James Dickey

Start Free Trial

James Dickey's Dear God of the Wildness of Poetry

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

In the following essay, Fraser records his impressions of Dickey's poetic voice and style.
SOURCE: Fraser, Russell. “James Dickey's Dear God of the Wildness of Poetry.” Southern Review 34, no. 1 (winter 1998): 112-24.

[In the following essay, Fraser records his impressions of Dickey's poetic voice and style.]

Dickey invokes this “Dear God of the wildness of poetry” in a poem of the '60s, “For the Last Wolverine.” He liked poems about animals, the wilder the better. Doomed to extinction, the wolverine gnaws its prey and looks straight at eternity, dimly aware of being the last of its kind. The poet doesn't mind if the reader thinks of him. Omnivorous and insatiable, he is like Thoreau devouring the woodchuck, all of it, hooves, hair, and hide.

When Dickey died at the beginning of 1997, he had dwindled, said his friend Lance Morrow, to a seventy-three-year-old ruin, “his flesh slack over the armature of bone, the lungs and liver a disaster.” Life magazine, introducing the pop icon thirty years before, didn't script an ending like this. The “bare-chested bard” it celebrated “looks, acts and often talks exactly like a professional football coach.” Standing six feet three inches and weighing 205 pounds, he has a paunch and huge biceps, incidentally a fresh literary voice. The biceps, etcetera, get into the voice in an elegy “For the Death of Lombardi,” the Green Bay Packers coach who thought winning was “the only thing.” In the poem he is dying of cancer, and his boys, Paul Hornung, Ray Nitschke, and Jerry Kramer, storied names, stand around him. “We're with you,” they say, having to believe there's such a thing as winning. “We're with you all the way / You're going forever, Vince.”

This sounds like the stuff of “the Sunday spirit-screen,” but the tricky thing is to hear what the lines are actually saying. They don't all speak for Dickey, a former football star at Clemson. The boy in the poem, sobbing into his jersey, is drawn by Norman Rockwell, whose art of half-truths misses life's bleakness, so stints on its glory. Dickey sees how the glory is contingent on loss. Not all of us win; on the contrary, everybody loses. Once golden like the poet—in his fantasy life a dead ringer for Hornung, the Packers' great running back—we subside into gray middle age. The poem's last lines tell us, when we look at them again, that we and the dying man are going the same way. Forever. But this isn't a poem that sets up expectations only to overthrow them, and the emotion it brims with is real.

Football gives Dickey his taking-off point for considering some home truths, incident to living. Life hangs by a hair, but the bruises it prints on us, “as from / Scrimmage with the varsity,” are man-creating and help us survive. “The Bee,” dedicated to the football coaches of Clemson, acts out this proposition and is meanwhile an ode to the game. Putting the old wingback through his paces again, knee action high as it was in his youth, fat man's body exploding through the five-hole over tackle, it bids him dig hard, for something must be saved. His son, stung by a bee that won't let go, is running in panic into the murderous traffic of the highway. Racing to save him, the poet hears his dead coaches, their voices still quick on the air. “Get the lead out,” they scream, and Dickey, leaving his feet at the last possible moment, brings his son down “where / He lives.” At the end of this marvelous poem, he salutes the dead instructor who taught him: “Coach Norton, I am your boy.”

But no modern poet is easier to poke fun at. More about football, “In the Pocket” is fun, except that the joke is on him. In the grasp of pursuers—“enemies,” he calls them—he reaches inside himself, as sports-writers say:

                                                                                                    hit move scramble
                    Before death and the ground
Come up          Leap stand kill die strike
                                                            Now.

That is what the writers mean when they liken football to life, and the only possible response is dismay. Dickey had genius, many poems attesting it, but critical talent wasn't his. He wrote too much, twenty volumes in thirty years, and the failures he left unchallenged drag his large output earthward.

