SOURCE: Cassity, Turner. “Double Dutch.” Parnassus 8, no. 2 (1980): 177-93.

[In the following mixed review of The Strength of Fields and The Zodiac, Cassity questions stylistic elements of Dickey's poetry.]

If you write in lines so long that your book has to be printed sideways, it seems to me you might well reconsider your methods. However, James Dickey has always been the least succinct of poets, and here, in a grand horizontal sprawl, is The Strength of Fields, a collection of lyrics and of adaptations from other languages. Dickey writes with undiminished vigor, but I am not sure I can say this as praise. Intellectually, he is so seldom on secure ground that he ought perhaps to proceed with caution.

His title poem, for example, is in direct contradiction to the Warren Court. It seems to say that politicians do represent trees and stones.

                              Men are not where he is
                    Exactly now, but they are around him          around him like the strength
Of fields …
                    The stars splinter, pointed and wild. The dead lie under
The pastures. They look on and help.

Perhaps President Carter, for whose inauguration the poem was written, needs livelier helpers. One is reminded of those unreadable Scandinavian novels about “The Land.” If Dickey covets a Nobel Prize, The Strength of Fields, as a title, should do it. For its purposes, it is the best since The Good Earth.

As a matter of fact, the poet's position is not vastly different from what Mrs. Buck's used to be. He has real talent, a wide public, a geographical area delineated for him by that public, and no serious critical appeal whatever. Buckhead, even when Dickey was living there, must have borne about the same resemblance to The South as the coastal treaty ports to China, or Pasadena to the Wild West. No Wonder his Buckhead Boys feel rather out of things.

Within his limits—one cannot really call them self-imposed; that would imply a sense of focus he does not have—he can be effective. “Root-light, or The Lawyer's Daughter” is a very amusing put-down of the idea of the Platonic Idea. Or would be if one could rescue it from its surrounding welter of verbiage. It is the dread Southern urge to use eight words wherever one will do. Surely it will be the punishment of the garrulous to sit in Hell at the knee of Edith Wharton's mother.

                                        She came flying
                              Down from Eugene Talmadge
                    Bridge, just to long for …
                              If you asked me how to find the Image
                                        Of Woman to last
                              All your life, I'd say go lie
                    Down underwater …
                                        Be eight years old …
                              in the clean palmetto color
                    [and] naked with bubbles,
                              Head-down … there she is.

No Georgian, I least of all, would be willing to forsake Eugene Talmadge Bridge, but the rest of the detail in the full version adds nothing.

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,
Swampy states                    watching
The lawyer's daughter shocked
With silver                    and I wished for all holds
On her like root-light. She came flying
Down from Eugene Talmadge
Bridge, just to long for as I burst with never
Rising never
Having seen her except where she worked
For J.C. Penney in Folkston. Her regular hours
Took fire, and God's burning bush of the morning
Sermon was put on her; I had never seen it where
It has to be. If you asked me how to find the Image
Of Woman to last
All your life, I'd say go lie
Down underwater for nothing
Under a bridge and hold Georgia
And Florida from getting at each other                    hold
Like walls of wine. Be eight years old from Folkston ten
From Kingsland twelve miles in the clean palmetto color
Just as it blasts
Down with a body                    red and silver buck
Naked with bubbles on Sunday                    root
light explodes
head-down, and there she is.

Root-light is phosphorescence, one of many spooky Southern phenomena. What has phosphorescence to do with the lawyer's daughter? Nothing. That is why I left it out. “The clean palmetto color” is of course so attractive a phrase I should like to steal it, and may.

I do not understand why he sets up the poem typographically as he does. If there is any rhythmic measure, or any non-random relationship of sentence to line, I cannot discern it. I have heard him read the poem—most engagingly—and still cannot. As a lyric it is marred by a leering resemblance to a Playboy cartoon, but it does represent the poet at his least pretentious.

“False Youth: Autumn: Clothes of the Age” (even his titles are long) shows him at his most pretentious, but may nevertheless be the most successful poem in the book. It is worth quoting in full, because, unlike root-light, its details are relevant to its subject, and do not paralyze the narrative.

