| Author | Message | ||
| ~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 33948 Registered: 11-1998 |
. Dear Membership – I briefly mentioned a poet in a thread around here whose work really knocks my socks off. And I made reference to his book. However, I didn’t go into detail about him, and I’d like to do that now. His name is Matthew Dickman. Matthew is a home-grown Portland boy (that’s where steve and I live). He is the author of two chapbooks, Amigos (Q Ave Press, 2007) and Something About a Black Scarf (Azul Press, 2008). He has been a recipient of fellowships from The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, The Vermont Studio Center, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker, Tin House, and Lyric. When not attending a writer's residency, he works in a bakery, where he can "shape five baguettes in under three minutes." As the back cover of his debut collection states, All-American Poem, winner of the 2008 APR/Honickman First Book Prize selected by Tony Hoagland, is a book “of great hopefulness about the ecstatic nature of our daily lives. Pop culture and sacred longing go hand in hand in these extraordinary poems. What you will find here is gratitude and praise for the experience of being human.” But beyond all that literary folderol, these poems are just a blast to read. I’m exposed to one hell of a lot of poems, so it takes real magic to keep me entertained, impressed, educated, fully engaged, and sometimes even laughing out loud. Matthew does all that and then some. Honestly, it’s been a long time since an entire collection is one in which I would say there’s not one stinker in the bunch, thrown in to fill out the pages. Every one of the poems in this book is a poem I read more than once. And not because I had to. They were just so smart, and funny, and human, and insightful, I wanted to experience them all again. Matthew simply talks to his readers in this collection. Nothing fancy. Nothing high-brow and over our heads. But don’t let that fool you. This is one poet who knows everything all of us carry around in our heads and our hearts. You can read the reviewers’ commentary below. Believe every word they say. They’re not exaggerating. And if you only have the money to purchase one book of poems this year, this is the one to get. It will change how you think about poetry. It would even appeal to those who think they hate poetry. All-American Poem by Matthew Dickman is available in the WPF BookShop under “Admin’s Featured Five-Star Book Picks." Love, M (Administrator) __________________________________________________________________ All-American Poem by Matthew Dickman __________________________________________________________________ BOOK DESCRIPTION Excerpt from Back Cover: “If Fred Astaire was up and around again and dancing with a humming Frank O’Hara across the dear and broken landscape of our lives, the sound of their steps, through the late spring afternoon, might have some of the sweetness of these poems. But these poems are sweeter than even that – and so bursting with knowledge and love they make me want to get up and dance myself . . . I didn’t know how much I needed this book until I read it. Now I carry it with me wherever I go.” -- Marie Howe “Matthew Dickman’s authority is that of the native: unwavering and resolute. But it is his artfulness and large spirit, telescoping without sentimentality the single outlook of a speaker who has escaped and now looks back, as bluesy as such projects go that gives his poems a universality of feeling, an expressive lyricism of reflection, and a heart-rending allure.” -- Major Jackson “These poems swing with verve and luminosity. They take no prisoners. They make friends with our citizen souls. Ravenous for life, for love, forgiveness, these are prayers made on a playground when one boy hits another, on a dance floor where a man waltzes with his brother and steps on his foot knowing ‘one will die first and the other will suffer,’ but dancing anyway, on and on, until every light in American blinks out.” -- Dorianne Laux EDITORIAL REVIEWS From Amazon.com: "Matthew Dickman's all-American poems are the epitome of the pleasure principle; as clever as they are, they refuse to have ulterior intellectual pretensions; really, I think, they are spiritual in character – free and easy and unself-conscious, lusty, full of sensuous aspiration. . . . We turn loose such poets into our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds." -- Tony Hoagland, APR/Honickman First Book Prize judge “All American Poem plumbs the ecstatic nature of our daily lives. In these unhermetic poems, pop culture and the sacred go hand in hand. As Matthew Dickman said in an interview, he wants the "people from the community that I come from" – a blue-collar neighborhood in Portland, Oregon – to get his poems. "Also, I decided to include anything I wanted in my poems. . . . Pepsi, McDonald's, the word 'ass.'" There is no one to save us because there is no need to be saved. I've hurt you. I've loved you. I've mowed the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress covered in a million beads slinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life, I take her hand in mine. I spin her out and bring her in. This is the almond grove in the dark slow dance. It is what we should be doing right now. Scraping for joy . . .” TABLE OF CONTENTS Part One The Mysterious Human Heart Slow Dance Some Days At Night My Hat Classical Poem Love The Black Album Public Parks an Imaginary French Film Snow Part Two Byron Loves Me V Roma Thanksgiving Poem Amigos All-American Poem Sad Little Outlaw Country Music Grief Trouble Lents District Part Three We Are Not Temples American Standard The Cows of