Cow Creek
Review by H. L. Hix
By the wholeness it tenders in so slender a volume (38 pages of poetry plus front and back matter), Dante Di Stefano’s Standard Time epitomizes poetry’s capacity to give the reader “a world in a grain of sand” and “infinity in the palm of your hand.” Standard Time deploys this poetic superpower, showing the All in the small, by embracing a vision of human life alternative to the neoliberal hyperindividualism that dominates in the contemporary economic and political order, the purport of which is that each individual’s egoistic pursuit of “rational self-interest” sums magically to collective good. In Di Stefano’s healthier, more generous vision, life does not consist in my getting as much as I can of what I can get, but in my as fully as possible being with who I am with.
To sense the beauty and strength of the bonds in Di Stefano’s book, it helps to invoke Robert Pogue Harrison’s assertion in The Dominion of the Dead that “… there exists an allegiance between the dead and the unborn of which we the living are merely the ligature,” and to complement Harrison’s point with the distinction Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell make in The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins: “‘vertical’ cultures are learned from parents, ‘oblique’ transmission is from other members of an older generation in a form of information transfer that we have institutionalized in schools, while peers of similar age exchange ‘horizontal’ cultures.” Vertical cultures “can be very stable” but “horizontal cultures — fashion and popular music styles, for instance — are fast moving and subject to very rapid change and are also generally much more transitory.”
Standard Time locates itself in those matrices. Whether or not Di Stefano has happened on The Dominion of the Dead, he certainly is aware of himself as a ligature between the dead (elders such as his father) and if not the unborn per se at least the very recently born, specifically his young children. Similarly, Di Stefano is alert to his placement within all three modes of cultural transmission: he is a son and a father, and thus both a recipient and a transmitter of vertical culture; he is by profession a teacher, and thus an agent of oblique culture; and he is “dialed in” to the horizontal culture of our moment.
Di Stefano’s sense of himself as ligature is clear throughout Standard Time. For example, early in the collection, “The Day” begins with a recollected incident from childhood.
The day rises like a rock
in the hand of my father
coming down hard
on my mother’s windshield
as she puts the car
in reverse and speeds
out the driveway
leaving him to wander
raving down the cul-de-sac
The poem recalls the inner life of the speaker as a child in such a household, but moves from there to “decades later” experience, in which “the days / I spent with him have accrued / a murky sheen of sorrow // and disgust,” and transitions ultimately from the past to the future, concluding with this resolution: “for the sake of my daughter / and my wife I say let’s make // the day a brocade a rocking horse / a bird on the highest power line / the good milk of being born anew.” That is the ethical and emotional summons to which in his poetry Di Stefano answers: how, as intermediary between those by whom he was given life and those to whom he has given life, to convey not sorrow but joy, not injury but health, not suffering but love. I can imagine being asked in informal conversation what it is I respond to in Di Stefano’s work, and replying “It’s so… human.” What I would mean by calling it “human” is that it so robustly answers that ethical and emotional summons.
Di Stefano’s sense of responsibility, as articulated in Harrison’s terms of joining dead to unborn does not pull apart fom his sense of responsibility as given in Whitehead’s and Rendell’s terms, and the interconnection of the two senses is especially clear at the moment when these two poems appear on facing pages: one addressed to a vertical-culture-transmitting elder, entitled “Things I Say to My Dead Father in the Middle of the Night,” and the other addressed to an oblique-culture-transmitting elder, entitled “Things I Say to My Dead Teacher in the Middle of the Night.” In the father conversation, Di Stefano’s role as ligature is figured as blossoming:
so many unsaid things floating
in the meadow between us, and I won’t
say them here, although if you suddenly
materialized at the foot of my bed
I suppose you’d be carrying those words,
my words, in the vase of your hands....
In the teacher conversation, Di Stefano’s role as ligature is figures as illumination.
It’s been over a decade since you died
and I’ve lived in the unlit rooms
of a hundred hundred poems and I know
a title is more than a light switch.
It can be a dimmer, a dial, a fuse box,
a live wire sparking in the twilight.
The poem ends with the speaker imagining the teacher’s finger “like a conductor’s wand pointing the way / through the fire music to illumination.”
It is a human summons, the human summons: “Freely you have received, freely give.” Dante Di Stefano’s Standard Time answers that summons, as typified by the penultimate poem in the book, explicitly addressed to the reader, in which the receiving and giving includes this exclamation: “I love the simple music / of these infinite mouthings // (not my own, but ours always).”
