David R. Guenette

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Like many thousands—indeed, if not millions—of other young Americans, I began writing poetry in high school, and no doubt at least partly fueled by the desire to be a non-conformist, like every one else. These earliest works are lost ephemera, thank goodness, but I do remember, vaguely, admittedly, that the few efforts written out had a political cast to them, as befit the times and my serious adolescent demeanor. Hey, my underground newspaper was titled The Student Voice, if you need any convincing at all about my aforementioned demeanor.

In college my interest in poetry grew, albeit, if truth be told, probably still largely fueled by the hormones within and the not entirely mistaken notion that a poetry book-toting, poetry-spouting young man—appropriately attired in a sometimes tweed jacket and genuine beret, of course—stood some chance at developing meaningful relationships with the opposite and still quite bewildering sex, and the meaning of “meaningful relationships” in this context can be left to your imagination. Still, despite the source of some of my motives, there were others more directly literary too, and it was a good if confusing time for poetry and literature. I’m still happy to recite at least fragments of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” as well as some Robert Herrick and a complete (if short) work by Gerald Manley Hopkins, but I would claim allegiance more to Ginsberg, Williams (William Carlos), and Robert Creeley, with Marvin Bell, Adrianne Rich, and Mark Strand as my trumps to show I was in the know. Well, what should one expect from a beret-wearing fellow who didn’t know how ridiculous a picture he could present with his sparse facial hair and earnest pipe-smoking stylings. I assure you that to this day I have a poetic heart.

It is the fortune of youngsters to be foolish, but I had other lucky breaks as well. One was to stumble across the American Hard-Boiled School of fiction, with its triumvirate of Chandler, Hammett, and Cain, and the force of the language—and I hold myself a Chandler fan most of all—was more than enough to keep me from ever seriously entertaining the idea that these works were mere entertainment. Even a 19-year-old is sharp enough to recognize good literature when it slaps him upside the head.

These poems were begun a few years after I finished with school, after a couple of generations of slowly improving poetry had already passed blessedly unpublished into my files, and after my having entered and moved well into the adult activities of professional life and marriage, and other such apparently restricting, yet actually liberating choices, with enough distance traversed to encourage me—require me, perhaps—to reflect on my first big choices about life and love. The P.I. Poems, then, are at once a celebration of my joy with and transfixion upon a too-often under-appreciated American literature, and the application of nostalgia as a diagnostic tool, as it were, in my early efforts to sort out the choices of my earlier personal history. Not that one should read these poems for autobiographical information, since a) those stories aren’t particularly interesting in and of themselves and b) I’m handy enough with poetry (one can hope) so as to let the poem’s own need demand the images and narration and to not be a slave to fact.

Given the many years over which I worked on these pieces (most often in the lapse than in the breach), I do wish that the sentiments expressed were more noble and useful, but I do hold some slim hope that the language itself—no small aspect of poetry, in theory—will be entertaining to others. But in the end, I’ve produced this slim work less for you than for me, since it is well nigh time for me to move on to more interesting considerations, about which you may one day be abused as in the manner of what is before you today.

If you are, like me, a fan both of poetry and American detective fiction of the of the hard-boiled sort, find The Whole Truth, by James Cummings, for a real treat. Formally, the work is a book length collection of sestinas (an amazing feat in itself), using Perry Mason characters as its subject. In neither form nor quality can The P.I. Poems compare. 

Well, time to go. Here’s looking at me, kid.

—DRG, September 27, 2000 

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