Smith, Randy. “James Dickey Interview” |

“James Dickey Interview: Part One – August 11, 1995,” and “James Dickey Interview: Part Two – November 7, 1995,” are reprinted from James Dickey Newsletter XXI (I) FALL 2004. The following information for the author is given in Contributors’ Notes in that issue:

Randall A. Smith is associate professor of English at Belhaven College, Jackson, Mississippi. He also serves as the director of the creative writing program there. In 2000 he graduated from the University of South Carolina with a Ph.D. in American Literature/Composition and Rhetoric. His dissertation was on James Dickey’s philosophy of language as revealed in his nonfiction prose.

Randy Smith is presently Professor of English and Creative Writing Department Chair at Belhaven University in Jackson, MS. He has published poetry in Sandhills, The Best of Sandhills, Yemassee, Rock and Sling, and Ruminate. His scholarly work has appeared in James Dickey Newsletter, The Creative Spirit, and The Way We Read James Dickey(University of South Carolina Press). He is currently working on a book of poetry, a textbook of peer editing exercises for creative writing classes, and a collection of essays about the intersection of Christian faith/theology and creativity/composition. You can find out more about Randy Smith’s current work, read his writing, and view a video of his teaching through the following link: http://www.belhaven.edu/academics/Creative_writing/default.htm

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Dickey Interview: Part One

August 11, 1995

S: My name is Randy Smith; I am here with James Dickey at his home on Lake Katherine in Columbia, South Carolina. It’s August 11, 1995. First of all, I’d like to thank you for letting me come out here and talk with you.

D: It’s always good to see you. You were a wonderful student for me, and I’m happy to connect up with you and help out any way that I can.

S: To start off, as you probably know, the English Department at the University of South Carolina will be asking about 2,000 first-year students enrolled in English 101 to read Deliverance this fall. What are your reactions to this and to the continuing popularity of the novel, now, twenty-five years after its original publication?

D: Well, any author would be very gratified at having what amounts to a classic work—a novel, a poem, a play, or whatever it might be—in the literary field. I’m most pleased. I think the popularity as you call it is due to a couple of factors. One of them is the fact that Deliverance is a very good adventure story, a page-turner. On that level, it’s good, and it also gives you plenty to think about on other levels, that maybe some of the readers of it are not aware of, including the philosophical and even the anthropological, because the whole thing is quite consciously modeled on Van Gennep’s Les Rites de Passage, the journey of the hero, the three-step journey of the hero: the withdrawal from life and the penetration to a source of power, which is the river, and the life-enhancing return, and it follows through with that. Withdrawal from life is going from the main characters’ ordinary lives to the river, and the source of power is what the narrator finds out about himself and about existence in general, and the life-enhancing return occurs when he returns to his old life and has a new perspective on things which enables him to operate in a different and better way than he had previously been able to do because his character, his being, has been changed by the penetration to the source of power, the river, and what happens on the river. But, see, there are a lot of people who would not be aware of this. Some people picked up on it immediately. But that was very much part of it, both consciously and unconsciously, on my part.

S: Is there any word of advice you could give to these freshmen readers as they embark on their journey down the Cahulawassee?

D: I would say to read my work like they would read anybody else’s work. They need to read with their receptivity at full stretch and with that sort of mixture of assent to the work and skepticism about it which are really two sides of the same coin. But the participation in it, in the events of the novel and the people in the novel, is the main thing that I would like to see the reader do—get in there with them and go through what they went through.

S: I know that that sense of participation always seems to be important on the reader’s part. You have to participate.

D: Well, you don’t have to, but it certainly is a lot better if you do. Some people are really not capable of very much of it. But everybody’s capable of some of it. That’s the way I feel.

S: I want to stay with the subject of readers for a little bit here. What do you imagine is the ideal reader for your writing in general and for your poetry in particular? In other words, whom do you imagine, or do you imagine, an audience for your writing as you write?

D: No, I don’t. I write to please myself, hoping that my standards will produce a work that other people will be able to connect with in their own way. That’s really the judgment I would have on that, the standard I would have. The good thing about a work of art is that it has something personal for anyone who encounters it. The focus on language, in poetry, is the supreme focus; it is because of what is conveyed by language that the poem has its existence. I would like to be read by people who are word-sensitive to the extent that a word is almost like a thing—such that it has almost a physical quality to it and is capable of putting out rings like the water does when you throw a rock into it, it expands—someone whose mind will be able not only to take that kind of expansion of consciousness but will encourage it, will look for it, and be glad to find it wherever it may be found. There are a lot of people who find it in different places. I think the individual’s reaction—say the reader’s reaction in the case of literature; or the viewer’s reaction in case of the classic arts, painting and sculpture and murals; or the audible part of it in the case of someone listening to music—the reader’s sensorium, his sensibility is fundamental to the art experience. It’s fundamental. You don’t think what the writer thought. You don’t reproduce his experience because you can’t, because you are not him. You have an experience of your own by means say of what the poet has said or the painter has put on the canvas. You have your experience of it. And a lot of irrelevancies can come into it, and they all should be welcome. If something in a painting reminds you of something that you have seen, that’s part of your contribution to the painting that nobody but you could make. That’s all very valuable. I don’t believe in the reader or the viewer or the audi-

tor being passive and just opening his mouth like a squab so that the mother can put food into the little bird’s mouth and all the squab has to do is swallow it. The bird has got to go after it. To change the metaphor back, the reader has got to be active even to a sense of participating in his nervous system, and even in his musculature, to what he’s reading or viewing.

S: A very physical participation in the whole process.

D: Sure, that’s very important to me. Most of my work is very physical rather than cerebral. Somebody like Wallace Stevens is all mind. He’s got a far finer mind than I have, but his work is scaled to that area, the philosophical part of the human consciousness, and, in my work, the philosophy is sort of incidental. For Wallace Stevens, it’s everything. But my work is much more physical, and whatever philosophy might be derived from it comes from that. That’s the matrix for me.

S: I know you have mentioned before some of the effects that you would like to have on readers, and you often talk about that in very physical terms. For example, in Sorties at one point you say that you would like to “devour” your reader. What do you mean by this, and what effect overall do you hope to have on readers?

D: Well, I don’t know exactly what I meant by that. But, I mean to encompass the reader and surround him and bring him into the world that I try to create, into the maw of the monster, the work of art, not have him stand off and contemplate it at an Olympian distance. I like him in there. Jackson Pollock said, “I fumble around a lot in my painting, but I know that I’m really going well when I feel like I’m in the painting physically,” and that’s the way I want my viewers to be too. I want them to be in the painting.

S: So, there are really two entries that must happen. The writer must enter the experience first, then the reader must enter as well.

D: Sure. The writer makes—I say the poet in this case—makes available the reader’s own life in a different way. He energizes or galvanizes a part of the reader which the reader maybe didn’t know he had. In other words, it’s an adding to and a deepening process for the reader. I have a new book coming out, my early notebooks, which will be out this spring. I was reading through some of these. I made them back in the last part of college, and when I was recalled into the Air Force, and when I was teaching freshman English at an engineering college, and various times like that. I took notes, and somebody else has collected them all, and we’re going to put this book out about the formative years, when I did take a lot of notes and thought a lot about what I was doing and tried to improve my standards and my perspective and make it sharper and more meaningful, at least to me.

I read through the whole manuscript and thought, “you are a different person when you are younger.” I think, “Gee!”—speaking of myself as I appear in the manuscript—I think, “Gee! What could this guy mean by this?” I don’t know what I meant. Then, I say, “What does he mean? But, isn’t that interesting.” It might be interesting to me now in a different way than it was then, because the reader, too, changes. It’s not a static thing. Participation—and I never use the word “appreciation”—that’s a black-listed word for me, because it implies some sort of grudging tolerance, or toleration, of the work. That’s negative essentially. I want it to be the supreme plus, the supreme positive, to have a positive charge out of it, if I could put one there.

S: So the writer does in a sense over his or her lifetime continue to create and cast off selves.

D: Yes. Goethe, I think it was, said, “I cast off myself like a snake casts off his skin and a new creature comes forward.”

S: Are there other things that you discovered about that former self in looking back at your early work?

D: Well, yeah. I think it’s of great interest. I don’t know how much interest other people might turn out to have in it, but it certainly is interesting to me. I had no idea I went through all those changes. I had no idea I had read a lot of people that I mention in here. I was a wildly eclectic reader. I read a lot in science, especially anthropology and other sciences, what I could master of physics and especially subatomic physics—I couldn’t follow the math very well, in some cases, not at all. But I read the general outlines of the mathematical philosophers like Dirac and Heisenberg, and others of those high mathematical physicists or physics-going mathematicians, and so on, essentially philosophers. Einstein, himself, thought that he would be more honored to have been known as a philosopher than as a physicist or a mathematician. And he certainly was one. That field of mathematical philosophy has a long and honorable heritage going all the way back to the pre-Socratics and the Egyptians, who were partly thinkers in the philosophical sense and partly scientists—somebody like Pythagoras whose famous Pythagorean theorem we all know from high school geometry. Do you remember what it is? It has to do with the right triangle.

S: I know it’s about the sides and the squares of the sides.

D: That’s right. The relation of the sides to the hypotenuse. It’s the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides. Now, how was an ancient Greek, who had no measuring devices except for drawing lines on sand with a stick, able to figure that out? If I were looking at a right triangle, if

I were sort of an incipient or amateur geometer, I would try to make some sort of formulation about the relation of the size to the hypotenuse. I could get that far. But to have the solution lie in the squares, in squaring everything and adding the two sides whose squares added would equal the square of the hypotenuse? The idea of the square would never have occurred to me. It wouldn’t today if Pythagoras hadn’t shown it to me 2500 or 3000 years ago, whenever he was around. They were very interesting people. They were part scientists, part mathematicians, part thinkers, part mystics, part musicians. Pythagoras invented the musical scale that’s responsible for that piano, there. [Dickey points to the piano in his living room.] All western music comes from him—the half-tone scale.

S: I didn’t know that.

D: Yeah. But he thought that music was related to the movement of the planets and other heavenly bodies. That’s where you get the phrase, “the music of the spheres.” He was a very strange and very fascinating thinker. I like the pre-Socratics because they were the last men in history who felt that they could reduce all of the universe, the animate and the inanimate, to one element. Thales thought it was water, Anaximenes thought it was air or breath, and Heraclitus thought it was fire. It’s strange, very odd, how close some of that stuff comes to what they think today. Heraclitus saw or formulated an idea that matter and energy are forms of each other, and it’s exactly what Einstein had in mind when he came up with the E=MC² equation that made possible the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb didn’t start with Einstein but with Heraclitus and the pre-Socratic philosophers. This is fascinating stuff to me. That’s what these early notebooks are about, reading these things and speculating about them. The book itself has to do with the early days of my writing efforts. The book is called Striking In. I hope some unfriendly reviewer doesn’t call it Striking Out! But, I have to take that chance. I’ll get you a copy when it comes out, if you’d like to see it, if you’d like to see some of this stuff I’m talking about.

S: I would like that very much. Let me ask you one more question about readers. In your first collection of critical essays, The Suspect in Poetry, you define “the suspect” as that which is “unbelievable,” “artificial,” or “contrived.” How is it that writers convince readers to accept the fictional worlds that they create in poetry? In other words, how do writers make readers believe?

