Dan Campion / camouflage, surrealism and satiric wit

Dan Campion, The Mirror Test

At a recent book reading, I was fortunate to meet an Iowa City-based writer named Dan Campion. We had an interesting conversation, and he kindly shared a copy of his recent book of poetry, The Mirror Test (MadHat Press, 2024).

As an artist and designer, I was immediately drawn to the cover (shown here, designed by Marc Vincenz, using an image credited to Vincenz, Jake Quart and Sonia Santos), which—like the poetry it illustrates—works by a finely hewn balancing act between clarity and confusion.

Ambiguity at its finest pervades Dan Campion's wonderful poems. I myself, as an addict of clarion vision, as well as its famous subversion in the varieties of camouflage, stopped abruptly in his book at Blaze Orange, a quietly elegant comment about the irony of vision, its enablement, yet also its prevention. Here is the complete text of that poem, reprinted with the permission of its author (copyright © Dan Campion)—

Blaze orange, the opposite of camouflage,

creates a bold, conspicuous mirage

of safety, as if iridescence could

not stain with hemoglobin red nor would

it disappear completely under snow

that rushes down with vicious undertow

nor fail to stop or slow a motorist

who'll flat refuse the breathalyzer test.

We bought my blaze orange T-shirt late one year

to spare me being taken for a deer

while walking through the woods. It's comical.

But even so, at least once every fall

I pull it from the bottom of the drawer

and put it on and venture out, secure.


Only recently, maybe ten days before I met Dan Campion, I had given a talk for a conservation group, about animal camouflage, in which one of the slides I showed was that of blaze orange hunter's garb. As for Dan Campion himself, I didn't recognize the name. Only later did I realize that in fact he was the author of a book I so enjoyed, years ago, about the humorous writings of Peter De Vries (1910-1993), titled Peter De Vries and Surrealism, a must read.

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

camouflage / a dance of beatings the boy endured

Above Roy R. Behrens, Papa's Waltz (© 2021). Digital montage.

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Yesterday, I put up this blog post and montage (above) on The Poetry of Sight, my more generic blog about vision, design, and the creative process. But it occurs to me that it might also be appropriate to repost it here, since Theodore Roethke's language has everything to do with camouflage, with concealed and embedded components.

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The title of the montage reproduced above (I sometimes call them “visual poems”) is intended as an homage to what some people regard as Theodore Roethke’s finest work, a sixteen-line autobiographical poem, titled “My Papa’s Waltz” (c1942). It is beautifully constructed, filled with engagement and gesture—and is yet at the same time disturbing in its beneath-the-surface suggestions.

Roethke, as a poet should, makes apt use of figures of speech, and we (the readers) are left to decide what to make of it. Does “papa’s waltz” simply describe an innocent dance, in which an inebriated father is engaged in ritualistic fun with his son, a small boy. Or, as certain components suggest, is it not a literal waltz, but instead a frightening memory of dance-like beatings the boy endured at the hands of a drunken parent?

You must read the entire poem, which is available online at the website of the Poetry Foundation. At the same, it also helps to read the article about this poem on Wikipedia, and to learn about the life of Theodore Roethke.