He has a sappy, portentous side, and his young man's silliness doesn't go away. In prose reflections (Sorties) he should have kept to himself, he considers masturbation, “one of the most profound forms of self-communication.” The best “abdominal exercise” was fucking. His wrinkled skin prompts this observation: “You can look at your foot … and it is not the foot you ever had before.” Well, yes. In his late forties, he wondered how he would spend the rest of his life. A whirlwind, it was. “But is it the right whirlwind?” He goes on about sex, but “phantom women of the mind” got to him more than real ones. The confusion introduces a wistful Platonist, one who believes (according to Robert Frost) that “what we have here is an imperfect copy of what is in heaven. The woman you have is an imperfect copy of some woman in heaven or in someone else's bed.” That is Dickey's idea. For better or worse, his poetry is restless, always looking over the fence. I'll come to the better part of this later.

He offers a target as broad as a barn, and critics who don't like him have a field day. He wouldn't keep his head down. That made him highly vulnerable, said Monroe Spears, a sympathetic critic. But this was lucky, for without the vulnerability, good things in his poetry wouldn't happen. In his novel Deliverance, he is Lewis, he told himself, a great white hunter more talkative than Hemingway's. His ideal society is peopled by “survivors” who live in the woods, hunting, fishing, and strumming guitars. Surprising us, Dickey had the nerve to sneer at Robert Bly. But I vote Yes to the novel's big idea. Thinking of how it would be in the wild, the hero says: “You'd die early, and you'd suffer, and your children would suffer, but you'd be in touch.”

The nature lover owed a lot to art. Evaluating an artist friend (“somewhat derivative”), Dickey draws his own portrait, ecstatic as he bends to the work. Surely, some “original inscape” must be coming. But “[i]nstead, when it comes, it comes out looking like Graham Sutherland or Van Gogh.” The word “inscape” is a tipoff, and much of him comes out like Gerard Manley Hopkins—“hoe blade buckle bifocal,” and so on. Dickey's first-person pronoun harks back to Whitman's, and trying out the high rhetorical wire, he tilts toward Hart Crane: “O claspable / Symbol the unforeseen on home ground The thing that sustains us forever” (“Coming Back to America”). Dylan Thomas was one of his heroes, “the only predecessor.” These are dangerous masters.

Dickey isn't a discursive poet, his unit being the line, not the verse paragraph. Many lines are catenae, multicolored beads on a string. As in “The Shark's Parlor”:

crabs scuttling from under the floor …
An almighty fin in trouble          a moiling of secret forces          a false start
Of water          a round wave growing …

His apprehension of things is paratactic, circumscribing what he can do. A psychologist like him finds it hard to sustain interest, and his long poems gleam only sporadically “like the flashing of a shield,” a phrase from Wordsworth's Prelude. In between the gleams, the matter, as with Wordsworth, inclines to the turgid. Wordsworth's blank verse isn't part of Dickey's equipment, though, nor is Stevens's, in some great poems that harness the mind.

But his catenae are crystalline, at least enough of them to compel attention. In “The Escape” they fuse, creating a structure like the windowpanes in the poem, fitting the noon sun together:

An enormous glass-fronted hospital
Rises across the street, the traffic
Roars equally from all four sides,
And often, from a textile mill,
A teen-age girl wanders by,
Her head in a singing cloth
Still humming with bobbins and looms.

Structure remains a problem—following his metaphor, the sun reflecting off the glass is apt to blind the eye—and Dickey's poems aren't easy going. The difficulty they give isn't the kind that arises from complex meanings but from a built-in liability of oracular poetry. W. B. Yeats on Hopkins (in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse) seems on the point or near it: “His meaning is like some faint sound that strains the ear, comes out of words, passes to and fro between them, goes back into words, his manner a last development of poetical diction.” “Poetical diction” here means an arresting but florid vocabulary, language disoriented to quicken perception. Change the content, “never the form,” said a cynical English statesman—good advice, but Dickey ignores it. Like Hopkins and the other masters he emulates, he defeats expectation in diction and syntax, as in “Paestum”:

Snakes under the cloud live more
In their curves to move. Rain falls
With the instant, conclusive chill
Of a gnat flying into the eye.
Crows fall to the temple roof;
An American feels with his shoulders
Their new flightless weight be born …

The fracturing of normal usage irritates more than enlightens, and seems a modern affectation that will pass.