Three red foxes on my head, come down
There last Christmas from Brooks Brothers
As a joke, I wander down Harden Street
In Columbia, South Carolina, fur-haired and bald,
Looking for impulse in camera stores and redneck greeting cards.
A pole is spinning
Colors I have little use for, but I go in
Anyway, and take off my fox hat and jacket
They have not seen from behind yet. The barber does what he can
With what I have left, and I hear the end man say, as my own
Hair-cutter turns my face
To the floor, Jesus, if there's anything I hate
It's a middle-aged hippie. Well, so do I, I swallow
Back: so do I                    so do I
And to hell. I get up, and somebody else says
When're you gonna put on that hat,
Buddy? Right now. Another says softly,
Goodbye, Fox. I arm my denim jacket
On and walk to the door, stopping for the murmur of chairs,
And there it is
hand-stitched by the needles of the mother
Of my grandson                    eagle riding on his claws with a banner
Outstretched as the wings of my shoulders,
Coming after me with his flag
Disintegrating, his one eye raveling
Out, filthy strings flying
From the white feathers, one wing nearly gone:
Blind eagle, but flying
Where I walk, where I stop with my fox
Head at the glass to let the row of chairs spell it out
And get a lifetime look at my bird's
One word, raggedly blazing with extinction and soaring loose
In red threads burning up white until I am shot in the back
Through my wings                    or ripped apart
For rags:
Poetry

Poetry is not so badly off as all that, Mr. Dickey; it needs only to be saved from its practitioners. One is tempted to say that Thom Gunn could have written the poem better, but since he hasn't, there is no point in withholding praise from the actual author. The barber pole is a real inspiration. Admittedly, I am predisposed to like any poem that savages Columbia, South Carolina. I went through basic training there. If the following line break is not random it is a stroke of genius, and the very last sort of effect one ordinarily expects to find in Dickey.

I arm my denim jacket
On and walk to the door

The defensiveness is gotten across with marvelous subtlety.

“The Rain Guitar” suffers from being a sequel to or trial run for the dueling banjos scene in Deliverance—that abyss—and from our suspicion that what a man of Dickey's age should really be playing is a ukulele. The guitar reappears in “Exchanges,” a notably bad performance. The poet, with no hint of irony, is apparently going down a checklist of cocktail party chic: smog, offshore drilling, freeways, the quality of life, and the death of whales. All too appropriate, unfortunately, for a Phi Beta Kappa poem, “being in the form of a dead-living dialogue with Joseph Trumbull Stickney (1874-1904)—(Stickney's words are in italics).” Italicizing was not necessary. It is perfectly obvious which words are Stickney's: his are the ones that make sense. In the Dickey text nothing has anything to do with anything else. You cannot call it free association because there is no association. The narrator is sitting on a bluff above the Pacific Ocean outside Los Angeles (where else?) and playing Appalachian music to a companion while worrying about environmental pollution. “We sang and prayed for purity.” A reader who will believe that will believe anything, although I should say in its defense that it is the most straightforward utterance in the poem. Compare it with this:

Day-moon meant more
Far from us                    dazing the oil-slick with the untouched remainder
Of the universe                    spreading                    contracting
Catching fish at the living end
In their last eye                    the guitar rang moon and murder
And Appalachian love, and sent them shimmering from the cliff

The operative phrase is living end. The girl, we learn presently, is now in Forest Lawn, and everything—astronauts have by now been added—is supposed to come together in an image of death. It doesn't. Nothing could get itself together after images like “birds black with corporations.” It brings one solidly down on the side of Chevron. Well, if there is anything I hate it is a middle-aged hippie.

I take this opportunity to say I personally find offshore drilling platforms the most attractive thing in any seascape. They provide a middle distance. In the bay at Santa Barbara they are like great ideographs on the oriental haze of the islands.

It would be just as easy to hatchet “For the Death of Lombardi,” a maudlin threnody for the iconic coach. It would be easy but counter-productive. We should regret instead that someone who is uniquely qualified to give us a good poem on the world of the locker room has failed to do so. Very few writers play football, and we should have our understanding enlarged if a poet could convey to us what it is actually like. My interest in endangered species is in seeing that they do not disappear from the table, but I neither hunt nor fish. I therefore owe a particular debt to Ernest Hemingway, and come away from Dickey with a sense of waste and frustration, his as well as mine.

