SOURCE: Strange, William C. “To Dream, To Remember: James Dickey's Buckdancer's Choice.” Northwest Review 7, no. 2 (fall-winter 1965-1966): 33-42.

[In the following essay, Strange identifies dream and memory as the main thematic concerns of the poems comprising Buckdancer's Choice.]

Dream, memory, and poem are an ancient knot in a web of tempting correspondencies: image and event, possibility and necessity, wish and commandment, future and past. At one time or another and in various measure, all of these pairs have been used to explain that tense presence which is a poem, and they are still useful, permitting one to describe handily the tendency of modern poetry as a shift from memory and its co-ordinates to dream. Of course, there are exceptions. Old Ovid seems a poet of the dream while David Jones clearly writes for us out of a remarkable memory. Still, our time is distinguished by poet-theorists such as André Breton, who talks of “l'homme, ce rêveur définitif,” and we support with our prizes the Seventy-seven Dream Songs of John Berryman. And when the drift of western poetry is seen in large perspective, as the pitch of its weight slips from heroic to lyric, then its direction is unmistakable. The Greeks called memory the mother of poetry; we moderns know a deep well of the unremembered where poetry and dreams are born.

James Dickey's most recent book, Buckdancer's Choice, stands out sharply in this context as a collection of modern poems in which one can feel both the lure of dream and the thrust of memory. In single poems and in the ordering of the whole, it displays a breadth of concern and a balance of energies that are notable in themselves and full of promise for the future.

Most simply, Buckdancer's Choice can be sorted into one set of recognizably modern poems that are dreams in fact or in technique and another set of poems that are “remembered” rather than dreamed. Indeed, this division is so much a part of this book that quite often a poem from one category will be paired off with a poem from the other. “Fathers and Sons,” for example, consists of two poems printed together: the first describes a boy asleep and dreaming while his father dies, and the second a father haunted by his memories of a dead son. Other poems may not be so explicitly joined, but they, too, will draw together to enforce a balance between timeless dream and time remembered. “Pursuit from Under” and “Sled Burial, Dream Ceremony” or “Faces Seen Once” and “The Common Grave” co-operate in this way. However, the most striking moments in the dialectic occur when these opposites meet within one large poem such as “The Firebombing” or within a short and remarkably compressed piece like “The War Wound.” One comes to read Buckdancer's Choice for such compounding poems as these, but the collection is best met in its simples.

Of the two categories, Dickey's dream poems are by far the less impressive. Sometimes they are too dependent upon other poems, even upon poems from other collections. “Sled Burial, Dream Ceremony” is scarcely intelligible without “Pursuit from Under,” and “Fox Blood” drives us all the way back to “Listening to Foxhounds” and “A Dog Sleeping on my Feet” in Dickey's second book, Drowning with Others. More often, these poems fail to impress because we know their moves too well. Dreaming transformations of men into appropriate beasts is old hat though Dickey can vary his tired totems effectively, reporting the metamorphosis as fact when it suits him, as in “Reincarnation,” or using it boldly in “Gamecock” to stage a conceit. His style, too, is masterful, reaching with suitable ease to the brittle clarity of nightmare. And his bag of dream tricks contains all the turns of a neo-Freudian rhetoric: condensation, displacement, reversal, etc. Indeed, the more clinical these poems are, the more effective they seem to be. Witness the depth and power of Dickey's conception in “Them, Crying” where compulsion is his subject. In something less than eighty lines, he brings to life a truck-driver, “unmarried, unchildlike, / Half-bearded and foul-mouthed,” who is drawn irresistibly to the children's ward of a large hospital by the sound of children crying within him. Or witness the perfectly realized counterpoint of hallucination and reality in Dickey's presentation of a voyeur in “The Friend.”

                                        He has learned what a plant is like
When it moves near a human habitation          moving closer the
                              later it is
Unfurling its leaves near bedrooms          still keeping
                              its wilderness life
Twigs covering his body with only one way out          for his
                              eyes into inner light
Of a chosen window. …

The dreams of damaged minds seldom have been rendered better than this. But the real surprise is to find that Dickey can make of these clinical materials poems that are gracious and charming. Such qualities are not common in those whose work is the dream, be they poets or psychoanalysts, and they have been too rare in Dickey's earlier verse. But he broke through with “Cherrylog Road” in his last collection, Helmets, and he breaks through in this book with a poem such as “The Celebration.”

