WAY BACK THEN THE FAMILIAR NOW

I mean like when you find out the dude you've seen at local shows for the past few years was best friends with your girlfriend's brother when they were little dudes. Or like when you find a 2003 issue of Indiana Review in the free box of a bookstore and you discover that it's got poems by some of your now favorite poets.

I'm a booksale stokedbro. Like if its a buck, why not? Sara and I always came out of booksales and thrift stories with at least a sack. Now what? I've got these two big boxes of never-gonna-read famous novels, poetry that didn't strike my heartgut, and anthologies or journals that I've devoured but can't find an excuse to keep. (Side note: I plan to sell these two boxes of books online for CHEAP soon, so eyes open.) After moving home and getting the GOTTA GO pile and the STAY HERE BUDDY pile figured out, I discovered this old copy of Indiana Review: Celebrating 25 Years.

I flipped to the back cover and man oh man what a list: Robin Behn, Nick Carbo, Michael Dickman (Listed as Michael Conrad Dickman), Denise Duhamel, Martin Espada, Mark Halliday, Terrance Hayes, Tony Hoagland, David Kirby, Michael Martone, Gary Soto, David Wagoner, and a bunch of others. I was like WOAH LET'S READ. And I did.

Reading these poems in a journal, eight years after they came out, was a strange process. I recognized the developing voice of Dickman, the earlier voice of Hoagland, the markings of the great beginning of Hayes, and so much more. It was reading beyond the page, but for one of the first times, reading with a significant contemporary gap. I mean I read online magazines and see like Mike Young poems and think about how they compare to the We Are All Good Enough... poems or how the Matt Bell's first ever published story (republished in Volume I of Stoked Journal) developed into the How They Were Found pieces, but never had I'd engaged with a collection nearly a decade old with a bunch of writers whose current work I'm digging now.

Michael Dickman's is probably the most interesting poem to me. A sectioned long poem with left-alignment and long stanza'ed sections, "How To Make Love" shows the poet with the startling images, the fearlessness of well-placed abstractions, the calm unleashing. But along with the listing as "Michael Conrad Dickman" (not sure why that's so weird to me), this poem stretches itself so far that it's actually thin in parts. One thing I've already loved about this Dickman is his ability to deliver so much emotion with such fluidity. As someone still finding his voice, it was cool for me to see someone so noticeable in his current voice trying to find his own early on.

I loved Lighthead by Terrance Hayes, and having seen him read after that book came out, I can say he's a oddly charismatic manpoet. Sometimes he still pushes it too far, too wild outside his comfort zone, like that one list poem about t-shirt ideas. But his poem in this issue "The Blue Etheridge" seems almost an introduction to Hayes as a poet, a strong voice in an interesting poetic climate. Here are two sweet parts of the poem:

Let's just say the parable
of the Negro who uses his dick for a cane
and the parable of the Negro who uses his cane
for a dick convey the same message to me.

AND

But I won't be telling you the story
of the forlorn Negro or the Negro cutthroat
or the Negro Hero or the Negro Tom.
I won't be telling you the story of the night
I died. I believe everything comes back
to music or money.

My favorite poem in the issue is "Sometimes It Takes A Long Time To Get Burned" by Gary Soto, a big-time poet I'm unfortunately not all that familiar with. Perhaps because of that fact, I was able to most engage with the poem itself, singularly. The poem basically talks about a dead guy in a Lincoln and the world revolving without him, not knowing he's dead--a dog barking, construction workers coming nearby. Because of the subject matter and story-telling style--very plain-spoken word choice and syntax and the use of sequence markers (First, Second...)--I marked that it reminded me of Stephen Dobyns. I think I love this poem because like Dobyns, Soto doesn't try to cram too much in there (content or language-wise), but rather illustrates this odd, sad, and deep image and situation without worry about how and why he died or what's gonna happen to him long-term. It's as if Soto is saying DUDE DIED AND THE WORLD KEPT GOING. Which is a harsh reality and I think the third person helps me see that and think about that. The title, however, is heavy-handed. Nonetheless, a sweet sweet poem.

Third, a dog barked. Fourth, a car stopped
And the driver took pictures, then pulled away.
The fog returned with the acids of an industrial laundry
Two miles from the dead man who, when alive, drove past it,
His own shirt starched, his pants done right.

Definitely an old issue of a journal that's sticking around.

OH MICHAEL

In his blurb, a rather lengthy one, for Michael Dickman’s first book, The End of the West, Franz Wright says, “To me, he is one of the younger American poets who are hiddenly heralding the end of the randomness, the glib irony Rilke strenuously warned against, the gratuitous non sequiturs and obscurities for obscurity’s sake which have been fashionable in our poetry over the past couple of decades.” Undoubtedly, he is right about one thing: the idea that Dickman’s poems are without that sense of associative franticness that inhabits much modern writing, including that of Dickman’s brother, Matthew, some of my favorite poets, and even at times myself.