“Lombardi” confirms what one has suspected for years: Dickey thinks he is Paul Hornung (whose autobiography, incidentally, is not to be missed; its narcissism makes poets seem self-effacing).

Yet running in my mind
As Paul Hornung, I made it here
With the others, sprinting down railroad tracks,
Hurdling bushes and backyard Cyclone
Fences, through city after city, to stand, at last, around you

The debt to John Cheever is this side of plagiarism, but only just. The real trouble with the poem is that its details are predictable. The statement of them is furiously hyped, but they are themselves predictable without being inevitable. They are exactly what I should have used in writing a poem about locker rooms, and I never go close to locker rooms.

Around your bed the knocked-out teeth like hail-pebbles
Rattle down          miles of adhesive tape from hands and ankles
Writhe in the room like vines                    gallons of sweat blaze in buckets
In the corners                    the blue and yellow of bruises
Make one vast sunset around you.

To measure their failure you have only to think of the hyena in Green Hills of Africa “racing the little nickelled death inside him,” or of the Kipling galley-slaves.

We fainted with our chins on the oars and you did not see that
we were idle, for we still swung to and fro.

The sunset of bruises is wonderfully bad, the taste of the Easter show at Radio City Music Hall brought to literature, and it appears twice.

the bruise-colors brighten                    deepen
On the wall                    the last tooth spits itself free
Of a line-backer's aging head

The tooth exemplifies the syntactical desperation to which Dickey has been reduced: something, anything, to make the obvious seem “poetic.” There is no conceivable way in which a tooth can spit itself out. The meaningless reflexive makes one see why Freshman English instructors tell their students to avoid the passive. The writing in “Lombardi,” as writing, confronts us with what three generations of modern poets have been unwilling to face: no amount of talent is going to help if the rest of your mind is a mess. Common sense is as useful in poetry as it is elsewhere.

I do not want anyone to think I underrate Dickey's talent. The best phrase in the poem is very good indeed.

the weekly, inescapable dance
Of speed, deception, and pain

It is no accident that it consists of abstractions (you can be sure in any modern poem that dance does not actually refer to dancing).

The passage on the athletes grown middle-aged ought to work but doesn't.

Paul Hornung has withdrawn
From me [sic], and I am middle-aged and gray …
We stand here among
Discarded TV commercials:
Among beer-cans and razor-blades and hair-tonic bottles,
Stinking with male deodorants: we stand here
Among teeth and filthy miles
Of unwound tapes, novocaine needles, contracts, champagne
Mixed with shower-water …

I have to say, however, the champagne mixed with shower water has exactly the unexpectedness whose absence I was deploring above. As for the deodorants, well, surely it is better to stink with them than without them.

I am not familiar with the originals of the translations in Strength of Fields, but I conclude either that the translator likes long-winded poets or that he can make anyone seem long-winded, even an oriental.

But I remember, and I feel the grass and the fire
Get together in April                    with you and me, and that
Is what I want                    both age-gazing living and dead

Nothing could be further from an ideograph.

More Chinese than his Po Chu-yi is Dickey's own brilliantly observed image in “The Rain Guitar.”

eelgrass trying to go downstream with all the right motions
But one

A bit dynamic—fluid, if you like—for the oriental taste, but you will find no haiku nearly as good. Pound's Cathay, much of it, is static by comparison.

the willows
have overfilled the close garden

Alfred Jarry is here (Ubu roi; the guitar player is still going down that checklist). Octavio Paz is represented, as is Georg Heym. In English, the best of the lot is Vicente Aleixandre. I do not know him, but assume he is fashionable, as he is in the company of Evgeny Yevtushenko. I have a feeling I am using different systems of transliteration for the first and last names, but let it pass. The swordfish in “Undersea Fragment in Colons” is strikingly rendered.

Swordfish, I know you are tired: tired out with the sharpness of your face:
Exhausted with the impossibility of ever
Piercing the shade: with feeling the tunnel-breathing streamline of your flesh
Enter and depart

The Art Deco quality of the fish is perfectly captured.

