James Dickey: Deep Deliverance

"Venom," a James Dickey poem dedicated to William Haast, "a man charmed by snakes," who died last month at the age of 100

2011-07-15T09:59:00.001-07:00

James Dickey's 1965 Note to Pitzer College - What's the Moscow Connection?

2011-06-18T06:02:00.000-07:00

A bit of a mystery here: Laurie Babcock at Pitzer College keeps finding hitherto unseen records of James Dickey's commencement address there -- the very first -- in June 1965. This good-humored letter confirming the engagement turned up in the back of the first yearbook. Apparently it was sent from Northridge, California, where Dickey lived at the time. So, why are the Moscow addresses for the U.S. Foreign Service and The New York Times at the top of the page? Maybe they started out trying to get a correspondent or a diplomat and were rejected, then found Mr. Dickey. Anyway, we're waiting to hear back from Laurie to see if she has the answer.

Checking in on the James Dickey bench at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris

2011-04-25T13:52:00.000-07:00

The inscription

In front of the Vivarium

The little island in the poem where snakes hung in the trees was empty until recently. Now it's a mongoose habitat. One thinks James Dickey would have found this rather pleasing.

The worn stairs of the Vivarium

The Pitzer Commencement: 1965

2011-03-18T18:11:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Laurie Babcock at Pitzer College Office of Public Relations for e-mailing these two photographs by the late Arthur Dubinsky and the clip that explains what's going on. James Dickey, you recognize. The kid in the skinny tie is Christopher Dickey, who wasn't quite 14. The little boy is Kevin Dickey, who would have been only six, but big for his age.

Welcome back to The James Dickey Newsletter

2011-01-01T23:57:00.000-08:00

We're delighted to see James Dickey sites beginning to multiply on the Web, and especially pleased that jamesdickey.org now takes you straight to the newly renewed James Dickey Newsletter. This is a note from its home page:

James Dickey Newsletter, continuously published since its founding in 1984, has been dedicated to the work and biography of James Dickey. Published first at DeKalb College, it moved in 2007 to the University of South Carolina. In 2010, with a move to Lynchburg College, the name was changed to James Dickey Review and emphasis on Dickey discontinued. This new digital James Dickey Newsletter returns to an exclusive concentration on Dickey and his work, resuming the on-going bibliography as well as including relevant Dickey information and articles. Comments and suggestions are welcome, as are submissions for inclusion.

Yet Another Tribute to The Greatest Movie Never Made

2010-12-20T05:56:00.000-08:00

Review: Jeff Bridges headlines the triumphant 'True Grit' for the Coen Brothers

By Drew McWeeny

The Dallas Morning News

As a longtime fan of Joel and Ethan Coen, one of the things that I have always taken a special delight in is the love they have for language.

After all, it was a line of dialogue maybe five minutes into the first film of theirs that I saw, 1986's "Raising Arizona," where I fell in love with them: "Her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase." I still remember reading the script for "Miller's Crossing" a few months before it came out and just reading and re-reading that opening monologue out loud, basking in the cascade of language. "The Big Lebowski" is like a ballet of profanity, every stammer and shouted swear a perfect punctuation for the unbalanced adventures of the Dude. "Fargo" makes high comedy of a regional accent, and nobody finds a more adorable way around a sentence than Marge Gunderson. And in their unproduced adaptation of "To The White Sea," there's an amazing monologue at the beginning, straight out of the James Dickey novel, that I could picture them cackling about as they wrote it. ... (more)

2010-12-16T00:18:00.000-08:00

Best Buy for Literate Person on your List --NOT A COOK BOOK but filled with delicious soul food

DON'T LEAVE HUNGRY: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

From Nancy Simpson's "Living Above the Frost Line":

...And now for the "main course," as Guy Owen called them, arranged and introduced by decade, with Smith's usual clarity of style and presentation! As the dust jacket notes, this anthology "charts the development of this influential journal decade by decade, making clear that although it has close ties to a particular region, it has consistently maintained a national scope, publishing poets from all over the United States. SPR’s goal has been to celebrate the poem above all, so although there are poems by major poets here, there are many gems by less famous, perhaps even obscure, writers too. Here are 183 poems by nearly as many poets, from A. R. Ammons, Kathryn Stripling Byer, James Dickey, Mark Doty, Claudia Emerson, David Ignatow, and Carolyn Kizer to Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Howard Nemerov, Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, and Charles Wright."

But wait--why rush through a feast? In this first week of National Poetry Month, let's sit back and anticipate what waits for us tomorrow, several poems from this beautiful and generous anthology. And because these few poems I offer will, I hope, serve to whet the appetite for more, here is the publication information and a link to the University of Arkansas Press. (Copied article written by Kathryn Stripling Byer April 1, 2009.)
Want to buy a copy? click on University of Arkansas Press URL
http://www.uapress.com/titles/sp09/smith-dlh.html

2010-11-13T23:24:00.000-08:00

The James Dickey "Goodbye to Serpents" bench in front of the Vivarium at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris on Saturday, and our old friend the Gabon Viper inside.

"Deliverance" and "The Wilding"

2010-11-11T01:45:00.000-08:00

Benjamin Percy's new novel, "The Wilding," looks like one to watch, and it's good to see him acknowledge so openly his debt to the work of James Dickey. An excerpt from Percy's interview on the Powell's Books Blog:

Percy: Well, the novel is in so many ways about animalistic impulses. Every character is struggling with this inner wilding, and in some cases it boils over. It manifests itself most obviously in the character of Brian, who in donning this hair suit becomes almost lycanthropic. Then there are more subtle examples such as with Karen, where she's stepping outside the boundaries of marriage and wrestling with sexual impulses that might lead her away from her family. This is an idea that parallels some of what we see in James Dickey's Deliverance. This year marks the 40th anniversary of that novel, and it's one of the most important books in my library. I modeled The Wilding in many ways after it. If you look at Deliverance, it's one of the central themes that Dickey is trying to explore as well.
I didn't set out to write about animal instinct. I didn't set out to write about the clash between wilderness and civilization. I never set out with a theme in my mind. I begin with images in mind, with characters in mind, and the themes rise up organically. It's at first an instinctual process for me, and then it becomes more intellectual as I go through draft after draft. Dickey's Deliverance and its furry, toothy core became kind of a model for this work.

Pat Conroy on James Dickey

2010-11-07T06:12:00.000-08:00

Pat Conroy's appreciation of James Dickey as poet, novelist and teacher in Conroy's new book, "My Reading Life," is simply magnificent. It draws on both the eulogy Conroy delivered in 1997 and the speech he made on the tenth anniversary of Dickey's death. Part of the manuscript for that talk is reproduced here:

Wild To Be Wreckage Forever

Let me now praise the American writer, James Dickey. I will make a few critical remarks about him during the course of this talk, but that is only because he is dead and I don't have to worry about him beating me up after the conference is over. It will also make me appear less sycophantic about James Dickey's achievement .... But let me open with a statement of my own passionate and indignant belief -- I do not care one goddamn thing about how James Dickey conducted his personal life. I care everything about what this man wrote on blank sheets of paper when he sat alone probing the extremities of his imagination. I don't care if James Dickey slept with a thousand women or the entire football team at Clemson or the marching band ...

For a full schedule of Conroy's readings, visit his site at:

http://www.patconroy.com/events.php

A Party at Carolyn Kizer's house, Georgetown, Washington D.C., Circa 1967

2010-10-16T09:12:00.000-07:00

Photos courtesy Jill Bullitt

Pulitzer-prize winning poet Carolyn Kizer was also a great Washington hostess in the 1960s. In the top photogaphs, George Plimpton descends on the piano where Carolyn is playing. Her son, then known as "Scott" Bullitt, looks on. In the bottom photograph are then-Poetry Consultant James Dickey, George Plimpton, the back of Sen. William Fulbright's head (we think), Jill Bullitt, behind her Christopher Dickey, Scott Bullitt, and I'm not sure who that is on the far right.

If memory serves, this was the night my father got so drunk that, without a license and almost no experience behind the wheel, I had to drive him in his 427 Corvette out to Leesburg, an incident I wrote about at some length in "Summer of Deliverance."

-- Christopher Dickey

From "The Paris Review," 1976

2010-09-19T01:03:00.000-07:00

INTERVIEWER

How can a young poet know if his work is really worthwhile?

DICKEY

You never know that. I don't know it; Robert Lowell doesn't know it; John Berryman didn't know it; and Shakespeare probably didn't know it. There's never any final certainty about what you do. Your opinion of your own work fluctuates wildly. Under the right circumstances you can pick up something that you've written and approve of it; you'll think it's good and that nobody could have done exactly the same thing. Under different circumstances, you'll look at exactly the same poem and say, “My Lord, isn't that boring.” The most important thing is to be excited about what you are doing and to be working on something that you think will be the greatest thing that ever was. One of the difficulties in writing poetry is to maintain your sense of excitement and discovery about what you write. ... You have to find private stratagems to keep up your original enthusiasm, no matter what it takes. As you get older, that's tougher and tougher to do. You want to try to avoid, if you possibly can, the feeling of doing it simply because you can do it.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3741/the-art-of-poetry-no-20-james-dickey

"Deliverance": The Movie - A New Appreciation

2010-09-04T01:07:00.000-07:00

'Deliverance' Movie Still Delivers Nearly 40 Years Later

By Mike Gillis

The New York Times recently acknowledged the 40th anniversary this year of James Dickey’s novel “Deliverance,” a book that catapulted Dickey to fame. That celebrity was well deserved: Dickey’s novel leans on the linguistic mechanics of poetry, of which Dickey was a master, and weaves a brutal tale of four men who navigate away from the city to the backwoods of Appalachia for a respite, and, perhaps, a smattering of soul-searching. Instead, they stir up primal fear and death, and none leave the woods unchanged, if alive.

