Ray Clark Dickson Bio-Vita
1.
I am a populist poet,
perhaps too accessible. I believe the perfect poetry audience suffers fools
well. I also believe in Bergson's concept of Duree, 'We carry with us all our
experiences compacted in an ever-rolling snowball of our lives’.
In street poetry I find
supple muscularity in Charles Bukowski; for off-street voices give me Czeslaw
Milosz and Derek Walcott, particularly his book-length poem, Omeros.
I like to write narrative
poetry, shirt-sleeved to formal.
Sometimes, like Guido
Gimlet's horse, I go riding off in all directions at once.
I excuse myself, saying
it's all in the name of diversity, not realizing it's poetry that opens one up.
One critic said I do
blue-collar and white-collar poetry in the same laundry. I think our psyches
have a choice of detergents.
A poet with a mind without
borders travels freely - poetry is your visa -a passport to the imagination
where art resides.
After a few pulp fiction
novels I soon realized my style was more Dicksonian than Dickensian, began
writing narrative poetry, short and long.
Poetry to me is passion,
curiosity and compression - along with the old Greek's adage, "Production
is the artist's form of virtue."
Dorothy Parker said, "Brevity is the soul of lingerie" - the poet's
simple lesson in compression.
It took some time for me
to realize that imagery, texture, form, as well as entrance (the importance of
entrada I heard from Octavio Paz in Mexico City years ago) signification and
revelatory endings didn't come from ice-cold vodka and tins of Beluga caviar -
but from a personal voice formed by long experience, intellectual and creative
energy. Also, following my credo day in and day out, "Production is the
artist's form of virtue." The more one writes the better one gets. You
become your own best editor, selecting-out and re-writing.
2.
I grew up reading poetry
of the 'moderns', those who had veered off from prosody, or the metrical
rhyming system. I've done a few rhymed ballads to keep ears tuned.
I try to fit my style to
the conceptual realism enjoyed by art.
"Life is the
examination, poetry the graduation." rcd "
Gregorian chants are like
beads in a rapper's rosary." rcd
I agree with Valery who
said, 'A poem is never finished, merely abandoned.' Therefore, poetry, I think,
is work in progress.
As Isaac Isimnov said, and
I concur, 'If my doctor told me I had only six months to live, I wouldn't
brood, I'd type a little faster.'
Remember Chaucer's
question, 'What things may this signify?'
A.R. Ammons said,
'Language is the medium that carries the inscription, but what is inscribed in
poetry is action, not language."
Robert Frost said, and I
agree, 'I was conservative in my youth in order to be anarchitic in my old
age.'
I read the Anglo/Irishman
W.B. Yeats for the singing line.
I learned from Pablo
Neruda's 'Memorial de Isla Negro' - his autobiography in the form of a hundred
poems. My poetry book 'Parlando' has 285 poems in 295 pages.
When you get my age
sometimes you can't tell mentor from mentee. rcd
Be sure you have your
beeper on when Mama Muse gives you a call. Rcd
3.
Poetry,
for me, is a Homeric expedition into the unknown with words and stanzas spun
in
spider's silk from the intellect to the heart. rcd
A
day will come when your hunger for excellence of expression will parse your
prose
to
pure poetry.
Stay
with your style. No one has lived your life but you. No one truly knows your
sensory
accumulations, throb of your beat. Voice is uniquely your own; there is no
need
to copy or emulate. Feed the flames of poetic desire by learning more about
the
craft through reading, attending and presenting your work at poetry readings.
As
a former jazz drummer I've found 'participial phrasing' is the music I hear
between
line-endings.
The
poetry audience is both endearing and enduring, a miraculous phenomenon
that
enables the poet to master fear and continue their poetic mission.
As
a former journalist (wrote everything from sports to obituaries) I was
interested
in
what G.K. Chesterton had to say about journalists: "Largely consists in
saying,
LORD
JONES IS DEAD to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
Form
or join your own poetic community. T.S. Eliot said, 'What life have you
if
you love not life together? There is no
life that is not in community.'
Like
most poets I'd like to climb out of my octosyllabic short pants and write
some
disturbing lines.
