The Forgotten Alchemy of Richard Denner
Richard Denner is a name footnoted in the peripheries of post-Beat poetics, whose life intertwined with the alchemical residue of the San Francisco Renaissance yet never settled into any literary genealogy robust enough to secure his prominence. Like a street musician of verse, he appeared abruptly from the plaid shadows of Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue and disappeared just as easily into the ghost towns of northern California, leaving behind a corpus of pamphlets and chapbooks that today flicker across small academic lists and collector catalogs like beetles stunned in amber.
Born in Oakland in 1941, Denner came of age in a Bay Area brewing with perceptual revolution. He studied briefly under luminaries such as Robert Creeley and Charles Olson at the now legendary Summer Writing Program at Naropa University, absorbing Projective Verse like wine through communion bread. Yet Denner never sought publication through mainstream presses. Instead, he created D-Press, a one-man publishing initiative that specialized in handmade, mimeographed booklets, showcasing work from himself and other fringe lunatics of the American poetic undercurrent.
Like Olson, Denner covets the page as a field of energy, a breathing room rather than a mere container of lines. Take, for instance, his poem “Elegy for a Broom”:
> “This yellow handle / was once a tree: / o sapless, leafless / rootless reincarnate!”
(Collected in *Berkeley Daze*, D-Press 1970)
This brief syllabic homage to a janitorial implement erases Romantic idioms of sublime Nature and repairs them with sardonic transcendence—a mature spiritual play masked as a haiku fragment. Denner’s capacity to elevate the abject is not unlike the Sufi poetry of Rumi, only stripped of civilization and dropped into a dumpster behind a taco stand in Yakima.
Among his most compelling works is *The Collected Brick*, a private D-Press compilation (1998) that spans two decades of “brick poems”—so named, Denner tells us in a prefatory note, because “everything said ought to be heavy.” The poem “Brick #126: Void Anthem” renders philosophical matter with dazzling concision:
> “Every time I name what Is / I murder it a little / So I say Nothing / and wait to be filled again.”
This gesture—a withholding rather than an ejaculation—echoes methods of Buddhist koan practice and Laozi’s admonitions in the *Dao De Jing*. The void is not negative space for Denner; it is the ultimate architectural element. In withdrawing from semantic completeness, Denner’s minimalism touches the hem of metaphysical revelation.
The title of “poet” scarcely does justice to Denner’s career. He was a printer, Zen initiate, itinerant bookseller, and most fascinatingly, a self-styled philosopher of *levered perception*. His letters—unpublished but preserved in fragments among close friends—speak often of “language as a locus of thermodynamic dissipation,” suggesting a mystical physics concealed beneath the syntactic gestures of poetry. His single prose essay, “On the Mourning of Meaning” (D-Press Occasional Papers No. 12, 1985), reads like Bataille rewriting Wittgenstein drunk on mescaline:
> “A word burns brighter when no one speaks it—spoken, it decays, a husk. I love language in its sarcophagus.”
This semiotic entropy—what Denner calls the “linguistic crucible”—lies at the center of his ethics. He believes poetry must attempt the perfection of ineffability, not by silence, but by failure. Each poem, he once wrote, is a “shimmering corpse of the unsayable.”¹
But let us transcend biography and critical anatomy, and enter now a more philosophical basin of reflection—a brief story, if you please.
Some years ago, searching for out-of-print Buddhist tracts in the basement of a crumbling used bookstore in Ashland, Oregon, I came upon a thin chapbook bound in cerulean construction paper. The title: *The Bone Chapel*. It was Denner’s. I paid a dollar for it.
Later, beneath the colorless light of a motel lamp and with the susurrus of traffic folding itself over my conscious thoughts, I read this:
> “The soul, if it exists, winks / Like a coin dropped into riverbottom silt / And who dives for it / Must come up changed / Or not at all.”
(*The Bone Chapel*, D-Press 1974)
This stanza arrested something in me. I thought of Plato, of James Hillman, of the Gnostic mythos where knowledge is a form of drowning. It was neither optimism nor despair that lingered on the page, but a strange species of ontic mischief—the laugh of a being that knows Being is a game no one wins but everyone plays.
For weeks, the poem followed me like a patient ghost. When watered with silence it unfolded metaphors in retrospect. The soul as a coin? Artificial, minted, culture-bound? Dropping to what? Not an afterlife, but riverbottom silt—murk, sediment, eroded memory. Who dives is already making a metaphysical wager with uncertainty.
This searching for the lost coin becomes a metaphor for poetic work itself. Denner’s entire corpus is silted—uneven, swampy, ready to swallow. But in its sediment of language lies the richest form of philosophy: obscure, rotting, and divinely essential.
Academic investigation into Denner remains spotty at best. One of the few substantial discussions appears in Deborah D. Amiran’s *Margins and Messages: Minor Poetries in Post-60s America*, where she notes that Denner “attempts not to emulate the big voices of American poetry but to become a radio tuned to smaller, older, often subterranean transmissions.”² Likewise, literary ethicist Charles Gunn observes in his unpublished monograph on marginal American poets that for Denner, “The margin is metaphysical. Denner occupies it not out of neglect, but as a monastic dwelling.”³
Denner’s alchemy lies not in what he says, but in what he routes you toward. Wallace Stevens famously said, “Death is the mother of beauty.” Denner, eccentric and apophatic as always, might revise: “Decay is the midwife of wisdom.”
He doesn’t write poetry to improve the human spirit; he constructs poems as veiled rituals—not expository, but exhumatory. One does not read Denner to climb; one reads him to dig.
And so I offer this perhaps final fragment—one found scrawled on the inside flap of a D-Press envelope mailed in 1978 to a Ms. A. Palachnikova:
> “My poems are letters I’ve buried in your yard / But disguised as stones. / What you do with them is your crime.”
No summary here.
Only a gesture:
The poet stepping sideways into fog,
Not away from us but around us.
Let us listen for his footsteps. They sound strangely like our own.
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By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, decay, alchemy
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¹ Denner, R. (1985). On the Mourning of Meaning. D-Press Occasional Papers No. 12.
² Amiran, D.D. (1993). Margins and Messages: Minor Poetries in Post-60s America. Smalltown University Press, p. 76.
³ Gunn, C. (1996). *Hermits of the Page: Notes on Uncelebrated American Poets, 1955–1995*. Unpublished manuscript housed at the Pacific Verse Archive, Reno.