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Winter 2016

The Clamor of James Dickey

Henry Hart College of William and Mary, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Hart, Henry, The Clamor of James Dickey (2016). SEWANEE REVIEW, 124(1). 10.1353/sew.2016.0026

This Other is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts and Sciences at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Articles by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CURRENT BOOKS IN REVIEW up there with my favorites—Emily the introductory material and notes), Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, and but there are numerous references to Elizabeth Bishop. In my book, that’s Dickey’s big ambition and personality. the top. In the foreword, Richard Howard calls The Complete Poems “a copious, —George Monteiro clamorous amassment” and remarks: “There is a sense (or folly) in which James Dickey grew too big for mere poetry; the energy and intensity of his powers spilled (surely the right word) THE CLAMOR OF into fiction, into criticism, as well as JAMES DICKEY into a curious form of prose com­ mentary packed into several volumes The Complete Poems of James Dickey of self-interviews.” edited by Ward Briggs Following Howard’s lead, Briggs (University of South Carolina Press, emphasizes Dickey’s determination 2013. 960 pages. $85) to spill—like a river over dams—into new territory. When the confessional After I published a biography of style of poetry practiced by Robert James Dickey in 2000, a photog­ Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, rapher from a Virginia magazine and Anne Sexton was in vogue, asked me to come up with the one Dickey went his own way toward word that best summed up James something “larger, more inclusive,” Dickeys career. He planned to and more mythical. “The main thing take a picture of me and the word the poet must remember,” he is for an article about my biography. quoted as saying, was “never to be At first I resisted. How could I or bound by facts.” In his drive toward anyone encapsulate Dickeys prolific, bigger, more stimulating, and more multifaceted career in one word? The universal forms, Dickey in the 1960s photographer, however, insisted, and lengthened his fines until they filled I complied, although I tried to find the page like “a shimmering wall of a word that would at least do some words.” The fame he enjoyed after justice to Dickeys expansive personal­ the success of his novel Deliverance ity and career, and that would also and after President Jimmy Carter suggest that he could not be reduced invited him to read a poem at an to a single word. In the end, I wrote inauguration ceremony in 1977 BIG on the blackboard, and the only increased Dickey’s desire to photographer took his picture. expand into new styles and new Reading over The Complete Poems genres. As Briggs notes, Dickey was of James Dickey, edited by his friend a “larger-than-life poet” who was Ward Briggs, University of South always determined to take on new Carolina professor of classics emeri­ challenges. tus, I was reminded of my uncom­ One of the premises of my biog­ fortable session with the magazine raphy was that Dickey’s large talent photographer. Briggs’s book is not and large personality deserved a large only big (close to 1,000 pages with biography. Briggs, who contributed

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substantially to my understanding quests for salvation. The glittering of Dickeys “outsized personality',” gifts Dickey sees around him in works from a similar premise in The “Christmas Shopping, 1947” are Complete Poems. He begins with parodies of the original gifts of Christ Dickeys first poems published in and the Magi, but for Dickey they the Gadfly (a Vanderbilt student “bear single witness to the bartered magazine) and the Sewanee Review birth, recall // the lip, the sponge, during the late 1940s. Hundreds of the God-swung temple-lash” and pages later, he ends with Dickey’s Christ’s “five wounds” on the cross. elegy for F. Scott Fitzgerald, “poems They remind Dickey of mythical of uncertain date,” and two childrens heroes who deliver spiritual gifts after poems. “Christmas Shopping, 1947,” suffering exemplary ordeals. the opening poem in the collection, As a war veteran fascinated by gives glimpses of Dickeys remarkable religion and mythology, Dickey craftsmanship as an undergraduate gravitated toward Christ as a symbol and of the obsessions that would of lost innocence and transfiguring define his career. In alliterative lines ordeals. Many of his poems over the that echo Gerard Manley Hopkins next five decades would attempt to and the Beowulf poet (“grave glitter redress the situation he addressed of guilt and gift”), Dickey announces in his first published poem. If “the his opposition to the horde of current of the five wounds [of Christ] shoppers who seem oblivious to the fails” to connect with the masses and God that the Christmas holiday is “the igneous cross no longer lights supposed to commemorate. He also the mesh / and marrow of the hugely announces the origin of his gift as living,” Dickey would try to open the a poet. Although Briggs argues that circuit between personal wounds, the early in Dickey’s career, “tribal ritual” wounds of others, and the wounds of led him “to seek the truths of the godlike heroes who deliver redemp­ world by means of communion with tion. In his elegy for Fitzgerald, the darker mysteries of nature,” many “Entering Scott’s Night,” he com­ of Dickey’s early poems communed munes with yet another wounded with wounded people and sacrificial artist-god capable of redemptive gods who reminded him of his own healing. Observing himself “in the wounds. Having survived thirty-eight looking glass” as an emaciated figure missions as a radar observer in the wracked by illness, Dickey asks: “Am 418th Night Fighter Squadron in I my other” in a “dark-glowing field the Pacific during World War II, of folk” among “the dead”? On the Dickey found in Christ and those verge of death, he imagines entering who resembled Him examples of the a dream-vision, like Piers Plowman in way wounds could be redemptive. William Langland’s alliterative poem, Edmund Wilsons essay “The Wound and mingling with other wounded and the Bow,” anthropological studies heroes at a Gatsby-like party. of fertility gods, as well as modernist Dickey based many of his memo­ accounts of mystery cults no doubt rable narratives on the three-stage taught Dickey something about how journey of the mythical hero (depar­ wounds could spur creativity and ture, initiation, return) as elucidated

