I grew up in the Atlanta area, which is not, truth be told, a terribly literary or cultural town. One poet, though, that everyone had an opinion on was James Dickey. The opinion was usually a violent one, and colored by personal dealings with said poet. Everyone had an alcohol-soaked anecdote, whether first or second hand. The Dickey poems I was first introduced to were later Dickey--the wilder free-verse stuff (though I retain a fondness for "The Sheep Child" because of having seen pickled creatures of this sort in the dusty museum of oddities at the State capital), and it was only later that I stumbled onto his earlier work.
I thought we might enjoy a break from the ubiquitous iamb for a bit. One of the interesting things about the books that make up the Early Motion (Wesleyan University Press, 1981) is his work with anapestic rhythms. We tend to think of this as the stuff of light verse. But particularly when divorced from rime, the triple rhythms can have an incantatory, lilting effect, with a sighing fall. (Indeed, Dickey often has short coda lines that feel like the adonic colons of Sapphic stanzas.) The key is not to consciously "scan" them, but read them aloud, and let the rhythms swing into place.
He writes in his preface:
"These poems emerged from what I call a night-rhythm, something felt in pulse not word. HOw this anapestic sound was engendered by other poetry, good or bad--by Tennyson, Swinburne, and also by Poe, Kipling, and Robert Service--I cannot say, except to assert that I had read these poets, and I have always like heavy recurrence of stress. First I heard, then I wrote, and then I began to reason; when I reasoned, I wrote more of the same. The reasoning ran something like this: suppose you have lines like "There's a land where the mountains are nameless,/And the rivers all run God knows where;/There are lives that are erring and aimless,/And deaths that just hang by a hair," and you decide that the level of meaning, compelling as it may be to saloon-keepers and retired postmen, is not good, but that the surge of the rhythm is, what then? What if images, insights, metaphors, evaluations, nightmarish narratives, all of originality and true insight, were put into--or brought into--the self-generating on-go that seems to have existed before any poem and to continue after any actual poem ends? What if these things were tried? What then might be done? What might become?"
Some of the better-known poems from this period include "The Lifeguard" "The Heaven of Animals" and "The Lupanar at Pompei." This is another that intrigues me. Much of it is the music, of course. But also the curious Biblical adumbrations.
The Poisoned Man
When the rattlesnake bit, I lay
In a dream of the country, and dreamed
Day after day of the river,
Where I sat with a jacknife and quickly
Opened my sole to the water.
Blood shed for the sake of one's life
Takes on the hid shape of the channel,
Disappearing under logs and through boulders.
The freezing river poured on
And, as it took hold of my blood,
Lept up round the rocks and boiled over.
I felt that my heart's blood could flow
Unendingly out of the mountain,
Splitting bedrock apart upon redness,
And the current of life at my instep
Give deathlessly as a spring.
Some leaves feel from trees and whirled under.
I saw my struck bloodstream assume,
Inside the cold path of the river,
The inmost routes of a serpent
Through grass, through branches and leaves.
When I rose, the live oaks were ashen
And the wild grass was dead without flame.
Through the blasted cornfield I hobbled,
My foot tied up in my shirt,
And met my old wife in the garden,
Where she reached for a withering apple.
I lay in the country and dreamed
Of the substance and course of the river
While the different colors of fever
Like quilt patches flickered upon me.
At last I arose, with the poison
Gone out of the seam of the scar,
And brought my wife eastward and weeping,
Through the copper fields springing alive
With the promise of harvest for no one.
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