Dickey’s celebrity wrecked his family, according to a memoir he and his son, Christopher, penned, “The Summer of Deliverance.” It diluted his writing, too, he admits in the book.

It did, though, two years after its publication in 1970, lend itself to a rare phenomenon: a movie that rivals its source material. ...

Our familiarity with the men and the world, or what we think the world is in modern times, is what powers “Deliverance” -- the thin line between civilization and barbarism can be crossed quickly. On the other side of that line, the informed world is at the mercy of the fiends who ignore it.

Tackling that theme can easily fail, and Boorman seems to know this. His film, a horror film for sure, needs no special effects nor artificial music cues to signal his audience. The fear, anguish, anxiety and survival of four men are crystal clear. It’s on their faces and voices. That is what makes “Deliverance” a triumph of filmmaking and continues to earn it a place among movies still worth watching.

http://roundtablepictures.blogspot.com/2010/09/deliverance-movie-still-delivers-nearly.html

"Bomber County" and "The Firebombing"

2010-09-03T00:06:00.000-07:00

Thanks, again, to Dwight Garner of The New York Times for pointing out this important passage in "Bomber County," Daniel Swift's extraordinary story of war, family and poetry:

“Bombing was to the Second World War what the trenches were to the First,” Mr. Swift writes, “a shocking and new form of warfare, wretched and unexpected, and carried out at a terrible scale of loss.”

Where poets like Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon brought us nightmare visions of muddy trench warfare, Mr. Swift looks to writers as disparate as T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis (“a secret war poet”), Randall Jarrell, John Ciardi and James Dickey to describe the multiple horrors of the air war. Not all of these men actually fought in World War II, of course, but each seriously contemplated the world those bombers left behind.

Mr. Swift writes particularly well about why good poetry about air bombing is rare and valuable. “The poetry of air bombing requires a particular imaginative sympathy absent from other war poetry, and it must play between telling and deferring the tale: between the poet who survived and the others who died that night,” he writes.

In other words, the poet must confront the experience of those unfortunate souls on the ground — often civilians — as well as his own. He must speak in a voice “pitched between condemnation and celebration, between terror and relief.”

It’s a pleasure to walk through this verse with Mr. Swift. His tone is serious but open, scholarly but solicitous of the general reader’s ability to unpack sometimes dense poems. He performs worthwhile tasks, like reading the issues of The Times Literary Supplement that were printed during the war.

Near the end of “Bomber County” he makes the declaration — and this will astonish some poetry critics — that Dickey’s long poem “The Firebombing,” from his 1965 collection “Buckdancer’s Choice,” is “the finest, strangest poem of this kind of warfare.”

Dickey’s poem depicts a bomber 20 years after the war, older, fatter and now living in the suburbs. “Twenty years in the suburbs have not shown me/Which ones were hit and which not,” Dickey’s narrator says. “My hat should crawl on my head/In streetcars, thinking of it.”
At the end of the poem he is haunted, “still unable/To get down there or see/What really happened.”...

The complete text of the poem "The Firebombing" is available among the excerpts form James Dickey's "Selected Poems."

The New York Times on "Deliverance" at 40

2010-08-24T23:19:00.000-07:00

Dwight Garner's appreciation of James Dickey's Deliverance and of his poetry should launch a long-awaited reexamination of his work:

"Dickey’s moral awareness infuses this book with grainy life; guilt and blame are not easily assigned. The book presents a quagmire none of its characters escape. In 2010, it’s lonely work looking for its serious successors."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/books/25dickey.html

James Dickey in the Norton Anthology

2010-06-01T04:20:00.000-07:00

I find James Dickey's poems to be immediate, and almost urgent. Yet there isn't a word in them that feels slapdash. They are obviously well-thought-out, well-constructed, yet behind them is a feeling of life, and breath, and truth. He's not afraid to look at something without blinking, and dig deep into it, to get to the heart of whatever experience it is.

http://www.sheilaomalley.com/archives/011875.html

Remembering James Dickey with Bronwen Dickey, Dot Jackson, Deno Trakas, John Lane

2010-04-30T00:42:00.000-07:00

Remembering James Dickey from SC Center for the Book on Vimeo.

Edward Byrne on "Sleeping Out at Easter"

2010-04-05T23:06:00.000-07:00

When James Dickey introduced his first volume of poetry, Into the Stone (1960), he opened the collection with “Sleeping Out at Easter,” a poem he hoped would set a tone for those to follow. Dickey reported in his book, Self-Interviews (1970): “While I was writing Into the Stone, I was very much interested in experimenting with verse forms. I’ve always been a great admirer of Hardy and tried to take a lesson from him in inventing.” In “Sleeping Out at Easter,” Dickey tested different approaches to the poem and arrived at a discovery of form complementing content: “Gradually, over a period of several weeks, I worked on it, italicized the refrain, tried a few other things, and it came out the way it is. It seemed to me to be quite a lucid poem—at least more lucid than what I had written up to that time—and at the same time mysterious. On the one hand, the story seems very clear. It’s just about a man sleeping in back of his house and becoming another person on Easter through the twin influences of the Easter ritual and of nature itself. His rebirth is symbolized by nothing more or less than waking up in a strange place which is near a familiar place.”

Drafts of the poem reveal the method by which Dickey established the persona, point of view, and process of discovery about details in the poem. For instance, the earliest version carries a different title, “Sleeping Out in June,” which probably reflects the actual timing of the event initiating his writing of the piece. However, after including language indicating a spring incident, Dickey changed the title to “Sleeping Out in April.” But by the final drafts, where Dickey had presented particulars suggesting religious allusions and symbolism, the title became “Sleeping Out at Easter.” In his biography of the poet, James Dickey: The World as a Lie (2000), Henry Hart comments: “The poem that begins Into the Stone, ‘Sleeping Out at Easter,’ typifies Dickey’s ritual and mythic approach to the world. Significantly, the narrator does not go to church on Easter Sunday to pay homage to the resurrection of the crucified Christ. Like Wallace Stevens’s persona in ‘Sunday Morning,’ he conducts his own service on his own turf and in his own way. Having camped out in an army blanket, he groggily wakes on Easter morning believing that he is ritually reenacting Christ’s resurrection and, in turn, all renewals of life from death.”... http://edwardbyrne.blogspot.com/2009/04/james-dickey-sleeping-out-at-easter.html

2010-03-10T00:10:00.000-08:00

Dickey once commented: “To have guilt you’ve got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don’t feel the guilt you ought to have. And that’s what ‘The Firebombing’ is about.”
-- Sherry Chandler's blog
"Firebombing"

"The Greatest Generation" of American Poets?

2010-02-17T04:58:00.000-08:00

An interesting post from Ron Silliman:

One could make an argument that there was a renaissance in American poetry, and that these poets were at the heart thereof, but it’s much more concentrated than, say, the Prohibition years. I’d go so far as to argue that it really concentrated around poets born between 1925 & ’27, tho the outer ring reaches back to 1922 & forward to 1930. Just 9 of the 63 poets in my augmented list were born outside of those years, while 26 were born in those three crucial years between ’25 & ’27.

It’s worth thinking about what that means in terms of American poetry, what social conditions emerged during the years in which those poets came into their lives as poets. It’s also worth noting that of the 63 poets, just two – Kaufman & Anderson – are African-American. The most obvious is that these are poets, especially those born in 1925 onward, who escaped WW2, but got to reap the benefits of economic prosperity & a rapidly expanding educational system, that both democratized post-secondary education after the war and ensured that pretty much anyone who wanted to could get a teaching job.

Second, not one, but both traditions in American writing underwent profound transformations in the 1950s, with the New American Poetry arising out of a strand that had mixed roots in both modernism & an Americanist tradition that could be traced further even than Whitman, while the neo-colonialist Anglophile poetics of the more genteel tradition likewise saw a hard rupture in the revolt of The Fifties, as Bly, Wright, Merwin, Rich & even Hall moved away from their own heritage of closed forms to embrace aspects of European literature & a more open poetics. What’s notably absent from Carruth’s list (& my expansion of it) are direct descendants of the agrarians: Randall Jarrell, Robert Penn Warren et al. James Dickey & Jonathan Williams are the only real southerners here, neither of whom could be so described. The closest you might get are indirect descendants, all students of Robert Lowell’s. Indeed one might say that the disappearance of the agrarian strain in American poetry is nearly as dramatic as that of the Objectivists, except that the Objectivists returned circa 1960, while the closed verse poetics of the agrarians simmered underground before returning as the New Formalism of a decade later.

So in the 1950s you had this clash between these two traditions – the raw & the cooked, as Lowell himself put it – but even the cooked poets were offering a version of nouveau cuisine, each side with its own variants. Phil Levine is as unlike Sylvia Plath as Gregory Corso is to Jonathan Williams. The degree to which these poets were their generation is worth underscoring. If I pick up one of the big double-issues of Poetry from that period, such as the October-November 1963 number, every single American poet born between 1920 and 1933 comes from the list above. All but two of the rest are older poets: John Berryman, J.V. Cunningham, Jean Garrigue, Randall Jarrell, Lowell, Charles Olson, Henry Rago, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Vernon Watkins & Louise Zukofsky. There is one poet who is younger, Ronald Johnson, born in 1935, and one British poet from this period, Charles Tomlinson. The 1965 double issue has fewer poets who are older (Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Ernest Sandeen & Ted Weiss), and two who were born after 1933 (Ronald Johnson again, and Wendell Berry, born in 1934). Again there are two Brits, Tomlinson & Gael Turnbull, and nine poets from my expanded list: Carruth, Creeley, Kinnell, Koch, Levertov, Rich, Sexton, Snyder & Whalen. There is however one not on my list but from that generation, David Posner, born in 1921, educated at Kenyon & Oxford, who taught for awhile at the University of Buffalo & at the University of California (it’s not clear at which campus). Posner’s status within the canon, which is pretty much nil, tells you everything you need to know about the boundaries of this list.

