In the fall of 1991, I entered my second year as a master’s candidate in English at the University of South Carolina and enrolled in James Dickey’s “Seminar in Verse Composition: Part One” (ENGL 600). At the time, fresh out of banking and new to the field of English, I was not sure that I knew what Dickey looked like or even that I had seen him on campus, but his reputation (and a few apocryphal stories) preceded my laying eyes on him. So, with some mixture of fear, awe, excitement, and curiosity, I arrived early with other students at room 312 of the Humanities Classroom Building on the first day of class that August and waited for Dickey. In my memory, we waited and waited and waited for Dickey to arrive—tension and anticipation building—but I am not sure that this really happened. I am, however, sure about the next part. One moment, students chatted and laughed casually; the doorway to the room was empty—the next, a large (and in my memory, larger-than-life) camouflaged man filled the door and hobbled into the room carrying two huge canvas suitcases. At this point, student chatter ceased.
I hope my powers of description do not fail me now because it is important for you to see (and experience) what I did that day—Dickey, a somewhat stooped, seventy-ish, but still bear-sized, man with thinning, gray-white hair swept back from his forehead. He wears a white safari hat, camouflaged t-shirt, faded blue jeans, leather belt and CSA belt buckle, two expedition-style watches, a large hieroglyphic silver ring, an intricately designed pendant on a long chain, and running shoes—with the entire end of one shoe cut off or blown away (sole and all) so that his white-socked toes stick through (I wondered to myself if he had battled some wild USC Horseshoe animal on the way to class.). Favoring his sore foot, he limps through complete student silence to the front of the seminar table, to the chair we all instinctively knew to save for him. He puts down the two large suitcases, unzips them, and removes books—one, two, and three at a time—placing them in piles at his end of the table. Soon he empties one suitcase, and—still in utter silence—begins working on the other one. He seems to be building a wall, a temple, or a fortress. I notice, as others do, that he is yet to look at anyone in the room. I am sweating—though I do not remember an air-conditioner problem that day. I begin to wonder if Dickey knows that other people are in the room. Eventually, he unloads both suitcases, and I am ready for the relief of class commencing. However, instead of sitting down, Dickey hobbles to a window and stares out toward the old part of campus and the back of the museum.
I do not think I exaggerate to say that Dickey stood wordless by that window for two or three full minutes. Some brave students risk little smart-ass smiles at one another; however, one girl across the table from me looks sick, or like she might have to drop out of graduate school altogether. Finally, Dickey returns to the head of the table, takes his seat, clears a path between the books, and does what even to this day makes me nervous when I remember it—he stares at each of us, without speaking and without smiling, for fifteen or twenty seconds apiece. By this time, the silence in the room is palpable; I have begun to wonder if I can control my own bowels; I can tell by the faces of others that I am not alone. Finally—and I mean finally—Dickey breaks his silent stranglehold by singling out one poor guy at the other end of the table and confronting him, “Son, why are you in this class?” In turn, without comment from himself or facial response, Dickey poses that question to each of us, and we each answer, wondering if this is some test for remaining in the class or even at the University. Afterwards, Dickey looked at us all and said (paraphrasing a quotation from Auden I think), “The only reason for being in here is that you like to fool around with words.” That day—and I wonder if it happened literally to someone in that room—Dickey scared the shit out of us.
When I read the announcement for the 2004 SAMLA session on James Dickey, inviting papers dealing with “strategies Dickey used as a teacher in instructing creative writing students,” I thought of the above, somewhat unusual, class ice-breaker and of my overall experience as a Dickey student (completing two courses in Verse Composition and a Survey of British and American Poets). The mercurial environment in Dickey’s creative writing class could be characterized by a number of divergent and contradictory adjectives: unpredictable, supportive, harsh, controlling, free-wheeling, fertile, stifling, energizing, debilitating, awe-inspiring, and fear-inducing. Were these characteristics simply the result of studying under the tutelage of a flamboyant, opinionated, and visionary teacher and writer? Or, can we attribute these to something that Dickey believed about writing’s purpose, process, product, and participants? My argument is this—Dickey’s conduct in the classroom grew, at least in part, out of what he believed about the nature of writing and creativity itself. In a nutshell, Dickey thought of the creative process as a type of heroic journey for all participants—writer, reader, and student—modeled on Van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage. The writer participates directly as a heroic questor; the reader—sometimes against his or her will—participates somewhat vicariously; and the student-as-initiate undergoes a trial by fire on the way to secret knowledge, skill, and membership in the society of writers.