D: Well, I don’t know. I think there is something very deep-seated about that. The reader will react to poetry—we’re just using that as an example because that’s the most concentrated form in terms of the ability to say a great deal in a small compass—people will react to poetry because of two things, and some-

times these things in combination. They like the language itself that the poet is using. They may or may not know exactly what the poet means denotatively or rationally, reasonably, but they like the sounds of the words and the associations of the words. The other kind of reader—as I say, these are not separate from each other either—likes it because of the insight into experience that he can apply to his own experience. I got this idea from an American poet, Winfield Townley Scott, and it’s quite a good formulation. An example from an insight poet would be—now, these are not mutually exclusive; the best poets have both of these in various proportions; I touch on this in that essay of mine called “The G.I. Can of Beets, The Fox in the Wave, and The Hammers Over Open Ground”—Edwin Arlington Robinson’s line: “and he was all alone there when he died.” This points to a situation which you are to take as actual, an actual situation in the world that involves a character, a human being, who is in a certain condition, and so on. That’s the reality-oriented type poet. Readers respond because of the awakening of the sense of reality and the use of that orientation to write the poem, and also to read the poem. The other one is the language magician, somebody like Mallarmé or Rimbaud or some of Wallace Stevens or Hart Crane or Dylan Thomas, all language, heavily on the side of language. Hart Crane and Mallarmé are almost entirely language-oriented rather than experience-oriented. Mallarmé characterizes the sunset by saying of it, “victorieusement fuit le suicide beau”—“victoriously fled the beautiful suicide”—which is a fascinating idea, but if somebody hadn’t told you that it had to do with the sunset, you wouldn’t know what it was about. You would think it had to do with a person rather than a phenomenon of nature: “Victoriously fled the beautiful suicide.” But it’s a fascinating idea, and the language, either in French or in English, is engrossing. Or Hart Crane’s line, “the seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.” Now, seals have to do with water and the ocean, and spindrift is that foam that blows along the beaches. But you can’t, by any stretch of the imagination, think that the seal’s gaze, which is reminiscent of spindrift in some way, is looking towards heaven or paradise. Literally, that doesn’t make any sense because you know it isn’t so. “He was all alone there when he died” you know is so, or could be so. But, “the seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise” is not so, literally. But it’s a beautiful linguistic formulation and fascinating for that reason. And, also, the imagery is beautiful in itself, not so much as it relates to the real world, but just in itself it’s beautiful. There are many examples that you could come up with on both sides, and some of them are sort of a combination of both. Shakespeare is full of things that you could take either way or both ways at the same time. I changed my style radically in mid-stream because I thought that I had been too much situation-oriented. I was getting tired of writing poems of the versified anecdote,

and I felt I should give more force or more play to the language side, like Hart Crane, or Mallarmé, or Paul Valéry, or somebody like that, or some of the surrealist poets—who are wonderful, but you would never take anything they said literally because it’s not supposed to be taken literally—“the sun is a bag of nails,” which is wonderful. It isn’t a bag of nails. The poet doesn’t say the sun is like a bag of nails; he says “the sun is a bag of nails.” Or, “an arrow with lips of cheese.”

S: I guess they can get a little outlandish.

D: Yes, but you like that. You know that’s what it’s setting out to do, and, as I say, you participate. You go along with it. You know what the guy is trying to do, if you can figure it out—you don’t even have to figure out what he’s trying to do. You are interested in what it does to you. “The sun is a bag of nails,” and “the lovers float down from the cliff like rain.” That’s wonderful stuff, wonderfully imaginative. Any touch of the true imagination, no matter how outlandish it is, partakes of poetry. Lorca said—what would it be in English?—“Adam impregnates a dazzle of fish.” You know that nothing like that happened or could happen, and, yet, it is fascinating in its own right. “Adam impregnates a dazzle of fish.” You’ve got this image of this guy having some sort of sexual connection with a school of fish in sunlight, and the sun glittering on them, and what he impregnates them with, or what the progeny would be like, is anybody’s guess.

S: This whole discussion about the two modes of language used in poetry leads to something else that I’d like to ask you about. I know you’ve said before that “language is magical and poetry is the magic within the magic.” What is possible through language?

D: Anything! Anything! You could make quite a good parallel between the creation of the material universe—including all the unseen hidden forces like electricity, for example, or gravity, everything that the material universe contains—between the creation of it by God, and the poet, the human poet, performing a sort of secondary version of that—because you don’t create the tree or the forest, you take a real forest or a tree, and you do something of your own with it. So, poetry is not like music, which is self-sufficient, because poetry uses language and language refers to things—things, events, people, and so on. Poetry is secondary because the given is what exists outside the poem or prior to the poem and the poet takes the given and makes something of his own out of it. “Victorieusement fuit le suicide beau”—that’s not God’s sunset, not the real sunset, and it’s not better than God’s sunset, but it’s different from it.

S: So, the poet takes those elements and raw materials out of the natural world and reshapes them and makes something new.

D: Yes, that’s right, exactly. In other words, the poet secretly thinks that he could show God a few things that God forgot about or didn’t pay enough attention to.

S: I have a question very much related to this discussion about the relationship between the poet, the word, and the real world, the natural world, the physical world. In Babel to Byzantium, you say the poet battles against “universal dissolution,” the loss of memories, experiences, and the self. In addition, you also say that you’ve always striven “to incarnate [your] best moments.”

D: Yeah, that’s right.

S: Is there some sense in which the poet tries to become the “word” itself?

D: Yeah, I think so. That’s the only immortality he’s going to have, and he’ll be lucky to get that. John Cornford—the young English poet who was killed in the Spanish War fighting against the fascists, killed at the age of twenty-one—was a rather derivative poet, but very fiery, and the only line of his that I can remember was “remember all the good you can.” I would say that to my children if I was on my death bed, which I very nearly was, but I didn’t get a chance to say that to them. Your best moments—some of them might not have been good or positive all that much, but they are the most memorable.

S: It’s almost like some kind of reverse incarnation—physical life becoming the word instead of the word becoming physical life.

D: Yeah, it might work both ways. That’s something that I really can’t decide. “In the beginning was the word”—there’s no doubt of that. You could construe that as meaning that God uttered the whole universe as the poet utters one word, the word. I had something like that in the latter part of one of my last books, where you do have this God-type sort of feeling when you get something that is good, you think is good, or you know is good, and could have been said only by you: “that just this moment found the word ‘golden.’”

S: Is there some sense in which any writer, any poet’s, work is a search for the word?

D: Sure, I think that in a sense it is. It’s like Bix Beiderbecke, the great jazz trumpet player in the late twenties, who was always trying to reach a note on the trumpet that was not possible to reach—that doesn’t mean extremely high, either, “F” over high “C” or something like that. It means just something, a sound that the horn won’t make. That’s what he was after. Or, like Arthur Sullivan’s famous piece, “The Lost Chord,” something that maybe was never there.

S: I know you said before that you are still trying to write that ultimate poem.

D: Yes, we all do. That’s what drives us all, the ultimate poem, after which there would never need to be anymore. Nobody’s ever going to do that, because one of the good things about poetry is that it is always open and it’s open to anybody. Everybody who comes into the world is potentially a poet and would have the materials that any poet has—his own experience, his own likes and dislikes, his own irrational response to things, rational as well as irrational. The best way to prove that is to think of the music you like, the tunes, just the simple tunes you like. You like them for a reason that you cannot analyze. I like to hear that rather than this. I just like it. That’s all, and that’s all there need be. You have that don’t you?

S: Oh, yes, definitely.

D: Everybody has that. It’s not characterized by the music I like; it’s not characterized by all of the things I like having the same qualities—most of them are quite different from each other. Some of them are Beethoven, and others are rock and roll—it’s a very wide range. I wouldn’t say I like one better or more than the other. It’s just what you like to listen to, and not just at the time that you are listening to it, because if you like it enough, it will change you. If you were indifferent to things around you and you hear that music or melody, you have a focus. You have an aesthetic focus which is peculiar to you. There are some very beautiful folk songs or adaptations of folk songs that I can play on the jukebox that are just unlimitable—they’re not like any other music. I like those. But I like the things that the great composers did, too. I think Carmen is the greatest opera that has ever been written, by far. A lot of people, musicologists, would disagree with that. But Nietzsche and I, we know what’s what! Nietzsche likes Carmen so much that—you know how excessive he is—he frequently gave out the opinion that God wrote it!

S: I’ve heard excerpts of Carmen, but I haven’t heard the whole thing.

D: Yeah, well it’s great! The thing I like about Georges Bizet so much is that he is so tuneful. His opera is full of such singable stuff—that and positive masculine-type stuff. I don’t know why I say masculine; it could just as easily be feminine. It just strikes me that way.

S: Well, we are moving along well here today.

D: That’s good, because I can finish strong, but I have to have a limit. Working to a limit of some sort is of very great value to an artist. Working to a limit—that’s why I spend a whole semester on poetic forms. And everything for you paid off in that sestina when you were in my class. That’s a remarkable piece of writing.

S: I really think that there is something about being limited that brings out the best in an artist.

D: Yes. It gives you strength, like the genie in the bottle in the old fairytale. The thing that gives the genie his strength is that he is in the bottle, the poem being the bottle. The form is the bottle. That’s where the strength comes from.

S: I think I am at the place as a writer where I have got to find a form to fit my content.

D: Well, you’ve got a wonderful thing with those rocks around where you live; that’s remarkable. Nobody has that but you. Nobody. Not only nobody has the rocks, but nobody’s paid any attention to it. And even more of a plus, nobody has paid the exact kind of attention that you have because you are what you are and they are what they are, or you were at the time. As I say, things change. “Change is the essence of all existence,” as Heraclitus says, “Things are always living each other’s death and dying each other’s lives. You cannot step twice into the same river, for new waters are ever flowing in upon you.” I say, they’re great guys, those early philosophers. And you are never in any doubt as to what they are talking about. When Christianity comes into it, there is so much speculation and they get so rarefied that they are hard to follow, some of those schoolmen, the scholastics, and so on, especially after St. Thomas Aquinas, known as the “subtle doctor” or “docteur subtil,” because he is plenty subtle. Aquinas is good on some things. He can tell you what God cannot do. As you know, God is supposed to be omniscient and omnipresent. You would think he could do anything he wanted to. Like the eight-hundred-pound gorilla—he sleeps wherever he takes a notion to sleep. But Aquinas can tell you what [God] can’t do. Can you think of anything that God can’t do? That’s impossible for him to do?

S: No, I can’t.

