On Poetry
GARRIGUE, JEAN
ON POETRY By Jean Garrigue James Dickey Airborne and Earthbound Every poet has his special vocabulary; by his vocabulary you know the poet; is the vocabulary also the man? In James Dickey's new...
...Sentence...
...The poem ends: It is that 1 can imagine At the threshold nothing With its ears crackling off Like powdery leaves, Nothing with children of ashes, nothing not Amiable, gentle, well-meaning, A little nervous for no Reason a little worried a little loo loud Or too easy-going nothing I haven't lived with For twenty years, still nothing not as American as I am, and proud of it...
...The honored aesthetic evil, The greatest sense of power in one's life, That must be shed in bars, or by whatever Means, by starvation Visions in well-stocked pantries He can remember but he cannot know because he was not down there, because he is "still unable/To get down there or see/What really happened...
...If they spring from the famous local, the famous particular, they also spring off it...
...He is not after precision of inspection...
...My voice turns around me like foliage...
...Or is he using Christian imagery in a way that the poem does not entirely persuade you is all that earned...
...The dead abound in his poems, they sing, or they are the "bound, shining dead...
...Dickey is back with his miracles...
...One can be of the air without having been in it...
...They have taken off into air...
...That he has published "Poems of the Air" and was a pilot in the Pacific Theater does not necessarily make the observation about flights and being airborne a pun...
...Dylan Thomas seems one...
...And leaves new each year...
...the too too solid world melts, thaws, objects become transparent, metamorphosis occurs or would always be occurring...
...it is also an untempered power...
...In Coining Issues MURRAY KEMPTON on 'The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell' URI RA'ANAN on Zbigniew Brzezinski's 'The Soviet Bloc, Unity and Conflict' GEORGE WOODCOCK on Constantine FitzGibbon's 'Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas' ISAIAH SHEFFER on Arthur Miller's 'I Don't Need You Anymore' and Tennessee Williams' 'The Knightly Quest' MICHAEL JANEWAY on Robert Sherrill's 'The Accidental President' This unreality, this moral ambiguity????not being able to know, working for one's country, what one is really doing????is the reality we must all live with...
...Who thinks his bones are light/Enough, should try it...
...Absolution...
...Is his Heaven really different from the unprevent-able, unstoppable life of rain, animals, and spirit that he praises in "In the Mountain Tent", which concludes: "I shall rise from the dead...
...No matter...
...The great, thoughtful arrow" will be sent forward...
...Wholly in position to admire...
...The experience is given in its complexity, with the self-directed irony when at the end of the mission, fire everywhere, the returning pilot sees himself all in flags: Streaming banners from my wingtips...
...nor the documentary care of notating, of objectively observing...
...The theme is something else: man's power, especially his power to kill...
...I speak to the wind, and it lives...
...And particularly the early poems seem often that...
...You are at once in the mind of the pilot remembering 20 years later in his suburban comfort how he dropped the fire over Japan they are now dropping over Vietnam: That moment when the moon sails in between The tail-booms the rudders nod I swing Over directly over the heart The heart of the fire...
...What they are riding on at the end are not roads but the mist above rivers...
...Dickey's all-acceptance seems all too easy...
...I breathe on my thumbs, and am blowing A horn that encircles the forest...
...He is a heady poet, and he is wrapped up in his own imaginative coil, airborne and fighting the earthbound...
...The theme of singing, of the great call or the sound that "Whispers like straw in my ear," appears many times...
...To be dead/In one life is to enter/Another...
...It is perhaps his flight of flights...
...He calls one poem "Dream Ceremony...
...but Dickey was, and the experience seems to have informed his very line????even the way he looks at things ????as if he learned from the airplane's bird's-eye view to slide over and lock many disparities into a sentence, to make many things meet at the same time as, up above, 50 mountains meet and are gone in a burst of speed...
...Something falls from the bank, and is swimming...
...Nothing moves, but something intends to...
...In "Reincarnation," one of the new poems...
...Told in a preacher-woman's rhythm and rant, this poem surges in a headlong rush in praise of energy, vitality????from the grunting of hogs and the lust of weasels all thrust forward on the tides of spring, to the impulse that pushes as relentlessly the motorcyclist lover to his girl's farm, that drags her as relentlessly to join him, though to do so she must kill her Bible-mad old daddy...
...In James Dickey's new big collection of 10 years' work {Poems 1957-1967, Wesleyan University Press, 315 pp., $6.95) you are particularly aware of the way words like light, water, father, fire and son, gold, crown and king, air, mist, beast, ring, star, stone, nail, occur again and again as though they were signs of a world he is making and re-making, a quasi-legendary world of the imagination...
...Emily Dickinson, who came out of a society that had taken the possibility of heaven seriously...
...Dickey returns to the air in a new way...
...There is no attempt to absolve, or solve...
...He doesn't hesitate to use the word "holy" either...
...Above all, with its blending of the animal-spiritual-primitive, the poem is strange, beautiful and believable...
...Can we call Dickey that...
...And I pluck my longbow off the limb Where it shines with a musical light, And crouch within death, awaiting The beast in the water, in love With the palest and gentlest of children, Whom the years have turned deadly with knowledge: Who summons him forth, and now Pulls wide the great, thoughtful arrow...
...Dickey puts this theme of power and evil in its most contemporary context in "The Firebombing," a long poem in open structure which does away with the formalities of introduction...
...To this great flight of the bird, no longer man, but who once was man, Dickey brings just the right specificity of knowledge so that at all times you believe you are in the air with him...
