It's about time Dave Awl published a book of poetry! His delight with language and exquisite mind have been well-admired by his fans for years. He's a long-time writer/player of "The Neo-Futurists," which is famous here in Chicago -- and indeed across the world -- for its "thirty plays in sixty minutes" theater experience called "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind." I've always loved Dave's Too Much Light plays because they challenge me as much as they entertain me, and I feel like I've gained a tiny glimpse into an amazing brain. It's good stuff. I've also managed to catch Dave in a few productions of the Pansy Kings Cotillion performance group, which he founded. He's been a major asset to the "fringe theater" scene in Chicago. Didn't I see him in a Theater Oobleck show, too? I can't remember. Everything I have seen him in has really just been awesome and I am a bona fide fan. I consider it a personal badge of honor that I was among the first to hear his bit on NPR's This American Life segment about Sissies. It was cool. But that's to be expected from Dave Awl, I guess.
This book, What the Sea Means, is pretty darned good! It includes really recent poetry, monologues from his gazillion shows, and some older poems. Words that come to mind are, "Range" "Depth," "Breadth," "What the . . .?!" How can a Jungian Surrealist write in rhyming quatrains? I don't pretend to know how he does it, but he does it well. And now he's doing it on the page, not just the stage.
Among my favorites in this collection are "What the Sea Means 2.0," "The City Slept and Metal Phantoms," "The Idea of You," "Stitching a Dummy," "A Perfectly Empty Room," "Immensity," "Talking to Myself," "Map of the Body," and "The Bestiary." I LOVE the Bestiary! If you like Rexroth's, you'll appreciate Dave Awl's. Hilarious!
I haven't decided which of these I'll give to my students when we study poetry this spring. I know they'd really get a lot out of and really get into a bunch of them.
Dave Awl is just a great writer and person -- I've had the pleasure of talking to him after a number of his shows. I can say with confidence that we could all benefit from having a little Dave Awl in our lives.