D: Well, he can’t make another god, and so on. Now, to speculate about that was very big in the Middle Ages—questions of that sort. Most of them didn’t lead anywhere especially, but they were very interesting in themselves. The human mind would turn itself on that sort of speculation about which there can really be no solution. There is the famous one about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Angels are a formulation; they seem to fascinate people, angels and their qualities. Especially now, you hear a lot of talk about angels. I never saw one myself. But an angel would be like a human being with wings. That’s the way they are usually depicted. One of the other early philosophers, Empedocles, said, “If horses had gods, the gods would live like

horses.” In his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell says—which is a good book, although it’s violently biased. Russell doesn’t like any other philosophers, any of them—Plato and Aristotle, the whole of the revered group of thinkers who have shaped the world, both the eastern world and especially the western world. He thinks they are all wrong and they have been very pernicious. He says of Plato’s Republic, “What people don’t seem to understand is that it is the blueprint for every dictatorship that has ever existed in the west”—and I can see his point, because it is an elitist doctrine, among other things. But Russell is talking about Empedocles, who was a Sicilian and who is rumored to have leapt into the crater of a volcano, the main one there, Mount Etna, in Sicily—it is still smoking away. Russell says that Empedocles leapt into the crater of Etna because he was unable to solve the problem of being. And Russell then unexpectedly breaks off and says, “The great Empedocles, that ardent soul, leapt into Etna and was swallowed whole.” He goes on to say, “Matthew Arnold wrote a poem about this called, ‘Empedocles Upon Etna,’ which, though one of his worst, does not contain the above lines.” But now, you take a poet like Matthew Arnold, who is essentially a philosophical type of poet whose main interest is in the philosophical message that poetry might be made to bear, might be able to get across—ethical problems and things of that sort— Matthew Arnold is a very great poet. Maybe not very great, but he is outstandingly good. You look at the Victorian scene which is uncommonly lively and came at a watershed moment in the history of the whole human race, not only the West but the whole of existence, because of Darwin’s 1859 Origin of the Species. Those Victorian thinkers and poets were no dummies. They knew what was at stake here. They knew the secret of things was in question. Not the secret, but the meaning of things was in question. Either man is divinely descended, or he is not, he comes from an animal, a previous form of Homo sapiens. You can’t have it both ways. There is either Adam and Eve, or there is Pithecanthropus erectus, one of those early forms of the transition between the so-called lower forms of life to Homo sapiens, the thinking type of man-creature. They knew, those thinkers, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and the other people at that time, that the question had to come down on one side or the other. It was necessary. You either took the leap of faith, say that Christianity asks you to take, or you went by reason which repudiated everything that faith tells you—which reduces religion to the status of supernaturalism, you know, ghosts, things that are passé, that people used to believe, but can’t possibly believe now with what we know. So, that’s what Darwin meant, and those thinkers agonized over these matters, and they were very intelligent. Mill was one of the most intelligent men who ever lived, and so were some of those other Victorian guys, and the poets,

too—they were all much agitated by these questions. You look at the three main Victorian poets as literary history would have it: Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold. The first two had far more literary talent than Arnold had, far more, especially Tennyson did. Tennyson had the best ear that’s ever used the English language for poetry, the best, especially when there was some sort of soft effect, like going to sleep or something—you know, like “tired eyelids are from tired eyes.” He would put you to sleep, but not just because he is boring (as a lot of Tennyson is), but because he’s good at the technical part of poetry that produces that feeling. Tennyson is a greatly gifted man. He’s not much of a thinker, although he tried hard, but he is a supreme craftsman. What I think of as the most beautiful image in English poetry is by Tennyson. It combines an image that utilizes something very near to the speaker and something far off. He’s on a cliff flower bed, or at least there’s one flower there between him and the ocean, which is way on down, say like at Dover or something. Way on down the eye meets the perspective out over the ocean a long ways. Tennyson is lying near this spot and says, “I see through the near petal slipped the far sail.” Hopkins hadn’t even been heard of then. He didn’t really come onto the scene until, say, around 1918, when Bridges published a selection of Hopkins’s poems. So he doesn’t really figure in that bunch. But the ones who were the acknowledged masters or great poets of that era were Tennyson, who was Poet Laureate and Queen Victoria’s favorite poet, who wrote good poems, especially in the technique; and Browning, who was good, but was as much of a novelist as he was a poet. As a poet, Browning is not in the class with Tennyson as far as poetic talent, linguistic talent. But he turned the interest onto people and their psychology. You read something of Browning’s, a well-known anthology piece like “My Last Duchess,” and you compare that to what Tennyson tries to do with people, the examination of people, in The Idylls of the King,” which is about Camelot and all of that stuff. There is some beautiful stuff in there, but Tennyson is unconvincing about people. Browning is very good about people and their motivations, and so on. But of those three, Arnold is the least gifted as a poet, but means more to us because the reverberations from his thinking in poetry have reached much farther than either Tennyson or Browning or, even if you can imagine such a thing, them combined. Does he not characterize our world in a lot of different ways? Arnold’s line—“Wandering between two worlds, one dead and the other powerless to be born”—could be applied to the situation of the Negro in America, the ex-slave. That’s a special application, but it could also apply to humanity in general in the twentieth century, after the atomic bomb, for example. I guess we would argue that the splitting of the atom brought in a new sort of an age, so, in a sense, the atomic age was born, but it was not born in the same sense

that Christianity was born. That’s what we lack. We lack that concerted religious faith, and I don’t think mankind can do without it. But you can’t get it back. Once you give it up, you can’t get it back. That’s like a woman wanting to be a virgin again. There are some things that don’t come back, and the loss of religious faith is one of them. They are lost for a whole people. You’ve got to become, whether you would put it by this name or not, an existentialist. You’ve got to believe—you are forced to believe—that you cannot call on supernatural divine power and interventions. That’s superstition only. The world that men live in is going to have to be one that they make and not one that God makes.

S: Since we’ve already touched on matters of religion and faith, I have a few questions about that and your background. I know you’ve mentioned before in your writing workshop that you remember and are fond of the Southern gospel hymns you heard when you were growing up.

D: Yes, I do. I like them. That’s an example of the music that you like. It’s not because I was raised with it but because I just like the tunes. I think the Baptists have marvelous melodies and beautiful ideas—“Shall We Gather at the River.” I say, unequivocally, “Yes!”—let’s do. And it doesn’t have to be for baptism either. I just like rivers.

S: In what ways do you think your own writing has been influenced by Christianity as it is practiced in the South?

D: I certainly think it has been in some ways that probably I myself don’t even know about. The example of Christ as a type of human being, I have nothing but admiration for. If people lived like Christ wanted them to live, we would have no human problems—at least no wars—because he laid down what people actually ought to do and the attitudes that they should have. But there’s a very great deal of difference between what you should have and what you do have. If men were capable of being ruled exclusively by reason, as Plato assumes that they are, then you could give them reasonable proof concerning the best course to follow and they would do it, because you could show them why it’s of advantage to do it. But people are not swayed by reason; they are swayed by emotion, some of it quite irrational and some of it quite destructive. Emotion is far more powerful than reason, far more powerful. You look at a crowd at a football game, for example, that pure emotionalism, and all that cheering and carrying on. That doesn’t get anything practical done. It’s just a release of people’s visceral being in some way. It’s their emotion and their, you could say, primitive instincts, or something like that. You could even say animal instincts. But it has nothing to do with the process of reason—a football game or a war. There’s a lot of strategy in war, and that calls for reason

and so on. But the instinct that makes war is not reasonable—it’s visceral. And if Plato thinks that people can be convinced by reason to follow the proper course, the proper path, that’s where he leaves out a whole important side of human nature, because they are not going to be ruled exclusively by reason. All these subconsciousnesses and the id’s and the subconsciousness part of the mind that is evident, say, in dreams, all of that stuff that Freud talks about is also part of the human make up, the human complex. It’s not just the reason of Homo sapiens at all. You’ve got a lot of other elements you have to contend with. You look at most politicians, and not just the obvious examples like Hitler, who is pure viscera, pure emotion, primitivism, blood drinking, as D. H. Lawrence would call it. You look at the reasons that people vote for politicians. Some of them will vote on the actual issues involved. But if Elvis Presley was running for president, he would be elected. And it would not be because he has great political powers to reason situations out. It would be because people have a sort of mass mania and emotional relationship to him. You look at how many entertainers have become prominent politicians. Some of them have been in very high places, like Reagan, who was an actor, a movie star, or at least a movie actor. His stand, his right-wing stand on issues, is part of his appeal, but not all of it. A lot of it had to with his high profile as a movie actor. And you see this all the time. Anybody could run for office. After we made the movie version of Deliverance, there was a lot of talk about the “Wild and Scenic Rivers Act” and about whether or not there was anything I could say that would get the Chattooga River—where we did most of the filming of the movie—put on the Wild and Scenic Rivers list so that it wouldn’t be dammed up. I was talking to reporters at the State House about this and saying what my views were—God knows we’re losing not just scenic America, but also a natural resource. And it’s a resource beyond what you could use it for to make money or to make dams and get out the electric power and so on—that’s what is usually thought of as a natural resource. But the resource is more; it should be spiritual. It should have to do with what used to be called the soul or the apprehension of beauty and the world as something that was made by something other than men as it was made originally—the rivers and the mountains, the leaves, the trees, grass, flowers—all of that. Men didn’t make those. And if they make them, they are only imitations of what was already there. A plastic flower may represent a flower, but it is not a flower. It’s a plastic representation of a flower. And so I was talking in something like these terms about why it’s necessary to preserve the wilderness. Not necessary maybe, because it’s being destroyed every day all over the world, especially here, in the new world. You know what they’re doing in Brazil, cutting the rainforest down, burning it out—terrible! As Thoreau says, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

That’s the side I’m on. After I was finished, the reporters came up the ramp, and one of them asked quite seriously, “Mr. Dickey have you ever thought of running for Congress?” I said, “No, I haven’t, but you’ve put the maggot in my brain. Maybe I’ll show up in Congress one day.” But the idea that that subject would even be broached in connection with me, who is pretty much apolitical as far as doctrinal politics are concerned, the fact that they would even suggest to me that it might be possible, shows you a great many things about the American mind. Because I’m a college professor and, compared to most people, fairly articulate, they think that that constitutes some sort of power. Knowledge is power; language is power. Look at how many people think of Bill Buckley as a great intellectual because he uses words that they don’t know the meaning of, the audience doesn’t know the meaning of. They think, God, he must be smart. I didn’t know what that word meant. A few people will go and look it up, but most of them are just impressed by the fact that he used it.

S: I have a question about the power of language, about a comment you made in the past concerning something you would like to do in your own writing. You’ve said before that “It’s time we got some glory back into [poetry].”

D: Amen!

S: What do you mean by this comment, and how have you attempted to do that specifically in your own writing?

D: Well, I don’t know. I think by the encouragement of a simple emotion in the individual—Awe! Awe! Almost anything is awesome if you look at it that way. A grain of sand—that it exists at all is awesome, as much as the fact that there is such a thing as a star or a planet is awesome. Everything is awesome. I believe one or another of the philosophical doctrines which is sort of a combination of pagan stick-and-stone worship and Christianity. Do you know what pantheism is?

S: Yes.

D: You do know. What is it? How would you define it?

S: It’s a belief that God permeates everything.

D: Is in everything. And this was the Gnostics’ belief. They came up with a wonderful saying based on that: “Split the stick and there is Jesus.”

S: I’ve heard that before.

D: That’s good too. I’d like to think so. “Split the stick and there is Jesus.” All right! Hooray! That’s where he ought to be.

S: I’d like to turn this back again to a question related to religion. I know in an interview with Bill Moyers that was reprinted in Night Hurdling…

D: Yeah. That was done right out there. [Dickey points out the window of his home toward his dock on Lake Katherine.]

S: “Conversation on a Dock.”

D: Except we’ve got a new dock, but it’s in the same place as the old dock was.

S: You said that you’ve been “a long-term hit-or-miss reader of the Bible” and you “think some of it is marvelous rhetoric and beautifully stated.” In what ways do you think your reading of the Bible, and I’m assuming here the King James Version…

D: Yeah, that’s really the only one for me.

