The Voices of Daniel Bourne

by Karol Crosbie

When Dan Bourne speaks through his poetry, he can be anyone. A five-year-old boy, a schizophrenic woman, a farmer's wife. He speaks of ordinary things—boys on swings, farm chores, dancers, ancient trees.

He modulates his voice for his different roles as poet, teacher, and editor. Professor of English at Wooster since 1988, he characterizes the grades he gives students in his poetry and fiction classes as "holistic and kind." As editor of Artful Dodge, a literary journal he founded in 1979, his voice is a little sharper. Thousands of poems are submitted for publication every year; only a few can be accepted.

But whether his audience members are students or seasoned poets, Bourne's message about his art form is consistent. "I often quote Lenny Bruce, who said that pain+time = comedy. It's like that with poetry," says Bourne. "You don't know if an emotion is going to be powerful until time has passed. It might have been very powerful for a couple of hours, and then that emotion may be gone. But if it can still command your attention many years later…

"T. S. Eliot said that poetry isn't about emotion, it's about conquering emotion. He had very little patience with the notion of a poem being a place to emote. Instead, it's a place to crystallize."

Because his poet's voice can reveal an array of characters, Bourne says the genre of writing that best informs his art is playwriting. But last spring, he found inspiration in two additional art formsmusic and dance.

Bourne wrote First Steps Out in response to a dance, Primal Urges, choreographed by Wooster community dance teacher Andrea Zuercher. The poem's reading and the dance, performed on campus last spring by Wooster alumni, faculty, students, and staff, involved part improvisation and part planning, he says. "Line breaks are about the pressure and release of language.What I wrote seemed to fit with the pressure and release of the music and the dancers' motions."

Bourne, who grew up on a farm near the Little Wabash River in Wynoose, Illinois, often writes about southern Illinois farmland. Stick Horse is an autobiographical snapshot of Bourne as a child. The cucumber horses and his infatuation with stick horses were real, Bourne says. "And although I don't remember riding my stick horse through my sister's cucumber horse herd, it's the sort of thing I would have done."

Bourne and his wife, Margaret, have a five-year-old son, Carter.

The poem is included in Bourne's book, The Household Gods, published in 1995 by Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Other books include Where No One Spoke the Language (CustomWords) and On the Crossroads of Asia and Europe (Salmon Run), translations of the Polish poet Tomasz Jastrun. Bourne's award-winning poems have also been published in many journals and anthologies.

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