With the Emerson excerpts nearing an end, I had hoped to start posting reviews of recent poetry collections that I love, that deserve a wider audience. Charles North’s Cadenza is at the top of the list, and Chris Martin’s American Music, Gabriel Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook, and many, many others—mainly from a younger generation of poets—follow close behind.
And I will get to them in time. The phenomenon of the Dickman twins, Matthew and Michael, and specifically Matthew’s first book, All-American Poem, is too powerful to ignore. The collection is so very bad and the method by which the Dickmans have foisted themselves upon the American poetry establishment—and, in turn, by which the poetry establishment has foisted them upon the American public—should be looked at closely.
Name-checking the states of the Republic does not make your poetry Whitmanic. Shoveling pop culture references into sloppy lines does not transform your poems into Frank O’Hara’s. Using the phrase “cock ring” or alluding to the seduction of a friend’s wife does not fill your poetry with edgy, erotic energy. The words arranged in All-American Poem are simulacra of the vital American poetries introduced by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet” and running through and beyond the appearance of Donald Allen’s landmark anthology of 1960. These are poems written by a personality, not a person. They are Reality TV poems that demand you love them simply for being written down. Everything about All-American Poem is insulting and self-centered, from the content of the work to its (lack of) style or perspective to the very manner by which it was brought into the world.
It’s difficult to reckon the numerous literary awards bestowed upon him with the work contained between the covers of All-American Poem. To date, Dickman has been awarded fellowships from the James Michener Center, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Vermont Studio Center in “Johnsonville,” Vermont, Oregon Literary Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Prize for Poetry, and the $10,000 Kate Tufts Award. That’s a lot of encouragement for very little pay-off.
The Dickman brothers have skated far into the poetry world on the novelty of being twins, the fact that they appeared in a Tom Cruise movie (he gave them a fruit basket), their “rough-and-tumble” background (I don’t count being teased because of your name as anything above and beyond what every single kid goes through), and by being so very in love with poetry. How wonderful. It’s nice to be nice, isn’t it? It’s too bad Matthew is so ungrateful to those who have helped him reach this point that he can’t even correctly name the village in Vermont where he spent a month, free of charge, writing some of these poems. (The current cost to attend VSC for a month is $3,750.) This sort of carelessness pervades his book, and is symbolic of the fact that he views America not as a living thing but as a MacGuffin he can’t even be bothered to fully investigate, except that it should promote his own self-interests.
But: to the poems. I regret that due to Blogger and my limited HTML skills, it’s been difficult to render, in a few instances, the poems as they appear on the page. I have tried to provide links to the poems if they are online. I encourage you to stop by your local independent bookstore and read the book for yourself.
Tony Hoagland, in his introduction, writes: “All-American Poem is a heroic and generous collection of poetry.” Which makes me believe that Mr. Hoagland either read an entirely different manuscript, written by a different person, or it was Opposite Day when he typed these words. For the work is indeed the opposite: it is cowardly and selfish. It gives nothing to the reader and asks everything in return. It tells, it does not show. The poems present people as concepts, if they even get that close. Mr. Hoagland calls the poems “unself-conscious,” and they are, in that they’re not aware of themselves in any way, on any level—romantic, pragmatic, linguistic, musical, spiritual, logical, psychological, historical, social—I could go on—nor of the tradition upon which they propose to add. For poems that are purportedly “not enlisted in the army of irony,” that are supposed to be “big, wacky, and humane,” they are certainly filled with their share of snide ridicule.
It would indeed be one thing if these poems were trying to be consciously ironic. Then the rips in logic they display would be part of their fabric. But they’re not trying to be ironic at all, nor surreal (nor are they wittily sincere). They are, however, desperately trying to be “accessible,” in the same way the instructions to heat your Spaghetti-Os must be accessible. In the early poem “Slow Dance,” Dickman attempts to conjure the ghost of O’Hara with “contemporary” references:
Especially here. “Unchained Melody” contains no power chords and “Stairway” only features them at the end of the song. If Dickman had a grasp on syntax he wouldn’t conflate these notions. He piles on these shifts in a sloppy way. At one point, the poet is dancing with a lover, then he’s dancing with his brother, which, rather than coming off as fraternal, just comes off as weird. The similes in “Slow Dance” are painful: people dance like buoys, insomnia pours across the floor like bathwater. The poem grows with an unearned cosmic savvy. It’s so neat.
These poems are precious and affected—that is, artificial, pretentious, and designed to impress—vague as a fortune cookie or horoscope composed to please the reader without making any connection with him. Again, in “Slow Dance,” Dickman writes, “It’s all kindness like children / before they turn three.” What? Anyone who has dealt with a human being going through his terrible twos knows this to be false. Just because a poetry is supposedly free of irony doesn’t mean it is free from the responsibility to be truthful.
“At Night My Hat” exhibits the first signs of narcissism
as well as misogyny
The search for what it means to be a man looms over these poems, as well it might for a poet who grew up without a father. But to go so far as to suggest headgear is purely a symbol of the “complex history of masculine principles” is to be denser than a black hole. Start here: ask any Iranian woman if she dare walk the streets of Tehran without a hijab.
Growing up in a single-mother household should’ve made Dickman more empathetic to the opposite sex but it’s quite the contrary. The majority of the women or ex-girlfriends in these poems are simply names, if they’re given names at all. They’re never fleshed out in any human or humane detail. Instead, the sexual peccadilloes and conquests of Matthew Dickman are meditated upon over and over again. They serve no purpose, it seems, other than to show off how much tail he’s gotten. How generous. From “The Black Album”:
How badly does the pronoun “it” play in this oh-so-sincere poem?
Putting that aside—and the fact that licorice is still black—if this observation had any psychic weight or maturity the conflation of sexual excitement and Neo-Nazis might be excused or reconsidered. If the “erotic” passages like this didn’t try to Eddie Haskell you into the sack, you might note their attempt at “cleverness.” But these half-assed seductions are framed so amateurishly, the feeling they elicit is like as when you hear of a serial killer reveling in the tokens collected from his victims because it’s the only way he can get off or understand women. From “Love”:
These are not Sharon Olds’s bold examinations of sexual ordeal (though the line breaks and meter-making argument are just as slipshod as Ms. Olds’s, who is, not coincidentally, the Dickmans’ aunt). They are abusive, and turn the spotlight onto Dickman’s own deficiencies, not as self-deprecating insights but to hold them up as psychotically cheeky, like Heath Ledger’s Joker and the imaginary stories he tells about his own suffering while pressing a blade to his quarry’s mouth. Men have always sung about the woes that the opposite sex bring—as well as the wonder—and women have done the same. The occasions in Dickman’s poetry give no thought to the workings of these relationships, either on a personal or universal level, except to revel in their own sexual superciliousness.
As O’Hara famously wrote: “You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’” Take away the humor and irony in O’Hara’s poems and there’s a lot of campy bitchiness. Not that they want to, of course, but Dickman’s poems couldn’t be ironic if they tried, for they’re written by an immature mind that ends up with sarcasm instead. Dickman has taken O’Hara’s mock manifesto at face value and has not only turned around to brag but is opening wide his arms, believing he can charm away his insufficient grasp of the English language. The poet’s not going on his own nerve or even what he thinks is nerve but what he thinks O’Hara thinks is nerve. It’s an imitation of an imitation of a wrong impression. There is no self-reliance here.
O’Hara is not the only iconic American voice that Dickman misapprehends. Mr. Hoagland writes of the poems in the book: “They are telling a thousand stories which Whitman called ‘the myriad peacock speculation of the world.’” He has the peacock part correct. The poems preen about the page screeching an almost-human sound, asking to be noticed but never justifying their existence via language. Names—brand names, proper names, all sorts of names—and places are thrown in as if their mere presence bequeaths some sort of significance to them and to the work, as if Starbucks and Wal-Mart are the pinnacle of the American ideal. Like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” these poems reel off historic markers and pop culture figures to fill the lines and waste your time. The poet doesn’t know what else to do to keep your attention. These poems don’t elevate “the trannys of South Dakota” to anything but a sideshow attraction in order to convince us of the poet’s unearned egalitarianism. They certainly don’t help to disabuse other cultures—let alone our own—of the notion that we are nothing but an insular community of children unwilling and, worse, unable to face our responsibilities.
