I’ve never been clear if Bill Deemer ever lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where so much of the New Western poetry of the 1960s came together, or whether he has always been up in the Eugene, Oregon area where he lives now. In the 1960s, Deemer was a name one saw frequently in periodicals like Jim Koller’s Coyote’s Journal & it was obvious that Deemer had a considerable ease with the formation of line & stanza. There were at least two books in the 1960s, Poems from Auerhahn Press, one of the prestige fine presses in San Francisco, and Diana, from Coyote’s Journal, the book that originally introduced me to Deemer’s work. There was, or so suggests abebooks.com, at least one self-published volume that decade – I never saw it. There was one book in the 1970s that I also never saw, then two in the 1980s from Coyote – which I believe is what Jim Koller’s press had evolved into – and more recently a trio of things from Bob Arnold’s Longhouse Press up in Vermont. I would be surprised – shocked even – if any edition had more than the 525 copies of that first Auerhahn volume, tho Deemer was shortlisted for the Oregon Book Awards for Variations. Longhouse’s catalog, which still has copies of the 250-copy run available at $25 apiece, says this of Variations:

I wouldn't be an American if I didn't do a little self-promotion. In that tricky vein of remembering just what it was like when you first read a Richard Brautigan poem during that time (50s-60s) or a Philip Whalen poem, or in further time a Louis Jenkins poem, and now Jim Dodge poem, and Eileen Myles poem, that flash. Never take a flash lightly. Bill Deemer is our Han-Shan and has lived for decades in a quiet corner of Oregon making these well-built poems of flash. There is nothing like them any where. Bill doesn't talk to us anymore since we did this book and had to raise the price a few dollars. I wouldn't want it any other way. It's a Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea sort of thing. We hand-made this book of hand-made poems.

Deemer comes very close these days to being a haiku-ist – his impulse for the short poem constructed around consciously counted syllables & a two- or three-part logic is broken only when he gathers several of these together, as in what I take to be the title work, “Variations on a Theme”:

Swallow
no bigger than that
flies all the way south

Crocus
no bigger than that
pushed winter aside

Insect
no bigger than that
needs so many legs

Splinter
no bigger than that
won’t be ignored

Tear
no bigger than that
ruins her makeup

Ant
no bigger than that
plunders & wars

Piaf
no bigger than that
but all Paris listened

Mosquito
no bigger than that
puts lumps on my head

Haiku
no bigger than that
made Basho famous

Nest
no bigger than that
shelters a family

Puddle
no bigger than that
reflects the sky

I can get into the efficiency of these stanzas almost instantly, a poetics with clear affinities with Phil Whalen & Anselm Hollo, say. They’re deliberately anti-ambitious, which I suspect must raise up a whole range of emotions when other poets read these works.¹ It takes a particular kind of gall to write without ambition & Deemer knows it:

FAME & FORTUNE

Fame:
the cows stop eating
to watch me pass.

Fortune:
more blackberries
than I will ever pick.

There are numerous homages to Issa & Basho, and a suite of six poems all offering variations on Williams’ “Red Wheel Barrow.” There is room for sentiment, humor, a little grumpiness. What there isn’t room for is excess or waste – this book’s primary value is an economy of precision. On its own terms, it’s a delight.

 

¹ I’ll be almost shocked if I don’t get a comment or email to the effect of “Geez, Silliman, you used to be so cutting edge!” But what that writer wouldn’t recognize is that as recently as the 1960s, this was cutting edge.