[In the following essay, Smith views Dickey in the context of a Southern writer.]

With the death of Robert Penn Warren, the mantle of preeminent Southern poet seems destined to fall to James Dickey. Wendell Berry, Donald Justice, Eleanor Ross Taylor, and A. R. Ammons are all worthy candidates, but each has deemphasized a Southern identity in ways Dickey has not. Much has been written about James Dickey that is misinformed, silly, or plainly wrong, especially in the latter half of his career. The critical profile ranges from a dismissive, apparently political, condescension to a sycophantic cheering. In A History of Modern Poetry, David Perkins writes tersely of Dickey's “Southern narratives” and implicitly of the facile local color some readers regard as characteristic of Dickey's poetry. Charles Molesworth and Neal Bowers are more expansive but, essentially, view Dickey as a charlatan and boor, extending Robert Bly's early attack on Dickey's poetry for what such critics oppose as socially and politically objectionable opinions. At the other extreme, Robert Kirschten ends his book James Dickey and the Gentle Ecstasy of Earth: A Reading of the Poems with an unbridled partisan cheer when he writes “Long may James Dickey be the slugger of creative daring and commitment to poetry so that we may continue our circle and sing.”

Whatever the nature of critical response to Dickey, I think a predisposition to matters “Southern” plays a role. To outsiders, Southern culture, if those are not self-contradictory words, remains renegade, bogus, mysterious, often buffoonish. The South has long and variously paid the cost of its disjunction from other regions of the United States. Even the election of two presidents from the South does not easily convince the Southerner that equity or respect has arrived. Just as New Yorkers may imagine a South Carolinian to be fully a product of swamps and hokum, the South Carolinian—any Southerner—believes plus ca change to be the rule. His children, if possible, will be sent as far northward to college as money and ability permit. His novels will appear in New York. He will accept, reluctantly, the Northern standard as definitive.

The Southern poet, like the cottonmouth water moccasin, does not travel well and thrives mostly at home. James Dickey has often enough been treated by his press as exactly what Bly called him, a “great blubbery southern toad of a poet.” Moreover, both in his poetry and out of it, he has confirmed the persistent view of the almost oxymoronic Southern poet, and not least by playing the role of the redneck sheriff in Deliverance. One has only to think of Donald Justice or Archie Ammons to note how different and how melodramatically poetic has been the role Dickey has played.

A Georgian who has lived most of his adult life in South Carolina, Dickey mounted his career in the 1960's and 70's, not merely upon rhythmically fresh and experientially different poems, but also on often corrosive opinions of the poets currently favored by one contingency or another. His success, and exuberant pleasure in his success, seemed unrestrained to many at his frequent stops along the poetry reading circuit. Indeed, Dickey's personal conduct on the circuit has generated an apocrypha about him not unlike that of Dylan Thomas. Dickey's advertising-man acumen rightly counted on notoriety to carry his poetry to an audience not often touched by academic meekness, but it may well be that his outlaw image among academics has underwritten the image of the Southern poet as inherently inferior and crude. Nevertheless, audiences that have turned out in hundreds to hear him from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, have found in Dickey a true grit not found in surreal fantasies, metric cosmologies, confession, therapy, or counter-culture meetings. Dickey's poetry seemed like life in the last half of the twentieth century—imperiled, dangerous, unprogrammed, abrupt.

Dickey speaks frankly from inside a male, individual, exuberant, and joyous experience. “The Performance,” “Walking on Water,” “At Darien Bridge,” not his most celebrated poems but each standing as a chronological step in his art, are stations toward the roaring joyride of “Cherrylog Road,” a ride which reaches apotheosis in “The May Day Sermon to the Women of Gilmer County, Georgia, By A Woman Preacher Leaving the Baptist Church.” The mystic lift-off from an apparently ordinary dramatic situation that might occur in any reader's life is a formidable trope employed by Dickey. Out of the ashes of momentary, mortal circumstance, Dickey offers the reader what religions have always offered, what “The Salt Marsh” shows: “… your supple inclusion / Among fields without promise of harvest, / In their marvelous, spiritual walking / Everywhere, anywhere.” It is the joy of those who discover consequence in human connections such as the truckdrivers hymned in “Them, Crying” because they feel for “Those few who transcend themselves, / The superhuman tenderness of strangers.”

Dickey's is a poetry far from ignorant of the dead, the hurt, the maligned, the abandoned peoples who are the common interest of lyric American poetry, but his investigation and his investment have nevertheless been in transcendent joy. His poems seek a good time, and they do it on middle-class terms. They are scarcely marked by the gloom of the American poet's self-conscious rehearsal of personal problems from Lowell's New England dance card to Sharon Olds's sexual abuses. His story is upper tier Southern, a bourgeois search for life after success: up from the fens of suburbia, to a university of modest name, discovery of imagination's life, a coven of writers, war and survival, a new and scrupulously-to-be-examined life, books published, a teaching eminence, more books. Had Randall Jarrell played football instead of tennis, he might have been this poet.