Dickey's self-conscious style approximates the condition of music, the big Romantic kind that aims to pin you to the wall. The other side of this is a paucity of nice discriminations. Declaimed poetry grows monotonous, and the bard is a windbag in long poems like “Reincarnation (II).” He hoped for language that “has a kind of unbridled frenzy about it,” becoming (as he acknowledged) inevitably more obscure. Like Mark Rothko, to whom he compared himself, Dickey loved colors, “just colors,” and wanted to build up “great shimmering walls of words.” It seems they went up at command or by magic, like the walls that obeyed Amphion's lyre. His best poems say he knew better, but his aesthetic is slippery, befitting the man who was drunk (if you believe him) for his last twenty-five years. This was boasting, but of a piece with his advice to his students at the University of South Carolina. Tune into the “celestial wireless,” he told them—the worst advice you can give to the young.

He wants so much, like a Thomas Wolfe in poetry, and the strain and cupidity tell. Everything is pristine and worth wonder. Compared to frivolous city fellers, he's awfully down to earth. In poetry, it's “the real, deep thing” that engages him, and he is “sure sick to death” of literary sophists. No misguided Platonist (the moralist now, not the lover of ideal women) put more stress on content, a great poem's “first prerequisite.” Of course he didn't cotton to John Berryman, all that intolerable playing (his italics). T. S. Eliot's subtleties went by him, and Eliot's having-us-on definition of poetry as “superior amusement” was like a red flag to Dickey's bull. To forfeit this side of poetry and/or Eliot's breezy view of it seems too bad, a loss for poetry in general, in particular Dickey's.

“Learned treatises” on poetry made his thumbs prick, as did learned poetry, Eliot's or Ezra Pound's. He said “intelligence always leads to overrefinement”; and against “palaver, and analysis,” he posed “large basic emotions.” I think we take his point while deploring its tendency. Our age of criticism has had its revenge on a poet who looked skeptically at academic critics pecking away at their laptops. Being a critic, I have a laptop, but have had to lean on a friend who knows how to “access” the library's outsize computer. Punching up the poet's name, my friend makes learned titles appear on the screen—in this case of Dickey, upwards of three hundred. Though he was vain enough, that would have appalled him.

Poetry struck him with the force of revelation, and he never got off the road to Damascus. Reading Theodore Roethke, “the greatest poet this country has yet produced,” Dickey realized with astonishment that he wasn't dead. Hyperbole is his element, but the second term at least is true, his poetry bearing it out. One way or another he wriggled free of mortality, getting beyond or outside himself. When he pronounces on life, his voice seems to know something he didn't.

In “May Day Sermon to the Women of Gilmer County, Georgia, by a Woman Preacher Leaving the Baptist Church,” Dickey brings us to the place where God speaks from the burning bush:

About nakedness: understand how butterflies, amazed, pass out
Of their natal silks          how the tight snake takes a great breath bursts
Through himself and leaves himself behind          how a man casts finally
Off everything that shields him from another          beholds his loins
Shine with his children forever          burn with the very juice
Of resurrection: such shining is how the spring creek comes
Forth from its sunken rocks          it is how the trout foams and turns on
Himself          heads upstream, breathing mist like water, for the cold
Mountain of his birth. …

Thanks to an enabling poet, down-and-outers, not out of pocket but evacuated in spirit, burst through the imprisoning bounds of the city into a bed of roses (“Bums, on Waking”). If we say that poetry is an act of generosity, Dickey's illustrates what this means.

He sought to re-create the world; and oxymoron, the conceit of the contraries, is a means to his end. “I want to work with extremely crazy, apparently unjustifiable juxtapositions,” he said, opening as great a division as possible between his comparative terms. Sometimes he fails to bridge them or is only showing off. When this happens, he is like Icarus falling into the sea, a failure but the splash makes you notice. Napalm and high-octane fuel pair with good bourbon and GI juice in “The Firebombing,” and the plane carries a monstrous burden “under the undeodorized arms” of its wings. I'd rate these pairings only so-so. In “Power and Light,” however, he straps crampons onto his shoes to climb the basement stairs, smiling when he says this—an improvement.

