A Dickey Encounter
By Mike Mattson
I just finished reading an interview with James Dickey
that was done in 1974 in his Columbia, South Carolina
home ("Writers at Work", Viking press, 1981. Edited by
George Plimpton).
I recently began a freelance writing career and have
started to pick up information about some of my
favorite authors. Dickey is one of them. I was touched
by Deliverance, having read it when I was a boy (I'm
now 35).
The over-riding sense that the reader comes away from
while reading this interview, is how much of a Man he
was. He reminds me of Hunter Thompson or Hemingway -
just telling the truth as he sees it, unabashedly. He
makes no effort to conceal his disdain for some of his
poetic colleagues. In our current "politically
correct" society, his views would be condemned as
"arbitrary", "biased" or "Republican". Indeed, they
were condemned.
I find it refreshing and thought that you may want to
show or include the book in your "Work" section.
Dickey fans will surely find it informative and
entertaining. I thoroughly it enjoyed it.
Here are a few excerpts from the interview that made
me laugh out loud --
"Interviewer: It's always ironic that the more
successful a person gets, the more under attack he
comes. I've noticed that there is an increasing amount
of bitterness by a great number of people toward your
work. Do you have any sort of response to their
criticism?
Dickey: Most the time I don't even know what it is. It
seems to me that a lot of it is politically oriented.
For some reason or other I've had the right-wing
monkey put on my back. But I'm not right wing; I'm not
left wing; I'm not any wing!
Interviewer: You got into what you call your one
political foray when Yevtushenko was here, in this
country. Why?
Dickey: Well, he's a close friend. I like him very
much, but I profoundly disapprove of the kind of thing
he does. He uses poetry as a pretext for making
bohemian speeches. He's a great deal better poet than
Allen Ginsberg, but he does the same sort of thing. I
don't think poetry is well served by that. Poetry can
speak on topical things eloquently. Look at Yeats on
the riots of 1916, for example. But we should not be
led into the corner of assuming that poetry is no good
which does not speak on news items. If a man wants to
write about the circle that's made in the water when a
fish jumps, he should be able to write about that and
should not be charged off as irrelevant because he's
not writing about the Vietnam riots.
Interviewer: It seem Allen Ginsberg is the diametrical
opposite of you.
Dickey: I certainly hope so. I think Ginsberg has done
more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than
anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that
enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they
are poets because they think, If the kind of thing
Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that! They damn
themselves to a life of inconsequentiality when they
could have been doing something more useful. They
could have been garbage collectors, or grocery store
managers. Poetry is, Yeats has said, "a high and
lonely profession." It Is very easy, too easy, to pick
up on the latest thing in the newspapers and write a
poem. That's all Ginsberg does. He just doesn't have
any talent. I'll do a Ginsbergian poem or a Robert Bly
poem for you right now.
Interviewer: Do you consider them in the same school?
Dickey: Well, not exactly the same, but they take off
from the same…launching pad. Their poem goes:
It is the hour when the Americans in Vietnam are
Examining their hands.
The dead are lying below the tangles of jungle brush.
All over Minnesota snow is beginning to fall over the
missile silos."
On Sylvia Plath -
Interviewer: How do you respond to the emergence of
Sylvia Plath as a celebrated figure?
Dickey: She's not very good. She's just someone who
killed herself out of literary desperation-out of
desperation to be literarily notable. Someone ought to
write an article called "The Suicide Certification,"
which assumes that if you're a poet and you kill
yourself, then you have got to be good. No way.
On Robert Frost-
Interviewer: Has the poetry of Robert Frost,
particularly the country poems, been of interest to
you?
Dickey: I don't care much for Robert Frost, and have
never been able to understand his reputation. He says
a good thing, now and then, but with a strange way of
averting his eyes while saying it which may be
profound and may be poppycock. If it were thought that
anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I
would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and
flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the
pipes.
Interviewer: Did you know him?
Dickey: Yes, I knew him slightly, and spent a couple
of afternoons with him when I was teaching at the
University of Florida in 1955, and a more sententious,
holding-forth old bore who expected every
hero-worshiping adenoidal little twerp of a
student-poet to hang on his every word I never saw."