It would be agreeable to say that in the translations we are at least freed of Dickey as a persona, but the voice of most of them is relentlessly first person, and we never get very far away from Paul Hornung. Still … Dickey's egoism has generated a thousand self-perpetuating anecdotes, yet the truth is, he is less imprisoned in his psyche than most poets. Whatever his poems are, they are not claustrophobic. Extroversion is an attractive thing about them, and may well account for their popularity. The poets he translates are, compared to him, closeted.

Speaking in his own voice he is a lyricist whose gift for the dramatic moment, for the accurate, vivid observation quickly rendered, is dissipated in non-structures enormously inflated. I seem to be describing Meyerbeer, and one could say that, like Meyerbeer, he will be immortal in his lifetime and for a few months after. The identification is not capricious: Meyerbeer may be said to have invented publicity—advertising—as we know it, and publicity has made Dickey one of the better poets who has ever been really popular.

Curious, therefore, that reviewers and public alike have by and large ignored The Zodiac, his magnum opus, if not his masterpiece. It appeared in 1976 in a trade edition from Doubleday and in a luxury edition from Bruccoli Clark. For the latter the author wrote an introduction that obscures as much as it reveals, and which I shall have to contradict from time to time.

I want to say at once The Zodiac is a work not just anyone could have written (so is Les Huguenots), and the question of indebtedness is to that extent moot. In basing it on “another of the same title,” however, he invites speculation. That other is by Hendrik Marsman, a Dutch poet killed in World War II. In the introduction to the Doubleday edition Dickey says “This poem is in no sense a translation, for the liberties I have taken with Marsman's original poem are such that the poem I publish here, with the exception of a few lines, is completely my own.” Prefacing the Bruccoli he says “Some thirty years ago, as a student at Vanderbilt, I read Hendrik Marsman's original.” I think he did not. I think he read A. J. Barnouw's translation of it published in The Sewanee Review in 1947, and I think Barnouw, not Marsman, is due the disclaimer. Everyone who compares the two will have to decide for himself the degree of Dickey's indebtedness. The main difference, to put it bluntly, is that Dickey's protagonist is more of a drunkard.

One can see what attracted Dickey. If Barnouw has represented the original dependably, it is the most American poem ever written by a European. Of his own version Dickey writes “The Zodiac is at the same time a vindication of the drunken, demonic poet and the desperately serious artist.” Although they were drunken and demonic respectively, there was nothing American about Verlaine or Rimbaud. Verlaine was too incompetent, and Rimbaud could have come only from the French bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. At one point he wanted to work for the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique. The presence of Arthur Rimbaud is perhaps the one thing that could have made the problems of the French in Panama worse than they were.

A strength of the Marsman-Barnouw is that in spite of manifold opportunities it at no point evokes Rimbaud. “Its twelve sections are the story of a drunken and perhaps dying Dutch poet who retires to his home in Amsterdam after years of travel and tries desperately, by means of stars, to relate himself to the universe.” (Dickey, in his own version.)

I can spare scholars of those months of Dickey's posthumous immortality a great deal of trouble by telling them that the division into twelve sections does not mean a one to one relationship with the signs of the Zodiac. Cancer the Crab appears, but the divisions are purely arbitrary.

The Dickey gets off to an unpromising start, by sticking too close to the Marsman-Barnouw.

The man I'm telling you about brought himself back alive
A couple of years ago. He's here,
Making no trouble
over the broker's peaceful
Open-bay office at the corner of two canals
That square off and starfish into four streets
Stumbling like mine-tunnels all over town.

(Dickey)

The man of whom I tell this narrative
Returned, some time ago, to his native land.
He has since lived, for nearly a full year,
Over the peaceful broker's offices
Which, at the corner between two canals,
Front on the square that, starfish-shaped, ejects
Its corridors into the city's mine.

(Barnouw)

The starfish is too ingenious by half, and doubly inappropriate to Amsterdam, which has neither beaches nor salt water. Nor do the tunnels improve things. Holland cannot even keep water out of its basements. Dickey had no reason to know better—except by checking his facts—but his mother lode had.

The real Amsterdam makes its appearance here:

… houses whose thick basement-stones
Turn water into cement inch by inch
As the tide grovels down.