Until the publication of The Whole Motion: Poems 1945-1992, there was no abundant evidence in Dickey's books for what Emerson, in his note to Whitman, called a “foreground.” The poems gathered under the title “Summons” now show how assiduously Dickey labored to present from his first published work a different sound in his poem. Yet even in the earliest poetry there is little of the historical Southern self-awareness and mea culpa whose breastbeating, in dark Faulknerian tones, constituted the “burden” of consciousness which would appeal, and does appeal, to generations of specialists. That it might not prove attractive to the educated, general reader, Dickey saw well enough. He set out to transform the pastoral lyric tradition by combining it with a heroic quest for a Southern self who would be, as Fred Hobson has described him, “the unburdened Southerner.” Hobson, writing specifically of Barry Hannah and young Southern fictionists, might be saying of all Southern poets what Cleanth Brooks seemed to say in citing the disinclination of lyric to attach to a determinate landscape and purview—that there is no such cat. Hobson says in The Postmodern Writer in the South that “not only do family and past mean nothing to him, the South and his identity as Southerner, he insists, mean nothing to him either. The South of his remembrance … isn't mysterious, isn't violent, isn't savage, isn't racially benighted, isn't Gothic or grotesque, isn't even interesting.”

The trajectory of Dickey's quest, as poems evolved structure, has moved from outside to inside, from emblematic anecdote treated narratively to experienced states of being, known lyrically. The scene, typical of the pastoral poem, has been the wood world or the sea world, nature, because it hosts the unknown and, traditionally, nurtures the spirit. Put bluntly, Dickey like Emerson, like Poe, like Keats has gone outside to find answers to questions echoing on the inside. As with all romantic and lyric poets, the problem was ever how to make intuited consolation, the joy of asserted consequence, credible to readers. What he has done, it now appears in his seventieth year, is to have commanded a formidable rhythmic shift whose expression has baffled as many of us as it may have dazzled.

Whether James Dickey is or is not a “Southern” poet may seem irrelevant to the matter of rhythm. The usual definition of the “Southern” is a historical consciousness aware of a great civil loss and a fearsomely burdened future; the location of story, as Flannery O'Connor put it, at the intersection of time and place where the clash and consequence of values may most effectively appear; the portrait of people unlikely to benefit from schemes of improvement but driven to suffer them; the environmental effects of rural reality, as the South has known it; the context of violence and violation—these are all to be found in Dickey's poetry. But so, too, is the presence of season, the confident cyclic regularity of living which suffers change and yet endures. The rhythmic nature of being Southern, though it may be something much older and deeper, is Dickey's subject and strategy in the work of his most recent decade.

Change continues to occur so fast we scarcely assimilate what it is. The physical landscape of the South has everywhere become an ugly memorial to greed and profit, every town and village marked at ingress and egress by the fecal-like stain of fast food dispensers, gas stations, auto lots, the Arabian knights of neon. Suburbs rise overnight to create instant slums which themselves breed every conceivable social ill. Yet the evidence of a past still alive is everywhere, too. There are living daughters of Confederate veterans in Richmond, the very last literal connection to that war. My own grandfather, who died at age eighty-eight this past winter, like many worked a lifetime without benefit of a formal education. He became an aeronautical engineer, who as a boy had hoboed a train to see the first automobiles. Sam Walton, an Arkansas man of the fields, transformed the South by harvesting Wal-Marts everywhere, creating appetites as well as an exchange of goods and ideas whose end we can't guess. The Agrarian ideal that early informed the classics-tutored imaginations of Southern poets has been lately expressed by Walter Sullivan who says, “Life lived on the farm is more authentic than life lived in the city, because the rural experience teaches the nature of reality.” One end of change much observed by Dickey's poems is the waning of Walter Sullivan's reality.

Freb Hobson is probably correct that writers from the South increasingly attend to a new, urbanized experience, the life they are actually living. But that no South, remembered or lived, is of any interest to contemporary Southern writers seems hardly demonstrable in the work of the region's poets. Their South is more, not less, violent, broken, grotesque, disintegrating, present, and interesting. It may not even be inhabited as much by Southerners—people who want to know what they are, and why; people defined by the consequence of a place. The once stable culture Fugitives found so severely altered remains alongside, not instead of, the South that constituted the “burden.” Southern poets, like writers of fiction, feel obligated to examine what is around them, what is inside them. Their interrogation takes a different path, but it remains an interrogation, even literally so in the voice of Robert Penn Warren. Ransom stroked and cooed. Tate fussed. Davidson nattered.