The degree of prominence that so many members of this “greatest generation” earned was not solely because they were fabulous (some were, some weren’t), but because they were it, pretty much the sum of what was available by writers in that age cohort during those years. In 1960, they were the poets between the ages of 27 and 40. Ginsberg, for example, was just 34.

But by the middle 1960s, you already had the kudzuing of MFA programs across the land, meaning that there were an increasing number of writers everywhere. If you look at my expanded roster, one thing you will notice is that most of the poets who did not teach, or at least not teach much, during that decade, came primarily from the post-avant tradition: Eigner, Ashbery, O’Hara, Schuyler, Corso, Ginsberg, Spicer, Blackburn, Whalen, Corman. Ashbery & Ginsberg would go on to teach later, but not during that critical decade. So that even tho the numbers of post-avants and quietists are almost even in that expanded list, ten, fifteen years hence creative writing programs would acquire a distinct orientation – and reputation – they are only now fully outgrowing. ....(read on)

An Interview on the Occasion of James Dickey's Birthday

2010-02-02T07:03:00.000-08:00

Scott Bowen posted this interesting little documentary on his blog along with an e-mail interview he did with Christopher Dickey:

For James Dickey: A birthday interview with his son, Christopher Dickey

Image via Wikipedia

Poet, novelist, and critic James Lafayette Dickey was born today, February 2, in 1923. He died 13 years ago, on January 19, 1997, at the age of 74.

In his time, he wrote a ton of magnificent poetry unlike anything his contemporaries produced, and three novels. He won the National Book Award in 1965 for his book of poems, Buckdancer’s Choice, and served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1966 to 1968.

I had the great good fortune to have studied with Dickey while in graduate school, and benefitted from his mentorship and friendship. I remember him joking at one of his Groundhog Day birthday parties, “The fox knows many things, but the groundhog knows one really big thing,” a quip I heard him repeat a few other times, as he was wont to retell his favorite notions.

Much of Dickey’s poetry has deep connections to nature, and examines thoroughly the exalting and conflicted relationship humans have with nature as they find it, and with their own origins in the natural world.

On what would have been James Dickey’s 87th birthday, I caught up with his eldest son, Christopher Dickey, the Paris Bureau Chief and Middle East Editor for Newsweek magazine, to ask some questions via e-mail about his father’s work, and about his own. ... http://trueslant.com/scottbowen/2010/02/02/for-james-dickey-a-birthday-interview-with-his-son-christopher-dickey/

February 2: James Dickey's Birthday

2010-02-02T04:41:00.001-08:00

He would have been 87 today.

Real Estate News: "Famous Citizens" of Columbia S.C.

2010-01-12T23:44:00.000-08:00

Famous Citizens: Coach Steve Spurrier; anchor Rita Cosby; Leeza Gibbons; astronaut Charles Bolden; the late novelist and poet James Dickey; novelist William Price Fox; the late Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater; Miss America Kimberly Aiken; Hootie and the Blowfish; actress Kristen Davis; Strom Thurmond; Jesse Jackson; the late James Brown; comedian Steven Colbert
http://edwingeraceblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/columbia-sc-state-capital.html

A Clearer Picture: The "Goodbye to Serpents" plaque in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, France

2010-01-03T00:34:00.000-08:00

The poem was published in The New Yorker in September 1963. But our first visits to the Jardin des Plantes were in 1954.

"Poems 1957-1967" Back in Print

2009-12-29T07:57:00.000-08:00

This from David Havird -- and we cannot thank him enough for his efforts:

"Chris, I wish you'd include this link among your "Deep Deliverance" links:
http://www.facebook.com/l/865aa;www.upne.com/0-8195-3073-5.html. It will let readers know that Poems 1957-1967 is back in print. I was after Wesleyan for years to bring it back, and the editor there finally agreed a couple of years ago--by then they had the ability to do small runs. I use it in courses whenever possible. Otherwise, it doesn't seem to get much play--or distribution. For me it's *the* essential book by a post-WWII American poet. BTW, I was a student and later friend of your dad's--I knew your mother well. I think that you and I met only once--when I was by the house in the mid 80s. As I remember, you were rummaging through the garage the whole time I was there. All the best, David"

James Dickey in the Marble Quarry, Robert Penn Warren in Vermont stone, Randall Jarrell moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All

2009-12-27T07:51:00.000-08:00

I don't know who "Walter" is, really, apart from the fact that he's created a Web site with the url www.deadpoes.org and has a Maine license plate on his Dodge van that reads DEDGAR. But I like the handful of videos I've watched on his Vimeo channel, http://vimeo.com/deadpoets . There is something weirdly appealing, both homespun and hi-tech, about the whole notion of seeking out poets' graves and reading their works, then broadcasting on the Web so the whole world can share the experience. I think somebody should read James Dickey's "In the Treehouse at Night" in the graveyard at All Saints Waccamaw. (His epitaph, suggested by William Styron, is from that poem.) But in the meantime, these are four videos Walter posted that I found interesting, and there are dozens more that I have yet to watch. - CD

James Dickey's "In the Marble Quarry" read by Coleman Barks whose friends like buried beneath Georgia marble, with a final sequence showing James Dickey's own gravestone in South Carolina:

"In the Marble Quarry" By James Dickey from Walter on Vimeo.

Walter's Blair Witch visit to the graves of Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark in Vermont in the dead of night is a little silly, and there is no reading, but it is hard to forget:

Cemetery Sleepover With Robert Penn Warren from Walter on Vimeo.

Stuard Dischell reads Randall Jarrell's stunning poem about the banality and tragedy of age, "Next Day," as he stands beside Jarrell's grave in Greensboro, North Carolina.

"Next Day" By Randall Jarrell from Walter on Vimeo.

Walter reads Roethke's "On the Road to Woodlawn" and some of Roethke's favorite lines from Sir Walter Raleigh:

Roethke & Sir Walter Raleigh from Walter on Vimeo.

"Goodbye to Serpents": The James Dickey Bench at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris

2009-12-26T09:15:00.000-08:00

Watching the Gabon Viper.

And as we were leaving the Jardin des Plantes, this "Encounter in the Cage Country."

Bull Sluice

2009-12-26T09:03:00.000-08:00

When we were filming "Deliverance" in 1971, I was nearly killed in precisely this place doing much the same thing on the Chatooga River. We took a rubber raft over the edge, thinking we would bounce through, and instead it stayed in the middle of this torrent. My friends fell out and went downstream, but I stayed in the middle of the pounding water trying to rescue the raft (which belonged to Warner Bros.). Somebody threw me a rope, but it kept wrapping around me as I tried to find something to tie it to. Afraid that I would be strangled, I finally just held onto the rope and fell over the side, straight to the bottom before I was dragged out a little battered and white from fright. All of this is in "Summer of Deliverance," of course. Page 191, I believe: http://tinyurl.com/y8n3o96
-- CD

The Nature of James Dickey and Gary Snyder

2009-12-24T00:15:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting essay by John Yohe comparing James Dickey's views of nature with those of another poet and contemporary of his, Gary Snyder. There are some factual errors in the brief biography of Dickey (he was a navigator and radio operator during World War II, not a "radar technician," and he didn't start teaching at Florida until 1954 -- that sort of thing). But the basic problem with Yohe's take is that he sees Dickey as threatened by nature and by such animals as the wolverine when in fact the key to his work was the ecstatic transformation of the poet/writer into the animals themselves. If there is something "threatening" about the beasts it is not the way they are in nature, but the way they exist inside of us. That is also part of what makes the animals -- and the poems -- so fascinating.

Having said that, it's worth noting that Dickey always liked to cite Aldous Huxley's essay "Wordsworth in the Tropics," about which see this interesting post of an interview with Peter Gilbert in Vermont: http://www.vpr.net/episode/44532/

Readers might also be amused by this post on the Dickey Scrapbook, which is a companion blog to this one: http://dickeyscrapbook.blogspot.com/2009/09/goodbye-to-serpents.html

In any case, for anyone interested in these subjects, Yohe's essay is worth a read:

Gary Snyder and James Dickey were born only seven years apart, and both went on to become famous poets from the 1960’s through to the 1990’s. They are both known as "nature" poets (Snyder more than Dickey), but each has a distinctive view of nature, as well as a distinctive poetic style. I was intrigued by the fact that both of their views on nature seemed to be true, or correct. I want to examine both the similarities and differences between these views, with the intention of finding out whether one view is "more true", or better, than the other.... http://tinyurl.com/yfovrqe

James Dickey and Typewriters

2009-12-21T23:51:00.000-08:00

The L.C. Smith on which Dickey wrote Deliverance
Photographs (c) Christopher Dickey

A James Dickey quote many a writer will relate to, picked up by Scott Myers on his blog "Go Into The Story":

On writing

"Any time I get a little money that I can spend on myself,
I buy another typewriter and put it in another room and
start another project. It could be a novel, it could be
a poem I'm working on, it could be a translation,
it could be an essay, a literary criticism, it could be
a children's book, it could be a film script and it could be
whatever it is I'm interested in doing at the time.
And in a strange way the different projects kind of
cross-pollinate one another. It's very odd. Almost a
mystical process. You see something in one typewriter
that would be better off in another typewriter."

