"Dueling Banjos": The Latest Incarnation ... with Hamsters

Jack Williams' Great Song/Eulogy About James Dickey: "The Old Buck Dancer's Gone"

Pat Conroy: Lord let him die, but not die out.

Pat Conroy died last night, and his passing is a tremendous loss.

In 2007, ten years after James Dickey's death, Conroy gave a wonderful speech at the University of South Carolina reminiscing about his experiences as his student, and the impact Dickey's teaching had on his own writing. But it speaks to the work and the aspirations of all writers, and tells us much about Conroy himself. These are some excerpts from his hand-written text.

Here, Conroy alludes to Dickey's scandalous personal reputation, grabbing wild metaphors out of the sky, and out of James Dickey poetry, as only Pat Conroy could do:

Here Conroy talks about how much Dickey reminded him, at first, of his father, “The Great Santini.” But Conroy loved Dickey’s writing, and his teaching, maybe almost as much as he hated his own father’s brutality.

On these last two pages, Conroy puts "political correctness" in its place before a ringing conclusion, "a prayer," as he calls it, about the work of James Dickey that speaks to the hope of every artist.

An excellent review by Gary Kerley of James Dickey's "Death, and the Day's Light"

You must read this review, published here as a PDF by The South Carolina Review. 

"This important volume gives readers the chance to keep Dickey’s poetry at the center of his literary life, where it belongs."

 

Christopher Dickey talks with Bill Nigut about James Dickey, North Georgia, Deliverance and the Buckhead Boys

"My father was absolutely the hero of my childhood and the last three years of his life he was my hero again." —Christopher Dickey

The 1968 Harvard Lampoon Parody of LIFE ... and James Dickey

It's quite a distinction to be parodied this way. Gives you an idea just how iconic James Dickey had become by the late 1960s. And this was before Deliverance.  The parody of "Falling" is especially funny. We've posted extra-large photos for easier reading.

James Dickey as Grandfather a.k.a. Fun Man, 1971

For more of these, visit "Our Scrapbook"

New James Dickey Author Page on Amazon.com

We are happy to report that the Amazon.com James Dickey page is shaping up nicely. Both “The Complete Poems” and “Death, and the Day’s Light” are now displayed prominently.

The biography is an abbreviated version of one on the site of The Poetry Foundation and emphasizes the poetry over the novels. There is a blog feed and a Twitter feed, and there will be several photographs, changed frequently.

Suggestions welcome, but in the meantime please spread the word on Tumblr, Twitter, FB, etc.!

Also, interesting to note the Amazon page already is number two when you search James Dickey on Google (without quotes), right after the Wikipedia entry. (For some reason when the name is in quotes it’s not coming up on the first page of the search. Go figure.)

Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.com/James-Dickey/e/B000AQ073Y


Photo is of James Dickey in Antibes, France, in 1954

Excerpts: Complete Poems of James Dickey reviewed by Times Literary Supplement (London)

Excerpts from the full-length essay in The Times Literary Supplement:

Am I still drunk?

By JULES SMITH, 25 October 2013

The Times Literary Supplement

James Dickey, THE COMPLETE POEMS, Edited by Ward Briggs 960pp. University of South Carolina Press. $85.

In the concluding scenes of John Boorman's film Deliverance (1972),

James Dickey (who wrote the screenplay and the novel it is based on) appears as the local sheriff, telling the north Georgia river's surviving canoeists "Never come back up here.” Dickey's poems share certain qualities of that character: a folksy, expansive machismo, capable of humour yet having an undercurrent of menace. The violent ecofable of Deliverance - suburban man confronted by savage nature - was also emblematic of Dickey's poetry, animated by visceral sensory experience, filled with scenes of hunting, fishing, war, sports and sexual obsession. A bizarre and poignant 1966 poem "For the Last Wolverine,” for example, invokes "the wildness of poetry,” urging the extinction-threatened wolverine and eagle to "mate / To the death in the rotten branches.” …

What this weighty Complete Poems convincingly shows is that Dickey's writing was always as much fictional as confessional, making emotive impact by rhetorical means, like the advertising copywriter he also was. Dickey once remarked that the poet "is not trying to tell the truth. He's trying to make it.” His favoured form was therefore the dramatic monologue, in which the poem "is both an exploration and an invention of identity.”