Dickey's voice, from his earliest poems, has possessed remarkable ventriloquial ability and is capable of calibration for effect, at times admonishing, assertive, but also evangelical with a range of wailing, crooning, wall-bursting rhetoric. The cast of characters through whom he has spoken, while not infinite, displays operatic range: a king, warrior, hunter, fisherman, fish, bird, wild boar, wolverine, leopard, quarterback, musician, woman preacher, womanchild, lifeguard, and others. Dickey's poems, being mysterious conduits for special speech, give back vital messages to the wobbling world, a message of solidarity and continuity from a scene of human engagement with natural force. Even the most patent “nature” reverie summons its authority for speech from an intuited scheme of order known both to Milton's “Lycidas” and to Poe, an order in jeopardy. This visionary role encourages Dickey in a self-appointed status as the civic voice of his tribe; he urges upon the people virtues to be celebrated for civilization and for vitality.

This twin-celebratory imperative has, I think, brought Dickey's poetry to a gulch it has not always transcended. The lyric hasn't the equipment or scope for a patient portrait of social ills and their remedies. Without being an epic chronicler of national states (one reason for the contemporary argument about whether lyric can be successfully political), the lyric poet feels he must contend against all risk for the biggest stakes. Dickey once told me he hadn't and wouldn't ever write “anything small.” Although small may have meant physical length, I understood it to mean poems not adequately ambitious to speak of and for the soul of the tribal life. His specifically regional and “big” poems mark Dickey's “Southernness.” “Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek,” “Snow on a Southern State,” and, later, “Sled Burial, Dream Ceremony,” “Slave Quarters,” and “Two Poems of Going Home” are variant examples.

The will to assume a civic voice characterizes a number of poems that began to appear with The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (1970) where the line-tempered and stanza-restrained form Dickey had refined to award-winning acuteness yielded to poems whose visual dimension is irregular and whose aural experience one must call, in general, loud. “Apollo,” “The Strength of Fields,” “The Olympian,” and “For a Time and Place” reveal Dickey assuming the venerable role of poet for the republic, broadcaster of answers. It is, I think, the wrong role for Dickey who seems here at his most bathetic and transparently bad. He is bad because he loses his skill for rhythmic delicacy, not because he abandons his narrative gift. He is bad because he fails to employ language as an act of discovery, a door into that wood world whose secrets the pastoral poet always unlocks. Dickey bangs dully, laboring more and more mightily, as if noise will overcome deafness, as in “For the Running of the New York City Marathon”:

I am second
Wind and native muscle in the streets          my image lost and discovered
Among yours:          lost and found in the endless panes
Of a many-gestured bald-headed woman, caught between
One set of clothes and tomorrow's:          naked, pleading in her wax
For the right, silent words to praise
The herd-hammering pulse of our sneakers,
And the time gone by when we paced
River-sided, close-packed in our jostled beginning,
O my multitudes.

Whitman, of course, would have smiled at this.

Even here, however, is the gist of Dickey's greatness, the seed of “right, silent words to praise.” Dickey is at his best when he abandons pretension to social and cohesive opinion, when he strikes off to find and celebrate the rural life which until his generation was dominant in the South. Indeed, Dickey's interest is most fervent for the pre-rural, wild landscape, the Adamic scene of long scars to our bodies and dark fears to our souls. This may well define the Southern poet, and Dickey in particular, as an American example of what Seamus Heaney has called a “venerator.” Dickey's quest has been to locate and report the sites of sacred energy which are the unploughed and unknown thickets our myths, legends, and souls regard as compelling, maternal, and tutorial.

The poet-venerator who praises the natural seems inevitably a pastoralist. More often an elegiac than an epic or dramatic writer, he means to concentrate emotive power to evoke immediate and strong response. It is a poetic attitude necessarily more backward-facing than forward, for it laments change that erodes the durable and the good by which we have so long flourished; yet it is also a poetic attitude whose interrogative aspect is less divorced from political and social engagement than we might suspect. To praise the past against a corrupted present is to lodge complaint against the causes and conditions of the corruption. As the portrait moves toward articulated vision, the transcendent and mythical scheme presses more vigorously into the receptive consciousness of the poet. The poem seeks to distill everything to essences beyond which no consciousness can go, the very process undertaken by Dickey's poems in books after the mid-1970's. Two possibilities open for the poet, one formal, one scenic. In evolving toward a poetic sound, Dickey found himself with gifts of the venerator but attracted by the imperatives of a republican voice, a divided duty as it were. The retraining needed to resolve that dilemma results in the characteristic (and not very Southern) sound of poetry Dickey has written in the 1980's and 1990's as collected in Head-Deep in Strange Sounds: Free-Flight Improvisations from the unEnglish (1979), Puella (1982), and The Eagle's Mile (1990).

