“my own private Idaho”: A Review of Danny Wilson’s Wanton Fury
Wanton Fury
Danny Wilson
BookRix 2018, 22 pages
Wanton Fury is the most recent poetry publication on BookRix.com, a site which hosts self-published authors in a breadth of genres. In the midst of populist works such as Nidhi Agrawal’s romance novel A cute love story: a story of a girl, which has amassed over 800,000 views since its 2010 publication on BookRix, poet Danny Wilson sets out as “A wanton soul trying to overcome imposter syndrome anew.” His short lyric poems thrash celebrity name-drops and cups of Joe against questions of consciousness and other elegiac musings. Are we all endeavoring to “Overcom[e] the numbness within a / Manic mind?” Wilson proposes an answer: “Leo Dicaprio smiles!”
For each pithy phrase that gestures toward introspection, Wilson provides an equal and opposite celebrity reaction. The collection’s first poem, “About November Again…” opens, “The passion of a philosophical soul / reigns supreme now.” He prepares his reader to transcend the physical world through his poetry: enlightenment by surrogate. Wilson, hand outstretched, leaps like his emblematic galleon stock image into the vast tides of philosophy, and together, he and the reader collide head-on with “Justin Bieber smirks!” Dante had Virgil; we have Justin Bieber.
Virtually all of the poems in the collection are conclusive and tightly arranged in a question-answer format. Wilson ends each poem with a concise epigraph, whether it be the “RIP” that mourns Betsy Ross, the “Amen” that concludes a prayer for “the matrix”, or the “I surrender….” that submits to the will of Kendrick Lamar and Wal-Mart shoppers. For all of the answers that Wilson poses, his speaker does not seem to learn all that much. He fails to access the interiority of any public figure, let alone the feelings of basically anyone around him at any time. He cannot fathom “Sister Mary Julius giving / Me a stern look?” Likewise, he imagines that “Senior / Citizens ponder reality over a / cup of joe”, and, though unlikely it may be, this non sequitur is emblematic of Wilson’s writerly tendencies. He engages tangentially with questions of existence, thought, and reality, but all he can muster are hollow popular culture references. But maybe that is his point: how can we understand ourselves when our only reference point for introspection is a two-dimensional image of a celebrity selling a hamburger?
For all his criticisms of superficial engagements with the self, Wilson feels like a tourist in each of his psychological troubles, pausing for fleeting pit stops in “mania”, bipolar disorder, and suicidal thoughts among other mental illnesses. That is not to say he is not troubled; he persistently longs for his “inner child” and laments his “angst filled / Psyche”. Still, he seems to shuffle through the table of contents of a DSM to collect careless shorthand for simpler problems – confusion, sadness, feelings of futility – all of which are universal enough not to warrant the obstructive language of mental illness.
His misguided detours aside, perhaps the most admirable facet of Wilson’s writing is his determination to find a source of genuine happiness. In nearly every poem in his collection, a public figure offers a disingenuous smile, and Wilson’s speaker asks something to the effect of, in his words, “Feeling detached while wearing a / Happy face?” Just how can we remedy our emotional ills? Luckily, Wilson offers not only a possible answer but also a charge for himself and other writers: “Changing the world one / Poem at a time.”