Carmine Dandrea
Carmine Dandrea
Undertaking the
American Dream
Carmine Dandrea, Professor of Literature and Creative Writing and former editor of Blossom Review, a magazine of the arts, was educated at Hobart College, Brown University, Elmira College, and Cornell University from which he received the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. He has taught at Elmira Free Academy, Elmira College, Corning Community College, and Lake Michigan College. Mr. Dandrea served in the United States Marine Corps and during the Korean War was awarded the Purple Heart Medal. He was a national winner in the Discovery '69 Program of the New York Poetry Center. His first book of poems, Heart's Crow, based on experiences in India, was published by P.Lal's Writers Workshop of Calcutta in 1972. His poems have been published in Plaintiff, Transition, Ego Flights, Michigan Magazine, Husson Review, Albion and other literary journals and anthologies. Over 30 of his poems have won prizes and awards. In 1977 the editors of the International Who's Who in Poetry awarded him a Certificate of Distinguished Contributions to Poetry. Wyndham Hall Press sent him to a Poetry Workshop near Limerick, Ireland, and published his book-length sequence of poems, American Still Life, in 1992. He has been a Scholar at the 1993 NEH Institute of Chinese Culture and Civilization at the East-West Center in Hawaii and has participated in the Center's 1994 Field Study in the People's Republic of China and its 1995 Field Study in India. His third book, Liberation: a Journey to India, was published in 1995 by P. Lal of the Writers Workshop of Calcutta, India. An ardent practitioner of poetry as oral art, he has read his own poetry and others' in Beirut, Istanbul, New Delhi and throughout India, in Katmandu, Honolulu, the People's Republic of China, and in the United States.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Counting Out My Growth In Deaths
A Karate Expert Kills A Car
The 1st Of November
The Image In The Mirror
Sunrise In Chicago
Alone In The House
An Elegy In Spring
Rising After Midnight
The Man From Yesterday
The Flower Man Is Gone
An Escape From The Institution
A Trinity For Maladjustment
How The Old Man Died
A Report From The Clinic
Everything Is Springtime And Great Beauty
Jungle
Farm Auction
Dreamland And Charles Bukowski
Melville
Estrangement
On The Eve Of The Gunfighter's Death
Undertaking The American Dream
The Will That In The Sunset Finds Release
Dirge For The Dead Anatoly
Hothouse
A Bird In Winter
Upstate March
Visiting The Cages In Bombay
In The Madras Market
The Highway To Delhi
Waiting For The Third Wave In
To A Korean Comfort Girl, Shot Sniping
I Find The Dead Chinaman
Easter, 1951
Rescue By Helicopter
Cheese
The Blue Sky Motel
A Dead Horse In The Supermarket
Piece De Resistance
Sequence: Those Inscrutable Chinese:
Lady With A Small Dog
Lunch At The Chinese National Art Institute
Shao Shi Peng Speaks Toilets
Mr.Gupta, Mr. Li
Everyone Loved Fala
Her Room At Night
The Universe Of Death
A Fable Of Flies
M. Del Papa
My Rich Croatian Uncle, Andy Smith
The School Photographer Takes My Picture
Dilemma
All The Little Comforts
Jumping Off The Eiffel Tower
I Love You, Minnie Wantagh, In The A.& P.
From the Book:
COUNTING OUT MY GROWTH IN DEATHS
This sun-filled Sunday morning
when I woke,
I knew that you would not;
I knew that you had gone,
and that your eyes
were closed to Sundays
and to sun.
All my life
I have counted out my growth
in deaths
until they have become
the total of my time
as every stone
that makes a cairn
becomes a marker of the spot;
and your death, Grandfather,
is only one
among the many deaths
I register;
but how special to my growth
it is, I think I know.
At ninety years, your mind alive
to Sundays and to sun,
you simply fell asleep at five-
a quiet afternoon of naps-
and died. No pain we knew of
crossed you in that hour.
Of course, you were alone,
and that was fitting too.
The family had gone home
and left the dream you had
to you .
Who could have known,
although we were aware
at ninety every moment spins
a pinwheel in the sky,
and every arrow spun
is ever pointed straight.
Death smiles, sweet and sure
as lovers do in summer sun,
each time you close your eyes.
With you, another part of time
that calibrates my growth
and scales love has gone.
The sun of yesterday
will not be here tomorrow.
The sun, however, rises
as perhaps I do.
But you, old dial, stand still
the farthest measure of my hour.
I have counted out my growth
in deaths,
and yours is shortening
my life's shadow.
My growth slows
with fainter, thinner line
to mark my moments
in creative light.
The sun at noon is nude,
and so am I.
DILEMMA
I've been reading evolution theory,
trying to get back
into the primal mud of pond behind the farm.
How hard it is to do
after Adam and the naming of things:
after the tawny lion and the slippery toad,
after the giant Redwood and the warty weed,
after the telescoping of giraffe,
the chipmunk chittering and the lisp
of squirrels sliding the telephone lines,
after the titmouse teetering
on the thinnest branch and the great crow
curving through the sky
in sheer, black-robed telegraphy.
How hard it is to do
after the wonderful fib
of Eve and Adam's rib,
after the infamy of apple,
the notoriety of glitter
surrounding the snake,
the Father filled with wrath,
unforgiving, relentless, but
promising some future fruit.
I'm sure that science is a useful thing,
but how drab and gray it is
beside such metaphors
that ring and sing.
Undertaking the American Dream
is a 112-page hand-stitched paper book with spine.
$16.00
From the US or Canada
From Other Countries
