DAVID DODD LEE, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW
Captainlainberg
“I don’t want you to write this down.
Don’t take notes while I’m talking!”
No one understood anything. Tim
stomped away. We are too often
combative with those we love. A family
member’s displeasure is not a thing
anyone wants to feel responsible
for! He needed to take a walk. He
needed to feel the spongy grass
of a golf green under his feet, tiny
aeration holes visible. He liked
fishing because he could also just be;
cattails reflected on a farm pond.
No. People. He floated down Curly
Road in his new Nissan, fine with
listening to Bloomberg on the radio,
stock tips. Then an Abba CD. (What
of it! he thought.) Off to your right you’ve
got your paddleboats for sale. The river
to the left is covered by a bridge two
people recently leapt to their deaths
from. One night he was on his back porch,
smoking (he’d been really trying to
quit), bats zagging overhead, when
he heard what he thought was a
train coupling or uncoupling (he
could never tell the difference) south-
west of his home, at the switching
yard. It was more like something being
crunched, though. Like tin foil being
balled up. Not rails and cables and
wheels of thick steel, but something
much lighter. The next day he observed
the gap in the fence where the SUV
had failed to stop at the end of
Brave Road. If not for an enormous
oak a residence would have been
destroyed. Two young men had died.
The driver, the Tribune said, was 26 year
old Randy Von Stuttenhagger. The
passenger, 24, was Joey Armadillo.
They had been drinking. There was
no bark left on the trunk of that tree,
and the wood itself had been blackened
by flames. The lucky homeowners
were said to be a principle at a local
high school and a CPA. What am I
doing here, living in fucking Captainlainberg?
Tim thought, pulling now into his
own uneven driveway. His son was there,
bouncing a basketball, playing Four
Horses with their neighbor, Mephlanda.
The roof on the house had a concave
bow to it. Living was hard. “I see
the lawn is not mowed,” Tim said.
“Why even grow grass if it has to be
cut?” his son whined. He had a point.
“We can’t even eat it.” The oak tree
the SUV had crashed into was about
thirty feet from the residence, a respectable
looking ranch home. Pieces of plastic
and windshield glass, two beer cans,
part of the vehicle’s front grill, and a
person’s shoe had been tossed onto
the roof of the house due to the intensity
of the impact and as of last week
(Tim had checked) were still up there.
David Dodd Lee on “Captainlainberg”:
I don’t want to suggest that what motivated me to write a sequence of poems (including “Captainlainberg”) came as part of some orderly process. As with most of my writing, I had a vague sense at first what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to write plainspoken poems in which the speakers were modelled after neighbors and people from my own past—folks from the rural Midwest. I did not want to write monologues spoken by specific people I knew, however. My plan was not, at any point, to write an updated version of the Spoon River Anthology. (The collection I’ve ended up with though, in many ways, is similar to SRA.) I just knew I wanted to latch onto certain VOICES I recognized and follow them wherever they wanted to take me. The poems are all fiction, but occasionally they are loosely based on something I’ve recently experienced. And in many cases the speakers share my own preoccupations and experiences and history. At the same time I wanted to place absurdity around the edges of things. In some cases the poems are quite surreal. They are often ridiculous (I wanted them all to be at least partly funny). Still, the struggles depicted in the poems (I hope) evoke pathos. “Captainlainberg” is not a real town, of course. I liked it for its idiosyncratic lack of poetic charm. Tim’s situation in the poem isn’t my own or anyone I know. He’s just Tim, who struggles to make sense of life sometimes. Why is it all so difficult! There is a haplessness evident in the tone of the poem but Tim’s hardships aren’t to be scoffed at. I hope I pulled off kind of balance between the absurd and empathetic. As for the car crash referenced in “Captainlainberg”—it really happened. And I really did hear a tinny little crunch from my porch rather late one night. Early the next morning I investigated and found the site of the accident (about a mile away), including the hole in the fence and the scorched tree along with several items that had been tossed up on the roof of the house the SUV had failed to demolish. (I did check the house quite a while later and the stuff was still up there.) “Captainlainberg,” the poem, and the manuscript to which it belongs, were inspired in part by the poems of James Tate, Arthur Vogelsang, and Noelle Kocot (whose Bigger World is a must-read).
David Dodd Lee is the author of ten full-length books of poems & a chapbook, including Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues Press, 1997), Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002), Abrupt Rural (New Issues Press, 2004), The Nervous Filaments (Four Way Books, 2010) Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, the Ashbery Erasure Poems (BlaxeVox, 2010), Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014), & And Other’s, Vaguer Presences (BlazeVox, 2018), a second book of Ashbery erasure poems. He has published fiction and poetry in many literary magazines (including The Nation, Copper Nickel, New World Writing, Willow Springs, and Pleiades) & is currently making final edits on Flood, a novel. He is also a painter, collage artist, and a photographer. Since 2014 he has been featured in three one person exhibitions, mixing collage & poetry texts into single improvisational art works. Recent artwork has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, The Hunger, The Rumpus, and Twyckenham Notes. His collage work, accompanied by an interview, will be featured in a forthcoming issue of The Journal. In 2016 he began making sculpture, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. Unlucky Animals, a book of collages, original poems, erasures, and dictionary sonnets is forthcoming in 2020. Lee is Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press.