James Dickey

James Dickey's notoriety is belied by his appearance. An Atlanta-born former football player, fighter pilot, and advertising writer, within the last ten years he has won prominence as one of the most provocative of American poets. But the large crowd that came to hear his Morris Gray Poetry Reading on October 25 may have been surprised to find itself faced with a solid, comfortable Southern businessman. This is what Dickey appears to be, except when his eyes glitter as he relishes the turns of his own conversation.

Apart from what he is saying, only this glitter and his expressive use of his hands give him away for being a poet. His exterior seems particularly unexotic if one has come fresh from hearing him read poems about bestiality ("The Sheep Child"), voyeurism and sexual assault ("The Fiend"), the bombing of civilians ("The Firebombing"), and adultery ("Adultery"). "Nothing is excluded from the poetic conscioueness," Dickey proclaims. "Anything that happens to your mind is grist for your mill."

He has assumed the role of a pioneer, a twentieth century Whitman, not only in the exploitation of untraditional themes but also in the development of a style that takes no cue from any predecessor--not even from Whitman. He takes enormous risks in his wriitng. He likes to quote Randolph Bourne: "The trouble with American culture is that the American artist is never allowed to make any mistakes. Poets today are afraid of gambling." He adds thoughtfully, "You have to get out on the edge and thread that very thin line between the predictable and the impossible, the ordinary and the ridiculous."

One of Dickey's most recent poems that teeters on this brink is called "Falling." An airline stewardess sucked from an aircraft falls to her death in a Kansas cornfield. On the way down she is:

like a glorious diver then feet first her skirt stripped beautifully

Up her face in fear-scented cloths her legs deiiriously bare then

Arms out she slow-rolls over steadies out waits for something great

To take control of her . . .

she passes

Her palms over her long legs her small breasts and deeply between

Her thighs her hair shot loose from all pins streaming in the wind

Of her body let her come openly trying at the last second to land

On her back This is it THIS . . .

The "Sheep Child" treads an equally daring line, portraying a legend of farm boys:

That in a museum in Atlanta

Way back in a corner somewhere

There's this thing that's only half

Sheep like a wooly baby

Pickled in alcohol . . .

One of the finest and riskiest poems is "The Fiend," which Dickey talked about in Richard Tillinghast's English C section. This poem depicts a voyeur in action:

. . . She touches one button at her throat, and rigor mortis Slithers into his pockets, making everything there--keys, pen and secret love--stand up. . . .

The class wondered if readers tended to identify the poet with this persona. Dickey replied, "Yes, and that's not the first time that's happened. The best letter I ever had on a poem was an unsigned letter with no return address, from New York City. Someone wrote to me and said, 'I recently read your poem "The Fiend" in the Partisan Review. I'm a member of the New York City Police Department--the vice squad--and I just wanted you to know, Mr. Dickey, that I've always had a lot of sympathy for you fellows.'. . . The real unanswered question, though, is what a member of the New York City Police Department was doing reading the Partisan Review."

He continued: "It took me God's own time to write that poem. . . . I thought about the sexual thing. You can read all the sex manuals in the world, about married love, manipulation . . . you come to the conclusion that society wants you to have a certain kind of sexual life and sexual response. But that may or may not be the one that you do have. The man in "The Fiend" is a voyeur--as I say, don't knock it if you ain't tried it. I thought of the fiend as one who had come to a tacit understanding with himself that he needed this, no matter what it led to--ridicule, disgrace or even electrocution. The sex instinct is that strong."

Dickey expands on these ideas in short homilies on the "new morality": "You go to hear ministers in church and you have a feeling that you're listening to fossils. They talk about honor and chastity--who believes in those things anymore? We know the delights of the sexual relationship. . . . Nowadays if you want to f---somebody, you do, if he or she is willing. You just do it for whatever there can be for both of you. This is why The Scarlet Letter is so quaint to us--all that agitation about fornication!"

He devotes a good deal of thought also to the possibilities of psychedelically induced works of art: "If the orgiastic moment were to result in a corresponding intensity of verbal presentation, I would be the first to use psychedelics. But experience suggests otherwise. Inspiration is momentary; after that, what Coleridge calls the 'architectonic' imagination must take over." His own experience with drugs was dissatisfying: "My own brief encounter with mescaline was very much of a withdrawal experience. . . . I like a sense of connection with other people and other things. I like to drink, of course, because of the sense of conviviality and celebration alcohol induces. . . . I don't believe lying around in a chemically induced trance is going to effect any changes for the better. As Gide said, 'Lucidity is my disease.'"

One feels that Dickey's ultimate concerns are not with the problems of the moment. The more enduring, if less controversial aspect of his poetry is its treatment of man's communion with nature, a theme which he handles with an insight that is unique in modern poetry.

Put on the river

Like a flecing coat,

A garment of motion,

Tremendous, immortal.

Find a still root

To hold you in it.

Let flowing create

A new, inner being . . .

Dickey says, "I have a very definite feeling about the connections of men and the world as it was before men themselves began to reconstruct it according to either commercial propensities or the heart's desire. I like the connection of the human body with natural, unadorned things, with lakes, especially with rivers, with trees, also with clouds--also with animals and birds. That seems to be restorative and life-giving; it seems to key the human being in bodily sense with the flux of existence. . . . My interest is in man as a very simple hunting and food-gathering, hopefully tribal creature."

Dickey reads his poems at a rapid clip in a loud, racy voice. Most poets simply intone; Dickey almost roars. His performance in Lowell Lecture Hall featured more commentary than poetry; his gift as a raconteur tends to run away with him. In the space of about fifty minutes he read perhaps seven shortish poems, the balance of time being taken up with tales of Civil War relics and films about Jean Harlow. His audience ate it up. His touch of natural Southern rhetoric is quickly evident; he is somewhat oratorical even in conversation. His whole manner is flavored with an exuberant self-indulgence. The brashness in him comes out in his explosive literary cirticism: Milton is one of the "great stuffed goats of English literature."

Though he has been connected with various universities, he is no convinced academic. The writing of a poem, he thinks, implies a one-to-one relationship between poet and reader, and he is distrustful of group studies of poetry "where the poem is laid up on the seminar table like a dead cat for dissection, all with a great steaming-up of academic glasses."

Opinions like these are not likely to endear' Dickey to certain academic coteries. Such people are also annoyed at the crashingly bourgeois publicity campaign that seems to accompany him wherever he goes. (Dickey has had the full Life magazine treatment, with photographs of him in his various uniforms.) More to the point, his critics deplore the occasional unrevised look of his poems--and certainly he can be, at times, both prolix and dull. Some would call him tasteless, but after all, tastes differ.

Dickey's defense lies both in his ambition and his achievement. He is trying to write poems for which there are no precedents; therefore some slips are to be expected, if not fully condoned. And it is a fact which few could challenge that Dickey's brief career has already produced a handful of poems that can be set with the very best of this period--poems like "The Performance," "The Firebombing," "Fox Blood," and "For the Last Wolverine."

Dickeys ultimate seriousness comes through in conversation even to those who have doubts about his ideals and style. He is an easy man to like, even for academics. He has important things on his mind. To put a cap on a conversation, he said, "One part of me is a very scholarly person--I like to read long monographs on Keats's prosody--but the other part is someone who has never seen a poem before. When I really want to enter the deep part of writing, it's as though I had never read anything before. I want to write each poem as if it were my first--not only my first, but anybody's first."