Dickman wishes to comment on our apathy (never his) in the title poem:
No, it’s certainly not happening here, not in these poems, not with this poet. The female passes the note while the male chides her. She is concerned with triviality while he is a man of learning. She’s nothing but a variation on a Patrick Swayze song. Dickman’s critique of the American public’s non-engagement with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan avoids engagement itself, ends up proving he’s as guilty of the attitude as the people he wants to lift up. Or condescend to. It’s unclear. When he writes
the lines drip with such disdain, are so eager to promote stereotypes rather than break them, are so ethnocentric and demeaning, that any hope of irony—which, remember, is not what Dickman’s about—is buried in the gold mine before it gets a chance to prove out. In this poem and elsewhere, Buddhists, Times Square, President Kennedy, women who listen to the Indigo Girls, a twelve-year-old Taiwanese child, the states of Mississippi, West Virginia, and Vermont (which contains only “maple trees and bears and log cabins”), and pretty much everything/one in between is talked down to so Dickman can impress girls and boys whom he believes don’t know a thing about poetry or America, except, it seems, like the poet himself, through the History Channel. No nuance exists in Dickman’s United States. Everybody comes home from work and opens a beer, every guy wants to get over, and every girl is there to be objectified and diddled.
Such is the case in “Poem for the Night Emily Opened Her Beer with a Bic Lighter.” The object of the poem (not the subject, for Matthew Dickman is the subject of every poem in this book), Emily
It’s hard to pick the most patronizing poem in this book, but “Amigos” is certainly a candidate. In the context of this poem, it’s a word whose tone is eerily similar to John McCain’s forced campaign refrain of “My friends . . .” Dickman plays the faux-poet by going deep down, name-dropping Robert Lowell as well as Barnes & Noble—which has treated small presses and independent authors so well—and imagines himself related to “the woman whose left arm has blossomed into skulls and roses” as well as the client of a man in a business suit who’s on the other end of a cell phone. That’s it. We’re either painted ladies or stuffed shirts to the poet, and we don’t know any better than to shop at strip malls and the big boxes. Dickman claims to have gone through 40 drafts of this poem. He should have redoubled his efforts.
The only time I cracked a smile while reading All-American Poem was at the beginning of “Chick Corea is Alive and Well!”:
Dickman is full of shit for a poet who is supposed to be such a straight shooter. He cites a Chick Corea album cover where the pianist is “smoking an unfiltered cigarette” and, on the LP itself, his “poor dead fingers” are “flying / like ghosts over IT DON’T MEAN A THING / IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT SWING.” According to Mr. Corea, no album exists with such artwork, neither is the experimental jazz musician known for his Duke Ellington covers but his fusion work with Miles Davis and his own band, Return to Forever. I won’t even bother with the necrophilic ending. This is not Whitman containing multitudes that contradict nor New York School abstraction of logic or language. This is just a bad poet writing about a subject with which he has no connection. It gives him the chance to use another pop culture reference he’s vaguely aware of so he can demonstrate how in tune he is with “the people.” He gives negative capability a bad name.
Where is the good-hearted and unironic nature in “Thanksgiving Poem,” that belittles, via Allen Ginsberg, President Lincoln and the Union soldiers who died to free a people from slavery
revels in neo-nativist anti-Mormon, anti-Catholic rhetoric
and ham-handedly insists lovemaking is not unlike an ad for Nescafé?
Dickman claims to have spent “. . . many hours, sitting / on the toilet, reading books by incredible people / like Mark Twain and Truman / Capote . . .” (“American Standard”). If indeed he has—which at this point is highly suspect—he obviously didn’t absorb lesson one in wit from these writers. Does he believe that by mentioning these figures—Shazam!—he’ll be equated with them, and with the character of America? It’s caricature that Dickman ends up with in these poems.
I am forced to admit that the highly unpleasant title poem does indeed live up to its name: it’s the captain of this cheerleading squad, calling out innocuous commands to a disinterested crowd. There are Cubans and Jews in Florida, don’t you know, and the only place to get “hitched” and see Elvis is in Nevada, of course. I wonder if Dickman’s keen vision allows him to see Russia from his house. His imitation patriotism is what allowed George W. Bush his eight years in the White House, is the shadow that lurks behind “Freedom Fries” and the “War on Terror,” is the thing that labels any attempt to help our neighbor as Socialism. Empty phrases meant to sound like something fierce but in fact are more ephemeral than steam from a sewer grate. We’re meant to believe that the poet is somehow reclaiming these horrible ideas and showing them to us in a new light, but, without irony, Dickman’s poetry is nothing but mean-spirited.
Dickman’s poetry is anti-Whitman. Whitman had empathy for the people he wrote about. He had sympathy for the new country and spiritual forces he knew could be conjured in a nation where people are free. He moved amongst the people. Dickman stands aloof, constantly bewildered by America. As well he should be. To know it would mean to give of himself but, because he’s a child, he refuses to do that.
“We can sit quietly on a blanket,” he writes in the title poem, “watching the transcendentalists come and go, talking / of Henry David Thoreau.” He co-opts one of the most famous passages in English-language poetry (written by a British citizen), not to show his affection for one of the most well-known native philosophical movements in this country but to illustrate, as he repeatedly does throughout the title poem and others, how mysterious and far away his America is, how disconnected he and everyone else is from the nation. But instead of proposing alternatives or answers, paths by which we might reclaim the spirit, he abandons us. How does this lift up a people? How does this shatter the mold? How does this transform the soul? Again and again though, it doesn’t matter if we can’t enter the poems or find anything new in them. All that matters is that Matthew Dickman has written them and that he mentions a lot of things. He observes but never engages.
In that they are a confidence game, yes, these poems are very American. But even then, Dickman lacks the invention to keep the dupe’s (reader’s) attention like a true bunko artist should. He bores you by the end of the first poem and by the end of the first section, you get the idea. Dickman admits his deceitful ways in an interview when he describes how he and his twin tried to scam Dorianne Laux to get into the University of Oregon: “‘We called her and pretended we wanted to apply to grad school,’ he said. ‘We met in her office and within 20 minutes, tops, she knew we were full of it. She could see we were kind of hustlers but we loved poetry.’” It’s one thing to love poetry; it’s another to be able to write it. The key word, though, is pretend: pretending to be interested in others, pretending to be poets.
All-American Poem is neither a barbaric yawp nor a howl, but a spiel. It’s Emo-lite: twee poems for broken-hearted navel-gazers that say, “You too can write ‘poetry’ (and get laid).” No wonder people are excited about this book. If you saw that someone got paid $3,000 to defecate on a piece of paper, you’d be a sucker if you didn’t stock up on Benefiber.
I’ve spoken about the poetry, given numerous examples of how inadequate it is (you can open up to any page and find similar or worse passages), but you now ask: Why bring up the personal aspects of the poet? This is out of bounds. Should we not judge the poetry on its quality alone? Yes. And while it is our fervent wish that bad poetry will bury itself under the weight of its own practiced sincerity, we must have counter-voices to those who promote this kind of work, which is: simplistic argument delivered by a monotonous, inconsistent voice that gives no attention to the details of language, image, tone, or emotion.
And in this very particular case, we must talk about the personal, the how-the-book-came-to-be, for the Dickman twins have put their life story, not their poetry, front and center, have made that the reason you should find them interesting. I will say now that I have not read Michael Dickman’s first book, The End of the West, but I have read some of the poems it contains. Michael seems to know how to break a line and use the page better than his brother but what kind of praise is this? Like saying of a basketball player: “He sure knows how to dribble.”
You can’t stop a person from putting down his private thoughts in a notebook. But you can certainly discourage him from inflicting them on the public. Perhaps more galling than the fact that Matthew Dickman was encouraged with so much time and money to write such bad poetry is that Tony Hoagland—who judged the APR/Honickman contest and wrote the book’s introduction—and Dorianne Laux, Marie Howe, and Major Jackson—who give the back cover blurbs—are all established poets who should recognize from the first few lines that Dickman’s poetry is not just incompetently crafted but is juvenile in all other respects as well. Really: these are people who teach PhD students at the University of Houston, edit poetry at the Harvard Review, and instruct undergraduate and graduate poetry students at the University of Vermont, Bennington, North Carolina State, Warren Wilson, Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, and NYU.
Poetry progresses on the master-apprentice relationship, on finding contemporaries with whom you have rapport, as all arts do and should. Master artists see in apprentices the gift to advance the craft and they help them to do this through their own instruction as well as their advocacy to entities, both public and private, that support artists who will contribute to their field.
