SOURCE: Mizejewski, Linda. “Shamanism Toward Confessionalism: James Dickey, Poet.” Georgia Review 32 (summer 1978): 409-19.

[In the following essay, Mizejewski explores the confessional poetry of The Zodiac, focusing on Dickey's poetic persona.]

Since the mid-sixties or so, one or two people at almost any English Department cocktail party have had a James Dickey story. Perhaps even more amazing than the stories themselves has been Dickey's mercurial quality that renders an anecdote from nearly every college reading and from so many personal encounters. After 1972, the stories became Jim Dickey-Burt Reynolds stories, and after January, 1977, there were tales from Carter's inaugural, but by then they were appearing in popular news magazines. Developing as a celebrity-poet, Dickey has broken from the university circuits of rumors and readings, and materialized in middle-class living rooms—in glossy coffeetable books and on the television screen, where he is likely to be reciting from his Biblical prose-poetry on a talk show.

President Carter certainly blessed an unusual inaugural poet. Unlike E. A. Robinson or Robert Frost, who had been nationally honored by Theodore Roosevelt and Kennedy, Dickey does not write an easily accessible “popular” poetry. His poems are certainly not academic, but the average reader who believes he can understand the somewhat deceptive simplicity of Frost or the small-town characters of Robinson might be confused by Dickey's elaborate sentence structures that snake like the Coosawattee and make breathtaking turns around tricky prepositional phrases. He might be disturbed by a poetry that, far from making Frost's humanizing inquiries into nature, sees man as an animal coded to hunt and survive by blood in the natural world, so that war, too, is a natural human activity. He might be disturbed by a poetry in which a middle-class, middle-aged man tries to reckon with how he had firebombed the Japanese by understanding his own sense of personal power as godlike destroyer and suburban builder—all this in semi-Biblical, Southern rhetoric.

This fine, complex poetry, in which the imagination is often the subject as well as the creator, is probably not the work of Dickey's that most Americans know. Far more have probably read his novel, Deliverance, and the fiction in Esquire. Even more than that identify him with the movie version of the novel, or know him as the publicized poet of inauguration week when Dickey, identified by the media as “the voice of the South,” interpreted the election of a Southern administration as no less than a Biblical event. Dickey has promoted not just a Southern mystique, but a Dickey mystique, and has become not just a nationally known poet like Frost, but a personality as self-mythologizing as the President's own brother.

The showmanship of the yarn-spinning and rhetoric during inauguration week is a trademark of the poet whose best work has always been charged with the presence of the master performer. The best of his Poems 1957-1967 work like an ideal, reversed ending of the Oz story: the curtain might be pulled aside for a glimpse of the professor working the levers to produce the sound effects and smoke, but the wizardry—contrived as it may be—continues anyway, and with a great deal of success. There is no demand for a return to the farm in Kansas—or Georgia—where real life is without magic and masks altogether. Instead, all sorts of bizarre and unlikely conjurings go on: a traffic jam becomes the Apocalyse, a military execution turns into an acrobatic stunt, a man's legs fall asleep and pick up the dream of the hunting dog sleeping on his feet. The artifices of showmanship and magic save us in poems such as “The Hospital Window,” “The Celebration,” “Slave Quarters,” “Power and Light.” They save us from sentimentality, pain, or self-pity. “Guilt is magical,” says the speaker at the end of “Adultery,” because guilt has been performed in the poem, exorcised by a shaman-narrator who has dissolved the walls of a motel room and extended the risks of a love affair into all the open frontiers of American history.

The presence of the poet-performer in those poems is as intense as the personal presence by which Dickey has become nationally known in the media over the past year. However, the public personality—of shaman, storyteller, good ole boy—is always that of a man who knows he is onstage and who keeps an actor's distance between himself and his audience. In the earlier poems, Dickey did likewise, always avoiding the “confessional” sort of personality found in Lowell, Snodgrass, Berryman, or Sexton. Dickey was especially critical of Sexton's work, which he found indulgent and uncontrolled. But while the public Dickey was developing as a showman, the poet Dickey was experimenting with how loosely personal his act could become. Eyebeaters showed some of this experimentation, but his most recent poetry, the book-length poem The Zodiac, shows an actor-poet who has gone as far as he can, almost on a dare, into a painful, public exploration of trauma. While Snodgrass or Lowell would have written unabashedly personal accounts of the loneliness, fear of failure, terror of mortality, and struggle with language that haunt Zodiac, Dickey opts for the shaman's mask again—this time, the mask of an historical person far removed in location and time.

