The Poetry of Jeff Daniel Marion

The Poetry of Jeff Daniel Marion By Gerald C. Wood "the reward of this labor/is vision" Dan Marion begins his 1981 collection of poems Tight Lines with a poem of the same name: First read the water, then cast toward pockets, the deep spaces between the cold print of rocks. It's the flow that beguiles— what's beneath that lures. But when the line goes taut, a dark, waiting presence will Hash and weave its way, throbbing, into your pulse.' These few lines suggest nearly all the characteristics of style and theme in his work, both what has been noted in other reviews and what has been overlooked. It is, in the first place, a simple and sensitive description of a fishing experience, directed to an attentive but uninitiated audience. One step from this scene is the rural East Tennessee countryside so well known by the poet immersed in his place. It is even easy to pick up the sensitivity to older, better ways of living, a longing for a cleaner, more vital past.2 All of the tendencies that lead readers to defining Marion's work as pastoral, regional, picturesque are present in "Tight Lines."3 And there is no doubt that he loves East Tennessee and that rural living is both his style and his obsession. But this poem also suggests other interests of Jeff Daniel Marion that, to use his words, lure the reader from these initial impressions. For example, the apparent intimacy between poet and reader is neither as complete or assured as it first appears to be. The narrator needs to direct the reader to "read the water"; the hidden aggression in his voice betrays a fear that most readers won't see, or later feel, the waiting presences described in "Tight Lines." Beneath the surface lies the poet's burden of a vision and depth of feeling which sometimes leaves him alone and alert for "lines" that tie, moments of shared awareness.4 What shapes the interchange between poet and reader, however, is not the poet's own isolation but his need to teach, to draw the reader from his dull and shallow consciousness. The obvious analogy between fishing and reading is consequently not the easy metaphor it may first seem. The poet likes flyfishing, but his goal in the writing is to nudge the reader into "pockets," "deep spaces," the "beneath," not to create one more image of a fisherman in a mountain stream. The poem is 39 not an imagistic study of a rural scene or a fishing travelogue; it is a dramatic struggle between the poet and his reader who is too easily beguiled by the flow, not so much of water as words on the page and the comfortable experience easily available when the poem is put down. The poet wants to jolt the reader out of usual ways of reading by making an almost surreal comparison between poetry and fishing, then draw the "hooked" participant into a subterranean world of "dark, waiting" presences that demand intense and disturbing responses. If Marion lives in a pastoral world, he is the soft-spoken neighbor of James Dickey in "Kudzu." Terms like "pastoral" and "regional" are useful descriptions of Dan Marion's work because the poems are about rural living and the East Tennessee where he has chosen to spend his life's time. But those same terms can be unnecessarily limiting for a poet of Marion's vision. His work is not static or picturesque in the usual sense of those terms; beneath the surface is a poetry of intense dramas—between poet and audience, a dynamic personality and his changing place, the present and the past, the shallow and the deep. These dramas are much more personal and psychological than they first appear; throughout his work the poet shows us an awareness that, in the words of Annie Dillard: There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom.5 This quest is essentially a religious one, for Dan Marion faces a world of brokenness and change with an unusually rich vision and the craft of...