Let me be clear: If Dickman’s poetry was even close to good or interesting, even in failure, I’d have no quarrel with it. The publication of this collection is a blatant example not only of cronyism at its most farcical—I’m surprised none of the blurbs contain the phrase “Dickie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job!”—but of the poetry industry’s need, like every industry, to push out product no matter how defective or useless, product they feel must be as facile as a Fox News sound byte.
Mr. Hoagland would have us believe that Dickman is the wise child pointing out that the emperor has no clothes when it’s in fact Dickman who’s the pompous monarch. Despite its laudatory tone, Mr. Hoagland’s introduction to All-American Poem is boilerplate enough to make me believe he was simply fulfilling his contractual obligation. I’m not sure what excuses Ms. Laux, Ms. Howe, and Mr. Jackson can offer. Still, one wishes that Mr. Hoagland reserved the right to not choose a winner for the 2008 APR/Honickman Prize if this book was the best of the bunch. Copper Canyon and the American Poetry Review decided to go for shtick over substance. Every entity associated with this book, with Dickman’s career trajectory up to this point, has been taken for a ride, and should ask for its money back.
When I find sycophants like Matthew Lippman posting reviews as poorly written as Dickman’s poetry, I know the train’s gone off the track. Mr. Lippman compares All-American Poem not only to the canonical work of Ginsberg and Whitman, but to essential rock albums like The Wall, Some Girls, Tusk, and My Aim is True. Mr. Lippman can’t be bothered to do a simple Internet search to be reminded that The Wall came out in 1979, not 1980, and he certainly can’t be bothered with making a cogent argument as to why Dickman’s poetry is high-quality. He merely spews praise like a second-grader on pixie sticks who’s just returned from a Jonas Brothers concert. The only time Mr. Lippman gets anything right is when he inadvertently exposes Dickman for the fraud he is: “There is a messy freedom in his language, the kind of mess that you might find if you walked into an art room created exclusively for four year olds.” He claims he must quote such long passages from the book because “Dickman’s poetry is about breadth.” It’s certainly not about depth. He must cast such a wide net in order to glean even partial phrases that might sound fresh. Mr. Lippman then writes, “His cadence is as much a part of his form as his formlessness as there is a kind of capricious chaos neither capricious nor chaotic.” This could be an excerpt from a Donald Rumsfeld press conference. Then, at the end: “You have an experience with it [All-American Poem]—with this voice, with these poems, with Matthew Dickman’s music and spirit—and then you run like hell, away from it, so you can tell the rest of the world as quickly as possible.” Yes: to not purchase it, please, for the love of all that is holy in poetry. This book is not Exile on Main Street as Mr. Lippman would have you believe. It’s not Robert Johnson nor Little Richard nor Jay-Z. It’s Pat Boone: an imitation and white-wash of America’s soulful roots.
If you’re brazen enough to put the word “America,” or any variation thereof in the title of your book or poem, you better bring to bear all the intelligence of spirit that the word evokes, whether to retrieve from ourselves the greatness of our nation or to point out its horrifying transgressions and correct them. This has always been true but it is exceptionally so in 2009, in the gathering darkness we face from within and without, when we now, more than ever, need to recognize ourselves and our abilities, not to elevate stereotypes over archetypes. Dickman has reduced the idea of liberty to an erectile dysfunction commercial. There is a populist streak in his work that veers frighteningly near the attitude of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, that foments apathy of duty to the art and an eager anti-intellectualism that is not spiritual or natural but vicious and parochial. It is an affront not only to the art of poetry but to the Union.
Chris Martin’s American Music, Shanna Compton’s For Girls (& Others), Maurice Manning’s Bucolics, Aaron Belz’s The Bird-Hoverer, Sabrina Orah Mark’s The Babies, Richard Siken’s Crush, Alex Lemon’s Hallelujah Blackout, Anne Boyer’s The Romance of Happy Workers, Daniel Nester’s God Save My Queen volumes, Ryan Murphy’s Down With the Ship, Jennifer L. Knox’s Drunk By Noon, Matt Hart’s Who’s Who Vivid, Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Harlot, Tony Tost’s Invisible Bride, Steve Scafidi’s For Love of Common Words, Morgan Lucas Schuldt’s Verge, Prageeta Sharma’s The Opening Question, Thomas Sayers Ellis’s The Maverick Room, Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s Green and Gray, Gabriel Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook—these are but a few recent collections by young American poets writing wildly interesting, vital work, who address the concerns of their country and of their generation in a myriad of intelligent and advanced styles. They have studied their poetic loves, have apprenticed for years, and have galloped into the frontier on their own, with only their native wit for a shield. They but do their work, and we know them.
Matthew Dickman has arrived on the scene with some barely-readable prose chopped haphazardly into lines, a “Mission Accomplished” banner streaming from his wagon, and wants people to accept him as a poet simply because he said so. He’s earned nothing, given nothing back, and his work shows no interest either in its predecessors or its contemporaries unless they appear in The New Yorker or the Norton Anthology, the only two sources of poetry that seem to exist in Dickman’s world.
“Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds,” wrote Emerson in “The Poet.” Well, then send in the clowns. Dickman, along with his twin brother, will no doubt be appearing soon at a poetry venue near you, courtesy of Alison Granucci and Blue Flower Arts—who also represents—oh, interesting—Tony Hoagland, Marie Howe, and Major Jackson. He will be touted as the next great American poet in the introduction and the audience will go along with the claim because, after all, Dickman has now been officially sanctioned. He might even get a job teaching in an MFA program and will then be responsible for instructing would-be poets who know even less than he does. I shudder when I imagine the dreck that will emerge from his writing workshops. The confidence game continues.
David Orr’s recent essay addressed the “problem” of determining greatness in poetry. Greatness comes from the poet who is in tune with his world, his moment. He may write big or small, be comic or serious, or the billion tones between, but the veracity of his poetry will be tested when—if I may flip Whitman—he absorbs his country as well as his country absorbs him. If we as readers don’t demand greatness from our poets, why would careerists such as Dickman even attempt to give us anything magnificent if they can take the bank with far less?
How, in a country founded on the poetry of the Declaration and the Constitution—founded on words—can we promote a poet who thinks so little of us? How, in a nation that is both a physical place and a still-radical idea, can we consent to such lame attempts at depicting pain, longing, joy, and love? How, in this new American era, with a President who not only cares about the sanctity of words, who holds them as dear as the Founders did—after eight grinding years of a man who did nothing for the American people, let alone its language, and everything for himself and his legacy—can we settle for a poet who regards words as nothing more than the means to continue his swindle?
We must not swoon in desperation, willing to fall into bed with the first lover who shows us the slightest hint of false affection, who whispers sweet nothings as he flashes a rhinestone smile. Not for love of anything but himself does Matthew Dickman write poetry.
Dickman said in a 2006 interview, “I want poetry to be part of my life, but I don’t want poetry to be my life.”
Don’t worry, Matthew. It’s not. As Townes Van Zandt said: “There’s two kinds of music: the blues and ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.’”
Mr. Bluebird is perched firmly on the shoulder of All-American Poem.
And I will get to them in time. The phenomenon of the Dickman twins, Matthew and Michael, and specifically Matthew’s first book, All-American Poem, is too powerful to ignore. The collection is so very bad and the method by which the Dickmans have foisted themselves upon the American poetry establishment—and, in turn, by which the poetry establishment has foisted them upon the American public—should be looked at closely.
Name-checking the states of the Republic does not make your poetry Whitmanic. Shoveling pop culture references into sloppy lines does not transform your poems into Frank O’Hara’s. Using the phrase “cock ring” or alluding to the seduction of a friend’s wife does not fill your poetry with edgy, erotic energy. The words arranged in All-American Poem are simulacra of the vital American poetries introduced by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet” and running through and beyond the appearance of Donald Allen’s landmark anthology of 1960. These are poems written by a personality, not a person. They are Reality TV poems that demand you love them simply for being written down. Everything about All-American Poem is insulting and self-centered, from the content of the work to its (lack of) style or perspective to the very manner by which it was brought into the world.
It’s difficult to reckon the numerous literary awards bestowed upon him with the work contained between the covers of All-American Poem. To date, Dickman has been awarded fellowships from the James Michener Center, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Vermont Studio Center in “Johnsonville,” Vermont, Oregon Literary Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Prize for Poetry, and the $10,000 Kate Tufts Award. That’s a lot of encouragement for very little pay-off.
