Dandarians, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Milkweed Editions, 2014
I am unsure that I can manage something summarizing or encompassing to say about Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Dandarians because the content is too expansive, too large, and I loved it without managing to be critical about it. So this is a response to, an exhortation to read, if you will, Roripaugh’s book.
There are many bright spots in the book but I think I loved most what the first poem promised me: a discussion of meaning and wordplay at the intersection of multiple languages and cultures, an exploration of Otherness, how history never stops resonating into the present.
The first poem is titled “The Planet of Dandar” and Roripaugh begins it:
Prismed through the scrim of my mother’s Japanese accent, I think dandelions are Dandarians. Dan-dare-ee-uns. Futuristic, alien—like something named after late-night B-movie space creatures from an undiscovered planet.
Maybe this is why the disturbingly lurid fronds seem too yellow to me. They seethe, I believe, with feverishly incandescent radioactivity. I’m convinced this explains the obsessive, anxiety-laced fervor with which my parents uproot them from our lawn. As if under threat of colonization.
The poem moves from here to Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, to the ramifications of the speaker’s pronunciation of this term at school, to the relationship between speaker and speaker’s mother. In these two verse-paragraphs, my music-ear picks up prism/scrim, seem/seethe/believe, feverish/fervor, feverishly/incandescent, lawn/colonization. Not to diminish the amazing conceit that Roripaugh is building, dandelions as metaphor for colonization, for Otherness, for threat.
Roripaugh continues:
And so when I tell you I’m an alien—a Dandarian, hailing from the planet Dandar—I am, of course, mostly joking. But not entirely. When I tell you I’m radioactive, it’s mostly a posture. But not entirely.
How anaphora makes her point. This verse-paragraph introduces the “you”, which comes back many times throughout the book and changes faces most of those times (but not entirely).
But the remainder of the book is not about the Dandarian, at least not by name. In the poems, the speaker continues to wrestle with language, with love, with lovers, with nature, in amazing ways but not in the same way that the opening poem captivated me. “Senchimental” is another strong example of a poem that discusses language as a metaphor for Otherness and for mother-daughter relationships: “As a child, I weld the words centimeter and sentimental together because my mother pronounces centimeter as senchimental…” The mother counts out centimeters as she knits. That poem closes:
It is, perhaps, no accident, that this is a poem in which the speaker is unsure about whether or not she is running away from something, or running toward it.
One senchimental. Two senchimental. Three senchimental.
I learn how to knit early on. But I do it very rarely.
Understand about needles. Beware the sudden flash and parry, the silvered piercing which leaves a hole that’s sometimes a wound, sometimes an aperture through which we fill ourselves with light. Understand that even the best of us can be skewered, tender pieces of meat that we are, as matter-of-factly as shish kebab.
In addition to the language poems, I loved Roripaugh’s nature pieces. “Antimoaney”, “Dee Aster”, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Vermillion River”. But “Skywriting” stands out for me, another example of a poem-long conceit. I too remember those little green caterpillars hanging from invisible strings in the woods behind my childhood home. But to think of them as writing in the sky, like airplanes? Amazing. And Roripaugh goes further:
A star drops out of the sky—sparkling spider dropping down from a shimmering dragline—and you are there to see it.
What I take away from the book as a whole is Roripaugh’s extensive vocabulary, the music within the language, the deep and thoughtful ideas and the juxtaposition of imagery which built those ideas. I had to slow down and think about what I was reading. It was marvelous. I look forward to reading it again.