I
believe it was in l952 when Jack Kerouac was in Mexico writing a third of
Doctor
Sax,
about 45,000 words in a month. His 242 choruses of Mexico City Blues
was
stirring in him at this time (later C l959, Grove Press). I lived for a year in
the jungle between Taxco and Cuernavaca writing pulp novels for a LA paperback
house,
short
fiction for the men's market and long narrative poems I found hard to market.
I
seemed to write better about environments with a hard edge. Also, the exchange
was
very strong between the peso and yankee dollar for writers and artists.
I
found the Mexicans a very warm and proud people.
4.
One
year I lived in a small Mexican village called Acuitlapan in the jungle between
Taxco
and Cuernavaca. The villagers were friendly, proud and very hospitable.
On
weekends I would hitch rides to Mexico City. I believe it was l952 (again in
'57)
that
I would visit expatriate writers & poets who gathered on Jack Kerouac's
rooftop
on,
I believe, Calle Arizaba. We vied for blue-collar bragging rights over cheap
green
tequila.
Jack said he had been a brakeman on the Southern Pacific, I said I punked
saws
and loaded green lumber at the Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Co. in Bend, Oregon.
Everyone
told of incredible jobs held to support writing habits. It reminds me today
of
the most unusual position held by any poet I've ever heard about: Alan Dugin,
who
won the Yale Younger Poet's Award, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Prix de
Rome and Shelley Memorial Award. Dugin said his most significant and satisfying
work was making artificial vaginas for the Planned Parenthood Association (to
demonstrate
proper
diaphragm insertion). No mention of work ethics or overtime. This may be an
indelicate observation - I can hear my old journalism professor at the
University
of
Oregon chiding me now, "Have you ever considered the efficacy of candor,
sir?"
Yes,
professor, we both know I've been one of your most troubling students. Far more
distressing
than Ken Kesey ("One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest." I vaguely remember
a
motivating counselor's, "Don't worry about a career, Ray, Mozart didn't
write anything
important
until he was nine years of age." I didn't realize at the time that poetry
would
be
my passport to the world.
5.
In
the 40's and 50's I was influenced by John Berryman (Pulitzer Prize winner),
65';
Randall
Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz (l9l3-l966) and Robert Lowell. Sadly, my mentors,
one
by one succumbed to the poets' occupational hazards, and until this day I
remember
the February of l972 and John Berryman's suicide. I had read his "Mistress
Bradstreet"
and the "Dream Songs"; Randall Jarrell's "The Lost World"
and his elegant,
mercurial
"The Changing Light."; Robert Lowell's "Day By Day" and
Delmore Schwartz's
"Summer
Knowledge". I think it was Browning who wrote, "We poets in our
youth/
begin
in gladness/ but hereof comes/ in the end/ despondency and madness."
Another
favorite of the time - Dylan Thomas visiting America - dying of alcoholism in
l953 - his wife, Caitlin Thomas explaining "that Dylan was never too keen
on life."
I
read a lot of James Wright and Kenneth Rexroth in the famed old Unicorn Press
of
the 60's and 70's. I remember Osip Mandelstam saying, 'Poetry has not slept
here
if the sheets aren't wrinkled.' Also, Diane Wakoski, 'Poetry may not make you
a
living, but it could be your life.' Poetry IS my life. I re-read Octavio Paz
(heard him
live
in Mexico City), Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams (grateful to The Beloit
Poetry Journal for appearing with WCM, Philip Levine, Anne Sexton, Gwendolyn
Brooks, Adrienne Rich and Langston Hughes in Beloit's "A FINE EXCESS:
Fifty Years Of The Beloit Poetry Journal I had 22 poems published there in last
l5 years. Hughes's translation of Federico Garcia Lorca's "Gypsy
Ballads" are available here for the first time. My two poems were selected
from l,200 poems published since l950 - l53 of us are in the book. Incidentally,
William Carlos William's masterpiece, "Paterson", was inspired by the
cantos of Pound.
