Dennis Barone: How to Be Hybrid
by Richard Deming
“Once more I have come to Hartford as / A ship moves into light and open space.”
–Dennis Barone, from “Unpack It”
Beginnings
Although he is a native of northern New Jersey, Dennis Barone has spent most of his adult life in Connecticut, including 40 years in Hartford and West Hartford. Born in 1955, Barone was an undergraduate at Bard College and subsequently he received a doctorate in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. Just two years later, Barone joined the faculty of the University or Saint Joseph in West Hartford, where he taught in the English Department and directed the American Studies Program until retiring in 2020. His commitment to Hartford is reflected in his creative and his nonfiction writing, including essays and Op Eds on architecture, landmarks, and issues such as affordable housing and education, as well as in his promotion of the great modernist poet and Hartford resident Wallace Stevens.
Although officially he was a university professor, Barone could well be considered “Dean of Connecticut’s Arts and Letters,” given his tireless work over the years on behalf of the state’s cultural scene as poet, teacher, scholar, arts organizer, editor, fiction writer, anthologist, essayist, and journalist. Citing William Dean Howells, Barone has described his commitment to the idea “that a writer should contribute to the world of letters in many different ways,” and he has proven his belief in this claim by producing a dazzlingly wide body of work. He is author or editor of over two dozen books; he has been published by a wide array of journals and magazines; and he has won the America Award, presented to an outstanding book of fiction by a living American writer, for his collection Echoes, and the Salvator and Margaret Bonoma Award for Excellence in Writing. In 1992 he held the Thomas Jefferson Chair, a distinguished Fulbright lectureship in the Netherlands, and in the past he has served as the Poet Laureate of West Hartford.
Discovering Writing
Barone discovered poetry early in life by way of the famed modernist writer William Carlos Williams, who, until his death in 1962, lived in Rutherford, not far from Barone’s hometown of Teaneck. It was the fact that Williams was a fellow New Jersey native that had initially drawn Barone to the older writer’s work. Some of that early influence is still evident in Barone’s own writing. For instance, Williams, too, wrote across genres. Though known primarily as a poet, Williams also pushed the bounds between poems and prose, just as Barone has done so often. Williams, too, wrote stories, essays, novellas, and criticism. Beyond this shared desire to move past categories to let the imagination go where it must, the two writers use precise, clear language that explores the range of possible meanings to be found in a literary sentence or line.
While living in Connecticut, Barone has become deeply enmeshed in the history and legacy of the state’s most important literary figures. In 2012, for instance, he edited Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776. Over the years, the modernist poet Wallace Stevens in particular has become an important figure for Barone and in turn Barone has acted as an important advocate for Stevens’s poetry. In 2009, Barone co-edited the anthology Visiting Wallace: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens. He has long served as the head of the Hartford Friends of Wallace Stevens, an organization that promotes both the cultural legacy of one of the United States’s greatest poets and curates talks and readings by contemporary authors indebted to Stevens’s influence. Barone founded and organized for 25 years the Wallace Stevens Scholarship given to a Hartford student and was responsible for the Stevens tribute panel installed near the Rose Garden in Hartford’s Elizabeth Park. He is also the poetry editor of The Wallace Stevens Review. Through these efforts, Barone has left on indelible stamp on the literary landscape of Connecticut.
Even though Connecticut periodically appears in various places throughout Barone’s wide body of work, the state and its specific identity is not something he explicitly explores. Key places—from Hartford’s Elizabeth Park to Waterbury’s Pine Grove Cemetery to the Village Restaurant in Litchfield—are referenced in such stories as “What Difference” and “Life’s Final Challenge” or poems such as “Frame Narrative,” Unpack It,” and “Pond and Ocean,” yet these often provide a way to ground the often philosophical, experimental elements of his writing. “Once more I have come to Hartford as / A ship moves into light and open space,” he writes in “Unpack It.” The specific locations he mentions help tie abstract experiences to real events and places.
Crossing Boundaries
In many ways, Barone’s work pushes between and among literary modes—poetry and prose; wit and earnestness; fiction and essay; image and sentence—to find a way to get beyond rigidity. His prose poem “Timber Edge” begins, “Each person is a category who has their own stigmatic shoes strapped to their bleeding feet. It is easy to keep track of these obsessive fools. Across the mosaic on our floor it is Arthur Murray not Arthur Miller who is on the move again.” In this piece, Barone—or the speaker, anyway—seems to want to break free of rote or ritualized adherence to predetermined modes of being or moving. Barone employs the form of the prose poem—which is arguably his true specialty—to place language between expectations. By its nature, the prose poem form is hybrid, destabilizing expectations because it is both prose and poetry. “I would say that the prose poem is both a form and a genre,” Barone has said, “and yet I am most interested in it when it is neither.” He then adds, “That is what I’m after, partly, when I write these things: plural, indeed, yes.”
The opening lines from “Timber Edge” include a bit of a pun with the reference to “their bleeding feet,” calling to mind the fact that a foot is a standard measure of rhythm in traditional metrical verse. Getting beyond an inflexible sense of traditional form allows freedom, Barone’s prose poem could be implying. Instead of being fixed, poems need to create fluid movement, the way dance does. At the same time, the poem invokes the figure of Arthur Murray, a famed ballroom dance instructor. His method of instruction included providing footprint cutouts that students were meant to place on the floor and follow in order to learn the dance steps. Barone makes use of an ironic tension here by employing a literary form whose hybridity dismantles certainty and brings into question a general human tendency to stand for categories or predetermined types. Nevertheless, Barone will often use constraints and invented forms to structure his work. “Writing is a problem-solving activity, an experiment with pen and paper,” he has said. “I like to set parameters for investigation and see where the work goes.” The ironic tendency of “Timber Edge,” however, undermines the possibility of reading “Timber Edge” as a polemic. No matter the form he employs, Barone uses literature to explore new ways of thinking and imagining rather than to argue or make claims. “Discovery is uncertainty’s outcome,” he has said, and this serves as a key to understanding what he is after as a writer and what he hopes to offer his readers.
Anthology Selections
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