S: In what ways might your reading of the Bible have influenced some of the style and content of your writing?

D: Oh, I have no doubt that it has influenced it. Again, to come back to what I said before, in ways that I’m not fully cognizant of. But it’s full of marvelous energy. That business about “God moved on the face of the waters.” That’s not the water, but the “waters.” You think immediately of the ocean, but it doesn’t say the ocean. Waters—lakes, rivers.

S: What do you like particularly about that rhetoric? That style?

D: Because it conveys importance on the facts of existence, both material and spiritual. It conveys importance on them. This is the thing that we lack most in the modern world, the sense of value, that things have value other than monetary values, that there are things that you value—not that everybody values—but that you value.

S: So the words themselves bestow that value.

D: That’s right! That’s what I like about it, to answer your question. They restore value to existence. This is why Homer is such a great poet. The Iliad is really the only epic poem, the only one, and nothing could ever match that because, one thing, we don’t have the unified culture that they did and, second, we don’t have any Homer. There’s a rather bitter saying about Homer, who is mostly legendary—legend has it that he was blind—some student said The Iliad was written not by Homer but by five other fellows with the same name. But there’s this saying—and I don’t quote this literally; I don’t know where it comes from—“Sixteen cities claim Homer dead through which the living Homer begged his bread.” Right? “The living Homer begged his bread.” This is a commentary, of course, on the fact that poets, as well as other kinds of people, especially in the arts, are revered after death and not paid any attention

to, or even reviled or driven out, when they are alive—or persecuted in some way, or at least ignored, beggars in a way.

S: So do you see that as one of the poet’s chief tasks, that bestowing of values?

D: Yes, I do. I certainly do. Either the bestowing of it or the reviving of it. That’s what I was going to say. That’s why Homer is so great, because everything is so important. You have a sword or a drinking cup—Homer gives you the whole history of it, the genealogy of the guy’s blade; it’s like a human thing. It’s like the pantheists say, “God is in it”—of course they were the Greek Gods and not the Christian God. But they had “mana,” what the anthropologists and the natives of various so-called primitive cultures called “mana,” m-a-n-a—soul, essence, the indwelling, creative force, what Hopkins calls “instress,” the force that holds things together in the form that they have. You know you can characterize a writer by thinking about the main word that he or she seems to come back to most frequently. What would Faulkner’s be, for example? Doom, or fate.

S: Yes, I think so.

D: That’s why I always liked Willa Cather, because her favorite word, her boss word is “splendor.” Where are you going to find any splendor any more?

S: The splendor of those prairies.

D: Splendor—not just beautiful or even awesome, but they have splendor. There was a movie forty years ago called “Splendor in the Grass,” which, as you might know, came from a line by Wordsworth: “The splendor in the grass and glory in the flowers.” Wordsworth has his moments.

S: Talking about this whole subject of splendor and glory, I know some critics have criticized your poetry for—and this is from a review of The Whole Motion in the Washington Post—its “grandiose rhetoric.”

D: Ah, bull! They don’t know the difference between real rhetoric and grandiose—they think all rhetoric is grandiose because theirs is.

S: Do you think that criticism might be due specifically to the work of the poet, the task of “putting the glory back into poetry”?

D: I try for something big. I’m tired of small poetry. I’m tired of the “oh-shucks-twern’t-nothing” attitude toward poetry. Because it isn’t nothing; at its best it’s plenty. It’s the best that the human imagination can summon up. And you don’t need to be consistently small about it either. You can open up instead of close down.

S: Do you feel that you have concentrated more on what you have called the “magic language” side of poetry?

D: Well, I have more lately than I ever did before, and it’s been of great advantage to me. “The far orchards blazing with slant”—something like that. “The far orchards blazing with slant.”

S: I can see the light.

D: Yeah. There’s a lot you can do with that approach. I gave the Peters-Rushton seminars at the University of Virginia on Hart Crane some years back. [Telephone rings and Dickey answers.] We were talking about the language-oriented poetry versus the so-called reality poetry. As I say, beginning with Puella, I began to work more with the language side of things, and I’ve never regretted it. People say, “Oh, God, Dickey’s poetry has fallen off—the late work.” Not so, it’s just changed. If you don’t do what they expect of you, they think you are declining. It’s not so—you are growing, or at least you are changing. That’s necessary. I see so many American poets who had a little success with doing a thing a certain way early on, some of them hardly more than kids, and they are now old men, and they have never changed because they were afraid to tamper with what worked for them when they were young. Therefore, they haven’t grown; they haven’t deepened. Some of these poets who are skillful and likable, and so on, have never been anything but that. They don’t move you. They are just skillful. They are like these southern girls who move to the north, and everybody says to them, “Now my dear, whatever you do, don’t ever lose that wonderful southern accent,” with the result that in a couple of months they are talking like Amos and Andy.

S: Let me ask you a question about the ending of To the White Sea, and I want to set it up by reading just a little part of that. At the end of To the White Sea, Muldrow says—and I don’t read this as well as you do…

D: That’s all right.

S: “I was in it and part of it. I matched it all. And I will be everywhere in it from now on. You will be able to hear me, just like you’re hearing me now, everywhere in it, for the first time and the last, as soon as I close my eyes.” My question is…

D: What happens to him?

S: Well, that too, but also, can we read this possibly as symbolic of what happens to the writer over the course of his career, becoming the word itself?

D: You might. You might. Yes, you might easily do that. Or, it might be what happens to the soul. Actually, what happens to him—you’ve read the whole thing haven’t you?

S: Yes.

D: Muldrow talks some in there, sometimes to somebody else, but mostly to himself, and he believes that…he’s lived as a hunter his whole life, since the cradle practically, as a hunter in the snow, in the whiteness and desolation, wind and cold, which he feels is his domain. And what happens to him at the end where that posse is shooting at him in that shack where he is staying and the bullets are going through him and everything—what happens—he’s always said that if you achieve the perfect camouflage, then you become where you are. You don’t have your own shape anymore; you’re just the environment that you have blended with, that this time you have blended with perfectly, so that there is nothing of you left. You have become where you are and have achieved the perfect camouflage by matching it. You have become it. You don’t just look like it, you are it. That has happened to him. He says also that the only way you can see some animals—their camouflage is so good—is by their eyes. But, if they close their eyes, that’s eliminated. So, either that has happened, or he is killed. But it may be that death itself is the perfect camouflage.

S: That’s interesting.

D: You pays your money, and you takes your choice. I deliberately leave it up in the air that he has become what he most wants to become—snow, cold, wind, and desolation. That’s going to make a hell of an ending to a movie, too. I can see a lot of ways they could do that.

S: Oh, yeah! That would be a great ending. I agree.

D: I can hear the audience turning around to each other and saying, “Well, what happened to him? Where did he go?” Let them wonder.

S: I think that’s the beauty of it.

D: I think it is, too.

S: I want to ask you about two possible influences on To the White Sea. I need to set these questions up too. In an essay on Jack London, you write about London’s move to the Yukon.

D: “Blood Zero.”

S: That’s right. You say, “As he moved further into the winter wilderness of the northern latitudes, he came increasingly to the conclusion that the ‘white silence’ of the North is the indifferently triumphant demonstration of the All, the arena where the knowable Secret could most unequivocally be apprehended and, as the conditions demanded, lived.” This sounds to me very much like the experience of Muldrow in To the White Sea.

D: Yes, it is. It may be I had forgotten that I wrote it or took that attitude toward Jack London, a half-trashy writer who is very good at his best, especially in that sort of setting. Did you ever see the film I did for Warner Brothers?

S: I haven’t yet.

D: I’ll show it to you when we have more time. It came out pretty well, I think. But anyway, I think that’s very close to Muldrow. Jack was a sort of hell-for-leather philosopher himself, but his mind was not as interesting as Muldrow’s—he was going in some way in that direction, Jack London himself, not his characters.

S: I want to follow up on this London question just a little bit more. Did you work in Alaska when you were working on the film?

D: No. It’s all in the imagination. I just tried to imagine it, sort of like Jack would have done, who did go up there. Sort of like him, but not exactly. The biggest technical problem of To the White Sea was in developing a convincing voice for Muldrow—since he tells the story—through which his own personality would come sort of inadvertently, like when he talks about the Kansas girl: “It’s sort of like the place where I buried the Kansas girl.” You don’t know that he’s ever done anything to the Kansas girl, who follows him around up there, wanting to go to some of those back-country places that he knows. You don’t know until then that he has killed her. And slowly it should dawn on the reader that what the American military has done is to loose on the Japanese civilian population the equivalent of Ted Bundy, that Muldrow is essentially a sociopath without any conscience, and that he is not limited to killing Japanese. He has a legitimate right to kill because we are at war with the Japanese, but he would do it anyway and has done it, without any conscience. So, when he cuts the woman’s head off and puts it on the water wheel, you should begin to realize that. Up until that time you’ve sort of been on his side—after all, he’s an American, in war time, in the enemy’s home country, where every hand is against him, and so on, and you are pulling for him. You get interested in his resourcefulness and his ability to camouflage himself. But when he cuts off the woman’s head…I mean he kills those people to get clothes in the fire-raid at the beginning of the book, and all he’s interested in is the sizes of the clothes and the shoes. Well, you could say, “He’s at war, and you are not supposed to exercise your conscience in a war,” and the reader will accede to that. You say you would have done that, probably—he’s resourceful and he gets what he needs to survive. But when he cuts that woman’s head off and puts it on the water wheel, he didn’t have to do that. That’s just something that he did because of something that had nothing to do with the war or the enemy, or anything of that sort. It had to do with some thing he did because of some-

thing in him that encouraged him or maybe even made him do it. So the reader will change his attitude and start being afraid of him or hate him. But above all, they are interested—they want to see what he’s going to do next, because you don’t know whether it will be good or bad or what it’s going to be. That’s why they turn the pages, one of the reasons.

S: It’s like you’ve said before, when a character is introduced into a particular “field of response,” there is a certain part of him that is able to come out that couldn’t come out otherwise.

D: Yeah, right. Or couldn’t come out as easily, as readily.

S: It seems like Muldrow becomes at the end what he has been most distinctly all the way through the book and that is a voice, a particular voice. As you said, the main technical problem of the book was the search for a voice for him.