In this case, though, the mask is too flimsy and the role too superficial, so that not even Dickey can play it right. Juggling with materials that he does not want to play confessionally, Dickey slips in his act and is finally unable to achieve the distance of the public, acting figure. Zodiac, which awed and puzzled most of its critics, demonstrates enough of the old Dickey eloquence and power to make it worthwhile to ask what went wrong. More than that, it asks us to examine what is perhaps the real difference between confessional and non-confessional poetry: the extent to which the speaker is onstage consciously enjoying his own performance as shaman, wizard, showman.

Zodiac has all the material for shamanistic transformations. The main character, Hendrick Marsman, is a hallucinating, half-mad poet-sailor who wants to “relate himself, by means of stars, to the universe,” as Dickey explains in the introduction. The scene is Europe in the late thirties or early forties, just before Marsman's death. Like an epic poet-hero sailing into the stars, Marsman knows he is a man in the hands of patterns and monsters created by someone or something else in the sky, and he is trying to construct a fantastic sort of metaphysics of the constellations.

But this time Dickey's conjurings fail. The power behind the poetic machinery blinks off, and the transformations never occur. Because there is often very little distance between Dickey and his subject, Marsman never becomes as dramatic as the self-performing speakers of the earlier poems. Often the metaphors are not imaginative juxtapositions but attempts by a drunken narrator to relate himself to anything. And even though Marsman is attempting to recreate a zodiac, the zodiac never becomes a real structure for his personality or imagination. The twelve sections take different scenes in a four-day span, alluding randomly to some of the constellations and signs, giving brief vignettes, and always returning to Marsman's terror of and fascination with the night sky. But there is no sense of closure to this loose history except for Marsman's impending death. When last seen, Marsman is writing and/or being firebombed, and the final affirmation of the transcendence of his art seems tacked-on in relation to Marsman's miserable, drunken wanderings throughout the other sections. Nothing in those other scenes justifies a triumph of either Marsman or the universal artist suggested throughout. In general, without the transformative magic of drama and distance, there is a sad exposure of the poet stepping out to admit it's all been just levers and smoke, and willing to give us now an “honest” account of the impossible attempt to transcend pain through language.

The transformations that do go on in Zodiac are mostly those between drunkenness, sleep, and brief periods of sobriety. Using alcoholic spiels as frames for monologues, like using dreams, allows for repetition, illogical apposition, random imagery, and quick shifts of scene. But unlike the dreamer, the drunk is also subject to misinterpretation and misperception of what is really there. Like Lowry in Under the Volcano, Dickey is relying on a belief in moments of drunken clarity and even brilliance, the ability of the drunk to come to realizations he could not have made sober. In a novel the length and scope of Lowry's, it is possible to develop a character who is a lucid and magnificent drunk. But in Dickey's poem of less than sixty pages, no character equalling the magnificence of the Consul is developed, although Dickey clearly intends to suggest an experience much wider than the historical Marsman's. As critics have pointed out, this is Dickey's most ambitious work, the epic that summarizes the themes of all his early work: the poet as part of history, man as an alien to nature and able to enter it only through the moment of the imagination, and language as the shaman's power against mortality.

Marsman, then, is romanticized as the poet-sailor to the extent that his “craft”—poetry and ship—becomes in the end the death-ship similar to the Anglo-Saxon burial ships for kings. In the last stanzas, Marsman identifies his personal struggle and extinction with the tragedy of all mortal poets attempting immortal tasks. His dramatic directives—“… put me in a solar boat … / That I can steer this strange craft to morning”—suggest the epic adventurer, too. But when Marsman hopes to “steer” to morning, he also simply wants to make it through another drunken night. So the question is whether Marsman's experience as presented by Dickey is, in fact, raised to such heroic stature—that is, if there is justification for such intimate and painful exploration of this speaker's psyche.