Hi CURRENT ROOKS IN REVIEW by Arnold van Gennep and Joseph big for poetry,” Robbins declared: Campbell. Like modernists before “Poetry, even at its merest, is big him, he employed “the mythical enough for anything James Dickey method” to repair the broken circuit could have thrown at it. It’s rather between himself, his heroes, and that his own poetry grew too small his audience. The challenge for for its unruly grandiloquence” and Dickey’s priestly narrators and for too small for Dickey’s desire to give Dickey himself was to keep delivering “full-throated vent to an oracular the boon—the current of sublime, windiness.” uplifting energy—and to avoid the The poet and editor Peter Davison natural tendency to grow insulated may have set Dickey up for this sort from it with creature comforts. of attack when he wrote in a 1967 Although some critics believe that Atlantic Monthly article (quoted by Dickey moved from strength to both Briggs and Robbins) that Dickey strength throughout his fifty-year and his rival Robert Lowell were the career, the consensus is that his only two major poets of their genera­ numerous stylistic experiments during tion. Both Dickey and Lowell were the second half of his career failed hugely ambitious and, like the tragic to produce poems as consistently heroes that populated their writings, engaging as those written between both poets suffered reversals. Perhaps 1947 and 1970. prompted by Lowell’s restless Reactions to Briggs’s Complete cultivation of different styles, Dickey Poeins have illustrated the ongo­ also refused to settle into a fixed style. ing debate about Dickey’s career. Briggs quotes a statement Dickey Dickey’s admirers welcomed the made about one of his later volumes, capacious volume as evidence of Puella, that could stand as the motto the poet’s consistent level of accom­ for his ever-evolving career. “When plishment. Calling for “a reversion the exploratory sense dies out of it,” to sanity” after some of the cultic Dickey said about his writing, then celebrations of Dickey’s genius in the “the sense of adventure, the excite­ past, the poet Michael Robbins in a ment” dies, and writing in a particular review published in Poetry magazine style becomes “just a routine and praised Dickey’s Poems 1957-1967, that’s the last thing it should be. . . . but disparaged much of what fol­ You have got to be prepared to fail lowed. In fact Robbins’s opposition to or to take a chance, to gamble.” Dickey’s later poems inspired what he Although the poetry Dickey wrote admitted was a “rant” against the sort after Poems 1957-1967 (about half of volume Briggs has edited. Once of The Complete Poems) may be less again, size was the issue. Briggs’s successful than what he called—with collection, according to Robbins, unfair self-deprecation—his “poetry was not only big, it was “gigantic,” of the versified anecdote,” his “enormous,” and “overpriced.” He willingness to take risks and make it argued: "You should not be able to new during the last three decades stun a moose with anyone’s Complete of his life was courageous. Briggs Poems.” Disagreeing with Howard’s takes risks, too, in his effort to give us comment that “Dickey grew too Dickey’s complete poetic oeuvre and

W CURRENT ROOKS IN REVIEW to elucidate it with scholarly notes. usurp it. Take the second quatrain of Although some readers will complain “Here,” the first poem in the collec­ that Dickey left too much low-grade tion and a perfect Petrarchan sonnet: ore in his poetry (he liked to compare poetry-writing to refining ore into It is the same no matter where gold), many readers should treasure you go, the rich seam of gold running and downtown you will find no through The Complete Poems. big surprises. Each fall the dew point falls until —Henry Hart it rises. White snow, green buds, green lawn, red leaves, white snow.

The understated music of these MEHIGAN RETURNS rhymes is exquisite, despite the strict adherence to formal constraints. The Accepting the Disaster rhyme of “surprises” and “rises” is by Joshua Mehigan delightful, and the return to “white (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. snow” at the end of the last line is 81 pages. $23 pb) a stroke of genius. It is Mehigan’s fidelity to common speech patterns Joshua Mehigan is a deliberate poet. that allows him to speak in strict and “I’m the least prolific writer I know,” musical meter without his verses he once said in an article for Poetnj. sounding elevated. A line like “Each The ten-year gap between his first fall the dew point falls until it rises” is collection, The Optimist, and this entirely conversational, yet contains second collection, Accepting the a sublime music that is all the more Disaster, however, seems wholly justi­ potent for its subtlety. fied. The craftsmanship in each poem One of Mehigan’s greatest assets is exceptional, and it’s apparent how in this collection is his mastery of the much Mehigan has grown as a poet. single line. He is as deeply engaged While The Optimist can feel imitative with the music and logic of a line as as well as brilliant, Mehigan’s voice Frost or Larkin, and his interplay in Accepting the Disaster is sure and with line and sentence is always possesses a disarming restraint. purposeful. This is evident in the Mehigan’s use of form in Accept­ triolet, “The Crossroads,” which is ing the Disaster is, to say the least, entirely end-stopped with periods. extraordinary. His subtlety in rhyme and meter is unparalleled; though This is the place it happened. It he often writes with end-stopped was here. lines and exact, often monosyllabic, You might not know it was unless rhymes, his verse never sounds you knew. forced. Instead the forms Mehigan All day the cars blow past and employs—sonnets, triolets, ballads disappear. etc.—complement and enliven his This is the place it happened. It distinctly low-key register, rather than was here.

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