Dennis M. Hammes

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Dennis M. Hammes, (April 8, 1945 - December 23, 2008) was an American poet.

Life
He was a 1963 graduate of Park Rapids High School, Park Rapids, Minnesota. Hammes was the author of several books of poetry, published in pdf and available for download from his online publishing company, Scrawlmark. He was well-known in Usenet as a regular contributor to the newsgroups alt.arts.poetry.comments and rec.arts.poems.



Writing
Hammes was a prolific writer of many forms of verse, in particular the haiku and the sonnet.

His master work was an epic series of sonnets which is loosely based on the legendary Orphic trilogy, and parallels the story of the trials of Orpheus but within a landscape of contemporary events. The three sequences of the sonnet series are: There are over 900 sonnets in the series.
 * Sonnets to Eurydice
 * The Women of Thrace
 * The Singing Head

There's some amazing writing in there. I did learn a lot from watching how he rewrote lines and added new ones, and seeing the improvements before my eyes. He built in some great consonance -- the p's in S2 and t's in S3 -- just read it out loud and watch them pop out. I could go on and on about each line he wrote, but I'll limit it to one example that shows his talent; the rhyme in LL7-8::From every jealous Dick and peeping Tom, it
 * Gushed, the prophet-zealot-preacher vomit.

The problem here was to come up with a rhyme for 'vomit'. First, Dennis moved 'vomit' to L8, so it looks like the rhyme we came up with, rather than the word to be rhymed. That's just standard good writing; but look at what Dennis came up to rhyme it with! Because "Tom" works so well there, on so many levels (from "Tom, Dick, and Harry" to the Lady Godiva association), the reader can see that "Tom" has to be the word used there -- that "it" has to be pulled up from the next line, just to make it scan -- and therefore "vomit" has to be the rhyme the poet came up with: a truly inspired rhyme, rather than the word we were looking to fit in. And look what pulling "it" up did for "Gushed"; it becomes the first word, and gets capitalized; the second-most prominent word in the line after "vomit". Dennis was a master craftsman, and one can learn a lot about the craft by reading his poems. -George Dance on the poem Hollywood Slut

Books

 * The Wild Goose Goes
 * By the Sword
 * Love Poems for the Incompetent
 * Sonnets To Eurydice
 * Haiku I
 * Haiku II
 * Haiku III
 * Occupation

Chaps

 * Offices
 * One Gallon (Four Quarts)
 * Starch Wars
 * Crazy Jinn Talks with the Bishop
 * Crazy Jinn Meets the Bishop

Handbooks

 * Prosody
 * Analytical Depression

Essays

 * The Iliad as Bible
 * James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Very Small Boy
 * Racine: Andromache
 * Shake or Bake?
 * Who Wasted Which Land? A view of T.S. Eliot