Facing the dilemma of how to give this kind of serious, even tragic stature to a character who is a personal and professional failure, Dickey attempts, like Lowry, to identify the “fall” of his character with the decline of western culture during the rise of Fascism and Nazism. But Dickey's background scenes, the European war setting, are only vaguely described. In most of the scenes, Marsman could actually be in any city in any historical period. We're told several times that Europe is itself at the edge of disaster, but in each instance this seems to be a momentary judgment made by Marsman in his own disastrous condition. At one point the comparison generalizes, “He goes on without anywhere to go. This is what you call Europe. / Right?” Marsman is wandering the city drunk, and we know he has no place to go, but there are no details given to suggest that all of Europe, too, is about to collapse. The observations about the historical situation seem oddly out of place, as in Part II when after telling us “His life is shot my life is shot,” the narrating voice concludes that “The gods are in pieces / All over Europe,” even though all we have seen up to that point is one of Marsman's hallucinations from the DT's. Marsman, we're told, has “been there / Among the columns:/ among Europe. He can't tell Europe / From his own death.”

However, except that we know the general time period, the idea of European decline is never fully developed. We never get the impact of a landscape like Lowry's, which is made real outside of the Consul's perceptions of it through the reports of the Battle of the Ebro, the Day of the Dead, the oppressive heat and dust, the overpowering presence of the ravine or barranca. Dickey uses a ravine, too, in two different places, but we can't be certain either is real like the real ditches all over Lowry's Quauhnahuac. Once Marsman imagines the sky as full of “gullies” with the moon itself fallen into one. But the hallucination is not very convincing, since the image dissolves into undescribed “Realities.” Marsman decides that “the key image / Tonight tonight / is the gully gullies: / Clouds make them, and other Realities / Are revealed in Heaven, / as clouds drift across.” The problem is that the metaphor seems appended rather than conjured, especially since it is self-consciously labeled by the poet Marsman as “the key image.”

As a poet, Marsman worries aloud frequently about this problem of his own perspective and “universality.” He comes across the other ravine image when he wanders the city one morning, either drunk or very hungover, and finds “some kind of / Lit-ravine” which he can't cross and which seems to “move across” him. He asks quickly, “But is it universal?”, using the word half-mockingly as he does on two previous occasions when he addresses God in poet-vs.-the-cosmos challenges. He taunts God in those earlier scenes as a “universal son of a bitch,” the creator to whom the critics can't object, the poet who is always universal. But in the third reference at the ravine hallucination, the term actually raises a serious problem in Dickey's book. It begins a long description of the zodiac, explaining how the ravine—that is, Marsman's spiritual abyss and ruin—has “been lifted from the beginning / Into this night-black— / Into the Zodiac.” Marsman's question here is significant: are his perceptions of himself in the gullies of the world and sky the hallucinations of one drunken artist, or are they symbols of a sustained tragic vision? Is Marsman's failure to “relate himself, through stars, to the universe” the failure of one mad poet or a symbol of what all artists attempt and fail to achieve?

This question is complicated by the dual nature of Marsman's crisis. His struggle for a metaphysical zodiac is therapeutic as well as artistic; he is seeking not just a spiritual framework, but a way to deal with his loneliness, alcoholism, sense of failure, and sense of his approaching death. One way to do this is to see an animistic universe which is dying with the personal self and which is full of symbols, signs, and some degree of empathy.

The constellations are the most obvious “signs,” and Marsman is especially obsessed with how they are full of “beasts,” animals and monsters that make a “scrambled zoo” similar to his personal zoo of hallucinations. Ironically, the only effective shamanistic move in the book occurs when Marsman decides to create a new constellation to fight Cancer or death: the Lobster, which sadly and comically turns into one of his creatures from the DT's and which turns on him and attacks him. The difference between this move and the metaphoric transformations in earlier Dickey poems is its self-consciousness. “Imagination and dissipation both fire at me,” Marsman says, thereby stepping out of the role of shaman and pointing to what he's doing, identifying it as just metaphor, which can't help him personally. “I didn't mean it,” he apologizes, at the mercy of his own hallucination. Unfortunately, the metaphors in Zodiac often really do control the poet rather than vice versa.

