By Randi Bjornstad
At 2 p.m. on Saturday, July 22, lifelong Eugene resident Dale Brabb will be at the Cornucopia restaurant at 17th and Lincoln streets in Eugene, reading poetry from his first book, A Gold Mine, one of four volumes of prose and poetry he has written and published so far.
Brabb’ has been writing his poetry for more than 50 years, and each collection explores and elevates some aspect of life —autobiography, jobs, family, relationships — that everyone experiences and perhaps shares, but which few turn into art.
Here’s one example:
Making sense of history
When I was ten I had an operation for hernia
so of course they put me under
coming out of the anesthesia I had a dream
of being underwater and drowning
the surface beckoned
I struggled to reach it
but just as I got there
something thrust me down to start again
over and over again it happened
Speaking to my father many years later
he told me of his role that day
I kept trying to sit up
and mindful of my fresh stitches
he pressed me back down for safety’s sake
suddenly it all made sense
one memory out of many
brought to me in technicolor
I couldn’t help but hug the old man
love had made him do it
and how was I to fault that?
Publishing-come-lately
Poet and author Dale Brabb; photo by Cliff Coles
Although Brabb has been turning his life into poetry since early adulthood, it wasn’t until the stultifying and isolating aspects of the pandemic came along that he had the luxury of time — and maybe money — to publish it.
It was only then, when he really had time to think about it — and with the support of the government-issued stimulus checks that helped millions of citizens weather the viral storm — that it occurred to Brabb that publication was something he could do and should do with his time and resources.
First came A Gold Mine, which he published via Luminare Press in September 2021, still at the height of the inward-turning world.
“Those poems were really my ‘author autobiography,’ ” he said. “I wanted it to be about my experiences in life, not anything else.”
In fact, Chapter 1 is titled Family Trees, with a subtitle, My family has had a big influence on my poetry.
Chapter 2 is War in Our Time (Subtitle, There are many forms that war takes.
Chapter 3, The Passage of Time, has a lengthy subtitle, In this chapter are poems dealing with various aspects of time, including life expectancy, eternity, our conception of time, and of course,the passage of time.
A Many Splendored Thing encompasses the poems in Chapter 4, examines Love, falling in love and falling out of love.
The fifth chapter, The Natural World, includes poems about encounters with the
natural world. Some are my own encounters, some are hypothetical encounters.
It’s followed by Chapter 6, titled Odd Grandpa, and described, As I’ve aged I’ve become more odd. This chapter is a collection of miscellaneous poems reflecting that.
Chapter 7, the last, is The Funny Papers, about which he says, I learned about satire at an early age reading MAD Magazine. These poems are what I used to call Bad Poetry, almost like cartoons, I hope the reader finds them amusing.
Poems from these chapters will make up Brabb’s reading, but it will be more than reading, he promises, it will be performance.
“Also important to this is that I have quite a history of doing theater — I have been a Shakespearean actor,” he said. “My first appearance was at Lane Community College in 1971 in The Tempest. I have been in four Shakespeare plays and helped direct three.”
He brings acting into his reading partly because of a long ago experience attending a reading by U.S. poet laureate and Oregonian William Stafford, whose work he greatly admired.
“That was the only poetry reading I ever attended, but I wasn’t very impressed by his delivery,” Brabb recalled. “So in reading my own poetry — partly because of my acting experience — I try to bring intensity of meaning to the words.”
A life of performance
Brabb recalls his own very first public performance, which involved singing with his father in church when he was 3 years old.
“Mom had made us matching flannel shirts,” he recalled. Later, he performed as a clarinet player while a student at Eugene’s Churchill High School. He also learned to play the guitar and played and sang with that instrument.
But there was one attempt at musical performance that failed him, and it has its own poem in Chapter 1 of A Gold Mine:
The Lord’s Prayer
Mom asked me to sing The Lord’s Prayer
to a church full of people
at Dad’s funeral
it would mean so much to him
She always asked me to sing
trotting me out like a dancing bear
to perform for the public
I could do what she couldn’t
But that day grief dissolved my face
words were washed away
like I was drowning
and I couldn’t sing
Maybe sometime I’ll sing it for them again
now there’s no hurry
and no one left to watch a weeping bear
stumble through his lonely dance
Write “when you feel like it”
Brabb graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in English, which he chose over pursuing a bachelor’s in fine arts “because I thought, ‘Well, English can probably make me a living.”
He took college seriously, making nearly straight-As, but after all that, “I actually graduated by mistake,” he said.
“I put in my application for graduation, and they said I couldn’t graduate because I was missing classes in Chaucer, so I didn’t qualify,” he recalled. “But in the middle of that summer, I got a letter from the department congratulating me on my graduation, and when I tried to figure that out, someone told me that yes, a secretary had put my request through by mistake, but the acting dean had decided to let it stand. So I graduated, but I never went back and read Chaucer.”
But by then, he was writing his own poetry.
“You have to write when you feel like it,” Brabb said. “When the muse grabs hold of you, you write. Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night, and you at least have to scribble down an idea.”
But that doesn’t mean doing nothing else, and everything else — such as the wide succession of jobs and experiences he has had — all become an important element in poetry, Brabb acknowledges and relishes.
“I have done so many different jobs in my life, and I think it all counts in the long run,” he said. “It all becomes the gist of the things I have written about.”
That “gist” has led to the self-publication of four books so far. Following A Gold Mine by only six months, Brabb published a second book of poetry, Vessels, in March 2022.
In a real departure just two months after that, he completed a novel called Detectives, which is described this way: “Introducing Phineas ‘Fin’ Erkle, Detective Extraordinaire, and his sidekick Hank the pigeon, as he solves cases in a small city. If your cat is stuck in a tree, he’s your man. If the paper-person keeps throwing your newspaper up on the roof, call him. He’ll tirelessly spend shoe leather to discover what you’ve lost, how you’ve been cheated, or if your parakeet has been murdered. All he wants in return is to keep on good terms with his wallet…”
Another eight months on, in January 2023, came another book of poetry, Balanced Rock and Other True Stories.
Copies of his books will be available at Cornucopia during Brabb’s reading, and when it comes to the poems he read from A Gold Mine, “I hope people will just pick one up off the table and follow along as I am reading so they can enjoy it more,” he said.
Such as this one:
Privilege
Have you never been hungry
I mean really hungry
have you never been cold
with no way to get warm
have you never needed sleep
and had no place to lay your head
then you are privileged
It isn’t your fault
merely a quirk of fate
but that doesn’t absolve you
from willful blindness
your luck does not confer superiority
privilege is just another hurdle
(if you want to be worthwhile)
to get over
Poetry reading of A Gold Mine, by Dale Brabb
When: 2 p.m. on Saturday, July 22, 2023
Where: Cornucopia, 205 W. 17th Ave. (corner of 17th and Lincoln streets), Eugene
Admission: Free; donations to “tip jar” welcome