Paul Ramsey, a Southern poet whose tastes tend toward the conventionally metric Anglo style, has written, provocatively, that “the metrical history of James Dickey can be put briefly and sadly: a great lyric rhythm found him; he varied it; loosened it; then left it, to try an inferior form.” The rhythmic form Ramsey so admired was not found by Dickey so much as forged by him for his need. It flashes in the twenty-five poems of “Summons” with which Dickey opens The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1945-1992. Stanzas from “For Robert Bhain Campbell” illustrate:

I like him; I love him,
I shall soon sit cold in an office,
Hearing the sea swing, the dead man step:
The sun at sunset in the mind
Never falls, never fails.
There is Berryman's poem, where you were a bird.
And I, an unsocial man,
Live working for some kind of living
In a job where there is no light. But
I can summon, can summon,
And your face in my mind is hid
By a beard I read you once grew.

An intense voice, wanting both intimate and chanting registers, swings through uncertain feet that sound at moments smooth and at moments about to collapse. But the last three lines display what Ramsey had in mind, a mesmerizing rhythm exactly embodied in the line statement, whether trimeter or tetrameter, syllables falling with firm yet delicate motion that is the anapestic shape for which Dickey's poetry would become known. Very shortly, one imagines, Dickey's sense for the line would have revised stanza one this way:

In an office, hearing
The sea swing, the dead man
Step the sun at sunset
In the mind, never failing.

Dickey's short line with a faintly incantatory quality has a talent for bodying drama inside the mind, a consciousness which moves easily backward and forward in time. Aggressive, sensitively receptive, it rocks with a feel of speed but also with grip and vision. By 1962, in Drowning With Others, Dickey had learned the subtleties inherent in this form, not least lean, agile stanzas in five and six lines, clusters of perception, and leaps from the real to the mystical, as in “Fog Envelopes the Animals”:

Fog envelopes the animals.
Not one can be seen, and they live.
At my knees, a cloud wears slowly
Up out of the buried earth.
In a white suit I stand waiting.

While four of the five lines make bold statement, a firm sonic progression of tetrameter creates a background sense of reluctant movement common in confronting the unknown. Each line proceeds as a consequence of the factual line one, though nothing else appears factual because of the shimmery, slightly and oddly formal syntax which makes “and they live” a soft cry of discovery, makes the cloud out of the earth seem a spirit, and makes the white suit of the speaker the ritual dress of the about-to-be-changed. Here, Dickey's trademark anapests create the three-pace phrase which retards an energy always threatening to bolt. Thus “and they live” holds back momentum and permits discovery, as “At my knees” sets it up.

By the mid-1960's Dickey mastered variations of the anapestic rhythm. They were needed to avoid the inherent monotony of his stichic incantation, a weakness especially troublesome for one of the two kinds of poems he wanted to write. Dickey had from the start an exceptional narrative talent, an ability to bring life to a scene, to color it, expand it, and cinematically make it move. The short line enabled that feel of immersion, the stress pushing ahead and the double drag of anapest retarding. The action of statement was realistic and external, assisting movement, and with it Dickey saw how to tap into moments of mythic reach. Here are two first stanzas that illustrate: “When the rattlesnake bit, I lay / In a dream of the country, and dreamed / Day after day of the river …” (“The Poisoned Man”). “Beginning to dangle beneath / The wind that blows from the undermined wood, / I feel the great pulley grind …” (“In the Marble Quarry”).

Dickey's ability to blow up ordinary scenes into posters of experience, an ability that would force his work farther from the domestic arena and into such wilderness as might be left to an urbanized South, created a need for a line form which did not risk monotony and did not delay progression through temporal and spatial levels. Dickey wanted form capable of what he called, after Whitehead, “presentational immediacy.” The poems of Buckdancer's Choice (1965), widely seen as his best book, restlessly range through the irregular lines and stanzas (his gap space device appears) of “The Firebombing” to the long-line quintets of “Reincarnation” to the scrupulous sculpted quatrains reminiscent of Herbert in “The War Wound” to the wall of words in “The Shark's Parlor” and “The Fiend.”

Dickey had worked himself into possession of many rhythms, none of which sufficed entirely for the tune he wanted to play. Nothing better illustrates Dickey's rhythmic hunt for the sound than his worksheets held by Washington University. Here are the first eight lines of “The May Day Sermon to the Women of Gilmer County, Georgia, By A Woman Preacher Leaving the Baptist Church,” in the first draft, then called “Sears.”

The wide-open dance of motes.
The swinging sand of the motes.
The wide-open dance,
The swinging sand of dust.
That other glory shall pass.
The stable wanders over the earth.
And at night, in the animal's sleep,
The stable wanders over the earth.

