I
“You don’t make money writing poetry” was one of those abrupt and transformative lines that James Dickey slipped into the end of one of his fascinating lectures while I attended USC graduate school circa 1987-91. Toward the end of my studies there, after the fearsome Black Monday Stock Market crash of ’87, and the ensuing USC budget angst and cuts, money for living was becoming a personal concern as the reality of getting a job in a tough market became more ominous.
That admonition was part taunt, joke, probe, and perhaps an unintentional reflective entrance into the character of Jim, who knew students cocooned in the platonic ether of graduate studies were in most instances kept alive by a perilously thin veneer of penurious departmental stipends. While I did not have to grovel for money (thanks Prof Keen Butterworth), and partially supported myself through summer work at a small family shipyard in Maine, I well knew that, shortly, it would soon be me and the commodity world outside of college. The idea of transforming my pen from key to the abstract universe to profiteer unit was shocking and repulsive. The thrill of graduate school was not gone, but it certainly had been tempered by questionable economic conditions. The Eden of worry-free scholarly delights was ending.
II
As he presented himself in class, Dickey was at once intellectually enormous, encompassing; he could simultaneously focus upon the most refined detail of the Arts or Scholarly abstractions. The slow barrage of scintillating ideas saturated and moved the listener to other worlds: the effect was disorienting, exhilarating, epiphanic or, at times, confusing. Dickey exercised rhetorical sequences for the toughest mental workout of a student’s life; if he lessened the intensity, you breathed a sigh of relief for the easy grasp. The excursions gave entrance to a vast, meaningful world of letters; the enormity of his presented disciplines provoked urgency and quest. He was both Socratic and apocalyptic, but the supreme gift was pleasure and, at times, humor.
My favorite segment of a Dickey lecture was when the ad man or carney barker magically appeared, and gag routines which got belly laughs were incorporated into his oral delivery in classes. Though working a rigorous writing and academic schedule, Jim had the wit and punch lines characteristic of a road-hardened insurance salesman. If a particular critic or writer irritated, piqued, or attacked him, and had an exposed weakness, it became comedic material for the class. Critics have accused Dickey, perhaps rightfully so, of the usual list of social offenses. Looking back, I remember that he was fond of recounting Dylan Thomas’ penchant for pissing in flower pots and other outrageous behaviors of writers and critics; but his humor was wickedly hilarious and often times pointed and instructive. I was a fan of Anne Sexton and the Confessional poets, but Confessional Gravitas with Sexton was forever removed by three words: “Rag Time Annie.” I still can’t get them out of my head; Dickey of course was taking a humorous crack at the indulgent bodily narcissism of Sexton. In the late eighties at a Strode Tower elevator on the fourth floor, in strolled a smiling James Dickey:
“How is it going, Spiro?”
“Fine Jim, classes are ok.”
“Doing anything else?”
“I’m dating an architect.”
“She will erect you” (dead pan delivery).
I laughed all the way to Five Points, and still marvel at the perfect execution in front of a gaggle of left leaning academics. The architect is long gone.
III
Twenty-two years later, I do miss the active presence of James Dickey, of knowing he was there and a force to be reckoned with, pushing the boundaries of poetry. There is a comfort in the lessening of political attacks against him, and movement towards canonizing his achievement. The simple pronouncement, “You don’t make money writing poetry,” is multitudinous. Certainly it was a common-sense admonition regarding students’ naiveté about writing success after graduate school. Dickey was, however, very aware of the degrading impact of politics and consumerism on culture; he came from the commercial world. His push to elevate poetry to supreme human utterance could be construed as the individual’s last stand against a hegemonic corporate oligarchy. The terrible and humiliating irony of our age is that articulation is robbed from humanity by the corporatized state and sold back to it through commercial media as a (false) consciousness. The propagandized cycle of consume and destroy has not only eroded and undermined democracy; Fordian mass production and commodification of nature has removed us from, as Dickey would put it, our primordial relationship with the Earth. The precious balance with nature has been lost. I would argue that Poetry, as the raw, uncompromised voice of the human being, is necessarily a resistance to the dehumanizing forces of the corporate state. For James Dickey the cultural function of poetry is a method of re-entrance to nature and, consequently, to ourselves.
