Dine-Rite
Breakfast Poems

Paperback: 96 pp.
Published: 2009

Price: $15.95

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Have a seat at a table or booth in Louis Daniel Brodsky's Dine-Rite: Breakfast Poems.

Everyone's welcome. As Brodsky puts it, this suburban diner is an "Oasis to the white- and blue-collar and the collarless: / Contractors, carpenters, painters, and plumbers, / Insurance and sales reps, cab drivers, loafers, / Grass-roots politicians, divorce lawyers, retirees, / The entire cast of the human drama, / Under one home-cooking-spoken-here roof."

And overlording this melting pot is its owner, a corpulent, self-anointed Baptist minister, whose unique brand of evangelism permeates Dine-Rite as thoroughly as the greasy, smoky air that wafts from the kitchen.

If you're hungry for poetry that both satisfies and leaves you wanting more, then you've come to the right place. Dig in!

 


 

Praise:

I originally discovered Louis Daniel Brodsky's poetry about twenty years ago when I was snared by a title called The Capital Cafe: Poems of Redneck U.S.A. I’ve been hooked ever since.  An astoundingly prolific and wide-ranging writer, Brodsky's sixty to seventy volumes of poetry include a number of collections on the Holocaust (Gestapo Crows, The Eleventh Lost Tribe and Rabbi Auschwitz among others); a series of books of political poetry written during the disastrous Bush administration years (the five-volume Shadow War series and the three-volume Regime Change series as well as Showdown with a Cactus); volumes of more contemplative verse on nature and rural life (Once Upon a Small-Town Time and the three-volume Lake Nebagamon series among them), love poems, family poems, regional poems and more.  In most of these, and especially in his wonderful series of short fictions, such as This Here's a Merica and Catchin' the Drift o' the Draft, Brodsky displays a wicked sense of humor, at once satiric and Rabelaisian.

Indeed, it was this side of Brodsky's writing that originally charmed me, in The Capital Cafe, and it is in full force in Dine-Rite, which is likewise centered around a restaurant, its staff and clientele. Yet it should be noted that even at his most sarcastic, Brodsky is a poet with a conscience – Jeremiah with a sense of humor.

Dine-Rite is a suburban diner in a bedroom community outside of Saint Louis, Missouri, owned by one John Marks, an enormous, self-styled Baptist preacher ("All three-hundred-plus floundering pounds of him").  It is a place for gourmandizing and bible study, and sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the two.  A number of factions patronize the café, but the group of bible-thumping Baptists, followers of John Marks, are the most conspicuous.  With self-righteous unction they spout bible verses to address "other people’s problems and their own," but not infrequently slip into swapping ribald jokes, "Tasteless, off-color, profane, misogynistic, homophobic,/Seething with racial and ethnic bigotries."

Perhaps it's a metaphor for the activities of the clientele, but Dine-Rite also suffers from grotesque problems involving plumbing and pests, as described in such jaw-dropping poems as "Bobby-Bill Jones: Manager of the Hour" (Managers come and go at Dine-Rite as John Marks has little patience for mistakes.  Only Luke Matthews, the final manager, seems to have any success.) and "Reaching Flood Stage." These are hilarious even as they are disgusting:

Abruptly, Dine-Rite's foundation shudders

From what might be an earthquake –

The beast of the New Madrid Fault, come around –

Or the sonic boom of a Boeing test jet

Or a hundred-car pileup on the parking lot

Or the dumpster falling off the trash truck's forks.

The deafening roar Pompeiis everyone, midbite,

Nagasakis their faces, with fright,

As a tidal wave of water invades the dining room.

Panicking, everyone tramples each other, to reach the exits,

Avoid the swirling turds from the ruptured sewer main.

Brodsky's exaggerated humor of the grotesque is also on display in poems like "Kine-dred Spirits" ("Holy cow!  This boisterous Wednesday morning…") in which the customers are likened to cattle – from the Baptist Bible-thumpers to the coaches from a nearby parochial school – and "Gluttonous for the Lord," a poem about John Marks that vividly and memorably shows him in his full corpulence – more porcine than bovine.  These poems bring to mind the caricatures of Honoré Daumier, the 19th century French painter whose unflattering sketches of people in society as animals also highlight certain character traits.