– James Dickey

------

Another blogger discovers the novel "Deliverance"

2009-12-19T02:53:00.001-08:00

"... I’ve finally read James Dickey’s (pause for juvenile snickers) classic.
Apparently the flick is the birthplace of the gay fan-base…
The book is an amazing look at American existentialism, before we truly embraced extreme everything.
I closed it with a feeling of loss building in me. We’ve become so desensitized that I’m not sure a man today could be made of stern enough stuff to be broken.... http://edgejammer.wordpress.com/2009/12/19/deliverance-not-a-gay-romp/

SOLDIER TO POET: An Exchange

2009-12-18T02:54:00.001-08:00

As the son of a poet and the father of a lieutenant colonel, I read this exchange with great interest and, should the subject of James Dickey come up again, I'd be curious to know the colonel's thoughts on "The Firebombing." Back in 2003 I wrote a long essay about it because it struck me that the poem tried very hard to come to terms with the weird detachment that has come to characterize much of modern warfare. Anyone interested can Google "Firebombings: From My Father's Wars to Mine." The direct link to the pdf is http://www.strom.clemson.edu/events/calhoun/guests/dickey.pdf
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

From a recent blog review of "Deliverance" ...

2009-12-16T23:59:00.000-08:00

"I bought the book because I heard there was a pretty gnarly sodomy scene but there turned out to be a really good book on both sides of it....."
http://www.deckfight.com/2009/12/favorite-reads-in-2009.html

Edward Byrne's Top 100 Books of Poetry

2009-08-26T00:43:00.000-07:00

Edward Byrne has posted his top 100 books of 20th century American poetry, in alphabetical order by author, on his excellent blog for the Valparaiso Poetry Review, "One Poet's Notes":

1. A.R. Ammons: Collected Poems 1951-1971 (1971)
2. Rae Armantrout: Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001)
3. John Ashbery: Selected Poems (1985)
4. John Berryman: Collected Poems 1937-1971 (1988)
5. Linda Bierds: Flight: New and Selected Poems (2008)
6. Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems, 1929-1979 (1983)
7. Robert Bly: Selected Poems (1986)
8. Louise Bogan: The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 (1968)
9. David Bottoms: Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems (1995)
10. Gwendolyn Brooks: Selected Poems (1999)
11. Amy Clampett: The Collected Poems (1993)
12. Lucille Clifton: Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000 (2000)
13. Billy Collins: Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001)
14. Hart Crane: The Poems of Hart Crane (1986)
15. Robert Creeley: Selected Poems (1991)
16. E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems: 1913-1962 (1972)
17. J.V. Cunningham: The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (1997)
18. James Dickey: The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)
19. Mark Doty: Atlantis (1995)
20. Rita Dove: Selected Poems (1993)
21. Robert Duncan: Selected Poems (1997)
22. Stephen Dunn: New & Selected Poems: 1974-1994 (1994)
23. Richard Eberhart: Collected Poems, 1930-1986 (1988)
24. T.S. Eliot: Complete Poems and Plays (1952)
25. B.H. Fairchild: The Art of the Lathe (1998)
26. Lawrence Ferlinghetti: These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems, 1955-1993 (1993)
27. Edward Field: New and Selected Poems from the Book of My Life (1987)
28. Carolyn Forché: The Country Between Us (1981)
29. Robert Frost: Complete Poems of Robert Frost (1968)
30. Alice Fulton: Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems (2005)
31. Allen Ginsberg: Collected Poems: 1947-85 (1995)
32. Louise Glück: The First Four Books of Poems (1995)
33. Jorie Graham: The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 (1995)
34. Barbara Guest: Selected Poems (1995)
35. R.S. Gwynn: No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000 (2001)
36. H.D. [Hilda Doolittle]: Collected Poems, 1912-1944 (1983)
37. John Haines: The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems (1993)
38. Joy Harjo: How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001 (2002)
39. Robert Hass: Field Guide (1973)
40. Robert Hayden: Collected Poems (1985)
41. Anthony Hecht: Collected Earlier Poems (1992)
42. Richard Hugo: Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo (1984)
43. Mark Jarman: Unholy Sonnets (2000)
44. Randall Jarrell: Complete Poems (1968)
45. Donald Justice: New and Selected Poems (1995)
46. Weldon Kees: The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (1975)
47. Galway Kinnell: A New Selected Poems (2000)
48. Carolyn Kizer: Cool, Calm and Collected: Poems 1960-2000 (2001)
49. Etheridge Knight: Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1980)
50. Yusef Komunyakaa: Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (2001)
51. Maxin Kumin: Selected Poems 1960-1990 (1997)
52. Denise Levertov: Selected Poems (2002)
53. Philip Levine: New Selected Poems (1992)
54. Larry Levis: The Selected Levis (2000)
55. Vachel Lindsay: Selected Poems of Vachel Lindsay (1963)
56. Audre Lorde: The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1997)
57. Amy Lowell: Complete Poetical Works (1955)
58. Robert Lowell: Collected Poems (2002)
59. Edgar Lee Masters: Spoon River Anthology (1916)
60. Walter McDonald: Blessings the Body Gave (1998)
61. Claude McKay: Selected Poems (1953)
62. James Merrill: Collected Poems (2001)
63. Thomas Merton: The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (1979)
64. W.S. Merwin: Selected Poems (1988)
65. Edna St. Vincent Millay: The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay (2001)
66. Marianne Moore: The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1981)
67. Howard Nemerov: Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991 (1991)
68. Frank O’Hara: The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (1995)
69. Sharon Olds: Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004)
70. Mary Oliver: New and Selected Poems (1992)
71. Charles Olson: The Collected Poems of Charles Olson (1987)
72. Robert Pinsky: The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996)
73. Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems (1981)
74. Ezra Pound: The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1996)
75. John Crowe Ransom: Selected Poems (1945)
76. Kenneth Rexroth: The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (2002)
77. Adrienne Rich: The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984 (1984)
78. Edwin Arlington Robinson: Collected Poems (1937)
79. Theodore Roethke: Collected Poems (1966)
80. Muriel Rukeyser: Collected Poems (1978)
81. Carl Sandburg: Complete Poems (1970)
82. Anne Sexton: Selected Poems of Anne Sexton (1988)
83. Charles Simic: Selected Poems 1963-2003 (2004)
84. Louis Simpson: Collected Poems (1988)
85. Dave Smith: The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000 (2000)
86. W.D. Snodgrass: Selected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987)
87. Gary Snyder: No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992)
88. William Stafford: The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford (1993)
89. Gertrude Stein: Tender Buttons (1914)
90. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (1997)
91. Mark Strand: Selected Poems (1990)
92. May Swenson: Nature: Poems Old and New (1994)
93. Allen Tate: Collected Poems, 1919-1976 (1977)
94. Mona Van Duyn: Selected Poems (2002)
95. Robert Penn Warren: The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren (1998)
96. Richard Wilbur: Collected Poems 1943-2004 (2004)
97. C.K. Williams: Selected Poems (1994)
98. William Carlos Williams: Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams (1986)
99. Charles Wright: Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems (2000)
100. James Wright: Above the River: The Complete Poems (1992)

The Bob Dylan - James Dickey - Donald Armstrong Link

2009-08-06T01:39:00.000-07:00

What Bob Dylan and James Dickey had in common, it seems, was a fascination with the tragic, mythic death of Donald Armstrong, the reinvented World War II pilot beheaded in the Dickey poem "The Performance":

'James Dickey famously growled in a 1969 symposium about the "debased kind of music Bob Dylan and these people play." If you read the line in context, Dickey was more complaining about the decline of traditional southern country and folk music, an opinion that Dylan would likely have agreed with then and now. But whether James Dickey was a fan of Bob Dylan or not, it's probable that Dylan was a fan of his.'

http://www.dreamtimepodcast.com/2009/08/last-time-i-saw-donald-armstrong-bob.html

Chris talking with Charlie Rose about James: 1998

2009-05-29T08:02:00.000-07:00

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/4712

James Dickey, Beethoven and YouTube

2009-02-02T03:27:00.000-08:00

ABC News: James Dickey Among Inaugural Poets

2009-01-20T02:21:00.000-08:00

ABC broadcast a segment about inaugural poets on World News Tonight, Sunday, January 18, 2009. James Dickey looms large in it -- so large you can see why he was asked to read at the gala, and not on the steps of the Capitol.

"Deliverance" in the National Film Archive

2009-01-03T00:31:00.000-08:00

National archive adds 25 significant films to preservation list

By Judith Egerton
jegerton@courier-journal.com

While you make and break your New Year's resolutions, the Library of Congress is keeping its promise to preserve American films for future generations.

This week, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington named 25 movies from every era of American filmmaking to its National Film Registry, which was established by Congress in 1989.

The films range from "White Fawn's Devotion," a 1910 film by James Young Deer, the first known Native American movie director, to the 1984 sci-fi movie, "The Terminator," directed by James Cameron.

Films named to the registry, which now totals 500 films, become part of the library's state-of-the art, motion-picture preservation program. The movies are selected for their cultural, historical or aesthetic significance.

The registry serves as an education resource while preserving films that are easily damaged and lost. According to Billington, the U.S. has lost about half of the films produced before 1950 and perhaps 90 percent of those made before 1920.

Here's a glimpse of the films selected for preservation in case you resolve to see some of them:

"The Asphalt Jungle" (1950) -- John Huston's excellent crime drama stars Sam Jaffe as the mastermind of a jewel heist. Marilyn Monroe appears in a small role.

"Deliverance" (1972) -- Kentuckian Ned Beatty stars with Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds in this adaptation of James Dickey's novel about a traumatic backwoods canoe trip.