Todd asked me about this blurb, the whole thing, which runs half of the backcover, and I’ve been taking time to digest it. Sure, blurbs are often lame, but I do think Wright brings up some interesting points about Dickman’s writing, but ones that also point to some of the contemporary writing I love and even many of my own poems.
I’ll come right out and say that I do like this book a lot, but honestly, I’m not sure why, as its distinctively outside of my “norm” and also has some glaring weaknesses. However, this book continues to resonate with me each time I’ve read it. Last fall, I read it twice in one weekend, so perplexed by my infatuation with it that I had to read it again. Now, as part of this class, we decided to include it because it is far from my aesthetic, forcing me to looking deeper into the book and my own poetic perspective.

As I contemplate this collection of poems more, I have begun to think of it as one of those air fresheners that shoots out a fresh scent every so often, something so minute that unless you’re looking closely at it, it’s effect can be missed. Still, its consistency and subtle potency keeps the place cozy and clean-smelling for a long while. Maybe, that’s an odd association.

Let me continue then. I think the kind of stuff Wright is talking about feels more like a quick straightening up, a couple swipes of a duster, picking up the magazines and dirty clothes. While for the moment its effective, deep down, things might not be as well-done and successful in the long run. Oh goodness, is this making any sense?

Dickman’s poems are sparse, heavily fragmented, and simple, yet somehow emotionally specific and impactful. I think it’s because he keeps coming at me. Most poems run a few pages, though short in word count. It’s this slow unraveling that seems to get me. Take the first page of “We Did Not Make Ourselves,” which slowly leaks humility onto the page:

We did not make ourselves is one thing
I keep singing into my hands
while falling
asleep

for just a second

before I have to get up and turn on all the lights in the house, one after the
other, like opening an Advent calendar

My brain opening
the chemical miracles in my brain
switching on

I can hear

dogs barking
some trees
last stars

You think you’ll be missed
it won’t last long
I promise

The lack of punctuation, the sparseness of words, the length it travels in such a short space really affects me. His negotiation of images to get to that last stanza, to me, is brilliant.

And, I think that’s where I find myself with Dickman, unable to comprehend how to write like this. Trust me, I’ve tried. I find both beauty and a challenge in attempting to blip through emotions that way.

But at last, I am of the temperament. that wants to run, to drag, to be dragged. Mike Young seems like one of those poets, one that I love, that Wright might point to as random for this type of discursive energy:

"You Know That Wait Means Stay"

Right away there’s thinking. Right away.
No matter how much I want my face to moon
with no contortion, leave all talk to voiceovers.
Hands take after purrs. Nicknames remind us
mostly of the fun inventing them. Every beach
fire is a kind of desperate flag. Cops pull over a
riding lawnmower, and the man won’t turn it off.
We walk the dike that crosses I-91. Headlights
pan like reasons. We’re keeping warm. Cars aren’t
fireflies, which is not even how I feel. “Funny isn’t
the same as being happy,” I tell you. Duh. Neither is
that. A family of tiny arsonists live in burned out
delivery trucks behind your neck. They are your
bad pillow. Hands wobble. It’s never been infinity
with me. Infinity is something I can fist bump.

But, I would be at the defense of Young’s poems because where I’m astounded by Dickman’s concision translating emotion to the page, I am equally enthralled with Young’s thinking, how it is both controlled and wild, natural in the most human of ways. For him to get from this excerpt to this quote, saying, “Sometimes I know that I don’t know what’s going to happen/next, but I know exactly who I’m going to be with when it/does,” is my definition of human thought and feeling combined and captured on the page.

My point wasn’t really to defend Mike Young against a theoretical attacker or to take away from Dickman’s approach. Rather, I wanted to hold Dickman’s style against my poetic worldview to see more, and what I seem to be learning is that Dickman’s book resonates with me because it feels so genuine, as Young’s poem does as well. While I’m not the kind of thinking, feeling human like Dickman, I know those types, and I appreciate the restraint and energy of both styles.

More and more, I’m wanting poems to feel like people, like personalities, like they exist outside the page and the world of literature, whether its an artifice or not. Wright complains that the “randomness” makes “it so difficult to determine whether or not a poet has talent or anything significant to tell us.” Certainly, that particular style runs the risk of getting lost in its action, ending up empty, but I’m realizing that as both a reader and a writer, through being close with a text, with myself, I can find the significance and talent, if it exists, both in myself and others.