Word: dickey
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...Complicated" appears in a blurb on the jacket of Summer of Deliverance (Simon & Schuster; 288 pages; $24), Christopher Dickey's loving, ruthless portrait of his father, the poet-novelist James Dickey. In the blurb, the novelist Pat Conroy writes, "If there ever lived a more complicated father, husband, and writer than James Dickey, I have not heard...
...beliefs. Paxon points to his conservative voting record--but quietly casting a vote is different from taking the lead on an ideologically loaded issue. And in his first nine years in Congress, he was never the front man on any cause dear to conservative hearts. Even Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican and friend, jokes that Paxon is "a New York conservative--conservative lite...
...poetry is not much read today. Perhaps almost no one's is. Dickey was a celebrity once, in the 1960s, when poets (e.g., Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg) could still command a modest fame. In 1966 Dickey won the National Book Award for Buckdancer's Choice. Readers made a connection between Vietnam and his poem The Firebombing, which recorded an ex-pilot's agony as, 20 years after World War II, he meditated on the holocaust he had dropped upon Japan: "...when those on earth/ Die there is not even sound; one is cool and enthralled in the cockpit/ Turned blue...
...Dickey was never enrolled in the obedience school of political correctness. He came from an earlier time, and anyway, his profoundly masculine imagination had a luminous, incorruptible autonomy. You may pick up traces of Walt Whitman or Gerard Manley Hopkins or Hart Crane--or Theodore Roethke, who was one of Dickey's favorites. But Dickey was himself--a now and then wild American, good at putting his own myths in motion and intoxicated by the English language. English professors called him "Orphic" or "Delphic," a prophetic delver, with an eye for nature and, interestingly, for the sometimes violent meanings...
Over the Christmas holiday, Dickey told a friend, Ward Briggs, a classics professor at the University of South Carolina, "I had a dream last night. I was back in high school playing football. I scored three touchdowns, including the winning touchdown, and I ended up with the most beautiful girl in the school. I said to her, 'This is the most wonderful day of my life. Too bad it's only a dream.' And she said, 'Yes, but in the dream it's real.'" One night, near the end, Briggs whispered in Dickey's ear, "In the dream...