Essentially, they are personifications, attempts to identify with and humanize the world rather than transform it. The confessional poetry of Sexton uses this technique again and again as a desperate kind of therapy. In Zodiac, these metaphors are sometimes forced or heavyhanded in the struggle to appropriate the external world into the psyche of the speaker. Describing his rooms, Marsman asserts that “A flower couldn't make it in this place. / It couldn't live, or couldn't get here at all. / No flower could get up these steps, / It'd wither at the hollowness / Of these foot-stomping / failed creative-man's boards.” This is an explanation that the “boards” of the artist-perhaps in the sense of the stage as well as of “drawing boards”—have failed, but the metaphor itself fails by getting out of control, switching contexts from creative survival to the more farfetched concept of the plant walking upstairs. Stranger things have happened in earlier Dickey poems—a man is hooked up to his own house wiring, or a shark gets loose in a living room—but only in a context that prepares us for the imaginative leap gradually through tone and narrative detail. That context is missing here, and we're left only with the desperate need to personify.

This happens several times in Zodiac when the appropriateness of the metaphor is clear only in relation to Marsman's undependable perception. We must take the word of the speaker that “The fish, too, / Are afraid of the sun,” or that the “Innocence” of water is an “ultimate marigold horror.” At one point a painting “squeezes art's blood out of the wallpaper,” a bridge is a “slain canal,” and the “gully of clouds” in the sky is “a shameless place” where “the rest of nature is.” All these are equations of Marsman's misery with a more universal misery, but they are also flat assertions rather than conjurations of a credible animism. This kind of exaggerated, bombastic metaphor led Stanley Plumly to ask in a review if Dickey has perhaps gone beyond hyperbole into “superbole.”

Wayne Shumaker suggests in Literature and the Irrational that all metaphor is essentially a belief in or hope for animism. But the personification used in Zodiac shows a shift in Dickey from magic to a kind of psychotherapy, or from lyric celebration to a thinly disguised confessional poetry. Part of this is the fault of the failed distancing device, which is an intermittent third-person narrator whose tone is never clear and who is rather extraneous to what is really Hendrik Marsman's poem. While Dickey at times seems to identify with Marsman wholly, at other times this third-person voice seems straining for objectivity, judgment, even reproach.

Zodiac opens with this narrator who is clearly outside the mind and situation of Marsman, “The man I'm telling you about,” as he says in the first line. Sometimes the shift from this objective narrator to an interior monologue is obvious, as when the narrator is used to introduce a thought of Marsman's. But often the point of view is ambiguous enough to be either interior monologue or objective description, and this creates a problem in tone. We're sometimes not sure if the perceptions are the results of Marsman's limited vision or alcoholic fantasies, or are descriptions of a setting from a more removed and dependable narrator. This is actually the problem with some of the personification metaphors which might come from a paranoid Marsman or, more problematically, from the narrator who is in charge of Marsman's story.

Part of the problem is that the narrator sometimes uses the diction of Marsman, even the drunken diction, and this is a real shift from the historical voice of the opening. Before we get to the first interior monologue by Marsman, the third-person voice has already dropped such lines as “Hot damn, here they come!” to describe the DT's, and “You talk about looking: would you look at that / Electric page.” In general, though there are first-person and third-person technical points of view, the voices are identical, and it is difficult to account for the presence of the outside narrator at all. Not only are they identical, but they are not very different in diction and sociology from the speakers in some of Dickey's earlier work. Drunk or sober, Marsman more often comes across as an out-of-shape Southern ex-football player than a Dutch sailor. He addresses Pythagoras as his “old lyre-picking buddy,” and he later laments, “O flesh, that takes on any dirt / At all / I can't get you back in shape.” Even some of the images are the same as those Dickey has used to describe other personas. When Marsman “polar-bears through the room,” it's difficult not to remember the middle-aged teacher at the end of “False Youth: Two Seasons” who “skates like an out-of-shape bear” to his car.

