ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 10, 1997 TAG: 9702100098
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: R.T. SMITH
ONE EARLY spring evening in 1971, I walked toward the exit of a packed auditorium in which James Dickey had just finished reading his poetry. I had not written anything that would qualify as a poem and didn't know anyone else who had, but I remember thinking, "If I never do another thing, I want to make a poem." I applied to graduate school the next week, resigned my job within a month and never looked back.
Last month, on Poe's birthday, when I heard that Dickey had died, I was reminded of Randall Jarrell saying when Freud passed away that he felt as if a continent had disappeared. Considering the circumstances, my exaggerated response may be understandable. In 1971, I was a high school teacher and basketball coach dabbling in community theater and looking for some direction. I had little interest in modern poetry and almost no knowledge of any Southern writers after Faulkner, but I had read and liked "Deliverance," and someone had convinced me to drive over to Queens College in Charlotte and listen to Dickey for the sheer novelty of it.
It may be difficult for anyone who remembers Dickey's swaggering on "The Tonight Show," his Playboy interview or his preening at the Carter Inaugural Gala to believe that he was the real thing. But on that night when I heard him read poems about war, the world of animals, the fragility of children and the dreamlike quality of life in the rural South, I heard modern English going off like firecrackers in a way I thought only Shakespeare could.
When "Buckdancer's Choice" received the National Book Award in 1966, it had been no fluke. The Judges' Citation read, "For the clarity, subtlety and passion with which he has used the imagination and the craft of the poet to explore a diverse vision of contemporary experience and to extend the resources of poetry." Shivering with ambiguities concerning gender, race, violence and loss, poems from that volume, including "Pursuit From Under," "The Shark's Parlor" and the title poem, continue to astound readers today. My favorite from that collection is still "The Celebration," which begins by describing Atlanta's Lakewood carnival at night:
All wheels; a man breathed fire,
Exhaling like a blowtorch down the road
And burnt the stripper's gown
Above her barely moving feet.
A condemned train climbed from the earth
Up stilted nightlights zooming in a track.
I believe any reader can see that scene, can feel its tremor. Exaggerated, maybe even delirious, these few lines highlight the world's witty juxtapositions to render a familiar American experience as timeless and mythic and vivid. I can never see anything even resembling a midway without these lines rushing into my mind.
Of course, such a spell was dangerous to a beginning poet, and I wrote imitation-Dickey poems for years. In fact, a decade later a reviewer in The Hollins Critic praised my collection "Rural Route" by saying I might be the next James Dickey. I wanted that to be somehow true even as I winced at the thought of being anybody's rerun. I shot arrows and canoed the Chatooga River and drank my bourbon neat. I wore his mask.
But in the intervening decade I also met the man and saw him indulge in the most outlandish antics imaginable. I examined the coffeetable books like "Jericho: The South Beheld and God's Images" with a mixture of scorn and envy. I saw him drunk and inauthentic and boastful, but the poems wouldn't go away, and every attitude I had touching him and his work became mixed.
I wanted Dickey's sense of surprise and the feel of common ritual in my stanzas. I even wrote a poem to the older writer about his eyes being threatened when he opened them during the making of a life-mask. My poem was a plea for him to get back to the serious business of disputing with his own demons, but it was chock-full of Dickey's own habits lowered to the level of lampoon. I began with, "Yes, we can still see, for beauty is not blinding," and ended with a plea for a little deliverance.
Dickey hated it, and now I can hardly blame him, but what I discovered while making that poem was that Dickey, whom Laurence Lieberman had called a "spiritual conductor" for our age, was more akin to an Old World "sin eater." Taking on the fool's role, he explored extreme positions with an unfashionable romanticism. He inhabited the worst of American competitiveness and brass in the search for light. He absorbed the damaging facets of our uniqueness until they possessed him, yet there's always a sense of hope in his poems, a joy in the power of the imagination, that the adoption of such guises might make it possible to transcend them.
He could be the most extreme version of an insensitive, self-parodying Southern male, but he could also wear the mantle of the penitent and seer. One of his most far-fetched poems, about a bowhunter who strips naked to run like a deer, is called "Approaching Prayer," and I'm certain Dickey did more than approach the intensity and authenticity of devotion when he worked on poems.