The initial lines fumble with that peaceful image of dust as if Dickey can't find a way through tranquillity to his violent tale of paternal and religious abuse, and indeed the struggle lies between potentially soporific iambs and anapests, all jarred by trochees. But by line six a stability arrives as the anapests set a dominant pace, one Dickey will couch in longer lines only in the very last draft before publication. Buried in the lines which seem sculpted by a worshipper's intensifying in-breath and out-breath, the surge and drag of Dickey's old trimeter works into, parallels, sometimes counters an older tetrameter whose sound is a rhythmic composite of Anglo-Saxon beats and King James idiom. With this shift of form, of rhythm, Dickey explodes his poem toward a hybrid and mystical parable of joyful ascension:

Open          to show you the dark where the one pole of light is paid out
In spring by the loft, and in it the croker sacks sprawling and
shuttling
Themselves into place as it comes          comes          through spiders dead
Drunk on their threads          the hog's fat bristling          the milk
Snake in the rafters unbending through gnats to touch the last
place
Alive on the sun with his tongue          I shall flickering from my mouth …

Ramsey was certainly correct in observing that Dickey had “loosened” the rhythm. He did so to liberate the poem from its own success, the solid “click” of the trimeter lyric as in “The Heaven of Animals.” Doubtless, the gain for Dickey was simply pleasure in stepping outside reader expectations, his own included. This will to change and change again seems, in retrospect, characteristic of Dickey's writing, as it was of Robert Penn Warren's. Having disguised and modulated his initial rhythm with the new spread of lines, increasingly other aspects of Dickey's treatment of language became manifest. In some respects language became his primary subject. He cultivated syntactic reversals, suspensions, word-fusions, print gimmicks, clausal ambiguities, and enjambments that left comprehension hovering mid-margin like annotation. “The Eye-Beaters,” in fact, employed the poem's margins for authorial commentary. Dickey transformed verbs into nouns, nouns into adjectives, adjectives into phrases. He played loose with syllable counts; he truncated sentences to fragments; he made lines of single words. He generally abandoned stanzaic regularity, allowing the words to determine rhythm visually by sometimes sprawling, sometimes marching, always defining their function in their management of the white space of the page.

The result of Dickey's improvisations was to move his brand of poem visibly away—as it had already removed itself thematically—from the more conventional contemporary poem. It was not unusual to hear, even among Dickey's partisans in the late seventies, that he was becoming hermetic. In truth, because of their interiority, their will to shift inner and outer forums, Dickey's poems had never been very accessible, but they became ever more oblique as he cut the reader's connectors and transitions, offered few clues to relationships, or left unnamed what he was talking about. Still, his tales spoke more than ever in the voice of what he had called “the energized man,” and nowhere more so than in The Zodiac (1976), a poem about poetry and language as much as it is about anything. The energized man, as far as Ramsey and traditional formalists were concerned, was a howler. And was passion enough to justify the willful obliquity of such lines as these from “Root-light, or the Lawyer's Daughter”?

That any just to long for
The rest of my life, would come, diving like a lifetime
Explosion in the juices
Of palmettoes flowing
Red in the St. Mary's River as it sets in the east
Georgia from Florida off, makes whatever child
I was lie still, dividing …

Dickey made formal experiments jam more and more intense life into the poem, the poem as enactment. Desiring to wed fiction, poetry, and film, Dickey was reflecting a break between himself and his more traditional predecessors in Southern poetry. Only Warren evinced anything like the formal trials Dickey attempted, and Warren never escaped the critical estimate of being a fiction writer who traveled in the netherland of poetry. Dickey, with the publication of Deliverance, Alnilam, and now To the White Sea, runs a similar risk with the Southern literature industry. But it is his poetry, surely, and its innovative motions that make him important both as writer and Southerner.

Dickey, to use Fred Hobson's word again, is unburdened by any great sense of classical obligation. The pressure exerted upon his formal choices comes not from an antiquarian standard but from an attempt to accommodate contemporary experience in a living language. Allen Tate said the problem for the modern was not that he had no form, but that he had too many. Dickey's problem has obliged him to understand that his engendered form would have to avoid the monotony his early and middle lyrics seemed headed toward. But the new form must also enable clear shifts away from the direct narratives which undergirded his accomplishment and reputation.

The nature of what constitutes a Southern narrative may best be known to the person who receives it as such. If the benchmarks of Southern fiction are applied, then one supposes there must be violence, warfare, sexual encounters, pursuit of a wild creature in the wood with an accompanying recalibration of the spirit's experience. If the dominant subjects of the poems are family members, dysfunctional or otherwise, and if the stories invoke the memory that composes a sort of compound of law and expectation for the family, then the grid definition for Southern literature may qualify poems as Southern narratives. But I see no reason why “In the Waiting Room,” Elizabeth Bishop's poem about a visit to the dentist, or Adrienne Rich's “Diving Into the Wreck,” an undersea divagation, might not be equally Southern, excepting, of course, neither poet identifies the landscape employed as Southern and, in any regional sense, the landscapes do not function as actors. When there is nothing definitively Southern in subject matter, we may wonder to what extent rhythmic patterns define what is Southern. Poet James Applewhite has suggested (in “The Poet at Home and in the South”) a relationship clearly Southern between tropical weather and slowed, indigenous poetic rhythm.