"Disneyland Dream" (1956) -- The Barstow family of Connecticut made this memorable and historical home movie about their trip to Disneyland and other Los Angeles sites.

"A Face in the Crowd" (1957) -- In his big screen debut, Andy Griffith portrays an alcoholic country singer who becomes an overnight star after a radio station employee (Kentucky native Patricia Neal) puts him on the air. The movie is based on a short story by Budd Schulberg, who also wrote the script for director Elia Kazan.

"Flower Drum Song" (1961) -- This Rodgers and Hammerstein musical stars Nancy Kwan and James Shigeta and was the first Hollywood studio film to feature a predominantly Asian cast.

"Foolish Wives" (1922) -- Director Erich von Stroheim's third American feature film about a criminal who pretends to be a Russian count established the Austrian actor-director's reputation as a brilliant, controversial auteur.

"Free Radicals" (1979) -- New Zealand-born filmmaker Len Lye's 4-minute work involves scratches on film stock that appear to dance along with African tribal music.

"Hallelujah" (1929) -- One of the first masterpieces of the sound era, the movie features spirituals and a mass river baptism in a story about a charismatic preacher. The all-black-cast film was an MGM gamble that the studio allowed partly because director King Vidor deferred his salary. The film starred Daniel L. Haynes.

"In Cold Blood" (1967) -- This black-and-white film version of Truman Capote's book about a real crime focuses on the men who murdered a family in Holcomb, Kan. Robert Blake and Scott Wilson play the killers. ... (more)

The above article is from the Louisville Courier-Journal, as you might have guessed. For other, similar articles see Google News.

On the Coosawatee...

2008-08-22T14:59:00.001-07:00

James Dickey Poems: An Online Selection

2007-11-04T01:10:00.000-07:00

James and Christopher Dickey, London, August 1954

Some of James Dickey's finest poems have been made available through The Poetry Foundation, along with a thoughtful sketch of his life and work:

POEMS
At Darien Bridge
Buckdancer’s Choice
Cherrylog Road
Falling
For the Last Wolverine
In the Marble Quarry
In the Tree House at Night
The Heaven of Animals
The Hospital Window
The Lifeguard
The Performance
The Sheep Child
The Strength of Fields

For further insights into these poems, see this and related blogs. For instance, a post relevant to "Darien Bridge" can be found on Our Scrapbook. A note about "For the Last Wolverine" can be found below. And a photograph of James Dickey's grave, with the epitaph taken from "In the Tree House at Night" -- "I move at the heart of the world" -- is available at American Byways.

There will be much more. - C.D.

Deliverance/Iraq: Commentaries

2007-10-24T22:58:00.000-07:00

The Shadowland column about "Deliverance" and the war in Iraq continues to attract attention. Earlier this week it was cited by Andrew Sullivan on Atlantic.com, "The Daily Dish," and now Scott Horton has weighed in with a kind and cautionary note on his Harpers blog, "No Comment":

... Dickey’s relation of Deliverance to the current American dilemma is not an entertainment. It’s an admonition. ...

War and Deliverance

2007-10-22T00:04:00.000-07:00

My Newsweek Shadowland column this week, which is published in an abbreviated form in the print magazine, was adapted from a speech I gave last year at the University of South Alabama at the invitation of Sue Walker:

War and Deliverance

A new DVD of an old movie may offer perspective on American attitudes behind the invasion of Iraq.

By Christopher Dickey

Newsweek Web Exclusive

Updated: 12:44 PM ET Oct 17, 2007

Probably you know as much as you want to know about the most infamous scene in the 1972 movie "Deliverance," that homosexual rape by the riverside in the backwoods of Georgia—"Squeal piggy!"—it's been a source of hetero horror and sophomoric jokes ever since it first hit the screen 35 years ago. Warner Brothers has just released a deluxe anniversary DVD of "Deliverance," in HD or Blu-ray if you please, so the film's likely to have something of a revival in America's living rooms. Woe to any parents who fail to take the R rating seriously: that one nightmare sequence is so graphic, so carnal, so violent and humiliating that you cannot help but cringe, or laugh. (A lot of people laugh, nervously.) And you just cannot forget it.

Since my late father, James Dickey, wrote the novel "Deliverance" and the screenplay for the movie, I like to think there's more to the story than that, and indeed there is. But it was only last year, when I was asked by my friend Sue Walker at the University of South Alabama (yes, USA) to give a talk about the Middle East, which I normally write about, and also the making of the film “Deliverance,” which people seem to want to hear about, that I started thinking about the movie's particular relevance for the post-9/11 world. My old man and I disagreed about many things, but when I watched the re-released film again just recently, in light of current headlines, I realized just how well he'd tapped into those mind-sets that eventually helped plunge us into the Mesopotamian quagmire.

The basic plot of "Deliverance" is simple enough. Four suburbanites from Atlanta go canoeing up in the mountains. ("This is the weekend they didn't play golf," as the movie's original publicity campaign put it.) Then they find that the wild river and the people around it are much more dangerous than they'd ever bargained for. One of the men from Atlanta is raped, one is killed and the others learn to kill.

The instigator of the expedition is Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds in the movie), and while he talks about getting back to nature and testing himself against the wild, he's really more of a country-club Friedrich Nietzsche: a would-be "übermensch," or "superman," riffing on the 19th-century German philosopher's conceits, constantly training his body and mind to excel, reinventing himself to lead. His destiny—to survive against all odds—will be a triumph of his will. Or so he thinks.

In the end, though, it is not the übermensch who offers deliverance from the nasty, brutish horrors of the river and the men of the forest. It is the perfectly ordinary man, the just-getting-by guy, Ed Gentry (Jon Voight), who transcends himself to survive. He is not inspired by a vision of the future, he does not aspire to be tested by man and nature. He's motivated by fear, pure and simple, and his desire to return to his normal life without that fear.
In the early parts of the story, Ed thinks Lewis is a little nuts, but he's fascinated by the idea that Lewis might be right about—something—he's not sure what. Obsessions like those of Lewis Medlock can create their own charisma, inspiring fear while pretending to resist it. Untested ersatz fortitude often looks impressive. The other businessmen from Atlanta, the soft-spoken Drew (Ronny Cox) and porcine Bobby (Ned Beatty), think Lewis is a lot nuts. In fact, they think he's dangerous. And they're right.

Me, I think Lewis is Vice President Dick Cheney's closet fantasy of himself, and as such, a sort of model for the Bush administration as a whole. And Ed, he's about the rest of us, just scared and trying to get by. And the river? That's the war in Iraq. ... (more)

Not Quite to the White Sea ....

2007-10-21T23:54:00.000-07:00

In the current issue of Time Magazine, the Cormac McCarthy has a conversation with Joel and Ethan Coen about moves they've made, would like to make, and wish they'd made. James Dickey's "To The White Sea" falls into the latter category.

CORMAC MCCARTHY What would you guys like to do that's just too outrageous, and you don't think you'll ever get to do it?

JOEL COEN Well, I don't know about outrageous, but there was a movie we tried to make that was another adaptation. It was a novel that James Dickey wrote called To the White Sea, and it was about a tail gunner in a B-29 shot down over Tokyo.

C.M. That was the last thing he wrote.

J.C. Last thing he wrote. So this guy's in Tokyo during the firebombing, but the story isn't really about that. He walks from Honshu to Hokkaido, because he grew up in Alaska and he's trying to get to a cold climate, where he figures he can survive, and he speaks no Japanese, so after the first five or 10 minutes of the movie, there's no dialogue at all.

C.M. Yeah. That'd be tough.

J.C. It was interesting. We tried to make that, but no one was interested in financing this expensive movie about the firebombing of Tokyo in which there's no dialogue.

ETHAN COEN And it's a survival story, and the guy dies at the end.

C.M. Everybody dies. It's like Hamlet.

E.C. Brad Pitt wanted to do it, and he has this sort of remorse or regret about it. But he's too old now.

J.C. But you know, there's something about it--there were echoes of it in No Country for Old Men that were quite interesting for us, because it was the idea of the physical work that somebody does that helps reveal who they are and is part of the fiber of the story. Because you only saw this person in this movie making things and doing things in order to survive and to make this journey, and the fact that you were thrown back on that, as opposed to any dialogue, was interesting to us.

There's much left unsaid here. Some $50 million had been raised by producer Richard Roth and others to produce the film and locations already had been scouted that summer of 2001. I ran into Brad Pitt at a party in Italy and talked to him about it. He was indeed enthusiastic (although George Clooney, who was also there, kept asking him why he'd make a movie that had almost no dialogue at all). The problem, as we were told eventually by Roth, is that the Coens wanted a budget that was maybe 50 percent higher, mainly for special effects during the firebombing of Tokyo. And that money just wasn't there. - C.S.

"Deliverance" 35th Anniversary DVD Reviews

2007-09-23T06:50:00.000-07:00

Visit Warner Brothers' Official Site to watch the trailer:
http://warnervideo.com/deliverancedvd/

The new DVD of James Dickey's "Deliverance," issued on September 18, is getting very good press. A few examples are below:

Jon Voight on making Deliverance review | Film Reviews - Times Online
A thoughtful interview from the London Times.

CHUD.com - Cinematic Happenings Under Development
This interesting review is by a writer who was born the year "Deliverance" hit the screen.

Deliverance - Trailer - Showtimes - Cast - Movies - New York Times
A positive notice in The New York Times, along with the trailer.

Deliverance - Movie - Review - New York Times
A very negative review of the movie from Vincent Canby in 1972. Apparently he just didn't get it. And, as usual, he attributed to James Dickey some of the execrable cliches interpolated in the script by John Boorman.

New on DVD: USATODAY.com
A useful little blurb.

