August
2002
Book
Review: Rules for Cool
By
Doughtry 'Doc' Long
128
Pages
Xlibris
Philadelphia, Pa.
$20 (paper)
Reviewed
by Mark M. Feffer
If you spend any time at all among those who write in Trenton,
sooner or later someone's going to ask if you've met Doc Long.
Besides teaching literature and creative writing at Trenton Central
High School, he's published poetry in a variety of journals, has
earned recognition from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and
the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, and has mentored poets
and writers, young and old, throughout the city.
On a drizzly First Friday in on South Warren Street a few months
ago, I bought of copy of his poetry, Rules for Cool, from Doc
Long himself. It was the second or third time I'd met him, and
we chatted a bit before I took his book up to Utopia, where I
sat at the bar and ordered myself a drink. My intention was to
peruse the book quickly and then gossip with the good folks behind
the bar. Instead, I was lost for an hour to the moods and textures
of the world sketched in the pages of this elegant book.
Doc Long is as much writer as poet. With words, he evokes as many
images as moods, and tailors them to the subject at hand-not an
easy thing to do in the short space afforded by a page or two
of paper. The mood of his work varies from subject to subject,
from piece to piece, and even when it's obvious he is simply playing
with words, his underlying thoughtfulness is clear. Beyond that,
he's as much writer as poet because of the way he uses words,
the way he puts them together. For example, in How Hot Was
It, he writes, "it was so hot / the wind needed a fan."
In an instant, the heat of the day is vivid, and it begins a path
along which Mr. Long can observe corners of society, of history,
of urban life:
it was so hot
your mama slapped your daddy
your daddy slapped her back
and they took you to jail, so you could do the time
it was so hot
politicians stopped lying
now you know when they happens
it's pretty damn hot
It is phrases like this, constructed so carefully, that invest
this collection with such power. Where some writers suggest images
that are as illustrative as shadows, Doc Long's are vivid, and
personal. In October Binge he writes:
half a moon is left hanging in a vacant tree
half of who i am is still with you
the other half so drunk I carry my stomach in my head
i smell of cigarettes
beer
sweat
cheap music and the perfume of a lap dancer named jasmine
who whispered in my ear to write a poem about her
The mood in those eight lines, those 59 words, is sad and powerful,
the core of a story another writer might have needed fifteen or
twenty pages to tell. But Doc Long's work is all about economy,
about conveying much with little. When you walk down the street
and glance at someone passing by, you can infer a lot by the way
they dress, the way they hold their bodies, the way the look at
you-or don't. These poems are something like that, but instead
of showing you the surface, they expose emotions that are deep
and allow you to imagine the story surrounding them. This isn't
an easy thing to achieve, but it's a mark of Mr. Long's skill
that he does it consistently. This is a book worth having.
###
Mark
Feffer is founding editor of the Trenton Writes Project (www.trentonwrites.com)
