Dan W Gaddy

From Cotton Fields to Cosmos Dan W Gaddy

When Dan Gaddy began writing poetry as a mere lad, he used conventional rhyme and meter (rhyming poetry), but later, as he matured, he found that free verse better expressed the depth and natural structure of his emotions and thoughts. His poems use a "stream of consciousness" technique, full of graphic images that speak a thousand words. He wrote of existentialism and how to wring meaning out of an existence full of struggle and pain, where there is no apparent rhyme or reason. He had an uncanny ability to transform trouble and struggle into creativity, turn the raw materials of a harsh life into art, and, in a sense, find meaning and joy in pain and struggle. He often wrote of the difficulties of his childhood and the hard lives of poor people, both Black and White, fighting to survive. Growing up in the segregationist South, Dan discovered that poor Black and White people found a common bond in the struggle for survival, and the laws and customs of segregation were ignored. In all of this, Dan could touch deep places in the heart with his innate gift of language as he spoke of the perversity of human nature and the injustices in society. In the Vietnam era, corresponding to his young adulthood, Dan's tone turned decidedly anti-war, and he wrote of the folly and tragedy of war with shocking, stark images. Dan's poetry could be likened to modern art including abstract, impressionistic, and surrealistic art forms. Although he paints his poems with realistic images, the images can convey many levels of meaning, from the literal to the abstract and figurative. Dan once told me that he was an eidetic thinker, that is, he thought in pictures as well as words. Sometimes his images are surrealistically distorted like Dali's melting-and-expanding clock faces spilling off the edge of a table - suggesting a different perception of time. Dan's unique sense of time is seen in this passage "'til time spins cobwebs on the stars."By design, Dan's words and images carry multi-dimensional meanings which are in keeping with his philosophy of poetry. Dan said that the purpose of poetry is to convey as many meanings as possible with an image or word; whereas the purpose of science is to convey only one meaning per symbol. Dan's poetry often mesmerizes readers into a dream-like, altered state of consciousness where they are invited to entertain a parallel reality in which the classical laws of physics do not apply. In this metaphysical and mystical realm, readers have their minds and emotions stretched by synesthesia and poetic conceits as large as the universe itself. Dan's art is both personal and universal, and he dwells in that nexus where the personal meets the cosmic and transcendental. His poetry is filled with the pathos of an existence, seemingly without meaning, in which humans must create their own meaning through art and the pursuit of beauty and truth. He once said that he was a slave to beauty and that the meaning of existence is to be found somewhere "between the gutter and the stars" and between the profane and the transcendental that may not have meaning outside one's own mind. The reader may find it enchanting that Dan's poems are filled with primal animism in which everything, even an abstraction, has life and consciousness. This personification of abstraction is found in passages such as "The wind stumbled in the trees and begged at my door and broke the heart of the morning." Dan delights in taking a child's eye view in what Piaget called the animistic stage of development where the child sees herself as the center of her universe and believes that everything is alive: To wit: "And now I hear a dreamer tell, how even the sun roams the sky to worship in the heart of man."I hope that my friend's poetry transports you, as it does me, to a transcendent realm of awareness, where form dissolves into feeling, and meaning flows from the rushing stream of consciousness.