As befits this comic tour de force, Brodsky has a fine way of ending many of the poems with the power of a punchline to a joke.  "Pocket Pal," for instance, a riff on a plumbing supply company's promotional diary, complete with inspirational sayings, concludes:

Arriving at the last page,

I found the most memorable gem of all,

This one handwritten, reaching out, personally, to me:

"For all your plumbing needs,

Contact me, Sid Pearlmutter,

I know toilets like the back of your hand."

While there is a loose drama at work in Dine-Rite that carries a narrative thread – with recurring characters such as the waitresses and the short order cooks – some poems stand out on their own as purely delightful meditations.  In "Introductory Offer," one gourmandizing breakfaster finds that his personal breakfast concoction, which he privately calls "Eggs Tetrazeeny" (a mush of scrambled eggs, hash browns, fake-bacon bits, doused with a bottle of ketchup), has been commandeered by Dine-Rite as a menu special.  Another notable poem is "Red," a meditation by one of the nameless regulars – one of those retirees whose social life revolves around the café, self-described "alter kocher farts" – which tells the story of a young woman who for a time came regularly to Dine-Rite, an attractive girl who dressed exclusively in red and whom the regulars dubbed "Little Red Riding  Hood." They appreciated that she brought a little color to their lives.  And then, just as suddenly, she stopped coming.

We still kind of miss Little Red Riding Hood.

She'd brighten up our day,

Stir up the wolf in our bones.

Brodsky's verse is full of internal rhymes.  He clearly delights in sounds, wallows in language.  It's no surprise that he’s also a William Faulkner scholar, drunk on rich, vivid imagery.  "With the zeal of an eager Eagle scout," begins the poem, "Pocket Pal."  "It’s a rambunctious hump-day morning," the first line of "Dine-Rite Atoll" beckons.  "He's in his normal Friday-a.m. good-mood mode" kicks off "Brotherhood of Rat Breeders."  Brodsky seduces us with the sounds, pulls us into the stories that follow.

While Brodsky is plainly having fun in Dine-Rite, his satire also points up the hypocrisies implicit in a certain strain of evangelical Christians, but then, they do present an easy target, and while he does shine a light on them, the main thing about Dine-Rite is the outrageous hilarity of the verse.  I won't spoil it by describing the denouement, but readers will want to feed on Dine-Rite through to its very end, "The Transfiguration of Dine-Rite," served up in the epilogue.

— Charles Rammelkamp, author of The Secretkeepers and The Book of Life


 

 


 

Dine-Rite: A Cosmos of Its Own

A.m. after a.m., they congregate, at Dine-Rite,

With the regularity of an atomic clock.

A few come with newspapers under their arms,

Most toting thermoses, lunchpails,

An exponentially expanding sect shepherding Bibles

They'll haughtily display next to their plates

And refer to, cursorily, during the following hour or so,

When all participants in this breaking of fast

Will resolve other people's troubles and their own.

This eatery and its counterparts, nationwide,

Are responsible for maintaining America's reputation

As a pressure cooker of cultural diversity,

From which certain elements of the ethnic stew

Are conspicuously missing, not sought out

(Other than to man the kitchen, bus tables, mop the johns):

Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, hippies, homos.

These suburban casual-dining establishments

Have their own honor-among-thieves codes of ethics,

Class stratifications, gerrymandered demographics,

Divine purposes in the infrastructure of the cosmos.

Indeed, each is a cosmos of its own,

A splendid microcosm,

Albeit somewhat skewed, biased, lopsided,

If not insurmountably flawed, in the Maker's conception,

When one considers that no institution,

Certainly no one individual, can be all things to all persons.

Ah, that such a place as Dine-Rite exists

Is reason enough to bequeath,

To each of us who frequents this greasy spoon,

Hope for future enlightenment.

One day, we might even see a new breed of patrons

Ordering chitlins, tamales, sushi, "pot"-pie, K-Y Jelly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
   
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