitz's poems are wry, brilliant, and unpredictable. They explore the grotesqueness of the physical world as a means of discovering its spiritual possibilities—Flannery O'Connor's short stories come to mind as an interesting analogue—and they are not afraid to be disquieting, funny, adventurous, and difficult. Stylistically, Schmitz has found a way to embody his physical-spiritual tensions in a distinctive version of American free verse: a continually enjambed line, a preference for the lowercase and for minimal punctuation, and a cross-roughing of syntax and stanza that sets up separate ordering procedures and thus asks the reader to intensify his or her concentration. A poem from his second major collection, Goodwill, Inc., serves to demonstrate characteristics of both subject and style in this unusual writer:

		STAR AND GARTHER THEATER
it is always night here
faces close but never heal
only the eyes develop
 
scabs when we sleep & head
by head the dream is drained
into the white pool
 
of the screen. we go on rehearsing
THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN
my arm is sewn to your shoulder.
your father's awful hand
& an actual criminal brain
 
take root under the projector's
cold moon. I wanted to do
only good. I planted my mouth
& kisses grew all over skid row.
now the fat ladies of the night
 
are lowered into the lace
stockings & strapped into their black
apparatus. this body is grafted
to theirs. alone we are helpless,
 
but put together winos, whores
& ambivalent dead we walk the daytime
world charged with our beauty.

Our experience of this poem may begin in delight at the capturing of the inner-city world of run-down movie houses that show old horror films and feature striptease acts. The comparison between lust as a mechanical feature of such a world and the nightmare constructions of conglomerate monsters in the horror films is brilliant in itself, but the poem argues more seriously, as we move into a full consideration of its claims, that we are all implicated by our common humanity in the skid row subculture and its meanings. The safe distance we feel at first, a distance of superiority and judgment, disappears, leaving us with our "grafting" to the world of whores and winos and the problem of their beauty as human beings like ourselves. The poem's meanings are deeply social and penetratingly psychological, but at the same time it is light-footed and playful in its moral exploration. The poem covers its ground too nimbly and modestly to make us feel that it has doctrinaire designs upon us. In this respect Schmitz may be superior to O'Connor, whose Roman Catholic beliefs and preoccupations he largely shares.

Schmitz's range of subjects and treatments is considerable. He knows the city, the rural Midwest where he grew up, and California, where he has taught for three decades. He does psychological portraits, narratives, and fantasies. He can base a poem on a news item or a photograph. Many of his poems are rooted in mundane details of suburban family life—tree pruning, house repair, minor and major illnesses, driving. Others take up subjects as diverse as the last surviving Japanese soldier hiding on Okinawa, a boy sneaking into a zoo at night, or a stuntman character climbing a skyscraper while dressed as a cartoon character. Schmitz's upbringing tells him that this is a fallen world; its inhabitants dream of upward movement and reunion with the divine. Our bodies are our encumbrances, but they are also our only sources of transcendence. We can use art to help us face the truth of our separation from the perfect and the eternal. The poem "Kindergarten," from Singing, shows how effectively Schmitz can deploy such insights:

Bee-logic: each small life
for the hive,
but not one of them lived out
 
at the same speed—
your heart thuds fortissimo but slow,
my heart trots to its death.
 
Proto-druggist pickpocket or priest
begin as mysteries to themselves.
Big-Head Vincent who chews his pastels
 
& wipes spit with the blue
over his squat trees,
& Levonn too who wets himself
 
is one of us.
Our keeper Sister Agnes,
wrinkled as a peach-nut & left-handed,
 
sings Latin, whose inside
is God's, she says, but we can go in
too with our tongues & the head
 
will follow, simplifying
heaven. Vincent went to heaven
in wet April. We sang a few words
 
of "Nunc Dimittis" among the gladiolus
& floribunda wreaths
gripping each other's fingers
 
as we knelt all points in a compass,
expecting somehow to sing
Vincent up. But we belonged
 
to the headless Vincent
someone crayoned on the cloakroom
wall under his coathook, 
 
the feet broken
right-angles, the heavy
arms straining against gravity—
 
a child's unfinished body,
waxy & insistent.

Personal memory here is beautifully distanced and framed so that the rhythms of life and death may reveal themselves through childish understanding. The wax of the crayon that draws the effigy of the dead child echoes the wax of the beehive that is the kindergarten and the larger arena of life, a physical reality that asserts itself in the colors and textures that preoccupy the children—their teacher is fascinatingly wrinkled, for example, and the hand-holding and kneeling rival any spiritual meanings of the memorial ritual—and lock them back into life and their fallen world. Again, it seems appropriate to note that Schmitz's poems move with a spryness and wit that belie paraphrase and theology. He has made a kind of music out of it all, we realize, a strange legerity that relocates our sense of the spiritual and refreshes us with the possibilities of language and unity. This is a poet who works steadily and well, never compromising his standards, and who presumably is not better known only because his poems require a level of attentiveness that the culture at large is still laboring toward.

—David Young