James Dickey claimed: "What I want to do most as a poet is to charge the world with vitality.” … This definitive edition proves that he succeeded.

Consider the editor Ward Briggs's statement that Dickey was "transformed into a poet by World War II". The war provided a rich subject, certainly, yet many details in the works it inspired are invented, notably the beheading of an American airman by the Japanese in "The Performance" (1959). One of Dickey's most bitterly controversial poems, "The Firebombing" (1964), questions "aesthetic evil" in the thoughts of a pilot dropping napalm on civilians "In bed, or late in the public baths" when "One is cool and enthralled in the cockpit, / Turned blue by the power of beauty.”

The culpability of flawed characters runs through Dickey's writing, sometimes uncomfortably close to home, as with the lengthy, lurid flagellation scenes of "May Day Sermon" (1967) to the women of Gilmer County, Georgia, by a Baptist preacher exhorting punishment for sexual sins. … Dickey's descriptive powers are peculiarly distinctive when moving through landscape or suggesting a hunter's mystic sense of communion with his target, "like a beast loving / With the whole god bone of his horns: / The green of excess is upon me" ("Springer Mountain"). …

Ward Briggs's edition contains all 331 poems, in chronological order of publication, a structure that shows how he developed from clumsy early rhyming towards free verse dramas via continual experiments with poetic forms. Briggs meticulously lists publication data and textual variants and gives explanatory notes, incorporating Dickey's statements though also correcting them.

In later years, Dickey's tone became mournful. He reacted to the death of his first wife Maxine with poems about visiting her grave to seek forgiveness, and he lingered over his brother Tom's deathbed in "Last Hours" (1994). In a beautiful elegy to mark F. Scott Fitzgerald's centenary, "Entering Scott's Night,” he modestly places himself

among guests at one of Gatsby's parties, "A dark-glowing field of folk, the dead, the celebrants.” James Dickey claimed: "What I want to do most as a poet is to charge the world with vitality.” Despite what Richard Howard has called his "conflicted spirit,” and self-mythologizing - or because of it - this definitive edition proves that he succeeded.”

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We strongly suggest you subscribe to The Times Literary Supplement, which may be the last great book review section in English.

Reading The Complete Poems of James Dickey

Christopher Dickey (photo), Ward Briggs and Ron Rash read from The Complete Poems of James Dickey, at the Southern Festival of Books over the weekend.

Humanities Tennessee made an audio recording of the reading, which we hope to share with you soon.

For Lewis King: The Last of the Deliverance Generation

These lines may not have been written about Edward Lewis King, Jr., nor for him, but they are of him, I think. Without him, James Dickey might never have found the river, might never have gone on the night hunt:

I stand in my own coming sleep,
A tall spirit ready to wind
LIke a ball of bright thread the wild river
All night around the still form
That shall lie exposed in the open,
Sustained at the heart of the danger
I have passed in the thickets this night
Which shall keep me safe till I wake
   And rise, and fall away.

Rest in peace, Lewis, the last of the generation of Deliverance, who died on September 12, in Sautee, Georgia.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/99/4#!/20588644/1

James Dickey, the Poet Laureate Years, 1966-1968

With Sen. Eugene McCarthy discussing poetry and politics before McCarthy's presidential bid, 1967-68

On the steps of the Leesburg, Va., house, apparently on the way to a serious engagement.

John Updike in James Dickey's pied a terre on Capitol Hill

At the Tomochihi archery range in Virginia.

James Dickey at work in Leesburg, cerca 1967

We published the proof sheet for these photographs several years ago, but only found the negatives this weekend. Thanks to modern technology I was able to scan and print several of them. There's not quite as much detail as I would like; some of those negatives were pretty thin, and the scanning process (at least on my set-up) is not as good as chemical printing. But these shots that I took when I was fifteen did capture pretty well, I think, my father's way of working in the attic office of our house in Leesburg while he was the poetry consultant / poet laureate of the United States. I've also posted these pictures today on the Facebook page of the James Dickey Newsletter, where I asked the question: "What's that poem?"

"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?

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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