In spite of this strained characterization of Marsman, the more important question in the end is whether the poem's form resolves the problems of the speaker. Although the twelve-part division suggests, like Lowry, a “twelfth hour” or end of a cycle, the structure of the poem is actually not a pattern of hours, months, or zodiac signs. It works instead as a looser pattern of drunkenness, ambition, self-reproach, and finally hope. While Marsman is obsessed with the zodiac, it is never actually materialized and never used as a means to structure his imagination. So the kind of resolution in the last section tries to be a closure to a structure and heroic pattern that is never really there. For the last lines of the book make a case for the triumph of Marsman, if not as an individual, then as symbol of a universal artist who might find the “instrument the tuning fork” that can create a music of the spheres which is possible “So long as the hand can hold its island / Of blazing paper, and bleed for its images.”

Without the integrity of a justifiable character and a clear structure behind it, the entire last section seems somewhat overwritten. Poetry, or at least the nobility of the poet's struggle, is affirmed in a sort of revelation like a thunderbolt: “A day like that. But afterwards the fire / Comes straight down through the roof, white-lightning nightfall, / A face-up flash. Poetry.” This also suggests a night bombing or even Marsman's death by torpedo which had been mentioned in the introduction. Throughout, Marsman asserts that poetry for him is a way of reading and writing in the night sky among the constellations. So having the sky literally fall on him can be either tragic or sadly and almost comically ironic. The problem is that the lines themselves become inflated at this point: “Poetry. Triangular eyesight. It draws his / fingers together at the edge / Around a pencil. He crouches bestially, / The darkness stretched out on the waters / Pulls back, humming Genesis.” This carries mixed connotations of a football quarterback and an epic Biblical movie. Unfortunately, Marsman has done nothing to make himself godlike enough for Genesis. In fact, one of the better passages in the book shows Marsman as poet opposing God as creator, setting up a nice contrast between creation of the universe by God and transformation of the universe through the imagination of man. “I say right now,” Marsman challenges at that point,” … like a man / Bartending for God, / What'll it be? … my old man / Was an astronomer, of sorts, and didn't he say the whole night sky's / invented?” But the invention never materializes in the poem itself, neither in any poem by Marsman nor in Dickey's romanticization of Marsman.

It is sad that the poet who criticized Sexton for her lack of control should write a long work that Harold Bloom hesitantly calls “obsessive and perhaps even hysterical.” Yet Zodiac illustrates all the hazards of confessionalism, despite its removed character and setting: the problem of justifying interest in the detailed personal problems of the speaker, the risks of using metaphor as a means of humanizing and appropriating a hostile world, and most of all, the problem of how to make the imagination transcend intense subjectivity so that there is a resolution in the art, if not in the troubled mind, of the poet.

Finally, it is ironic that the poem about poetry for which Dickey may be best remembered is in his very first volume of poetry—his elegy for Donald Armstrong, “The Performance.” Here we find many of the themes later developed in Zodiac. It is about how the poet, the man who died, and all men who know they are playing temporary roles can use the imagination to make the final surprising gesture which is the only recourse we have against death, uncertainty, and “the great untrustworthy air” in which Donald Armstrong flies as a pilot in the war. Armstrong's real, faulty acrobatic act is finished and perfected in the poet's memory and in his acrobatics of the imagination. And like the acrobatics, the stanzas and syntax are orchestrated “under pressure” in long, dazzling sentences and in a breathtaking handstand that turns reality upside down and gives us the vision that is suddenly clear and perfect, the vision of a man whose blood has rushed to his head. The background and character are entirely credible—and entirely credible, too, is the sudden backflip from the actual experience into the poetic fantasy. This is the Dickey most of us love and remember, the man who loves to dazzle his readers, “Doing all his lean tricks to amaze them,” like Armstrong's imaginary stunts. And this is the Dickey we hope to see again in his future work—for though Dickey is not a young poet anymore, he demonstrates the enormous amount of energy of the master performer who can avoid the confessional poet's trap of becoming too entangled in experience to use the magic and artifice of Prospero and Oz.