Much scholarship already exists on the heroic quest in Dickey’s work (especially in regard to early poems like “Sleeping Out at Easter” and “The Vegetable King” and the novels Deliverance and To the White Sea), so I will not belabor this point; however, I would like to establish the baseline for this discussion. In what is possibly Dickey’s most important essay, “The Energized Man,” Dickey discusses the feelings that predominate in contemporary suburban middle-class life: “drift,” “purposelessness,” and “genuine malaise”—a “feeling, not only that we are not using our energies properly, as we have been meant to use them, but that we are hardly using them at all” (“Energized Man” 163-64). For Dickey, “poetry” and the “energized man: the man with vivid senses, the man alert to the nuances and meanings of his own experience” (“Energized Man” 164) are the antidotes to drift and malaise. In his earliest notebooks, dating back to 1952 and 1953, Dickey discussed poetry and the creative process in terms related to Van Gennep’s work—Dickey described “art [as] a separation from, contemplation of, reunion with, purification of, insight into, and understanding of experience” (Striking In 101). In 1963, when he reviewed The Morning Song of Lord Zero by Conrad Aiken, Dickey said that writers like Williams, Roethke, and Stafford write poems that have the “curious power to return you to the actual world with a deeper sense of the meanings that lie hidden in it” (Babel 90). According to Dickey, the writer engages in his or her heroic quest through the vehicle of the poem. As Dickey claims in “The Self as Agent,” the poem becomes a “field of response”—a type of reality itself—in which the poet energizes various aspects of himself and from which the poet returns with new insights and truths (Sorties 157). Through this incarnation and testing, the poet (or at least the “I-figure” in the poem) discovers a truth “flowing with energy, meaning, and human feeling” (Sorties 161)—he may even become “godlike” by the end (Sorties 157). By no accident, Dickey titles his collected journal entries and essays Sorties—a military metaphor that is central to his whole conception of the creative process. Every poetic composition represents a “sudden attack or raid” on the springs of meaning, “a flying into combat” against inconsequence, a lone journey into the dark night of the soul where blessing may be wrestled from the angel.
Readers make sorties too—every time they read—and sometimes against their wills. In a two-part interview I completed with Dickey for my dissertation (now published in the Fall 2004 issue of the James Dickey Newsletter), I asked him what advice he would give to readers of Deliverance. Dickey says: “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” (“Interview: Part One” 2). Now that’s quite a request when you are reading something like Deliverance—I’m not sure I want to go through what Lewis, Bobby, Ed, and Drew went through—especially what one of them went through. Previous to this question in the interview, Dickey says: “The whole [book] is quite consciously modeled on Van Gennep’s Les Rites de Passage, the three-step journey of the hero: the withdrawal from life…the penetration to a source of power…and the life-enhancing return” (“Interview: Part One” 1). So, Dickey wants his reader to go with Ed—in a sense to be Ed—on the journey down the Cahulawassee. In fact, Dickey says that he means to swallow his reader much like the river and river experience swallow Ed—baptizing him in such a way that he comes out a new man: “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” (“Interview: Part One” 3). Of all things, standing off at a safe distance definitely is not possible while reading Deliverance—a book that Dickey himself describes as a “page-turner” (“Interview: Part One” 1). The current and force of the narrative pull you in and drag you to places you do not necessarily want to be, cause you to witness things you do not necessarily want to see. [Think too of reading a Dickey poem like “The Sheep Child”—especially in front of a class—you do not want to keep going, but you cannot stop reading.] In this place of testing, this “field of response”—in the “maw of the monster”—the reader is revitalized in much the same way as the writer. As Dickey says: “The writer 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” (“Interview: Part One” 3).
Finally to the real subject at hand—Dickey’s classroom as a type of heroic journey itself, a field of response where the novice-writer-initiate is tested and vitalized. At least two aspects of this classroom experience seem significant: the structure of Dickey’s year-long seminar in verse composition and the posture of Dickey as teacher. As for structure, the first semester course (ENGL 600) required students to work in various traditional forms. I remember writing couplets, sonnets, villanelles, ballads, rhymed quatrains, and sestinas. As he said in class once, Dickey believed in “working out” with forms, much like a body-builder lifts weights or a hunter practices at the archery range. In fact, speaking metaphorically, Dickey says that the strength of the poem—and by extension, the strength of the writer—comes from the form itself: “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” (“Interview: Part One” 10). In a way, Dickey used the first semester of verse composition to build up the poetic muscles of his students, to fill their quivers, to train them for a journey into places where they would need real strength.
