JAMES DICKEY: SOMETHING THAT MATTERS
Dickey wants to change the reader; he wants to use the poem as a medium through which the reader is raised or torn out of himself into a larger, more energized state of being...This is a poetry that forces the reader to know he is in the presence of a kind of truth at which (he) could not have arrived at by himself. -Bruce Weigl and T.R. Hummer,”Introduction”, The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1984, p.2.
...a curious tension exists between poetry and belief, idea, principle, or reason. That is, while we hear a good deal about poetry’s need to be based upon an explicit view of the meaning of existence, we are often very bored and exasperated by the poetry which testifies to such a view. -Howard Nemerov, William Blake in Poetry and Fiction: Essays, Rutgers UP, New Brunswick, 1963, p.vii.
You want to get the reader in,
move him about emotionally,
intuitively, physically even,
out of complacency, drift, help
them find their real lives, combat
the malaise, do some purging,
undistorting, unblunting: your poem
is something that matters--a two hundred
year old romantic dream--and we’ve been moved.
Some transforming, healing,
life-affirming impulse: pretty
ambitious stuff, eh? From
an initial repulsion through
acceptance to a full embrance--
sounds like something I’d like
to pull off, too! Can we call you
a poet of the second and third epochs?
A foundation poet for the Kingdom
of God on earth? I don’t know, James,
but I like what you’re into, so much of it:
the dramatic confrontation of self and guilt,
the presence of such joy as to remove self-pity--
good gear, James, good gear!
The search for the energizing Truth:
now there’s a goal worth pursueing.
How are you coming now, James,
in your redeeming search of the depths?
That divine intermediary? Is it more than
the poem? More than imagination?
Is there something beyond these sacred
and resplenent tokens from the planes
of glory? Is there something beyond
the green garden of these blossoms
in the lands of knowledge, beside
the orient lights of the Essence in the
mirrors of names and attributes?*
2 October 1995
*Baha’u’llah, Seven Valleys, pp.3-4.
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