David Landon’s Poetry: Winning the Gentle War


by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

David Landon’s poems are quotidian glimpses of shopping and tending to and losing and finding, but in Landon’s grasp, the dailiness transcends the mundane to become “moments in a gentle war against whatever odds diminish hope.” This line from the poem, “Kleos, or Fame” encapsulates the essence of Landon’s new collection, “Some Moments in a Gentle War.” Landon takes the reader with him grocery shopping and to visit his aging parents inviting “a complicity between strangers” that makes the reader grateful they were allowed to tag along.

“I always wrote poetry, and I always acted,” said Landon, Bishop Juhan Professor of Theatre Emeritus at the University. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he won the American Academy Poetry Prize. He pursued a doctorate degree in French at Vanderbilt and after graduating stayed on to teach. Learning of his past experience in theater, the head of the French Department urged him to take a role in a French play. “That got me back into acting,” Landon said. Things became edgy at Vanderbilt when he gave the son of a major donor a B+ grade instead of an A. With the uncomfortable dust still settling, Sewanee offered Landon a job teaching French and Drama. “Sewanee was really the perfect place for Luann and myself,” Landon observed, citing his early education at an Episcopal boarding school and his father’s vocation as an Episcopal priest. Luann, likewise a poet, led her husband back into the realm of the poetic muse when she persuaded him to attend a writers conference with her.

Landon credits his years of teaching Shakespeare for his predilection for iambic pentameter, the meter of all Shakespearian plays. “Iambic pentameter asks to be spoken,” Landon insisted. The easy, spoken flow of Landon’s lines makes the poems feel like a conversation with the reader. Most of the poems are unrhymed, and when the lines do rhyme, the rhymes are subtle, without overpowering or distracting the poem, and reader, from the idea the poem is finding its way to. And for Landon, that’s what writing poetry is all about, “getting to the original idea.” Landon jots down lines and keeps revisiting them, adding more lines, tweaking others, searching for the idea. “Sometimes the idea in a first line I jot down is not the idea deep inside,” Landon acknowledged. A poem that begins with sipping coffee in a midtown New York Starbucks closes with the words, “May God be in my head.”

The reader travels with Landon even into “the murk ... where the usual checks and contradictions tempt you towards solution with a gun.” Yet Landon and the reader manage to resurface “mysteriously alert” where “gentle vibrations tune our will to be.” (“A Creature from the Murk” and “One day it has to be.”) “Ugly war is being fought by people who want power,” Landon said in discussing the poems. “The moments in a gentle war are not always happy, but we just may win. They are a reason to go on.”

Sewanee poet and professor of creative writing Jennifer Michaels said of “Some Moments in a Gentle War,” “Landon’s poems both narrate and participate in a ‘gentle war’ — that is, a quiet but noble campaign ‘to take back history from violence.’ ... these captivating poems are as current as today’s news, and give the reader strength to bear it.”

“Some Moments in a Gentle War” is available at the University bookstore and online from Amazon and the publisher, Finish Line Press. Landon’s recent poems have been tapped for recognition by several highly regarded literary magazines, Able Muse, Southwest Review, and the Georgia Review.

Arriving at the final poem, “A Connoisseur of Wind,” the poet’s muse “looks at us, and bows, and leaves us here.” The reader wants more, but despair not. Help is on the way. Landon is urging a collection of unrhymed sonnets into book form. Stay tuned.

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