With landscape as rhythm and a form evolving to minimize the narrative, squeezing it between the lines, Dickey's most recent poetry arrives at a new phase. I mean by rhythm, now, what Warren meant in Democracy & Poetry when he wrote that rhythm is “not mere meter, but all the pulse of movement, density, and shadings of intensity of feeling.” Dickey's reason for the change, insofar as it may be a personal choice, cannot be known; we can see, though, that his interest in peopled dramas has lessened (though it is not entirely abandoned) in favor of an interest in states of being realized through intense, and, after Puella, drastically shorter nodes of language. Puella is an odd interstice, as I think is The Zodiac, for its poems attempt to speak in the voice of Dickey's second wife, Deborah, hence as dramatic monologue, and they attempt the coherence of a bildungsroman or a portrait much like an autobiography, a fictive self self-made.

These poems are unsuccessful heroic quests, narratives of a speaker whose goal must be an emergence from darkness into a treasure-hoard of bright knowledge. For all of Dickey's story skills, neither Puella nor The Zodiac sustains a beginning-middle-end clarity and progress that we will pay to watch all the way through. I think neither voice is so credibly itself as it is Dickey's, pitched, squeaky, noddingly thrown. The life-plot in each poem is so subordinated to a massing of language appropriate to Dickey's interest in states of passionate being that confusion results. Nor does a lift-off occur, transporting us to revelation. Both poems are never “small” but they try too hard to be “big.” In them may be seen the manner of Dickey's late poetry, its richness and a manner arguably Southern, observably a different rhythm, and yet visibly the result of a shift meant to realign Dickey's formal strategies with his continued search for an inwardly intensified consciousness and an outwardly pressurized rhythm.

Without study of his worksheets and drafts, no definite date can be assigned for the emergence of the lyric sound characteristic of everything Dickey has published since 1976. The poem of this sound shows a baffling, edged sense of incompleteness, arbitrariness, and rough-born form that some have regarded as proof of a failed talent. Although there is no doubt the late poems are tougher going, I think Dickey's last collections are no less and probably more referential, accessible, and reality-based than John Ashbery's. But the rhythmic pitch is different, as in this excerpt from Puella:

With a fresh, gangling resonance
Truing handsomely. I draw on left-handed space
For a brave ballast shelving and bracing, and from it,
then, the light
Prowling lift-off, the treble's strewn search and wide-angle
glitter.

In this five-line passage from “From Time,” Dickey buries his statement (“I draw on left-handed space”) in a haze of unpatterned syllables which make an appositional elaboration, a stretched and gliding poetic sound which features three suspensions or caesuric swirls. Dickey recognizes that his poem resists referential access, so he provides a subtitle (“Deborah for Years at the Piano”). The passage cited is, otherwise, unresolvably ambiguous—yet feels rhythmically persuasive as it works by accretion and momentum, prose principles, and alludes to carpentry, stress forces, and photographic effect all to reinforce a sense of “measuring” in the reader. The laid-in quality of language intense with intention but struggling to maintain movement explains the frequent verbals. To the extent that the lines exist to be commentary on what it feels like to play piano, they are registers of inward awareness, slowed thought imitating act and look.

The registration of states of being, of conditions of feeling, as the emphatic enactment of poems appears to migrate toward a form which employs greater ellipsis, compression, and density, all provided for not through symbol so much as through the word-function shifts which Dickey favors, a truncated and often spatially isolated or dramatically enjambed statement for which the usual expectations are frustrated, subverted, and altered. He removes the scaffolding of dramatic circumstance and blurs the occasion of speech, leaving primarily a language of emotive intensity, a sort of curriculum for the soul's exuberant epiphanies. The Eagle's Mile (1990) reads, even for a long-immersed Dickey partisan, with a difficulty unmatched by any previous work. But that difficulty has always been a part of Dickey's artistic project and it seems transient for steady readers.