Point Reyes American Studies Lucky Number Poem for the Night Emily Opened Her Beer with a Bic Lighter The Small Clasp The World is Too Huge to Grasp SAMPLE POEM: All-American Poem I want to peel off a hundred dollar bill and slap it down on the counter. You can pick out a dress. I’ll pick out a tie: polka dots spinning like disco balls. Darling let’s go two-stepping in the sawdust at the Broken Spoke. Let’s live downtown and go clubbing. God save hip-hop and famous mixed drinks. Let’s live in a cardboard box. Let’s live in a loft above Chelsea, barely human, talking about the newest collection of Elizabeth Peyton, her brilliant strokes, the wine and cheese. You can go from one state to another and never paint the same thing twice. In New Mexico we could live by a creek and hang our laundry on the line. Let’s get naked in the cold waters of Michigan. Let’s get hitched in Nevada, just you, me, and Elvis. We could sell cheese curd in Wisconsin. We could rent the sky in Montana. I could pay off my bills. You could strip in some dive on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Let’s bite each other on the neck. Oh my sexy Transylvania! We could be relationship counselors for trannies in South Dakota. It must be hard to have a woman living inside you when you’re watching cows chew the frozen grass of December. You are everywhere, sweet Carolinas. You’re my boss, Tennessee, you honeysuckle. 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? Texas, I was with you on the fourth of July watching the sky undress with my friends and we were Americans on America Day, which is every day, coming home from work, drinking a beer and waiting for the dark, for the night, for the rocket’s red glare, lying around on a blanket in the backyard, a girl from your hometown leaning against you, slipping her slender foot in and out of the saltwater sandal. She’s wearing cherry lip balm and taking ecstasy. Later you can taste it. The smooth wax along her mouth, her arms stretched out in the grass and each narrow leaf of grass like a separate lover, the horizon of a summer tan rising above her low-cut jeans. She looks different here than she did in her uniform, standing behind the counter of the Coffee-Go, steaming milk, rows of flavored syrup above her head: almond, blackberry, mint, vanilla. 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. It is not Clare or her brother or all the bourbon in Kentucky. On the Fourth of July I walk out among the fallen watermelon rinds, the corn cobs, paper plates with chicken grease being pushed by a little breeze so they look like moons spun out of orbit. I go inside. I turn the television on. It’s playing the Civil War again. The Battle of Gettysburg remembering itself on the football field at Lincoln Memorial High. A rush of gray uniforms poised on the scrimmage line. The poor sons of Alabama wearing the uniforms of dead soldiers. The North marching down toward cotton revenue and Big Tobacco. The South starving, fighting, often without shoes, the narrator explaining how the muskets were loaded, fired, and then re-loaded. That’s a lot of time to think about the person you’re killing. Unless, of course, you were home and your house was burning down. Out of the smoke there’s always more smoke. There’s always the hacking apart and crying. You can go from one Civil War to another and still not be free. The man in charge of the antique cannon has lit his shirt on fire. The man in charge of the horse runs Ray’s Hardware on 10th and Main. He’s having a liquidation sale this weekend. The show is over in an hour. That includes commercials and the slow, I won’t kill you, pace of the re-enactment. This is how it happened, the narrator is saying, while his producer plays a negro spiritual. It makes you weep. The vocalist calling out to God. Oh Lord! Oh Lord my God, she’s singing, have pity on our souls. You can go from one state to another and pity will meet you at the Grayhound Station. In the stands of the Lincoln Memorial football field a little boy is eating cotton candy while the dead men rise up from the twenty-yard line and walk toward their families. I love the History Channel. It’s so foreign. The old reels of Germany having the fascism bombed out of it. Kennedy waving from the black sedan. It’s almost real. Boston grieving. Pulling its hair out. You can take the Chinatown bus from Boston to the Chinatown in New York City. You can go from one shop window with peeled ducks hanging by their ankles to another shop window with peeled ducks hanging by their ankles. In Oregon you can go from one hundred-year-old evergreen to another hundred-year-old evergreen and never turn around. They’re everywhere, cut down and loaded up, like paperbacks in bookstores. My favorite bookstore is in Evanston, Illinois. The owner is Polish and his daughter wore a wool skirt that kept sliding up her legs as she sat on the edge of his desk. God bless her for it was cold outside and I was almost alone but for my copy of The Idiot I carried with me everywhere. You can go from one Russian novel to another Russian novel and never have borsht. You can go from one daughter to another and eventually end up with your own. You can go from one Founding Father to another and still have the same America. The same Alaska. The same baked Alaska served on a silver plate in the same hotel where the wait staff are all South American, the same cows sleeping in the same Wyoming with the same kids getting drunk, shooting cans, peeing on the electric fence. The same Main Street with the same True Value. The same flags staggered between the streetlights like marathon runners. I walked down that street in Tacoma, Washington with Jennifer when Jennifer had red hair and listened