All poets are oxymoronic, and really good poets make ill-assorted things complicitous. Seeing them together, we find not strangeness but congruity we hadn't noticed before. Eugenio Montale, a modern master—Dickey does variations on him in his “Free-Flight Improvisations”—has an antipoetic sun like drippings on chimney tops, and iridescent words like the scales on a dying mullet. Many grudge this mordant phrasing, but Montale wills us to endorse it as right for the milieu he works in. Reshuffling old bones, Dickey is like that.

Except that comparing him to Montale needs a “Yes, but” reservation. Though Dickey plays with standard grammar and the way words reticulate, violating as he does this conventional notions of form, his poetry is old-fashioned, an honorable word, and in its attitudes toward life more pro than anti. It struts its stuff, frowned on by approved moderns—Eliot, his great antagonist, heading the list. Whatever the subject, it lights up “Like a bonfire seen through an eyelid” (“A Folk Singer of the Thirties”). The eyelid is the delimiting form.

A poem for a dying lady, “Angina” is highly formal—try counting the beats per line and estimating the kind of poetic foot your ear seems to hear. Emotion that might be mawkish wells up in this poem, but the controlling form makes it supportable. Thinking of love, the poet imagines taking a chairlift:

Up a staircase burning with dust
In the afternoon sun slanted also
Like stairs without steps
To a room where an old woman lies. …

From the pink radio comes “helplessly bad music,” paradoxically her only help; and death,

A chastened, respectful presence
Forced by years of excessive quiet
To be stiller than wallpaper roses,
Waits, twined in the roses, saying slowly
To itself, as sprier and sprier
Generations of disc jockeys chatter,
I must be still and not worry,
Not worry, not worry, to hold
My peace, my poor place, my own.

Macabre and tender, this ending is like Emily Dickinson a hundred years later, not least in its spareness of line.

Conceiving of poetry as “part of the Heraclitean flux,” Dickey rejected “marmoreal, closed forms.” Alexander Pope is no doubt marmoreal, and so are epigrammatists like Walter Savage Landor. But all form is closed, decisions having been taken, and this sounds suspiciously modern—worse yet, postmodern. Still, he jibbed at the role assigned him, “a kind of spokesman for spontaneity,” and said “nothing can exist without form.” Dickey's distinguishing thing—after you notice the sensibility, vigor, knack for invention, and so on—is that he is a formalist in an age of slapdash. His style is gerundival (moving, unfurling, keeping, covering, living, watching), and favors parallel constructions:

In some guise or other he is near them when they are weeping without sound
When the teen-age son has quit school          when the girl has broken up
With the basketball star          when the banker walks out on his wife.

(Both quotations are from “The Fiend,” a.k.a. The Poet.) Walt Whitman, famous for breaking the mold, is such another, both needing a centripetal pull.

Or the pull is away from the ego. Too much I is a problem in Dickey, and knowing that, he took measures. He didn't want to be the failed writer of The Zodiac who “can't get rid of himself enough / To write poetry.” He gets rid of himself by hitching on to public events (like the inaugural of the president, or of the governor of South Carolina), or by preferring narrative forms to lyric, where the danger of drenching the poem in the self is much greater. “The Eye-Beaters” tells a story, glossed in the margins à la “The Ancient Mariner”; and “Falling,” taking off from a clipping in the New York Times, reclaims territory that used to be fiction's. Doing what he can to slough the tyranny of self, Dickey imagines his way into a woman's life, or joins his voice to other voices, one that of a Chinese poet who died more than a millennium earlier. “The dead at their work-bench altars” tutor his ego, letting him know there's nothing new beneath the sun.

One of Dickey's permanent poems, “The Rain Guitar,” shows the opportunist, always a good role for a poet. Traveling England in the rain, he has his guitar with him, and it prompts the question: “With what I had, what could I do?” Winchester is the scene, but where is the cathedral? “Out of sight, but somewhere around,” like the War in the Pacific, North Georgia railroad tracks, British marching songs, and a buck dance. Harmonizing, they make a tune all its own, affecting, also comic, also “improved”—Dickey's word—by lumping discrete things together, then fishing for a common term.