D: Yeah, right. Well, he’s got to be convincing. But he says things that the ordinary person would not think of, and he says them as though they should be obvious to anybody. That’s what makes it so strange and interesting, even fascinating, to some people. But he says these curious things as though they ought to be obvious, as though they were things that anybody would know, when actually the only one who knows them is him. It’s just his attitude. Like when he says the fisher marten is the most beautiful animal there is. Most people don’t even know what one looks like. It’s like a cross between a larger pine marten and a wolverine. And they are pretty. That’s where sable comes from. Sable is fisher fur. But they are weasels. The wolverine is the most dangerous animal in North America. But they are dangerous not because of the supernatural attributes that the Indians up there where they live give to the wolverine, but because they are weasels. The wolverine is the largest weasel, the largest of the mustelidae, and he has the rapacious killer instinct of the weasel multiplied from a little bitty animal like a ferret on up to a thirty-five- or forty-pound animal. He just has that viciousness and excessive blood-lust that weasels have—and they have it. They are among the few animals that will kill when they don’t need to eat. They just like it. And Muldrow likes it too. He doesn’t go on about how much he likes it, but it is obvious that he does. What he is good at is planning, like when he’s a prisoner. He’s already scheming about what to do—not to get away from them under any circumstances—but how to get away from them in that truck. If he can get his hands loose—you already know he’s got a tremendous grip; he is smallish; he’s not a real big, strong guy. That’s why I had that thing about him doing the pinch grip chins in the Quonset hut in Tinian Island. You know he’s got a tremendous grip, and he knows it. He gets his feet through where they’ve got his hands tied together—he gets his hands in front of him, and then the guy that’s guard-

ing him comes over there, kicks him and spits on him. And he’s got him. He’s got him! And you sort of feel sorry for the poor Japanese, because you know he is going to die. And he’s got him! Then he kills the guy and puts him over where he was, where they had put him in the corner of the truck. He puts him over there and puts the tarp over him like they had over him, and he gets the guy’s rifle and fires a shot. He knows they will stop the truck to see what is going on. And he slides back the bolt and shoves a shell in—anybody who has ever handled a gun knows how to handle all guns, almost all anyway. This is a military rifle, and he didn’t have any trouble with that. They come around there, and he waits until they get into a position that’s advantageous to him, and he shoots and kills them. He knows—he’s counted them already—he knows how many are in the truck. He knows there’s one more guy up there, but he doesn’t want to shoot him. He wants to fall on him from above like a fisher marten. That’s what he likes better than anything, to get something from above, to fall on them from above. That’s why he has such a great liking for the arboreal hunter, like a fisher or a wolverine. The wolverine is one of the best climbers in the forest, as big as he is. He can climb up a tree—he can be up in the top of a tree before a black bear can get to the first limb. He is very agile in the trees. And that’s one of the things that appeals to Muldrow, that hunting from above. That’s why he likes those hawks so much at the end; that’s why he goes out with them. That part is good, isn’t it?—where he discovers he actually has a good arm and throws that Inuit spear out just for the hell of it, throws it into the snowbanks. It’s going to make a good movie, if they do it right. Hollywood, as we all know, can screw things up pretty bad, but I hope they won’t. One can only keep the faith and hope things will turn out for the best.

S: Let me ask you one more background question about To the White Sea, and I need to set this one up too. This is from an early review that you did of Kazantzakis’s poem, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel; you note that the poem’s main character travels “into the Antarctic ice floes to die or to become pure spirit.” In addition, you say that one of the main themes of the poem is the “transmutation of matter into spirit,” such that the main character “runs the risk of losing his vital identity and becoming nothing more than a Voice.” Although Muldrow in To the White Sea doesn’t “lose his vital identity,” he does seem to “become nothing more than a Voice” at the end.

D: Yeah, well, that’s what he wants to be.

S: And “pure spirit.” Is there any connection?

D: I haven’t thought about there being any, but there obviously is one. But, again, it’s not conscious. So much of creativity takes place in the unconscious in what

William James, the psychologist, calls the deep well of unconscious cerebration. The way the image is made is prior to your thinking about it. It’s like Stendhal says, the French novelist: it’s as if your brain can be likened to a glass of water with salt in it, and you put a stick down in there and go off and leave it for a week, or a certain period of time, and then you pull it out, and it’s covered with crystals. The stick is the idea or whatever might have started you thinking in these terms. The stick is like the idea that you drop into this glass of salt, into the unconscious, and you pull it back out, and it’s covered with all of these associations that your unconscious mind has made because of it, like the oyster making the pearl. It’s an unconscious process, a natural process, which is infinitely mysterious. But the real writer does not want to analyze it. He just wants to go with it, to use it.

S: He wants it to happen and to participate in it.

D: And when it happens, he knows it, and he takes it where it leads him, and that’s where I think we should end.

S: Can I ask you one more question?

D: Okay.

S: And this will be the last one. You have spoken many times over the years about the importance of energizing various parts of the writer’s self through writing and about making sorties into the lives of the “other.” Do some of your most recent publications, for example the title of The Whole Motion and the ending of To the White Sea, reflect an attempt on your part to consolidate some of these selves and “sorties”?

D: Well, maybe, but again, not consciously. It was a semi-conscious decision to switch off from the poetry of the versified anecdote to the language-directed orientation. That was at least partly consciously done, and I have never regretted it. Because even if you return to writing about incidents and events and so on, it’s enriched by this linguistic emphasis that you’ve had by doing it the other way. It’s at least partially conscious in that case. As I said earlier—I didn’t get through saying what I was going to say about it—years ago I gave the Peters-Rushton seminars at the University of Virginia on Hart Crane because that was what they wanted me do, and I was not at all averse to it. I’m a great admirer of him. Crane—although he didn’t even have a high school education—had a native intelligence of very great merit, and, consequently, he’s one of the best writers on the poetic process that I know, mainly in connection with his own work. He was a great analyzer and explainer of the theories behind his work. Thank God this is all in his letters—he’s remarkable on this. It’s almost as good to read his glosses on the poems that he wrote as it

is the poems—not quite as good, but it’s quite an adjunct to the poems themselves. To listen to Hart Crane talk about poetry is certainly something you want to get in on. So I gave these Rushton seminars, and I said, “Now, when you read Crane’s poetry….” And some of these participants said, “I can’t understand what he is talking about. I just can’t get a handle on it. It’s so strange.” And I said, “Well, Crane instinctively and deliberately and consciously left the denotative part of language—didn’t leave it out, but put it in the background and put the emphasis, what he thought was the poetic emphasis, on the connotative part of language—that is the part of the words or of a single word that suggests rather than says.” For example, you look at that light, and you could say anything about the way it shines. The light could shine; it could burn; it could radiate. There are lots of different things it could be doing, and whichever one you finally use in the poem would be the one that had the most suggestion, that would create the most suggestibility in the reader as far as you could tell because it creates it in you. That’s really the only criteria you could have. That’s the way Crane operated, on the connotative side of language. I said, “Now you must not try to reason out the denotative meanings of these lines, but just concentrate on the suggestive aura around the words and around the images that the words contribute to and build up. Concentrate on that and just let it happen.” And so I read them a line from one of the “Voyages” poems: “adagios of islands”— three words—“adagios of islands.” I’ll tell you what the audience said. I asked one woman, a graduate student, who happened to be in the front row, “What do you get from that? I mean, what do you take from it? Not exactly a question of how you took it, how you got it, but what did it do, that imagery of ‘adagios of island’?” She said, “Well, I know an adagio is a slow movement in music or dance. All that comes to me is islands leaping slowly over one another, perhaps to music by Tchaikovsky.” I said, “Crane wouldn’t fly in the face of that at all; if that’s what he suggests to you, that’s fine.” Actually, he says in the letter that he sent with the poem to one of his friends, Malcolm Cowley, or somebody, that “adagios of islands” refers to the movement of the boat coasting slowly between islands and that it seems much more imaginative, and therefore poetic, to characterize that as “adagios of islands,” besides ushering in a whole world of music. You’ve got to follow Crane with what he says. He’s no dummy, I’ll tell you. That’s the way he operated. It’s about the same way that Mallarmé operated. He says, “If you want to write about the forest, don’t write about trees. Try to project the horror of the forest, not the actual trees that make up the forest, but the horror of the forest. Not what is said, but what is suggested.” Another approach from this orientation is Eliot’s line—from one of his “Preludes” I think, or

maybe it’s from “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” one of those early poems of Eliot’s—which says, “every street lamp that I pass beats like a fatalistic drum.” Now obviously on the literal or rational level, this is not true—in other words, a lamp can’t beat like a drum. But in the sensibility of an individual, especially a modern individual, an over-refined, neurotic type of an individual, this would seem to be the case: “Every street lamp that I pass, beats like a fatalistic drum.” It’s his nerves, and maybe even his heartbeat, which contribute to that drum effect and not the lamp itself. The lamp is only associated with that effect. But if the lamp does cause it literally to happen, or something like it to happen, it’s in the person that is doing the perceiving rather than in what is perceived. That’s a good insight, and this is the way a good deal of modern poetry works, not just Crane’s or Eliot’s. This is brought in by the French symbolists. I don’t mean to turn this into yet another seminar, but they are the ones, especially Mallarmé, who introduced that idea into poetry, the idea of the suggestion factor—the penumbra of association that surrounds the core or the kernel of the denotative meaning, the dictionary meaning of the word. It’s the aura of association that surrounds a word that is important poetically, or is most important poetically. And when you begin to utilize that, it opens up a whole new world of expression. It did for me. As I said, the decision to try to do it was conscious on my part, but, when it began to operate, the process itself took over, and I didn’t need to implement it with anything, because if you encourage your mind to think that way, it will take over. The mind will take over and do it on its own, and you will get “the arrow with lips of cheese.” Were you in the second part of the course where we take the whole semester to write one poem?

R: Yes, I was.

D: We start out with the irrational side of these associations, dreams and so on. These students don’t need to be urged to cut loose. They want to do it anyway. They’re all so inhibited that they want somebody, a teacher especially, to tell them to be uninhibited. Let go! Let it go! Say what comes into your mind—anything, everything! No reason for the process ever to stop—maybe you could just arbitrarily limit it to, say, a page. However, if you get going and it runs beyond that, keep going with it until you begin to slow down or stop and the association process temporarily turns off for you. Although it never turns off—it goes on for twenty-four hours a day in everybody, in sleep and everywhere else. There was one of those free-association pieces that a student turned in for one of my classes that said, “And I want to be the one who plucks the chicken claw from the garter belt of the woman psychiatrist”—which is a wonderful image, a wonderful insight. You look at that. Now, you want to

take that on reasonable terms instead of purely irrational terms. You look at that—a chicken claw, just the claw of a chicken. What does that suggest to you? Voodoo!

Magic!

R: Something fearful, almost.

D: Voodoo. And the association of psychiatry with voodoo and black magic and so on is obvious. But it’s also very funny. One thinks it is amusing that a woman psychiatrist—a psychiatrist especially!—would have a chicken claw in her garter belt, because of the association with the primitive mysteries, voodoo, black magic, and all of those things. But I too, when I read that, wanted to become the one who would pluck the chicken claw from the garter belt of the woman psychiatrist. Why is it better to say the “woman psychiatrist” than the “lady psychiatrist”? A lot of people would say it would have more effect to say “lady psychiatrist.” But it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t. In this age of women’s lib, the “woman psychiatrist” has more impact than the “lady psychiatrist,” which implies too much dilettantism. These women psychiatrists are deadly serious, and that’s what makes it so funny. Don’t you think?

R: Yes, I think so.

D: Yeah. OK. Finito!

R: Well, thank you very much. I enjoyed talking with you.