The Dickman brothers have skated far into the poetry world on the novelty of being twins, the fact that they appeared in a Tom Cruise movie (he gave them a fruit basket), their “rough-and-tumble” background (I don’t count being teased because of your name as anything above and beyond what every single kid goes through), and by being so very in love with poetry. How wonderful. It’s nice to be nice, isn’t it? It’s too bad Matthew is so ungrateful to those who have helped him reach this point that he can’t even correctly name the village in Vermont where he spent a month, free of charge, writing some of these poems. (The current cost to attend VSC for a month is $3,750.) This sort of carelessness pervades his book, and is symbolic of the fact that he views America not as a living thing but as a MacGuffin he can’t even be bothered to fully investigate, except that it should promote his own self-interests.
But: to the poems. I regret that due to Blogger and my limited HTML skills, it’s been difficult to render, in a few instances, the poems as they appear on the page. I have tried to provide links to the poems if they are online. I encourage you to stop by your local independent bookstore and read the book for yourself.
Tony Hoagland, in his introduction, writes: “All-American Poem is a heroic and generous collection of poetry.” Which makes me believe that Mr. Hoagland either read an entirely different manuscript, written by a different person, or it was Opposite Day when he typed these words. For the work is indeed the opposite: it is cowardly and selfish. It gives nothing to the reader and asks everything in return. It tells, it does not show. The poems present people as concepts, if they even get that close. Mr. Hoagland calls the poems “unself-conscious,” and they are, in that they’re not aware of themselves in any way, on any level—romantic, pragmatic, linguistic, musical, spiritual, logical, psychological, historical, social—I could go on—nor of the tradition upon which they propose to add. For poems that are purportedly “not enlisted in the army of irony,” that are supposed to be “big, wacky, and humane,” they are certainly filled with their share of snide ridicule.
It would indeed be one thing if these poems were trying to be consciously ironic. Then the rips in logic they display would be part of their fabric. But they’re not trying to be ironic at all, nor surreal (nor are they wittily sincere). They are, however, desperately trying to be “accessible,” in the same way the instructions to heat your Spaghetti-Os must be accessible. In the early poem “Slow Dance,” Dickman attempts to conjure the ghost of O’Hara with “contemporary” references:
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about
how all the stars in the sky are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes.
Especially here. “Unchained Melody” contains no power chords and “Stairway” only features them at the end of the song. If Dickman had a grasp on syntax he wouldn’t conflate these notions. He piles on these shifts in a sloppy way. At one point, the poet is dancing with a lover, then he’s dancing with his brother, which, rather than coming off as fraternal, just comes off as weird. The similes in “Slow Dance” are painful: people dance like buoys, insomnia pours across the floor like bathwater. The poem grows with an unearned cosmic savvy. It’s so neat.
These poems are precious and affected—that is, artificial, pretentious, and designed to impress—vague as a fortune cookie or horoscope composed to please the reader without making any connection with him. Again, in “Slow Dance,” Dickman writes, “It’s all kindness like children / before they turn three.” What? Anyone who has dealt with a human being going through his terrible twos knows this to be false. Just because a poetry is supposedly free of irony doesn’t mean it is free from the responsibility to be truthful.
“At Night My Hat” exhibits the first signs of narcissism
At night my hat disappears.
And then my coat, scarf, gloves, my watch with the time inside it
bravely marching forward. I wish I had a dog to walk.
I wish I had an animal to feed and clean up after. Something
to make a noise when I get home, to see the shadow
of my hat and wag its tail in acceptance.
as well as misogyny
The hat resting softly with its complex history of masculine principles:
helmets and berets, stocking caps, Stetsons. Ten-gallon
Texans and Australian straws.
The search for what it means to be a man looms over these poems, as well it might for a poet who grew up without a father. But to go so far as to suggest headgear is purely a symbol of the “complex history of masculine principles” is to be denser than a black hole. Start here: ask any Iranian woman if she dare walk the streets of Tehran without a hijab.
Growing up in a single-mother household should’ve made Dickman more empathetic to the opposite sex but it’s quite the contrary. The majority of the women or ex-girlfriends in these poems are simply names, if they’re given names at all. They’re never fleshed out in any human or humane detail. Instead, the sexual peccadilloes and conquests of Matthew Dickman are meditated upon over and over again. They serve no purpose, it seems, other than to show off how much tail he’s gotten. How generous. From “The Black Album”:
Black like licorice used to be
and black like the lace bra Susan wore
beneath a baby-blue t-shirt
and how I would take her to the mat like a wrestler
and how she would keep her black boots on
so that now when I think of black boots I am no longer thinking
of Neo Nazis or soldiers but bedrooms and bedposts.
She had a black pair of handcuffs with black feathers
so that it looked like a black bird of submission.
How badly does the pronoun “it” play in this oh-so-sincere poem?
Putting that aside—and the fact that licorice is still black—if this observation had any psychic weight or maturity the conflation of sexual excitement and Neo-Nazis might be excused or reconsidered. If the “erotic” passages like this didn’t try to Eddie Haskell you into the sack, you might note their attempt at “cleverness.” But these half-assed seductions are framed so amateurishly, the feeling they elicit is like as when you hear of a serial killer reveling in the tokens collected from his victims because it’s the only way he can get off or understand women. From “Love”:
I was living with a girl who loved to say the word
shuttlecock. She would call
me at work and whisper shuttlecock
into my ear which loved it! The blastoff
of the first word sending the penis into space.
Not that I ever imagined
my cock being a spaceship,
though sometimes men are like astronauts, orbiting
the hot planets of women,
amazed that they have traveled so far, wanting
to land, wanting to document the first walk,
the first moan,
but never truly understanding what
has moved them.
These are not Sharon Olds’s bold examinations of sexual ordeal (though the line breaks and meter-making argument are just as slipshod as Ms. Olds’s, who is, not coincidentally, the Dickmans’ aunt). They are abusive, and turn the spotlight onto Dickman’s own deficiencies, not as self-deprecating insights but to hold them up as psychotically cheeky, like Heath Ledger’s Joker and the imaginary stories he tells about his own suffering while pressing a blade to his quarry’s mouth. Men have always sung about the woes that the opposite sex bring—as well as the wonder—and women have done the same. The occasions in Dickman’s poetry give no thought to the workings of these relationships, either on a personal or universal level, except to revel in their own sexual superciliousness.
As O’Hara famously wrote: “You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’” Take away the humor and irony in O’Hara’s poems and there’s a lot of campy bitchiness. Not that they want to, of course, but Dickman’s poems couldn’t be ironic if they tried, for they’re written by an immature mind that ends up with sarcasm instead. Dickman has taken O’Hara’s mock manifesto at face value and has not only turned around to brag but is opening wide his arms, believing he can charm away his insufficient grasp of the English language. The poet’s not going on his own nerve or even what he thinks is nerve but what he thinks O’Hara thinks is nerve. It’s an imitation of an imitation of a wrong impression. There is no self-reliance here.
O’Hara is not the only iconic American voice that Dickman misapprehends. Mr. Hoagland writes of the poems in the book: “They are telling a thousand stories which Whitman called ‘the myriad peacock speculation of the world.’” He has the peacock part correct. The poems preen about the page screeching an almost-human sound, asking to be noticed but never justifying their existence via language. Names—brand names, proper names, all sorts of names—and places are thrown in as if their mere presence bequeaths some sort of significance to them and to the work, as if Starbucks and Wal-Mart are the pinnacle of the American ideal. Like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” these poems reel off historic markers and pop culture figures to fill the lines and waste your time. The poet doesn’t know what else to do to keep your attention. These poems don’t elevate “the trannys of South Dakota” to anything but a sideshow attraction in order to convince us of the poet’s unearned egalitarianism. They certainly don’t help to disabuse other cultures—let alone our own—of the notion that we are nothing but an insular community of children unwilling and, worse, unable to face our responsibilities.
Dickman wishes to comment on our apathy (never his) in the title poem:
This is the Fourth of July
and she looks like the end of summer. She’s a wind
moving through the trees. She’s the best thing
about high school assemblies. We are a country at war
and she’s passing a note to you in class, your book open
to the chapter on dissecting frogs. How to keep the brain intact
when removing it from the small skull. The note says
why were you holding Clare’s hand after lunch?
We are a country at war but it’s not really happening
here.
No, it’s certainly not happening here, not in these poems, not with this poet. The female passes the note while the male chides her. She is concerned with triviality while he is a man of learning. She’s nothing but a variation on a Patrick Swayze song. Dickman’s critique of the American public’s non-engagement with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan avoids engagement itself, ends up proving he’s as guilty of the attitude as the people he wants to lift up. Or condescend to. It’s unclear. When he writes
Give us a kiss Hawaii. Who says we’re not an Empire? Fuck ’em,
they need Jesus. They need the Holy Ghost.
