[A. E. Stallings]

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.

[robert mezey]

I like a couple of Dickey's earliest poems, but never
thought he managed that anapestic meter very well---he
just mounts the galloping anapest and holds on for dear
life. Not that I blame him---it's a very tough meter
for serious verse---I just criticize him for choosing
a cadence he didn't know how to handle. (To see a real
master in action, you'd have to go to Hardy, I think.)

[MacArthur]

(The one time I tried to write a trimeter-- something call "Travel Poem"-- was after reading this, and "Night Journey" by Roethke.
I think the lines are a little too end-stopped-- but that may work with the devotional purpose.
I like Dickey's comments above-- I like the poem. My own copy is in a career collection. Dickey edited the Robinson collection in the same series, and wrote a nice appreciation of Robinson.
I've vaguely heard some stories about Dickey as a human being. I think it's too bad...but then, the world's full of people like that, who don't write poems.)

Sleeping Out at Easter

All dark is now no more.
The forest is drawing a light.
All presences change into trees.
One eye opens slowly without me.
My sight is the same as the sun’s,
For this is the grave of the king,
When the earth turns, waking a choir.
All dark is now no more.

Birds speak, their voices beyond them.
A light has told them their song.
My animal eyes become human
As the Word rises out of the darkness
As my right hand, buried beneath me,
Hoveringly tingles, with grasping
The source of all song at the root.
Birds speak, their voices beyond them.

Put down those seeds in your hand.
These trees have not yet been planted.
A light should come round the world,
Yet my army blanket is dark,
That shall sparkle with dew in the sun.
My magical sheperd’s cloak
Is not yet alive on my flesh.
Put down those seeds in your hand.

In your palm is the secret of waking.
Unclasp your purple-nailed fingers
And the woods and the sunlight together
Shall spring, and make good the world.
The sounds in the air shall find bodies,
And a feather shall drift from the pine-top
You shall feel, with your long-buried hand.
In your palm is the secret of waking.

For the king’s grave turns him to light.
A woman shall look through the window
And see me here, huddled and blazing.
My child, mouth open, still sleeping,
Hears the song in the egg of a bird.
The sun shall have told him that song
Of a feather returning from darkness,
For the king’s grave turns him to light.

All dark is now no more.
Birds speak, their voices beyond them.
Put down those seeds in your hand.
In your palm is the secret of waking.
The sun shall have told you this song,
For this is the grave of the king;
For the king’s grave turns him to light.

James Dickey



[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited August 20, 2001).]

[Caleb Murdock]

Robert, can you explain why Dickey's anapestic verse isn't effective, and give some examples of effective anapestic verse? Most of what I read in the poem that Alicia posted sounds good to me.

(Ah, I see I've just graduated to 3 stars.)

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited August 20, 2001).]

[A. E. Stallings]

Well, I somewhat agree with Mr. Mezey on this... I rather like the horse/rider analogy. This is certianly not dressage, where horse and rider are in perfect harmony. More of a rodeo. My purpose in bringing up Dickey is not to set him up as a paragon of anapests. (Despite the board's name, I think there is room in Musings on Mastery to discus the work of other poets without suggesting that they are absolute masterpieces.) Rather I am intrigued at his formal roots, which I think are often forgotten. (It is certainly interesting to hear Dickey talk of Tennyson and Robert Service as influences!) I think both the free and formal camps are too quick in dividing poets up among themselves. Most free-versers until very recently were cross-overs.

And I do think that many of Dickey's early poems have a certain originality and raw energy, partly from harnassing this "night rhythm". This is another I find haunting. (Again, this is more rhythmic than strictly metrical.)


The Lifeguard

In a stable of boats I lie still,
From all sleeping children hidden.
The leap of a fish from its shadow
Makes the whole lake instantly tremble.
With my foot on the water, I feel
The moon outside

Take on the utmost of its power.
I rise and go out through the boats.
I set my broad sole upon silver,
On the skin of the sky, on the moonlight,
Stepping outward from earth onto water
In quest of the miracle

This village of children believed
That I could perform as I dived
For one who had sunk from my sight.
I saw his cropped haircut go under.
I leapt, and my steep body flashed
Once, in the sun.

Dark drew all the light from my eyes.
Like a man who explores his death
By the pull of his slow-moving shoulders,
I hung head down in the cold,
Wide-eyed, contained, and alone
Among the weeds.

And my fingertips turned into stone
From clutching immovable blackness.
Time after time I leapt upward
Exploding in breath, and fell back
From the change in the children's faces
At my defeat.

Beneath them I swam to the boathouse
With only my life in my arms
To wait for the lake to shine back
At the risen moon with such power
That my steps on the light of the ripples
Might be sustained.

Beneath me is nothing but brightness
Like the ghost of a snowfield in summer.
As I move toward the center of the lake,
Which is also the center of the moon,
I am thinking of how I may be
The savior of one

Who has already died in my care.
The dark trees fade from around me.
The moon's dust hovers together.
I call softly out, and the child's
Voice answers through blinding water.
Patiently, slowly,

He rises, dilating to break
The surface of stone with his forehead.
He is one I do not remember
Having ever seen in his life.
The ground I stand on is trembling
Upon his smile.

I wash the black mud from my hands.
On a light given off by the grave
I kneel in the quick of the moon
At the heart of a distant forest
And hold in my arms a child
Of water, water, water.

[Tom]

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[This message has been edited by Tom (edited January 30, 2005).]

[A. E. Stallings]

Dear Tom,

Thanks for responding. (It is always nice to have a board livened up with some controversy.) I am not sure I understand your system of analysis, however. I am puzzled at the concept that the "poetry" of a poem should be visible in a break-down of said poem into "key phrases".

[Solan]

Tom,

you said

You see, this seems to be "thinking", fake poetry.

I don't get what you mean here. Are you advocating a view that poetry is a kind of "pure spontaneity" with no thinking?


------------------
Svein Olav

.. another life

[smallmouse]

Just a note to say I am enjoying this thread, found myself thinking about The Poisoned Man overnight. It is what I thought poetry was, growing up. As I am reading poems out loud these days (in public, oh no) the idea of "letting the rhythms swing into place" vocally is intriguing to me.
Thanks all.
Elizabeth

[Tom]

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[This message has been edited by Tom (edited January 30, 2005).]