Dennis Hinrichsen, Dementia Lyrics,

Green Linden Press, 2026,

ISBN: 978-1-961834-11-8, 100pp, $20.00.

 

 

 

Especially for a certain demographic (okay, mine), Dennis Hinrichsen’s theme about dementia is compelling. Dedicated to two friends who died at the age of 73 (my age), as a result of their dementia, it’s the poet’s overriding preoccupation, but homelessness and alienation are not far behind. This is Hinrichsen’s vision of The Modern American Wasteland. He introduces the reality in the first poem, “I Had a River Once. Two Friends. This Is the City of Dementia”:

 

  a friend of mine from

               the city

 

of Dementia can forget

             a thing

 

just by looking at it (charred

                    lemon

 

meringue) and then letting

                         time

 

pass or a stanza pass—time’s

                    the fire for him—

 

my presence is a flotilla

                       of

 

clouds—a clot in open sky—

                   he remembers

 

my name—so far—it signals

                          comfort—

 

lyrical nonsense

                   energy—

 

I am here to play

                         with pencils—

 

he was a cartoonist once—

         but he’s tired—refuses

 

this—refuses his pills—waves me way

 

This is heartbreaking, of course, the poet’s helplessness, his friend’s deterioration. And then later in the poem, the second friend –

 

the way second friend burns

      you’d

 

                         think he was aura-ed

                             in

 

methanol

      but it’s just his cerebellum

 

clear-flame shutting down—

the clog

 

is consciousness—

       that’s where the suffering is—

 

The next dementia lyric is called “[shotgun] [Self-portrait as a Painting by William S. Burroughs with Jr. Walker & The All Stars].” He continues to metaphorically depict the tragic condition, to show it in almost allegorical terms. Note that Hinrichsen has always had a penchant for inserting a certain “soundtrack” into the abstract dramas he’s outlining, sort of like Jean Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil. Indeed, the junk car parts and spraypaint graffiti are reminiscent of the apocalyptic vision of Godard’s One Plus One.

         

graffiti-esque the brain these days—

 

each moment a train car wreckage of

Krylon and illegibility filled

 

with car parts—often chassis

          and moonroofs—front

 

and back bumpers—

I live in a car town you see—

 

they line up like pretty candy

        a mile from here—boutique chocolates

 

of raw American steel (mostly)

and so much horsepower

 

even R. E. Olds would buckle

to his knees—

 

Channeling Walt Whitman, as he does throughout this volume (see “Synapse,” involving a patient in a hospital who once asked him to kill her), Hinrichsen continues to draw the picture in  “He was a Boy. He Had a Boat.  This Is the City of Niagara Falls.”

 

 

I sing the body electric                 I sing

the future of

 

death            I wish I had stock

 

in it

it happens               so quickly

 

ion channels breaking

down

 

mitochondria lost               sucked

into

 

the Lewy bodies       those spheres

of

 

protein clogging the neurons

 

conclusion :: cellular          death ::

 

(friend cannot reason now)

 

Poems called “Dementia Lyric with Miles Davis and a Gamelan,” “Dementia Lyric with W.S. Merwin and a Cobra,” “Dementia Lyric with Issa and a Falling Bird” spell it out even further. And then there’s “Dementia Lyric :: unbeknownst,” subtitled a short film on engram theory called the forgetting. The mystery of dementia baffles us all, but the poet fleshes out its implications and manifestations.  “Dementia Comes in Many Forms. Alzheimer’s Is Just One,” a New York Times article tells us. Hinrichsen writes about ataxia, a neurological condition which affects muscle control, into the weeds, medically. And engram theory? An “engram” is a unit of cognitive information in a physical substance, the theory having to do with how memory is stored. Unbeknownst is the section title here that includes these poems, and there is so much that isn’t known, that he can only show and make guesses about.

 

The Day Zero Sequence section, one of four the collection is divided into, begins:

 

Cannot speak. Cradles smartphone. Trembling hand. Letter by letter, stabs

last good thing he will ever say to me. No. 2 pencil. Eraser tip.

 

Later in this section, in “Pedal Steel Death Song”:

 

last words swallowed                             last vapors

 

where does language go      when body fails

 

Homeless people appear regularly in these poems, at intersections, asking for things. It’s part of the zeitgeist, A Clockwork Orange vibe. In “[cinéma vérité] [with Automatic Window]” it’s precisely seven dollars and forty cents the man requests. In “Dementia Lyric with Miles Davis and a Gamelan,” “on cue / another of the city’s extras approaches to ask / for spare work.” In “Postcard Utopia,” a panhandler begs for money. In “[lyricism] [Musique Concrète]” two homeless men appear. Later it’s a homeless man pushing a grocery cart in a “city of genocide” – “gunshot city,” “day zero city” – in This Is the City of His Dying, the fourth major section of Dementia Lyrics.

 

Water – aquifer – river – rain – is a potent image throughout Dementia Lyrics. Life-giving but also polluted, Hinrichsen metaphorically associates it with the brain. As he writes in “Aqua Americana”:

 

I am dowsing now    this is microdose      my psilocybin

rush toward you     from you             Silurian Devonian

since brain too is aquifer

 

In a note, Hinrichsen informs the reader that Silurian Devonian is the groundwater reservoir beneath the Home Place where his family farmed in Iowa. An aquifer is a body of permeable rock which contains and transmits groundwater – it is lifegiving, life-sustaining. The brain is the pool of memory, consciousness. It can also be polluted like any water source. “I Had a River Once…” begins:

 

          in the vocabulary of river this is foam—

                in neuron

 

          clogging protein (river cannot stream

                     with it)

 

          (friend cannot burn new engrams)

 

Later in the poem he writes:

 

someone has inserted Death

in the river

 

and it’s floating downstream—

 

“Aquifer Manifesto” follows “Aqua Americana” – which ends “A drink of water (a poem) is just a sequence of drops that have fallen / from the sky. Unending. As closure is. As ambient is.” “Aquifer Manifesto” is essentially a poem in praise of rain, aquifer. The final poem, “re.ac.tor.se.quence,” which appears on the page as white lettering on a black background spells the metaphor out:

 

          death of fresh

          water :: the body

 

          aquifer :: I can feel it

          as self-

 

          shining

          dries :: handbacks leathered ::

 

          spotted :: the cerebellar

          pinching

 

          at memory already

          beginning ::

 

          neural nets

 

          tearing :: knots

          (that

 

          kiss in the dark)

 

          coming

          undone

 

 Interestingly, Hinrichsen likens the state of dementia to Zen Buddhist consciousness, being forever in the now, which is not a completely tragic idea at all, is it?. In both “I Had a River Once…” and “Atrophic” he makes this connection, and again in “Dementia Lyric with Miles Davis and a Gamelan,” when he contemplates his “friend besieged / by dementia”:

 

morning coffee lost to him—his Zen moment

on an endless loop

 

so he is almost Miles Davis some days—

       a bitch’s brew

 

of redundancy cutting him to pieces—

 

Dementia Lyrics is a brave attempt to understand that umbrella term, “dementia”, when memory, reasoning, thinking decline, to express in lyrical terms the effects and consequences. Dennis Hinrichsen is nothing if not a uniquely innovative poet, language in his hands like hot steel in the hands of Hephaestus, deity of fire and metal-working.

 

Charle Rammelkamp

 

 

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Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books. His latest collection is The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, Kelsay Books.