D: If you ever become a teacher—and I expect you will—do something like this with your students. Do what you and I have done this afternoon, and make it fun. Get them to open up. The inhibition barrier is the hardest thing for a beginning writer to overcome because they don’t want to be wrong. But what they have to realize is that there is not any absolute right or wrong. This is a field where everything is wide open—it’s not according to some preset standard of value or anything like that. It makes its own value, especially if it’s good. Auden says somewhere, and this seems to be my day to quote from people, when you read a good poem—you know, like Alexander Pope’s poem on the pleasure of wit, meaning imagination, “True wit is nature to advantage dressed, / what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed”—this is one kind of good poetry. You think to yourself when you read the poem of this sort, “Goodness, I thought that a lot of times but, of course, I couldn’t say it this well, with that much skill and economy. I couldn’t say it that well, but I thought the same thing a lot of times.” That’s when you read a good poem. But, Auden says, when you read a great poem you don’t think that. You think, “I wouldn’t have thought of this in a thousand years. How did he come up with something like this about this subject, and, yet, I must admit, his way of seeing it is better than

my way. Therefore, I will from now on see it this way, until something even better comes along. I will see it the way this poet has presented it.” That is, it becomes an enlargement and a deepening of consciousness rather than just a clever repetition of something that you knew beforehand. It becomes a new thing, a contribution that couldn’t have come to you in any other way. That’s what it is. It’s like Dylan Thomas’s lines:

Open a pathway through the slow sad sails

Throw wide to the wind the wings of the wandering boat

That my voyage may begin to the end of my wound.

Thomas adds to all this strangeness of imagery a wonderful incantatory sound that he gets. He is irresistible. His range is very narrow, but within it he is unique. If you were to try to characterize, from the standpoint of sheer originality, the three most original poets in the English language, I think most people would say they would be John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. Now, somebody like Auden is not original in that sense. Auden is somebody who is super-rational and does say what you thought, but couldn’t express as well as he does. But, Dylan Thomas is coming from left field—you never would have thought anything like that if he hadn’t thought it and showed it to you. Now Donne is very original, but, compared to Thomas, it seems a sort of willed originality, a forced originality. It’s good—some of the things that he comes up with are real good. But it seems to be an intensification of qualities that are already there in people. It is not something that’s sui generis—its own thing. Hopkins is the same way in another sense. Hopkins was a great and intense scholar. After all, he was a Jesuit whose favorite philosopher was Duns Scotus, as subtle a philosopher as there is, one of the medieval schoolmen. Hopkins’s idiom is very carefully thought out and worked out according to very recondite theories. Thomas is natural—there is no sense of strain about him at all. Thomas just thinks this way, and that’s where the difference is, and that’s why he is as great as he is. I like Auden. I like them all. And I like them for different reasons. I love the 18th century: “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” When Marilyn Monroe died, I was living in London, and I passed this newspaper kiosk that had headlines in about twenty-point type: “MARILYN DIED.” I didn’t, until that moment, know that Marilyn had died, but I had no doubt as to who Marilyn was. I said, “My God, Marilyn Monroe is dead. I wonder what happened. How did Marilyn die?” Huge question mark. I didn’t know how she died. I don’t think anybody knows right now, even today, how she died. I hadn’t gone five, ten, fifteen steps down Regent Street when the words of Alexander Pope came to mind, a couplet from Pope’s “Epistle to an Unfortunate Woman,” I think it’s called.1 It epitomized not only Marilyn Monroe’s fate but the whole Hollywood pleasure syndrome and, by extension, our whole culture—Playboy, Penthouse Magazine, pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, money, opulence, conspicuous waste, conspicuous consumption. The lines of Pope—all epitomized by Marilyn Monroe—came into my mind perfect for that, speaking of those “Who purchase pain with all that joy can give, / And die of nothing but a rage to live.” Isn’t that great? Not only for Marilyn Monroe, but for us.

R: For all of us.

D: “Who purchase pain with all that joy can give, / And die of nothing but a rage to live.” That’s good. That’s great rational insight at its best, I thought. The eighteenth century is good, not just for couplet satire, but for lots of other poems—most of them are couplets. Dryden was a great poet. Plenty of poets there. Pope was good in his own way. There used to be a great standing argument in graduate school at Vanderbilt when I was there as to who the greater eighteenth century poet was—whether Dryden was greater than Pope or Pope was greater than Dryden. I like Dryden very much; he’s got a lot of masculine power to him. And, I use him a lot—I mean, I’m conscious of sort of an inexorable roll in his language. Pope is much more subtle and much more of a drawing room, social poet than Dryden. Dryden liked to write about big themes, Biblical themes, for example, his political satire called “Absalom and Achitophel,” which is very heavily footnoted because you don’t live in his time and you don’t know who all the references are to. So you have to dig through the footnotes to get what Dryden is talking about. The same thing is true of Pope in “The Dunciad”—you don’t know who the dunces were whom he excoriated so mercilessly. Pope is good though, venomously. The guy was only 4’10”, a hunchback. And he talked about how poetry came to him when he was just a boy, how he grew up to be the great satirist of his time. Everybody was running scared of him, and he says how amazed he was to see men not afraid of God, afraid of …

S: Him?

_______________

1. Actually, the title of the poem is “Epistle to an Unfortunate Lady.”

___________________________________________________________

James Dickey Interview: Part Two

November 7, 1995

S: I am here with Mr. Dickey at his house on Lake Katherine. It’s Tuesday, November 7, 1995, and we’re going to work on the second part of an interview that we started at the end of August. I think I’m just going to jump in to some of these questions that were left from what we were talking about last time. You’ve said in Sorties that “the most important single ingredient any poem can have is a sense of necessity.”

D: Yes.

S: What do you mean by necessity and how do poets build that quality into their poetry?

D: It’s an intangible, surely, but the poem creates itself. The poem gives you a sense of urgency in that the subject is important, or maybe it’s in the form of a question, or the subject is important and something must be said to resolve it or to establish the fact that it’s not capable of being resolved. But, there is something that makes the subject matter and the treatment seem urgent and necessary, and, if the reader hadn’t read the poem, he wouldn’t know that it was necessary—the necessariness comes as a result of the poem itself. This is hard to grasp, but you can see the necessity when you read actual poems; some have that and some don’t. Most don’t.

S: Is it to some extent a search for necessary subject matter?

D: No, that has something to do with it. You don’t search it out, but, when you come on it, or it comes to you, you must have the intelligence and the taste and the intuition to know that it potentially has the quality of necessity. Potentially—if you can find a way to get it to express itself, as best as may be done. That’s the difficulty about it.

S: What’s the best way to spot a poem that doesn’t have that sense of necessity?

D: I don’t know—just by the way the language goes. I keep referring to this—I don’t know whether I did with you or not—but John Berryman said something years ago in a review of somebody’s book of poems—I think the guy’s name was Howard Griffin—he said, “Howard Griffin’s poems are not worth reading because he is unable to do the necessary thing required, which is to sound as if he meant it.” There are a lot of poems that seem to be done out of some sort of sense of frivolity or just playing around with the subject but no real involvement with it. You need a sense of genuine human involvement with a subject, of concern with it, and you need that to come through the

words. Now, how you get it is different. There’s not any formula for it, but you do need to promote that feeling any way you can. You can’t manufacture it. You know what’s interesting to you; you know what’s vital to you. It might not be to somebody else, but you hope to write a poem that has enough sustained power to it to convince the reader that if he hadn’t thought it was vital before this, he does now.

S: This question is along the lines of some of that. You’ve commented many times before on the loss of “consequence” in modern life. In what ways does poetry restore that “consequence”?

D: Because it concentrates on things as if they were important and as though they were important, and, in a sense, it bestows importance on subjects and events and people that an ordinary person or layman—the man on the street—would not see, would not feel was of any moment, or was not enough to spend any time on. And, you get poets who can concentrate on a moment of time and make you live it at different levels than you ordinarily would be able to do—first by the insight that is behind what the poet says, and then by the words in which he says it. For example—I was just talking about this in class today—I’ve never particularly liked the beauty of middle-aged women; I never thought it was of any special value. Like everybody else, I like young women, in the bloom of youth and enthusiasm and health and all of those things. But, when Donne says—this is not an exact quotation; this is as close as I can get from memory—“Not spring nor summer beauty has such grace / As I have seen in one autumnal face,” I started wanting to look at more “autumnal” faces. And I have. This is not something that prompts some kind of an attitude or moral stance in me, but it creates interest in something that I might have been missing, that Donne makes possible for me to pay more attention to. And he’s right. I see a lot more in autumnal faces than I did before I read that, because Donne’s language, in expressing that sort of personal observation that he had, sparks that in me, or creates that in me, and, therefore, increases me in some way, deepens me, or however you would want to put it. And that’s the magical power of poetry, to be able to do that.

S: Your statement about the poem not creating a moral stance in you brings up another question. What is the connection between morality and poetry?

D: Oh, that’s a subject that has entertained the ages. I don’t have any fixed notion of what it might be. Morality can be, and usually is, construed in a very narrow sense. It means morality according to the dictates of a code of behavior or mores or law or religious sanction or something of that sort. But I think as far as poetry is concerned, a lot of poetry preaches and is admittedly didactic.

Some of it is sort of surreptitiously didactic. But it seems to me that whatever morality there is in poetry has to do with the energizing of the human spirit and enabling it to sense more, to feel more, and to understand more.

S: You said once in a review of another poet’s work that “a sense of the sacred…is probably the most important quality that poetry can possess.” You also said in an interview that you have been called a “religious poet” yourself. In what ways would you describe yourself either as or not as a religious poet?

D: I’m not any sort of a traditional religionist, but, if I were to be called religious, it would have to be because of the attitude I have toward the natural world, what some would call God’s creation. I suppose I could qualify as being sort of a pantheist in the sense of believing that everything that exists is considered as divine or part of the divine being. And, certainly, I look out at the starry heavens and down at the grass blades, and I think, “Something made all this, and whatever did it is worthy of my worship—whatever—whether it has any concern with me personally or not, which I doubt if it does.” It still is a remarkable thing to have done, to have created this universe just as it is. The abiding question, though, about all of that is, why is it done this way? Why is this the way it is rather than some other way? But, there must be some reason why it is this way. Or maybe, that’s just what happened and how it happened to be.

S: Is that part of the poet’s task, to ponder that?

D: I don’t know. I don’t really ponder it openly or in a one-on-one confrontational way, but I suppose it feeds into a good deal of what I write, without my being necessarily conscious of it. It’s a question not so much of a set of beliefs, as it is a kind of an attitude.

S: You’ve reviewed a lot of religious poets, what does it mean to be a religious poet in our time?

D: A lot of them are, say, like Thomas Merton, for example, sort of special pleaders for their version of religion, and I can’t connect with that because I’m not of their belief. They are either trying to confirm me in the belief that I might have that would be similar to theirs or identical to theirs, or they are trying to convert me to theirs, and I resist that also. However, the whole problem of belief, whether or not you have to believe exactly what a poet believes in order to appreciate his poetry, is not necessarily true. I’m not a Roman Catholic and I like the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins very much indeed, but the religious emphasis is the part of it I like the least. His idea of God being present in all things is more to my liking, but the business about Mary and Jesus and the rest of the Christian machinery, I don’t really respond to that. I realize it’s important to the Western culture that I grew up in—I know all that; every-

body does who did grow up in it—but it doesn’t really hit me deep, at least as far as I’m concerned, as far as I can tell it doesn’t. It doesn’t connect with any vital center in me, and there it is. I mean, it just doesn’t. People talking religion, like these people on television, these revivalists and all that, they make me nervous. They’re telling me, “Now God doesn’t want this, or God wants you to do so-and-so.” The first and only question I ever ask is, “How do they know?” Well, they say, “because the Bible says so,” but the Bible says a lot of things that I am foursquare against. One of them is the notion of revenge. I think that’s extremely, extremely destructive, and the Old Testament is full of it—the main avenger being the Lord, who wiped out whole populations for some little trivial transgression or inflicted these terrible, terrible physical torments on people, like Job, because of very little or nothing. That’s too irrational for me, and too cruel. It doesn’t speak of a temperament that I would want God, or any God of mine, to have—that extreme emphasis on revenge. That’s a very primitive human emotion and very strong, but it shouldn’t be encouraged and especially not by a book, the Bible, which purports to teach people to be forbearing and sympathetic with each other. To tell people that they should be sympathetic and forgiving on the one hand and seek revenge on the other, or to tell them that the Lord seeks revenge—“Vengeance is mine”—it’s contradictory, and it’s just a question of what you want to believe, because it’s convenient for you or because your temperament is more congenial to it, or some other reason. This is a personal matter.