to Broadway musicals. We smoked cigarettes in the town square below a statue of one soldier carrying another. The plaque read “Brothers in Arms.” One soldier carrying another in his arms. We were young and mean and thought it was funny. You can go from one town square to another and never fall in love. Even in New Hampshire where people Live Free or Die. What kind of life is that when you’re on the road and the woman next to you is hardly there, hardly speaking, her feet on the dashboard like two very different promises. How are you supposed to drive under these conditions? Forget about the rain. Forget about Vermont and the Green Mountains’ majesty. Forget Ted Nugent. Forget Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Forget the swimming pools in California because if she doesn’t love you what chance have you got with LA? In LA you don’t get to be lonely. You get skin peels and mud masks. You can go from one spa to another and watch the same lemon slices of cucumber float above the eyes of thirteen-year-old girls and seventy-year-old women. You won’t see that in Minnesota. Minnesota! cover me up in a wool blanket and put me to bed. Let me sleep. Let me have the dream again where Kenneth Koch walks through my mother’s house looking for a leash. He’s taking my dog for a walk. The dog is scratching at the front door and Kenneth is saying yes, yes, I’m coming. You can hear him telling the dog that one broken heart deserves a heart that has been differently broken. I had that dream in New York City. Times Square looks like America throwing up on itself. I want to hold its hair back. I want to sit in the park where my brother and I drank coffee and ate donuts from Dean & Deluca. We watched a man fly a little wooden airplane over the green benches. We ate lunch at the Cedar Tavern. The french fries I ordered were covered in pepper like the poem Frank O’Hara wrote to Mayakovsky, saying I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist. The burger was bloody in the middle as if it wasn’t through living. My first girlfriend refused to eat meat. She said she wouldn’t be a tomb for another living creature. But she privately cut herself on the arms which confused both her parents. Senior year she moved to Idaho. I miss her, my sweet potato. You can go from one state to another and still hate yourself. Hide in your room listening to The Cure, carving little commas in your skin. You can go to Arizona State and never leave your past behind. Arizona waiting with open arms for the new blood. The great white hope of tailgate parties and college football. Put me in coach, I’m ready to play! I’m ready for the lobster rolls of Maine and the co-eds of Maryland. In Maryland I played miniature golf with a waitress from Denny’s. I spent the winter sitting in her section, drinking Pepsi, watching her hips hydroplane inside a green polyester skirt. It was the year my Uncle Joe died. He was a G.I. He was a G.I Joe. A man who hid under the table if a car backfired. He refused to eat rice. He came back from Normandy wanting ice cream. He had a friend from Arkansas who ended up all over his uniform. An ear burned into the helmet. He had a friend from Colorado who got his hands cut off, slow, and forever. His pal from New Jersey was thrown into the sky like a human constellation of broken teeth. You can go from one state to another and still feel pretty good about enlisting. Joe lived in a trance. Loved saved him. He would scratch his wife’s name over and over into the tough leather of his boots. Hidden below the view-line of a foxhole, his knife drawn, the word Alice, written like a child writes on a chalkboard. Alice, Alice, like an antidote for death. Joe died in a hospital. You can go from one pool of blood to another and never see your own reflection. Oh Mississippi, I worry about your boys. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, are you half empty? Washington D.C., the sons of senators are sleeping between flannel sheets. Darling let’s go to Florida and sit in the shade of an orange grove shack. Let’s meet some Cubans and Jews. The world is so big. Why stay up all night and only have ourselves to keep warm? I’ve never been to West Virginia. What the hell are West Virginians doing this weekend? Or Iowans? In Iowa there’s a new Wal-mart opening and I’m gonna shed some dimes. We’ll take a bus there. A bus is a diplomat. It throws us all together, our books, hats, and umbrellas. I am never more human than when I’m riding next to someone who makes me shudder. If my body touches his body who knows what will happen? Race issues and cooties. The great unknown coming home from work. You can go from one state to another and still not know how to act. We are losing ourselves. We are somewhere in Delaware. You are my Georgia peach. Your love is like a field of buffalo when we still had buffalo and they looked like dark rolling hills deep in North Dakota. America I’m in love with your imports and exports, your embargoes and summits! Let’s walk down to the river. Let’s bless the paper boats and turn the whole thing into wine. We can sit quietly on a blanket, watching the transcendentalists come and go, talking of Henry David Thoreau. Take me to the river, Ohio, put me in the water. Missouri goes down to the river and drinks Vanilla Cokes. Rhode Island goes down and prays for money. Connecticut goes down and washes its clothes on the sandy bank. We go down to the river and the moon pulls up in its silver Cadillac. America, let’s put our feet in the water! Let’s tie a rock around our waist and jump in. The moon is revving up. The river is rolling by. Tom Petty is singing about a girl from Indiana and I am buying you another drink. I am trying to take you home. . |