Head-Deep in Strange Sounds: Free-Flight Improvisations From the unEnglish appeared in 1979, a baker's dozen poems, each carrying such handrails as “after Alfred Jarry,” “near Eugenio Montale,” and “from the Hungarian of Attila Joszef, head crushed between two boxcars.” Are they translations? Imitations? Some sort of shared composition? I think it matters primarily that they are poems which seek a form-sound in the translation experience of European poets at the same time and in much the same way that James Wright and others did, and do so by breaking the chronological-anecdotal structure, linear and clear as ancestral verse, seeking a dream-fusion of states of being, a braiding in which the inhibitions of usual form and practice may be escaped, and in which looming death-shadows can be cheated by colloquy. It is also a form which permits Dickey to speak of emotion as well as of a citizen's public experiences, about, as he says “the evil / of just living …”; or of the magic of the language of numbers “from the frozen, radiant center / Of that ravishing clarity you give. …”

Double-Tongue: Collaborations and Rewrites, the final section of The Eagle's Mile, contains nine poems very similar to those of Head-Deep, each displaying the phrase-making power that has made Dickey a notably epigrammatic poet as well as an image creator with the skills of a jeweler, a power reenfranchised by the brevity, spatial sculpting, and concentration characteristic of this later work. With compressive form, Dickey has vitalized landscapes as historical and evolutionary witnesses. In “Lakes of Värmland,” he eulogizes and releases Viking warriors “in water turned to brass” by old wars, his precursors, of whom he says “I wish to gather near them …,” a discourse as doomed and moving as that of “The Seafarer,” that Anglo-Saxon call to the quest tinged and poignant with late-life's hard wisdom. Indeed, the common landscapes in these poems are rife with danger, with cold, height, inhospitable trials, the blank mercilessness of rooms of air a man comes to—“No side protected, at home, play-penned / With holocaust. …” Dickey's late season poetry has left him with a chilling view, sometimes vistas, of mortal experience, one which does not always offer consequence for the yearner, though it has cyclical inevitability, which Dickey seems to regard as a sort of master rhythm to which man must seek to fit himself. For that, the poet's pastoral yearning has never been quite enough to satisfy Dickey, though he has deep roots in the agrarian and Southern awareness of elemental cycles. Landscapes contain now, it would seem, the full evocation of final ends he wants. In the talky but, perhaps, undeniable “Farmers” he says:

When love gives him back the rough red of his face he dares
To true-up the seasons of life with the raggedness of earth,
With the underground stream as it turns its water
Into the free stand of the well: a language takes hold
And keeps on, barely making it, made
By pain: the pain that's had him ever since school,
At the same time the indivisible common good
Being shared among the family
Came clear to him: he disappears into fog …

His old habit of conducting big matters from the civic podium forces Dickey to assert what he does not dramatize, the noble and exemplary synchronization of environment and manhood, deed and principle. The Southerner knows this ordinary farmer, praised into mystical junction with the elements, knows that language of pain and sacrifice; this is an old mainstay in the program of heroes. But Dickey's landscape here has less rhythmic conviction than the Burma Shave rhetoric somewhere behind it.

The new rhythm of landscape, an image strategy, antirational and associational, born of his interest in European modernist poetics, frequently permits Dickey the immediacy and dream-like intensity of consciousness receiving stimuli unmediated. Yet the form also weakens under statements made bluntly, as if they were without need of coloration, extension, appositional naming. “Gila Bend,” a memory of pilot gunnery training in World War II, recalls the scene of “a cadaver / On foot” and it is really scene, not human dilemma, which commands the poem's energy, a desertscape of “… small-stone heat / No man can cross; no man could …” survive to “rise face-out”:

Full-force from the grave, where the sun is down on him
Alone, harder than resurrection
Is up: down harder
harder
Much harder than that.

The slight comic bravado in the last line undermines grim memory because the poet appears manipulative. One is hard-pressed not to feel the trochees, triply repeated as “harder,” slide into lapel-grabbing. The same intensity, however, leads in The Eagle's Mile to an unusual feel of colloquy with natural forces (often personified), and you feel strongly the renewed energy in elemental and religious imagery such as that of birds, flight, and upward soaring. Poems praise yearning for heights. As Dickey says in “Eagles,” about ambition, “The higher rock is / The more it lives.” If you feel your suspension of disbelief faltering before hierarchical ordering which Dickey loves, it is worth recalling that boasts functioned in our tribal memory and literary heritage to defend against self-defeat as well as to illuminate destiny. The stance of the aged warrior gazing at eternals, willing survival, reappears when Dickey writes: “Where you take hold, I will take / That stand in my mind, rock bird alive with the spirit- / life of height …”

When the heroic imperative wanes and the pastoral waxes, Dickey locates himself at edges of change. “Circuit,” “Daybreak” and “Two Women” are all poems of beaches, apparently the Atlantic off South Carolina. Dickey's beaches are sentient forms constantly remaking themselves (as the soul does) with “their minds on a perfect connection” which, when you are upon them, allow you to “meet yourself …,” even to make a kind of ultimate prayer: “Stretch and tell me, Lord; / Let the place talk. / This may just be it.” The colloquial side-of-the-mouth tone of that last half-line has become a staple finishing line for Dickey, where it cuts against the profound statements of revelation which he favors.

