Word: dickeys
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WHICH BRINGS us to this latest book by James Dickey, Dickey, after spending years as a good but relatively unknown poet, wrote the best-selling novel Deliverance and was promptly inserted into the Machine. Once you are there, any drop mush that egests from your mental driftings is considered a literary event. And that is exactly what the journal part of this book is: drop mush. It is touching in a way, though, because what it mainly records is the mindless trivia imposed on the life of any American writer. Most of it consists in literary laundry lists (Should...
...Dickey's angle seems to be the desire to unload the frustrations of middle-age. This is understandable, particularly for a poet, since, as Eliot said, a poet at that point in life is faced with the choice of repeating old formulas or going through the agony of trying to break into new kinds of composition. Biographies of poets invariably contain a crisis or breakdown, or suicide at this stage of life. And indeed, Dickey relates how his is groping for a new kind of poetry that will be different from anything being written today. This problem is that...
While the journal can be safely skipped, the sixty pages of essays tacked on at the end are well worth reading. They all deal with modern post-Eliot and Pound poetry, what Dickey thinks is wrong with it, and where he thinks it should be going. Like everyone else, Dickey has the irrational longing for the unwritten and perhaps unwriteable poetry which would hold up a clear mirror to the way we live now. He does, however, offer some very rational suggestions on how this kind of poetry might be achieved. For one thing, he says, the poet must discard...
...most famous poet declaimed his verse to a packed house at Madison Square Garden's Felt Forum last week at the beginning of a U.S. tour. Eugene McCarthy read a poem against the war in Viet Nam. He was joined by more professional American poets, including James Dickey and Richard Wilbur. The Bijou Singers emitted a chorus of eerie wails, echoing such Yevtushenko lines as: "The stars in your flag, America, are bullet holes." The climax of the spectacle came, however, when Yevtushenko read Bombs for Balalaikas, composed overnight in protest against the bombing of Impresario Sol Hurok...
...lead with eight minutes to play. Although Kansas City scored a last-quarter touchdown to win 20-16, Pastorini left the field to a standing ovation from the Houston fans. Even so, his position is far from secure; he faces stiff competition from another Oiler rookie, Lynn Dickey, who at Kansas State broke every Big Eight career passing record and completed eight passes in Houston's opening loss to the Cleveland Browns...