This last is as clinical a dream poem as one could wish for. Surely, no tenets are more basic to the art of psychoanalysis than these: We all carry within us a record, written in scars, of the inevitable frustrations met by our growing appetites. Of necessity, these frustrations are usually sexual and often involve our parents. Adjustment, maturity, wisdom, or whatever you choose to call the achievement of a sound life, depends in part upon our becoming aware of past pain and its effects in the present; and this past is recovered most easily through the symbols that we dream. Now, Dickey could have tailored “The Celebration” to these propositions. In it, the poet describes himself moving through symbols to a quite literal anamnesis of his parents as lovers and then back from this vision of the primal scene to a new sense of himself and his responsibilities in the present. What the poet learns, he feels along the body more than knows—“[I] stepped upon sparking shocks / Of recognition when I saw my feet … knowing them given”—, but he does try to state what he has recognized as clearly and as directly as he can. He talks of learning to understand

                              the whirling impulse
From which I had been born,
The great gift of shaken lights,
The being wholly lifted with another,
All this having all and nothing
To do with me.

The final lines of the poem are even more explicit in pointing the moral of all this seeing: the poet sees and becomes as a consequence “a kind of loving, / A mortal, a dutiful son.” It is hard to conceive of a poem more properly psychoanalytic in its recognitions and consequent moralizings.

The details which earn this recognition, making the “whirling impulse” known and truly told within the poem, also are heavy with the modern craft of dreams. In its first lines the poem looks like a phantasmagoria of lust:

All wheels; a man breathed fire,
Exhaling like a blowtorch down the road
And burnt the stripper's gown
Above her moving-barely feet.
A condemned train climbed from the earth
Up stilted nightlights zooming in a track.
I ambled along in that crowd. …

Most of us have met such carnal nightmares before, in the Commedia or in The Rape of the Lock, but this one is distinctly modern. More savage than Pope's, more narrowly psychological than Dante's, this fantasy is twin to the cases reported in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams or to George Grosz's drawings of Berlin. Reason can stumble through this queer pastiche but is sent spinning when we find that all this fantasy is simple fact. The blowtorch-man is a fire-eater in a side show, the stripper just that, the condemned train a roller-coaster, and the crowded scene, Lakewood Midway at carnival time. With some care Dickey has led us into his poem, forcing us to see both the literal and the figurative dimensions of its sense, refusing to let us simplify.

In the second stanza Dickey quickly re-asserts the figurativeness of the carnival setting. Just in case his realistic explanation of the hallucinatory first stanza may have been too surprising and too distracting, he makes another ride, the dodgem cars, explicitly figurative by using them as one term of a simile: “each in his vehicle half / In control, half-helplessly power-mad / As was in the traffic that brought him.” After this reminder, the poem need not be so explicit with its images; Dickey has prepared us for the symbols that he must use. In the literal scene, the poet is walking quietly and alone in the carnival crowd when he sees with surprise that his mother and father are there, “he leaning / On a dog-chewed cane, she wrapped to the nose / In the fur of exhausted weasels.” Age and sexuality are finely caught here as the phallic symbols of cane and wrap are modified by their worn, literal substance. More than anything else, it is precisely this shadow of sexual energy in his parents that surprises the poet. They are so old. What can they celebrate? “I believed them buried [that verb is no accident] miles back / In the country, in the faint sleep / Of the old, and had not thought to be / On this of all nights compelled / To follow where they led. …”

In the stanza which follows, similar details reinforce this effect of tired fact scarcely covering powerful fancy. His mother carries a teddy bear that is as insistently symbolic as weasel wrap and dog-chewed cane; she holds it as if it were a child, and it was won for her “on the waning whip” of his father's right arm. The “crippled Stetson” which his father wears may not be so suggestive, except in its bobbing movement, but even here one could cite a section of Freud's dream book headed simply “A Hat as a Symbol of a Man (or of Male Genitals).” The poem's central image, of the old couple riding on a ferris wheel, needs no such footnoting:

                              They laughed;
She clung to him; then suddenty
The Wheel of wheels was turning
The colored night around.
They climbed aboard. My God, they rose
Above me, stopped themselves, and swayed
Fifty feet up; he pointed
With his toothed cane, and took in
The whole Midway till they dropped,
Came down, went from me, came and went
Faster and faster, going up backward,
Cresting, out-topping, falling roundly.

“The Wheel of wheels” is a perfectly apt description of a ferris wheel, but here it is also an intensive and a symbol. The cane, too, has become ambiguous with a new-old strength, for “toothed” may still mean “dog-chewed” but it suggests “possessing teeth.” And all of the verbs that move these lines carry into them a phallic significance that nearly obliterates their letter. The whole passage is rich with a sense that scarcely requires glossing, even though it is this large image that elicits from the poet those attempts at direct statement our analysis began with.

