The End of the West

Reviewing the books I recommended at the staff meeting this week, I rather wondered how I might ever have found one of these, The End of the West, by poet Michael Dickman, had I not received a copy from the publisher. Poetry doesn't find new readers the way fiction does nowadays: there are seldom newspaper reviews, or even much mention made online of poetry. The customers I encounter who themselves read poetry tend not to come to booksellers for assistance with the frequency of other readers, instead finding their quiet way to the poetry shelves and just as quietly buying what they might have found on their own. That may not be every bookseller's experience, but it has been mine. There are one or two regulars in the store, devoted readers of contemporary poetry, from whom a recommendation can be drawn out, but these seem to be rather more the exception than the rule. I don't doubt, in a bookstore less general, a store more specifically devoted to poetry, a store as rare and wonderful, as for instance, Open Books: A Poem Emporium, here in Seattle, this sort of conversation must be more frequent. I have always found everyone there, customers, readers and staff, only too eager to discuss and make recommendations, but one can feel rather shy of confessing one's near total ignorance of contemporary poetry in such small temples to the art. (I've used the excuse of Christmas shopping for a friend -- better read and with a better ear -- to go there, and had the benefit myself. I can recommend this method for anyone equally embarrassed, but curious.)

It has been my experience that nowadays, if one does not write poetry, or subscribe to the magazines or societies aimed at those who do, if one does not regularly attend poetry readings, for fear of being forced to listen politely to poems one would be unlikely to read, in other words, if one does not attend to the business of poetry, the chances of finding a new poet to read on one's own are slim. Like many casual readers of the stuff, I haven't actually enjoyed most of the poetry readings I've been to: the atmosphere not infrequently seeming more like church than a party, or slipping unnoticed into a club devoted to some game I do not play, a secret society devoted to some arcane study, or a union-hiring-hall, than a cultural event. And "performance poetry," as it turns out, does not imply a more polished entertainment, only a microphone, younger participants, and more frequent, if also more awkward rhyme. As for the journals and magazines devoted exclusively to poetry, or to poetry of any particular kind, for the casual reader like me, these offer all the charms of specialty watercolor instruction, or breed fancier magazines. With the exception of some forgivable embarrassments from the middle of my adolescence, and my indulgence in clerihews here, I can make no claim to even a passing interest in the composition of poetry, and such poetry as I read aloud, even when others are kind enough to listen, is always of a kind that may safely be said to be entirely in memoriam to reputations long established and in no real need of me. I am not then, in any way, in the business, but at the bookstore, and the business of poetry there, as I've said, is predictably slow.

So chancing to find a new, young poet who's first published book I genuinely enjoyed, is for me a lucky thing. Serving on the committee for a minor, regional prize, I've been reminded that even in the least productive times, there will always be more stuff that is published than I will ever want to read and that even the stuff I may have to will seldom be anything more appealing than what I'm likely to encounter at either an "open mic night" at a coffee house, or in some workshop, or MFA class at some minor public university. It isn't that any of it is bad, so much as it is boring.

Reading Michael Dickman's first book, I was thrilled to find that there was a happy unfamiliarity in his voice, youth, in other words, but with nothing of that outraged entitlement, that righteous, humorless indignation, that can make the young so endearing and their poetry so tedious to settled old parties like me. His would seem to have been, from the little of his biography I've managed to learn, a not uneventful or sheltered youth, but he regrets none of it, at least in so far as he uses it, in his poems, with surprising and surprisingly effective judiciousness; every reference to what sounds like personal recollection of family, grandparents, friends, school, drug use, being placed without blame, as context, often quite startling and just as often funny, for what he might then have to say about the look of things around him, or the strange workings of love, the common violence of daily life, or about the sad necessities, and luck, of survival, as in the opening of the poem, "Scary Parents":

"I didn't shoot heroin in the eighth grade because I was afraid of
needles and still am

my friends couldn't
not do it --

Black tar
a leather belt
and sunlight

Scary parents

They filled holes
all afternoon
then we went to the movies"


Reading these poems, I was particularly struck by how antic even his most thoughtful lines seem to be, so that in a poem like "Ode," for example, as he plays with first one metaphor then another, in praise of a lover, he happily incorporates a wry, even smart-ass self awareness of the silliness inherent in sex and sexual attraction, even as he celebrates the wonder and base physicality, as well as the unsuspected divinity, of another's naked body:

"Do you think there's a difference
for the Lord
between

slow dancing in the kitchen at night, no music, your arms around my
neck and later

my face
in your ass?"

That's funny, but it isn't a flippant question, is it? In this almost childish celebration of what sounds a new and exciting carnality, there is also a very much more sophisticated shock in the thought, a thought that seems to occur to him almost as he writes, that no part of his experience of his beloved need be any less thrilling than any other, and that either of these equally new liberties taken in the same night might be equally offensive to God, or a suggestion of the abundance of creation.

Dickman's sparse lines can suggest both a bracing preference for direct address, and shyness of spoiling a happy thought, or an effective image with too much manipulation or expansion, and I sometimes found myself wishing he had the confidence, or experience to let himself go on at greater length, to risk more, and say more than he does, because what he has to say is surprisingly interesting, original and even wise. I wonder, reading poetry like this, if it is as good as this, that the poet might not find that confidence in other traditional or less obviously modern forms; what would this brilliant kid make of a sonnet? of Browning? of something as technically knotty, and allusive, as Yeats or Blake? That said, much of what I most enjoyed about reading Michael Dickman's poems was all to do with their sweet accessibility, the brave profanity with which he seems to shrug off any discovery but joy, as here, near the end of both his first book, and near the end of his last and longest poem, perhaps his best poem, "The End of the West":

"Listen to those stitches
splitting open
in the air
above me

leaving stars
in a dark
I can hardly plot my way through"

And to think I might never have read that, but for the chance of a job on a committee, and a book in my mailbox. I need such young voices in this dusty room. Michael Dickman, it seems to me, was a happy chance. I'll be looking for others, but I'm glad of this.