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Wednesday, July 12, 2006
James Dickey, “Coming Back to America”
What do you think (if anything) of the poet, James Dickey? He wrote the novel, Deliverance, which got made into the film with Burt Reynolds. That’s his main claim to fame, I guess. To take a break from what I’ve been working on - Plato - I’ve been reading comic books and James Dickey, Poems 1957-1967. My favorite is one called “Coming Back To America”. But a close second is “Falling” - a six page poem about an airline stewardess being swept out of an emergency exit door and landing in a Kansas field. (No, she doesn’t make it.) “For the Last Wolverine” and “The Bee” also have their good points. The former is about how cool wolverines are. (A risky theme.) The latter is about chasing your son, who is being chased by a bee, and about to run into traffic, and remembering your football coach at Clemson shouting at you to ‘get the lead out’. Very manly stuff, you gather.
Anyway, here’s a bit from “Coming Back”:
We descended the first night from Europe riding the ship’s sling
Into the basement. Forty floors of home weighed on us. We broke
through
To a room, and fell to drinking madly with all those boozing, reading
The Gideon Bible in a dazzle of homecoming scripture Assyrian
armies
The scythes of chariots blazing like the windows of the city all cast
Into our eyes in an all-night squinting barbaric rays of violent unavoidable
glory.
There were a “million dollars in ice cubes” outside our metal door;
The dead water clattered down hour after hour as we fought with
salesmen
For the little blocks that would make whole our long savage drinks.
Then he takes a shower, stuffs all the hotel towels in his luggage, wakes up with a hang-over and staggers up to the hotel pool on the roof, where he meets a lifeguard who lost a kneecap in a five car pile-up in Bensonhurst. He has a fantasy about leaping with her in the pool as “the sun shook off a last heavy Hotel.” Then he is fantasizing about making love to her while flying out over the city. “Woman being idea temple dancer tough girl from Bensonhurst/With a kneecap rebuilt from sunlight”. A lot of the poem is about painful-sounding flashes of light in the eyes. I pretty much like it.
Googling, there is a bit of Dickey on the web. First, there’s ‘search inside’ for a pretty good (and cheap) volume of selected poems at Amazon. I learn that the Coen brothers were at one point working on a dialogue-free adaptation of Dickey’s novel, To the White Sea. There’s a Paris Review interview that is rather interesting - amusing on account of the footnotes, at the very least. (Dickey says “Donald Davidson was my teacher”. The note says “Donald Davidson was not, in fact, Dickey’s teacher, although Dickey often claimed as much.” Then he tells a lie about going to Korea, apparently. I guess he was a liar.) Here are a couple poems: “The Shark’s Parlor". And two more. What do people think of Dickey?
Comments
I’ve taught Dickey’s “The Sheep Child,” which is an interesting, if over-earnest, dramatic monologue from the POV of the love-child of a sheep and a farm-boy.
I’ve never found Dickey particularly interesting, though. There’s something terribly overblown about his grotesqueries. Poulin compares him to Flannery O’Connor, but I think that comparison reveals the crucial problem with Dickey’s work.
In “The Sheep Child,” it’s interesting how Dickey gets us to sympathize with the sheep child—until we remember that the figure embodies the stupidest of stereotypes about farm-boys (which isn’t to say bestiality doesn’t exist, but that sheep-fucking is more silly or pathetic than it is disturbing). It takes Dickey’s mixture of “high” moral insight and attention to “primal” urges to make something as at once moving and ridiculous as “The Sheep Child.”
If you rent the DVD of Deliverance, there’s a wonderful contemporaneous interview with Dickey, “the poet laureate of the South,” in which much is made of his reverence for masculine virtues. It’s about ten minutes’ worth of praise for Dickey’s apparently superhuman ability to be a poet and a “man,” simultaneously. I’m afraid I made a decision within those ten minutes never to read anything by Dickey lest I be inspired to chuck it through a window, you know, in a totally masculine way.
