Post by Mike Wezyk on Jun 1, 2013 10:35:32 GMT -5
Michael Dickman remembers the way light fell through the windows of his Portland, Oregon home. He remembers the sounds, and shapes and the colors that filled his mind and field of view. With a single mother and a twin brother born in 1975, he was left to discover the world around him for himself, making all connections and assumptions as an untarnished entity, experiencing for the first time his surroundings. After changing colleges five times, Dickman received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. One of Dickman’s most known poems, "Returning to Church" won the 2008 Narrative Prize, awarded to him by Narrative Magazine.
Dickman’s poems take the reader through the strangely fathomable untarnished views of the world around him. Reading his poetry is like walking barefoot through a coniferous forest late at night, the fog just at waist level, so the things you step on are concealed yet nip at your soles making a presence. His poetry shows that his upbringing was without a creed, with no life philosophies and no warnings since he was raised without a father or authoritative figure. His poems reflect the world surrounding him, along with all its tedium, terrors, and delights and sadness. Dickman’s poems do not censor, they are blunt and say things that the audience knows, but does not want to hear. In a sense, one could say they are awkward, but in their own way brilliant. In his poem “Ode”, Dickman writes
“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?”
The way he blatantly writes shows the reader how he sympathizes with both their grace and suffering. He has no restraint in writing about things like God, and how little he cares for what humans do on earth, and how little sympathy is actually given. He also writes about how everything can turn against someone at any second, how they can be swaying happily in the kitchen dancing, and then be thrown off to the side with “my face / in your ass?”
The first work that Dickman published in 2009 was entitled The End of the West. Later his second book, Flies, was published in 2011 and won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Dickman continues to write poetry and be an inspiration to anyone wishing to experience the less perfect side of it. With intentional untarnished views of the world and gruesome examples that are not concealed from the reader, the poems are examples of how the world around us works.
Dickman’s poems take the reader through the strangely fathomable untarnished views of the world around him. Reading his poetry is like walking barefoot through a coniferous forest late at night, the fog just at waist level, so the things you step on are concealed yet nip at your soles making a presence. His poetry shows that his upbringing was without a creed, with no life philosophies and no warnings since he was raised without a father or authoritative figure. His poems reflect the world surrounding him, along with all its tedium, terrors, and delights and sadness. Dickman’s poems do not censor, they are blunt and say things that the audience knows, but does not want to hear. In a sense, one could say they are awkward, but in their own way brilliant. In his poem “Ode”, Dickman writes
“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?”
The way he blatantly writes shows the reader how he sympathizes with both their grace and suffering. He has no restraint in writing about things like God, and how little he cares for what humans do on earth, and how little sympathy is actually given. He also writes about how everything can turn against someone at any second, how they can be swaying happily in the kitchen dancing, and then be thrown off to the side with “my face / in your ass?”
The first work that Dickman published in 2009 was entitled The End of the West. Later his second book, Flies, was published in 2011 and won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Dickman continues to write poetry and be an inspiration to anyone wishing to experience the less perfect side of it. With intentional untarnished views of the world and gruesome examples that are not concealed from the reader, the poems are examples of how the world around us works.