S: I have one other question for you along these lines, more along the lines of cultural influences. One of your most famous and complex poems, “May Day Sermon,” is written in the form of a sermon, and your own poetry readings, your barnstorming for poetry, might even be seen as a type of revival meeting for poetry.

D: Well, I don’t know. I never really looked at it that way, but I can see how that might come up, except that I’m not trying to convert anybody to anything.

S: Except maybe poetry.

D: Well, just to acknowledge their own sensibility and the connection that it has with words. That’s really all.

S: Were there any specific influences in your past, specific experiences with churches or certain types of preaching, that shaped your writing?

D: No, they never made any sort of impression upon me at all, hardly any. I have the usual guilt feelings that any Christian child does about sin and punishment. I never thought about rewards. I don’t think any child ever thinks about the rewards of going to heaven. They think about the punishments that God

is going to inflict on them for doing this or not doing that. The Catholic religion is especially bad about that. Are you a Catholic?

S: No.

D: All you have to do is read James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist to see how bad that can really get in warping a child’s sensibility and filling him full of guilt about the most natural things in his whole experience. Religions are all shot through with guilt or giving the child, the young person, a feeling of guilt about almost anything he does. And one should not live that way. I believe in joy, myself, and responsiveness and participation in the on-go of the life process and not in hanging up in a corner mumbling prayers and asking to be forgiven for something that was perfectly natural, that’s built into your nature as a natural part of it, such as the sexual urge which enables the race to perpetuate itself. But, to call that original sin and to say that you’re condemned to hell even by the very fact of being born, because of sin back somewhere in some cloud cuckoo-land where a snake talked and caused a woman to eat an apple—that’s the stuff not of religion, but of the animated cartoon, as far as I’m concerned. That’s too absurd to be believed. Original sin. Original sin. I think of plenty of things as bad and wrong, but in the religious sense to call them sinful seems to me to be irrelevant. However, it hasn’t been irrelevant for thousands of years. Look how many people have been martyred and burned at the stake and dismembered and boiled in oil and all kinds of things, being punished as heretics for one religious transgression or another, or alleged transgression, all in the name of religion. Or, look at the wars, the Crusades, and all that—all the hideous business that has been done in the name of religion. And you look at Northern Ireland now, the Catholics and the Protestants fighting it out, all in the name of the Prince of Peace. Now there’s a paradox that’s very difficult to resolve.

S: Are there any particular things that you drew on for the type of sermonic rhetoric or language found in “May Day Sermon”?

D: No, I don’t think so. “May Day Sermon,” which is probably my best poem, or surely one of them, derives from the primitive Baptist beliefs in sin, especially sexual sin, prevalent in those mountain enclaves up in Appalachia—you hear a lot of that up there. But, it’s actually an “anti-sermon” sermon. It’s against what the previous sermons have been stressing—sin and denying your own nature—in this case, the girl denying her womanhood because of her father’s fanatical religiosity, the Baptist version of what used to be called “zeal” in the eighteenth century, what we would call fanaticism. It has to do with the natural instincts—the woman preacher is telling the women of Gilmer County to throw off the yoke of sin and religious interdiction and become full women; to realize their womanhood and not thwart it and truncate it and kill it off in

the name of some false ideal of sin; to rise up in their socks on May Day and acknowledge their womanhood, go with the natural flow of nature, turn the animals loose in the barn, let them be wild creatures.

S: That poem certainly does have the feel of a sermon about it. The language captures very well that kind of rhetoric.

D: You ought to see Bridget Hanley do that on stage. If you ever have a chance, if they bring it down here, you must see it. She is just spellbindingly good.

S: I’m changing gears just a little bit. I wanted to ask you two or three questions about your criticism. In the “Preface” to Babel to Byzantium, you say that you don’t believe that you have any “system of evaluation” which you apply consistently as a critic—do you still believe that? And what might be some of the consistent ideas or standards of judgment in your criticism?

D: In mine? I don’t know. Two things—the individual imagination and the skill in getting it down in terms of verbal communication. First, the imaginative outlook—I suppose you could call it the vision of the person—and, second, the articulation of it, that means the language. That’s really all I need. But somebody else might think something is imaginative that I don’t, or I might think something is imaginative that they don’t. I mean, this business of absolute standards, the kind of thing that Yvor Winters tries to impose, is absurd. It kills—that’s the death of poetry. That’s the death of any real creative instinct, and it’s the reduction of poetry to a standard, to a format. And that’s the last thing you want it to be, or so I feel. And if you look at all the things that Winters admires so much, you’ll see how similar they are to each other. There’s no individuality. There’s hardly any difference between them. I mean, you can’t tell a Robert Bridges poem from a Sturge Moore poem. They have the same preoccupations; they have the same themes and the same diction, and it’s foolish to assert that that’s the only way poetry can go, because it isn’t. There are a million gates open besides just that one little one.

S: What aspects of contemporary poetry do you find yourself at odds with?

D: Any form of preaching or proselytizing—that and the denial of true imagination in favor of gush, emotional slither, or emotional display. There are people who confess, or write so-called confessional poetry, like Lowell, who are good, who are convincing. And there are others who do the same things who are just embarrassing, people like Ginsberg, who’s a joke. But again, it depends on who’s doing it and how much talent and insight they bring to it. Two poets can do the same thing, or aim at doing the same thing, and one will be good and the other won’t. The difference is the difference in talent.

And that alone can tell of his insight plus technique. But mainly insight. It’s seeing things a certain way.

S: So, the ability to communicate that individual imagination is most important.

D: Yes. Wherever it may be found, that’s the main thing, that’s the main thing. And the wonderful thing about poetry is that there are so many ways to say things. There are so many ways of taking the world, or any aspect of the world, so many differences. I mean, a student can say things that are just as amazing as anything that William Blake can say. They don’t often do it, but it’s not only theoretically possible, it’s actually possible. The reason that we think of Blake as more of a poet, or certainly a very valuable poet, is that he did more of it, you know, than most other people could do, and it’s of a generally high level of vision, of seeing things in a way that you never knew it was possible to see them, unless you saw him see them. You know? A great deal of Wordsworth, almost all of him, you don’t feel that about. You feel like he’s a rather plodding, ordinary fellow with no great amount of insight into anything much. The best of Wordsworth, almost everything that’s good in Wordsworth, is in the “Tintern Abbey” poem and in parts of the first few books of the “Prelude.” The rest of it is a dead, dead weight, and it’s just going on and on without having anything to say, or repeating the same thing. He certainly has serious claims to being the dullest poet in the language—and for such great stretches. But he has an ability in a few places to have that uniqueness. And he does have it, but not often, and just for a few years of his life, maybe four, five, or six years. The rest of it is officialdom. Official poetry. And so commonplace. You just have the feeling of somebody going on and on despite everything. And it’s painful to read it. It would be painful if it were not so soporific. Just as sort of a test case, I read through a couple of those long poems like “The Excursion” and “The Recluse,” just to see if I could get through them—and I did get through them—sheer willpower. And occasionally there will be a little something that seems to be wanting to get said, just a little bit, you know, and then the waves of ennui envelope it and it’s lost for the next eighty pages. Double pages. You know, two columns on one page, like so many scholarly books are. It’s just gone—I don’t understand the attention paid to him. He’s just one that I think is so terribly overrated. But there are lots of those throughout English poetry. He’s one that I just don’t see—there are certain poets that just exist in the blind spot in your eye. You just can’t see them. He’s one. And Robert Graves is another one—he has not a speck of imagination. William Carlos Williams is another. He never sees anything but the most obvious thing about the subject. And I’m sure he would say, “well that’s

the main thing about it. It’s the most obvious that’s the subject itself.” Not necessarily. That’s too easy.

S: You just taught today. How do you seek to bring out that sense of the unique imagination in your students.

D: Well, in the things that they hand in, to try to point out the places in their own texts, their own poems, where I think this seems to happen—and why it does in this particular place, I mean how it does. What we try to do in that class, especially, is to develop their critical, or self-critical, sense so that they will know when they’ve got something good and when they haven’t and not just have it all, more or less, at the same level because they wrote it. They need to be able to distinguish the good and bad in their own work and promote the good and discourage the bad. If you can give them that, or even get them started to thinking about things that way, you’ve done a lot for them.

S: You’ve said before that to “be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.”

D: It is.

S: In what ways should poetry be “precise” and in what ways should it be “reckless”?

D: Well, it should be precise in the kind of emotional precision it possesses. Let me give you an example. Let me think of something. I can give you an example from the French poet, André Freneaux, who says—this is just a rough translation—“If I could go forward with the falcon on my fist, I would know what to do.” Now, you’ve got a very precise picture of a guy with a falcon on his fist, or wrist, going along like that, but why should there be any connection between having the bird on his wrist and him knowing what to do in presumably any situation? The answer is that there’s not any connection, except you feel that there might be one. You know? It might be that the falcon would imply that he was a very bold person, or that he was taking the boldness and aggressiveness from the bird and using it to apply to other situations, or that he was somebody who could control power, you know, or something like that. All those things might be possible, but he doesn’t say any of those things—but they are implied, and the line hits you with all of the possible implications that are available to you personally. “If I could go forward, or go along, with a falcon on my fist, I would know what to do.” That would be a good epitaph for somebody, wouldn’t it, on a gravestone? But the precision of the images there—a guy just going through life is like going through a crowd of people with a falcon, and with an expression on his face of confidence. If you were filming it, you would know what to do. But, that’s what I meant. The reck-

lessness is in putting the man with the falcon on his wrist, or fist, and knowing what to do together as though they belong together. That’s reckless, that’s unusual. But it’s also precise enough to get an exact image.

S: It’s like the “adagios of islands.”

D: Yeah, yeah, sure.

S: Whose line is that?

D: Hart Crane. It has analogies to that. Yeah. Sure.

S: I just have a few other questions, about three more.

D: Sure. Is this getting what you want?

S: It is. Very much so. You’ve said that your father read famous trial speeches to you when you were growing up which might have given you a liking for words, that the War gave your poetry “desperation and intensity,” and that Dr. Monroe Spears at Vanderbilt helped you understand the “creative possibilities of the lie.”

D: And also of form.

S: What do you think have been the most important influences on your views of what is possible through language?