Doktor Holbo—you know about the two Donald Davidsons, right? My written attempt to “reconcile the paradoxes of Davidson’s career” (analytic philosophy & the Agrarians) was lost to the ether years ago, but I wish I had it now. Maybe I can reassemble it…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davidson_(poet)
I do know that the Donald Davidson I studied with (really! I took his classes) never evinced any agrarian poetizing tendencies,
But how much do you really know about anyone? Here is a poem by “Donald Davidson.”
Walking into the shadows, walking alone
Where the sun falls through the ruined boughs of locusts,
Up to the president’s office.
It is sometimes thought that translatability
into a familiar language, say English,
cannot be a criterion of languagehood
on the grounds
that the relation of
translatability
is not transitive. — Hearing the voices
Whisper, “Hush, it is General Lee!”
The idea is
that some language, say Saturnian,
may be translatable into English,
and some further language, like Plutonian,
may be translatable into Saturnian,
while Plutonian is not translatable
into English.
But the soldiers’ faces under the tossing flags
Lift no more by any road or field,
And I am spent with battle and old sorrow.
Enough translatable differences
may add up to an untranslatable one.
Walking the rocky path, where the steps decay
And the paint cracks and grass eats on the stones.
By imagining a sequence of languages,
each close enough to the one before
to be acceptably translated into it,
we can imagine a language so different
from English
as to resist totally
translation into it.
It is not General Lee, young men…
Corresponding to this distant language
would be a system of concepts altogether alien to us.
It is Robert Lee in a dark civilian suit who walks,
An outlaw fumbling for the latch, a voice
Commanding in a dream where no flag flies.
I like James Dickey very much, despite nearly everything.
I agree that much of Dicky’s poetry is overly grand, but I’ve always liked “Cherrylog Road,” about a boy & a girl sneaking off to make out in a junkyard--"wild to be wreckage forever"-- & “The Lifeguard,” about the aftermath of a child’s drowning from the point of view of the lifeguard who failed to save him. This poem is also one of the few poems in American English to put anapests effectively to use in a serious poem.
When I was an undergraduate, Mark Strand read all of Dicky’s “Falling” to his American Poetry class at the Univ. of Washington. I thought it was silly then & still think it is silly now. As in the Monty Python colonel walking into a scene with his riding crop tucked under his arm & declaring, “No! Too Silly!”
There’s some kind of Jerry Garcia connection via Buckdancer’s Choice, I suppose. Dickey did learn to play banjo at my alma mater, Reed College, where he was Poet in Residence in about 1963. He was quite outgoing and was better liked than Galway Kinnell, who came later and wasn’t.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davidson_(poet)
John, why does it not surprise me at all that you’re from Reed?
Boy, that came out wrong. What I mean is, “Why doesn’t it surprise me that a learned, self-motivated autodidact attended Reed?”
(But please, continue with Dickey.)
I’ve myself has only just been exploring and questioning Dickey the last year or so, so might as well jump in.
Undeniably, Dickey as a US poet is a direct descendant (not copyist) of Whitman, and like Whitman reading him can be a touchy thing – the yawps that both bellow are always threatening to hurl themselves over the top in bathetic glory (oxymoron?). Once recognized, however, it seems to me that that bombastic element – which to me is the same as that which might be found in an oral story-teller – works to keep the poetry within the cosmos of the aesthetic and out of the limited sphere of conventional narration. In echo of how he was in life, the tales he offers successfully sound a full and clear ring of truth . . . . until you hear them for what they are: poetry. Not narrative. Not real life. They are first and foremost words on a page, which is to say literature (if, as it should be, of a peculiar kind).
Dickey’s work is surely woven from the heavier, more thickly threaded fabrics of open masculinity, but I think it’s too simple to let the masculinity become the defining factor of his work. Combined with the ‘overly grand’ character, the result is that the masculinity (and the tale within the text) becomes abstracted out of realism. It is the same as listening to the apocryphal great uncle tell a story about surviving the perils of the Great Depression in the belly of Chicago; a story wonderful and enthralling and yet still, somehow, wholly believable; one which culminates in a long moment of wistful nodding, a tilted beer, and a dead pan “And if you believe that one, I’ve got a bridge over the Hudson . . . .” Here’s the critical moment for the audience: there is either to remain naively gullable, and believe every future tale as real irrespectively; to react negatively, considering oneself ‘cheated’ by the ironizing of the story; or, to listen from this newly proffered perspective: this is an aesthetic performance, so listen not just to the story, but also to the story being told, the story _as_ told and as a _told_ thing.