...The Owl King," from the same book, approaches a more complicated religious feeling????the dream haunting many of the other early poems to make up another unity, to get beast, man and the vegetable world together again in another way...
...The poem is honest about all this...
...Man's power is irresistible to the "beast that shall die of its love...
...In "The Summons" sound again exerts an unearthly persuasion...
...The poems swing between these polarities of the buoyantly earthless and earthiness itself, as in "A May Day Sermon to the Women of Gilmer County," a long Whitmanesque paean to sex and the rites of spring...
...Dickey does not want to be bound down by staring hard at a thing and inspecting it from all sides...
...One asks these questions and never quite gets an answer...
...I hang my longbow on a branch...
...We think of Thomas as essentially, if mystifyingly, a religious poet...
...And he uses that kind of thickening of paradox, that strenuous harnessing of the opposites that Thomas did...
...Identities change hands, so do parts of the world, things flow into one another...
...His poems are a series of flights????flights that get longer as his work progresses...
...It is hard not to wonder about his poetic fathers...
...But this mystique must remain a mystery, for he seems to want us to understand less than to accept...
...It is the ruthless power of a god...
...Is it enthusiastic pantheism...
...I sound my green trumpet again, And the whole wood sings in my palms...
...To accept his miracles above all: of walking on the water, of having those dead "outsing two birds," of entering into Heaven????a heaven completely taken as a reality a poet can still talk about without any embarrassment...
...The vast trees are tuned to my bowstring And the deep-rooted voice I have summoned...
...he is trying to say the impossible and, if we are to believe him, to do the impossible...
...I lower my hands, and I listen To the beast that shall die of its love...
...And also to be borne aloft into the great stream of the air????far above earth, yet seeing it all at far remove????is to be as close to the vast pulse of earth as possible...
...This is the paradox of Dickey's hunger for this world????his longing to be of it, yet out of it, out of the "hell of thumbs," the rooted human condition...
...Is it simply a poetic heaven, symbolic decoration...
...he works for that kind of tension by which the poem advances in a doubling back upon itself and a swirl of sideways movement...
...The thing itself is in that...
...Especially in the first two books, Into the Stone and Drowning with Others, you hear one of Thomas' rhythms in back of lines, one of his ways with words, especially the Thomas manner of Dickey's: "In the tied, scribbled dark," "Through the red, vital strokes of his tears," "The four, taxed worthy legs," "In their thin, slain, time-serving bones...
...The pilot can remember it all, but: It is this detachment...
...The water that puffed like a wing Is one flattened blaze through the branches...
...But his sense of identity with the elements, grasses, light and animals is nearly always tactile: "The stones beneath us grow rounder/As I taste the fretted light fall...
...Resurrection, Immortality????those Problems, those Great Perhapses????turn up: "When I begin living forever...
...And the lovers achieve their apotheosis...
...Light bones, of course, are not enough...
...It is man flying as he really should, by his own wing-borne power, "As though to be born to awaken to what one is" were this, the "new start" in the old Freudian dream of flying, the "new start" in air, with wings of one's own...
...Frequently one is tempted to think that this God, these angels, are simply the gods of the poetic intelligence, of the all-embracing, all-accepting awareness that the poet is striving for????an equivalent in itself of a godlike state...
...Beneath it, some being stumbles, and answers me slowly and greatly With a tongue as rasping as sawgrass...
...We are in a landscape so early it might be Merlin's (as in "Dover, Believing in Kings"' with its Arthurian echoes), though time is also localized by the reference to childhood and playgrounds: For something out of sight, I cup a grass-blade in my hands, Tasting the root, and blow...
...It is also concerned with sight and insight????a kind of parable with a fairy tale touch on the darkness that allows you to see, the darkness of going into the Self, of shutting out all but what allows the vision within to give forth its light...
...No hunter has taught me this call-It comes out of childhood and playgrounds...
...The wind at my feet extends Quickly out, across the lake, Containing the sound I have made...
...yet could never escape intense preoccupation with the idea...
...Air and earth...
...To see from so on high, to sail over the Southern Cross, to meet icebergs at the North Pole, to look miles down on clouds????this is to have the god's eye, bird's eye...
...The water below me becomes Bright ploughland in its body...
...In short, he treads air as much as he can...
...In "The Owl King" the father, possessed by singing, makes the music that the owl king and the blind child "profoundly move" in, and the father says of this seizure of himself by strange powers: "What spirit has swallowed my tongue...
...I have carried it here from a playground Where I rolled in the grass with my brothers...
...Parable or not, the poem suggests, in beautifully concrete and dense specifics, that to rise out of the human condition one has to get just this elevation, this unearthly liberation...
...The bird that was man has found the word that is his wings, the word that is the will and the desire, the knowledge and the impetus...
...As flowers do...
...His description of the owl king "gravely dancing," the words he gives this king of the woods: "I felt the hooked tufts on my head/Enlarge, and dream like a crown," and that moment when the child says of the owl's claw "In my hand I feel/A talon, a grandfather's claw/Bone cold and straining/To keep from breaking my skin" makes the poem's odd magic humorous, human, and palpable...
...Across the lake, a tree Now thrums in tremendous cadence...
...Although a poet of the spirit, Dickey can give his poems a strong physical presence...
...there is no straining after the imposed moral conclusion...
...The Holy Ghost seems to brood over his work...
...worried it like a bone, mocked it, rejected it...
Vol. 50 • May 1967 • No. 11