He has a gift for comedy, seen to best advantage in “Daughter.” Powerful stuff comes our way in this poem—“Roll, real God. Roll through us”—and we might end up stranded in the land of rodomontade. But humor, toning things down, retrieves them. Its function is more than expedient, however—true of all the great comic turns, beginning with the drunken porter in Macbeth. Not chastely classical but deliberately impure, Dickey mixes tears and laughter, making a compound tougher than its unadulterated parts.

A poet in the modern idiom, he mostly frees himself of old constraints like rhyme and meter. But no good verse is free, an invidious word for poetry, and conventional forms are vestigial in Dickey, like the ghost of iambic pentameter in The Waste Land. He likes writing in stanzas, for example septets:

And now the green household is dark.
The half-moon completely is shining
On the earth-lighted tops of the trees.
To be dead, a house must be still.
The floor and the walls wave me slowly;
I am deep in them over my head.
The needles and pine cones about me …

(“In the Tree House at Night”)

This sounds to my ear like a sestina, structure being firmly linear and feeling intensely focused but at the same time dispersed. Each stanza—there are eight altogether—walls itself off from the others, and such unity as you get comes from the anapestic rhythm, Dickey's hallmark. After seven lines, his poem wants to break off, but the beat, impelling us forward, won't let it.

Dickey feels at home in short lines, and if his metric were old-style, it would often be trimeter. The short line suits and helps generate his uncomplicated male truths, simple but not simpleminded. Familiar protagonists keep turning up, as in a repertory theater: stonecutters, hunters, fishermen, soldiers, and aviators—men of action, not introspection. “Therapist, farewell,” he writes in “The Eye-Beaters”: “Give me my spear.” Don't call him “macho,” however, but a man who has his hands on the ropes. His competent heroes reflect him. “I have had my time,” he says in “Summer,” and we believe it.

“The Lifeguard,” stamped with the seal of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, is a tale of balked purpose and young life cut short; but an emphatic rhythm, both at ease and powerful, asserts continuities. Words recur, half a dozen of them, as in a sestina, and feminine endings heighten the disciplined run of the lines. At the end of each six-line stanza, exhaustion supervenes, the three-beat line reducing to two, and the poem seems to die on us. But then, a breath taken, it gets going again. This isn't dogged or defiant, like Samuel Beckett's “I can't go on, I'll go on,” only natural, the way spring follows winter.

Form is the hero in “Fence Wire,” from Helmets, the volume where Dickey comes into his own. “Arranging” the fenced-in acres of a farm, the humming sound of electric current defines the life of its animals too. It does this the way Stevens's jar on a hill in Tennessee takes dominion over the world that surrounds it. A war poem from the same volume, “Horses and Prisoners,” has a figure that suggests Dickey's special achievement, formal but incandescent. Growing flowers pound like hooves in the grassy infield where the horses used to be, and the dead men are enclosed by the poet's mind, “a fence on fire.”

Dickey's commitment to form isn't generally acknowledged. Howard Nemerov, in a 1963 review of Drowning with Others, sees “a willed mysticism”—damaging, if true. Nemerov's poet wills himself “to sink out of sight,” like the man who speaks in “The Driver,” eluding the shape (or form) that declares him. But this version of Dickey misses the mark. Form in his poetry is the condition of life, and the “fence,” always there, prevents it from leaking away.

Two poems worth revisiting clarify his conservatism, the kind that holds fast to dear life. In “The Driver,” he swims down to a submerged half-track and sits where the dead driver of the title sat before him. Wanting to cross over to the undiscovered country, he says, or tries to say: “I am become pure spirit.” But only the dead, who no longer hear life's high requiem, can say that. At last he swims back to the surface and, leaping for the sky just before darkness claims him, fills his lungs with the breath of life.

Opting for life, he opts for a purview of truth. Religious cranks and political ideologues are, like willfully mystic poets, avid of the whole truth. First, though, they have to kill their truth, impaling it like a specimen. No poet aspires more than Dickey, but he settles for our human condition, necessarily a privation. He does this again in “A Dog Sleeping on My Feet.” Taking his cue from the sleeping animal, he yearns to speak “The hypnotized language of beasts.” This may be worth doing but doesn't go with what we are, and at the end he breaks off, faltering and failing “Back into the human tongue.”