And perhaps the little quip offered on the Paris Review site linked above speaks as well to it as anything:
*snip*
I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.
*snip*
(Let’s pass as unnecessary-to-the-moment on defending Ginsburg.) Simply, Dickey knew what he was doing while he wrote: the masculinity and grandiosity are not merely some natural ‘voice’ (as is hailed in writing workshops) but controlled causes – not effects, mind you, but causes – pointed to a final end of creating a literary poem. Take the two poems linked above: “Pursuit from Under” and “Bums on Waking.” They’re structured somewhat in the manner of a classic imagist poem (that is, two or more elements set into an energetic relationship with each other). Only, one element (the narrative) is much longer and more prominent than the second element (an unstated or under-stated emotional/ideational perspective). And (risking stepping on toes) compare the line/phrase breaking of “The Shark’s Parlor” to those of the Davidson poem, above. (And I’m speaking solely of this single poem, not Davidson’s work as a whole.) The poems offer a comparison of a more graceful and, say, clever phrasing/breaking in “Shark’s Parlor” against a line breaks (and phrasing) which are more mechanical, if not occasionally clunky (line three, particularly).
I’m begining to straying – so let me refocus to close. I would argue the masculine character of Dickey’s poetry should be seen as one controlled element of his creative processes: one that is used to successfully move the poems from banal narratives through abstraction to an aesthetic engagement. Does it work all the time? I’d never say that. But I think he does offer much – poetically and aesthetically speaking – to the reader. (Far more than most current poets.) And while the masculinity (seems I’ve cornered myself into using that word as the catch-all term), when too directly perceived can disrupt the reading and sink his poetry into silliness, I do believe that when given aesthetic permissibility, just as you must with Whitman (or, for another from many potential examples, Keats with his delicate femininity), Dickey’s poetry steps up out of the ordinary and into something much more interesting. (Mony Python is rather silly when viewed in such-and-such a way; but from another angle, one permitting the work to speak its own dynamic, it becomes rather a wonderment. E.g., the courtroom sketch that runs like an Ionesco play.)
Quick clarifying note: In no way am I praising Dickey as the Great American Poet or such. When I pick up his Collected Poems, some days I enjoy him, some days not so much. But undoubtably, and keeping to the examples above, there is much in “The Shark’s Parlor” that bears intent exploration, and much offered to feed a hunger for the beautiful in literature. And much which successfully stands on its own to criticize those grocery-store managers whom Dickey point a finger at in the quip above.
"And (risking stepping on toes) compare the line/phrase breaking of “The Shark’s Parlor” to those of the Davidson poem, above. (And I’m speaking solely of this single poem, not Davidson’s work as a whole.) The poems offer a comparison of a more graceful and, say, clever phrasing/breaking in “Shark’s Parlor” against a line breaks (and phrasing) which are more mechanical, if not occasionally clunky (line three, particularly).”
Alas, this is faint praise indeed—that “poem” was a sort of joke, which people may not have gotten, in which I spliced a paragraph from the philosopher Donald Davidson’s essay “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” into an excerpt from a poem by the Agrarian poet Donald Davidson. For which I will go straight to hell for several reasons. But I have no doubt that Dickey can do better! (As can Davidson-the-poet, I am sure.)
Anyway, I will now stop hijacking this respectable, Dickey-centered thread with silliness. Sorry, all.
Dicky & Ginsberg have more in common than either one of them would have cared to admit. My main problem with Dickey is that the poems are too often about Being James Dickey rather than about the subject at hand. Or that the jubject at hand, whatever it is, merely serves as an occasion for Being James Dickey.
No worries—whether Davidson wrote it or not doesn’t matter to the point. I’m mostly sorry I missed the joke. (Though, I can at least and honestly say I did smell something fishy on first read—so the humor wasn’t totally lost on me.)
hey pica, thanks for your joke. I appreciated it. (Thanks for comments, everyone. I was worried this would be a quiet thread, but it livened right up.)