Perhaps it is elegiac praise for places he views as junctures of meaning and consequence which is the most Southern aspect of Dickey's poetry. Place has historical consciousness; there he locates rhythmic and final realities. There is a great sweetness he is adamant to express, and a singing quality in these poems, which Dickey has always had but not pared to such efficient presentation as in the violent “Night Bird,” narcissistic “Daybreak,” playful “To the Butterflies,” and in the second half of “Two Women”:

Early light: light less
Than other light. Sandal without power
To mark sand. Softly,
Her hair downward-burning, she walks here, her foot-touch
The place itself,
Like sand-grains, unintended,
Born infinite.

The liquid balance that sounds, with l's, the hieratic entry and imagistic power of this woman evokes Genesis, Eve, and Helen. Poe would have approved. With the poetry in The Eagle's Mile, Dickey fuses image medallions with compact narrative. The roaring rhythms of his mid-career lyrics slow to write less and get more said. A fine page architect, Dickey's effects range from list to epitaph. Even the civic witness he has long coveted works in “The Eagle's Mile,” a poem ode-like in celebrating the masculine and democratic virtues of Justice William Douglas, an outdoorsman and master of Hopkins's “cliffs of the mind.” Dickey sees Douglas's spirit riding over the last wilds of North Georgia, making contact with sources of origin that R. P. Warren would certainly have applauded, even if Tate and Ransom might have suspected an Adamic blindness:

Catch into the hunted
Horns of the buck, and into the deepest hearing—
Nerveless, all bone, bone-tuned
To leaves and twigs—with the grass drying wildly
When you woke          where you stood with all the blades rising
Behind you, and stepped out
possessing the trail …

Beside this man-on-the-trail solitary, Dickey stacks a poetry of tenderness in “Daughter,” which few could so convincingly modulate, from a father's gladness at the delivery of his daughter to an exaltation of the guiding powers of life. It begins in the touch of a small finger:

To him: not father of God, but assistant
Father to this one. All forests are moving, all waves,
All lava and ice. I lean. I touch
One finger. Real God, roll.
Roll.

Dickey's poetry has turned autumnal but it is not gloomy. He has lived and lives as an unregenerate warrior in act and in spirit, a joy-seeker, a minister for whatever world he can act for and in. Richard Wilbur's phrase “the mood of manhood” describes what Dickey enacts in poetry. He rejects conventional structures and visions of the contemporary poet who answers only by dim light. Dickey's pastoral depends on heroic enterprise, on out-of-shape Rocky-like runners (“The Olympian”), on a middle-aged man's fantasy of foiling an assault by stripping the thief of his weapon (“Spring-Shock”), on watching a snowfall that may be someone's “very great winning hand” (“Snow Thickets”). In all places and times, Dickey believes, manliness connects to consequence, a way, a courage of behaving by which we can see, as “Expanses” tells us, that “a man comes; / It's true, he's alive. …” To know that is to frame acceptance, a submission to the rhythms of being, and finally “Brother: boundless, / Earthbound, trouble-free, and all you want— / Joy like short grass.”

Urban America breeds few readers of poetry who favor the old-fashioned man at the heart of The Eagle's Mile, a man who forged a life from wilds we don't have much of now, a man for whom the hard scenes of memory speak the unspeakable, one whose destiny is not accusation, guilt, burdened consciousness, but is to live without sophistry. That is Dickey's motion, however, one inseparable from the environmental awareness of his Southern experience. In “The Little More,” a sort of catechism, he describes the marginal quality of time between boyhood and maturity, the immortal moment that cannot truly be said, but may be seen as “Joy set in the bending void / Between the oars” of a rowed craft. Joy, all boys must learn, is the lure of living, the quest's end. It can come only to the boy, Dickey believes, who submits to evolving a competent self. “The Little More” finds Dickey's hero emerged from the wilderness, paternally wise, offering what Dickey has always had in abundance, appetite and the power to “carry,” which is simultaneously a metaphor and a faith:

Boy who will always be glanced-at
and then fixed
In warm gazes, already the past knows
It cannot invent you again,
For the glitter on top of the current
Is not the current.
No, but what dances on it is
More beautiful than what takes its time
Beneath. Running on a single unreleased
Eternal breath, rammed
With carry, its all-out dream and dread
Surging bull-breasted,
Head-down, unblocked.

The public cadence of exhortation and the private cadence of knowledge—to be and to know—are in the Southern poetry of James Dickey, as mysterious as our destiny. From the pastoral to the prayerful to the final “all-out” labors of the heroic athlete, James Dickey praises. It is not athletic success that Dickey covets for us, but what he calls an “Eternal breath / rammed with carry,” which has to be pregnant destiny, and more, a little more, as he says. He celebrates consequence, the order within all other orders, and motions, which men and women who give their lives to poetry bear upon the page as the issue of life. Life's issue, as he might say, is everything. It is local rhythm. It is many motions braided in one.