Riffs

by Dennis Lee

Riffs is the story of a passionate love affair, told in vintage Lee style - with whoops, deep chords, and headlong improvisational arcs. We hear Bach, Bo Diddley, Bird; the news is heartache and being. Celebratory, catastrophic, the poem tracks ways in which eros and our lives are made mutually accountable. Riffs is a landmark achievement from the poet of Civil Elegies and The Gods . "This is a grown-up voice, a voice of gritty honesty, of integrity ... we are taken along for the ride in an entirely convincing, captivating way." -- Quill & Quire

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Dennis Beynon Lee, OC, MA is a Canadian poet and thinker who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He is also a children's writer.

After attending high school at the University of Toronto Schools, Lee received bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Toronto. He is best known for his children's writings; his most famous work is the rhymed Alligator Pie (1974). He also wrote the lyrics to the theme song of the 1980s television show Fraggle Rock and, with Philip Balsam, many of the other songs for that show. Balsam and Lee also wrote the songs for the television special The Tale of the Bunny Picnic. Lee is co-writer of the story for the film Labyrinth.

Reviews

[Mark Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before I could read, I knew Dennis Lee's poetry by heart. He taught me that poetry was fun and I have never been afraid of it since. In this book of poetry for adults, there is some of that sense of fun in the musical rhythm of some of the lines, the puns, and the word play, but in RIFFS, Lee has a lot more on his mind than "alligator pie."

This book is a story poem in 88 segments about the disintegration of a love affair between a middle-aged man and a married woman, who eventually chooses to remain with her husband. The early poems describe the affair from the man's point of view and they smoulder with passion and intensity, but there is a feeling of fun as well.

" How
hooked I--
honey how

hooked &
horny; hooked and happy-go-
honking--hey, how

hooked on your
honey-sweet honey I
am."

The fabulous rhythm and alliteration in these lines is almost song-like in its exultation. You can feel the self-satisfaction of the egotistical lover as he serenades his lady love.

There is a slow move in the text to the break-up. Longer and longer descriptions of the time they are apart, musings on their love in the past tense, intense delineation of loss and longing--these things almost imperceptibly move us to the time when he bitterly decries her treatment of him, and we realize it is over, but for the few messages on his "machine" that enflame brief hopes.

My favourite line in the book reads: "Even the speechlessest rockface deigns to utter its pendant climbers." The line evokes this great picture of a man climbing the cliff of the woman's love, swinging dangerously like a "pendant" from her neck, and knowing that the higher he climbs, the further he'll fall. But she is impassive, speechless, not even deigning to "utter" yeah or nay, but merely permitting the continuance of his kamikaze love. This inditement of the woman is harsh. My handy Oxford dictionary informs me that there is a sense of the word "pendant" which means "match, parallel, companion"--and in this sense, we see that "Even" the cliff is companion to the climber, but she will no longer even admit that connection. And don't you love the word "speechlessest?"

There is something in this relationship's breakdown that brings the man to consider more transcendent concerns, becoming quite metaphysical (and philosophical?) about things, perhaps to put his feelings in perspective. But he still comes back to anger as the poem sequence alternates between a description of feelings and the events which condition them, he will often come up with a bathetic line like, "You / dumped me, you / dumped me, you / came back today and you / dumped me, bitch and / congrats! / (And / thanks for the killer putdowns. / You butted me out... / Now I get to lick out the ashtray.)"

RIFFS is composed with technical brilliance that doesn't allow itself to snuff out the emotion of the lines, and presents a compelling and sympathetic portrait of a man in pain. But it does so in a way that lets us know his faults through his own lips, like a Browning dramatic monologue. Those who thought they knew Dennis Lee should look again.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Home-spooked
hotline. Nobody's li'l number

one. Big-eyed
radium child on stretched-out scrims of alert -

you could go off in my
life? . . . Well of

all

things!

- pg. 9

* * *

Some kinda
stunts & wonders? Hocus-
focus? Hot cross

nerve ends?
Come on c'mon nice
lady, we ain't got all

lifetime! . . . Indefatigably-adored one:

please to
appear on the sheet right now, called up by
succulent, shrink-wrapped, wholly-refundable me.

- pg. 16

* * *

Will pass your place.
Will think of us in
two-tone pandemonium,
performing the belly the beast,
performing the stations,

referring all calls to the wizard of waste not
want. Your waist: your sultry waist.
My stupid want.

- pg. 24

* * *

All the left-out
corners,

faeces of living, the
lint:

show me a riff with straight-up ejection & I want

those in too,
and count on your body to help.

- pg. 31

* * *

Burning thru
altitudes of lifetime:
atmosphere very thin, me
very too. Fuel for outward, low -
back, a farce.

Signal if you are receiving this, otherwise ciao.

- pg. 47

[Luigi Sposato · Rating 5 out of 5]

The introduction by Paul Vermeersch really sets the tone for Lee's sublime work.

Lee has a command of rhythm, such a command, that I felt like this book taught me how to read again. Between the form, and 'pings,' this collection is a 5/5.

[Javier Ponce · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book reminded me why I'm not too fond of most contemporary poetry books in English. Their understatement of poetry is questionable. They 1. look like prose, 2. have bad verse breaks, and 3. have an annoying narrative voice (tries to be funny, is anecdotical, curses a lot). Such a shame.

[Andrew Sare · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is it so wrong of me to wish that Dennis Lee produced a mega novel 900 pages of brain disconnecting snortings, bashes and woots? If it took Denis Lee 10 years to produce the 80 odd page Riffs (!!!), then maybe there's one coming, 40 years in the making? One can dream.

In the afterword Dennis Lee explains the concept of of his masterpiece -Riffs:
" I presume people know what a riff is. The word comes from jazz, and it refers to one of those little melodic improvisations a soloist does. Though strange to say, back in the sing era a riff was what happened when the gentlemen in the bass section stood up and went, "wah-WAAAH, wah; (Ta-dah, doo-dee-die); Wah-WAAAH, wah..." And then the soloist comes in, "Da-zingo, snick!; Zoom, gobble-da-gobble-da; Wacko doo-da-dit; And the Price of Fish!" - all that in four seconds. And then the Wah- WAAAH, wah brigade starts up again. The later being basically rythmic, with no melodic interest and no particular feeling. And of course scored in advance, since everybody had to play the same thing... And in the thirties, that's what a riff was. But by the kind of transfer where "Frankenstein" went from being the mad scientist to the monster, "riff" went form being the rhythmic filler to the solo fireworks"

[Putnam Harper · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was alright, I think Lee is a talented poet and thought the ambition in the experiment was respectable, yet it just didn't work for me.