But working our way up to these statements as the poem meant us to, we find that the lesson read is something more than a moral tag at its close. Recognition sparks within and without this poem, for “The Celebration” is peculiarly reflexive. Its images know themselves as they would be known, and the “whirling impulse” this poet sees, he teaches us to see, with all the fervent pragmatism of a revivalist. “Believers, I have seen / The wheel in the middle of the air. …” Though such language is borrowed from an old faith and testament, with some wit it calls a new generation of dreamers back to the constant task of prophecy: in omens find a responsible joy, and let it find you.

                              Believers, I have seen
The wheel in the middle of the air
Where old age rises and laughs,
And on Lakewood Midway became
In five strides a kind of loving,
A mortal, a dutiful son.

With this poem and others like it, Dickey seems to be saying to his contemporaries, “Look, I can do it too,” and also “Look, how narrow this thing that we have done.” “The Celebration” is a first-rate product of our time's craft of dreams, but it is also ours in ways that are not so admirable: in the passivity and in the privacy of its vision. Dreams happen to a person, and if you live in and for them, you wait and are paid for your waiting in coin of no man's realm. Clearly, a balanced art demands visions that one chooses as well as those that one is chosen by, and visions of more than one's self. Poetry, at least, should be dreams that one can trade in. Concern with the trap of solipsism, that Wordsworth and Sartre both know so well, and concern for a poetry that is performance as well as visitation run throughout Buckdancer's Choice. One finds it in certain implications of “The Celebration”'s moral close: in seeing others oblivious of me, I see myself and my responsibilities, my “duty.” One finds it in the way that this small book is crammed with the full reality of other persons: generations of family, friends, an old teacher with a bad heart, a truck driver drowning in tenderness, a voyeur, a slaveowner, enemies from an old war, and victims. One finds it in Dickey's appetite for

                              those things that, once
Established, cannot be changed by angels,
Devils, lightning, ice, or indifference:
Identities! Identities!

in a context where these “Identities” are both the mathematics that Mangham teaches and the man that he is as the poet's remembering “establishes” him. One finds it, conversely, in Dickey's reaction to “an angel's too-realized / Unbearable memoryless face.” One finds it, particularly, in his sense of memory as counter-weight to dream, public and willed, and in such poems as “Buckdancer's Choice.”

Intended or not, the use of this poem as title piece flaunts such a book as John Berryman's Seventy-Seven Dream Songs, for “Buckdancer's Choice” is a song, too, but not a dream song. It is an old song that minstrels once danced to, shuffling and flapping their arms like stunted wings, and the poem remembers it as it was performed. The poem begins by recalling the poet's mother, “dying of breathless angina” but finding breath and life of a sort in whistling to herself “the thousand variations” of this one song. It also remembers the poet as a boy who “crept close to the wall / Sock-footed, to hear the sounds alter, / Her tongue like a mockingbird's beak / Through stratum after stratum of a tone. …” Behind this spot of time lies another evoked by it: the house in which the boy listens is “barnlike, theatrelike,” he is “sock-footed,” and his mother's whistle calls up in him “a sight like a one-man band, / Freed black, with cymbals at heel, / An ex-slave who thrivingly danced / To the ring of his own clashing light. …” Together, these two moments of time past form a metaphor of sorts whose point is most immediately that time does pass. “For years, they have all been dying / Out, the classic buck-and-wing men / Of traveling minstrel shows; / With them also an old woman / Was dying of breathless angina. …”

But there are three faces to this metaphor—the minstrel's, the mother's, and the boy's—and only the first two are stained by death. The song speaks for each of them in different ways proclaiming

                              what choices there are
For the last dancers of their kind,
For ill women and for all slaves
Of death, and children enchanted at walls
With a brass-beating glow underfoot,
Not dancing but nearly risen
Through barnlike, theatrelike houses
On the wings of the buck and wing.

Choices and risen are the most difficult terms in this last and fullest statement of the metaphor. Clearly, they are meant to give the image its final shape by opposing the dying mother and the last dancer to the boy who does not die and, apparently, to the poet who remembers him with this poem. The alignment is clear, if not its sense. Why choices?

