Word: poet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Slams started in Chicago in the mid-1980s when Marc Smith, a former construction worker and a published poet, created them to revitalize poetry readings and reach new audiences. I first heard about them in 1991, when I reported on the growing phenomenon for TIME. Like many poets, I was suspicious of the concept. How could you judge poetry? Why would you want to? But when L.A.'s first team went to Portland, Ore., in 1996, I tagged along with some friends. While not everything I heard fit my definition of poetry, it was a Woodstock of words, images...
...taking art down to its essential flat patches of color, strong boundaries, tapestry-like abutments of form and a general emphasis on the decorative. Their prototypes came from Japanese prints and the influence of Paul Gauguin. And they had close ties to Symbolism. Their literary god was the poet Stephane Mallarme, who had conceived of poetry as a structure of words and absences: "To conjure up the negated object, with the help of allusive and always indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence." This was very close to the effect of Bonnard's still lifes and interiors...
...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...
...Deliverance thinking that the really complicated business here was not so much James Dickey's life (he died in early 1997 at the age of 73) as his son's effort--tender, scathing, forgiving--to sort it out. Christopher Dickey begins the book, "My father was a great poet, a famous novelist, a powerful intellect, and a son of a bitch I hated...
...Newsweek, writes with a fine complexity, acquired the hard way, by experience with a self-absorbed father, a mother who was herself alcoholic and a family drama that descended, from time to time, to the gothically dysfunctional. After Christopher's mother died of cancer at age 50, the widowed poet waited just two months before marrying a former student of his, almost 30 years his junior. In 1991 the local newspaper reported that she was caught injecting cocaine in an abandoned house with a stranger and given two year's probation for possession. The hunter-athlete-poet told...