Dinner Table Refuge by Benjamin Schmitt
Punks Write Poems, 2015
Paperback, 118 pages, $14
ISBN: 978-0986170737
Clocking in at over 100 pages, Benjamin Schmitt’s Dinner Table Refuge tackles a number of issue— death, politics, homelessness, love, punk rock nostalgia, and even zombies and robot takeovers. The collection is not only wide in scope, but wide in its array of forms. Collage poems mix with straight-forwarded narratives, but the work resonates the most when the poems are clear, when they recall the idealistic punk rockers of the poet’s youth, or offer meditations on love in the book’s final section.
There is a thread of memory, images of slam dances and sweaty punk clubs that reoccur in the book. The poem “1997,” for instance, transitions between the past and present well. Set against the backdrop of punk rock youth, the poem drives deeper, hitting notes of love and heartache.
In 1997
the punk rocker read a book on this curb
returning now
fifteen years later
he doesn’t remember until he begins crossing the street
and sees that spot he sat reading Homage to Catalonia
one youthful melancholic Friday afternoon
a few hours before she broke up with him
The poem continues to weave in and out of the past and present, as the speaker remembers the various punk patches that adorned his studded leather jacket. The conclusion echoes the beginning, when the speaker again remembers the girl who broke up with him and his book that she never returned. Schmitt has a knack for writing about memory and the passage of youth, while detailing the people that inhabited those clubs, making them more than punk rock caricatures in Doc Martins boots and Black Flag t-shirts.
The idea of lost youth returns later in the book through the poem “We were radicals,” as the speaker reminisces about all of the idealistic plans he and his punk friends had, such as plotting for the overthrow of capitalism, while quoting the Dead Kennedys and Bakunin. There is a collective “we” that echoes throughout the poem, too, which stands not only for the speaker and his friends, but also the activist punk scene. That said, there are times when I wanted these characters to be given more specific names and details, like the girl in “1997.”
The collection makes a major shift in its final section, through a series of love poems. Here, Schmitt offers some of his most well-crafted lines and images. In “T.,” he writes, “I rediscovered my body/in her arms. As she/clutched me I felt the music of pores/singing through skin and I knew/that to truly love the music one had to be/reborn in such embraces/to experience the inevitability of total loss/before sensing the fluidity.” Another poem, “Weirdos,” reads like a praise poem, as the speaker compliments all of the nerdy characteristics of his partner, including her Captain America action figure and affinity for Lord of the Rings marathons.
Dinner Table Refuge is not afraid to address more serious topics, such as white guilt and homelessness, or how the passing of time can tame youthful ideals, but it’s also a collection that will draw laughs from the reader through its pop culture references. It is a book diverse in both subject matter and form, and some of Schmitt’s strongest poems successfully capture a moment and place in time, be it a punk club or a first date with his partner. The lines range from funny to confessional and even sensual in the final pages.