Students encountered that place requiring real strength during the second semester of verse composition (ENGL 601)—here, they went into the “maw of the monster.” What is a “maw” anyway?—“the mouth, throat, or stomach, especially of a voracious carnivore.” Metaphorically, it could represent the unconscious, the shadow self, the source of creativity—or a confrontation with inconsequence, purposelessness, taboo, or death—to name a few possibilities. I know that I was sucked into some kind of “maw” on my first-day-of class experience with Dickey. When I took the second-semester verse writing course during the spring of 1993, Dickey required us to begin the workshop with prose records of several dreams—then each of us chose one dream to work on the rest of the semester as a poem, revising it over and over again. Apparently, in past years, students did not escape with such a relatively benign assignment. David Havird records his 1975 experience in the essay “In and Out of Class with James Dickey”:
The spring semester stresses revision. For the first assignment the student submits two prose narratives—of a dream and a masturbation fantasy—and a free association. Dickey then chooses for each student the most inventive one of these—the one that seems to promise a poem. The process of revision, which begins with the isolation of evocative diction and arresting images, then commences. (469)
I’m not sure that I want to imagine some of those “arresting images”—I certainly would not want Dickey to choose the narrative that I had to shape into a poem week after embarrassing week. But here maybe is evidence of the method behind the madness—the workout with forms during the first semester trained students for the “penetration to a source of power” (no pun intended, but accepted for what it’s worth) during the second semester. And all of this was not lost on Havird. In the same reminiscence, he says:
Dickey embodied the allure of forbidden knowledge. We were emboldened by his authority to descend into those shadowy, profane settings within our own unconscious psyches. There we would discover our divinity. Whether its character was fiendishly bestial or Messianic—it did not matter. We had no doubt that we would not merely survive the catabasis, but emerge intensified. (460)
The quest of writer, reader, and student alike leads to the energized, intensified man. As Dickey said in a 1965 interview: “Essentially, the most exciting thing for a writer, especially a young writer, is to get as many of [his contradictory personalities] energized as he can, to let the monster speak as well as the prospective husband…” (Voiced Connections 24). As Dickey said about his second-semester students: “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 it go! Let it go! Say what comes into your mind—anything, everything! No reason for the process ever to stop…” (“Interview: Part One” 25).
Finally, we come to the posture of Dickey-as-teacher. In and out of class, he presented himself as the master, the guide, the one who leads his pupils through the darkness to light. I do not mean to claim too much for Dickey—to say that every off-the-wall remark or alcohol-inspired classroom antic had some well-thought-out purpose behind it, but I do not want to claim too little for him either. Dickey did believe that he was the hero-returned whose repeated sorties into the dark maw of the monster had given him something valuable to offer his initiates. As he says in Self-Interviews:
I think there’s only one justification for any poet teaching, and that is if he thinks he can teach poetry differently from the way it’s always been taught because he secretly believes that he has the philosopher’s stone of poetry and all the other fellows are dusty academics who don’t know what poetry really is…I wouldn’t have the interest or enthusiasm to teach [poetry]—if I didn’t feel that I was the only one who’s ever been privileged to teach it as it really ought to be taught. (Self-Interviews 51)
And Dickey did present himself as the master philosopher. For a reading and discussion of works-in-progress in October 1993 at the University of South Carolina, Dickey asked graduate students to assist him in raising a chair to the top of a long conference table and then climbing himself onto this makeshift throne. One of Dickey’s old tricks, but he made his point and gave us a memorable visual.
From my first day of class and many others, I learned that I was in the presence of something awe-inspiring and even terrifying when I was around Dickey. At times he seemed to be the enlightened guide of Frost’s poem “Directive,” desiring to get us “lost” in our creative quests, leading us through dangers to a pool where we could “drink and be whole again beyond confusion” (379). At other times, he seemed to be a sphinx-like, riddle-posing monster himself. The first time I actually talked to Dickey after class, he immediately took my hand in his and, from his sitting position, looked deep into my eyes and said, “Son, you have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen.” This kind of unpredictable statement (with its strange mixture of genuine compliment, cliched come-on, and homosexual suggestiveness) left me much like events on the first day of class left me—baffled, off-kilter, nervous, and speechless. But I was learning, in an odd way, one of the writer’s most necessary skills—John Keats’s negative capability: the ability to be in “uncertainties, Mysteries, [and] doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Baldick 147). Through his comments on our poems and the example of his own poems, I learned the other part of negative capability—the emptying of self, the imagining of another life from the inside out.
In some ways, Dickey acted as a type of Zen poetry master—teaching us “to transcend technique [and self] so that…art becomes an artless art growing out of the Unconscious” (Suzuki 10). On the last day of my class with him in the spring of 1993, Dickey—already in poor health, probably assuming that he had few classes left to teach, periodically choking with emotion—read to us from the end of Zen in the Art of Archery. [Since, I have learned that Dickey usually read from this work on the last day of his year-long seminar in verse composition, often parading around the classroom with his own bow-and-arrow set to dramatize the reading.] Following is the selection that Dickey read to us. Although Dickey did not do this, I will make two substitutions for the zen master’s original words in order to emphasize my point about how Dickey saw himself, his art, and his students:
I must only warn you of one thing. You have become a different person in the course of these years. For this is what the art of [poetry] means: a profound and far-reaching contest of the [poet] with himself. Perhaps you have hardly noticed it yet, but you will feel it very strongly when you meet your friends and acquaintances again in your own country: things will no longer harmonize as before. You will see with other eyes and measure with other measures. It has happened to me too, and it happens to all who are touched by the spirit of this art. (92)
Then Dickey looked at us in tender silence and said, “Now go.” And we did.