In the wolverine poem I began with, Dickey seems to exalt a “mindless” way of being, “beyond reason,” and it wouldn't be hard to fellow these quotations with others. But it isn't intellect he takes aim at. The butt of his wrath is the desiccated and goal-oriented man whose instinct is for decapitation. John Crowe Ransom puts it that way in his poem “Painted Head,” where the mind, floating free, leaves “the body bush” behind. Dickey's poems explore what happens when the mind is independent of the body. Finding out what happens, he quit his advertising job, sold his house, and headed for the territories.

“The Salt Marsh,” another keeper from the volume Nemerov looked at, locates Dickey amid stalks of sawgrass, swallowed up in a growing field that offers no promise of harvest. His body tingles like salt crystals, and the sun directly above him destroys all four points of the compass. But losing himself, he finds himself, and as the grass bends before the wind, he bends with it. “Supple” is the word for this, for the poetry too, not stately but quick with motion, often musical, and by its nature communicating repose.

Music isn't prized much in modern poetry, going all the way back to Pound's animadversions on the “swishiness and slushiness” of the post-Swinburnian line. Poets and their critics, canonizing anti-poetry, equate dissonance and truth, and the bulk of Montale will illustrate nicely. Music resonates in Dickey, though, setting him apart in his time. He knew what poetry ought to offer—not finding it in Charles Olson, dismissed for his lack of “personal rhythm,” or in William Carlos Williams's “tiresome and predictable prosiness,” and still less in Mark Strand, whose “deliberate eccentricity” seemed merely silly. Never mind if these judgments meet your agreement: all the words are chosen with malice aforethought. Thinking them over gets you closer to Dickey's intention.

The rhythm he heard had to be “characteristic of the writer.” Also it had to be syncopated, i.e., off the beat. His ear is cocked for the beat, however, absolutely the sine qua non. The critical thing was to move on the song without losing the music. In the Buckdancer poems, the key changes often, but not so often that it baffles the ear. Prosiness was tameness, when the poem stops swinging or its claws are blunted or drawn.

The “timid poem” needed wildness, Dickey said in “For the Last Wolverine.” But he wasn't a primitive, flinging about the bedclothes or burning down the house, and his lines for Richard Wilbur declare an un-Beat-like poet:

                    the great wild thing is not seeing
All the way in to the center,
But holding yourself at the edge,
Alive, where one can get a look.

“Holding yourself,” as if walking a tightrope: this poet is poised, like a bow-and-arrow man, like a musician, two roles Dickey excelled in. The other term to key on is “alive,” evidently equated with wildness. It doesn't mean abandon, though, but the abandoning of self that goes with complete involvement. The hero in Deliverance makes this meaning vivid.

But writing about writers, especially poets, one tends to straighten them out—a mistake. I mustn't discover too much order in Dickey, who had his crazy side, like Ancient Pistol when he sang of Africa and golden joys. The wildness he commends to us is partly itself, hair-raising when it gets into the music. Some examples:

                    on August week ends the cold of a personal ice age
Comes up through my bare feet.

(“Pursuit from Under”)

My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.

(“The Strength of Fields”)

Or this reminiscence of an old man in a terminal ward, lying back,

                                                                      his eyes filmed, unappeased,
As all of them, clucking, pillow-patting,
Come to help his best savagery blaze, doomed, dead-
game, demanding, unreasonably
Battling to the death for what is his.

(“Gamecock”)

This recognizable voice of Dickey's sounds in an early poem, “The Performance,” remembering Donald Armstrong, a fellow airman, beheaded by the Japanese. About to die, he rises, kingly, round-shouldered, then kneels

                                                                      down in himself
Beside his hacked, glittering grave, having done
All things in this life that he could.

That is the voice we want in poetry, suitable for life's occasions, the kind we must get through alone.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Dickey's ‘The Firebombing’

Next

Review of The Selected Poems

Loading...