Right Kansas? Kansas! My yellow brick road of intelligent design. We are not
monkeys. They’re all in prison, right Texas?
the lines drip with such disdain, are so eager to promote stereotypes rather than break them, are so ethnocentric and demeaning, that any hope of irony—which, remember, is not what Dickman’s about—is buried in the gold mine before it gets a chance to prove out. In this poem and elsewhere, Buddhists, Times Square, President Kennedy, women who listen to the Indigo Girls, a twelve-year-old Taiwanese child, the states of Mississippi, West Virginia, and Vermont (which contains only “maple trees and bears and log cabins”), and pretty much everything/one in between is talked down to so Dickman can impress girls and boys whom he believes don’t know a thing about poetry or America, except, it seems, like the poet himself, through the History Channel. No nuance exists in Dickman’s United States. Everybody comes home from work and opens a beer, every guy wants to get over, and every girl is there to be objectified and diddled.
Such is the case in “Poem for the Night Emily Opened Her Beer with a Bic Lighter.” The object of the poem (not the subject, for Matthew Dickman is the subject of every poem in this book), Emily
Yet we are exhausted by the time we get through this sentence. Once again, we have the female doing the pedestrian while the male has grand pseudo-Transcendental revelations into nature so he can get laid, without irony or satire. Even then, the run-on sentence shifts and we’re clobbered by the language with “understanding,” meaning both faked empathy but also an attempt to make the reader comprehend what’s going on and why. Too bad we can’t, and don’t even want to by the time it’s over. This is, anyway, all we know of Emily until we get a smarmy catalog of her body parts that Dickman “likes” before he comes to this considerate pronouncement: “Tenderness and beer go well together.”
. . . opened her beer with a Bic lighter. Sitting there
I could hear the river
and it made me feel important. More important, I imagine,
than Emily felt when she finally finessed
the right amount of pressure
between the cap of the beer and the chewed-up
end of the lighter, popping the cap
into her lap, the river, moving in its one direction,
made me feel as if I was living
the same way, with the same purpose, and by proxy
had the same power, the same
hydro-ecstatic-willingness not to be exhausted
by my own body.
It’s hard to pick the most patronizing poem in this book, but “Amigos” is certainly a candidate. In the context of this poem, it’s a word whose tone is eerily similar to John McCain’s forced campaign refrain of “My friends . . .” Dickman plays the faux-poet by going deep down, name-dropping Robert Lowell as well as Barnes & Noble—which has treated small presses and independent authors so well—and imagines himself related to “the woman whose left arm has blossomed into skulls and roses” as well as the client of a man in a business suit who’s on the other end of a cell phone. That’s it. We’re either painted ladies or stuffed shirts to the poet, and we don’t know any better than to shop at strip malls and the big boxes. Dickman claims to have gone through 40 drafts of this poem. He should have redoubled his efforts.
The only time I cracked a smile while reading All-American Poem was at the beginning of “Chick Corea is Alive and Well!”:
Which makes the elegy I wrote for him seem a little distasteful.
Let me tell you, just because you see someone in a black
and white photograph doesn’t mean he’s dead.
Dickman is full of shit for a poet who is supposed to be such a straight shooter. He cites a Chick Corea album cover where the pianist is “smoking an unfiltered cigarette” and, on the LP itself, his “poor dead fingers” are “flying / like ghosts over IT DON’T MEAN A THING / IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT SWING.” According to Mr. Corea, no album exists with such artwork, neither is the experimental jazz musician known for his Duke Ellington covers but his fusion work with Miles Davis and his own band, Return to Forever. I won’t even bother with the necrophilic ending. This is not Whitman containing multitudes that contradict nor New York School abstraction of logic or language. This is just a bad poet writing about a subject with which he has no connection. It gives him the chance to use another pop culture reference he’s vaguely aware of so he can demonstrate how in tune he is with “the people.” He gives negative capability a bad name.
Where is the good-hearted and unironic nature in “Thanksgiving Poem,” that belittles, via Allen Ginsberg, President Lincoln and the Union soldiers who died to free a people from slavery
A few days after the smoke cleared in the South
and the muskets were hung
in the dining rooms of the North,
President Lincoln announced a National Day
of Thanksgiving. So that every god-fearing citizen
of these United States could sit down, leave the past
for the dead, and have dinner.
To think of a simpler time full of beads, corn, peace-pipes,
and the magical largesse of Plymouth Rock:
Them Indians and them Pilgrims and them Indians, what a meal!
revels in neo-nativist anti-Mormon, anti-Catholic rhetoric
Weird but somehow exactly as I always
imagined Thanksgiving to be. Something beyond yams.
And it was. My ninety-three-year-old grandmother
ate almost four desserts. My mother looked about to cry.
My sister looked like she was going to ignite. The family
sitting next to us were talking loudly
about the Mormons, whom they thought
were a cult that worshipped space aliens.
But they were Catholics and believed in eating flesh,
drinking blood, and a magical zombie
who walks out of a cave after being dead for three days.
and ham-handedly insists lovemaking is not unlike an ad for Nescafé?
I miss you, you live so far away. Thanks
to the coffee beans and coffee, the warm
smell of steamed milk and people putting
cappuccinos to their mouths
so that there is a moment
like lovemaking when their mouths are covered in cream.
Dickman claims to have spent “. . . many hours, sitting / on the toilet, reading books by incredible people / like Mark Twain and Truman / Capote . . .” (“American Standard”). If indeed he has—which at this point is highly suspect—he obviously didn’t absorb lesson one in wit from these writers. Does he believe that by mentioning these figures—Shazam!—he’ll be equated with them, and with the character of America? It’s caricature that Dickman ends up with in these poems.
I am forced to admit that the highly unpleasant title poem does indeed live up to its name: it’s the captain of this cheerleading squad, calling out innocuous commands to a disinterested crowd. There are Cubans and Jews in Florida, don’t you know, and the only place to get “hitched” and see Elvis is in Nevada, of course. I wonder if Dickman’s keen vision allows him to see Russia from his house. His imitation patriotism is what allowed George W. Bush his eight years in the White House, is the shadow that lurks behind “Freedom Fries” and the “War on Terror,” is the thing that labels any attempt to help our neighbor as Socialism. Empty phrases meant to sound like something fierce but in fact are more ephemeral than steam from a sewer grate. We’re meant to believe that the poet is somehow reclaiming these horrible ideas and showing them to us in a new light, but, without irony, Dickman’s poetry is nothing but mean-spirited.
Dickman’s poetry is anti-Whitman. Whitman had empathy for the people he wrote about. He had sympathy for the new country and spiritual forces he knew could be conjured in a nation where people are free. He moved amongst the people. Dickman stands aloof, constantly bewildered by America. As well he should be. To know it would mean to give of himself but, because he’s a child, he refuses to do that.
“We can sit quietly on a blanket,” he writes in the title poem, “watching the transcendentalists come and go, talking / of Henry David Thoreau.” He co-opts one of the most famous passages in English-language poetry (written by a British citizen), not to show his affection for one of the most well-known native philosophical movements in this country but to illustrate, as he repeatedly does throughout the title poem and others, how mysterious and far away his America is, how disconnected he and everyone else is from the nation. But instead of proposing alternatives or answers, paths by which we might reclaim the spirit, he abandons us. How does this lift up a people? How does this shatter the mold? How does this transform the soul? Again and again though, it doesn’t matter if we can’t enter the poems or find anything new in them. All that matters is that Matthew Dickman has written them and that he mentions a lot of things. He observes but never engages.
In that they are a confidence game, yes, these poems are very American. But even then, Dickman lacks the invention to keep the dupe’s (reader’s) attention like a true bunko artist should. He bores you by the end of the first poem and by the end of the first section, you get the idea. Dickman admits his deceitful ways in an interview when he describes how he and his twin tried to scam Dorianne Laux to get into the University of Oregon: “‘We called her and pretended we wanted to apply to grad school,’ he said. ‘We met in her office and within 20 minutes, tops, she knew we were full of it. She could see we were kind of hustlers but we loved poetry.’” It’s one thing to love poetry; it’s another to be able to write it. The key word, though, is pretend: pretending to be interested in others, pretending to be poets.
All-American Poem is neither a barbaric yawp nor a howl, but a spiel. It’s Emo-lite: twee poems for broken-hearted navel-gazers that say, “You too can write ‘poetry’ (and get laid).” No wonder people are excited about this book. If you saw that someone got paid $3,000 to defecate on a piece of paper, you’d be a sucker if you didn’t stock up on Benefiber.