D: Invention is the name of the game—to invent around an idea or an image and take what comes to you thereby and know what to do with it. And then do it. That’s the main thing, I think. You have to invent, or if you don’t invent, you have to find some way of accepting what comes into the mind willy-nilly, or just by chance, or by dreams, or by observation, or by however it impinges on your mind, however it gets in your mind, by whatever means. Because a lot does—sitting in this room for thirty seconds, a million impressions come to you, just as many as you can possibly imagine. You couldn’t recall what is going on in this room as I speak. You couldn’t record that in a million years. There’s so much there. But it’s a poet’s business to pick out the ones that are the most revealing, and the most pregnant, or that yield the most in the way of interest and insight. And that’s largely a matter of intuition. It’s just how you feel it. You don’t have to reason it out. Sometimes it helps if you do try to reason it out. But all those contingencies about having the falcon on the wrist and the imagery and so on are not the main thing. The main thing is the whole proposition. “If I could go forward with the falcon on my wrist, I would know what to do.” There is something beyond any of the formulations that I gave as a result of the exercise of reason. There’s something beyond that that’s not explained that is maybe the truly poetic thing about it, that’s beyond explana-

tion, that no amount rationality will ever solve or, as I would say, tame. It’s sort of a will-of-the-wisp, fox-fire type of great illusion or something.

S: This question maybe comes a little bit out of left field. In what ways would you classify yourself as a romantic, modern, or post-modern writer?

D: I don’t know, I don’t much take to classifications of any sort. I have, I suppose, the romantic propensity to expand and explore, to try out. To get back to our friend Wordsworth in one of his good phrases—“unknown modes of being”—that appeals to me very much. But I have the classicist’s very severe self-questioning quality that makes me subject everything I write to a very intense scrutiny, including intuitive scrutiny, to determine whether it’s right or not—not whether it’s good or not—but whether it’s right, whether it seems right or even inevitable, and also unforeseen, or maybe unforeseeable. Those are the things that I look for and try to promote. I was just reading some of my early poems that are coming out in this new book Striking In, and I must have the smallest vocabulary of almost any poet, or at least I surely did in those days. I hardly ever use a word for which the meaning is not immediately ascertainable. I don’t do like Hart Crane and use words like “incunabula” and that sort of thing, or “corymbulous.” That scares me, and it impresses me when they do it, but I know it’s not right for me, because I just ain’t going that way—I mean my mind doesn’t seek that sort of thing out. Or “apodictic”—words of that sort that you have to look up. I don’t avoid that; if I knew more of them, I might use them, but I don’t know really very many. I’m given to formulating things in relatively simple statements, and it seems to work better for me in that it’s more direct. I don’t want to have anybody reading a line of poetry of mine and having to look up “incunabula,” because that would disturb the thrust of it. I want it to go, and keep going, you know?

S: So that the words don’t interfere with the emotional thrust of the poem.

D: That’s right; they help it. That’s exactly right. “Corymbulous.” But you can be very obscure in simple words also, like Shelley when he describes something—I think it’s a mountain peak he’s talking about; you can never tell with him—as “pinnacles dim in the intense inane.” The “intense inane.” We think of inane as a very negative sort of word. What would that mean to you, generally, to speak of something as inane? Beneath notice or so much of a cliché that it’s sort of negligible, that’s it’s not even worth giving another thought to—that’s inane—naive in the wrong sense, dumb, stupid. What an inane thing to say, you know? But “pinnacle dim in the intense inane” is using inane in another way than that, and how in the world can inanity be intense? That is really very curious. Now it may be curious and yield insight, or it can be just curious period. The “intense inane.”

Somebody ought to write a book of literary criticism called the “Intense Inane,” an examination of several writers under that rubric.

S: I think we probably have a lot of that already.

D: Yeah. The “intense inane.” We’ve got plenty of them that are inane, but that doesn’t say how intense they are.

S: I have another question. You say in Self-Interviews that “[you] have only one rule of thumb about what will eventually wind up as a subject of a poem: something that keeps recurring to [you] without any apparent reason.”

D: That’s right. I’ll stick right with that.

S: What are the kinds of subjects that won’t leave you alone now?

D: Now? Oh, I don’t know. Right now? Oh, gosh…I’m trying to conjure something up that has that quality, but nothing comes to me right now. I don’t know.

S: That’s the kind of thing that probably strikes you at some particular moment. How do you know when you are onto a subject like that?

D: Well, intuition. Feeling. When you get some positive response to something…are you talking about when you’re writing it or when you read what somebody else has written?

S: When you’re writing.

D: When you’re writing it. If the feeling is positive, you have two feelings about it. You either feel like I think this is right or you have the feeling I know it’s right, this is what I want. In fact, if you’re very lucky, you think, this is better than what I wanted. That’s the true reward, when something is really better than what you had in mind when you started to write it. Some word, rhythm, some metaphor, something comes to you. I had something happen working with some of these early poems. I was writing a poem about Robert Frost, whom I don’t really care much for, and even less as a man, but I had a rather nice afternoon with him in Florida in 1955. We walked along beside the ocean, and we talked about some things that were personal to him. We talked about how much the English poet Edward Thomas had meant to him. He said, “he’s the only human being that I ever truly loved.” I thought this was strange—this old man, he’s got a wife and children, and this other guy was sort of a journeyman nature writer, who aspired to be a poet, and Frost sort of brought him out as a poet, and Thomas wrote a couple of books of poems and then was killed in the First World War. But, Thomas was a writer on rural subjects, and he was writing about horses and had a reference to the “team’s head brass.” I don’t know what “head brass” is on a horse’s head, what kind of accouterment

or equipment it is. I don’t know that much about horses and what they wear. I would think it had something to do with work horses or plow horses or something like that, but I don’t really know. But the “team’s head brass” struck me as a phrase and, in writing the poem about walking around with Robert Frost, I took that line or that image from Edward Thomas as one of the things that might have been instrumental in the solidification of the friendship between Frost and Thomas. And, I felt like since I did feel that that might be so as we were walking along the beach at sundown, that I might have something of the same sort of splash of intuition that maybe they had, or maybe Thomas had, or maybe Thomas had because of Frost, or something like that, and then the phrase came to me: “a horse-headed flash in the sun.” I thought, yeah, that’s what I want to put right here in the poem. And that’s what I wanted. And I hadn’t thought of it before. It’s a striking image in itself, even if it didn’t refer to this thing. You don’t likely think of a flash from the sun having the shape of a horse’s head.

S: It also fits in nicely with the image of the sun being pulled by a chariot with horses, which brings in a lot of other things.

D: That’s exactly right. I thought of all that later. But first it was just the image of a “horse-headed flash.” And that’s the kind of thing I mean, that comes to you. You know it’s what you want. It’s something that was not in the poem, but it focused a lot of what was already in the poem that hadn’t previously had any reference to anything like that. It just came in. This is what I’m talking about, and you have to know it when it comes.

S: I guess you have to develop that intuition.

D: Yeah, well you do develop it. And it will develop. It’s just like the exercise of any other faculty. It’s like playing a musical instrument—your motor circuits get so grooved around doing it that the more you do it, the more you can do it. The more material it’ll take in, the wider it’ll go, the deeper it’ll go, until you realize finally that the supply of things available to you is quite literally endless and the combinations of things—like the sun and horses and brass and light and these two men, one an old man and the other dead sixty, seventy years ago—all come into one flash, one “horse-headed” flash. I mean, it’s just something that’s given to you. You don’t know how it comes out of you, and, somehow or other, it seems to come from somewhere else at the same time. But that’s beyond human comprehension. It certainly is far beyond mine. It’s just beyond. A poet, I think, is somebody who knows enough not to question it and not to analyze it too much, but just to know that it’s right and to try to find out the best possible use to be had from it.

S: One last question on this. You’ve experimented a lot with forms…

D: Yeah, sure. I have. And I urge the students to do that too. I’m sorry that we couldn’t have about another two or three sessions of the first part of the course, which I call the course in forms, because I wanted them to invent one, you know, like Hardy used to do. You go through Hardy’s poems and you see a lot of poems that you’ve never seen before, and you’ve never seen them before because they didn’t exist before. He just made them up. He was an inveterate tinkerer with language, like a backyard carpenter putting chicken coops together in different ways. You could have a long line, a short line, a medium line, and then another long, then a short one or a medium one, and then end with the short one, and it will make them rhyme this way—this rhymes with this, and this one with this, and these two rhyme, and maybe these three rhyme. You can juggle it anyway you want. And then you commit yourself to seeing what words you can put down that would fulfill those conditions, that would satisfy those conditions. And that’s a lot of fun. You know? And Hardy must have had a lot of fun doing this because you look through his collected poems and you find a lot of forms that you would never see anywhere else, because he just invented them, he just made them up. Nobody has followed them. Nobody did it but him, like that famous one about the Titanic, “The Convergence of the Twain.” That would be one of them. You never saw that used anywhere but in that one poem. He has a couple of short lines and then this real long line—curious looking on the page. You say, why would he do it that way? And you just have to answer, because he wanted to. He felt like trying it out to see what would happen if he did. And that poem is what happened.

S: What are you currently experimenting with?

D: I think I may go back to do some formal verse before I go to that great anthology in the sky, but, right now, I’m just working with the forms that are something like “May Day Sermon”—I have two or three poems, or really two related poems and one just by itself. The main two are a set of poems called something like “Two Poems on the Survival of the Male Body.” One of them is about weightlifters or bodybuilders on the beach, and the other is about the war, and the third poem, the independent poem, is about painting and an attempt by a painter with Parkinson’s disease to try to recreate the Garden of Eden. It’s just called “Eden.” This is interesting. As I say, I like to go for the outlandish some of the time. “Falling” is outlandish, “May Day Sermon” is outlandish, “The Eye-Beaters” is outlandish—but I like to work out close to the margin of what has been done, or what I have done, and try to push it out a little more. Get out there where nobody can help you, where there’s not any

precedent—that’s the thing that appeals to me. The sense of adventure and exploration is very strong with me. I think the adventurousness of writing is one of the nicest things about it. Taking chances. And knowing when you’re wrong! I think a writer should reserve the right to be wrong, as wrong as possible. He should not discount that. He shouldn’t try like Yvor Winters to adhere to a desperately narrow little path, where he knows he can satisfy the conditions. I don’t do that. I like to go out where there may not be any conditions to satisfy or the conditions are beyond being satisfied, by anybody or anything. It’s like Bix Beiderbecke trying to hit the impossible note on the horn. The sound doesn’t exist; it’s beyond all sounds, couldn’t be done. But you are tantalized by the possibility of it. Or it’s like Rilke’s unicorn: “it fed not on grain, but on the possibility of meal.” Isn’t that good?

S: That is good.

D: The unicorn, you know, the mythical animal: “It fed not on grain, but on the possibility of meal.” That’s what poetry can be after—the unattainable. I don’t believe in perfection, in poetry or anything else. Perfection is the equivalent of the zero on the Kelvin scale, the point at which all molecular motion stops—it’s frozen, dead, moveless, unchangeable. I like there to be a sense of flow and change and even of the unfinished, or the unfinishable, about what I do, or of the poem going on beyond where the actual poem ends, you know? To come out of chaos and to make a temporary sort of stand at order and form and then just drift back into chaos, sort of like a spotlight on something, in universal darkness. I hope you can follow all of this. I can’t.

S: Well, I can, I think. Is there anything that you’d like to add to what you’ve already said?

D: No, that’s as much as I can say. I can’t think of anything more.

S: Well, thank you very much.

D: Sure.

S: I’ve enjoyed coming out and talking with you.

D: Yeah, you are certainly always welcome. Let’s go out and get some soup or something.

S: Let’s do that.

D: Julie’s. Do you know Julie’s Place?

S: I know the name, but I haven’t been there before.

__________

Smith, Randy. “James Dickey Interview”

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