Perhaps the greatest reason for lovers of words to remember Dickey, who had been poetry consultant to the Library of Congress and Carolina Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and even for a time served as advisory editor of Shenandoah, is for the way he remapped the Southern literary landscape. A suburban boy whose family still held close links to the rural life, Dickey loved the out-of-doors with a convert's fury. He was fascinated with the interaction between the Old South, which was rapidly fading, and the New South, wrapped in its layers of homogenizing merchandise and attitudes.
Dickey agreed with Kafka, as he reiterated in "Metaphor as Pure Adventure," that all writing is a form of prayer, and he knew all the tricks of the rural evangelists and the European anchorites. He knew his Bible and his history and many of the technical intricacies of all sorts of trades, from guitar picking to celestial navigation. He could write with audacity and delicacy at once. And he was always ravenous for the transcendent experience, as when one character working with a mine detector hears birds calling in "Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek":
"Nimblewill":
Three tones; your being changes.
Did Dickey fake it some of the time? Probably. But when he dispatched his imagination to places, even feelings, he couldn't find in his own nature, he sent that imagination there completely, with spurs flashing and sabers drawn. His sense of the dramatic was wild; a whirlwind might not be breeze enough to satisfy him. His taste leaned toward the Gothic and the potentially ridiculous, and his early thrift and measure exploded in late career to a careening, adrenaline-fueled voice that approached rant in its febrile quest for litany. Yet he was more drunk on language than anything you can buy in a bottle, intoxicated on a dark version of the self that most of us can't help but recognize.
If he was nearly finished as a poet when his monumental - and I don't use that word lightly - "Poems 1957-1967" appeared, he refused to give up the hunt. Politically incorrect, arrogant, self-aggrandizing and bedazzled by his own considerable wit, the Georgia-born poet was always good copy. He might be dressed in a Mexican vest or a shirt given to him by Burt Reynolds. He might be sporting a Martin guitar and comparing his picking to Doc Watson's or explaining the cut and furl of his new Stetson, but Dickey was always interestingly got up. He really did own a denim jacket with an eagle on the back over a scroll that read POETRY. He may have told his secretary at an advertising firm that the poem she was typing was going to sell God.
Poets as diverse as Dave Smith, Betty Adcock, Rodney Jones, Richard Dillard and Fred Chappell learned abundantly from the work of Dickey, and we recognize the dialogue with him in their most original phrases. Even, when I'm writing poems filled with the Irish landscape and language, I know that the nervy, fence-wire tension I strive for in the sentences and the best glitter of syllables within a line are lessons I picked up from Dickey.
Recognition may be the main point here. When Rilke saw the archaic head of Apollo in a museum, it said to him, "You must change your life." Things were always saying that to Dickey, and when I walked up the incline of that carpeted auditorium and out into the night, I heard a voice saying the same thing.
Now, when I think about him and his work, his charisma on the page and his relentless intensity, the poem that most often comes back is "Pursuit From Under." In it a middle-class householder remembers reading of the rigors and risks of polar exploration when he was a boy. He remembers thinking of a killer whale that moved under the ice to menace those who walked across it. While his own snowfield was only a blue meadow, he felt the presence of his ancestors closing in on him like that whale, perilous but invigorating. The poem ends with a vision of the boy and man embracing the vast coldness of the world and the sanctuary of the imagination:
The cows low oddly here
As I pass, a small bidden shape
Going with me, trembling like foxfire
Under my heels and their hooves.
I shall write this by kerosene,
Pitch a tent in the pasture, and starve.
That urge to energetic extremity and willingness to embrace the dangerous and unlikely is Dickey's gift to me, and he taught me to think with images and work my way "close to the music of what happens," as Seamus Heaney puts it. To close his poem "For the Last Wolverine," Dickey chose a line that might express the kind of deliverance he was obsessed with: "Lord, Let me die, but not die/ Out." I hope his wish will be granted. I believe it will.
R.T. Smith is editor of Shenandoah, a literary journal published by Washington and Lee University. His books include "Faith," a collection of short stories, and "Trespasser," a volume of poems.
LENGTH: Long : 164 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. James Dickey in 1990, when he was teaching poetry atby CNBthe University of South Carolina in Columbia.