I’ve spoken about the poetry, given numerous examples of how inadequate it is (you can open up to any page and find similar or worse passages), but you now ask: Why bring up the personal aspects of the poet? This is out of bounds. Should we not judge the poetry on its quality alone? Yes. And while it is our fervent wish that bad poetry will bury itself under the weight of its own practiced sincerity, we must have counter-voices to those who promote this kind of work, which is: simplistic argument delivered by a monotonous, inconsistent voice that gives no attention to the details of language, image, tone, or emotion.
And in this very particular case, we must talk about the personal, the how-the-book-came-to-be, for the Dickman twins have put their life story, not their poetry, front and center, have made that the reason you should find them interesting. I will say now that I have not read Michael Dickman’s first book, The End of the West, but I have read some of the poems it contains. Michael seems to know how to break a line and use the page better than his brother but what kind of praise is this? Like saying of a basketball player: “He sure knows how to dribble.”
You can’t stop a person from putting down his private thoughts in a notebook. But you can certainly discourage him from inflicting them on the public. Perhaps more galling than the fact that Matthew Dickman was encouraged with so much time and money to write such bad poetry is that Tony Hoagland—who judged the APR/Honickman contest and wrote the book’s introduction—and Dorianne Laux, Marie Howe, and Major Jackson—who give the back cover blurbs—are all established poets who should recognize from the first few lines that Dickman’s poetry is not just incompetently crafted but is juvenile in all other respects as well. Really: these are people who teach PhD students at the University of Houston, edit poetry at the Harvard Review, and instruct undergraduate and graduate poetry students at the University of Vermont, Bennington, North Carolina State, Warren Wilson, Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, and NYU.
Poetry progresses on the master-apprentice relationship, on finding contemporaries with whom you have rapport, as all arts do and should. Master artists see in apprentices the gift to advance the craft and they help them to do this through their own instruction as well as their advocacy to entities, both public and private, that support artists who will contribute to their field.
Let me be clear: If Dickman’s poetry was even close to good or interesting, even in failure, I’d have no quarrel with it. The publication of this collection is a blatant example not only of cronyism at its most farcical—I’m surprised none of the blurbs contain the phrase “Dickie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job!”—but of the poetry industry’s need, like every industry, to push out product no matter how defective or useless, product they feel must be as facile as a Fox News sound byte.
Mr. Hoagland would have us believe that Dickman is the wise child pointing out that the emperor has no clothes when it’s in fact Dickman who’s the pompous monarch. Despite its laudatory tone, Mr. Hoagland’s introduction to All-American Poem is boilerplate enough to make me believe he was simply fulfilling his contractual obligation. I’m not sure what excuses Ms. Laux, Ms. Howe, and Mr. Jackson can offer. Still, one wishes that Mr. Hoagland reserved the right to not choose a winner for the 2008 APR/Honickman Prize if this book was the best of the bunch. Copper Canyon and the American Poetry Review decided to go for shtick over substance. Every entity associated with this book, with Dickman’s career trajectory up to this point, has been taken for a ride, and should ask for its money back.
When I find sycophants like Matthew Lippman posting reviews as poorly written as Dickman’s poetry, I know the train’s gone off the track. Mr. Lippman compares All-American Poem not only to the canonical work of Ginsberg and Whitman, but to essential rock albums like The Wall, Some Girls, Tusk, and My Aim is True. Mr. Lippman can’t be bothered to do a simple Internet search to be reminded that The Wall came out in 1979, not 1980, and he certainly can’t be bothered with making a cogent argument as to why Dickman’s poetry is high-quality. He merely spews praise like a second-grader on pixie sticks who’s just returned from a Jonas Brothers concert. The only time Mr. Lippman gets anything right is when he inadvertently exposes Dickman for the fraud he is: “There is a messy freedom in his language, the kind of mess that you might find if you walked into an art room created exclusively for four year olds.” He claims he must quote such long passages from the book because “Dickman’s poetry is about breadth.” It’s certainly not about depth. He must cast such a wide net in order to glean even partial phrases that might sound fresh. Mr. Lippman then writes, “His cadence is as much a part of his form as his formlessness as there is a kind of capricious chaos neither capricious nor chaotic.” This could be an excerpt from a Donald Rumsfeld press conference. Then, at the end: “You have an experience with it [All-American Poem]—with this voice, with these poems, with Matthew Dickman’s music and spirit—and then you run like hell, away from it, so you can tell the rest of the world as quickly as possible.” Yes: to not purchase it, please, for the love of all that is holy in poetry. This book is not Exile on Main Street as Mr. Lippman would have you believe. It’s not Robert Johnson nor Little Richard nor Jay-Z. It’s Pat Boone: an imitation and white-wash of America’s soulful roots.
If you’re brazen enough to put the word “America,” or any variation thereof in the title of your book or poem, you better bring to bear all the intelligence of spirit that the word evokes, whether to retrieve from ourselves the greatness of our nation or to point out its horrifying transgressions and correct them. This has always been true but it is exceptionally so in 2009, in the gathering darkness we face from within and without, when we now, more than ever, need to recognize ourselves and our abilities, not to elevate stereotypes over archetypes. Dickman has reduced the idea of liberty to an erectile dysfunction commercial. There is a populist streak in his work that veers frighteningly near the attitude of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, that foments apathy of duty to the art and an eager anti-intellectualism that is not spiritual or natural but vicious and parochial. It is an affront not only to the art of poetry but to the Union.
Chris Martin’s American Music, Shanna Compton’s For Girls (& Others), Maurice Manning’s Bucolics, Aaron Belz’s The Bird-Hoverer, Sabrina Orah Mark’s The Babies, Richard Siken’s Crush, Alex Lemon’s Hallelujah Blackout, Anne Boyer’s The Romance of Happy Workers, Daniel Nester’s God Save My Queen volumes, Ryan Murphy’s Down With the Ship, Jennifer L. Knox’s Drunk By Noon, Matt Hart’s Who’s Who Vivid, Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Harlot, Tony Tost’s Invisible Bride, Steve Scafidi’s For Love of Common Words, Morgan Lucas Schuldt’s Verge, Prageeta Sharma’s The Opening Question, Thomas Sayers Ellis’s The Maverick Room, Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s Green and Gray, Gabriel Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook—these are but a few recent collections by young American poets writing wildly interesting, vital work, who address the concerns of their country and of their generation in a myriad of intelligent and advanced styles. They have studied their poetic loves, have apprenticed for years, and have galloped into the frontier on their own, with only their native wit for a shield. They but do their work, and we know them.
Matthew Dickman has arrived on the scene with some barely-readable prose chopped haphazardly into lines, a “Mission Accomplished” banner streaming from his wagon, and wants people to accept him as a poet simply because he said so. He’s earned nothing, given nothing back, and his work shows no interest either in its predecessors or its contemporaries unless they appear in The New Yorker or the Norton Anthology, the only two sources of poetry that seem to exist in Dickman’s world.
“Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds,” wrote Emerson in “The Poet.” Well, then send in the clowns. Dickman, along with his twin brother, will no doubt be appearing soon at a poetry venue near you, courtesy of Alison Granucci and Blue Flower Arts—who also represents—oh, interesting—Tony Hoagland, Marie Howe, and Major Jackson. He will be touted as the next great American poet in the introduction and the audience will go along with the claim because, after all, Dickman has now been officially sanctioned. He might even get a job teaching in an MFA program and will then be responsible for instructing would-be poets who know even less than he does. I shudder when I imagine the dreck that will emerge from his writing workshops. The confidence game continues.
David Orr’s recent essay addressed the “problem” of determining greatness in poetry. Greatness comes from the poet who is in tune with his world, his moment. He may write big or small, be comic or serious, or the billion tones between, but the veracity of his poetry will be tested when—if I may flip Whitman—he absorbs his country as well as his country absorbs him. If we as readers don’t demand greatness from our poets, why would careerists such as Dickman even attempt to give us anything magnificent if they can take the bank with far less?
How, in a country founded on the poetry of the Declaration and the Constitution—founded on words—can we promote a poet who thinks so little of us? How, in a nation that is both a physical place and a still-radical idea, can we consent to such lame attempts at depicting pain, longing, joy, and love? How, in this new American era, with a President who not only cares about the sanctity of words, who holds them as dear as the Founders did—after eight grinding years of a man who did nothing for the American people, let alone its language, and everything for himself and his legacy—can we settle for a poet who regards words as nothing more than the means to continue his swindle?