The "New" Deliverance DVD... at last!

2007-09-01T07:58:00.000-07:00

The review in "DVD Talk" is a rave:

... Hollywood just can't make films like Deliverance anymore; this type of recklessness is now reserved for independent filmmakers.

Rough and unflinching, Deliverance doesn't pull many punches and is still a fairly shocking story in retrospect. Dickey's imagination spawned this fictional tale of violation, murder and survival, but the visualization by Boorman and company raises the stakes even higher. The story starts off relaxed and deliberately paced, but the arc boils before the halfway point and refuses to let up for quite some time. It's as much about the aftermath of traumatic events as it is the events themselves, dragging our protagonists through the mud and watching their attempts to wash themselves clean. For these reasons and many more, Deliverance is much more than the sum of its parts: it's a taut, tense thriller that remains one of the decade's most visceral adventures.... (the full review)

Not the Last Wolverine

2007-07-22T02:07:00.000-07:00

Poet, naturalist and friend John Lane, having finished his most recent book, "Circling Home," about his house and its environs in Spartanburg, S.C., went to Alaska earlier this month. He and Betsy Teter, his wife and partner in many adventures, visited rivers, mountains and glaciers, and recorded some of their experiences on John's Web site: The Kudzu Telegraph.

On Friday the 13th, John wrote me a note: "We went up to Denali and stayed in a back country lodge a few days. We saw amazing animals -- caribou, grizzly, black bear, dhal sheep. I wanted to see a wolverine in a park so I could write a poem called 'My First Wolverine,' but no luck."

Then a couple of days later, at the Totum Inn, Valdez, where the owner has a passion for taxidermy (if not orthography), there the wolverine was: stuffed on top of display case.

Betsy told John that dead animals don't count, and of course she's right about that. But I think this dark setting, a little reminiscent of the Sheep Child's shelf in an Atlanta museum "where dust whirls up in the halls for no reason ... piling deep in a hellish mild corner," is just about perfect. Look at the caribou horns behind the snarling face, and the totem wings on the wall. In its way, this snapshot captures magnificently the spirit of James Dickey's "For the Last Wolverine," which was as much about the survival of the poet-beast as it was of the weasel god:

... How much the timid poem needs

The mindless explosion of your rage,

The glutton's internal fire the elk's
Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,
The pact of the "blind swallowing
Thing," with himself, to eat
The world, and not to be driven off it
Until it is gone, even if it takes

Forever. I take you as you are

And make of you what I will,
Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty

Non-survivor.

Lord, let me die but not die
Out.

--

To view the original poems on line Atlantic Monthly subscribers can go to www.theatlantic.com.

The specific links are:
For the Last Wolverine, published in May 1966
and
The Sheep Child, published in August 1966

These two poems will also be among the first audio publications issued by the Digital Dickey project that John Lane has organized.

-- C.D., Paris, 22 July 2007

The Leesburg Proof Sheets

2007-04-18T03:40:00.000-07:00

Much of the novel "Deliverance" was written in this house on North King Street in Leesburg, Virginia, from the summer of 1966 to the summer of 1968, when James Dickey was the poetry consultant at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

While digging through some old documents, we recently came across proof sheets of photographs taken in about 1967 by Christopher Dickey, who was then 16 years old.

They show the house in good weather and bad (with Maxine sweeping snow off the steps and boxwoods). If you explore them you get a sense of what life at home was like in those days, with Jim writing in his office on the top floor, or hosting other writers at the Library of Congress, among them John Updike and Peter Taylor.

2007-04-18T03:37:00.000-07:00

2007-04-18T03:20:00.000-07:00

2007-04-18T03:19:00.000-07:00

On the Set of "Deliverance"

2006-12-22T22:35:00.000-08:00

From Christopher Dickey's memoir, Summer of Deliverance:

Warner Brothers had built a dirt road to a dark laurel thicket by the river. It was a rough, steep track that got slicker and more dangerous every afternoon when rain poured from the skies. The trees were enormous, forming a thick canopy hundreds of feet in the air. It was a rain forest, right here in the mountains of Georgia. Its floor was so shadowed that small plants found it impossible to grow in the thick loam of the rotting leaves. The mountain laurel was not shrubbery but a collection of trees twisted like gnarled fingers reaching for the light. The whole effect was beautiful and threatening. This was where the rape scene was going to be filmed.

The script called it “Resting Place.” It is the second day of the story. Ed and Bobby in one canoe have gotten separated from Lewis and Drew in the other and they pull over to the side of the river to wait for them to catch up. Coming at them out of this dark forest they see two mountain men, one of them carrying a double-barreled shotgun.

One of the mountain men, the smarter of the two, was played by Bill McKinney, a serious character actor whose main obsession off the set seemed to be looking after his body. Each morning he swallowed dozens of vitamin and mineral pills, and when he talked to you he’d study with casual fascination the veins and sinews standing out on his own forearms. Burt claimed he saw him running naked through the Kingwood golf course in the early mornings.The other was Herbert “Cowboy” Coward, who had worked with Burt a few years before at one of those Wild West shoot-out shows in a rickety amusement park in the Smoky Mountains. Cowboy was no actor, but the script called for the character to be missing his front teeth, and Cowboy looked like his had been knocked out with a ball peen hammer. The character had to seem at once terribly stupid and terribly frightening. Cowboy could do that. He never left character. But when he talked, he usually stuttered, and when he tried not to stutter, words would come out in weird orders. “You ain’t a’goin any damn wheres,” was a line that stayed in the movie. “I’m g-g-gonna lay a b-b-big long dick right in your mouth,” was one that didn’t.

For the first few days at “Resting Place” there was a full crew on the set. There were some problems with new lights that the cinematographer brought in. The preparations were slow, conditions uncomfortable. A lot of people were getting sick in the constant damp and changing temperatures. A couple of the gaffers who’d been working in the water day after day were getting lesions like jungle rot. Others were busy spreading calamine lotion on poison ivy, chigger infestations, mosquito bites. At first there were a lot of jokes about snakes, but there were a lot around, and soon they were taken seriously. We’d see cottonmouths in the water and big rattlers sunning themselves on the higher, drier stretches of the road. One day as I was walking with the hair stylist from the set to the riverside mess tent for lunch, talking about the tensions that were growing around the scene that was coming, and not really thinking about where we were putting our feet, I saw a shape in the middle of the path just in front of us. It was fatally still. Its back was patterned like leaves. “Freeze,” I said, and touched the hair stylist’s shoulder. Her foot stopped in mid-air, inches above the copperhead. The snake’s sullen, slow-moving skull lay like an arrowhead in the black compost, its body thick and passive. One of the lighting men decapitated it with a shovel and skinned it. We knew there were others around, waiting.

The leads rehearsed, memorized lines, or practiced canoeing. All of them were getting pretty good at it, and out on the river, most of the day anyway, at least there was sun. But at Resting Place the mood was getting darker. Ned Beatty no longer played the happy fat boy around the set. He was getting harder to talk to, brooding, concentrating. The day of the shooting, Burt and Ronny weren’t called. The press, even the studio’s photographer, was barred from the set. The hair stylist and the nurse were asked to go watch the river.

There is a full rehearsal which tells us what’s to come. One of Boorman’s great talents is the way he orchestrates the movement of his actors through the frame, and the movement of the camera around his actors. His cinematographer, Vilmosz Szigmund, sets up a master shot in which the actors go through the entire scene, and the camera takes it all in. Ed is pushed up against a tree and strapped there by the neck with his own web belt. McKinney takes a big hunting knife Ed carries and asks him how he’d like his balls cut off, then cuts a line across Ed’s chest just to watch him bleed. Bobby is standing at a distance. McKinney tells him to drop his pants. Cowboy points the shotgun at him and gives a big grin that is no less horrifying for being so ludicrous, so hungry. When he’s stripped to his jockey shorts, Bobby panics and tries to run. McKinney chases him, Bobby is trying to scramble up a steep hillside on all fours but the earth and leaves slip away beneath him. McKinney grabs him, pushes him up the bank for a few feet, then follows him, pawing him, squeezing Bobby’s ass and his breasts, sliding and falling back down into the rotting leaves. He grabs Bobby by the ear and the nose like a pig and half drags him, half rides him to a decaying log, forces him to lie over it, and rapes him.

One of the assistant directors called me from the sidelines and had me follow the actors through the scene. I was going to stand in for Ned while they set up the lights and the track for the camera. I didn’t have to take off my clothes. All I had to do was go through the general motions, standing on the marks set up during the rehearsal, crawling as if in slow motion up the steep bank covered with leaves. No one led me by the nose, or rode me like a sow. But I had to lie down over the log, with the wood pressing into my stomach, and there were no jokes that could be made, there was nothing for anyone to say, that could keep me from feeling humiliated. I couldn’t wait for this day to be over. But it was only beginning.

Jon and Ned, McKinney and Cowboy come back onto the set. They’ve been looking for a way to match dialogue to action and somebody has the idea of making Ned squeal as McKinney forces him over the log. “Squeal like a pig…. Squeeeeal! ….. Squeeeeal!” And Ned does, in terror at first, and then, slowly, horribly, the squeals become groans of pain. And finally Boorman calls, “Cut.” Then the action is run again, and again, each time growing more grotesque. At lunch there were several nervous, risqué jokes. There was some kidding about McKinney getting carried away. Ned tried to snap back out of character, to relax. But it wasn’t working. And that day, and for the rest of the time he was in north Georgia, he seemed to have changed, as if whatever sadness or insecurity he’d covered up before as a man, as Ned Beatty, just couldn’t be contained any more.In the afternoon there were more shots of the same scene, but now from different angles. I wanted to go somewhere else, but I had to stay available to stand in, or lie down, or kneel for every new camera set-up. I didn’t watch the shooting anymore, but I couldn’t get away from the sound. That night I called my father. I was sick of the film, sick of the whole story. And I wondered why the hell he had to have this homosexual rape. “I had to put the moral weight of murder on the suburbanites,” was what my father told me. It was what he always said. He had to portray the mountain men as such monsters that the suburbanites would decide not only to kill, but to try to cover up their crime. Lewis can shoot McKinney in the back with an arrow, and look around at this forest about to be inundated by a dam, and say “Law? What law?” and every man watching will think, yeah, bury the son of a bitch.

