Phaeton's Wheel

Naropa’s pedigree comes through the Beats, who loved and absorbed jazz, and this makes a nice literary lineage for Dennis’s home ground of New Orleans, and music that runs like a fabric through the city runs through his poems as well. You can go from the unheard to the expressed, or from the expressed to the unheard. That’s a metaphysics of art right there, one that knows when it’s alive and lived, cognizant of the formless mystery of its origins, in poetry, jazz, or living. You have to be in tune with the subtleties and come away with something recognizable as clarity (whatever that might mean). It could mean you’re a romantic who loves his wife the way Dennis does in a number of poems, and that, too, might be slippery to explain.
--Gary Allen, The Poetry of Dennis Formento: A Little Corner of the Unknown Universe