We must not swoon in desperation, willing to fall into bed with the first lover who shows us the slightest hint of false affection, who whispers sweet nothings as he flashes a rhinestone smile. Not for love of anything but himself does Matthew Dickman write poetry.
Dickman said in a 2006 interview, “I want poetry to be part of my life, but I don’t want poetry to be my life.”
Don’t worry, Matthew. It’s not. As Townes Van Zandt said: “There’s two kinds of music: the blues and ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.’”
Mr. Bluebird is perched firmly on the shoulder of All-American Poem.
55 comments:
Michael--Solid essay and a great response. I'd love to have a review/essay of yours on American Music, Crush, or Essbaum's work (perhaps covering all her collections) for GRL. Mull it over and, if you'd like, get back to me: gentlyreadlit@ymail.com
I enjoyed reading this thoughtful and passionate review! Now I'll have to read the book. BTW, how are the Dickmans related to Sharon Olds?
Excellent review- I will check this out, it does seem as if another 'prize winner' has inexplicably emerged. Ah, Mr. Hoagland, why? Were the other possibilities really worse?
Very thorough.
I had no idea who this person was the poem triggered a certain response from me as well.
http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2008/12/upon-reading-recent-poem-in-magazine.html
Do you think Hoagland picked the book because it indirectly flattered his own work/seemed derivative of his own work ? Too often, big-name poets pick their (so-called) clones with these book contests, partly out of insecurity, I suppose, partly out of a desire to see their own line continue, however attenuated and bastardized.
Tell us how you really feel, brother! ;)
(& thanks)
Hmm, word verification = thing
Brian: I can see Hoagland's decision being partially based on the fact that Dickman's work is in line with his, though it's conjecture, as you say. That explains it somewhat. Doesn't excuse the act. Makes it kind of worse.
Shameless Hussy, that particular poem is by Michael Dickman, the twin brother.
maybe he meant bill evans? lots of photos of him smoking.
You know what I like about this review? That fact that you went to great lengths to essentially say "this is shit."
I gotta love that thoroughness.
Matthew W. Schmeer: To even describe these poems as shit is to assign value to them. Shit is the root of things, rids the body of toxins while building up the natural world that surrounds us. It’s part of nature, part of a process that has meaning and power behind it. It’s disconcerting to hold in your hand something that rightly shouldn’t exist. But that’s exactly what you do when you pick up All-American Poem.
if you think the twin poets are bad,
wait till the clone ones come along . . .
...and each clone is a little more transparent than the previous clone (like the Andy Warhol silk screen of Elvis), as are their words on the page, the ink growing fainter, til [many silent white years go by] ...look over there! A period!
nice—kind of a bid
to put in for the William Logan slot
when he retires . . .
...because if you build a period, Logans (bright red on their heads and tails) will flock to trees around it, and wait impatiently for it to hatch.
Knott: Mr. Logan can take his slot with him when he "retires," which I hope is soon. That doesn't interest me and I don't plan on doing negative reviews, especially of this intensity, often. But I will do so when necessary. And this was necessary. Big picture.
"big picture"?
it's just po biz . . .
your outrage is manufactured (like Logan's) and farcical——
but it's brought you some idle attention,
so its "necessity" has worked to advance your career,
which is the point,
isn't it——
Knott: Not the point at all. Outrage not manufactured and quite genuine. I'd say "Good try," but it wasn't.
michael - re: knott - don't feed the troll
"Just because a poetry is supposedly free of irony doesn’t mean it is free from the responsibility to be truthful."
I'm stealing this. This one sentence sums it all up for me---though the entire review is quite insightful and spot on.
Like Knott said, it's po-biz, so why the vitriol? I understand the poems are bad; one really doesn't need the text surrounding the excerpts to see that. But why the personal attack? The biz side of poetry was, is, and always will be partisan, how could it not be? Dig a little, and you'll find obvious connex between Laux, Jackson, and the twins. Oregon products all, with Laux at the helm. Favors for favors, etc. Look, Jackson publishes Jill Bialosky's god-awful poems in Harvard Review because Jill Bialosky is his editor at Norton. Big deal. Undoubtedly, if the twins weren't snatching all the rare sunshine from the poets you think deserve it, you'd have a better choice? But someone else'd rip that choice to shreds. I guess I just don't get the feigned surprise here at the twins' ascension. But I do like the general dint of your piece. As you already know, you ain't ever gonna get an NEA now!
JMSW
Hello Michael,
I was unfamiliar with the Dickman(s)' work until I read your review. Based upon the excerpts, I would have to agree with most of your insights and observations.
HOWEVER (of course) it seems as though you are falling into a bit of a trap (one that I fall in so often that think of it as my summer home) and that is allowing your passion to cloud your clarity of judgment (or at least your restraint!) at times.
Me too, Me too. All the time.
That being said, here are a few things that I would like to remark upon, and this is, of course, based solely upon the excerpts you have presented (you don't think I am going to buy this book after this review, do you?)
1) "At Night My Hat" - 'is self-centered.' Probably so. Aren't the vast majority of poems (and perhaps even works of modern fiction?) Lo, for the days of George Eliot.
2) 'And misogynistic' – again, not what I see from the excerpted work. I see it as more a problem of identification - if he had said "The MAN'S hat" instead of "The Hat" it might have made more sense this way. Nothing wrong with focusing on a cultural object of a specific gender, I don't think.
3) Do you really think that Sharon Olds' work is slipshod? I imagine you are referencing her meter. But her poetry ... it can be so beautiful ... and it's not even my style
4) Referring to TS Eliot as a British citizen I guess is OK but as everyone knows, he was born in St. Louis, after all. I don't really think that is the major problem with that particular set of lines and it seems to be knit picking a bit there (if that's how you spell it. It might be.)
5) On a semi-unrelated note, I am not sure that I think of Frank O'Hara as 'ironic.' In fact, I tend to read him when I am sick to death of irony. He might have been, well, a little excessive and loved the everything a little too much but I don't suspect that he was posing or pretending, although I can't say with any real certaintly. To me, he seemed pretty sincere.
6) The whole bit about “You too can write ‘poetry’ (and get laid).” No wonder people are excited about this book. If you saw that someone got paid $3,000 to defecate on a piece of paper, you’d be a sucker if you didn’t stock up on Benefiber" leads me to believe that you are no longer a disinterested commentator! And as much as I agree with you on so much of this, it makes me want to defend the Brothers Dickman.
And so on.
And I will stop with that, because, I won't.
All the best,
RG
"to go so far as to suggest headgear is purely a symbol of the 'complex history of masculine principles' is to be denser than a black hole. Start here: ask any Iranian woman if she dare walk the streets of Tehran without a burqua."
It strikes me as odd when a reviewer condemns factual inaccuracy then makes factual mistakes in his review. Iranians aren't much for burqas (the Arabic word is not "burqua"). In Iran the head covering is called a "hijab". After the Islamic Revolution women were persecuted for exposing too much flesh. Things have improved since. "Improved" does not mean equal rights; the Islamic regime's policies must frequently be condemned. But a complete face & body covering garment is not an Iranian thing and one might be consider your assertion what you call other things in your review -- a stereotype.
"If you’re brazen enough to put the word 'America,' or any variation thereof in the title of your book or poem, you better bring to bear all the intelligence of spirit that the word evokes, whether to retrieve from ourselves the greatness of our nation or to point out its horrifying transgressions and correct them."
Oh!
Glenn: thanks for the correction on my vocabulary. I'll change it in the review, and I apologize for it here. I'll contact the American Heritage Dictionary people immediately and tell them to give a better explanation.
And I'm aware that the situation in Iran has improved, and I'm no Middle East expert (perhaps Riyadh would've been a better example?), but I have a friend from Iran and was thinking of her when using this as an example, after a piece she wrote about visiting her family a few years ago and being warned not to leave the house without an escort, tied in with the head-covering tradition. Improved, yes, but women are still second class citizens there.
But I specifically framed it the way I did because, as I said, I'm no expert on the Middle East. I wanted it to be a starting point, not an exhaustive analysis of that particular horrible poem.
An additional thought or two:
If MD was searching for a masculine voice to infuse his poetry, then why not have the likes of Hugo or Dickey? I know it's a matter of personal choice in writing, but you are correct---there are masculine voices to be had which do not go so far as to objectify women (re:"it").
