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Driving & Drinking
Inside the cab of an old truck the monologue Turn right up there and get off these pavements... The speaker is John Sims, an unlettered pig farmer, and the journey is the back roads of southern Utah. While John and his driver drink canned beer, we hear of pranks, pitfalls, bootleggers, rural childhood, bluecollar jobs, and the horrifying tale of an explosive accident on an oil rig.
- GenresPoetry
Paperback
First published April 30, 1982
10 people want to read
About the author
David Lee
17 books1 followerDavid Lee is the author of more than fifteen books of poetry including So Quietly the Earth, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2004. In 1997 he was named Utah s first Poet Laureate and has received the Utah Governor s award for lifetime achievement in the arts. A former seminary candidate, semi-pro baseball player, and hog farmer, he has a Ph.D. with a concentration in the poetry of John Milton. He taught in the Department of Language and Literature at Southern Utah University for three decades, where he received every teaching award presented, including teacher of the year three times.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 3, 2008
Early this morning, around 2am or so, I was very drunk and went to lay down to sleep-- only to be knocked out of bed by an enormous explosion. In a roaring flash, the house was reduced to shambles. As I picked my sorry self up, darkness settled over the ruins. Fortunately, I had my baseball bat, a flashlight, and this book of poems, Driving and Drinking by David Lee on Copper Canyon Press. My nerves were understandably strung as tight as a tennis racket, but the wife was ok, the dogs were ok, the police were on their way--sirens wailing in the night, and I was soberized or untoxicated by the whole experience. After giving my report to the police, who appeared from the shadows in the front yard with bright flashlights, we all huddled around the rubble fireplace--the wife and me and the dogs--and I read this epic poem aloud cover-to-cover, pausing only for an occasional drink of water or a bite of some crude beef jerk we had fashioned from a trip to the grocery store. It proved a delightful read, and a kind diversion from the events of the evening.
March 30, 2009
David Lee, Driving and Drinking (Copper Canyon, 1982)
Driving and Drinking, a long poem comprising the whole of David Lee's second book, hits one of those buttons that absolutely grates on my nerves: the misspelling of the word “thought” as “thot”. This in a sea of other dialect-style spelling, which generally drives me up the wall, but “thot” is one of those that has always gotten farther under my skin than most, and so I can't claim objectivity here; the fact that this rubs me the wrong way may have no effect whatsoever on your reading of it, so take the following with as much salt as necessary. That said, here's a representative example of the diction to be found here:
“I run a fish boat for years
on the river it was a good way to make
a little money back then
during the depression it got so bad
to where one time the auction only offered us
a dollar apiece for top hogs then charged
20 cents to handle so's we had to take
over a hundred head out and shoot them
cause it wasn't worth it but I could
make enough to get by poaching fish...”
(19-20)
That's one of the sections where most everything is spelled the way you're used to seeing it, but that lack of punctuation is common here, as well. Now that I think about it, actually, maybe it really is time for David Lee to come back into vogue; the rambling, punctuation-less, tangential one-sided conversation is a hallmark of the Instant Messaging generation. It should go brilliantly.
What it reminded me of, however, is the opening monologue from Jon Jost's Last Chants for a Slow Dance, and the narrator here has that same sort of creepy/pathetic vibe about him that Tom does in that film. Lee's pig farmer is a lot funnier, however, and one certainly can't say that Driving and Drinking isn't readable in any way; unlike a lot of work, both poetry and prose, written in the kind of heavy dialect Lee employs here, he has a fine enough touch with it that it rolls off the tongue easily, and few words are far enough away from their usual spellings for the reader to need to pause and reread a lone a few times to figure out what that word's supposed to be. (There is one, however, that took me until a second use to figure out. No, I won't tell you what, you'll have to find it yourself.)
Fainter-hearted readers should probably be warned that the subject matter here might distress them at times, and our narrator has never even heard the term “political correctness” (and had he'd probably equate it to supporting Barry Goldwater in some election somewhere), and so you may run into some terms you find offensive. None of which should stop you from actually reading the thing, should you stumble across it. Me, I thot it was fun. ***
Driving and Drinking, a long poem comprising the whole of David Lee's second book, hits one of those buttons that absolutely grates on my nerves: the misspelling of the word “thought” as “thot”. This in a sea of other dialect-style spelling, which generally drives me up the wall, but “thot” is one of those that has always gotten farther under my skin than most, and so I can't claim objectivity here; the fact that this rubs me the wrong way may have no effect whatsoever on your reading of it, so take the following with as much salt as necessary. That said, here's a representative example of the diction to be found here:
“I run a fish boat for years
on the river it was a good way to make
a little money back then
during the depression it got so bad
to where one time the auction only offered us
a dollar apiece for top hogs then charged
20 cents to handle so's we had to take
over a hundred head out and shoot them
cause it wasn't worth it but I could
make enough to get by poaching fish...”
(19-20)
That's one of the sections where most everything is spelled the way you're used to seeing it, but that lack of punctuation is common here, as well. Now that I think about it, actually, maybe it really is time for David Lee to come back into vogue; the rambling, punctuation-less, tangential one-sided conversation is a hallmark of the Instant Messaging generation. It should go brilliantly.
What it reminded me of, however, is the opening monologue from Jon Jost's Last Chants for a Slow Dance, and the narrator here has that same sort of creepy/pathetic vibe about him that Tom does in that film. Lee's pig farmer is a lot funnier, however, and one certainly can't say that Driving and Drinking isn't readable in any way; unlike a lot of work, both poetry and prose, written in the kind of heavy dialect Lee employs here, he has a fine enough touch with it that it rolls off the tongue easily, and few words are far enough away from their usual spellings for the reader to need to pause and reread a lone a few times to figure out what that word's supposed to be. (There is one, however, that took me until a second use to figure out. No, I won't tell you what, you'll have to find it yourself.)
Fainter-hearted readers should probably be warned that the subject matter here might distress them at times, and our narrator has never even heard the term “political correctness” (and had he'd probably equate it to supporting Barry Goldwater in some election somewhere), and so you may run into some terms you find offensive. None of which should stop you from actually reading the thing, should you stumble across it. Me, I thot it was fun. ***
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews