Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Rebecca Gambale, Festival Assistant

Have you ever recalled a dream or memory to another person? What happens to the structure of your language as you pull up the dormant images in your mind? Think of your fragmented speech, and how your voice sounds when you say it aloud, repeated from the past. You are digging, and you are feeling. You are translating an experience into language. This embodies the subtle mood of a Michael Dickman poem – see him read his poem “Flies,” below, and watch how careful retelling becomes the foundation of his style.

(Note: Disregard the mistaken YouTube title — this is actually Michael reading “Flies”)

The mindfulness created by Dickman’s paucity of words creates an organic experience; we are lowered into these memories as though they were our own. We are introduced to familiar images, and thoughts so private they could only be internal. This verbal economy makes every image-driven line haunting, every carefully chosen word resonant. Dickman is not telling you a story, he is showing you what a memory feels like as it rings out in your mind.

With every line of a Michael Dickman poem, we become aware of how a word breaks a silence. When that line is finished, we become aware of silence again. This elemental relationship with words, this giving and taking away, creates an intimacy with the reader which is captivating. We wait to know when the silences will return, as silence becomes as meaningful as image. We are at the mercy of Dickman’s staccato structure, but comforted by his smooth reading. Read Dickman’s poem, Good Friday, while listening to it and you can imagine him confiding in you, methodically placing each line against the heavy silence which surrounds. (Note: The poem’s text here differs from the recorded version.)

Reading Dickman, we become aware of the white space on the page in contrast to his tidy lines. See the visual effect of how his images stand stark against white space in his poems “Nervous System,” “Seeing Whales” and “My Autopsy.” There is a sense that the reader should slowly consume the images presented, as though absorbing them in personal memory. There is a feeling that phrases become mantras, heavily ruminated on and rooted in memory, such as in the poem “We Did Not Make Ourselves.” The phrases “You think you’ll be missed / it won’t last long / I promise” and “There is only this world and this world// What a relief / created // over and over” have a feeling of self-comforting and consoling to them, often like the phrases we may think to ourselves so subconciously that we don’t even realize them.

Born in the Lents District of Portland, Oregon, Dickman is getting a great deal of attention for his first collection, The End of the West, released by Copper Canyon Press in 2009. Since, he has been awarded a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton for 2009-2010. He has been profiled in the New Yorker with his twin brother Matthew, and has been generally received as a young poet to watch.

Please use the “Share your thoughts with us” box below to share other resources you may have found for this poet. In this way, we can build together a mini-wiki-encyclopedia on the 2010 Festival Poets.

Return in the weeks ahead as we continue to profile the 2010 Festival Poets.

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10
For more information, visit the Poetry website

Follow the Dodge Poetry Festival on Twitter
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Join the Friends of the Festival (use the blue Donate button on our homepage)

Khalil Murrell, Program Associate, Poetry

In the great, big ol’ picnic of Matthew Dickman’s poems, everything is eligible for singing: a glowing, off-the-vine “Roma,” the chicken hung in the window in “The Mysterious Human Heart,” and even the skinny girl wearing a Talk Nerdy to Me t-shirt in “V.” His poems enter and re-enter the strange and heart-wrenching places of American life (see “Lents District” and “Trouble”) without leaving us in sentimentality or despair. He takes us to places as democratic and basic as Walmart without simplifying the complex world into “Love” and roses.

Dickman’s debut collection, All American Poem, offers rich tensions between humor and heartbreak—even the joyride through sorrow—that fill our everyday lives. In fact, like Jeffrey McDaniel and Tony Hoagland, Dickman often employs jest and witticism on his way to poignancy. Watch him read “Slow Dance” below.

We’ve all heard more people write poetry than those who read it. True or not, this sentiment may result from the belief that poetry—arguably the most democratic of all the arts—feels removed at times from its capacity to engage the masses. But with a Whitmanian catalog style that spills down the page, Dickman seems to have found a way to write inclusive and accessible, yet densely complex poems that help bridge the gap between high art and the mainstream. “I want to write poems I want to read, in a way,” the Portland native said in an interview. Matthew and his brother, Michael Dickman, may be the closest thing the poetry world has ever come to having a phenom, including being profiled in the New Yorker and having a small role as a pre-cog in Minority Report with Tom Cruise. But the hearty muscularity and generosity of his work suggest both Dickman and his poems will be around for a long time to come.

Please use the “Share your thoughts with us” box below to share other resources you may have found for this poet. In this way, we can build together a mini-wiki-encyclopedia on the 2010 Festival Poets.

Return in the weeks ahead as we continue to profile the 2010 Festival Poets.

* * *

The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10
For more information, visit the Poetry website

Follow the Dodge Poetry Festival on Twitter
Become a fan of the Dodge Poetry Festival on Facebook
Join the Friends of the Festival (use the blue Donate button on our homepage)

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Starting next week and continuing into October, we’ll be using the Poetry Fridays blog to introduce the poets participating in the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival.  Each post will feature brief profiles of one or more poets, with links to poems, videos, interviews, podcast, bios and anything else of interest we might find in our research.

More importantly, we invite you to join in the process of building these profiles by using the Comments section of each blog to link us to items of interest you might discover about these poets.  Teachers, especially those bringing students to the Festival, can make such contributions part of a research assignment.  In this way, together we can build our own mini-wiki-encyclopedia on the 2010 Festival Poets.

The late Stanley Kunitz once commented on the Festival’s great democratic spirit.  He was referring, in part, to its long tradition of having an amazingly broad, deep and diverse line-up.  The 2010 Festival continues that tradition.  So far, the poets who have agreed to participate include:

Be sure to follow us in the weeks ahead as new names are added to this list, and to meet the 2010 Festival Poets.

You can always view video clips of readings from past Dodge Poetry Festivals on our YouTube channel.