I
Love Monday! Poetry Night
Dan
hosts poets Kate Gray, Jeff Knorr and Judith Montgomery
from Clackamas Community College
7 pm Monday, Dec. 13, Borders Books and Music 708 SW 3rd Ave.,
220-5911
Free
Read more of dan Rapheal's poetry.
1. Dan Raphael likes playing with a full deck.
2. He looks like a bag man and reads like a dream.
For more than two decades, poet and organizer Raphael has
been a fixture on the local literary scene, jarring readers
with his jumpy, enigmatic style, organizing readings and
publishing both his own poetry and the work of other local
writers. He's not your flashy slam dude. He's not an actor.
He doesn't say cheese. He's a poet. And he knows it.
3. Dan has made it his plan to foster Portland's
poetic landscape. His local reading series at the downtown
Borders often turns the staid bookshop topsy-turvy. And
he's almost completed his most ambitious publishing project
to date, a series of books that in the end will number 26.
These are chapbooks by other poets such as Walt Curtis and
Jim Grabill, but book No. 1 belongs to Dan. He calls this
imprint 26 Books.
4. The 26 Books idea, hatched in 1993, was to produce
a series of 26 books by 26 writers of 26 pages each. In
addition, he has published Playing with a Full Deck,
an anthology of 26 additional writers--for a total of 52
authors (a "full deck") represented in the project. Dan
makes no money on 26 Books; generous grants from Literary
Arts Inc. and the Regional Arts and Culture Council have
helped him realize his goal.
5. Obviously Dan has an affinity for the number
26. Besides it being the number of letters in the alphabet,
it was Dan's number in high-school football; it is the number
for Gemini (which Dan is); and it has ties to numerology
(2+6=8, the number associated with Raphael). Plus 26+26=52,
a full deck.
6. Award-winning poet Ivan Argüelles writes
that Dan "is one of the progenitors of what I refer to as
the 'real underground' of the contemporary poetry scene...[he]
takes his language into the swiftly developing chasms of
new sci-fi terminology, while still maintaining his balance
of humor. Clearly, in reading his text, we are past the
end of the 20th century." Indeed, as the 20th century enters
its dying days, this edgy, provocative poet is creating
valuable and salient images.
7. He has 12 collections of his own poetry out in
the world. The most recent, isnt how we got here,
was recently published under his new Unnum imprint.
8. Dan believes poets should read out. "A lot of
people will look at someone's poem on the page and can't
make heads or tails of it. But when you go to a reading,
you can hear them read it themselves and gain a lot from
the sound element of it."
9. He moved to Oregon in 1977, living briefly in
Ashland before settling in Portland: "The weirdest thing
I ever did in a car was when I drove to Oregon with a friend
in a '42 Plymouth. I couldn't drive a standard, so he'd
get the car to highway speed and we'd change positions while
going 50 mph."
10. By day, Dan is the office manager at the Lake
Oswego DMV.
11. "I have a scar on my chin from when a guy in
a bar cut me with a broken bottle, thinking I was my older
brother, who at the time was dealing heroin. I got seven
stitches and the guy got a crushed larynx."
12. Born in Pittsburgh, June 7, 1952.
13. Of local involvement in the literary arts, Dan
says, "I wish there was more. I don't know if there's an
audience for it--our level isn't that much different than
Seattle." He doesn't see a particular "Portland style,"
but instead finds that local writers are increasingly diverse
and have a wide variety of artistic loyalties.
14. Dan has recently been doing a lot of his writing
immediately after going to the movies.
15. When asked what could make the local poetry
scene better, he responds, "I'd like to see another big
literary-arts festival in Portland." Also, "with music,
when you bring a band into town, you get a local band to
open up for them. So when a writer comes to town, like for
the Arts and Lectures Series, why not have a local prose
writer or a poet read in front of them? If the person was
good, everyone would appreciate it."
16. From 1976 to 1993, Dan edited NRG--a
tabloid magazine whose editorial policy was "If I can't
understand it, I'll publish it." He concluded it with the
anthology Co-Lingua.
17. After spending his first 18 years in Pittsburgh,
Dan went to college at Cornell. He studied Civil Engineering
before making the switch to English. After Cornell, he received
an MFA in creative writing at Bowling Green State and an
MA in literature at Western Washington University.
18. Dan is very tall--well over 6 feet in height.
19. His poetic talent even extends into the beerhall:
"Hair of the Dog Brewery makes an IPA just for Mickey Finn's.
They were looking for a name. I gave them 'Dogfish,' which
they now use." His favorite of his own homebrews is his
"Old Stumpfucker" barleywine.
20. Weirdest comment on his poetry (from a grad-school
workshop): "Poems like that make me want to reach for my
shotgun."
21. Dan currently reads more prose than poetry,
and he's a fan of science-fiction. On its relation to his
own work, he says, "Science-fiction is one area of literature
that specifically thinks about the nature of reality and
how, if you change a few specific things, then everything
else changes. I think language is a record of changes. The
meanings of the words, the connections have changed. That's
what you're tapping into as a writer. Having an alternate
vision, that's always tied into sci-fi."
22. Favorite all-time poets: Walt Whitman, Cesar
Vallejo
23. Local poet and Reed College English professor
Lisa Steinman first met Dan when they were both students
at Cornell. She says, "One of Dan's amazing virtues is his
ability to include and keep in touch with practices and
people from across various boundaries and groups. He has
his own aesthetic commitments, but he also has the most
open and inclusive sense of poetry I've run across."
24. One of Dan's favorite poetry moments is hanging
out with Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley at a backyard
keg party in Portland.
25. If he could spend an afternoon with anyone still
alive, his top choices would be Joni Mitchell, Thomas Pynchon
or Neil Young.
26. The first stanza of his poem "The Afternoon
of America Is not Impossible, America on Bicycles":
what is this rain
steel medicine
the afternoon of bicycles
coming out of their cocoons falling
dry onto fields of broken bottles
the improbable afternoon,
the coruscation of friction
in these hush droplets electromagnetically suspended
by that unsheened wallpaper, the
hostile fluorescence
turning shadow into stain,
almost standing with the paste of
sweat inhaled, the force-feeding
mitt of cathode ray mantras on &
off on & off repeatedly,
the quiescence lost between
oil changes, painted leopards,
clowns in thousandollar suits
ripped open to grade school
teachers, sewing tinfoil into
brassieres....
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Willamette Week | originally
published December 8,
1999
|