To choose is to be free, and the buckdancer is a freed slave who celebrates his freedom by dancing out “The thousand variations of one song,” thriving all the while in the choices of his dance. His dying art remembered frees the woman who is slave to the nearness of her death, for his song is both a literal artifact making it possible for her to partake of a joy her dying body denies her and a kind of emblematic definition of its own use. Joy is the one song, but she cannot simply identify with it; rather, she must achieve her own identity as a kind of thousand-and-first variation of it. Art's long memory has saved for her the fact of joy, but she must join with it, finding herself in her own performance of this joy as a dancer finds identity in the strict measure of his dance or as variations find themselves in a sounding theme.

The boy and the poet who remembers him complete the literal scene by making something nearly heroic out of the invalid's ultimate lyricism. In listening to his mother “warbling all day to herself,” the boy reverses the movement from minstrel show to muffled sickroom by transforming the house into a kind of theatre, while the poet remembering this three-personed song in his poem restores it entirely to the public domain so that we, too, may use it. Perhaps this is one justification for the poem's claim that the vanishing dancer and the dying woman are countered by a “risen” boy: the song she appropriates—and what could be more private than the “prone music” of an invalid's whistle—he takes back for himself and in time performs, that others may for the moment find themselves, and company, in “Buckdancer's Choice.”

But “risen” makes figurative sense as well as literal, as it must when it involves even such mimic wings as the buckdancer's elbows suggest. At first glance, “risen” looks like more of that southern evangelical baroque that is such an engaging quality of Dickey's imagination, but here I think the religious implications are more precise and more serious. “Risen” is but the end of something that has been building from the first lines of the poem. For example, why should his mother's whistle have split the air into just “nine levels”? Is the number meant to remind us of the nine muses, or of the nine heavens through which Dante rose as the blessed were manifest to him under the conditions of space and time? When this same fracted air, in terza senza rima, is offered as proving “some gift of tongues of the whistler,” the reference is more certainly religious and more illuminating.

Speaking in tongues is described several times in the New Testament. In Acts St. Peter defends the authenticity of the experience in terms which could suggest Dickey's poem: “your sons and daughters shall prophesy, / And your young men shall see visions, / And your old men shall dream dreams” (2:17). However, St. Paul's discussion of the gift of tongues seems more clearly relevant to a reading of Dickey's poem. In I Corinthians 14, he develops at some length the distinction between tongues and prophecy that St. Peter hints at with his young prophets and aged dreamers. According to St. Paul, the man with the gift of tongues speaks in mysteries to his God; his spirit prays, but his understanding is not fruitful unless his words are interpreted for him and for others. To the unbelievers, speaking in tongues will seem testimony only of madness in the speaker. (In this context, the address “Believers, I have seen …” at the close of “The Celebration” acquires further ironic bite.) Describing his mother's whistle as a gift of tongues, Dickey draws heavily upon St. Paul's conception and even language, for St. Paul calls this a “speaking into the air” and expands his claim with a series of musical metaphors. More important, Dickey's reference seems to involve St. Paul's valuation of the experience: speaking in tongues is a valid gift of the spirit, but the gift of prophecy is much greater. The prophet is a tuned pipe and harp, a certain trumpet; he speaks to all for the sake of all. He is a bearer of public visions. If the old woman has received the gift of tongues, her son hopes for the gift of tuned speech, for the gift of prophecy; and in time he receives it, as this poem testifies most powerfully.

No wonder, then, that Dickey chooses “Buckdancer's Choice” as the title piece for this collection: it is a perfect emblem of the art he would achieve. Modern poetry has been content too long with an invalid's private song. Dickey is reaching once more for the time that was and the time that is to be. He is reaching for prophecy.

Dickey's verbal skills were always considerable; they have grown more sure. In his earlier books the fluent movement of his verse was overwhelmed at times by a surge of anapests, and diction was marred by conventional insincerities. Those poems had a brother dying “ablaze with the meaning of typhoid” and fell too often into the cadence of “O grasses and fence wire of glory / That have been burned like a coral with depth. …” Now, such cadences are modulated by carefully indicated pauses within the line: “He has only to pass by a tree moodily walking head down …” and his familiar elegiac and meditative vocabulary includes new tones, like the impeccable gaucherie of “Homeowners unite. / All families lie together, though some are burned alive. / The other try to feel / For them. Some can, it is often said.” Still, these are not the clearest measure of Dickey's growth or of his achievement in this new book. Poems of real substance may be recognized by what they do to our commonplaces about poetry, not cancelling them out but making them more true than they were before. We have known for a long time that the modern poet seeks in “la plénitude du grand songe” for “memorable speech.” The virtue of Buckdancer's Choice is to insist that the deepest dreams belong to languages not to men and that the best poetry is speech remembering.