(Dickey)

… a row of mansions
Whose cellars stand in water masonried

(Barnouw)

One up for Dickey. It would be invidious to point out that the city is sealed off from the tide by locks, and as the canals are flushed artificially every now and then, I am prepared to give the benefit of the doubt. Most of the first section is devoted to the vagaries of the badly hungover protagonist, but the author announces his theme baldly.

The Zodiac.
He must solve it must believe it learn to read it
No, wallow in it
As poetry.

Here he does not follow the Barnouw closely enough. It says simply

The puzzling palimpsest of the common life
That he must solve and read as poetry

An attack of D.T.'s—he imagines an invasion of army ants [Author's Note: The ants are an expansion of Barnouw's “insect plague of his own thoughts.”]—delays things, but soon he is drunk and writing, and the poem rises to a passage of genuine power. It is not parallelled in the original.

Will the animals come back
Gently, creatively open
Like they were?
Yes.
The great, burning Beings                    melt into place
A few billion-lighted inept beasts
Of God—

Embedded in the delirium is an article of faith any poet will have to respect.

the poem is in there                    out there
Somewhere, the lines that will change
Everything, like your squares and square roots
Creating the heavenly music.

Section II is a meditation on the nature of time, precipitated by the striking of a clock.

The whole time-thing: after all
There's only this rosette of a great golden stylized asshole

The level of diction in this section, throughout, is the uneasiest in the poem, and owes nothing to Barnouw. To credit its force I shall say I can never look at the rose-window of a cathedral in quite the same way again. Another onslaught of the shakes ends the meditation, and this time the poet imagines that he is attacked by a giant lobster, whom he considers elevating to Zodiacal status. The passage may or may not be a parody of Eliot's pair of ragged claws. In any event, the lobster is in the Barnouw.

Section III, the least effective in the poem—Dickey's and his model—is a reminiscence of travel.

That remembered Greek blue
Is fantastic. That's all: no words
But the ones anybody'd use: the ones from humanity's garbage can
Of language.

“Anybody'd,” I think, is a word practically nobody would use.

Section IV is a recovery. A poetic recovery; the narrator's liver is beyond recall. The section includes one of Dickey's more interesting conceits.

Without that hugely mortal beast          that multi-animal animal
There'd be no present time:
Without the clock-dome, no city here,
Without the axis and the poet's image          God's image
No turning stars          no Zodiac          without God's conceiving
Of Heaven as beast-infested          Of Heaven in terms of beasts
There'd be no calendar          dates          seasons
No Babylon          those abstractions that blitzed their numbers
Into the Colosseum's crazy gates          and down
down
Into the woven beads that make the rosary
Live sing and swirl like stars
Of creatures

The train of associations, while quite free, can easily be followed. Of course, it has Barnouw to keep it on the track. “Blitzed” is a mistake. In a poem about the heavens the root meaning, lightning, will get in the way of the Panzer divisions. The fault is Dickey's. In Barnouw the verb is “struck.”

We have in section V the first hint of reconciliation, of relating by means of stars to the universe. Barnouw's lines are quoted without alteration.

The faster I sleep,
The faster the universe sleeps

To seek in sex the meaning of the cosmos is about as intelligent as it would be to use an ephemeris as a sex manual, and I should like to dislike section VII on principle, but I cannot. I like it. The meaning could not be more clearly conveyed, and the sense of quiet at the end is very impressive.

Don't shack up with the intellect:
Don't put your prick in a cold womb.
Nothing but walking snakes would come of that—
but if you conceive with meat
Alone,
that child, too, is doomed.
.....Realities
Are revealed in Heaven, as clouds drift across,
Mysterious sperm-colored:
Yes.
There, the world is original, and the Zodiac shines anew
After every night-cloud. New
With a nameless tiredness                    a depth
Of field I can't read an oblivion with no bottom

The Marsman-Barnouw, in the casting of old barren Reason from the house, is downright priggish.

Do not sleep with the intellect,
Do not couple with a cold womb.

I incline to a view that writing is one thing and sex is another, but whatever turns you on, as they used to say in my and Mr. Dickey's early middle age.