I understood that was the way it was supposed to work. But I didn’t think my father understood what had happened that day filming by the river. In the book you can read the rape scene and know it happened, but you get around it and go on, and get other things out of the novel. In the movie – it was becoming what the movie was about. It was the thing everybody was going to remember. “Squeal like a pig!” Not Lewis’s survivalism, not the climb up the cliff, not Ed’s conquest of his own fear. It was all going to be about butt-fucking. “You’re wrong, son,” my father said.

There was something else that I wanted to tell my father on the phone, but I couldn’t. We were starting to hear from our trailer-park friends that there were a lot of people in these mountains who didn’t like this film we were making. And you didn’t know who might get it into his head to teach some of these movie people a lesson. There were plenty of real mountain men out there, with real guns. The director and the stars were all secure up at Kingwood, the rest of the crew were together at the Heart of Rabun. But I was here at this bungalow motel with my little family. We were all alone. And I was the son of the man who wrote the book. I was scared. Scared enough to leave. But I stayed because more than anything else I was afraid to admit how scared I was.

* * *

Each morning we struggled and slid down to some part of the Chattooga, and each evening we crawled back to Clayton. But the lingering depression that started in Resting Place grew worse. The work was no longer new. People had gotten to know each other too well. Even the river seemed to have run out of surprises.

Then we changed rivers.

On the mythical Cahulawassee there is a deep gorge not far down stream from Resting Place. The four suburbanites bury McKinney and head back out on the water with no idea what lies up ahead. The sound of the gorge is rising in their ears when Drew, in the lead canoe, looks like he’s been hit by something. Without any warning he tumbles over the side. Now they are all caught up in a rush of white water too powerful for any of them to handle. One of the canoes is broken in half. The other tumbles through the falls. By the time they reach still water at the bottom of the gorge, Lewis’s leg is horribly broken. Drew has disappeared. And Bobby and Ed think he was shot. The other mountain man must be up there on the cliffs above them, waiting, they think.

It’s up to Ed, now, to save their lives, and the only way he can do that is to climb the side of the gorge at night. He puts his bow over his back with the razor-sharp arrows in a quiver attached to the handle and starts the long ascent through the dark.

The actual Chattooga didn’t have a suitable location for this action. But Talullah Falls, not far away, was perfect. There was a hydroelectric dam about a half mile upstream with gates that could adjust the ferocity of the torrent pouring through the gorge to suit the needs of the shot. The flow could be reduced to a trickle if need be. But it was still a dangerous place. The first half of the falls ended in a deep pool that you could swim or paddle across easily when the current was turned down. But the only way to walk to the other side of the gorge was on a slick, slightly submerged retaining wall twelve inches wide with the pool on one side and a ninety-foot drop on the other. Everyone used the wall, holding on to a little rope for security. I still don’t know why no one slipped when the water was low, or was washed over the precipice during filming when the river swelled across it in heavy. Maybe it was the luck of people who’d started to quit caring.Burt used to be a stunt man and wanted to take his own risks, do his own “gags.” And Boorman let him.

For the break-up of the canoes, special effects man Marcel Vercoutere devised a catapult to launch Reynolds thirty feet in the air, hurling him toward the pool. He was well padded, but he was still pretty badly beaten up on the rocks. Jon Voight took to climbing the lower levels of the cliff, sometimes fifty feet or more, without any safety equipment. Boorman let him. Jon was about twenty feet above the crew when he lost his hold and tumbled back off the rocks. A prop man was able to break his fall, barely, but stood frozen for a few seconds before he let Voight go. Everybody was frozen. The exposed blade of a hunting arrow on Jon’s bow quiver was a breath away from the prop man’s throat.

It was like the whole film was becoming some kind of macho gamble in which each man was out to prove he could take the risks the characters were running, characters that James Dickey had only imagined.
At the top of the gorge, 150 to 250 feet above the rocks, the risks were even greater, and everybody played. As they searched for the best camera angles, Boorman and Szigmond leaned way out over the edge of the precipice, and only rarely put on safety harnesses. Lives were risked to position lights, or to saw off a twig that blocked the lens.

In the story, Ed reaches the top of the cliff just before dawn. He sees the mountain man, rifle in hand, peering at the river below. Ed draws down on him. His hand starts to shake, just as it did with the deer. The mountain man sees him. Ed’s only going to get this one shot. The mountain man fires, and you’re not sure for several seconds if the arrow has hit him or not. Then the mountain man turns. You see the arrow in his chest and he falls to the ground. But Ed doesn’t leave him there. All this killing, all these crimes have to be buried by the river. He uses a rope to lower the mountain man’s body down the cliff and sink it in the pool.

The special effects men thought they’d use a dummy for the scene of a corpse dangling and twisting at the end of a cord high on the side of the cliff. But the dummy looked too much like a dummy. “Would Cowboy do it himself?” someone asked as the mannequin was dragged back up over the ledge. Cowboy took a look at the drop. It was about 200 feet at this point. He fingered the thin rope that would hold him. He shook his head. He took a swig of the Pabst Blue Ribbon beer he always had close at hand, and sighed, and nodded toward the dummy. “Well,” he said, “I g-guess if he c-can do it, so c-can I.”

Members of the crew and the artificial family at Kingwood began to go home. An assistant producer, both assistant directors, a camera operator and two nurses left for reasons of health, or weariness or frustration. Burt’s Numero Uno left, too, during the most dangerous part of the filming. But it was so important to him to be seen with a woman, even if no woman was at hand, that one day he came to the set in Tallulah gorge with a handful of love-letters written to him by women who’d slept with him. He passed them around to the crew for their reading enjoyment. One collection was from a pair of girls who called themselves Franny and Zooey. Another more depressing set of letters was from an exotic dancer in a Newport News service club who was trying to launch her son's career as a musician by having him play backup during her routines. Burt was going to be her ticket out of all that, she thought.

The filming moved back to the Chattooga for a last sequence on the roughest section of the river before the four surburbanites arrive on the still waters of the lake that is rising behind the fictional town of Aintry. One morning everybody arrived on the set to word that someone had been shooting at the trucks the night before. No one was hurt. Everyone was a little spooked. It added to the sense that the whole production was racing against time, against some impending disaster. But we were on the home stretch, and almost too tired to care.

A lot of times when the shooting was on the river the stand-ins were left waiting at pickup points to meet the actors and camera crew when they came in off the water. We’d been most of the day at one of the roughest sections of the Chattooga when a heavyset kid everyone called Chicago borrowed a raft from the prop department and suggested we try shooting the rapids. It was mid-summer now, and the only place you could see that was cool was in the water. We watched a couple of other members of the crew bounce downstream in inner tubes. They dropped over a ledge of about ten feet, twirling around for just a second in a whirlpool, then bouncing out and heading on down the river. It looked like a safe enough thrill.

Chicago and I got into the raft and kicked out from shore. We hit the current and started to twirl slowly, picking up speed as we approached the drop. Now we were over the edge. And down. And the raft filled with water and we started to spin. It wasn’t sinking, but it wasn’t moving out of the whirlpool either. It was agitating and banging like a tennis shoe in a washing machine. One of the boys on shore threw us a rope, and Chicago grabbed it and went over the side. I saw him resurface down river and get pulled by in by the others like some enormous salmon. I was gulping water under the falls, and the raft was spinning and shaking too fast for me to think of anything now except how I was going to get out of it. I knew I couldn’t make it swimming. I knew the hydraulic tumbler would drag me down to the bottom. I had to have the rope. The boys on shore were shouting and signaling. They were going to throw me the line, but I was supposed to tie it to the raft so they could pull it out. They threw. After a couple of tries, I caught. They left the line slack. But as the raft spun the rope wrapped around my chest, my arms, my neck. I struggled to get it off, tried to find some place to tie it, it looped over my head and neck again. The water pounded from above, boiled up from below. The raft felt like it was going to tear apart. I freed my neck of the rope again and wrapped the end around my hand and went over the side. The current pushed me straight to the bottom, banging my body on the rocks, twirling me at the end of the cord that tightened like a noose around my hand and wrist. And then I was back on the surface, and being pulled in to shore. I guess I looked like hell; as gray as the rocks by the riverside. “We thought we’d lost you,” said Chicago. “Me, too,” I said.

It was about as close as I’d ever come to dying, at least at that point in my life, and that evening I tried to tell my father all about it. But he seemed to have other things on his mind. He was back on the scene. Back in the movie.The shooting was almost over and he’d been given a part to play on screen. He was going to be Sheriff Bullard, who doesn’t really believe the story these city fellas tell him about what happened on the river -- “How come you boys to have four life jackets?” – but who lets them go anyway. My father had never acted before. Not as such. And it embarrassed me, then, to watch him on the set. When I watch the movie now and see those scenes I think he was just about perfect: he is big and menacing, and there is a little of the Winslow sheriff in him; but there is also this genteel insecurity as Bullard tries to cope with the hinted atrocities taking place in his county, and there are several times in his brief appearance when he is just so much like my father, even the best of my father, sober and thoughtful and picking his words with real care, that I am glad just to be able to see him. We were into the last days on the set there was a last scene to shoot in which my father and I appear together, although it was later cut from the movie. Ed and Bobby and Lewis are called back up from Atlanta to the dam at Aintry. Lewis is on crutches. All of them are wearing business clothes, all have come to see a corpse on a stretcher covered by a sheet. Sheriff Bullard reaches down and lifts the shroud to show them the body of – you’re not sure. It could be one of the mountain men. It could be Drew. You don’t know and you never do see. Ed wakes from the dream.