And what were you ever going to do with an NEA grant, anyway?
it's the trendy trick it seems to do the negative review,
as featured in the new Poetry Magazine and Poetry Foundation website,
so i assume yours here is an audition for their next opening . . .
like Logan you're not wasting your ammo on midgets: he only (or mostly) attacks the famous/notorious/prize-po's
and it's obvious you're responding less to Dickman's poetry than to his po biz plums, his name-brand splash of celebrity——
i don't blame you for being envious of his eclat——
I'd heard of the Dickman twins but never read anything of Matthew's until reading this review. That being said, maybe I'm biased in my feeling that Dickman has slapped the "POET" pin on his lapel and strutted into the right place at the right time. (It's all about the lapel pin, you know.) He does seem somewhat circumstantial, and not unlike the feeling I get when an ironic phrase is stripped of its irony and blasted through every Myspace-sponsored media outlet known to the 23-year-old Bushwick crowd. (...Uh oh, did I just name-drop??)
chill out, shiavo! i'd enjoy reading better if your jealousy weren't so obvious
I might be able to buy this if you could actually write a good poem. I'll keep waiting.
Great, the world needs another male poet who writes about sex like he invented the vagina.
Word verification is, I swear to God, "prosear"!!!
Oops. I have connected the wrong Dickman. Who knew.
"Many poets are discontent at the lack of response to their poems. They complain, they grumble, they resent the prominence of others, they seek to blame somebody. The worst of them are Bitter Old Boys, or BOBs, with their equivalent BOGs (Liam Rector used these acronyms in a letter.)...BOBs assume that they are mistreated because they went to Iowa or because they didn't; they are ill used because they come from the Midwest or the South, California or New England; they are turned down because they have not flattered the right people. Indeed, Foetry made its points, and everyone can cite cases of friends rewarding friends...a BOBs bitterness is a waste of energy, time, and concentration." --Donald Hall Exactly.
"Anonymous said...
chill out, shiavo! i'd enjoy reading better if your jealousy weren't so obvious
6:13 PM
Anonymous said...
I might be able to buy this if you could actually write a good poem. I'll keep waiting.
8:23 PM"
Ahh....the substanceless snark of anonymous cowards. Never gets old.
For what it's worth, here's my two-bits:
All-American Road Rage
-after All-American Poet,
Matthew Dickman
Fill up with white lightning,
Get blue in the face,
See red, run one last red
Light after the mother-
Fucker--bang-bang--you're dead.
"Ahh....the substanceless snark of anonymous cowards. Never gets old."
Ahhh....the substanceless ass-kissing of Matt Cozart. Never gets old.
Talk about tone:
http://www.faceofthecookie.com/2009/02/20/i-give-up/
You shouldn't have spent so much time on Dickman(s) - clearly he doesn't deserve it. Now I think because you said it's really bad in so many words and with such vigor, the backlash will be he'll sell more books out of car-accident-type curiosity.
In the future, save the space for the ones you love and make people go buy those...
Anony-mouse, when I kiss ass, you'll know it. My ass-kissing is full of substance.
My comment to "you" was more along the lines of stating the obvious.
I want to say, in all sincerity, thank you not only for caring, but for taking the time to construct this post. I've become an exceptionally lazy blogger/thinker/etc, and I might half-think my way to something like this, but not pursue a thoughtfully-constructed, well-written post. It was good to read and see.
why is there not room for all voices in poetry?
calling this writing sloppy is akin to saying lucinda williams sings out of tune. so? um, perhaps that's part of the point.
i mean, if writing poetry is a means to these guys getting laid who cares, really.
And if some well published poets see something here, maybe a substantive commentary on the shallow postmodern suburban life...then...let's take it for what it is
it's a bitch that life ain't fair, but i'm not gonna lose any sleep over the twins... good for them
i would rather read their book than your overdone reworked rewarmed sloppy second rerun work any day
and as a woman i don't feel i need you defending me against what you as a man perceive as misogynist...or does that sensitve stuff help you get laid
unfortunate name you have
"(though the line breaks and meter-making argument are just as slipshod as Ms. Olds’s, who is, not coincidentally, a relation of the Dickmans)."
If this is another charge of nepotism, can you substantiate it?
I'm wondering what you think of Paul Guest's work.
It's a little awkward to post here seeing as though I'm implicated in the argument, albeit as an antithesis, but I think it's important to note that Michael's whole thrust is the interrogation of contemporary poetry's infrastructure. Why should we care if Dickman writes poems to get laid or score prizes? Because we care about poetry. Not good poetry, not bad poetry, but poetry that does something to make the world a more honest, interesting or humane place. Fuck middling. Fuck complacency. Go out and write some poems that make people think differently. And care enough to get riled when poems that make people think the same are celebrated.
Are these poet twins joined at the hip or head?
Have spent enough time with the twins in poetry circles to know not to sit at any dinner table with them.
They don't see or hear anyone who cannot assist their careers.
and the train of talk is how Allen Ginsberg hit on them and Louise Gluck wants to suck their dick and Emily Dickinson sends them handwritten letters and Shakespeare invited them to his summer home and baked them a cake.
Despite this nauseating subject line, they hold a certain sway and power. I think its that they've tricked enough people into thinking enough Important people love and adore them that very few people trust their gut reactions and discomfort. And far fewer are willing to say it in public.
I'm reminded of this blog post on counterfeit art:
"Fakers derive their power from our own expectations and prejudices. Stephen Glass’s talent, writes Maliszewski, “lay less in the originality of his imagination than in his solicitous ability to seize on whatever the conventionally wise were chatting about at cocktail parties and repackage it in bright new containers, selling the palaver right back to them. Nobody was the wiser.” Studied more closely, though, Glass’s “wild inventions form a thin skin stretched over a fairly standard body of accepted truth and mainstream opinion. Glass’s imagination is not, in other words, all that original. It is, in fact, crushingly banal. How else to explain his production of so many fabrications that deliver, in story after story, the shared assumptions of the editorial class in new and perhaps slightly surprising forms?”
Shared assumptions is a key. Fakers tell us what we want to hear."
Hello All,
Michael, you owe me around $50 dollars from when you stayed with Matthew in Austin, and never seemed to have money for tacos or beer. I still have receipts. Oh those were the days. Poems and Led Zep! I hope you're well. Maybe next time Hoagland will pick your book. Are you still writing sonnets?
Yours,
Michael Dickman
i can't be the only one your William Logan Jr. rant
made curious about reading Matthew Dickman,
so i found some of his work online and thought it was brilliant,
and ended up posting one on my prose blog with an expression of my admiration——
he certainly doesn't need my approbation, of course!
And for a large part, Australians, if they wear them at all, wear felt hats, not straw.
For sure...this review is outrageously good.
Who care about the twins poetry...I want more of these wonderful essays by you.
Well done.
Excellent essay!
Based on the excerpts quoted in the (worthwhile) review, I find the poetry rather atrocious, to say the least.
I will say it's the kind of stuff that would encourage me to do something useful, rather than read "poetry" - like volunteer trash clean-up, or something. Maybe that's its real (negative) value.
Wow..this is the first time I have read Schiavo and the last so won't see his response if there is one. This rant reminds me of "hell has no fury like a poet scorned" or poet envy. Anyhow something like that. Matthew Dickman's book, of course is brillant. Which would explain the author's attack. Both of the Dickman men work tirelessly on their poetry as many friends and other poets attest too. Maybe Schiavo doesn't understand that those of us who are not poets really enjoy reading art that speaks to us. Readers of this blog beware. The New Yorker is printing an article this week regarding the Dickman poets so be prepared for more crying from this site. As for me, guess I will have to miss it as I will be rereading All American Poem and starting on The End of the West. Much more entertaining than a group of want to bees rearing their envious ugly heads. Hats off to Michael and Matthew who found "grown up" poets in the community.
Much of Schiavo's disapproval of Matt Dickman's work seems to be based on Dickman's politically incorrect subject matter. (He's rude about women! He's insensitive about sex!) And, as Wendy mentioned, you could cut the envy at this site with a knife. Whether or not Dickman's poetry is any good is probably a moot point. The wits at this site and others like it would no doubt describe any poet's work as "shit" if the poet achieved some degree of fame, or managed to attract readers who weren't other poets in their creative writing workshops.
Ugh, obviously you don't like Dickman's poems. That's fine; I'm sure he couldn't care less. I like Dickman's poems, but that's not the point. The point is this: get over it. Focus on writing your own poems. Read more poems you like. Spare us the diatribe.
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