I do not know what to make of Section VIII, and I don't think Dickey does either. In the Barnouw it gives the impression of a lyric imported from somewhere else, from Heredia, or one of the later Parnassians (nothing American here).

He goes along
The dead canal that sleeps in its bronze bed
Between the quays.

Dickey gives it the full treatment, to try to bring it in line with the rest of the poem, but nothing he does really works. First we have the Midnight Cowboy.

Time
To city-drift leg after leg, looking Peace
In its empty eyes as things are beginning
Already to go twelve hours
Toward the other side of the clock

He takes on the canal as if he were Teddy Roosevelt.

He moves along the slain canal
Snoring in its bronze
Between docks

In another line he big-sticks the Parnassians on their own ground.

The trees are motionless, helping their leaves hold back
Breath

I can produce no hard evidence, but I have an impression section IX owes something to Tonio Kröger, in German-language courses in the Netherlands often a set piece.

… the bitter right his shyness granted her
To pass him in the street with a frigid look,
Haughtily jesting with the sinister boy
Who once had been his idol and his friend
And who had taken her away from him

(Barnouw)

Again, Dickey's only response is to hype it up.

Empty is the grave of youth

(Barnouw)

The grave of youth? HA! I told you: there's nobody in it.

(Dickey)

One feels he has sat too long in creative writing classes where they tell you everything must be dramatized.

Section X is a love scene, and not at all interesting. Where a little sexiness would have helped, Dickey perversely adds none.

Section XI is the first intrusion of social life into the poem. The protagonist goes to a party. How he secured an invitation I find the most stimulating problem the work poses. Barnouw renders the arrival vividly, and Dickey wisely does not change it.

He polar-bears through the room

But if, as Dickey claims, he completely re-worked the “original,” why did he feel compelled to stick so close to it when no purpose is served? His worst enemy never said he did not know how to enjoy a party, and surely this is a scene in which we had rather have Dickey than Marsman. What, finally, did the Barnouw mean to Dickey? If it stuck in his mind for thirty years, and had enough force to make him compromise what is clearly intended as his artistic testament with the hint of plagiarism, it must have seemed to him a text brought down on stone tablets, but a text to be elaborated in art and lived out in life. I can think of no more convincing argument for keeping romantic poems out of the hands of the young, and for discharging agrarians who would put them there.

Easy to see that Dickey's idea of making something poetic is to add “intensity”—as if he went about with a hard gemlike Bunsen burner. In spite of his fondness for Appalachian stage effects (if one did not know Buckhead better, one would say he grew up waited on by White servants who sang a lot), it seldom occurs to him to use a homey image. The voltage would seem to him too low. On the rare occasion when he does use one, it is a disaster: the determination to say everything by way of images, be the image good, bad, or indifferent.

The garden, he thinks, was here,
Bald          a few sparse          elephant-head hairs

“Bald” is in the Barnouw, but for the elephant-head Dickey has no one but himself to blame. Nor was the bald itself necessary; I presume the Dutch word is kaal, which can also be translated as “bare.” In the Transvaal, kaalveld is bare veldt.

The concluding section has been praised, and correctly so.

Oh my own soul,          put me in a solar boat.
Come into one of these hands
Bringing quietness and the rare belief
That I can steer this strange craft to the morning
Land that sleeps          in the universe on all horizons
.....So long as the hand can hold its island
Of blazing paper, and bleed for its images:
Make what it can of what is:
So long as the spirit hurls on space
The star-beasts of intellect and madness.

If we can have an elaborate statement of a simplistic notion, Zodiac is the most elaborate and the most explicit example we have of the idea of poetry as the unconsidered utterance of the bardic genius aided in his unreason, if need be, by drink and drugs. If we take Whitman and Sandburg seriously, we have to consider Dickey, because he has more specific literary talent than either, and is by no means the phoniest of the three. His poems compare poorly with those of Hart Crane, but who knows what Crane would have written like in his fifties. I for one doubt that he could have written at all. Appalachia knows what to call such transports—speaking in tongues—and what to think of them: they are in the same category as the handling of snakes. In secular and more pretentious guise they are endemic to American poetic thought, and are not likely to go away. My own feeling is that if you wanted to invent a method to get the least out of the most talent, you could hardly do better.