I
read and admired Derek Walcott (l992 Nobel Laureate - "The Odyssey"
and "The Antilles"- remembered one vivid line, "A moon so bright
you could read palms by it."
innumerable
influences - Robert Frost's New Hampshire experience, Wallace Stephen's
"Sunday
Morning"; T.S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party" and "Ash
Wednesday" (it was Pound
who
advised Eliot to cut "The Wasteland" in half and he might get it
published. He did,
and
it worked, both aesthetically and historically). Charles Olson, Duncan and
Creeley
on
Black Mountain - tone, cadence, metaphorical voices - Theodore Roethke's
"Collected
Poems"
- one in particular, "Heard In A Violent Ward" - all kinds of
influences from
Billie
Holiday to John Coltrane's tenor sax - and most of all to Mother Muse who makes
you
dig out those psychographic words that burn in the dark. Rcd
6.
I
re-read Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems for symbols of expression, the
importance of breathing spaces between words, stanzas, line-endings.
Most
older poets see things from a distance - revealing self - soft, moody, tough,
brittle, enduring - I like to take whatever, whenever Mother Muse is in the
mood to give me.
Remember
Ralph Ellison, 'I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse
to
see me.'
Remember
Pablo Neruda's words (Il Postino, "The Postman): 'Poetry doesn't belong to
those who wrote it, but to those who need it.' That's why poetry deserves a
wider audience than family and friends - you have to send it out - stand up to
rejections that every serious poet receives - rejoice in acceptances - think
also that your poetry is a bouquet of self, flowers to be given away.
I
recently wrote a poem on Ernest Hemingway's l00th Anniversary. I'm indebted to
Hem for two disciplines, (I) characterization, and (2) story action. He asks
the question in "Death In The Afternoon", 'What creates the emotions
of the experience?'
"A
musician is to an acoustician as a poet is to prose." rcd
I
think there should be at least one poet for every thousand plumbers unless the
loo overflows, then, never, ever, call a poet.
Words,
phrases, stanzas are cogs in cognition's railway to the stars. rcd
Tonight,
with you, a warm audience, I feel like Henry Kissinger (who seems to be
appearing again) - his voice down deep in the guttural gazebo of his larynx
"I have never - been so honored - as the last time - I dined alone - in
the Palace of Mirrors - "
7.
Robert
Frost said, "Write a poem that breathes with its own breath." He
suggests, to me, a strong body of work, original voice, tone, rhythm, powerful
language, truth of real emotions, learned experience, find the right active
verb that opens the door to the poem inside, awaken each utterance with passion
and control. Read contemporaries and the masters - read, read, read - watch for
dead and empty language - choose particular
words
you like from what you read (words only, do not take the author's lines or
meanings) - develop your own dictionary true to your voice and style -some
major poets have hundreds of thousands of 'personal' words that excite or pique
interest and ennobles the text. Be a 'tekkie/pro/ when it comes to the
essentials - study markets, samples of accepted poetry, present immaculate
work, proofed and aesthetically appealing, short modest cover letter if
required (let your work speak for itself), track submissions, acceptances,
rejections. Remember the old Greek's advice: "Production is the artist's
form of virtue." You are a poet. The world needs you. Be disciplined, true
to yourself.
Duke
Ellington said, "To write, all you have to have is physical isolation -
and whatever
is
in you bubbles out of you." I'm fortunate, I guess. I can write in a phone
booth.
I
believe in the consonants of art and life - enjoying oneself, the luxury of
irony, detachment, learning when to break loose, turn yourself in, pay homage
to the particularities of personhood, as all poetry resides in the kingdom
within.
I
must be unafraid to step down on my punches, search for a rarified poetry with
strength and dexterity, a fresh suppleness, clarity, combing of language. If we
only knew how good we could be there would be no more feeble or colorless
poetry.
Between
poetry I write aphorisms, observation and anecdotage. Sometimes these written
words mock me - cold as a saltwater shower. I warm up the day with a warm-up in
verbal alliteration - something antic - say - something like this (because I
live in a college town) . . .let's call it A WARNING TO BUDDING BAUDELAIRES -
The bell bonged/ by bats/ in the belfry/ are the same bats/ that binge/ by the
bong/ in the pantry.
I
understand that great yogis believe there is no end to life - just to be
on
the safe side I'm going to enjoy this one to the fullest.