I was the corpse under the sheet...

All text and photos (c) Christopher Dickey

More from the Set of Deliverance, 1971

2006-12-22T02:50:00.000-08:00

I love this picture of Herbert "Cowboy" Coward between takes. (c) Christopher Dickey

Our Father, James Dickey

2006-12-22T02:14:00.000-08:00

A few weeks from now we will mark ten years since the death of James Dickey, a great poet and novelist, and, in the end, a great father to me, my brother Kevin and our sister Bronwen.

Without question the finest tribute written at the time of his death was Bronnie's, which appeared in Newsweek as a "My Turn" column. She caught the man.

MY TURN

HE CAUGHT THE DREAM

BY BRONWEN DICKEY

And if the earthly has forgotten thee,

Say to the silent, "I am living."

To the running water, say "I am."

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

MY FATHER ALWAYS SAID THAT WHEN it comes to writing, write what you want to say. The questioning, the changing, the editing ... that all comes later."Use the freedom," he said. I have just watched my father die. His life,which was reduced in the end to pulses on a dusty screen, has ended. And, if I can find the strength, this is what I want to say.

You could say that the day had been a tough one. As much as the grieving family tried to prepare me, I was horrified by what I saw waiting at the hospital. I did not recognize the man before me. That man was not talkative and vibrant. That man was not determined and strong. That man had given up. And, perhaps, it was time to. He was nothing more than a pained skeleton,and his chest heaved as though every breath was a last valiant effort. Hisfingers were purple from lack of oxygen, though it was being forced into his lungs in liters. My father was not physically recognizable, but his essence was still strong in the room. His books were strategically arranged nearby, and he still wore two watches, his Citizen Wingman and his Ironman Triathlon. Funny, he always had to be on time.

I can't remember exactly what I said to him - I think I was talking about boys and school and other trivia - but I remember him looking up at me through all the tubes and the plastic with tears in his eyes. He did not have the strength to cry, but I think he knew it would be the last time we saw each other. All I could do was burst into tears and flee from the room. Here was the man that changed my diapers, made me peanut-butter sandwiches (with thecrusts cut off), showed me how to throw knives and to shoot a bow, read me poetry, stayed up with me all night when I was sick, taught me to play chess, came to all my recitals, braided my hair, watched movies with me, checked my homework ... and he was dying. Dying. And where was the pride in his death? Where was the glory in being the human part of an oxygen tank?

I forced myself to stop the tears and returned to the room. I sat down in the chair beside his bed and held his hand, which was covered in a mix of blood and Betadine from the IVs. "Come on, Dad," I tried to say with a smile. "I need you, OK?" And what he said, the last words he ever said to me, were "I've always needed you." God, I loved my father. I squeezed his hand and told him that I loved him, and he nodded. Weary and dazed, I left the hospital with the hope that he would just hold on through the night, but he couldn't.

I was awakened at 11:18 p.m., Sunday, Jan. 19, with the news that my father had died. In a way, it was a relief. I didn't want him to hurt anymore. He should have been paddling down some wild river in a canoe, or playing bluegrass ballads on his guitar, or tapping away at a typewriter, not straining for breath in some sterile hospital room. I got dressed and droveto the hospital with no tears, and I saw that the door to his room was partially open. Seeing the person you love more than anything in the world dead is one of those lose-lose situations. I figured I either would see him that last time and have that image burned into my memory forever, or I would always wonder and wish I had. My father told me never to look at him dead, and I should have listened. It was the most horrible thing I have ever seen.

I never thought there could be such a dramatic difference in a person who is very ill and one who's dead, but the difference was incredible. The lights were off, and there was an eerie backlight behind the bed. My father... My father's body was 'propped up, but his head had fallen back and his mouth was open. He looked like he was in pain. A lot of pain. Did I have to see him gasping for air the last time I ever saw him? I screamed. I didn't know what else to do. I just stood there in hysterics. The only person with me was my brother, Kevin. He didn't know what to do, either. We were both kind of floating around in a sea of turmoil and pain. I am still in that sea. There are islands of normality and "okay-ness," but the existence of the islands does not destroy the existence of the water.

There was no time for grieving that week. There was too much to do. Funeral and memorial-service arrangements, cleaning out the house (which we had to sell), appraising most of the big items in the house (which we had to sell), changing locks so our house wouldn't get looted, those sorts of things. And then we had to deal with all the fans and the sycophants. I don't remember when I really did grieve. I think I do every day, because every day I am overwhelmed with the fact that I will never see him, talk to him, ask himquestions or listen to the answers again. He was my mentor and the dominant force in my life.

So I am left with memories of greatness. Not the greatness of the writer but the greatness of the father and the teacher. One time in the class he taught, my father was reading his poem "Good-bye to Big Daddy," about the death of football player Big Daddy Lipscomb, and this big ox-headed football player in the class started bawling in the middle of the reading. The class was dismissed, and my dad just went over to this guy and held him while he wept like a child, saying, "It's all right, Big Boy; it's gonna be OK." That is the kind of teacher James Dickey was. There are no words for the kind of father he was.

A few of his favorite quotes echo through my mind like steps down an empty hallway. "Live blindly and upon the hour" from a sonnet by Trumbull Stickney; "None of them knew the color of the sky," the opening line of Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat"; "Catch thou the dream in flight," and a line referring to someone's eyes that were,''somewhat strangely more thanblue."
I will live blindly and upon the hour. I will catch the dream in flight, though I do not know the color of the sky. And my father's eyes, though they will not see my graduation, my marriage or my children, will always be somewhat strangely more than blue.

-------------

DICKEY, 15, is the daughter of the poet and novelist James Dickey, who died this year at the age of 75.

---------------

Bronwen is now 25, and still a wonderful writer.

The Chattooga

2006-09-29T04:03:00.001-07:00

Chris, Bronwen and Kevin at Woodall Shoals, September 2004, during hurricane

Earlier this month, I went back to North Georgia for only the second time since "Deliverance" was filmed in and around the town of Clayton during the summer of 1971. The trip was about the rivers in these mountains, and discovering how best to keep them wild. There was a fundraiser for the Chattooga Conservancy at a beautiful little retreat called Splendor Mountain. I also wanted to see what changes had been wrought. (The last time I was there was in the middle of Hurricane Ivan, so it was kind of hard to look around.) And I wanted to meet the people. More about all of this in the weeks and months to come.

James Dickey: Deep Deliverance

"Venom," a James Dickey poem dedicated to William Haast, "a man charmed by snakes," who died last month at the age of 100

James Dickey's 1965 Note to Pitzer College - What's the Moscow Connection?

Checking in on the James Dickey bench at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris

The Pitzer Commencement: 1965

Welcome back to The James Dickey Newsletter

Yet Another Tribute to The Greatest Movie Never Made

Review: Jeff Bridges headlines the triumphant 'True Grit' for the Coen Brothers

By Drew McWeeny

The Dallas Morning News

Best Buy for Literate Person on your List --NOT A COOK BOOK but filled with delicious soul food

"Deliverance" and "The Wilding"

Pat Conroy on James Dickey

A Party at Carolyn Kizer's house, Georgetown, Washington D.C., Circa 1967

From "The Paris Review," 1976

"Deliverance": The Movie - A New Appreciation

'Deliverance' Movie Still Delivers Nearly 40 Years Later

"Bomber County" and "The Firebombing"

The New York Times on "Deliverance" at 40

James Dickey in the Norton Anthology

Remembering James Dickey with Bronwen Dickey, Dot Jackson, Deno Trakas, John Lane

Edward Byrne on "Sleeping Out at Easter"

"The Greatest Generation" of American Poets?

An Interview on the Occasion of James Dickey's Birthday

For James Dickey: A birthday interview with his son, Christopher Dickey

February 2: James Dickey's Birthday

Real Estate News: "Famous Citizens" of Columbia S.C.

A Clearer Picture: The "Goodbye to Serpents" plaque in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, France

"Poems 1957-1967" Back in Print

James Dickey in the Marble Quarry, Robert Penn Warren in Vermont stone, Randall Jarrell moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All

"Goodbye to Serpents": The James Dickey Bench at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris

Bull Sluice

The Nature of James Dickey and Gary Snyder

James Dickey and Typewriters

On writing

Top Posts for 2009 on Valparaiso Poetry Review Blog

Another blogger discovers the novel "Deliverance"

SOLDIER TO POET: An Exchange

From a recent blog review of "Deliverance" ...

Edward Byrne's Top 100 Books of Poetry

The Bob Dylan - James Dickey - Donald Armstrong Link

Chris talking with Charlie Rose about James: 1998

James Dickey, Beethoven and YouTube

ABC News: James Dickey Among Inaugural Poets

"Deliverance" in the National Film Archive

On the Coosawatee...

James Dickey Poems: An Online Selection

Deliverance/Iraq: Commentaries

War and Deliverance

Not Quite to the White Sea ....

"Deliverance" 35th Anniversary DVD Reviews

The "New" Deliverance DVD... at last!

Not the Last Wolverine

The Leesburg Proof Sheets

On the Set of "Deliverance"

More from the Set of Deliverance, 1971

Our Father, James Dickey

The Chattooga